10 ms·

Star Citizen is doing 'bedsheet deformation' physics now

76 points by throwaway743 4y ago

smoldesu 4y ago
This is arguably an improvement over their previous focus, adding thousand-dollar consumable ships with the hopes that their high-rolling whales would keep them laughing all the way to the bank.
- nvrspyx 4y ago
  Make no mistake, that's still their primary focus.
  - throwaways85989 4y ago
    But now they focus on accurate bedsheet physics, to attract undead, ghosted investors..
    - nvrspyx 4y ago
      No different than the bartender AI, defecation, elevator UI, etc. It's a smoke screen to serve as an illusion of "healthy" development. It's a means to sell more ships. No one will buy ships for a game that will never exist, but they will for a game that they "believe" will eventually exist.
FatalLogic 4y ago
The saddest thing about Star Citizen is that so much money and human effort is being burned for creative development which is almost certainly going to end up buried, unappreciated, in a failed project
- prox 4y ago
  This is why I like Elite Dangerous’ model better. They shipped a game and made iterative improvements. It has many flaws, but for most intents and purposes it’s a running space sim.
  - em-bee 4y ago
    agreed, ship something and then improve it is a way better approach, then at least we have a game even if the money runs out. star citizen risks never completing, and that's just not something i feel comfortable supporting. the irony is that i long ignored elite dangerous because its name made me think it's some kind of battle oriented shooter, and not a space simulation.
    - dvh 4y ago
      When I'm making game and I want to finish it fast, I limit myself to "2 of everything". If the game is about maze of rooms, I made 2 rooms (because 2 is minimal amount when you need to implement the switching). When I plan to have hundreds of guns, I make 2 because that's the minimum to test switching. 2 characters. 2 attacks. 2 NPCs. 2 endings. 2 levels. 2 quests... Only when everything is implemented I either release as mvp or start adding more content into otherwise finished game. So in case of bedsheet deformation, I would make a function that returns deformed bedsheet, but in first release it would simply randomly returned one of 2 premade assets.
  - tibbydudeza 4y ago
    Or No Mans Sky - hyper and expectations but the team behind it has improved it so much.
    - lokedhs 4y ago
      If NMS has been honest with what they had vs. what their vision was, they wouldn't even have had to suffer all the negativity. Imagine if ED had marketed itself around the idea of being able to jump out of your ship and play in first person, people would have been furious. The fact that NMS managed to come back and actually implement pretty much everything they had originally promised is pretty amazing, but I think it's an anomaly, and most games that suffer from initial disappointment will end up being cancelled.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  I haven’t followed the progress of this game for a long time but it reminds me of the importance of MVPs. If you can’t get something out on the market that is fun within a reasonable time, it likely never will successful. People rag on about incomplete games a lot but these days games a long past the throw over the wall products they used to be. They are living products designed to last a decade or more. Getting real players on the game and driving the feedback for future development is critical to getting a final product that is perfect.
  - MrMember 4y ago
    I guess it depends on the developers' definition of "successful." If the goal was to ship a completed game than Star Citizen is an abject failure. If the goal was to make hundreds of millions of dollars working on an overly ambitious passion project than it has been wildly successful.
- stubish 4y ago
  Occasionally I fire up Star Citizen, discover the controller support is still awful, and never see all the stuff they have been working on. Having heaps of developers and artists working on fluff is great if you have the money, but you need a solid core.
altcognito 4y ago
Maybe it’s in the MVP?
richardfey 4y ago
I thought they were talking about oceanic bedsheets
lkj3lkjlkj3 4y ago
[flagged]
lolinder 4y ago
Star Citizen reminds me very much of that story about the Danish artist who was commissioned by a museum to produce a new piece for $84k and gave them two empty canvases entitled "Take the Money and Run".[0] Cloud Imperium is, at this point, a modern art studio that is constantly trying to see just how overtly they can make fun of their patrons while still receiving big checks. [0] https://www.npr.org/2021/09/29/1041492941/jens-haaning-kunsten-take-the-money-and-run-art-denmark-blank https://www.npr.org/2021/09/29/1041492941/jens-haaning-kunst...
- s5300 4y ago
  - mvid 4y ago
    This response makes the GP seem more valid
    - s5300 4y ago
      Hmm… I don’t exactly see how but maybe I should specify. I very much keep up on the development of the game, & I think it’s going great. I think we have another 3-4 years to go before what I’d imagined when I first heard of the game (a few weeks after it’s public announcement) is possible. Server issues are likely to be a bulk of what needs ironed out. Unfortunately, as for me not personally touching the game - severe physical illness that makes it very hard to be at a computer. I would definitely be playing every major release if I could comfortably do so. If that still makes your comment correct - in what I’m saying makes the GP seem more valid - I guess I have a misunderstanding. If SC ends up being a complete flop - it will be unfortunate, but I truly believe a great amount of tech will come out of the disbanding teams. If you think all of their hundreds to thousands of something employees are all in on a grand conman scheme & they’re doing literally nothing but sinking their collective reputations - I’ve got some… lemme see… maybe horse dewormer to sell you, perhaps other things… The cherry on top for me is the longer it takes to ship (heh) the more likely it is I’ll actually be able to comfortably play the game I’ve dreamt about for some time, definitely before SC was ever announced. Some of my friends who’ve backed are literally going to have become doctors or with kids approaching middle school before 1.0 :)
MBCook 4y ago
At a certain point should projects like this be investigated by some authority? $450m is not far from double GTA V’s budget. 10 years is 3x as long. Something just doesn’t seem right here. I’m not saying they’ve made nothing. But have they made reasonable progress given the scope, timeframe, and budget? It doesn’t seem like it.
- alar44 4y ago
  That's what I'm thinking. If this is legal, I'm going to hire an artist and an animator and just have them make press releases and eat people's money.
  - vinyl7 4y ago
    That's pretty much what a lot of kickstarter indie games are.
    - iancmceachern 4y ago
      That's pretty much what a lot of startups are.
- acomjean 4y ago
  I’m not sure how they’ve structured the game sales and add ons (ship sales). Over charging people isn’t illegal..it’s a shame though. But if at some point enough people start asking their credit card companies for charge backs, this won’t go on too much longer. Though I suspect the higher ups have paid themselves well enough, it won’t matter to them. I suspect the majority to just forget about it, or be too embarrassed to make a fuss and just walk away from the money they’ve spent. There are a huge amount of slightly older games out there for good prices..,
- wedn3sday 4y ago
  A few differences between starcitizen and GTA: when GTA started development it was being made by an existing studio, SC when it started was like 5 dudes, so they've had to build the studio at the same time as they're building the game. GTA is an improvement on a previously done format, breaking very little new ground. The SC devs literally had to re-write large parts of the Cryengine to add 64bit support so they could build whole solar systems (at about 1/10th scale, but still quite large). Comparing the two is like saying, Ford was making a million cars a year 20 years ago, Tesla is a scam because they cant make a million cars a year.
random-human 4y ago
A bit surprised they haven't found a way to exploit the crypto/NFT crowd yet. Or have they?
- cyber_kinetist 4y ago
  I mean, they already figured out how to do this shit way before the crypto/NFT crowd…
- Ekaros 4y ago
  NFTs would mean that the "players" can resell stuff they bought, can't have that. Then they might not buy new stuff instead...
leeoniya 4y ago
maybe they'll finally crack the unsolved problem in physics of predicting friction coefficients between arbitrary materials & surfaces. 10 years might be worth the wait!
- a0zU 4y ago
  It turns out the SC devs have spent this whole time solving every fundamental problem in physics to create perfect immersion.
jwmoz 4y ago
This will go down as the biggest Ponzi in entertainment history.
- cyber_kinetist 4y ago
  “Maybe the real Star Citizen was the friends we made along the way”
- wedn3sday 4y ago
  Well, if its a ponzi scheme, its the most fun I've had blowing up space pirates in a ponzi scheme.
- detaro 4y ago
  "Ponzi scheme" does not mean "thing that gets lots of money that might not deliver and I don't like"...
- CodesInChaos 4y ago
  You may consider Star Citizen a scam, but it's definitely not a Ponzy scheme. In a Ponzy scheme the profits of early "investors" are paid from the money later investors put in.
- lfkdev 4y ago
  Thats not what a Ponzi scheme is
tjpnz 4y ago
What happens when the engine becomes dated? Do they begin the process all over again?
- cwillu 4y ago
  https://www.eteknix.com/chris-roberts-explains-star-citizen-engine-change/ https://www.eteknix.com/chris-roberts-explains-star-citizen-...
beowulfey 4y ago
Star Citizen and DayZ were the two games that taught me to avoid buying early access games at all cost.
- bardan 4y ago
  I had great experiences with DayZ when it was still an Arma mod. The standalone was very disappointing. On the other hand, the dev of the original mod was the lead on the standalone (for a while) so buying it made me feel like I was contributing more directly to him. Part of the reason I liked the mod so much was because of how unpolished it felt, the ui sort of stapled on top of the Arma ui, everything a little janky and you're plunged into a hostile zombie world. Funny how something unpolished can feel more appropriate.
  - orbifold 4y ago
    The UI in the mod was honestly working better and the mod had more features, better working zombies than the standalone game for a long time. The zombie mechanics was mostly a distraction and what the main draw was the long realistic weather and survival mechanics in a vast well simulated world, with realistic weapons / injury mechanics.
- krautsourced 4y ago
  "avoid buying...at all cost" had me chuckle a bit ;)
- CodesInChaos 4y ago
  Buying early-access is quite different from kickstarter style financing. I only buy early access if the product is already worth the money at the time I buy it. For example factorio was already a great game when I bought it, but only hit 1.0 several years later.
astrobe_ 4y ago
Maybe it's a first step to the simulation space-time continuum deformation, or gravitational waves.
nyx_land 4y ago
Star Citizen for me is a recurring reminder that there are probably hundreds of talented game developers either working independently and living in poverty to work on things that they're truly passionate about and that have real thought and craft put into them, or developers working in the triple-A mines making derivative bloated nonsense every year with terrible working conditions, and yet so often the projects with massive amounts of funding and support are things like this or Yandere Simulator or DayZ being made by devs who are either con artists or completely incompetent devs, or both.
- arlcode 4y ago
  It also reminds me why financially prudent overseers and other non tech people are needed in a well working company and are not necessarily as bad as some devs claim (within reason). Star citizen was the attempt to free development from the shackels of "investor money" and the expectation was that this would remove the need to push out some unfinished product. Having succeeded in raising enormous funding they instead opted to release...mostly nothing. No investor would have accepted such a behaviour and at this point in time they seem really lost, working on meaningless details such as bedsheets. Back in the day I expected one of the typical Kickstarter outcomes: "Great game", "Mediocre game with some innovation", "bad game" or "no game" but never in a million years would I have expected reading this article. Over the years it has become clear why Chris Roberts was removed by Microsoft. He seems to be a fairly poor Project Manager.
bblb 4y ago
450 million is a ridiculous amount of money for any software product. It breeds internal bureocracy and lost focus. They must have 100 or more C-level people by now. But maybe I finally got it after all these years. It's not about the software or the playable game. It's about storytelling. That's what the whales are addicted to. It's "VXJunkies", but with big bucks. I don't blame them. I also find it fascinating to watch and read about the latest technical details about some specific tech that they came up with. S42 and PU will never happen. But what might happen is, that some of the employees take all that knowledge and skill they've been gathering all these years in CI. They will setup a new indie game studio and will release something actually viable and playable. Maybe a new "No Man's Sky" with a cool tech stack.
xupybd 4y ago
Do they have a road map of when they will release the game?
- rantallion 4y ago
  It's optimistic to think that it might actually release.
- jdlshore 4y ago
  They have a publicly available progress tracker* that’s based off of their internal Jira. They only forecast one quarterly release at a time, though, so there’s no ultimate release date. Given the size and complexity of the project, I doubt they would be able to make an accurate forecast. *I’m on mobile so can’t give you the URL, but searching “star citizen roadmap” should lead you to it.
- waste_monk 4y ago
  They had a roadmap for a while but dropped it because people were getting (rightfully) upset about the lack of progress.
  - zeeZ 4y ago
    They had a roadmap for the next three or four quarters, which they initially said they would only add items to they are committing to shipping. That obviously didn't work out and people were getting pissed because the closer the release date for a feature got, the more likely it was for that feature to get moved back or even removed from the roadmap entirely, not to be seen again for several years. It goes a bit beyond lack of progress, which is still being made. Mostly bad management.
jdlshore 4y ago
A lot of misinformed comments in this thread, most of which are repeating the “scam” canard. I expected better of HN than the sort of rhetoric that shows up on r/games. I’m not a backer of the game, but I have been following it with interest over the past several years. The fact is, SC has shipped 17 quarterly releases over the past four years. Each has made demonstratable progress towards the ultimate goal, which is an immersive sim MMO with triple-A production value and real-time action gameplay. All of these things have been done before, but they’ve never been done all at the same time. (Immersive sims: Deus Ex, System Shock. MMOs: World of Warcraft, Eve. Triple-A action gameplay: Call of Duty, Battlefield.) It’s a lot of work, and the core networking technology required to make it an MMO, server meshing, is yet to be proven out. There’s plenty to criticize. But the game is very obviously not a scam, nor is it “selling JPEGs.” For $45, you can download and play it right now, access all the content available now and in the future, and never pay another cent. Anyone saying otherwise is lazily repeating Internet memes, and HN deserves better than that. (If you don’t want to pay $45–and I wouldn’t blame you; I never pay for software based on future potential—you can see its current state very easily with a visit to Twitch or YouTube. There’s plenty of streamers playing it.)
- zeeZ 4y ago
  There are also free fly events where anyone can play the game for free. The next one is coming up may 20-31.
- throwmeariver1 4y ago
  sunk cost fallacy?
- arlcode 4y ago
  I backed it very early and while not calling it a scam, I moved it from "In development" to "basically failed" in my head because frankly it didn't deliver close to what it promised in a reasonable time. They are clearly working on something and apparently people are happy with it but I'd be very surprised if they ever deliver what I payed them for: A cinematic ,mediocre to good, single player space shooter to keep me entertained for a few hours. They seem unable to put a cut in it and just finish this part of the project. It'll probably never live up to their ever increasing expectations. (Not blaming anyone but me for giving them money. I learned a lot since then)
wedn3sday 4y ago
When did hackernews stop enjoying strange niche software? If people think starcitizen is cool, why do you care if they pay developers to make their weird game? No one is going to come slap league of legends out of your hands and force you to play a space sim. I quite enjoy playing SC, and have spent a grand total of $50 on it 5 years ago, and gotten at least a hundred hours of play time out of it. Am I frustrated by the developers? Absolutely. Do I enjoy the product? Also yes.
optimalsolver 4y ago
Sunk Cost Galaxy: A video series examining this mess: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGq4YEp8QUY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGq4YEp8QUY
h2odragon 4y ago
Meanwhile, X3 keeps rolling along...
jrootabega 4y ago
It does sound silly the way they present it here, which is intentional. But I recently started Skyrim, and damned if the unrealistic way NPCs sleep IS pretty annoying. They just rotate 90° on their z axis and hover over the bed, stiff as a board, with their eyes open. If this is something that you might see an NPC do while walking around your ship, that's something that Star Citizen can do to differentiate it from existing space pilot sims, so i don't think it's totally ridiculous. But the more practical approach would have been bunks that close like drawers so you never see them sleeping, or stiff sleep sacks that can simply bulge.
- Stevvo 4y ago
  I find Skyrim's animations quite charming, although they were already dated from a technical perspective when the game first came out.
tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
I expected this to be about gravity distorting spacetime (often explained using a rubber sheet analogy). Nope, actual bedsheets.
tibbydudeza 4y ago
Remember when I was young C programmer out of varsity - immature really. Wasted a year to port some software over to a new embedded platform but eventually it became a new OS (GOS - named after me obviously) , network stack (RS485 based) with queues , new debugger but it was all so buggy that is crashed more than it ran. I was so overwhelmed as I kept working on new stuff without fixing existing stuff that eventually a veteran saw me struggling and took me aside and helped me to do a quick and dirty port minus all the crud. I learned a valuable lesson - yes write good code - but good enough - and know when to STOP and SHIP it.
- john567 4y ago
  Very valuable lesson. Put some effort into defining scope and prevent yourself from improving your design as you go. (There may be time for that next time) Know your platform! If you know exactly how well the different things you need are going to behave you are free to take every shortcut out there. If you're experienced you'll carve out a space for you to return to if you need. i.e. you make things modular where needed. The first iteration should be working code and unless there's time to make improvements you don't. You move on to the next thing.
kingcharles 4y ago
I put some decent money into Star Citizen. Then I ended up in jail for over 8 years. I remember thinking, "Well, at least Star Citizen will be finished when I get out..."

76 points by throwaway743 4y ago

This is arguably an improvement over their previous focus, adding thousand-dollar consumable ships with the hopes that their high-rolling whales would keep them laughing all the way to the bank.

nvrspyx 4y ago
Make no mistake, that's still their primary focus.
- throwaways85989 4y ago
  But now they focus on accurate bedsheet physics, to attract undead, ghosted investors..
  - nvrspyx 4y ago
    No different than the bartender AI, defecation, elevator UI, etc. It's a smoke screen to serve as an illusion of "healthy" development. It's a means to sell more ships. No one will buy ships for a game that will never exist, but they will for a game that they "believe" will eventually exist.

FatalLogic 4y ago

The saddest thing about Star Citizen is that so much money and human effort is being burned for creative development which is almost certainly going to end up buried, unappreciated, in a failed project

prox 4y ago
This is why I like Elite Dangerous’ model better. They shipped a game and made iterative improvements. It has many flaws, but for most intents and purposes it’s a running space sim.
- em-bee 4y ago
  agreed, ship something and then improve it is a way better approach, then at least we have a game even if the money runs out. star citizen risks never completing, and that's just not something i feel comfortable supporting. the irony is that i long ignored elite dangerous because its name made me think it's some kind of battle oriented shooter, and not a space simulation.
  - dvh 4y ago
    When I'm making game and I want to finish it fast, I limit myself to "2 of everything". If the game is about maze of rooms, I made 2 rooms (because 2 is minimal amount when you need to implement the switching). When I plan to have hundreds of guns, I make 2 because that's the minimum to test switching. 2 characters. 2 attacks. 2 NPCs. 2 endings. 2 levels. 2 quests... Only when everything is implemented I either release as mvp or start adding more content into otherwise finished game. So in case of bedsheet deformation, I would make a function that returns deformed bedsheet, but in first release it would simply randomly returned one of 2 premade assets.
- tibbydudeza 4y ago
  Or No Mans Sky - hyper and expectations but the team behind it has improved it so much.
  - lokedhs 4y ago
    If NMS has been honest with what they had vs. what their vision was, they wouldn't even have had to suffer all the negativity. Imagine if ED had marketed itself around the idea of being able to jump out of your ship and play in first person, people would have been furious. The fact that NMS managed to come back and actually implement pretty much everything they had originally promised is pretty amazing, but I think it's an anomaly, and most games that suffer from initial disappointment will end up being cancelled.
Gigachad 4y ago
I haven’t followed the progress of this game for a long time but it reminds me of the importance of MVPs. If you can’t get something out on the market that is fun within a reasonable time, it likely never will successful. People rag on about incomplete games a lot but these days games a long past the throw over the wall products they used to be. They are living products designed to last a decade or more. Getting real players on the game and driving the feedback for future development is critical to getting a final product that is perfect.
- MrMember 4y ago
  I guess it depends on the developers' definition of "successful." If the goal was to ship a completed game than Star Citizen is an abject failure. If the goal was to make hundreds of millions of dollars working on an overly ambitious passion project than it has been wildly successful.
stubish 4y ago
Occasionally I fire up Star Citizen, discover the controller support is still awful, and never see all the stuff they have been working on. Having heaps of developers and artists working on fluff is great if you have the money, but you need a solid core.

altcognito 4y ago

Maybe it’s in the MVP?

richardfey 4y ago

I thought they were talking about oceanic bedsheets

lkj3lkjlkj3 4y ago

[flagged]

lolinder 4y ago

Star Citizen reminds me very much of that story about the Danish artist who was commissioned by a museum to produce a new piece for $84k and gave them two empty canvases entitled "Take the Money and Run".[0] Cloud Imperium is, at this point, a modern art studio that is constantly trying to see just how overtly they can make fun of their patrons while still receiving big checks. [0] https://www.npr.org/2021/09/29/1041492941/jens-haaning-kunsten-take-the-money-and-run-art-denmark-blank https://www.npr.org/2021/09/29/1041492941/jens-haaning-kunst...

s5300 4y ago
- mvid 4y ago
  This response makes the GP seem more valid
  - s5300 4y ago
    Hmm… I don’t exactly see how but maybe I should specify. I very much keep up on the development of the game, & I think it’s going great. I think we have another 3-4 years to go before what I’d imagined when I first heard of the game (a few weeks after it’s public announcement) is possible. Server issues are likely to be a bulk of what needs ironed out. Unfortunately, as for me not personally touching the game - severe physical illness that makes it very hard to be at a computer. I would definitely be playing every major release if I could comfortably do so. If that still makes your comment correct - in what I’m saying makes the GP seem more valid - I guess I have a misunderstanding. If SC ends up being a complete flop - it will be unfortunate, but I truly believe a great amount of tech will come out of the disbanding teams. If you think all of their hundreds to thousands of something employees are all in on a grand conman scheme & they’re doing literally nothing but sinking their collective reputations - I’ve got some… lemme see… maybe horse dewormer to sell you, perhaps other things… The cherry on top for me is the longer it takes to ship (heh) the more likely it is I’ll actually be able to comfortably play the game I’ve dreamt about for some time, definitely before SC was ever announced. Some of my friends who’ve backed are literally going to have become doctors or with kids approaching middle school before 1.0 :)

MBCook 4y ago

At a certain point should projects like this be investigated by some authority? $450m is not far from double GTA V’s budget. 10 years is 3x as long. Something just doesn’t seem right here. I’m not saying they’ve made nothing. But have they made reasonable progress given the scope, timeframe, and budget? It doesn’t seem like it.

alar44 4y ago
That's what I'm thinking. If this is legal, I'm going to hire an artist and an animator and just have them make press releases and eat people's money.
- vinyl7 4y ago
  That's pretty much what a lot of kickstarter indie games are.
  - iancmceachern 4y ago
    That's pretty much what a lot of startups are.
acomjean 4y ago
I’m not sure how they’ve structured the game sales and add ons (ship sales). Over charging people isn’t illegal..it’s a shame though. But if at some point enough people start asking their credit card companies for charge backs, this won’t go on too much longer. Though I suspect the higher ups have paid themselves well enough, it won’t matter to them. I suspect the majority to just forget about it, or be too embarrassed to make a fuss and just walk away from the money they’ve spent. There are a huge amount of slightly older games out there for good prices..,
wedn3sday 4y ago
A few differences between starcitizen and GTA: when GTA started development it was being made by an existing studio, SC when it started was like 5 dudes, so they've had to build the studio at the same time as they're building the game. GTA is an improvement on a previously done format, breaking very little new ground. The SC devs literally had to re-write large parts of the Cryengine to add 64bit support so they could build whole solar systems (at about 1/10th scale, but still quite large). Comparing the two is like saying, Ford was making a million cars a year 20 years ago, Tesla is a scam because they cant make a million cars a year.

random-human 4y ago

A bit surprised they haven't found a way to exploit the crypto/NFT crowd yet. Or have they?

cyber_kinetist 4y ago
I mean, they already figured out how to do this shit way before the crypto/NFT crowd…
Ekaros 4y ago
NFTs would mean that the "players" can resell stuff they bought, can't have that. Then they might not buy new stuff instead...

leeoniya 4y ago

maybe they'll finally crack the unsolved problem in physics of predicting friction coefficients between arbitrary materials & surfaces. 10 years might be worth the wait!

a0zU 4y ago
It turns out the SC devs have spent this whole time solving every fundamental problem in physics to create perfect immersion.

jwmoz 4y ago

This will go down as the biggest Ponzi in entertainment history.

cyber_kinetist 4y ago
“Maybe the real Star Citizen was the friends we made along the way”
wedn3sday 4y ago
Well, if its a ponzi scheme, its the most fun I've had blowing up space pirates in a ponzi scheme.
detaro 4y ago
"Ponzi scheme" does not mean "thing that gets lots of money that might not deliver and I don't like"...
CodesInChaos 4y ago
You may consider Star Citizen a scam, but it's definitely not a Ponzy scheme. In a Ponzy scheme the profits of early "investors" are paid from the money later investors put in.
lfkdev 4y ago
Thats not what a Ponzi scheme is

tjpnz 4y ago

What happens when the engine becomes dated? Do they begin the process all over again?

cwillu 4y ago
https://www.eteknix.com/chris-roberts-explains-star-citizen-engine-change/ https://www.eteknix.com/chris-roberts-explains-star-citizen-...

beowulfey 4y ago

Star Citizen and DayZ were the two games that taught me to avoid buying early access games at all cost.

bardan 4y ago
I had great experiences with DayZ when it was still an Arma mod. The standalone was very disappointing. On the other hand, the dev of the original mod was the lead on the standalone (for a while) so buying it made me feel like I was contributing more directly to him. Part of the reason I liked the mod so much was because of how unpolished it felt, the ui sort of stapled on top of the Arma ui, everything a little janky and you're plunged into a hostile zombie world. Funny how something unpolished can feel more appropriate.
- orbifold 4y ago
  The UI in the mod was honestly working better and the mod had more features, better working zombies than the standalone game for a long time. The zombie mechanics was mostly a distraction and what the main draw was the long realistic weather and survival mechanics in a vast well simulated world, with realistic weapons / injury mechanics.
krautsourced 4y ago
"avoid buying...at all cost" had me chuckle a bit ;)
CodesInChaos 4y ago
Buying early-access is quite different from kickstarter style financing. I only buy early access if the product is already worth the money at the time I buy it. For example factorio was already a great game when I bought it, but only hit 1.0 several years later.

astrobe_ 4y ago

Maybe it's a first step to the simulation space-time continuum deformation, or gravitational waves.

nyx_land 4y ago

Star Citizen for me is a recurring reminder that there are probably hundreds of talented game developers either working independently and living in poverty to work on things that they're truly passionate about and that have real thought and craft put into them, or developers working in the triple-A mines making derivative bloated nonsense every year with terrible working conditions, and yet so often the projects with massive amounts of funding and support are things like this or Yandere Simulator or DayZ being made by devs who are either con artists or completely incompetent devs, or both.

arlcode 4y ago
It also reminds me why financially prudent overseers and other non tech people are needed in a well working company and are not necessarily as bad as some devs claim (within reason). Star citizen was the attempt to free development from the shackels of "investor money" and the expectation was that this would remove the need to push out some unfinished product. Having succeeded in raising enormous funding they instead opted to release...mostly nothing. No investor would have accepted such a behaviour and at this point in time they seem really lost, working on meaningless details such as bedsheets. Back in the day I expected one of the typical Kickstarter outcomes: "Great game", "Mediocre game with some innovation", "bad game" or "no game" but never in a million years would I have expected reading this article. Over the years it has become clear why Chris Roberts was removed by Microsoft. He seems to be a fairly poor Project Manager.

bblb 4y ago

450 million is a ridiculous amount of money for any software product. It breeds internal bureocracy and lost focus. They must have 100 or more C-level people by now. But maybe I finally got it after all these years. It's not about the software or the playable game. It's about storytelling. That's what the whales are addicted to. It's "VXJunkies", but with big bucks. I don't blame them. I also find it fascinating to watch and read about the latest technical details about some specific tech that they came up with. S42 and PU will never happen. But what might happen is, that some of the employees take all that knowledge and skill they've been gathering all these years in CI. They will setup a new indie game studio and will release something actually viable and playable. Maybe a new "No Man's Sky" with a cool tech stack.

xupybd 4y ago

Do they have a road map of when they will release the game?

rantallion 4y ago
It's optimistic to think that it might actually release.
jdlshore 4y ago
They have a publicly available progress tracker* that’s based off of their internal Jira. They only forecast one quarterly release at a time, though, so there’s no ultimate release date. Given the size and complexity of the project, I doubt they would be able to make an accurate forecast. *I’m on mobile so can’t give you the URL, but searching “star citizen roadmap” should lead you to it.
waste_monk 4y ago
They had a roadmap for a while but dropped it because people were getting (rightfully) upset about the lack of progress.
- zeeZ 4y ago
  They had a roadmap for the next three or four quarters, which they initially said they would only add items to they are committing to shipping. That obviously didn't work out and people were getting pissed because the closer the release date for a feature got, the more likely it was for that feature to get moved back or even removed from the roadmap entirely, not to be seen again for several years. It goes a bit beyond lack of progress, which is still being made. Mostly bad management.

jdlshore 4y ago

A lot of misinformed comments in this thread, most of which are repeating the “scam” canard. I expected better of HN than the sort of rhetoric that shows up on r/games. I’m not a backer of the game, but I have been following it with interest over the past several years. The fact is, SC has shipped 17 quarterly releases over the past four years. Each has made demonstratable progress towards the ultimate goal, which is an immersive sim MMO with triple-A production value and real-time action gameplay. All of these things have been done before, but they’ve never been done all at the same time. (Immersive sims: Deus Ex, System Shock. MMOs: World of Warcraft, Eve. Triple-A action gameplay: Call of Duty, Battlefield.) It’s a lot of work, and the core networking technology required to make it an MMO, server meshing, is yet to be proven out. There’s plenty to criticize. But the game is very obviously not a scam, nor is it “selling JPEGs.” For $45, you can download and play it right now, access all the content available now and in the future, and never pay another cent. Anyone saying otherwise is lazily repeating Internet memes, and HN deserves better than that. (If you don’t want to pay $45–and I wouldn’t blame you; I never pay for software based on future potential—you can see its current state very easily with a visit to Twitch or YouTube. There’s plenty of streamers playing it.)

zeeZ 4y ago
There are also free fly events where anyone can play the game for free. The next one is coming up may 20-31.
throwmeariver1 4y ago
sunk cost fallacy?
arlcode 4y ago
I backed it very early and while not calling it a scam, I moved it from "In development" to "basically failed" in my head because frankly it didn't deliver close to what it promised in a reasonable time. They are clearly working on something and apparently people are happy with it but I'd be very surprised if they ever deliver what I payed them for: A cinematic ,mediocre to good, single player space shooter to keep me entertained for a few hours. They seem unable to put a cut in it and just finish this part of the project. It'll probably never live up to their ever increasing expectations. (Not blaming anyone but me for giving them money. I learned a lot since then)

wedn3sday 4y ago

When did hackernews stop enjoying strange niche software? If people think starcitizen is cool, why do you care if they pay developers to make their weird game? No one is going to come slap league of legends out of your hands and force you to play a space sim. I quite enjoy playing SC, and have spent a grand total of $50 on it 5 years ago, and gotten at least a hundred hours of play time out of it. Am I frustrated by the developers? Absolutely. Do I enjoy the product? Also yes.

optimalsolver 4y ago

Sunk Cost Galaxy: A video series examining this mess: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGq4YEp8QUY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGq4YEp8QUY

h2odragon 4y ago

Meanwhile, X3 keeps rolling along...

jrootabega 4y ago

It does sound silly the way they present it here, which is intentional. But I recently started Skyrim, and damned if the unrealistic way NPCs sleep IS pretty annoying. They just rotate 90° on their z axis and hover over the bed, stiff as a board, with their eyes open. If this is something that you might see an NPC do while walking around your ship, that's something that Star Citizen can do to differentiate it from existing space pilot sims, so i don't think it's totally ridiculous. But the more practical approach would have been bunks that close like drawers so you never see them sleeping, or stiff sleep sacks that can simply bulge.

Stevvo 4y ago
I find Skyrim's animations quite charming, although they were already dated from a technical perspective when the game first came out.

tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago

I expected this to be about gravity distorting spacetime (often explained using a rubber sheet analogy). Nope, actual bedsheets.

tibbydudeza 4y ago

Remember when I was young C programmer out of varsity - immature really. Wasted a year to port some software over to a new embedded platform but eventually it became a new OS (GOS - named after me obviously) , network stack (RS485 based) with queues , new debugger but it was all so buggy that is crashed more than it ran. I was so overwhelmed as I kept working on new stuff without fixing existing stuff that eventually a veteran saw me struggling and took me aside and helped me to do a quick and dirty port minus all the crud. I learned a valuable lesson - yes write good code - but good enough - and know when to STOP and SHIP it.

john567 4y ago
Very valuable lesson. Put some effort into defining scope and prevent yourself from improving your design as you go. (There may be time for that next time) Know your platform! If you know exactly how well the different things you need are going to behave you are free to take every shortcut out there. If you're experienced you'll carve out a space for you to return to if you need. i.e. you make things modular where needed. The first iteration should be working code and unless there's time to make improvements you don't. You move on to the next thing.

kingcharles 4y ago

I put some decent money into Star Citizen. Then I ended up in jail for over 8 years. I remember thinking, "Well, at least Star Citizen will be finished when I get out..."