Author Topic: 3.0 Progress Watch  (Read 144796 times)

dsmart

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Re: 3.0 Released To PTU
« Reply #90 on: December 01, 2017, 02:52:06 PM »
As I said, I am new here. So you'll read this intro as happily excited as everyone else, including Derek Smart, and you'll like it.

I don't speak for Derek but I doubt he's happy about it either, aside from feeling some degree of vindication.  He backed the project early on after all - you generally don't do that just to shit on it.  I backed too, because I believed it looked to be fun.

This whole thing was nothing but a colossal letdown.

^this. All of it.

There are people who are conveniently ignoring the fact that I was one of the early backers. And that I fought them when they refunded me without my asking for it. Even spending money on legal bills to get them to honor their agreement with backers. Meanwhile, those guys were spending money on JPEGs, while attacking me for expressing my opinions about something that I consider myself to be one of the most qualified people alive to render an opinion on something I've spent over three decades on.

As I've said before, I am more disappointed than pissed. My fight with them is just a byproduct of the angst that they caused when they decided to attack me, thus sparking their anti-social backers - Shitizens - to spend the better part of over 2.5 years attacking me - for writing about a fucking video game.

The game is never - ever - getting made. The vindication only comes in the form that I was right since I called them out in July 2015 and said that by over-scoping the game, they killed the project.

Right now, there are bunch of lunatics parked on Reddit saying that because 3.0 has barren moons - aka planetary tech - that I've been proven wrong. Completely ignoring the fact that my statements have been precise, to the point, and not open to any misinterpretation. That being, the game as pitched, cannot be made. It's got nothing to do with any one thing (engine, networking, physics, AI, rendering, terrain etc); it's to do with ALL the things that we as developers put together to call a GAME. And this shit here, is what they simply can't make.
Star Citizen isn't a game. It's a TV show about a bunch of characters making a game. It's basically "This is Spinal Tap" - except people think the band is real.

dsmart

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Re: 3.0 Released To PTU
« Reply #91 on: December 01, 2017, 02:58:22 PM »
If CIG don;t have experienced dev work on this project of historical magnitude, then what did Crobert does with the 180m? Did he spend those on actors and motion cap? Now I have 0 years game dev experience, but I know something is wrong when they decided to go wild with Crobert vision, and the engine problem will be doomed from start.

That's going to be the biggest issue when the whole thing collapses eventually. Nobody knows what happened to the money. And even though the funding chart is currently showing $170M, we DO know with 100% certainty, that it's not accurate. However, real or false, that's that funding chart (which I hear is probably going away with the new website) number that people are going to remember. And they can't come back and say, "well it was only $50M - honest!". It's going to be like breaking into a house an admitting to burglary in order to avoid a murder charge because there was a dead body in one of the rooms.
Star Citizen isn't a game. It's a TV show about a bunch of characters making a game. It's basically "This is Spinal Tap" - except people think the band is real.

StanTheMan

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Re: 3.0 Released To PTU
« Reply #92 on: December 01, 2017, 05:38:02 PM »
If CIG don;t have experienced dev work on this project of historical magnitude, then what did Crobert does with the 180m? Did he spend those on actors and motion cap? Now I have 0 years game dev experience, but I know something is wrong when they decided to go wild with Crobert vision, and the engine problem will be doomed from start.

That's going to be the biggest issue when the whole thing collapses eventually. Nobody knows what happened to the money. And even though the funding chart is currently showing $170M, we DO know with 100% certainty, that it's not accurate. However, real or false, that's that funding chart (which I hear is probably going away with the new website) number that people are going to remember. And they can't come back and say, "well it was only $50M - honest!". It's going to be like breaking into a house an admitting to burglary in order to avoid a murder charge because there was a dead body in one of the rooms.

How much did CRoberts  stash into Bitcoin etc ...?

premiumnugz

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Re: 3.0 Released To PTU
« Reply #93 on: December 01, 2017, 08:40:18 PM »
How much did CRoberts  stash into Bitcoin etc ...?

When you're running a commercial fraud on this scale getting involved in Bitcoin just attracts more attention from three-letter government agencies. There's absolutely no need, all the dirty work is done by big shiny accountancy firms who shuffle the money away as expenses and play three-ring-circus with various shell companies and bank accounts around the world. If they ever did get caught it would all look technically legal, even if it's morally questionable.

They're never going to go down, or even be smeared, for the volume of money they spent or who received it... Citizens will explain all that away as "they deserved it for giving up so much of their life" and "most company directors get paid a lot, look at that EA guy" etc etc...

Chris, Sandi and Ortwin et al will be hung on specific promises they made and failed to deliver despite having all that funding, and choices they made in terms of leadership of various aspects of the project, which may have not been legally responsible in the eyes of the Federal government and it's new laws on Kickstarters.

There's a reason Derek, Sandi and the Queen of England all bank with Coutts, and it's not because Derek or Sandi are  royalty.
« Last Edit: December 01, 2017, 08:43:51 PM by premiumnugz »

dsmart

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Re: 3.0 Released To PTU
« Reply #94 on: December 02, 2017, 12:31:40 PM »
I don't bank with Coutts  :c00lbert:
Star Citizen isn't a game. It's a TV show about a bunch of characters making a game. It's basically "This is Spinal Tap" - except people think the band is real.

Motto

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Re: 3.0 Released To PTU
« Reply #95 on: December 02, 2017, 04:17:25 PM »
Yet...

DemonInvestor

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Re: 3.0 Released To PTU
« Reply #96 on: December 03, 2017, 06:39:58 AM »
The game is never - ever - getting made. The vindication only comes in the form that I was right since I called them out in July 2015 and said that by over-scoping the game, they killed the project.

Right now, there are bunch of lunatics parked on Reddit saying that because 3.0 has barren moons - aka planetary tech - that I've been proven wrong. Completely ignoring the fact that my statements have been precise, to the point, and not open to any misinterpretation. That being, the game as pitched, cannot be made. It's got nothing to do with any one thing (engine, networking, physics, AI, rendering, terrain etc); it's to do with ALL the things that we as developers put together to call a GAME. And this shit here, is what they simply can't make.

First post, so first let me thank you on sharing your insights so far.

As non developer might i ask you, while you mention those interconnectivity, to share your thoughts on the whole cutting back on network traffic by reducing the connectivity between people within and outside of objects?
They've so often shown off characters waving at each other while being in different objects, and have so many hatches instead of actual airlocks in their ship design, that it just screams to me that they've got to revisit those designs and decisions, which would be another letdown for their shrinking fanbase. Also questioning how you think they'll actually tackle boarding actions during space battles when they're now speaking about heavily instancing stuff.

Personally i think Roberts is so far doing the most expansive brainstorming session in history. As i've seldomly heard/read them discussing any implications for the gameplay systems of their decisions so far, but tons of nebulous general ideas of what systems are going to be in the game.
« Last Edit: December 03, 2017, 06:41:40 AM by DemonInvestor »

dsmart

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Re: 3.0 Released To PTU
« Reply #97 on: December 03, 2017, 07:11:02 AM »
The game is never - ever - getting made. The vindication only comes in the form that I was right since I called them out in July 2015 and said that by over-scoping the game, they killed the project.

Right now, there are bunch of lunatics parked on Reddit saying that because 3.0 has barren moons - aka planetary tech - that I've been proven wrong. Completely ignoring the fact that my statements have been precise, to the point, and not open to any misinterpretation. That being, the game as pitched, cannot be made. It's got nothing to do with any one thing (engine, networking, physics, AI, rendering, terrain etc); it's to do with ALL the things that we as developers put together to call a GAME. And this shit here, is what they simply can't make.

First post, so first let me thank you on sharing your insights so far.

As non developer might i ask you, while you mention those interconnectivity, to share your thoughts on the whole cutting back on network traffic by reducing the connectivity between people within and outside of objects?
They've so often shown off characters waving at each other while being in different objects, and have so many hatches instead of actual airlocks in their ship design, that it just screams to me that they've got to revisit those designs and decisions, which would be another letdown for their shrinking fanbase. Also questioning how you think they'll actually tackle boarding actions during space battles when they're now speaking about heavily instancing stuff.

Personally i think Roberts is so far doing the most expansive brainstorming session in history. As i've seldomly heard/read them discussing any implications for the gameplay systems of their decisions so far, but tons of nebulous general ideas of what systems are going to be in the game.

As someone who has built networking tech over the years, it's a very difficult subject to explain to non-programmers. The long and short of it is that it all goes way beyond how features work, but rather how much data gets sent to the server, to the client, how frequently etc.

A lot of the work in networked games is handled client side - meaning stuff that that the server doesn't care about or needs to know about. Some of that includes things like a player in a doorway, in a ship, shooting, jumping, waving etc. All the play cares about is what a client is doing and where they are in the game world (2D or 3D).

e.g. in Star Citizen, when you have 8 players in ArcCorp, each one needs to know where they are, and what they are doing. So if playerA is waving, PlayerB needs to see that. In a peer-to-peer game, where all clients talk to each other, that data is communicated between clients. In a client-server game, where the server is referee who doesn't trust the client - since they can cheat - it's the server that is responsible for receiving, analyzing, and sending that data to other clients. So if the networking isn't optimized and a lot of data gets sent to the server, which then has to process and send it back, it can cause some significant performance issues.

If you know about Big Benny, then you know the problem. A player can move it, but the other player won't know about it because the server doesn't handle anything that isn't related to actual player clients. And if they do "grabby hands" cargo, it's the same problem because while they would have to process that data specifically, there can still be issues whereby the cargo is lost, dropped, not in the right location etc. All the problems currently seen in 3.0.

All the buzz words you see CIG and backers uttering, like network bind culling, serialized variables etc, aren't even close to what they need to solve their networking problems. Yes, they will help, but their impact is minimal - at best - in the general scheme of things because there are LOT of other INSURMOUNTABLE things that they have to overcome - and which they can't.

Things like players being in one ship, trying to board another etc, is trivial to do because it's just positional data. It's no different from how you have a player flying around in space, and another driving on the moon below. As long as they are all in the same instanced world, those kinds of things aren't hard to do. But they can be plagued with problems as we have seen in the game since 2.0 was released. And in 3.0, due to the addition of new things and features, it just got worse. And there is just no recovery because there isn't enough time to rip it all out and do it right. They waited too long to do that - and they're hamstrung with their use of the WRONG engine for the game they are trying to build. Using on variant (Lumberyard) of CE3, isn't going to solve it for them. Even AMZ has stated that the engine isn't for MMO games. Sure, you can use it to build one, but you would have to write a LOT of support code for it.

All that aside, trying to do inter-instance connectivity (like how ED does it), is going to be worse because of how the game works. ED gets away with it because they built a robust networking engine from the ground up, then plugged it into their game engine. They planned for it from the start. And they only have ships to deal with. Star Citizen on the other hand has a LOT of features to deal with in a networked world, including the fact networking an FPS game is fraught with issues all by itself.

I was on an Open House stream yesterday in which I mentioned that backers have not realized or reconciled the fact that, in the 400 people they claim to have working on this game, NONE of them has EVER worked on a game of this scope, let alone an MMO. So they've basically been doing R&D, as learn-as-you-go. That's just not going to work, and that's why the project has suffered, and is on the verge of a catastrophic collapse.

More here: http://dereksmart.com/forums/reply/5949/
Star Citizen isn't a game. It's a TV show about a bunch of characters making a game. It's basically "This is Spinal Tap" - except people think the band is real.

DemonInvestor

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Re: 3.0 Released To PTU
« Reply #98 on: December 03, 2017, 10:57:17 AM »
@Derek
Thanks for the long answer and the link. Though i had read that before i've gone to a few more links and beside the overall gems of CIGs iconsistency, it was again an intersting read.

Just realized what you simply know from experience and might see as a micro level was more of a macro level for me. As i was more thinking about how effective their "culling"/"instancing" could be given their current designs ideas of mostly open ships and hard player limits per instance when one has got "unconnected" containers with people who just might want to connect within seconds and any logical (inherent game world logic as opposed to network) barrier for them to not be able to.

Than again i'm wasting time thinking about a company who's selling digital moon land plots.

StanTheMan

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Re: 3.0 Released To PTU
« Reply #99 on: December 03, 2017, 11:25:00 AM »

backers have not realized or reconciled the fact that, in the 400 people they claim to have working on this game, NONE of them has EVER worked on a game of this scope, let alone an MMO.

And most of the people working on the game have very little experience playing MMOs to know what is important in gameplay terms even if they could convey that to Croberts or Erin.

So they cant develop an MMO from lack of technical expertise and they cant even nominally design one either.....

You can excuse a lot of Backers for their lack of technical understanding.    but

You cant excuse backers having a lack of MMO gameplay awareness.

And you cant excuse Backers failing to spot when CRoberts and Erin has lost their integrity as people and their credibility as experts.
 
« Last Edit: December 03, 2017, 11:29:58 AM by StanTheMan »

dsmart

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Re: 3.0 Released To PTU
« Reply #100 on: December 03, 2017, 11:58:07 AM »
@Derek
Thanks for the long answer and the link. Though i had read that before i've gone to a few more links and beside the overall gems of CIGs iconsistency, it was again an intersting read.

Just realized what you simply know from experience and might see as a micro level was more of a macro level for me. As i was more thinking about how effective their "culling"/"instancing" could be given their current designs ideas of mostly open ships and hard player limits per instance when one has got "unconnected" containers with people who just might want to connect within seconds and any logical (inherent game world logic as opposed to network) barrier for them to not be able to.

Than again i'm wasting time thinking about a company who's selling digital moon land plots.

Yeah, it's very difficult to explain at a macro level without getting too technical.  :science:

The whole thing about "server meshes", "interconnecting instances" etc is all rubbish. Anyone who looks at this game - after 6 yrs and $170M and thinks "Yeah, they're totally capable of doing that", is a fool.

For one thing, given instance1 where there is a ship with 6 gamers, then have instance2 with a ship with 6 gamers, you have to hand-off players going from I1 to I2 and vice-versa by disconnecting them from one, while connecting them to the other. Well, think about how many things could possibly go wrong with that, then in the case of Star Citizen which has to handle ships AND fps gamers - and multiply it by x10.


Star Citizen isn't a game. It's a TV show about a bunch of characters making a game. It's basically "This is Spinal Tap" - except people think the band is real.

DemonInvestor

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Re: 3.0 Released To PTU
« Reply #101 on: December 03, 2017, 02:44:49 PM »
Yeah, it's very difficult to explain at a macro level without getting too technical.  :science:

The whole thing about "server meshes", "interconnecting instances" etc is all rubbish. Anyone who looks at this game - after 6 yrs and $170M and thinks "Yeah, they're totally capable of doing that", is a fool.

For one thing, given instance1 where there is a ship with 6 gamers, then have instance2 with a ship with 6 gamers, you have to hand-off players going from I1 to I2 and vice-versa by disconnecting them from one, while connecting them to the other. Well, think about how many things could possibly go wrong with that, then in the case of Star Citizen which has to handle ships AND fps gamers - and multiply it by x10.

6yrs and only now working on most likely the biggest resource constraint they have for the sort of game they advertised. Funnily i just took a look at the Javelin with it's max 80 person crew idea. Though than again how one can conceptionalize a 80 person crew without directly answering what they're all going to do (besides playing online hearts on a second computer or something) on said ship.

Well small container to small container sounds like the most easy scenario to me. Think about container in container (as in Javelin + MPUV).
Don't forget it's not just a FPS but seemingly one, where you can shoot from one instance into the next - i mean i read that at least once.  :laugh:

And all of that isn't even touching on the whole P2W and what happens if one of the advertised pirates actually robs a big buck spender of his big toy.

N0mad

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Re: 3.0 Released To PTU
« Reply #102 on: December 03, 2017, 02:49:48 PM »
I'd love to know the final breakdown of how many people are doing what job at CIG. How many are programmers vs artists / animators / designers. And how does this compare to a normal AA studio? Considering the technical challenges they face, they need a lot of programmers, bus since this is CIG and they just make tech demos and JPEGS to sell the ships they aren't making, then I'm assuming they have a huge art department instead.

StanTheMan

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Re: 3.0 Released To PTU
« Reply #103 on: December 03, 2017, 04:28:37 PM »
Yeah, it's very difficult to explain at a macro level without getting too technical.  :science:

The whole thing about "server meshes", "interconnecting instances" etc is all rubbish. Anyone who looks at this game - after 6 yrs and $170M and thinks "Yeah, they're totally capable of doing that", is a fool.

For one thing, given instance1 where there is a ship with 6 gamers, then have instance2 with a ship with 6 gamers, you have to hand-off players going from I1 to I2 and vice-versa by disconnecting them from one, while connecting them to the other. Well, think about how many things could possibly go wrong with that, then in the case of Star Citizen which has to handle ships AND fps gamers - and multiply it by x10.

6yrs and only now working on most likely the biggest resource constraint they have for the sort of game they advertised. Funnily i just took a look at the Javelin with it's max 80 person crew idea. Though than again how one can conceptionalize a 80 person crew without directly answering what they're all going to do (besides playing online hearts on a second computer or something) on said ship.

Well small container to small container sounds like the most easy scenario to me. Think about container in container (as in Javelin + MPUV).
Don't forget it's not just a FPS but seemingly one, where you can shoot from one instance into the next - i mean i read that at least once.  :laugh:

And all of that isn't even touching on the whole P2W and what happens if one of the advertised pirates actually robs a big buck spender of his big toy.

Yes and this is why most of the people supporting CRoberts clearly havent a clue, or haven't thought about, what they claim they are going to do.

That's why Derek original blog was so powerful because it jolted many Backers out of the fantasy mindset and forced them to consider the facts.  Croberts was bullshitting about Star Marine around that time and we had been in development for long enough for people to start having reasonable doubts about CRoberts capabilities.

Erin has continued in a similar vane, claiming 1000's in an instance and exciting things for crew to do like pressing a button or two to help someone actually having fun....

He is just as much of a lying scammer as his brother and clearly has no idea what is fun to do in an MMORPG and how people would be griefed to buggery and back with the gameplay elements they claim they are developing and those they brainstorm on their fluffed up shows.

When you think how much there is to do and how little progress has been made you only need a tiny bit of technical nouse to ask a simple question like the one you have you have and the scales are removed from ones eyes...


« Last Edit: December 03, 2017, 04:30:46 PM by StanTheMan »

Aya Reiko

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Re: 3.0 Released To PTU
« Reply #104 on: December 04, 2017, 12:19:01 AM »
Yeah, it's very difficult to explain at a macro level without getting too technical.  :science:

The whole thing about "server meshes", "interconnecting instances" etc is all rubbish. Anyone who looks at this game - after 6 yrs and $170M and thinks "Yeah, they're totally capable of doing that", is a fool.

For one thing, given instance1 where there is a ship with 6 gamers, then have instance2 with a ship with 6 gamers, you have to hand-off players going from I1 to I2 and vice-versa by disconnecting them from one, while connecting them to the other. Well, think about how many things could possibly go wrong with that, then in the case of Star Citizen which has to handle ships AND fps gamers - and multiply it by x10.

6yrs and only now working on most likely the biggest resource constraint they have for the sort of game they advertised. Funnily i just took a look at the Javelin with it's max 80 person crew idea. Though than again how one can conceptionalize a 80 person crew without directly answering what they're all going to do (besides playing online hearts on a second computer or something) on said ship.

Well small container to small container sounds like the most easy scenario to me. Think about container in container (as in Javelin + MPUV).
Don't forget it's not just a FPS but seemingly one, where you can shoot from one instance into the next - i mean i read that at least once.  :laugh:

And all of that isn't even touching on the whole P2W and what happens if one of the advertised pirates actually robs a big buck spender of his big toy.
What they'll actually be doing:

SC is the bastard child of the worst of AAA's devs PTW mentality and the numerous failed KS's that aimed too high and crashed and burned with all of that cranked up to 11.  All further amplified by the remaining fanbase's NMS-like fantasies of what the thing is going to be.

It's all going to be hilarious with the whole thing slams into the ground.

 

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