Star Citizen, Roberts Space Industries - Chris Roberts' life support and retirement fund [2012-]

By 2022:
- Interesting info. They threw almost everything from Squadron 42 away in 2019.

By 2025:
- Interesting info. They threw almost everything from Squadron 42 away in 2022.
The heap of bad signs is now larger than the country of Denmark!
 
Quelle surprise :rolleyes:

Jebuz that 2nd part: hahahah we make this shit up without planning it out, hahahaha there are tons of obvious inconsistencies we have no excuse for, haha we put patsy questions in the list, hahaha we love working here :no: hahahaha we do so many of these PR bits we can't even remember which one we're on, hahahahaha there is so much important stuff we have no reasonable time scale for hahaha ha ha hah bye ha o_O
 
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Throwing stuff away is what every studio building AAA content does. I'm as skeptical of this ridiculous project as anyone else, but that bit of info in itself is not so redflag worthy, in my opinion
 
Throwing stuff away is what every studio building AAA content does. I'm as skeptical of this ridiculous project as anyone else, but that bit of info in itself is not so redflag worthy, in my opinion

Throwing stuff away must be pretty common, yes.
But reportedly in 2016 they threw away everything connected to the single player part of the game, which had been in development for at least 4 years at the time.
Just to reiterate: 4 years worth of single-player content were thrown away.

Sounds kind of bad to me.
 
Throwing stuff away must be pretty common, yes.
But reportedly in 2016 they threw away everything connected to the single player part of the game, which had been in development for at least 4 years at the time.
Just to reiterate: 4 years worth of single-player content were thrown away.

Sounds kind of bad to me.
That is silly.

They changed their missions to allow planetary flying and so on, it doesn't mean complete purge of assets.
 
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This is quite impressive. Their engine has obviously come a long way and their procedural tech is looking great for creating what is literally a city planet.

 
Impressive tech demo.

It still feels very shallow and empty though, almost hauntingly so. It's a massive city with bright lights and vehicles going all over the place... and open areas with a small number of characters just randomly standing or sitting around staring into space, or wandering aimlessly about. The narrator even says that in the video - there will be some hand-crafted areas where you can interact with stuff, and the rest of the planet is basically just eye-candy.

This seems to be a common theme amongst these massive games. The scope is so large that it's impossible to give it meaningful texture and depth. Procedural generation can get you so far, but cannot flesh out a whole galaxy.
 
And I don't see anything wrong with that. Reality dictates that a planet sized City cannot be populated with meaningful content. If you went procedural with NPCs and missions, then they'll all end up basic missions and similar anyway. There's absolutely nothing to gain from trying to do interiors and population throughout the entire expanse.

It's about an enormous believable immersive environment that has some meaningful focus areas of interaction.
 
Right, and that's the crux of the matter. Reality bites, and even a semi-infinite budget can only get you so far with content.

I guess where I'm coming from is that there are three galaxy-scale games on my radar at the moment - Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous, and No Mans Sky. ED was first to market, it was called "mile wide, inch deep, wait for SC or NMS". Then NMS came out, massive disappointment, mile wide, inch deep, wait for SC. TBH this looks mile wide, inch deep.

There is a fundamental reason for this that in my personal opinion it is because it is to all intents and purposes impossible to create a game a mile wide and more than a few inches deep. It was impossible decades ago and even now with SCs budget it is still not going to work.

The massive scale just seems to hypnotise people.

IMO the only game which has got this truly worked out is EVE, because EVE relies on the players to create the content. Personally I dislike what EVE has become, despite having played it for nearly a decade from launch, but it does seem to deliver on its original vision.

To be clear, I still play ED and I am enjoying it because I have embraced what it is. I do have a nagging feeling though that SC will disappoint many, many people given the disconnect between the vision and the physically possible.
 
There is a fundamental reason for this that in my personal opinion it is because it is to all intents and purposes impossible to create a game a mile wide and more than a few inches deep. It was impossible decades ago and even now with SCs budget it is still not going to work.
Well unless you literally throw thousands of people at content creation, it's always going to be impossible. Even then, you're limited by time. The framework that SC is building for their worlds with a combination of procedural and custom focused content will gradually bring meaningful interaction and unique spots to all these planets and moons. Just like everything with SC, it's just very slow getting there.

And I still think there's little to gain from trying to fill out every inch of space with custom stuff. Travelling from one location to another for a mission on Arccorp is now a truly immersive experience but you don't want to have thousands of markers everywhere along the way leading you off to "side quests".
 
In many areas this is far from complete. If they make it in time there will be some AI improvements (NPCs, dealers and opponents) in the next update in late May. Later, when they further optimize the engine, the density of NPCs will be increased significantly. They once had NPC masses but the frame rate was very low (like 7fps).

In addition the optics will be upgraded in the next 12 months with improvements in the level of detail of the buildings, particles, fog, the shadows, a new GI, new hard surface and manmade shaders, better reflections, new hair technique, etc.

On the roofs of these buildings there will be landing stations where you can live or where there will be certain missions. All this is far from being in its final state. What I find most important at the moment is that they improve the AI. Outside of that more professions are needed. By the way, the flight model feels completely different now.


Thats how the same area looked in 2014 when they first showed it:

All of this was still scripted (no whole planet etc.).
 
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What I heard elsewhere is most of the planet is no-fly zone & you can't get down close other than around the scripted & higher-detail port area.

Apparently FPS is pretty good though & thats certainly impressive.
 
Not sure there's anything new in the article that would turn off a hardened backer. It hopefully provides enough info to stop newcomers backing based on CIG's overblown promises. If people still think the project will deliver what they want then fair enough.
 
Even if CIG only has done 3% of what they said its still more than most AAA games. In 2019 there were almost no ship sales and still the funds which are raised in a daily basis increased to around $80 000 which is nore than ever before. There were times where they made $25 000 a day.

The forbes text looks more like the person gathered his personal statement with the help of google search together. He should have rather focused on development mistakes.
 
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