They need sales, this is nothing new and neither are ground vehicles. Ursa, hangar buggy, dragonfly etc. When they release 3.0, whenever that may be, backers will have a few things to move around these uniquely huge cryengine assets with. Of course it's going to excite some. The funding tracker tells us to the tune of a quarter million dollars in a day. That's a decent level of interest still.
As long as they can get money for concepts then there is hope the technology will catch up with the plans. More time to do the 'impossible'. I mean, just because it hasn't been done yet, doesn't mean it can't be done. If the funding doesn't dry up and they keep plugging away at it they're bound to get something worthwhile in the end.
Moving from a moon to a planet when you've gone from maximum map size of 10km X 10km to millions X millions doesn't sound like a tough ask. Once they have moons I doubt planets will be far behind.
The gamescom presentation will be vital to the funding. Create more buzz and the company keeps on keeping on. Get moons out to backers and there will be much rejoicing and wallet opening.
This project isn't finished yet, no where near.
If only that were true. They are not making enough monthly income to sustain all the studios. This is not hyperbole, it's an actual fact now, going from what we have seen of the financials. As long as they are making less than $3M per month, they just can't continue forever without scaling down the team. And never in the history of the industry, has throwing money at a bad project, resulted in a good project. And the issue with these two projects is more about the promises made, than about what kind of games will come out at the end.
The surface area of the planet/moon is irrelevant. It's all about performance, practicality, and what to do and put on the surface. ED has a far more superior engine and game, yet they don't have planets. They have moons and planetoids with specific POIs. In SC, the reason they are doing moons and planetoids is specifically because of the scale and performance issues. Big for the sake of big, doesn't make it a game if it's pointless. In these games, the reason you would want a large surface area, is about aircraft. An aircraft flying at 350 m/s in space, isn't going to travel that fast on the planet without running out of space.
As to the moon vs planet vs planetoid issue, this is an excerpt from
what I wrote yesterday:
"
I remember when planets were coming. Then we found out they were moons (Yela and Cellin) – of course because they are smaller, and easier to handle and build, than full blown planets.
Then, after promising the Stanton system back in 2016, they are now saying that they’re going to be moving (LOL!!) Delamar from Nyx to Stanton. You know why? Because they can’t do planets, or they would be building the Crusader planet, which is in Stanton already. Instead, since Delamar (within the Glaciem ring/belt in Nyx) is just a large asteroid the size of a small planet (hence planetoid), they are moving it to Stanton.
If they can move Delamar, they could very well have changed Crusader from a gas giant to a regular planet, built that, and left Delamar where it is. But that would mean having to build an actual planet which would require a larger surface area, more terrain assets, POIs etc. The problem with creating surface area in these games is that when you have air/space craft which can travel up to 350 m/s in space, due to the expanse, on a planet they will quickly run out of space to fly.
And Delamar, which has the Levksi landing zone, may not even be in 3.0 when it first launches.
===
It's worse than that.
Nyx is an entirely different star system which they haven't built. So leaving Delamar where it is, would have meant building the Nyx star system, when in fact they only have Stanton (15% built, if you counted all the elements in the Star map, compared to what's in the current game client), and having to deal with player transitions from one system to another. So they just said, fuck it, we'll just move it."
It doesn't matter how much money they have, or how long they keep at this, it's
never going to amount to the game they pitched. Back in July 2015 when they had $85M, I said they needed at least $150M, the right tech, and experienced people to build Star Citizen. They crossed that financial milestone back in May 2017 - and they are still
not even 15% of the way there. Now, assuming the GameStar article is accurate, they are talking about 5 - 10 systems at "launch". So do the math.
That's an easy one to answer; you can just judge by their current progress. Obviously if they had an unlimited pot of money and unlimited time they could probably make any game they wanted - in that sense it's not an impossibility. When you look that so far they have a tiny % of the game they want to make and already have burned their way through many millions (depending on how you estimate their spending to date) you can begin to see that there's no way they finish the game in the way they have described. The only thing holding this whole house of cards from crumbling down is a thin veneer of glue known as the jesus patch - the promise that they are just 1 patch away from fixing all the huge problems with the game and allowing a very quick, streamlined addition of content all the way to full alpha and beyond.
It's not even the Jesus Patch that's holding it together. It's the real backers, and those engaged in money laundering, who are propping it up financially. Without some money coming in, investment and loans aside, the whole thing falls apart. And that's the thing with Ponzi schemes, no matter how long you run them for, it's only going to take one event to topple it.
That's silly. Just because it hasn't been done yet doesn't mean it won't be done. They talk about their new systems coming online which, if true, might well allow a lot of the touted features to be possible.
Some said 2.0 was impossible yet it got done. A single cryengine map, millions of square kilometres in size. If you'd just looked at arena commander you may have made the same conclusion. 2.0 can't be done, AC is only 10 X 10km or so, no way they can make a map millions of kilometres a side...
Recent sales have proved they can raise money as and when they want so it's not dieing anytime soon. With time and more money who knows what will be become possible.
That's a silly argument to make. Nobody is saying that it can't be done because it hasn't been done before. The narrative, at least from my perspective, is that it can't be done because the game pitched faces insurmountable obstacles in terms of tech, talent, and money. So far, this continues to be fact, as evidenced by the amount of money they've thrown at it, how long it's taken, and the fact that even 3 years overdue, still isn't even 15% of the way there.
Nobody ever said 2.0 was impossible. Please go ahead and cite some sources where you saw this. Like Arena Commander, Star Marine etc there is nothing in 2.0 that would have been impossible because it doesn't contain anything that hasn't been done before, nor revolutionary. And the map size in 2.0 has nothing to do with it not being possible to do. It's just a map extent increase which they hacked in support for; and I've written extensively about this already.
And raising money has no correlation to success if they have insurmountable challenges to face. And those challenges stem from the game they pitched. There are many million and billion Dollar companies that fail - every day - wiping away years of work and investor money. I'm sure they too thought they would make it if they just kept getting money.
Speaking of performance issues, this is from yesterday's AtV. Ignoring that it's running in the editor, this is with NO game clients and NO gameplay features in the scene. Only rendering. And THAT'S the problem they are facing, and which I have been writing about since I got wind of it.
