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So.... 'Star Citizen'. I'm a game-maker and I've been following the development of star citizen since its 1st public announcement, before any crowdfunding even.

So.... 'Star Citizen'. I'm a game-maker and I've been following the development of star citizen since its 1st public announcement, before any crowdfunding even. Even from the very beginning it has looked like an unmitigated clusterfuck. (I decided to hold off funding it, I'm so happy I did) For the initial demo videos it looked like Roberts used his own money to hire artists to make lots of assets for the demo videos in Cry-engine.. Which is grand, makes sense + it worked, they got funded. But then they continued developing that demo-video project into the full game!!! Which is baffling. The main thing is that Cry-engine is one of the worst engines I could imagine for this type of game, I imagined they'd be fighting it every step of the way and they have been. Another practice theyve had from the start is building the game backwards, Creating (extremely labour intensive) final AAA polished art assets before they've even decided what the mechanics are let alone built and tried them, god only knows how may assets they've had to scrap. I could go on and on, eg. completely retooling cry-engine to use 64 bit floats. Which must have been a gargantuan task + also completely unnecessary if you plan out your game right. (eg. look at Kerbal space program)

everyone 9y ago
Compare it to Elite dangerous which started development at the same time. It was made pretty much on schedule. Its been at version 1 for a couple years with many people enjoying an extremely solid game. Star citizen has been in development hell for years. It looks like theyve reached the Sisyphusian point where X amount of work creates bugs that will take > X amount of time to fix. Still I would love to be proved wrong and it comes out and is the best game ever of my fantasies. (Elite dangerous is too MMOey for my tastes)
- ivraatiems 9y ago
  In fairness, Elite: Dangerous was much, much less ambitious than Star Citizen. No out-of-ship experiences, no planet landings or exploration out of the box (that has been added now), not even any character customization in the initial release. Even now, with much more than the initial launch featureset added, E:D doesn't have anything close to SC's scope. What E:D does have is an amazing flight model, great visuals and a genuinely well-made physics engine that offers a surprising amount of realism. It's the most "you are a real pilot in a real spaceship" feeling game I've ever played. It just needs more depth to the actual game beyond that.
  - sundvor 9y ago
    You forgot the ridiculously detailed, rich and vibrant sound! That soundscape as you undock is just nuts, on a good set of cans. The best I've ever heard in a game. Love ED! Edit: I played on a 34" ultrawide with TrackIR and the Warthog HOTAS. The immersion is staggering. Sadly my throttle has died so it's on hold until I can get a new set.
pvg 9y ago
None of this is in any way related to Wing Commander II, a game that came out in 1991.
- shmerl 9y ago
  Except for Chris Roberts and his interest in space games.
  - pvg 9y ago
    Barely. It's thread rage-jacking and is bad.
    - metric10 9y ago
      Star Citizen is “Wing Commander but we couldn’t/wouldn’t get the naming rights from EA, so Star Citizen wink-wink.” It’s the modern day continuation of Wing Commander. Edit: Maybe minus the space tigers...
    - everyone 9y ago
      Thats fair. I have loved wing commander, privateer and freelancer. I hence followed SC development closely, and hence have been cognizant and baffled by these issues. I was too curious what the HN community would have to say in response. I'm frankly hoping to be slammed on my technical comments and have someone prove that its all gonna be ok!
      - pvg 9y ago
        You can always write a thing about SC and post it or post a thing about SC and comment on that. But hijacking posts with an unrelated thing you'd like to discuss or complain about just poops all over the ongoing on-topic conversations, please don't do it.
    - pheldagryph 9y ago
      The rage yes maybe, but Star Citizen is definitely not off topic. Article mentions WC1-3, it's a franchise article. SC is Origin's canceled Privateer Online [:)] without the license. For the Wing Commander community, they're inseparable despite the licensing. [:)] http://www.wcnews.com/privateeronline.shtml http://www.wcnews.com/privateeronline.shtml
shmerl 9y ago
It feels like vaporware honestly, but I still hope they'll release Linux version eventually (using Vulkan). I never backed them, so it wouldn't be as upsetting if they won't, as to actual backers.
acemarke 9y ago
I'm a Star Citizen fanboy, and have kept a close eye on the development process. Yes, the development has been full of fits and starts, but they've also solved some amazing technical challenges. The 64-bit map size aspect was critical for having solar-system-sized maps with proper precision for multiplayer. The independent physics grids per ship implementation was a big deal. Also, they were able to pick up many of the core CryTek engine developers who had built the engine in the first place, and that's paid off with the rapid development of their procedural planet generation technology. Sure, the development has been repeatedly behind schedule, and we've learned to pretty much ignore any projected deadlines they announce. But, they've got several hundred people working full-time on a pair of AAA-class games and the current alpha versions _are_ playable, so it's not just vaporware. They also have been posting the current project task planning info on the website for about the last year, with info drawn directly from their internal JIRA, and the community is watching that eagerly to calculate weekly progress update diffs. Supposedly CIG is aiming for quarterly patch releases this year based on what's ready at the time rather than a specific feature list target, with 3.1 due out this month. We'll see how that pans out, and if they can actually manage more consistent releases. I pitched in for them to make the game of Chris Roberts' dreams, and I'm enjoying watching the development process. As long as they continue to make progress, I'm quite happy to sit back and wait for them to get it "right".
- everyone 9y ago
  "The 64-bit map size aspect was critical for having solar-system-sized maps with proper precision for multiplayer" No. When something is very far away from you, it will probably not even be visible, if it does appear it will be very small. You will not be able to interact with it. From your perspective its position does not need to be precise. With a sane game architecture for this kind of game you dont need higher precision floats. This has been done in loads of games. I mentioned KSP because a tiny team did this in Unity (not even their own engine) Considering how it will instantly double all the payloads, this is something you'd particularly want to avoid for a multiplayer game. I can only guess that they did this because they used cryengines built-in physics, and every ship in an instance is in the same phsyics 'world' (which is insane) "The independent physics grids per ship implementation was a big deal" Thats not a big deal. Its relatively trivial to do imo. You just have multiple physics 'worlds' and any bodies which protrude into another system are represented by kinematics in the other system. Transitioning from one system to another could look very weird, simply because the fantasy of the game does not cog with consistent physics, but they have not overcome this problem either. I imagine implementing it whilst using cryengines built-in physics system may have been the truly colossal task. But why in gods name are they using cryengine (an engine strongly geared towards making crytek fps games) to make space game?
Raphmedia 9y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen_refunds/ https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen_refunds/ is a good community to find out negative information on the project.
ocdtrekkie 9y ago
Star Citizen feels like a bit of an off-topic diversion for this thread, I guess. But see, the shear ridiculousness of Star Citizen's scope is the only reason I backed it. ...I've always dreamed of a hyper-realistic space simm that allowed you to do whatever you wanted. (Even in the alphas that have been released so far, I can do so many things that simply isn't possible in any other space game, ever made. In Elite: Dangerous you can't even get out of your seat.) Of course, knowing that scope when I backed it, I understand the risk. I won't be shocked if it fails. And I won't really feel like I was slighted, or cheated. I put the money towards a thing I hope can be a thing, and maybe it will be. Maybe it won't. That being said, the current lawsuit with Crytek is a super good reason to withhold funding them until it's resolved. There's so much shiftiness in there, and it's probably the first thing I've seen that could prematurely abort SC. It boggles the mind that they went the way they did to dodge licensing.
jdlshore 9y ago
For some reason, Star Citizen attracts a lot of armchair project managers. From where I sit (not a backer, but a curious observer), it looks like a pretty normal large-scale project: full of decisions that are questionable in hindsight, but sensible if taken in context and assuming normal, fallible people following a—neither brilliant nor terrible—iterative and incremental process. One of the things that people seem to miss is that Star Citizen development functions a lot more like a SaaS, with recurring revenue, than a traditional game project, with a big-bang release. CIG (the company behind Star Citizen) averages about $90K PER DAY in backer revenue. This has been consistent for years. [1] The money comes from ship sales which, at the time of nearly all the sales, are nothing but polished art assets in various stages of development. Given this context, their decision to produce polished art assets and prioritize playable releases over rewrites not only makes sense, it's smart. [1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tMAP0fg-AKScI3S3VjrDW3OaLO4zgBA1RSYoQOQoNSI/edit#gid=1694467207 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tMAP0fg-AKScI3S3VjrD... Edit: I've read your other replies in this thread and your dismissive attitude towards software development challenges looks a lot like inexperience. Since you offered your credentials as a "game-maker," I have to ask: is your game development experience as a professional software developer, working in a large team on commercial AAA products? Or is it smaller scale? I ask because decisions that are obvious and trivial for a hobbyist solving small problems look a lot different at scale.
- everyone 9y ago
  Ive done both. Based on what Ive seen, star citizen, as a piece of software, seems to be a total mess. Theres no excuse for that imo, if its the result of bad project management or whatever then so be it, its still a mess. "decisions that are obvious and trivial for a hobbyist solving small problems look a lot different at scale." What scale? Users? team size? Also, I dont see how either makes it ok to write crummy software. Give me an example. Also in what way are the hobbyist problems small? Tiny teams (eg. the Dwarf fortress guys) have done some of the most groundbreaking plain old technically difficult work Ive seen.
  - jdlshore 9y ago
    Team size. (Although, at scale, you're actually talking about dozens of teams.) The problems that occur at scale have to do with dividing work, cross-team collaboration and coordination, and the sheer volume of work being too large for any one person to fully track and understand. I'm not saying Star Citizen development is perfect. They're doing a lot less automated testing than I prefer, the code they show in Bugsmashers isn't particularly well designed, and they would have benefited from adopting feature teams and timeboxed releases much sooner than they did. But software development always looks easier from a distance than it is in reality. The problems are fractal, and don't make themselves known until you're deep in the middle of implementation. (This is why so many projects are under-estimated.) Your criticisms lack that nuance. You say they're writing crummy software, but you offer no evidence other than 50,000-feet hand-waving assertions. It comes across as either inexperience, or an axe to grind.

everyone 9y ago

Compare it to Elite dangerous which started development at the same time. It was made pretty much on schedule. Its been at version 1 for a couple years with many people enjoying an extremely solid game. Star citizen has been in development hell for years. It looks like theyve reached the Sisyphusian point where X amount of work creates bugs that will take > X amount of time to fix. Still I would love to be proved wrong and it comes out and is the best game ever of my fantasies. (Elite dangerous is too MMOey for my tastes)

ivraatiems 9y ago
In fairness, Elite: Dangerous was much, much less ambitious than Star Citizen. No out-of-ship experiences, no planet landings or exploration out of the box (that has been added now), not even any character customization in the initial release. Even now, with much more than the initial launch featureset added, E:D doesn't have anything close to SC's scope. What E:D does have is an amazing flight model, great visuals and a genuinely well-made physics engine that offers a surprising amount of realism. It's the most "you are a real pilot in a real spaceship" feeling game I've ever played. It just needs more depth to the actual game beyond that.
- sundvor 9y ago
  You forgot the ridiculously detailed, rich and vibrant sound! That soundscape as you undock is just nuts, on a good set of cans. The best I've ever heard in a game. Love ED! Edit: I played on a 34" ultrawide with TrackIR and the Warthog HOTAS. The immersion is staggering. Sadly my throttle has died so it's on hold until I can get a new set.

pvg 9y ago

None of this is in any way related to Wing Commander II, a game that came out in 1991.

shmerl 9y ago
Except for Chris Roberts and his interest in space games.
- pvg 9y ago
  Barely. It's thread rage-jacking and is bad.
  - metric10 9y ago
    Star Citizen is “Wing Commander but we couldn’t/wouldn’t get the naming rights from EA, so Star Citizen wink-wink.” It’s the modern day continuation of Wing Commander. Edit: Maybe minus the space tigers...
  - everyone 9y ago
    Thats fair. I have loved wing commander, privateer and freelancer. I hence followed SC development closely, and hence have been cognizant and baffled by these issues. I was too curious what the HN community would have to say in response. I'm frankly hoping to be slammed on my technical comments and have someone prove that its all gonna be ok!
    - pvg 9y ago
      You can always write a thing about SC and post it or post a thing about SC and comment on that. But hijacking posts with an unrelated thing you'd like to discuss or complain about just poops all over the ongoing on-topic conversations, please don't do it.
  - pheldagryph 9y ago
    The rage yes maybe, but Star Citizen is definitely not off topic. Article mentions WC1-3, it's a franchise article. SC is Origin's canceled Privateer Online [:)] without the license. For the Wing Commander community, they're inseparable despite the licensing. [:)] http://www.wcnews.com/privateeronline.shtml http://www.wcnews.com/privateeronline.shtml

shmerl 9y ago

It feels like vaporware honestly, but I still hope they'll release Linux version eventually (using Vulkan). I never backed them, so it wouldn't be as upsetting if they won't, as to actual backers.

acemarke 9y ago

I'm a Star Citizen fanboy, and have kept a close eye on the development process. Yes, the development has been full of fits and starts, but they've also solved some amazing technical challenges. The 64-bit map size aspect was critical for having solar-system-sized maps with proper precision for multiplayer. The independent physics grids per ship implementation was a big deal. Also, they were able to pick up many of the core CryTek engine developers who had built the engine in the first place, and that's paid off with the rapid development of their procedural planet generation technology. Sure, the development has been repeatedly behind schedule, and we've learned to pretty much ignore any projected deadlines they announce. But, they've got several hundred people working full-time on a pair of AAA-class games and the current alpha versions _are_ playable, so it's not just vaporware. They also have been posting the current project task planning info on the website for about the last year, with info drawn directly from their internal JIRA, and the community is watching that eagerly to calculate weekly progress update diffs. Supposedly CIG is aiming for quarterly patch releases this year based on what's ready at the time rather than a specific feature list target, with 3.1 due out this month. We'll see how that pans out, and if they can actually manage more consistent releases. I pitched in for them to make the game of Chris Roberts' dreams, and I'm enjoying watching the development process. As long as they continue to make progress, I'm quite happy to sit back and wait for them to get it "right".

everyone 9y ago
"The 64-bit map size aspect was critical for having solar-system-sized maps with proper precision for multiplayer" No. When something is very far away from you, it will probably not even be visible, if it does appear it will be very small. You will not be able to interact with it. From your perspective its position does not need to be precise. With a sane game architecture for this kind of game you dont need higher precision floats. This has been done in loads of games. I mentioned KSP because a tiny team did this in Unity (not even their own engine) Considering how it will instantly double all the payloads, this is something you'd particularly want to avoid for a multiplayer game. I can only guess that they did this because they used cryengines built-in physics, and every ship in an instance is in the same phsyics 'world' (which is insane) "The independent physics grids per ship implementation was a big deal" Thats not a big deal. Its relatively trivial to do imo. You just have multiple physics 'worlds' and any bodies which protrude into another system are represented by kinematics in the other system. Transitioning from one system to another could look very weird, simply because the fantasy of the game does not cog with consistent physics, but they have not overcome this problem either. I imagine implementing it whilst using cryengines built-in physics system may have been the truly colossal task. But why in gods name are they using cryengine (an engine strongly geared towards making crytek fps games) to make space game?

Raphmedia 9y ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen_refunds/ https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen_refunds/ is a good community to find out negative information on the project.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago

Star Citizen feels like a bit of an off-topic diversion for this thread, I guess. But see, the shear ridiculousness of Star Citizen's scope is the only reason I backed it. ...I've always dreamed of a hyper-realistic space simm that allowed you to do whatever you wanted. (Even in the alphas that have been released so far, I can do so many things that simply isn't possible in any other space game, ever made. In Elite: Dangerous you can't even get out of your seat.) Of course, knowing that scope when I backed it, I understand the risk. I won't be shocked if it fails. And I won't really feel like I was slighted, or cheated. I put the money towards a thing I hope can be a thing, and maybe it will be. Maybe it won't. That being said, the current lawsuit with Crytek is a super good reason to withhold funding them until it's resolved. There's so much shiftiness in there, and it's probably the first thing I've seen that could prematurely abort SC. It boggles the mind that they went the way they did to dodge licensing.

jdlshore 9y ago

For some reason, Star Citizen attracts a lot of armchair project managers. From where I sit (not a backer, but a curious observer), it looks like a pretty normal large-scale project: full of decisions that are questionable in hindsight, but sensible if taken in context and assuming normal, fallible people following a—neither brilliant nor terrible—iterative and incremental process. One of the things that people seem to miss is that Star Citizen development functions a lot more like a SaaS, with recurring revenue, than a traditional game project, with a big-bang release. CIG (the company behind Star Citizen) averages about $90K PER DAY in backer revenue. This has been consistent for years. [1] The money comes from ship sales which, at the time of nearly all the sales, are nothing but polished art assets in various stages of development. Given this context, their decision to produce polished art assets and prioritize playable releases over rewrites not only makes sense, it's smart. [1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tMAP0fg-AKScI3S3VjrDW3OaLO4zgBA1RSYoQOQoNSI/edit#gid=1694467207 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tMAP0fg-AKScI3S3VjrD... Edit: I've read your other replies in this thread and your dismissive attitude towards software development challenges looks a lot like inexperience. Since you offered your credentials as a "game-maker," I have to ask: is your game development experience as a professional software developer, working in a large team on commercial AAA products? Or is it smaller scale? I ask because decisions that are obvious and trivial for a hobbyist solving small problems look a lot different at scale.

everyone 9y ago
Ive done both. Based on what Ive seen, star citizen, as a piece of software, seems to be a total mess. Theres no excuse for that imo, if its the result of bad project management or whatever then so be it, its still a mess. "decisions that are obvious and trivial for a hobbyist solving small problems look a lot different at scale." What scale? Users? team size? Also, I dont see how either makes it ok to write crummy software. Give me an example. Also in what way are the hobbyist problems small? Tiny teams (eg. the Dwarf fortress guys) have done some of the most groundbreaking plain old technically difficult work Ive seen.
- jdlshore 9y ago
  Team size. (Although, at scale, you're actually talking about dozens of teams.) The problems that occur at scale have to do with dividing work, cross-team collaboration and coordination, and the sheer volume of work being too large for any one person to fully track and understand. I'm not saying Star Citizen development is perfect. They're doing a lot less automated testing than I prefer, the code they show in Bugsmashers isn't particularly well designed, and they would have benefited from adopting feature teams and timeboxed releases much sooner than they did. But software development always looks easier from a distance than it is in reality. The problems are fractal, and don't make themselves known until you're deep in the middle of implementation. (This is why so many projects are under-estimated.) Your criticisms lack that nuance. You say they're writing crummy software, but you offer no evidence other than 50,000-feet hand-waving assertions. It comes across as either inexperience, or an axe to grind.