Star Citizen is doing 'bedsheet deformation' physics now
pcgamer.com
pcgamer.com
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-kunst...
At the end of the day Star Citizen isn't a blank canvas. There is a real playable game, not tech demo, right now. Sq42 is a bloody circus, but this pervasive belief that the project is a scam is trivial for anyone to prove false without spending a dime: just wait for the next free fly weekend.
The joke among my friends is never put on a suit you like, because the game is going to crash and you'll lose it.
And 400+ Millon to get to where we are?
I think it's disengenuous to ignore the chronic, glaring deficiencies in planning and execution while pointing to a streaming pile of shit and saying "look, it works".
Or, I can launch into what appears to be a PvP game with terrible flight mechanics (compares to Elite Dangerous).
If there is more game in there, they sure did a great job at hiding it.
I don't believe that anyone at Cloud Imperium actually cares about bedheets. They simply recognize that Star Citizen is now a work of performance art, and this is the next stage of the performance.
It’s weird, how you can get so attached to something that you start to forget what really attracted you in the first place.
There is a huge audience for gaming videos on YouTube and twitch, and a lot of people in the audience aren't also playing those games. Their enjoyment is just in the story, and the visuals, and the commentary. I always wondered why the money keeps rolling in -- maybe because the anticipation and the imagination are already giving them enjoyment of a not-yet-fully-playable game.
Classical art was sold on the perceived quality of the art. Contemporary art is sold on the notoriety of the artist. A framed copy of what was originally a stencil graffiti was sold for > $1 million because it was Banksy. After being shredded as part of a prank, the then shredded work was resold for > $25 million.
The value of those empty canvases are now likely worth well north of the $84k paid, because wow what art. And yes, /s.
"How clever!" they think. And remember that the canvasses would be sold for much more than what it cost.
Do you think the artist should have duct-taped a banana to them instead?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Good to see they made it right and are 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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)
$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.
Also all three of your variables - scope, time and budget - have been dynamic and mostly increasing, while progress has been made. There's obviously a problem with scope and time management, but I don't think criminal levels.
Apples and Oranges (with a development goal of pumpkins)
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..,
No one will buy ships for a game that will never exist, but they will for a game that they "believe" will eventually exist.
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.
*I’m on mobile so can’t give you the URL, but searching “star citizen roadmap” should lead you to it.
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.