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

[Deleted member 11852]

Chris Roberts: "Bullshit!"

 

[swaaye]

Oh boy there are people who have pumped over $10k into the game. The comments are interesting.

 

[tabs]

Took a look at the comments upon your suggestion. Here's one that stuck out to me as an interesting take on it, in particular the final sentence:

The key to understanding modern game business models (crowdfunding, F2P cash shops, freemium, etc) is to stop thinking about games as something a kid has to be able to afford with his birthday money, and start thinking about them like any other adult hobby. For the number of hours people put into games, some spending a few hundred or even thousands of dollars is still much cheaper than traditional hobbies like golf, boating, cars, collecting things, building a workshop, etc. If your primary leisure activity is sitting in front of your PC and playing a game, why not spend money on it and support the creators and the game? Games also have the benefit over most other hobbies that it's still really cheap to get in the door. Everyone doesn't have to be a whale to keep a game going, just some people. This model of funding is not a new thing, it's just a reversion back to how art was funded before the commoditization of it happened in the twentieth century, patronage for art is a very old and time tested model.

Personally I've been happy to wait until it's released before buying it, but they'd already shattered their funding goals before I really took notice.

 

[homerdog]

Oh no!

 

[homerdog]

I haven't paid a dime and don't plan to until it gets officially released (which I suspect will be never), unless one of the "modules" is good enough in its own right to justify the price of entry.

The game probably has 6-8 months before it becomes the laughing stock of the Internet if they don't release something truly substantial or at least something that resembles a release date. Which is sad because it looks so awesome.

By the way I was wrong it took way less than 6 months

 

[Pixel]

To paraphrase Mark Twain - The reports of Star Citizen's demise are greatly exaggerated.

 

[Pixel]

One fallback option is if the money runs out they could possibly go to a publisher for additional funding in exchange for loss of the bulk of after game releases sales revenue or even ownership of the company, ip and franchise.

 

[Billy Idol]

Chris Roberts: "Bullshit!"

Oh boy, now I am really worried. What a childish and unecessary reaction....and still nothing to show. If all he got is 'no, others are wrong' and 'At GC we are probably going to show somethin special'...meh. 85mill in the hands of a juvenile grown up...

 

[Jupiter]

watched the new Gamers Nexus video where Chris Roberts also goes into detail on what to expect from the multicrew demo at GamesCom. (Around 6 min in)

>We're going to show [multi-crew] at GamesCom: You're going to start in a space station, you're in a room, you get out, the space station is huge – you'll see this gas giant outside, you'll go out to the landing pad, get into a cutlass with your friends. They'll all get into the Cutlass – which will all be its own zone running in the local grid – this is why we have the physics partitioned for each individual ship, so it can fly around and you can be moving around the ship irrelevant of where the ship's going.

And here (about 9m30s in)

>I'm really excited by where we're at with multi-crew. Hopefully people will be impressed by what they see when we show them at GamesCom. It's a real system that has extensibility and we're going to show you getting into one ship, taking off, flying, EVAing into another ship, powering up... All the stuff you've seen in machinima videos and have thought 'if I could do that in a game, that would be awesome.

 

[Davros]

Davros thinks people waiting for star citizen to be finished should at least give this a try
I-War 2: Playable Demo:
http://www.i-war2.com/downloads/category/32-demos

 

[tabs]

Honestly Davros I think quite a few people care about the drama more than the game. I took a look at I-War when you suggested it previously but it's hard to want to play such a dated looking space game when I've got Elite to play. I don't mind old graphics too much but couple that with old UIs and my interest quickly turns to frustration.

 

[swaaye]

I've played I-War2. Not really interested in going back to that or any of the other oldies. For some reason the old space games have lost their charm for me.

I am excited to play a brand new, very slick modern version of this genre though. Various other recent attempts have been badly lacking in excitement.

 

[Jupiter]

Oh boy, now I am really worried. What a childish and unecessary reaction....and still nothing to show. If all he got is 'no, others are wrong' and 'At GC we are probably going to show somethin special'...meh. 85mill in the hands of a juvenile grown up...

Especially the development of huge games takes time. Add open development to the mix and it becomes intentionally longer.

Important:
[Discussion/collaboration] Decided to try and compile a list of all known "core" modifications CIG is making to cryengine. Looking at them all in one place really puts the delays into perspective!
http://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/38pb1o/discussioncollaboration_decided_to_try_and/

Many features did not exist in video game engines and needs to be developed for Star Citizen.


also impressive:
"Currently, the plan is for those areas – specific windows, specific sections of hull – to be fixed. Roberts compares it to Battlefield 4’s ‘Levelution’ (everyone still cringing about that name? Yes? Good) elements, in which players can cause, for example, a high-rise to collapse mid-match, permanently altering the layout of the map. But the eventual idea is to have these moments be unscripteted.

“At present, there are specific things that can be blown up or destroyed: displays [and] windows, stuff like that,” says Roberts. “Longer term, we’d very much like to have a more procedural system, where you could perhaps blow out parts of the ship at any point… Longer term it would be nice to have some of that on the bigger ships, so you could set a grenade off in a corridor and it would rip a hole in that particular section.

Which is good, because as we point out, the problem with both Battlefield 4’s Levolution and later CoD’s similar weapons-of-map-destruction is that while they’re cool the first couple of times they happen (especially on stage at a gaming expo), watching the same building collapse 50 times over becomes predictably ho-hum. A procedural destruction mechanic is one guard against fatigue – the other is the resulting shift to zero-gravity.

"It’s not so much that an area can get flooded, or now a big building falls on you,” Roberts says, when we make the comparison. “There will be cases which are the equivalent of the building falling on you that do significant damage inside some of the structures, and if you’re out in space things will blow open and people will be ejected into space. We have some procedural destruction. But I think the zero-G aspect changes things up. You’re not just walking along flat surfaces; you can launch up to what used to be the ceiling.

http://www.redbull.com/en/games/stories/1331726969794/star-marine-interview-with-chris-roberts

 

[Jupiter]

I have made a few pictures of the new Merlin in UHD: https://flic.kr/s/aHskdm5CS1
This reminds me visually of Star Wars.

Chris Roberts posted a video about physic grids. I'm surprised he is still coding:

Images from the reworked Constellation (ATV): http://imgur.com/a/wWAZW
Audio Update (FMOD -> Wwise): https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14853-Star-Citizen-Audio-Update

 

[hoom]

>We're going to show [multi-crew] at GamesCom: You're going to start in a space station, you're in a room, you get out, the space station is huge – you'll see this gas giant outside, you'll go out to the landing pad, get into a cutlass with your friends. They'll all get into the Cutlass

Then they have to start over 3 times because they crash the Cutlass into the docking bay/first asteroid outside the bay/get shot up immediately & while the immersion factor was pretty cool the first time, by the 3rd we will all want to be able to just skip it.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

In the very same day they release an article purely for damage-control, they also release a brand new virtual spaceship for purchase.

 

[Jupiter]

Gamescom presentation was stunning. I have never seen something like that before. And that's just the beginning.
Link:

Dictator93 from an other forum wrote this:

"Things you can see in the [multi-crew video] video:
Localized physical grids: station has its own gravity, emptiness of space does, inside ships you have your own physics, etc..
- Zone system: no lag and no unecessary rendering
- Huge world: solar system sized map (here just a tiny portion of it)
- Multi crew gameplay: multiple people on a ship doing different roles (command chair, engineer, co commander, gunners)
- Retrieve, Recovery, and EVA: go out of your ship into the void, board other ships, get them in working order for missions
- IDRIS (smaller capital ship shows up at the end)"

They have also showed many other things during the event (social module, a HOTAS setup)
Stream: http://www.twitch.tv/starcitizen/v/10047942

 

[Jupiter]

Here is the livestream version of the multi-crew demo with Roberts commentary:

Some massive explosions during the live demo:
https://gfycat.com/BlackEmptyArmyworm (only possible with high GPU power)

Idris Frigate in the end:
http://i.imgur.com/TlFtd2L.gif (there will be much larger ships [2km])

_____

They will release the social module for backers this month:

(still WIP)

The 1-to-1 no-faking animation system that has to work both in 1st and 3rd person has been the biggest roadblock. They are slowly making it work. But it has been the biggest challenge when it comes to the FPS module. They are still working hard on it. Therefore the FPS module will come out later next month.

 

[Kyyla]

Its cool and all but the videos demonstrate feature creep gone amok. Good luck to all the backers. Why wold I want to walk along empty corridors instead of just hopping in the spaceship anyway?

 

[Jupiter]

They will all be filled with NPCs. It is still WIP. Much can be done on these platforms. So, for example, to buy weapons/ships etc. or accept missions.

The amount of game the people who got in for 40$ are going to get is the best deal on this planet. In the one hand you get three AAA games at once. And in the other hand most people will have a great time watching the game grow. Every week there are tons of new information. 10 for the Chairman, Transverse the Verse, Reverse the Verse, Bugsmashers, Weekly Reports, Monthly Reports, Lore etc.

The first singleplayer campaign alone will be at least a 20 hour experience. Just the performance capture stuff that was shot is 5-6 hours of content. Then there’s all the action.