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This was so spot on, and in line with all I’ve been saying, that I just had to repost it.
“While many in this thread and elsewhere have described Chris Roberts as a “troubled visionary” type, who could potentially create something amazing if reality wasn’t such a bitch, or if he’d just listen to reason for once, I want to argue the following:
Any project is constrained, and recognizing, managing and navigating within these constraints is the hallmark of a competent designer (and a grown-up, if we’re being honest here). Having an unconstrained vision is the same as dreaming – it means almost nothing once you wake up and face reality. The vision presented for Star Citizen is not only bland and uninspired, owing to Roberts’ complete lack of creative ability, it was also never as clear as any of the supporters believe. What Roberts has is a feeling, in his gut, and not a vision. If he had this clear, artistic vision of the project, then he wouldn’t be constantly tempted to add to it so significantly. That is not the hallmark of a designer with a brilliant vision – it is the hallmark of an “ideas guy”, and believe me, that is not a positive thing to be labeled.
In the real world, Roberts has no direct experience being the project lead on a hundred-million dollar project. His last successful interaction design project was what – the original Wing Commander? He has been a detriment to every project he has been involved in since then. Roberts is unable to understand the very basics of interaction design, yet he is the lead designer and director of a hundred-million dollar project, and he (believes that he) is beholden to no one. If I asked you “Do you think an 18-year-old kid who decided to spend his 111 million dollar inheritance on one project will be successful?” hopefully, your first question would be “Who is he hiring to actually direct it and do all the real work?” The thought of giving a complete newbie a project of this scale is laughable and ridiculous. We aren’t talking about a veteran of the field, here – we’re talking about someone who doesn’t understand the very basics of many of the technologies he is designing his game around, let alone the field his game is supposed to compete in.
This project was doomed from the start because of Roberts. The person who attracted many of you to the project is the one and only reason why it could never be anything but a complete failure, and this was obvious from the beginning to anyone willing to think critically for a second. Oh, sure, this guy with no relevant experience will overtake an entire industry through the sheer brilliance of his ever-changing, ever-expanding vision. This washed up half-wit, incapable of stating anything precisely, will skillfully direct an incredibly complicated project to the satisfaction of anyone. That happens all the time, I’m sure.
Star Citizen isn’t in danger of being a failure because of budget problems or backer distrust – it is guaranteed to be a failure because of Roberts’ actually retarded cognitive abilities.
I wanted to respond to this, because you are absolutely right except concerning Roberts himself. This is, what, his fifth or sixth try at this? He is unable to learn from past mistakes because he has no ability to reflect and is deathly afraid of taking an honest look at himself. Sure, he has learned to pretend to say self-deprecating or self-critical things, but it is more humble-brag than anything – if only someone had forced him to cut back on ideas (HE HAS SO MANY OF THEM GUYS THEY ARE LIKE ALL IN HIS HEAD ALL THE TIME) then he wouldn’t have spread out his talent and he could have really knocked it out of the park! That might be true in some vague sense, but is also admitting to the least of his creative sins so he won’t have to face the big ones. The reality is that he is a bad director and a bad writer. It wasn’t studio pressure that made him make a submarine movie in space. It wasn’t over-ambition that created the infamous bulldozer scene. It was a complete lack of creative ability and an idiot at the helm.
He is the antithesis of a good interaction designer, and I say that as someone who does research on precisely that topic. He has no ability to have a “conversation” with his material, because he is entirely deaf to what we call the backtalk of the situation – unless of course it is directly flattering to his ego. That is why he can only add things to the project, because that shows how ambitious and brilliant he is. Having a realistic scope and staying within constraints – which, again, is one of the most important parts of any form of design, development or project management – is beneath him. Add to that, that he doesn’t understand what makes something good, in the many different ways that things can be good, and so he must rely entirely on his underdeveloped aesthetic sense – which is more that of an over-excited 9-year-old, than of an adult man. He calls himself MAVERICK for fuck’s sake.
I hope you don’t take my harsh tone as being aimed at you, because it isn’t. It is just so ridiculous to me that this is the reality we live in, because the emperor was always naked in my eyes (to my utter disgust). I saw through Roberts’ bullshit as soon as I learned about the project, around the 15-20 million dollar mark. He is completely devoid of what my field considers the prime virtues of a modern interaction designer: The ability to reflect and criticize his own thoughts, ideas and actions, the ability to handle scope, the ability to iterate without losing progress or starting over, respect for his end users, enough of a technical understanding to recognize what is possible and what is not, the ability to manage expectations of customers, the ability to communicate precisely and effectively, the ability to create actually original and creative work, and I could go on forever.
If this project had been headed by anyone else from your list, and Roberts’ was in no way related to it, then it probably would have had a chance. This whole project is a sort of autism chariot catch 22 though – without Roberts at the helm the project wouldn’t have been a crowdfunding “success”, and with Roberts at the helm it can never be anything but a complete fiasco.”
We’re in year five…and…
”
So we’re constantly working on that. We’re working on optimizing code but we’re actually in the middle of a massive backend rewrite – completely changing the way the serialization works to a much more efficient, logical way. Which is the item port- the item 2.0 system we’ve talked about, which we’ve recently got going. It is a fundamental part of that, because we’re restructuring some of the way that entities are set up – so we’re changing it completely from the way it was done in the old CryEngine to be a very component-based setup, much more logical, and we’re only really serializing data that we need to serialize rather than big globs of data and it’s not nearly as, I guess, fixed as the old system was. Because the old system was really built for small, 16 player or 8 player, multiplayer games – deathmatch, FPS shooter-style whereas we’ve got something that we need to be up for long times, hours or days of time have the server up and have hundreds of people on it.
So our ability to scale has been much bigger, it’s something we’ve been working on for quite a long time, and we’re still working on it, we’re getting close to having some fruits of it being born in the near future. So this is very much analogous to us using, when we did the zone system and moving to 64-bit math instead of 32-bit math. All those things sort of paid off – what allowed us to be able to do Crusader and the local physical grids and all the cool stuff that you’ve seen from 2.0 onwards and a lot of this other backend stuff we’re working on is going to make the experience much better, much smoother for you and have a higher framerate on the server – one of the reasons why people see desync issues now, and maybe some precision issues is the actual server when it’s under load is running at actually quite a low framerate, even compared to clients.
You could be on a client running at 40 or 50 frames, yet the server is only running at 10 or 15 frames. Now the server running at 10 or 15 frames is simulating physics only at 10 or 15 frames, which means there are big steps between each frame, whereas on your local machine, you’ve got much smaller steps, so what can happen is, on the server, you could be here – which is something that happened in the EVA situation – and the next frame of what the server thinks you’re doing is, like you’re player is half-way in the wall of the ship – he’s moving outside. But on your local client, you haven’t – because you have all the fidelity whereas on the server, it goes, “oh look, he’s half way in the world, so I’ll give him a big impulse to try get him out” whereas the server isn’t in the same position which basically catapults your EVA person – could potentially kill him from the damage and that was one of the things that was creating, say, the deaths that you would see in an EVA-transition going in and out.
And partly that was because the server on the physics step was running at a much slower framerate than the client so we’re working on things to make all that better, it’s a work-in-progress, it will take a little while to get goingbut once it does, it will be better and there will be a lot more people in the instances and we’ll be moving smoothly. So these are all things that the network team is working on – I wish we had more members of the network team, we have essentially about 4 engineers that work on the game server network side and then we have another 3 that working in the backend services side. But if any of you out there are network engineers and wanna work on a really ambitious game, let us know, because we’ve had open positions for this for quite a while.We’re always looking for good people because the things that we need is networkers, there’s a big need for us on the engineering side, AI is a big need and physics – if there’s any physics geniuses out there but if you talk to anyone in the game business, those are all the areas that are it’s genuinely hard to find people. We’re moving along and it’s going to be pretty cool when it’s all said and done, cause it’s basically building a system, I’ve talked about it before, that the next generation of how you build these online cloud-driven systems, so we can distribute it across many servers and process more than you would in traditional single-server setups.
So anyway, probably a long answer for whether or not there will be spaces for more additional pilot players, but there you go.“1) Go to the pastebin URL in the image/video and open in one browser tab
2) Open The Library Of Babel in another tab
3) Click on “Search”
4) Copy and paste the hex code from #1 above, press enter
5) Now use the codes in the video/image to arrive at the final page e.g. W4 is Wall #4
Note: Unless you have listened to a stream rant I had, you won’t “get” the meaning of the encrypted message. 😀
…and so it was on 07/06/15 that I wrote my first Star Citizen blog, Interstellar Citizens.
Since that time, amid the dreams, the lies, and the deceit, coming from the company, a lot about this disastrous project has been written, spoken, and speculated. What most people don’t know is just how bad things are or that they have unequivocally lost EVERY penny they put into this project.
And through all that, I stand firm on the opinion I made back in July 2015 that Star Citizen, as has been pitched, will never get made. Ever.
Now, in year five and over $111M, it exists as nothing more than a glorified tech demo. It’s not a pre-alpha. It’s not an alpha. It’s not a beta. It’s not a game. It’s none of those things. It’s a glorified CryEngine mod.
The protracted false advertising of a product in order to make money from hapless gamers, is tantamount to consumer fraud. Look it up.
Events set in motion about two weeks ago, but which have been brewing since last year, have now sealed the fate of this project. It is unrecoverable. It is unavoidable. It is an E.L.E. And it is about time we as gamers, knew the truth.
I have always stated that there is absolutely NO version of this, where they get away with this. Yet people think that these things just get resolved over night. It takes time to get to the bottom; then you have to sort through the chum. It’s a process.
And I have a response to that in this encrypted code that’s been working it’s way through these past few days.
Since Shitizens clinging to revisionist history, someone has done the legwork for them on Chris Robert’s “accomplishes” (Hint: it’s all bullshit really)
The IGN article comments gave me a (bad) idea. What [i]are[/i] Chris’ game credentials, really? He’s often mentioned in relation to a lot of games, but what did he actually do according to the games themselves and the credits provided with them (as collected by mobygames)?
Wing Commander (1990)
• Design (Amiga, Sega CD), director (Amiga, Sega CD, SNES), graphics/3D Programming (DOS, Amiga), lead design (DOS), programming (DOS, SNES), producer (DOS, Amiga, Sega CD), software engineer (Amiga, Sega CD), space system (Amiga, Sega CD)
Secret Missions I
Director (SNES), producer (DOS, SNES), programming (SNES)
Secret Missions II
Producer, programming
Wing Commander II (1991)
• Producer
Special Operations I
Creative Director
Special Operations II
Creative Director
CD ROM Edition
3D System, graphics, lead design, producer
Not given credit for: script, story, programming, direction, design
Wing Commander: Privateer (1993)
• Executive producer, original concept
Righteous Fire
— No credits
Not given credit for: script, story, programming, direction, design
Strike Commander (1993)
• Cameras, cockpit, HUD, and MFDs, ,director, graphics ,library code, mission design, original outline, producer, RealSpace System programming
Tactical Operations
Producer
Super Wing Commander (1994)
— No credits, other than for original PC version
Wing Commander III (1994)
• Castmember (DOS), director (DOS, 3DO), executive producer & director of movies, producer (DOS), story (DOS, 3DO)
Not given credit for: anything in the Playstation version
Wing Commander: Armada (1994)
• Producer
Not given credit for: original concept, design, programming, direction
Wing Commander IV (1996)
• Executive producer, director
Not given credit for: original concept, design, programming, story
Privateer 2 (1996)
— No credits
Wing Commander: Prophecy (1997)
• Special thanks (Windows)
Starlancer (2000)
• Executive producer
Freelancer (2003)
• Original concept, special thanks
Not given credit for: producer, (lead) design, direction, programming, story, script
So, all in all, he’s only really “made” three games: Wing Commander I, Strike Commander, and Wing Commander III. Maybe his movie madness in WC4 should count as well. The rest, he has at best produced, and in many cases, he did nothing — especially not the design, original concept, or writing that people often want to bring up. His programming contributions ended with Strike Commander and the CD-ROM version of WC2.
Someone put together this Star Citizen QA – Complete History Of 10 For The Chairman
Try these queries.
http://www.scqa.eu/?keywords=definitely
http://www.scqa.eu/?keywords=absolutely
http://www.scqa.eu/?keywords=yes
http://www.scqa.eu/?keywords=certainly
Note that 90 of that crap isn’t even in the game yet. $111M+ 5 yrs + 500+ people working on it at four studios around the world
Let me assure of one thing: It’s a lot worse than than.
And the E.L.E (Extinct Level Event) that I have been hinting at these past few days, is playing out as I type this. I have stated since last year that if they survived 2016, that it would be a miracle.
Regardless of what they do now, neither Star Citizen (mPU) nor SQ42 are ever going to see the light of day in completed form.
The last ditch feature attempts coming up in the “persistence” (hinted for 2.4 patch) are solely geared toward making money.
If you think I’m kidding, watch yesterday’s RtV in which Chris made an appearance. Listen. Watch. Observe (the body language, mannerisms etc of everyone).
