• Rottcodd@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    119
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    2 months ago

    Do people just not know who and what Chris Roberts is?

    This is what he’s done throughout his career - the only thing that’s notable about Star Citizen really is the scale of it and thus the opportunities he has to find ever more things to obsessively tinker with.

    It’s entirely possible that if Microsoft hadn’t bought out Digital Anvil and given him the boot, this wouldn’t even be Star Citizen - it would be Freelancer, coming into its 25th year of delays.

    • P03 Locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      16
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      2 months ago

      Chris Roberts is still rich, and could probably retire right now without worrying about anything. He could tank the company, and he wouldn’t care.

      • Blackmist@feddit.uk
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        26
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        2 months ago

        When has any really rich person ever gone “you know what? I actually have enough now…”?

        • theneverfox@pawb.social
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          17
          ·
          2 months ago

          Wozniak is probably the most famous example. He recognized the corrupting nature of money, decided he had enough, and stopped to live in comfort and occasionally work towards causes he finds important

          Lots of people have done the same… But if they’re rich and still chasing after money? They’ll never stop

          • Blackmist@feddit.uk
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            9
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            2 months ago

            I guess Notch as well. Sold Minecraft for an obscene amount of money and got into indefensible right wing views instead.

        • ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          arrow-down
          3
          ·
          2 months ago

          That’s the majority of them, but ragebait articles aren’t written about them, so you have no idea who they are.

          Don’t be so easily manipulated by media.

      • lime!@feddit.nu
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        26
        ·
        2 months ago

        the wing commander series was famous for inflated development costs, freelancer was repeatedly delayed and eventually released like five years after it’s announcement, and since then… he’s been working on star citizen

        • SSTF@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          2 months ago

          Keep in mind Freelancer was released after Microsoft acquired Roberts’ company, kicked him out of a leadership role, and drastically slashed the scope.

          Star Citizen is what happens when there is nobody above Roberts to say no, and now after years plenty of people under him with an interest in keeping the development churning.

    • Shadywack@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      2 months ago

      I mean, some people called this back in fucking 2012, but the dreamers bought into his vision. He’s always been real great about vision and lofty ambitions, but shit on execution. He sells dreams, but doesn’t know how to finish anything. Every project he was attached to that executed on deliverables, was due to control being outside of his purview and accountability enforced.

  • peopleproblems@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    117
    arrow-down
    6
    ·
    2 months ago

    And then, compare it to No Man’s Sky, who gave us lofty expectations, failed to deliver on launch, but actually kept with it despite no new revenue flowing into the game from existing buyers. And now we have something incredible. We have a universe that is unfathomably large. We have multiplayer, we have all sorts of events and quests. Freighters! You can piece together your own ships now.

    I hope we can eventually build space stations or pilot Capital Ships. No Man’s Sky came out in 2016. In 8 years it has done far more than SC has done with far less of a budget.

    Do I wish we could have everything that Roberts promised? Sure. But I also have a bridge to sell that you can at least walk over.

    • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      2 months ago

      NMS certainly evolved a lot, but I wouldn’t call it incredible. Also, despite the game universe being absurdly large, you can see everything there is to see visiting less than 20 star systems

      All the daily quicksilver quests are a fucking chore, too.

    • ms.lane@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      2 months ago

      Also to be fair (and critical), while Sean lied to both Sony and us about the state of the game-

      They also probably did have most of everything they promised at one point, then the Christmas Flood happened. That’s when the lies started and but those lies were likely more for Sony rather than us, as it’s entirely possible Sony would have outright cancelled the game if they’d known how much was actually lost in the flood.

      Instead they released what they could in the time they had left then just kept plugging away at it post release.

  • shadowedcross@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    66
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    2 months ago

    Yeah, Star Citizen is the world’s most expensive tech demo, that is the picture book definition of scope creep. It’ll just keep getting more and more complicated, but never get to any kind of a “complete game” state.

    • slaacaa@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      31
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      2 months ago

      I work as project manager, just spent the entire week fighting a client on a new project’s scope, because he wanted more things done by the team than what was agreed in the proposal.

      Anytime I read about this game, I have to do breathing excercises in a corner to calm my anxiety.

  • Hemingways_Shotgun@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    60
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    2 months ago

    Well no shit. He figured out that as long as you never “release” a finished game, you’re not going to be blamed for “bugs” while still collecting money on in-game purchases.

    There’s a reason he made sure that the in-game store was perfected and ready to go long before the game was anywhere near completed. It’s been the plan ever since he and his team realized that the ultimate scope was likely out of their reach.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      20
      ·
      2 months ago

      If massive universe sums like that were technically feasible all of the other studios would have done it. They were overly ambitious and didn’t understand the limits

      • Maalus@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        29
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        2 months ago

        I mean Elite Dangerous is right there, finished, playable and fun.

        • Player2@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          9
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          2 months ago

          And it first released a decade ago already (in a couple months)

            • mipadaitu@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              7
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              2 months ago

              Nope, it’s real time travel with no FTL. The reason it’s “finished” is that it takes hundreds of real life years to get anywhere, so they have plenty of time to populate the world’s before the first players arrive.

          • Maalus@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            8
            arrow-down
            2
            ·
            2 months ago

            Yeaaah, but they pulled the exact same thing Star Citizen did initially. They overpromised and underdelivered heavily. It took them years to get where it is now.

      • Scolding7300@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        2 months ago

        In terms of immersion I think they’ve done a great job. Played during a free weekend. But they need to aim for a gameplay loop, polish, and release. Not this feature creep mentality

  • yamanii@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    35
    ·
    2 months ago

    I’ve genuinely been sat in meetings that got derailed for 30 minutes so that the placement of objects that players are likely never to interact with could be discussed in detail. There’s just no actual focus on getting the game done.

    We have a saying here that translates to something like this: “perfect is the enemy of done”. Getting lost in details like this will always delay things a ton.

    • Fades@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      2 months ago

      My boss LOVES to throw that out all the time as a defense for when I inform him that he and mgmt are rushing something out the door that isn’t ready.

      It definitely has wisdom but it’s not something to wave around all the time either.

      Not that that’s the problem here, SC ain’t ever coming out and it’s not because of perfection. It’s because it’s a scam lol

      Read this fucking gofundme trash: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals

  • alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    46
    arrow-down
    12
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    Because Crysis looked good, Chris Roberts mandated that Star Citizen would use Cryengine 3.

    To make astronomically large spaces fit in the game engine from 2009, they made everything infinitesimally small.

    So now due to the inaccuracy inherent in floating point calculations, instead of invisibly nudging things a few millimeters in the wrong direction, teleports people hundreds of feet out of their ships into space if they bump into a physics object, ladder, elevator, etc.

    This is what happens when an ideas guy with no technical knowledge is making technical decisions.

    • G0ldenSp00n@lemmy.jacaranda.club
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      44
      arrow-down
      5
      ·
      2 months ago

      This is not even true, they rewrote the engine to support native 64-bit precision to let them fit large spaces, they didn’t just make everything small. They basically employ all the people that used to make Cryengine since Crytek went out of business, so the engine they are building is actually pretty good.

      • Agent Karyo@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        19
        arrow-down
        5
        ·
        2 months ago

        I am engine developer, but even to this day you can clearly see Cryengine 3.x issue in star citizen.

        They simulate zero-g areas as a Cryengine underwater map. You routinely see stuff floating as if in water even on planets with gravity.

        You can also witness strange bugs that confirm the size issue (that they made everything extremely small in a Frankenstein version of a Cryengine map); one example would be your footmarks suddenly becoming massive.

        The completely fucked up physics in sc (e.g. tanks bouncing like beachballs) is also a legacy of Cryengine 3.0.

      • Fades@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        2 months ago

        Classic, the person who doesn’t know what they’re talking about is SO sure that they know the truth. So much so they’re out here correcting people and handing out false info.

        so the engine they are building is actually pretty good

        Keep living in a false reality pal. I’m sure you k or so much more than the engine dev who replied to you.

        How much $$ have you wasted on star citizen lmao

    • Billiam@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      33
      ·
      2 months ago

      To make astronomically large spaces fit in the game engine from 2009, they made everything infinitesimally small.

      In fairness, when Star Citizen first went in to development CE3 was a modern engine.

    • Nailbar@sopuli.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      2 months ago

      This is what happens when an ideas guy with no technical knowledge is making technical decisions.

      If you’re talking about Chris, he’s a coder too, and wrote some of the entiry container system for the game.

      I’m not sure where you’re getting your info about them scaling everything down and that being the cause for wonky physics, though.

    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      arrow-down
      8
      ·
      edit-2
      2 months ago

      Jesus fucking christ, that was their fundamental approach?!

      … Did they ever come anywhere close to a dynamic server model, with dynamically sized in game zones being handled by dynamically changing server clusters, dependant on player count in an area?

      I remember making some comments in a thread in the main SC forums about it almost a decade ago that were basically to the effect of: that’s almost certainly impossible to pull off with enough fidelity / low lag to actually work in a real time, absurdly open world shooter game, but if they could pull it off it would basically be the greatest achievement in game networking history.

      • perslue@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        11
        arrow-down
        5
        ·
        2 months ago

        After 10 years they increased the per server population from 50 to 100, but don’t worry server messing soon TM.

        So no.

        • limitedduck@awful.systems
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          12
          ·
          2 months ago

          Meshing tests have gone up to 2000 and the shards that were left on overnight were 300-500. The current evocati build of 4.0 has meshing enabled, just limited to 100 for now

    • Cris@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      edit-2
      2 months ago

      Wow… I’m pretty crap at making decisions, but like… not that crap 😅

      That’s like an impressively bad choice

  • limitedduck@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    29
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    2 months ago

    Today was day one of Citizencon and CIG revealed a lot of stuff that shows they’re still working to give players the game they want. Most of it was actually tech to answer the scalability problem for everyone wondering how they’re going to get to 100 star systems when they still only have 1

      • arudesalad@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        32
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        edit-2
        2 months ago

        Fun fact: If you take the year, add two, you’ll get the current planned release date for sq42

        This isn’t dependent on the current year

      • limitedduck@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        12
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        2 months ago

        Personally, I don’t think they should be aiming for 100 anymore, even if it was promised. That number was for the original pitch and was arbitrarily high since it was for a much shallower and easier to create game

        • fartsparkles@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          12
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          2 months ago

          I’d gladly take a single functioning system rather than wait another 12 years of my life for this Kickstarter project to deliver.

        • arudesalad@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          2 months ago

          Today they announced that it was cut down to 5 and they will slowly work their way back up to 100 after launch (whenever that is)

          • limitedduck@awful.systems
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            5
            ·
            2 months ago

            It was a good decision. It was also smart of them to review the initial 100 planet goal to add some much needed context

        • jagermo@feddit.org
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          2 months ago

          The original pitch also had dedicated servers and those are gone, sadly.

          • limitedduck@awful.systems
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            edit-2
            2 months ago

            How are they gone? The current servers are hosted by CIG, there’s no p2p or player hosted servers. How would that even work for an MMO?

              • limitedduck@awful.systems
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                3
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                2 months ago

                I would say private server is more what you’re referring to, also CIG’s wording, but maybe agree to disagree. A quick search says that they haven’t cancelled that feature, but it’ll appropriately be the very last thing they work on

                • lime!@feddit.nu
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  6
                  arrow-down
                  1
                  ·
                  2 months ago

                  the common understanding of “dedicated server” is a server binary you can download and run yourself. a “private server” is usually still hosted on the company’s hardware.

  • FangedWyvern42@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    25
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    Is anyone really surprised?

    I do think they will at least release Squadron 42, but the main game is never coming out.

    • rozodru@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      2 months ago

      I honestly don’t even think they’ll get that far. I mean they’ve announced it now, yet again, for a 2026 release date…two years from now. they’ve been doing this for the past decade. “It’ll release in 2016” then it’s “Squadron 42 coming 2018” and so on and so forth. Mark my words we’ll get to 2026 and at their little convention they have to further milk their userbase of money they’ll announce Squadron 42 for 2028 but please, user, they need more backers and as a reward for backing you’ll get a fancy ship you’ll never get to keep.