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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 norma

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
    The issues that concern me the most aren't ones arising from production scale. I think the project was just fundamentally flawed at the beginning because of the choice to use cryengine, and they never corrected it. They doubled down and poured huge amounts of great work after bad. At the very inception of any software project you need a very small handful of experts to decide some fundamental things eg. What language / framework / engine to use. What platforms it will be on, what networking model it will use. In the case of star citizen, Chris Roberts picked cryengine himself (probably just cus cryengine games tend to look nice), even though he hadn't produced a game in years. It did make sense for the demo-video. As I said, it worked, he got funded, but after getting funded he should have scrapped that visual demo and hired a few experts to draw up a plan for how to realise the actual game. I would have been looking to headhunt people who were architects for battlefield or planetside. Instead it seems like CIG just started hiring everyone like crazy and dogpiling work ontop of the visual-demo. It seems from their dev updates that the team is putting in a heroic effort trying to work through the issues, though it also looks like a perfect realization of the sunken cost fallacy.
    - 9y ago

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
  The issues that concern me the most aren't ones arising from production scale. I think the project was just fundamentally flawed at the beginning because of the choice to use cryengine, and they never corrected it. They doubled down and poured huge amounts of great work after bad. At the very inception of any software project you need a very small handful of experts to decide some fundamental things eg. What language / framework / engine to use. What platforms it will be on, what networking model it will use. In the case of star citizen, Chris Roberts picked cryengine himself (probably just cus cryengine games tend to look nice), even though he hadn't produced a game in years. It did make sense for the demo-video. As I said, it worked, he got funded, but after getting funded he should have scrapped that visual demo and hired a few experts to draw up a plan for how to realise the actual game. I would have been looking to headhunt people who were architects for battlefield or planetside. Instead it seems like CIG just started hiring everyone like crazy and dogpiling work ontop of the visual-demo. It seems from their dev updates that the team is putting in a heroic effort trying to work through the issues, though it also looks like a perfect realization of the sunken cost fallacy.
  - 9y ago