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KOTAKU (UK) ON-GOING STAR CITIZEN INVESTIGATION
Kotaku (UK) is working on a five-part series of Star Citizen articles as part of their on-going investigations into the project.
- Inside the Troubled Development of Star Citizen
- The 24-Year Feud That Has Dogged Star Citizen (English translation of “Star Crisis” article in Swedish LEVEL mag, June 2016)
- Who Are the Star Citizen Superbackers? (re-print of an August 2016 article)
- What Happened to Star Marine, Star Citizen’s Missing Module
- What to Make of Star Citizen (added on 09/30)
The Star Marine one is pretty interesting as I had already covered it extensively in one of my blogs; and is also covered here. I had even hinted on Twitter that the problems with that project being scrapped, were not solely (if at all) the fault of Illfonic. Since last year I had said that due to the NDA, Illfonic couldn’t defend themselves from the accusations from backers that they were responsible for the fate of Star Marine. Reading the 1st and 4th articles above, it becomes clear that the same problems that plagued Star Citizen proper, also plagued Star Marine.
The interesting part is that, even after going on the record and saying that Star Marine was already released and in Star Citizen, he recently (coincidentally just ahead of GamesCom2016) started talking about it again as coming soon; no doubt to reduce the liability associated with the cancellation of a prominent module that backers had paid for – in full.
This is Star Marine in 2014. Nope; definitely not in the current Star Citizen build.
Then there’s the wall of lies by Ben Lesnick, which also mentions Star Marine back in 2015.
Another titbit, we got word of how Chris Roberts became involved in that first Kotaku article.
“I alluded to this earlier, but the original article was due to come out before Gamescom and initially contained no Roberts at all. Then, during the standard request for comment, the Big Man himself couldn’t resist handling things personally, thinking there would be no better source for disproving the vicious rumours (or, you know, doing anything because he’s the best and knows all the best words) than himself.
Prior to him getting wind of the article, it was probably going to be some F42 people (presumably Erin and an equally cagey backup), and you can imagine how different the final article would have been in that situation.
All in all its just a repeat of the Escapist fiasco from last year. At a time where no info is still the best info for the project, he waded in there and needlessly made another mess. If the gossip about Ortwin turns out to be true I don’t doubt it’s because he’s finally realised Chris is a liability beyond anyone’s control.“
Chris truly is his own worst enemy. Seriously, if he wasn’t involved in that first article, it would certainly have not only read differently, but also won’t have cast him and the project in such a poor light. It’s quite revealing, and shows all the same behavioral traits from his past (solo or joint) endeavors (all of which btw, ended up being catastrophic failures) after Wing Commander.
STAR CITIZEN 3.0 (JESUS PATCH) COMING IN 2016
Chris lied (again) to raise money at GamesCom2016. It’s just not happening. The End.
Even the upcoming 2.6 patch (the last one before the big leap to all the 3.0 promises) is currently in the first Evocati testing stage. It doesn’t contain Star Marine. It’s now Oct 2016.
UPDATE: In today’s pre-recorded AtV broadcast (16:19), they’ve now gone on the record saying that what Evocati are now testing, isn’t even 2.6, but 2.5x. Which means that 2.6 – whatever that is – will be their end of year patch. My sides.
CHRIS IS AT IT AGAIN
So last week, two new interviews (1, 2) popped up over at GamersNexus. This time he’s gone on the record again promising even more new features. This time, seeing as he is on the procedural planets roll, he’s gone and promised planetary weather patterns and solar positioning of stellar bodies. In a game where every asset that’s part of the scene is either static or with an animation (e.g. the rotating parts of the station) controller. Aside from the fact that it’s all blatant lies, it’s yet another example of the feature (assuming they actually do it) creep that has plagued this project. Remember, they don’t even have planetary landings yet; let alone a fully built star system from the 100 that was promised during the campaign back in 2012.
Oh, and it’s no longer the Best Damn Space Sim Ever. It’s now the Best Damn Everything Sim. Yeah. Of course those key parts are now being picked up by the media and propagated.
Some hilarious titbits from the GamersNexus interview.
- Says the Sun doesn’t move around our solar system (6:50). Which most of us who are into the sort of thing, know to be false. The Sun is actually moving through our galaxy. The gravity of the stars (billions of them) within it, are what keep the Sun at the relative center of the galaxy where it maintains an orbit. But yes, it does move.
- Thinks The Morrow Tour (SQ42 reveal) from CitizenCon2015 looked terrific (4:37). Here, you take a look.
- Talks about the short term thinking that drove all their previous iterations & presentations (11:18). Gee, who knew? We’ve all known and seen how they end up showing material as “Coming Soon“, yet never to see the light of day. The trend continues as recently as this past GamesCom2016 presentation, and is expected to continue again in the upcoming CitizenCon2016 fundraiser on Oct 9th.
What’s even more hilarious in all these recent interviews is that he keeps talking about Elite Dangerous as a competitor. This despite the fact that not only is that game (also crowd-funded prior to release) out, and making vast improvements in leaps and bounds, but is also technologically superior in every way. And even so, they aren’t modeling our galaxy at a 1:1 level of fidelity. Yet, there he is, talking up a bunch of crap about a sci-fi based universe that’s supposed to be competing at the same level.
He is never going to learn. At all.
AND THEN CAME BEN
This (we have history) clueless, racist, incompetent buffoon, is the single worst thing that could have ever happened to this project. Next to Chris, and Sandi, he’s this project’s prime liability. And I for one, can’t wait to read his deposition. For those of you who have forgotten how this fool got involved in a project that many believe is now an on-going scam, go watch this interview segment from Feb 2014. And you can read his legacy (1, 2, 3) archived for posterity, complete with homophobic, racist, antisemitic comments. Then there’s this rant against backers. Yes – he works for CIG/RSI.
With the Star Marine fiasco in full swing, and backers expecting (<— LOL!!) it to be in upcoming 2.6 patch as promised (<— LOL!!) by CIG/RSI, he recently went on an interview (5:59) in which he was asked a specific and direct question about it. He was taken off guard. Seriously, this is a 100% accurate transcript of that answer.
Batgirl
“You have had an opportunity to PLAY and not talk about yet, STAR MARINE, that’s gonna be coming to us in a few short weeks, I hope SOONER than that, but… since the EVOCATI doesn’t have it I’m gonna say ‘a few short weeks’, um…”Ben Lesnick
(grins) fingers crossed!Batgirl
“Yeah, fingers crossed, I know how you go, there’s always SOMETHING that’ll keep it from coming out and we wanna know and make sure that it’s ready to be TESTED and not just be BROKEN… so… I mean that’s what we’re DOING… um… but… but… even FPS in this game is more about SUPPORTING each other than just KILLING each other, what are your thoughts from the few hours that you got to spend in STAR MARINE?Is that… am I getting that same feeling?”
Ben Lesnick
“EEee-yeah it’s very team based… but uh… it… it’s still that kinda FPS experience… definitely you fighting other PEOPLE. Uhh… I… I… I think it’s more than just the GAMEPLAY with STAR CITIZEN, it’s more… we have all these people behind the IDEA of doing FPS differently… an-ya-nuh nobody goes into… the latest BATTLEFIELD er… BATTLE… I keep calling… CALL OF DUTY saying, ‘oh what, what kind of technological improvement is it’, it’s more… you know…I don’t know where I’m going with this…
But…
Duh… it… it feels like we have all these people with a FULL UNDERSTANDING of what goes into the GAME, ah… we… I think… which helps you a lot“
Yeah.
STAR CITIZEN ACCOUNTS VS CITIZENS NUMBERS
I have a high profile source who has managed to explain to me just how exactly the funding chart (powered by Turbulent) works. And I have a new blog in the works related to that one. I have written many times that most of us have reason to believe that the chart is inaccurate, and that it appears to be manipulated to show health and interest in the project. As these things go, nothing short of a State or Fed investigation, or a lawsuit, will be able to get to the bottom of that. Naturally, some people have resorted to scraping it as well. Heck, this is Chris himself proclaiming one million citizens milestone back on Oct 4th, 2015.
This project has so far raised over $124 million with zero oversight and financial accountability – both of which were promised to backers (see Section VII) from the onset. Notwithstanding the fact that with the June 2016 ToS, they not only removed (see comparison) the ability to get refunds, but also changed most of the terms related to that, as well as financial accountability.
To compound the issue is the fact that, all this time, nobody in the media has seen fit to ask Chris the real backer numbers for the project. If they did, they were probably told off-the-record, or the question wasn’t answered. In either case, why is it such a secret? The simply answer is that it’s better to say the game has 1.5 million backers, than to say that’s 1.5 million accounts, of which barely 500K (as of when we last scrapped the metrics) are backers (who put money into the game).
In fact, just a few months ago, a statement made to the media as to the veracity of this 500K number, went largely unnoticed, as it was made to an obscure magazine in an interview of Turbulent, the guys who built, and run it for CIG/RSI. Here, take a look at the original French version, and the English version. See anything missing? Well, this part does not appear in the English version.
BREAKING NEWS! EXPLOSIVE NEW LEAKS!
The rumors and leaks keep on coming – and from most of the studios associated with the project. The most prominent rumors that seem to be picking up steam are that layoffs and high-profile exits are coming, that they’ve literally run out of money to build Chris’s dreams in the long term, and that Sandi and/or Ortwin may be on the way out.
Though we’re still trying to get first hand confirmation with the authorities, there is also word that a complaint was filed with the CA Department of Labor regarding overtime at the studio. This is a very big deal because the labor dept in most states, are very strict about this sort of thing. Just ask the many companies – including game companies – who have run afoul of it and came away with heavy fines, time consuming investigations etc. Note that this overtime crunch period also appeared in the first Kotaku article.
“The fines are the least significant cost. I had a couple friends who had a job where they apparently had to be there at work 15 minutes before their shift due to IT shenanigans but were never paid for it. This went on for years. Apparently, Department of Labor got an anonymous letter from someone working there, they investigated and found the company violated labor laws. This opened them up to a civil class action suit which resulted in not just the current employees of the company but former employees as well getting paid that extra 15 minutes at time and half for every day they worked there, minus lawyer fees. My friends got about $2000-3000 each for working there almost ten years.
Now, here, we have CIG employees that have over 80 hour weeks and 36 hour days and not getting paid for overtime. Even the 90-day probationary employees who worked then left would probably be looking at 250-500 hours overtime in their work history and (I’ll pull $20/hourly for entry-level creative work), that’s about $5k to $10k per those employees. And CIG was a revolving door. They’re looking at least $2- to $3 million in overtime pay alone.“
Whale backers are still frantically trying to get their money out of the project. In the past 24hrs, a backer with over $11K finally got a refund after almost two months of wrangling.
TheAgent is back!
Once again, TheAgent is back with more leaks and rumors. As always, a hefty vial of salt is highly recommended.
- the leaker back in august told me there was new mocap going to be put in after citcon in october
- but! sandi has been getting paid to do the fill in mocap for the female models for the last few months
- and! sandi will also be in the new scenes in october/november
- these are not technically “reshoots” since its new material, but had to be added since some actors are no longer available or desire to work with roberts and the script was rewritten (again, for the 3rd time after principle shooting)
- the last leak on mocap shooting was $29m, is now a projected $40m+ (one person said 60m but I dont believe that
- unconfirmed: ortwin is now distancing himself from the project, requesting a buyout
- confirmed: legal ramifications for unpaid overtime due to an “anonymous letter” sent to the california labor commissioner
- 3 absolutely key guys are leaving
- the money has run out
- les dennis is appearing in sq42
- cig are being sued for 50 mill + by a group of investors and whales
- an ex senior staff member has been questioned by police after a xxxxx was brutally xxxxx in a xxxxxx
CITIZENCON 2016 CASTING CALL
So, in what can only be called filler for the show, CIG/RSI put out a call for backers to do a short video. Not judging though, but here, please introduce yourself to “saviors of PC Gaming“. Enjoy.
NEW INVESTIGATIVE MEDIA ARTICLES
In the vein of the recent The Chris Roberts Theory Of Everything article, comes a Kotaku UK article which delves into the Star Citizen fiasco. It’s quite a lengthy read. Read Inside the Troubled Development of Star Citizen
Several mags, including PC Gamer are also covering it, while adding their own commentary. Read Eight-month investigation lifts the lid on Star Citizen’s troubled development
PCGamesN now also has a Former Star Citizen devs claim impossible standards wasted months of development, Roberts responds article, as does Rock, Paper, Shotgun with Roberts Acknowledges Some Of Star Citizen’s Woes In Tell-All Investigation
A Swedish magazine, LEVEL, did a similar article back in July, and which, last we heard, was picked up by a leading English media outlet for re-publication; with the Swedish author doing the official translation. As that has been some months now, some are of the opinion that the article may have been bought and buried. But as these things go, there is an unofficial English language translation floating around from back in July. UPDATE: That outlet was in fact Kotaku UK; and they have now published the article on 09/26/16.
BREAKING NEWS! EXPLOSIVE NEW LEAKS!
So TheAgent, who frequents the Goon enclave, and who has posted leaked info in the past, and which were correct, has posted a new slew of leaks. Some are pretty explosive.
What’s interesting is that just yesterday from the 2.6 Evocati leak which I wrote about (see below), I had extrapolated that there was no chance of the much touted (at GamesCom 2016) 3.0 patch (aka Jesus Patch) coming out in 2016. Heck, it’s bad enough that neither Star Citizen nor Squadron 42 are coming out this year. So if TheAgent is correct, that’s pretty hilarious. Then again, as they did with the completely disastrous (it was rushed out) 2.0 patch from Dec 2015, they may just rush out a subset of 3.0 at some point this year, just to prove us wrong. We’ll see.
The bottom line is that, as I previously wrote, Chris has done it again. He went on stage, made false promises, raised money as a result, and once again is probably not going to deliver.
Printed verbatim from TheAgent :
- no 3.0 this year (duh), release date is now “after [a significant portion of] SQ42 is released”
- ship sales will continue
- there’s yet another new studio involved (most likely contractors/outside dev pool) for planet artwork/maps
- “The Squadron 42 [Prelude] has to hit its [Q1 2017] goal. No more excuses.” unsure who, just listed as “top exec”
- a lot of mocap issues with translating them directly into the game, mostly due to character and players size (?? not sure what this means)
- “Expect a lot of cutscenes.”
- mocapped characters are fine stationary (sitting, standing, etc) but currently anything involving complex animation makes the models freak out, mostly clipping and clothes problems (still)
- certain characters have several (reported up to six!) different models, as certain scenes had to use entirely different models for the same character due to model size, lod and poor mocap translation
- specific reshoots using stand ins for A list actors are ongoing, mostly animation, actions and poses (still occurring as of q3 2016)
- FPS AI still murders everything through walls, doors, whatever
- certain departments continue to pump out work at an incredible rate while others snail behind, causing back up and necessary “refactoring” when certain elements do not work or had scope change
- heads of department told to “turtle” and avoid outside influences (?? )
- they can’t get the intricate damage model to work in SP/MP at all yet, ships continue to randomly jumble themselves to death
Also…
CitizenCon 2016 (Oct 9th)
- crunch time continues for all studios, many people are working seven days a week for the citcon showing
- companion app with $ to ingame currency purchases, chat, etc (design phase only, citcon slide)
- new A list cutscene, wrapped shooting july 2016 (majority of overtime is spent working on this)
- touting multiple SQ42 endings on one citcon slide, also says it directly affects SC world/player character
- FPS purchasable classes still a thing and one of the major things they are revealing
- SQ42 prelude still listed as march 2017
- ^ “no way we’ll hit that deadline” ^
- Roberts: 2.6 should be playable at Citcon
- nothing playable at this time, live streams still using 2.5
Follow up…
the hope is to release SQ42, which will retain players and continue to grow their base while they work on the major problems of SC. SC ship sales and some single player sales (models, skins, ships, va packs, etc) to continue to bring in revenue
they will be pushing a new subscription thing at citcon too, btw
it supposedly rewards sub only campaign missions, fps classes, certain ships, etc
STAR CITIZEN 10 FOR THE CHAIRMAN (16-09-21)
After a long absence, the 10FTC program is back, featuring The Chairman himself, Chris Roberts – with a different format. This one was all about characters; specifically about scanning of character heads for the actors in the Squadron 42 interactive movie, and also having player head/face character customization.
It’s all the usual bullshit really.
The most important takeaways from this video are the following:
- Chris completely forgot that, back in 10FTC Ep19, (14-05-05), over two and a half years ago, he had promised character aging (1, 2).
- There has been a lot of talk about how CIG/RSI, despite the work being done on the “game”, continues to use a lot of movies, scripted demos etc in order to show work that’s coming soon. Most of that stuff over the years, has never made it into the game; either because it was just a promo, or because the R&D simply didn’t pan out and had to be trashed.The most recent of this was the GamesCom mission demo (16-09-19), which while being heavily scripted, staged and full of R&D stuff not in the game, helped them raise $4 million. Before that it was things like the Star Marine movie (14-08-19), the Pupil To Planet (15-12-16) movie, the Nyx base (15-08-28) on a procgen planet etc. In fact, their Vimeo and YouTube channels are littered with this stuff going all the way back to 2012.So now comes the kicker. In this segment (starts at 16:40), Chris now tells backers to “forget about The Morrow Tour” which he now basically admits (just as I reported back then) was put together, rushed etc. For those of you not paying attention, The Morrow Tour gameplay segment was from Squadron 42. It was shown in Oct 2015 at the CitizenCon 2015 event. They raised over $3.5 million during the month of Oct based on that presentation, and JPEG ship sales.
- The $22 million dollar stretch goal promised a facial capture mechanism which would import backers facial image into the game. At the 11:30 mark, Chris now pretty much says that’s off the table due to fidelity of the system they are now using.
Yes, games in development evolve over time, things change, are improved upon, tweaked etc. That’s not the issue here. The issue here is that time and time again, we’ve seen this happen whereby they spend resources on creating these assets in order to continue raising money. Most of the work ends up getting trashed because they can’t be used in the actual games being made. Heck, they once trashed an entire gameplay module (Star Marine developed by a third-party contractor, Illfonic). And just a few months back, amid major outcry, not to mention the legal liability issue, it’s apparently coming back. This despite Chris – falsely – claiming in 10FTC Ep85 (16-01-25), that the long promised, and much touted Star Marine, was already in the Star Citizen game backers were playing at the time.
So, with all this time and money wasted, it should have come as no surprise when in 10FTC Ep83 (16-04-18), Chris declared that the first release of the game wasn’t going to be the full game promised (for Nov 2014), but rather a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
By all accounts, most of us believe that this whole thing has evolved into an elaborate scam which goes beyond just a simple case of broken promises in a video game. It has all the makings of a massive engineering Ponzi scheme designed to unjustly enrich the execs in charge of it, under the pretext of making the games promised. This is why they need to keep raising money using these tactics. The pattern is easy to see:
- Wind up backers with wild promises (mostly lies) and unachievable objectives
- Take the money raised as per the aforementioned
- Later, walk it all back, or ignore that the promises were ever made
- Rinse. Repeat
And according to metrics, even with the suspicious nature of their funding chart, there appears to be around 2000 backers still putting money into this train-wreck. It’s mind-boggling to say the least.
ABOUT THAT VISUAL STABILIZATION BULLSHIT
This one is particularly hilarious to most of us. The “head bob” issue in the fps part of Star Citizen has always been a problem, and a major source of complaints. So a week ago, CIG released a video segment in which they were touting the implementation of something they were calling “visual stabilization”. Pretty much the same horseshit they come up with when making up names for tech that already exists, and which they’re pretending to have created.
Basically, as most of us had already said, they removed the “head bob” from the animation. That’s it. Nothing more. Nothing less.
So yesterday, in an AtV segment, the Lead Animation Engineer confirmed this. The segment starts around the 11:22 mark.
THE OPEN-BUT-NOT-SO-OPEN DEVELOPMENT
A few months ago, CIG/RSI introduced a new layer to their testing protocols, dubbed Evocati. We had a laugh with that one, and I covered it in my April blog. Basically, it’s been going on since then. With the current 2.5 patch being a horrid and largely unplayable mess, with backers aching for the upcoming 2.6 patch which they hope will bring much needed fixes and stability, it comes as no surprise that details about that upcoming patch have now leaked. Again.
But that’s not the issue here.
The issue is that some of the more toxic members of the community are up in arms about Evocati backers breaking the NDA by leaking patch details. To the extent that there is now a Reddit discussion going on about how to deal with such leaks. Oh the irony.
Here’s the thing, nobody should be encouraged to break an NDA they agreed to. When you think about an NDA as a contract, the only circumstance under which those can be broken and details leaked, is if the leaker is either a whistleblower or a concerned person passing along info about fraud, wrong-doing etc. Thing is, even the media, bloggers etc, all encourage this sort of thing when they accept info from anonymous sources at companies where they may have either a specific NDA, or a contract with an NDA section. But stuff still leaks, regardless.
It’s interesting to note that most, if not all, all crowd-funded game projects in development, tend to give access to alpha and beta builds to their backers. Star Citizen has been in a perpetual state of Alpha (according to CIG/RSI who are redefining the terminology; in our books it’s a pre-Alpha aka tech demo).
Anyway, this Evocati NDA represents an interesting conundrum for backers. As a backer in the Evocati, you already have access to the game you paid for. Just like the other backers who were not selected to be in the Evocati. But then, being in the Evocati for a game you already paid for, you now have to agree to an NDA which forbids you from sharing any details about it. So why would someone choose to break the NDA and share the patch details? One person in a discussion, told me:
“It’s wrong for them to be doing this. We all payed (sp) for the game, and yet some have access to it, while others do not. They claim open development but we have no clue what is going on with the project most of the time. A friend of mine pledged over eleven hundred dollars and is not in the Evocati. How is that fair?“
While it does not absolve them of the liability of breaking an NDA, it’s easy to see why it makes sense to the people doing it. Especially in light of the fact that this latest leak has clearly shown that not only is the 2.6 patch most likely not coming in Oct; but that given that the test pattern has a lengthy period from “limited Evocati –> wide testing –> live“, it means that it probably won’t be out until sometime in the Nov/Dec time frame. And that, my friends, all but guarantees that the much touted 3.0 (aka the Jesus Patch) which Chris was heavily promoting at GamesCom as coming by end of the year, is not being released this year. At all. Yeah, I know – shocking. Note that there isn’t even a 2.7 patch. It was once talked about, then came GamesCom and Chris saying that after 2.5 (current), there will be 2.6, and then it’s onto 3.0 – the Jesus Patch which fixes everything, and includes all of the latest promises.
So much for “open development“; and one in which backers have no clue what’s going with their game, how the money is being spent, let alone how Squadron 42, which is rumored to have now cost over $30 (!) million to develop, is coming along.
STAR CITIZEN vs LINE OF DEFENSE. AGAIN
Yes, they’re still doing it. As soon as someone says something negative about Star Citizen, one of two things is likely to happen. i) Derek Smart is evoked ii) Line Of Defense is crap becomes a point of discussion. Happened again within the past 24 hours; I’ll just post excerpts from the exchange. It’s just amazing to us how it is that these guys truly think that attacking and slamming me and my game, will somehow make Star Citizen a reality, a better game etc. It’s mind-boggling.
“Mr. Smart – Do you want to know what really the funny part is? The maintenance mode you claimed the project was in earlier this year shows astonishing progress. I hope that your own project will also enter such an maintenance mode at some point.“
Usually when people call me out in a thread, when I respond, it tends not to work out so well for them.
So, for your sake, aside from the fact that it’s a violation of the forum rules (look it up), try not to do that. There is nothing to be gained by singling me out. Just post; and anyone who cares enough will respond.
My indie game, like it or hate it, is coming along just fine; and the people testing and helping us out with it, are perfectly happy with it. Our changelog shows steady and meaningful progress; our bugs list isn’t even noteworthy, our roadmap remains focused, straightforward and informative.
Meanwhile, 500 people + five years + $124 million later; Star Citizen has no clear focus nor objective or roadmap; has over 29K (!) documented bugs – most of which are 2+ years old; and the changelog for each patch shows even more issues, while not fixing the majority of what came before.
And the “game” is very much in maintenance mode seeing as NOTHING tangible (unlike you, most of us actually pay attention to the changelog) has been done to the game since I made that comment earlier (Mar 30th, 2016 in post #2805 to be exact) this year.
Despite the fact that you guys think that by obfuscating facts, you’re going to convince anyone of anything, the reality of the situation is that all of this material is actually out there. Anyone who knows anything about games, can look at the SC changelog since Mar to now, and clearly see that, outside of shops, one new location (GrimHex), as well as some new weapons and ships made flight ready, NOTHING tangible by way of meaningful progress outside of bug fixes and tweaks, have been made to the game.
No, I am not going to explain to you what “maintenance” mode means as it pertains to software development; go look it up and add it to your MS Word document, so you can copy and paste it wherever you guys post.
Comparing this multi-million dollar game with a triple-A budget, to an indie game with a small team, isn’t going to make Star Citizen any better, nor increase its chances of ever being released (even as promised), or make it a good game. And the more you guys do it, the sillier and more desperate it looks. At the end of the day, just like all my games, LOD is in no danger of not being released.
As we’ve all stated, the people like you in the community, are the worst thing that could ever have happened to this project. So no matter how the game turns out in the end, it is forever tainted, and will forever remain the laughing stock of gamers and game devs everywhere.
DEALING WITH LEAKS & SOURCES
“You mention quite often about having “insider reports” – what is the veracity of these reports? Are they reliable and proven so?
I’m not needling you here. For info I was a backer since 2012 and recently got a full refund on this thing (thanks to your site).I used to be a fan but the progress and other things just wasn’t sitting right with me. I’m not cat calling for them anymore but I’d still like to see them succeed at some point before my retirement from the mortal plane.”
My blogs and blog forum are littered with all the information that either flows to me, or which are based on my opinions and speculation as a seasoned developer. The people that I know who are either still part of the project, or who have since departed, have proven to be trustworthy. Even when I get anon drops to my Lockbin account, I tend to vet them via several sources before saying anything because on more than one occasion, I have received “bad intel” which the person intended for me to use and look foolish in the process. And I have actually spent quite a bit of money in vetting and/or researching material e.g. that whole Mae Demming tickle porn videos (btw, those videos have now been flagged as private on most sites that had them) issue had me paying for that information to be vetted that it was Sandi Gardiner. Same thing with a host of other similar materials in countries such as Australia, Germany, UK and here in the US. Which is why I’ve always maintained that the single worst thing that could happen to CIG/RSI, is for them to sue me; or for them to be involved in any lawsuit that brings me in.
Those other guys, actually have an entire site dedicated to “documenting my predictions”. A site that not only contains a bunch of pure and utter nonsense; but material either taken out of context, or completely ignored because you know, anything short of telling the truth is them “losing” to me. And by all accounts, their worst fear is not that croberts was wrong; but that dsmart was right in any regard.
Here is one of their examples of me being “wrong”: “CIG does not have the tech for seamless FPS transitions 14 november 2015”
Note that I made the comment in Nov 14, 2015. They didn’t have the tech at the time. The first anyone saw it in action was GamesCom 2016 (Aug 19, 2016). In a scripted demo running in a controlled environment.
And how did I know they didn’t have the tech, without me being there? Because a source told me that it was non-existent, that they were making stuff up etc. And that was after Nyx (which most of us took apart), running in the CE editor, was shown on Aug 28th, 2015. And which we all saw they were fabricating stuff. To this day, and since then, nobody has seen anything of Nyx.
All this despite the fact that, since last year, I have – in no uncertain terms – stated that the game as pitched could never be built, that neither game would see a 2016 release etc. But they ignore this and pretty much everything else, even as features are cut, non-existent, talk of an MVP is actually a thing etc; all simply because it goes against their narrative.
The good thing about this industry is that when companies fold, NDAs become null and void, that’s when word starts going out in more places. While most won’t risk their livelihood by going on the record, they still talk; and the people they talk to are the ones who end up spreading what went on. This happens every single time. The stuff that I know, and which hasn’t even been made public due to the risk it poses to people still on this project, is the sort of thing that is so completely unbelievable that even if posted anon, nobody would believe it; even if it didn’t come from enemy #1 (yours truly).
I’m not in this for kudos or any of that. I’m not in this because I want them to fail. I’m not going to post blatant lies, knowing they are in fact lies, or knowing that it would only leave me exposed to a lawsuit, regardless of my liability insurance coverage. I’m only in this because they made this personal, made it about me, and decided to wage a war with the one person who never saw a fight he didn’t like. And the more they try to harass, attack and/or discredit me, the worse it gets because like them, I’m simply not going to stop; nor can I be intimidated. And when the end comes – as I am 100% certain that it is – I’m not going to be jumping up and down rejoicing because the only thing that will be in it for me, is vindication (even though the fact that they can’t build the game as I stated, is already vindication enough)
STAR CITIZEN CUSTOM GAME ENGINE
So yesterday someone pointed to a video interview that Brian Chambers, Development Director, gave at GamesCom 2016 this past August. At the 6:15 mark, he was asked about the progress of the game engine. He stated that the engine was “over 50% modified from the base CryEngine“.
What follows below is my comment (posted on Frontier forums) following an exchange in which one person said “They needed to make their own engine, but it’s too late for that now” and then a Shillizen backer said “Considering that they stated they changed more than 50% of the engine Its accurate to say that they already did just that.”
I already knew that they were using CryEngine3 as the basis for the game. In fact, I wrote an entire section in my July 2015 blog specifically about that, and why the engine they chose simply wasn’t up to the task.
Here’s the thing, when you use middleware engines, they are as-is. You rarely ever have to modify the source engine. In fact, back in the day, you would need a very expensive source engine (e.g. ID Tech5, UE, CryEngine etc) to even do that. Why would you need a source engine license? Simple: if the engine isn’t adequately suited for something that you need to support. And more often than not, it’s usually better to build your own engine, than to try and modify a middleware engine, because depending on how far you want to take it, you’re better off doing it from scratch if you already have the expertise to modify someone else’s engine using their source code.
That’s why, even today, anyone licensing engines like UE4, Unity etc, rarely have to mess with the “guts” of the engine. They use them as-is; and if you want extended features (e.g. network, UI, scene management), you can find plugins which augment (are built on top of) the underlying engine without you ever having to mess with the engine’s source code. e.g. anyone wanting advanced networking/multiplayer in Unity5, will probably buy the Photon plugin. Similarly there are hundreds of plugins for it. So, more often than not, someone else has already done the “targeted” work for you. Want larger scenes? There’s a plugin for that. Want a better scene editor? There’s a plugin for that. Want better audio, networking, UI, matchmaking, shaders, progen terrain etc – you have so many options that you simply do NOT have to write ANY custom code for UE4 or Unity5, unless you want to, or have no choice.
Similarly, when we licensed Trinigy (later bought and renamed to Havok Vision Engine), we didn’t need anything in the source license as we had no intentions of modifying the source because we already knew that the engine (bare metal, with very little fluff and/or useless features) was capable of doing exactly what we wanted. In the implementation of other middleware to “overload/replace” the built-in HVE implementation (e.g. Triton for water bodies, Silverlining for sky, clouds, atmosphere etc, FMOD for audio, Iggy for UI etc) we made minimal changes to the underlying engine in order to build our custom engine that powers Line Of Defense.
So, our revision of HVE, coupled with the augmentation of third-party middleware which worked better with the built-in HVE versions, became our “custom game engine”. We didn’t even make .01% mods to HVE because the engine was quite capable of supporting the game I was building. In fact, it was because I was able to find such a C/++ engine, that I halted development of yet another in-house game engine for this game; as I felt that we were reinventing the wheel. We lost a little over six months of dev work on that; and which I wrote-off as R&D. CryEngine was a non-starter due to scene sizes and other limitations; Unity was C#, UE4 wasn’t out yet, and though I already had private access to it, I was advised (by Epic) not to use it for production work at the time, since it wasn’t ready and too many things could change along the way.
In contrast – hence my alarmist warnings from last year – once it occurred to me that the new game scope CIG were trying to build could never be done on CryEngine3, I said so; right off the bat. I also stated that such a game needed a custom engine.
Then it came to light that they were in fact using CryEngine3 as the basis for such a custom engine. This despite the fact that once you embark on such an endeavor, the further you go, the more you realize that you could’ve just written your own engine from scratch to build the exact game you wanted.
In this interview that you linked, Brian says specifically: “over 50% modified from the base CryEngine”. Note that would be CryEngine3. And (just as I said in my blog), they stopped taking updates from CryTek awhile back due to the fact that their code base had forked so far off, that it didn’t make sense. Also they only have source license to CryEngine3. Which, btw, is why VR will never come to Star Citizen unless they go back in and bring up the now legacy (and broken) VR support they have in CryEngine3, up to the current standards. The game will never support VR anyway; so there is that. But I digress.
The reason that I went back and quoted (the forum trims multi-quotes) the entire comments (from you and Soliluna) in what you just now responded to with Brian’s comment, was because
i) when you say they already did just that, I stated that it’s false. why? well because they did not make their own engine
ii) when you say they changed more than 50% of the engine, I asked for cited sources because to my knowledge, nobody knew just how much modification they had done to CryEngine3 in order to come up with StarEngine
Now we do. And it not only looks even more bad for them; but it also – again – proves me right when I stated last year that the game they were building could never be built with the engine they chose. Ask any tier 1 engineer, and they will tell you that no dev goes and modifies a source engine by 50% unless they are a) out of time to build a custom engine, or don’t have the expertise to do so b) out of time to switch to another engine c) have game assets which have slaved them to the engine they’re stuck with
So, from the start, they thought vision 1.0 of the game could be done with CryEngine3. They were right. Then Chris increased the scope; which then put vision 2.0 of the game outside the scope of CryEngine3. They kept going with the CryEngine2 mod, until at some point, they reached “zero barrier” and could no longer turn back (port to an adequate engine such as UE4 or even CryEngine5, or build a custom engine from scratch).
Now, according to Brian, in Sept 2016, they have modified CryEngine3 by about 50% in order to come up with a custom engine for the game Chris wants them to build. And it’s still a freaking mess.
The problem is that even if they get to 90% modification of CryEngine3, it still won’t be possible for it to power the game that Chris wants because, not only will they never – ever – get to a 100% modification to make that happen, but that would also imply that they have completely replacedCryEngine3 with whatever abomination that is Star Engine. With all their resources and money, they could have built a custom engine – from scratch – in under two years.
And they will still fail to build, let alone deliver the Star Citizen game promised. Since SQ42 doesn’t have all the ganky nonsense that is in SC, they stand a good chance of delivering on that, as I’ve stated time and time again. Unfortunately, not only are a multitude of backers already entitled to that game for free, but unless SQ42 knocks it out of the park, it’s never going to earn the income required to keep buying them time to continue with Star Citizen.
In closing, I welcome folks to ponder this: They are using a heavily modified version of CryEngine3. CryTek are now on CryEngine5 (free). And even Amazon’s Lumberyard is built on CryEngine5 (free). So ask yourself this, how is spending all this money and dev resources to modify a source engine by 50%, a good thing – under any circumstance? It’s not. It’s a waste of time and money. Which is precisely why they are coming up with all these tricks to keep raising money; even long after they quadrupled the money they were originally asking for.
This is the sort of thing that should make any reasonable and/or sensible backer, absolutely mad.
“So, I get your point that if they had simply written their own custom engine it would have saved them a lot of time and money, rather than going the long way round and rebuilding another engine a piece at a time.
But why, in your estimation, would it not be possible for them to re-write Cryengine 3 to the point where it CAN support the kind of features a game like Star Citizen needs?
Am I wrong that it would simply take more time and money (which they seem to have plenty of) or would this (shall we say less efficient approach?) present other obstacles that would make the task Sisyphean?“
- Think of CryEngine3 as paint mix color # 1234
- You are building a house; and you already know what color you want it to be. That being color # 1234-drywall (note that paint is texture specific)
- You continue building your house, still intending on using color # 1234-drywall
- At some point, the owner has decided that the back of the house will use a different kind of wall texture (e.g. drywall vs concrete); so 1234-drywall isn’t going to work there
- The builders, with instructions from the architect, continue with concrete for the back of the house; even as the painters, having bought loads of paint # 1234-drywall, continue painting other parts with it
- Several months down the road, painters tell the architect that 1234-drywall simply isn’t going to work on that concrete back wall
- Seeing as there is no way to make 1234-drywall work on a texture which would require 1234-concrete, the painters set out to create the closest thing to 1234-concrete as possible, by doing their own mix. Not unlike how you can walk into a paint store and ask them to color match (they have computers for this) as close as possible 1234-concrete, derived from 1234-drywall
- The end result is that, as drywall (vision 1.0) is totally different from concrete (vision 2.0), the chances of that concrete back wall painting ever matching the drywall used elsewhere, are close to zero
- So the builder and architect decide to mix their own paint in order to meet with the owner’s specification. Along the way, they decide that the best way forward is to probably rip out the concrete wall or plaster drywall over it so that 1234-drywall works. There’s your MVP (drywall for the back of the house, instead of concrete).
At the end of the day, as I mentioned in my missive, in order to come up with a custom engine which would make it somewhat possible to build vision 2.0 of the game, they would have to modify CE3 by a whole lot more than 50%. And even so, the underlying CE3 architecture is still going to be there because things like scene management, 64-Bit positioning, networking etc, are all the things they would need to either rip out and replace, or build on top of. And the time it takes for them to be doing all that, could have been spent building a custom engine which specifically does what they want.
It is hard for a none programmer to quite grasp how horrendous it is to go back and modify someone’s code; let alone an engine built by several people. Which is why, last year when people were saying that opening F42-GER with ex-CryTek engineers was going to be the magic bullet, most of us who know better, just laughed. It’s been almost 18 (?) months since; look at what they have now.
To be clear, I don’t envision there ever being a time whereby their CE3 FrankenEngine ever powers vision 2.0 of the game. I simply don’t see it happening. For that, would need to modify CE3 by 90% or more. Well, therein lies the rub.
Let the record show that in my very first blog back in July 2015, I did say that it would take at least $150 million to build vision 2.0 of the game; assuming they had the tech, talent, time, and money. We’re at $124m and I have no reason to believe that they will ever achieve the promised vision 2.0 using that engine; even with $250 million.
And that’s the reason why Chris declared the MVP. As I understand it from sources, he has been advised time and time again, that vision 2.0 is simply not possible with what they have. And the best they can hope for is to ship “something” (in this case an MVP, and/or SQ42) in order to buy more time. However, the risk there is that, given their burn rate around all these studios, contractors, overhead etc, there is no guarantee that they are going to keep this charade up for much longer. Once they ship whatever he thinks is an MVP and/or SQ42, it’s going to immediately change everything for better or worse.
btw I don’t believe that Chris will ever come out and say that any version (e.g. 4.0) is the final product, hence MVP. He has thrown the MVP word out there simply as something that he can fall back to in the event that he is ever accused of never shipping the finished product. Just like he did with Star Marine, where he said that “it’s in the PU”, he will simply say that he already indicated that they will first ship an MVP, then build on top of it. That notion of “building on top of it” is the part where he gets to justify more time and money in order to bring his vision 2.0 to life. The fact that he made a bunch of promises, while not delivering on even 50% of them even with all the money, is going to get lost in translation along the way. Especially if he ever ships the SQ42 promised; which, as I understand it, is on just as much shaky ground as Star Citizen, seeing as – this point – they still don’t even have a complete “game” with everything promised in the stretch goals.
The upcoming CitizenCon on Oct 9th is going to be more of the same. Neither Star Citizen nor SQ42 is going to be released this year. That’s already a foregone conclusion. Whatever shows up at CitizenCon is going to be of the same smoke and mirrors vein. If they ship any aspect of SQ42, we’re hearing from sources that it will be tagged as a “prelude” (most of us call that a demo btw) in order to keep the backers at bay, gauge interest etc. It will succeed as far as the hardcore backers are concerned; but most of us won’t care, as it won’t be the promised EP1 game.
At the end of the day, none of this will matter. As gamers, all we can do is wait, watch, dissent, speculate, argue, fuss, fight etc until they either ship as promised, or fail completely. Those who are trying to quash dissent are the ones helping to spread the ludicrousness of this whole thing.
If you thought the refund debacle wasn’t bad enough, then wait until you see the latest response from CIG to someone who asked for a refund. And naturally, the poor guy got viciously attacked by the Shitizens in the community.
LATEST CITIZENCON 2016 RUMORS
With GamesCom 2016 over, it’s time for CitizenCon 2016 on Oct 9th. This is the annual fundraising event that CIG/RSI claims is a “fan” event and not at all marketing (LOL!!). In fact, if you look at their Q4 earnings year on year, it’s easy to see how their fundraising revolves around bullshit, lies, false promises – and scripted content. Last GamesCom, it was all about Star Marine. That’s since been shit-canned; though, clearly for liability (and broken promises) reasons, it’s apparently coming back soon in the 2.6 patch. This despite Chris Roberts claiming that it was already in the game backers were playing. Yeah.
With that, an insider and denizen of the SA forums who has provided some accurate insider info in the past, posted this about 24 hrs ago.
Prepare for Shitcon
- Bare witness to a star studded sq42 trailer with lots and I mean LOTS of cool explosions
- Observe your citizen landing on a hand crafted proceduraly generated planet, buy some land and initiate farming mechanics.
- See an epic space battle with 4 cap ships and up to 16 citizens engaging in zero gravity combat.
- Buy some new trousers in a space trouser shop .
- Explore the Grim hex , be careful of pirates though !
- And if thats not enough for you , get saving those space dollars for a new JPEG
If the above is true, then clearly they are repeating what they have done in the past, and as recently as GamesCom 2016 whereby they create a staged proof-of-concept demo in order to rope backers into giving them more money under the guise of it all coming soon.
For my part, I have long suspected that they will have to show something of SQ42 before the end of the year, seeing as I said over a year ago that sources had told me that the game was never coming out in 2016. And since it was last seen at CitizenCon 2015, nobody has seen much of it since; let alone any game play videos. Like Star Citizen – which Chris promised back in 2015 was coming in 2016 – there is no way that SQ42 is coming out in 2016. So them doing a glitzy playable presentation – which I think it highly unlikely – or a trailer (likely), is probably the best that backers could hope for. And if rumors of them actually trying to release a playable prelude to EP1 is true, well then, the backlash is going to be fun to behold, given insider reports that it’s just sub-par.
Then again, back in Jan 2015, he proclaimed that Star Citizen would have raised $100 million before release in 2016.
STAR CITIZEN / Squadron 42 (2016)
Right now, for a five year, $123 million project, the pre-Alpha PU 2.5 build is complete rubbish. I present, Exhibit # 999999
Basically, the first PU version which was released over a year ago, has hardly made any progress, other than bug fixes, a new base, and the ability to buy clothes or run around naked. That’s it. Most of the gameplay promised for Nov 2014 release, isn’t there. No mining. No trading. No exploration. No cargo manipulation. No planets to land on. No multi-crew position/skills. No mission/quests etc. All there is, right now, is a repetitive “go flip a switch” mission with horrid NPC pirate ships. That’s it. Oh, and player ship PvP if you’re into that sort of thing.
And since the Gamescom 2016 presentation, they’ve been touting PU 3.0 (aka the Jesus Patch, and which was previously touted as 2.7) which they’re threatening to release by year end – complete with ALL of this:
- Procedural planets featuring an improved version of what was shown at GamesCom
- Player professions which include mercenaries and pirates, trading (which includes cargo transport), as well as bounty hunting
- Implementation of modules which include Subsumption AI, mission/quest giving, improved items (Items 2.0) system, as well as improved networking (which some backers think is going to solve all their current problems)
- Completed Stanton (one of the hundred promised btw) system which is to include a twelve (!) moons, four more areas (adding to GrimHex, Arc Corp, Crusader) and over thirty (!) space stations
Yeah, we’re still laughing when we look at the calendar, and notice that it’s already September and the current 2.5 patch is just plain broken; and if 2.6 releases with Star Marine as promised, they’d be pulling the same stunt they did last year when they released a horribly broken PU 1.0 which backers foolishly assumed would be the start of great things to come.
This was the GamesCom 2015 presentation. Yeah.
In case you haven’t been paying attention, what CIG/RSI are doing now is basically checking off boxes in order to not run afoul of promises made – and which they have received money for. After receiving over $123 million based on promises, any non-delivery is subject to legal action. It’s completely different from when a project removes features for whatever reason.
WISHFUL THINKING GONE AWRY
Yesterday, a backer (aka data miner) found some legacy scene files lurking in the game’s distribution. Despite the fact that these assets have been in the game for years (backers currently download this, and other useless files with each patch btw) now, some sites (1, 2, 3) decided to make news items out of it.
Sources say that this is one of various assets built to showcase parts of the game in a promo trailer, but which later proved to be “impractical” for completion, due to the game engine limitations. Which rings true, seeing as the engine is still struggling under it’s own weight and will never – ever – be able to render even a quad of that scene, let alone the whole thing, complete with texture assets, NPC entities, players etc
Yes, you’ve probably seen that scene concept somewhere. In fact, here is an album showing all of them.
…MEANWHILE, OVER IN THE NOT-MARKETING, MARKETING DEPT
So this popped up earlier today.
That’s not marketing though, right? RIGHT?
