Star Citizen Dev Progress Watch

[Judge_dolly_OG]

I mean, who seriously thought that the quarterly major release schedules would last? And that's not even how a managed software dev works. You release as you go along and things are ready. They put themselves in this boat when they kept going for long stretches without major updates, and so whales were concerned, weren't spending etc. Next thing you know, they change the schedule THREE times within a span of 14 months.

That sort of fixed release date is not uncommon in corporate development, the difference being that if stuff is not ready, as OCS clearly wasn't it would get cut from the release. That would leave them with a pretty barren release though, and they needed to sell the Kraken

Their decision to include OCS in the release has now made the entire release late, with late November being the earliest it will actually get off PTU and into PU.

And they still want to add a big patch and 3.4 in the remaining time of the last quarter... Yeah, right. I'd say they should roll 3.3.5 into 3.4 and have done with it, but realistically even that is not achievable, and I can't see them sticking to these releases as they will have embarrassingly little to put in them.

[dsmart]

That sort of fixed release date is not uncommon in corporate development, the difference being that if stuff is not ready, as OCS clearly wasn't it would get cut from the release. That would leave them with a pretty barren release though, and they needed to sell the Kraken

Their decision to include OCS in the release has now made the entire release late, with late November being the earliest it will actually get off PTU and into PU.

The 3.3. build was already full of new content. They didn't need OCS to make it a major release. Also remember OCS & NBC were in 3.3.5 - which was part of the reason it was split into two parts. Until they decided to merge them back into 3.3. Heck, even the 3.3.5 that was shown at ShitizenCon, wasn't running with OCS.

[StanTheMan]

The 3.3. build was already full of new content. They didn't need OCS to make it a major release. Also remember OCS & NBC were in 3.3.5 - which was part of the reason it was split into two parts. Until they decided to merge them back into 3.3. Heck, even the 3.3.5 that was shown at ShitizenCon, wasn't running with OCS.

Is the average Backer going to know if OCS is actually working even if they were willing to look at its implementation objectively ?

How would someone not knowing what they were looking for tell ?

 

[dsmart]

Is the average Backer going to know if OCS is actually working even if they were willing to look at its implementation objectively ?

How would someone not knowing what they were looking for tell ?

They can already tell, not just because CIG claims it's enabled, but because of quicker load times in some instances, assets which are prematurely unloaded (so they're not visible in the level) etc.

Even those guys claiming faster fps, don't even have a freaking clue how OCS works, and that the only performance gain is due to it not loading assets which are beyond a certain distance from the player location. That's why you still see massive dips in fps even with OCS. I already wrote many times that this would be the issue. Here we are.

[StanTheMan]

So when OCS is implemented..at some point it will dawn on Backers that it isn't fixing the FPS and other performance issues.

Which of Chris and Erin's lies do they hang their hopes on then.    Network bind Culling ?

[dsmart]

So when OCS is implemented..at some point it will dawn on Backers that it isn't fixing the FPS and other performance issues.

Which of Chris and Erin's lies do they hang their hopes on then.    Network bind Culling ?

They are both implemented in the current PTU 3.3 build.

[dsmart]

Well, don't say I didn't call this one - because I did.

So basically 3.3 - which is still shit - is going live today. Aside from the fact that they just released another PTU patch which crashes right on start-up.

As I had predicted, 3.3 is going to be the final year release. Say goodbye to 3.3.5 and 3.4

@ 2m10s

Sandi:
Today We'll Dig Into Some Ongoing Progress With CORE TECH, But First We're Going To Take a Look At The STATE OF ALPHA 2.3... And Some Upcoming Changes To The ROADMAP

Chris:
...yes... ah... so we got some good news... aaand some BAD NEWS...

Sandi:
Ok. Give Me The Good News First.


Chris:
Ah... OK... that's always much BETTER!

(shouting) AH, SO ALPHA 2.3 IS GOING LIVE TOMORROW! Ah, which is really cool and uh, 3.3.5 with HURSTON and LOREVILLE... ah... part of it... ahm... is coming to the PTU in SHORT ORDER as soon as we go live on 3.3... we had to... GET... 3.3 out live to people before we could... move the next sort of, uh... RELEASE into the PTU phase... so that's a real important specs... ah... STEP... and people will be able to play... ah... ah... you know... well... a nice STABLE 3.3 but also... have fu...

... you know, uhm... EXPLORE even... ahm... HURSTON even... if they're willing to... put up with a few CRASHES in the PTU... and that all gets us closer... to... next thing up... the list...

Sandi:
WeLL tHAt DoESn'T SuCK

Chris:
HAHA! No, no it doesn't, ehhh... I mean it's a little later that where we wanted to be but it's a LOTTA CONTENT and the MOST important thing is the OBJECT CONTAINING STREAMING... technology... is now stable enough for us to go LIVE and that's a big big thing 'cos we've been working on that for well over a year... uh, and it's the... it's the... sort of... TECH PILLOW that's gonna allow us to... SCALE... the rest of the world, uhm... on the CLIENT SIDE and then on the TECHNOLOGY SIDE... we're really happy 'cos that's sort of passing a really big GOALPOST that we needed to get past.

It, ah... you know... it's taken us obviously longer than we thought and it's been a bit more complicated and difficult than we thought but that is the sort of CASE with that sort of... R&D that you have to do and there's so many, you know... ISSUES that go into it that we've already DISCUSSED... ah, but ah... YEAH... but it's... it's ehm... it's good to be DONE. Good to get that working.

Sandi:
Very. Cool. So. What's. The. Bad. News. Then.

Chris:
Haha! OK, well... the BAD NEWS is, ah... some, ah... THINGS are gonna move OUT of 3.4 and into 3.5, I mean I think people understand our... are AWARE of the fact that, uh... that 3.3's been running LATE so it's, ah... been putting a lot of PRESSURE on 3.4 and the biggest knock on, and this is probably not, ah... particularly APPARENT to people... uh... is that fact that each one of our releases, ah... when we make a 3.3 or a 3.2, um... comes from GAMEDEV which is our main ELEMENT STREAM, so it tends to be... a combination of slightly stable and also full of a whole bunch of CONTENT that you're not ready, or you don't want to put in the current RELEASE...

Instead of excluding THINGS 'cos we got so many THINGS we include THINGS and say, 'OK, we want these THINGS in this release', and so it takes a LOTTA TIME you know, anywhere from... uhm... ah... I think we've never done a SHORTER THAN TWO WEEKS but it's usually more like... FOUR WEEKS... 'cos like, we have HUNDREDS AND HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF FILES, ah, it's... ah... you know... GAMEDEV itself is almost TWO TERABYTES of just the dataset of GAMEDEV itself...

Ah, and that's not just the ARCHIVE stuff, that is like the actual working set... ah, so, most people only have a small portion of it depending on what area they're working on... ahm... so we have to make sure that we're make... the right ones are going ACROSS... and there's only the stuff you need for 3.3 which also takes time to STABILISE, so if... we... ah... go BACK, after we get 3.3 back from GAMEDEV, and then try to stabilise it, and then also test it and get it out, ah... everybody on the development side... um... and this was something that came up, ah... you know... just this week, ah... ah... essentially I've said... ah... we... wuh... it's gonna put us in risk of releasing, ah... 3.4... um... by the end of this year...

So we still wanna be date driven when we can, when we're not waiting for some... TECH PILLAR... and so... we made the HARD DECISION to... ah... basically STAY in the 3.3 branch which will be... come... 3.4 when 3.3.5 is out... and then move the bits of CONTENT, ah... and functionality across that we can't easily from GAMEDEV... that means that we can't move everything that we were planning to have in 3.4... and, uh... some STUFF, ah... is a bit of a BRIDGE TOO FAR, so... ah, we're going to lose some... uh...

Sandi:
So what are some... what are these THINGS... that are being PUSHED OUT

Chris:
Ha! OK... ah, well, I was just saying that, so... some of the THINGS we can move from GAMEDEV and some of the THINGS we can't. Now we're gonna have the HURSTON BUSINESS DISTRICT in 3.4, ah... so we're making sure that's gonna be in and polished, we're gonna do a lot more, ah... work and improvements on the FOIP... and the VOIP stuff... ah, the other SHIPS... ah, that we had scheduled for coming in for, uhm... 3.4 will be in 3.4 as well 'cos it's much easier to bring a SHIP or a WEAPON or an ITEM or a GUN across... uhm, but you'll know in the ah, the ROADMAP that's gonna be updated tomorrow, ahm... what... ah... what has moved and what hasn't moved, so...

The biggest ones are FEMALE, ahm, ah... player character... 'cos... that touches a MASSIVE AMOUNT OF STUFF...

Sandi:
But WHY. Is it so hard. For me to get my. Female Character.

Chris:
It's not just the fact that... ah... there's... you know... THOUSANDS OF ANIMATIONS HAVE TO BE DONE... I mean, we have the same issues that you do in the real world, where, like, a new CAR SEAT, you can adjust your seat, if you got different leg... you've got different length arms and different length legs...

Female skeleton is 5'8" and the male skeleton is 6'.

So we have to have SOLUTIONS for the female getting into cockpit, and... you know... not having their hands hyper-extended or the legs hyper-extended... ah... so there's some TECH that comes in there, there's some STUFF that happens in the character customizer... CLOTHES are another issue, uhm... so there's a HUGE amount that touches a massive amount of DEPARTMENTS and it's a lot of work... and PEOPLE have been working on it for quite a while so it's not something that we just started, it's just... it's in GAMEDEV and we're not in a position to bring it into... um... the 3.3 stream...


@ 11m35s

Sandi:
But I thought you guys were working on some, like, making the game dev more efficient?

Chris:
Well... our goal is... with, ahm... GAMEDEV is that we're going to QUARANTINE it, and we're gonna have some downsce... downstream, ah... development streams... that people do their feature development in, ah, and so what will happen once that's the case is they'll develop a feature in FEATURE_STREAM and then once it's done it will get reviewed and then once we say, 'OK this looks good', it will go through what's called a QATR which is a QA Test Request and it will get fully tested and then we decide, 'OK does it... is it STABLE, does it WORK WELL, does it HURT PERFORMANCE', and if it doesn't, eh, if it... IS stable and DOESN'T hurt performance and it all works well it gets put into GAME_DEV.

So we're only gonna put things into GAME_DEV that are working and have been tested and have been polished, which will mean that GAME_DEV itself will be a lot more stable, ah... and therefore it will have several benefits... one, ah... people like ARTISTS who are always, like, at the mercy of someone putting something stable in GAME_DEV and crashing the editor... uh... the... you know, the next they get... there, they... get the editor tool and they wanna like, do their... build an environment, it CRASHES, 'cos someone's got some other feature that's broken now...

To be able to test these STREAMS, and have all these multiple... whether it's a RELEASE STREAM and a GAME DEVELOPMENT STREAM and a FEATURE STREAM and... there's MULTIPLE FEATURE STREAMS... uh, the BUILD SYSTEM has to be able to handle all those streams, and deal with it, and the... and the... and the... what we call it... COPY_BUILDS, our internal tool that you download, whatever build you wanna be able to do has to be able to take that... so...

Some other things that are in GAME_DEV like CLOUD_TECH which we are extremely excited by... and we're actually doing some really cool STUFF with it, so I think we actually have a little piece to show about that.

Jake Matthes
(Junior VFX, Wilmslow, joined Jul 2018):
So this volumetric cloud tool that I've been working on for, for uh... not too long now is still in very early development.

[Spunky Munkee]

My brain hurts after reading that.

It's as if an alien race picked up a terrestrial broadcast, didnt speak English but tried to use the words to make a message to communicate with earth. The greatest minds would be confused by that broken incoprehensable stream of jibberish

Backers are breaking out their checkbooks though...

[StanTheMan]

My brain hurts after reading that.

It's as if an alien race picked up a terrestrial broadcast, didnt speak English but tried to use the words to make a message to communicate with earth. The greatest minds would be confused by that broken incoprehensable stream of jibberish

Backers are breaking out their checkbooks though...

What you mean you have learnt nothing about game development  from this  ?


And Sandis new interrogate Chris approach... it is just another Bait and Switch.   

[Judge_dolly_OG]

What you mean you have learnt nothing about game development  from this  ?


And Sandis new interrogate Chris approach... it is just another Bait and Switch.

The way the backers were talking about it on Reddit, you would think it was Frost/Nixon. His wife gently prodded him about delays, not exactly the sort of grilling that is really needed. The citizens took it as some sort of watershed moment in the projects time, a new chapter of honesty and integrity.

They knew exactly what's they wanted to say and Sandy was just trying to keep him on track, CR will talk bollocks quite happily and not deal with the issues at hand, telling whales what they want to hear. Until they actually come out and start being realistic about what sort of game they can build, then I have zero respect for them.

It's pretty fundamental, but like everything it is ignored, e.g. flight model, actual gameplay, in favour of shiny ships and FIDELITY.

[dsmart]

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/roadmap/board/1-Star-Citizen

Also :

- 3.3 is live

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/1/thread/star-citizen-alpha-3-3-available

3.3.5 is on PTU

https://pastebin.com/fCviZ7cK

[Motto]

What a dumb, empty, shallow and utterly stupid person you have to be, living a dumb, shallow and utterly stupid life, to still believe that CIG is capable of eventually building and releasing a game.

[StanTheMan]

The way the backers were talking about it on Reddit, you would think it was Frost/Nixon. His wife gently prodded him about delays, not exactly the sort of grilling that is really needed. The citizens took it as some sort of watershed moment in the projects time, a new chapter of honesty and integrity.

They knew exactly what's they wanted to say and Sandy was just trying to keep him on track, CR will talk bollocks quite happily and not deal with the issues at hand, telling whales what they want to hear. Until they actually come out and start being realistic about what sort of game they can build, then I have zero respect for them.

It's pretty fundamental, but like everything it is ignored, e.g. flight model, actual gameplay, in favour of shiny ships and FIDELITY.

yep.

CNN have probably already approached Sandi to understudy Jim Acosta.

[dsmart]

The way the backers were talking about it on Reddit, you would think it was Frost/Nixon. His wife gently prodded him about delays, not exactly the sort of grilling that is really needed. The citizens took it as some sort of watershed moment in the projects time, a new chapter of honesty and integrity.

They knew exactly what's they wanted to say and Sandy was just trying to keep him on track, CR will talk bollocks quite happily and not deal with the issues at hand, telling whales what they want to hear. Until they actually come out and start being realistic about what sort of game they can build, then I have zero respect for them.

It's pretty fundamental, but like everything it is ignored, e.g. flight model, actual gameplay, in favour of shiny ships and FIDELITY.

That's not even the funny part. No, that would be the part where these shows are planned, recorded, edited, then aired.

[dsmart]

Hurston 3.3.5. Pledge moar!!

https://imgur.com/a/XGsIZ9i#Zx7dkHK