3.0 Progress Watch

[David-2]

Yeah, that totally looks like fun. FF to 3:05 for some hilarity

AFAIK the player can't see inside those boxes - so what the heck do you suppose was in there?  Schrödinger's cat wanting out?

[David-2]

Yeah, this was totally ready

Yeah, but a lot of them are totally dups!

There're probably only 8500 unique bugs there.  Maybe even only 8000.

[dsmart]

They're totally going to release this to live for the holidays, regardless of the state. FF to 20:15

[AncoGaming]

Yeah. That picture of 11.4K issues from the Issue Council is, well, a bit misleading.

Not saying that these builds are anywhere near working, hell no, but some of the SC community like to duplicate entries for some reason or they don't read or report stupid shit which has no place being there etc. etc.

The whole concept of the IC has never worked and I don't even know if anyone besides some poor dude from community management did ever glance over it. Back in the days I've contributed over there because of some strange mechanic which got you selected for 1st wave testing whenever a PTU came out but nowadays no one gives a crap anymore because you can simply buy your way into Testing.

Come to think of it, this isn't even Pay2Win... this is Pay2Crash, holy crap this whole concept must be a wet dream for every publisher out there.

[N0mad]

I'm a little torn, on one hand I feel really sorry for all the devs who joined CIG thinking that this was going to the a career defining move, only to end up in development hell with Chris Roberts.

On the other hand, they're idiots. Why on god's earth did they make a cargo crate persist when storing the character data? The guy who explained that his fix was to remove the crate only on death is an idiot - when clearly the solution was to NOT PERSIST AT ALL!? I know they've made everything overly complex, but this should be basic stuff.

It must have dawned on them by now that they lack the collective talent to make this game.

One other thing I realised - we've become very accustomed to the ATV format, and it is nice to see the people doing the work, however, it must be the only game dev diary where no game is seen being played. Normally these things have a showcase of all the latest cool gameplay with a someone talking over it. This must be the only company which gives more screen time to the employees than the actual game. I can't imagine why.

[AncoGaming]

I wouldn't call those devs idiots. I mean, who knows how much they are really allowed to decide?

In old Jump Point magazines I've seen design concepts of ships and game mechanics. Some dudes were really creative, drawing stuff, thinking about solutions, then these concepts were sent to Roberts and meanwhile everything grinded to a halt because he and he alone were to decide where the concpets were going. So he drew all over the stuff and it got sent back and forth until finally some details like a fuckin' space toilet or whatever got greenlit. This was the process of almost everything and this kind of stupid micromanagement (next to other stuff) has been delaying this project ever since. I've been criticising it for years.

So I simply assume the persistence of a cargo crate is part of Robert's "Vision" and if you don't like it you can pack your bags and get lost. There may be a lot of collective talent but no one's allowed to make use of it, I fear.

[StanTheMan]

I wouldn't call those devs idiots. I mean, who knows how much they are really allowed to decide?

In old Jump Point magazines I've seen design concepts of ships and game mechanics. Some dudes were really creative, drawing stuff, thinking about solutions, then these concepts were sent to Roberts and meanwhile everything grinded to a halt because he and he alone were to decide where the concpets were going. So he drew all over the stuff and it got sent back and forth until finally some details like a fuckin' space toilet or whatever got greenlit. This was the process of almost everything and this kind of stupid micromanagement (next to other stuff) has been delaying this project ever since. I've been criticising it for years.

So I simply assume the persistence of a cargo crate is part of Robert's "Vision" and if you don't like it you can pack your bags and get lost. There may be a lot of collective talent but no one's allowed to make use of it, I fear.

An experienced professional delivers a solution and then tells the boss it was the bosses input and expertise that led them to it.

[Spunky Munkee]

Does it really matter how good the devs are or how creative they may or may not be? In the end whether it be because of Roberts tight restrictions or Roberts dictatorial management style in the end this project was driven off the cliff and Chris Roberts was at the wheel.

It wasn't the goons, the Devs, EA, or Kim Jong Il who ruined this project, It was one individual. He had plenty of money, his choice of engines, his choice not to build a custom engine to handle the load which really ruined this project and wasted tens of millions of dollars trying to overcome with workarounds and rewrites.

His lying about delivery dates, scope of the project, who the Marketing manager really was, his changing the TOS to suit his whims and needs destroyed any confidence in him. His concealing the games true progress and financial state let to further erosion of consumer confidence.

Be it due to poor decision making while leading the project or his lying and cheating the public this game is in the toilet. Chris Roberts need only look in the mirror to see the problem.

Perhaps, one day, if CIG could get rid of Roberts and if they has some cash and some continued backers support who were willing to accept a game of a much smaller scale and decreased fidelity they might get some sort of game. They would need to clear house on upper managment and get a very focused Project manager, not an incompetent wasteful boob like Roberts who couldn't run the drive through window at McDonalds.

Do I think he would step aside, NO, not unless the project was out of cash and he was about to shutter the doors. Do I think enough backers would continue supporting a reboot for years to come, some might. There are a lot of if's here. One huge conditional statement that all begins and ends with Robbers. I think he would kill it rather than see it taken away and continue and flourish without him. This would be Robbers third strike. Freelancer, Ascendant  Films, and CIG.

[Motto]

That's not true. I think that Chris is very capable of driving through the McDrive window.

[N0mad]

Of course I blame Chris. But the problems on the programming side are likely to be a bit more complex. Firstly, have they attracted and hired the correct people for the job? I did read somewhere that they have low salaries for the programmers because of the "prestige" of working on Star Citizen will draw the talent. They also have an inexperienced team who have never made an MMO before. Then they haven't hired enough of the right people - for instance their networking team is just a handful of people. These are all management decisions. I suspect they just hired loads of artists and level designers to build JPEGS and tech demos.

Secondly, when designing a system, there's the quick and easy way, or the more complex way. Chris has chosen the complex way every single time. The problem being that whilst the quick and easy way can be programmed quickly and debugged easily (new features can still be added later), doing things in a complex way can get exponentially harder. For instance, suppose I want to sell land on my empty moons. The simple solution is to divide up the land into grids (simple, since the heightmap data will be in a grid anyway), assign owners to each grid, give the grid a flat area on which to build (just assign the same height values to an area of the heightmap), allow users to "purchase" a base which spawns into a predefined location on the flat area. This is easy and CIG could have this up and running in a week. But that's too easy for Chris Roberts: he has to have a beacon which players can place themselves (given the trouble with carrying small cargo boxes this will be a problem), which they can use to claim an arbitrary area of land (more scope for errors with overlapping territories), the beacon will monitor the weather and for intruders (a whole new set of problems, firstly detecting these things, then telling the player). They can also survey the land, using as yet undefined game mechanics. They then hire a team with Pioneer (again, a whole new set of problems - how do you go about this?) which flies to the planet and builds the base (Chris will clearly demand lots of animations and building mini games etc, not to mention how to deal with variable terrain, how the player explains to the team where to spawn the module, and which module etc). Again, these are all management decisions. None of these necessarily add any gameplay which you could define as "fun" either, and it presents a much greater challenge to the coding team who have to create many more systems in the code with much more scope for things going wrong. The land mechanic isn't the only example of course, it's the just the latest example of Chris making the game far more complex than it needs to be without a second thought to how this might be implemented in the code.

[Spunky Munkee]

In the end I doubt that implementation of this land ownership mechanic has been given a moment's thought other than getting art done for the beacon and deciding how much he will charge for the privilege of owning virtual land. It's nothing but a money grab at this point. One more facet of an elaborate scam. Too bad the cultists just think about how wonderfully detailed this new world our fearless leader is creating for them. Perhaps he can sell some sort of product tie in/ placement with Caldwell Banker or some other realtor office. When the shit hits the fan he will just claim he was working to create something, he really tried to make a go of it. Of course it certainly begs the question that if your table is overflowing with problems, the game is inexorably broken, consumer confidence is damaged, why did you add to the list of unfulfilled promises AND ask for money for building into the game. Should it have cost more money to do this? Should cultists have paid for this non existent privilege at this point and time?

Just one more layer of the scam. If you make it appear to be true, making the lie so much more elaborate it becomes so much more real in the greedy minds of the cultists. I have no doubt that Robbers has studied the art of the con, how to get the mark to fulfil his dreams in his own mind. Scary.

As I said in the rest of this reply (that got wiped in a 502 error) I think things will catch up to him. Perhaps it will be like the story "Misery" and a cultist will abduct him forcing him to write code and complete the game...

[N0mad]

I agree. The land sale looks like a quick last minute money grab, but it's not the only example where Chris has set out for maximum fidelity without giving a second thought as to how it will actually be implemented. I'm not just talking about the graphics, but the animations and game mechanics which need to be programmed. Other examples would be shopping / mission givers / mobiglass / cargo box handling / making it an MMO - the list goes on. All of these mechanics could be implemented in a simple straightforward way. Shopping for instance, why do you need to have lots of different items of clothing and AI interaction? Why does mobiglass have to be "in the world", not just in the player's own UI layer? Why do you need an NPC to interact with to get missions? Why do you even need to carry cargo, why can't it just spawn in your ship as needed?

[justme]

hello guys and girls,


i don't think we should connect the issue council with the burndown. the burndown is related to the internal Q&A, not related to the issue council. also the total number of reported bugs you could see, is from all builds, not just the actual one.
and it also needed to be said, that the majority of the bug reports are just not worth the space they need on the server. the most reports are just copies of an existing report, or simply invalid.
this is not really the fault of the citizens, but of the stupid issue council design. if you work with non q&a-people, you need to redesign that in a more intuitive way.

and when you check the description of the issue council, it seems a bit more, that this is just for giving the citizens the feeling to help, but at the end, they don't really care about.


the major problem i have with this burndown is, that they are talking about the live release. with every patch, nearly every day a new build comes up, we get new problems, but a better performance. and i think it is a bit too enthusiastic even to talk about a live release. even the 3.0 is not yet finished in the ptu. there are tons of problems to run that real stable. at the moment the most citizens can start testing around, not to think about playing a game, like in 2.6.3. as long as the 3.0 build is not fully released to the ptu, it is just nonsense to talk about a live release. and i don't know, who they wanna calm down with that misinformation?

in my opinion, they need to get rid of all the peaks in the gameplay. also the core elements, for example the traversal, should work right. and of course the complete build needs to be released. if all this is not done, it is just senseless to talk about a live release candidate.


at the moment i didn't mentioned even one single aspect, that is really working as intended. not even one. and if you watched every episode of bugsmashers and burndown, you are just asking yourself, why exactly these bugs they told us to be fixed, weeks and month ago, are still in the actual build.

[Motto]

Because they change their broadcast formats so often to hide the fact that this game cannot be build. They're still trying to find a format where they can show progress without the backers running for the doors. Hint: they can't. Game Over.

[N0mad]

Unsurprisingly the community is in denial about the state of the game. I wonder, like Derek says, if they'll go live despite all the bugs.

Can't wait for this **thing** that's happening in 2 weeks, coincidentally, it seems, around the time of the Holiday livestream  :supaburn: :supaburn: