Vapourware Scam Citizen - Only people with too much money can become StarCitizens! WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?

[Modron]

Eh Cleve is a poor scam artist, hasn't raked in millions in multi level marketing scams yet.

 

[Kingston]

Smart update

http://dereksmart.com/forums/topic/star-citizen-musings/#post-5094

Wow. The less written about the holiday stream on Dec 16th, the better. It was an absolute disaster. To the extent that shortly after, not only did they pull the stream (copy over here) from YouTube, but they also proceeded to wipe out any/all dissent (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) from the official RSI forums. Of course Reddit – where only the hardcore Shitizens have some level of control – was ablaze. The media (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) had a field day with this one; and Imperium News (<— LOL!!) has a pretty good write-up about the fiasco and resulting fallout.

As I had warned several weeks before, not only did they not show anything of Squadron 42, let alone the much touted 3.0 patch, but the whole stream was devoid of any meaningful content. Remember back during CitizenCon when Chris Roberts stated that the SQ42 demo was mere days away, but they didn’t want to risk showing it? Well, we knew that – like always – he was lying then. So it came as no surprise to most of us that SQ42 was still a no-show. In fact, I wrote about that in this blog and in this musing.

To further compound the problem, the dev schedule – which they’ve been tinkering (1, 2, 3) with and making material changes to as they remove several promised features – which they made public a few weeks after CitizenCon in order to appease gamers, didn’t get updated until a few hours ahead of the stream; and to show that the 2.6 patch was again delayed to Dec 22nd.

The community manager didn’t even do a community post ahead of the stream; even as the forum denizens were getting nervous about what that would mean. Then shortly around the same time the stream went live, a newsletter from Chris Roberts went out. The hilarious part?

“After we made the decision before CitizenCon that the Squadron 42 vertical slice wasn’t ready to be shown publically, we spent some time on reviewing how far off we were and what we wanted to achieve in order to be comfortable showing a full chapter of S42 gameplay. After all the effort we expended for CitizenCon, we didn’t want to spend additional developer time polishing intermediate solutions if it wasn’t going towards the final product. A slick demo isn’t that helpful if it pushes back the finished game, so we decided that the priority should be completing full systems over getting the vertical slice into a showable state.“

Basically the only highlight of the stream – if you can call it that – was that they got to play 8v8 Star Marine in the much delayed 2.6 build. It looked no better than a glorified CryEngine mod; and played even worse. Seriously, 4-5 years in dev and almost $140 million dollars, they can’t build an FPS module using a custom build of an engine built specifically for FPS games. It’s amazing. In fact, Star Marine was MIA for much of the year; and even Chris Roberts went public and said that it was just a game mode, that backers were already playing it etc. There was a huge furor over that. Then due to what can only be attributed to a complete lack of any meaningful progress in 2016, they decided to resurrect it as a standalone module. And aside from being complete rubbish, is largely broken.

Then, shortly after the stream ended, they finally released the 2.6 from Evocati to the Public Test Universe server. It was invite only of course. It completely broke the live 2.5 version, leaving other backers who have no access to either Evocati or the PTU, with a game they can no longer play. So once again, as they did with the 2.0 release in Dec 2015 which was broken and didn’t work for weeks, they’re about to do the same thing by releasing it to live (scheduled for tomorrow). Except this time, 2.6 is a lot worse, and doesn’t contain any meaningful update.

Of course during the stream they had the usual ship sales to continue raising money. Most backers weren’t having any of it; so their funding continued to tank. It’s hilarious to even talk about raising money at this point. This was a game that needed less then $5M. Then it was $12M. So far they have raised almost $140 million; and having run out of money (according to several sources), time, and amid dwindling resources and high level studio departures, dodgy corporate shenanigans etc, the conclusion is that they simply can’t build the game they promised.

 

[Drax]

yawn

 

[Grotesque]

 

[:Flash:]

So after all these years in development, and after they claimed a lot of time had to be spent to update the CryEngine to 64bit, they have now announced that they will switch to Amazon's Lumberyard engine, which is currently still in beta.
http://www.polygon.com/2016/12/23/14062698/star-citizen-amazon-game-engine

 

[Bumvelcrow]

It is based on CryEngine, and has been used internally by Amazon studios for some time.

Sounds like relatively small disruption for presumably small reward. Changing to a significantly different engine at this stage may hurt their 'release schedule'.

 

[Santander02]

Switching engines after years of development, where have I heard that before...

 

[Kem0sabe]

Its a non issue this, lumberjack is a fork of cryengine with added support for amazon cloud and streaming.

If anything this makes sense because crytek is closing doors eventually and amazon is developing this as a free community sourced version of cryengine.

 

[Makabb]

Its a non issue this, lumberjack is a fork of cryengine with added support for amazon cloud and streaming.

If anything this makes sense because crytek is closing doors eventually and amazon is developing this as a free community sourced version of cryengine.

Meanwhile at Kemosabe's place

 

[Deleted member 7219]

Speaking as someone who works for a software company, you want to be developing on supported engines/frameworks wherever possible, so this is a smart move on their part.

 

[Grotesque]

Lumberyard and StarEngine are both forks from exactly the SAME build of CryEngine.

We stopped taking new builds from Crytek towards the end of 2015. So did Amazon. Because of this the core of the engine that we use is the same one that Amazon use and the switch was painless (I think it took us a day or so of two engineers on the engine team). What runs Star Citizen and Squadron 42 is our heavily modified version of the engine which we have dubbed StarEngine, just now our foundation is Lumberyard not CryEngine. None of our work was thrown away or modified. We switched the like for like parts of the engine from CryEngine to Lumberyard. All of our bespoke work from 64 bit precision, new rendering and planet tech, Item / Entity 2.0, Local Physics Grids, Zone System, Object Containers and so on were unaffected and remain unique to Star Citizen.

Going forward we will utilize the features of Lumberyard that make sense for Star Citizen. We made this choice as Amazon's and our focus is aligned in building massively online games that utilize the power of cloud computing to deliver a richer online experience than would be possible with an old fashioned single server architecture (which is what CryNetwork is).

Looking at Crytek's roadmap and Amazon's we determined that Amazon was investing in the areas we were most interested in. They are a massive company that is making serious investments into Lumberyard and AWS to support next generation online gaming. Crytek doesn't have the resources to compete with this level of investment and have never been focused on the network or online aspects of the engine in the way we or Amazon are. Because of this combined with the fact we weren't taking new builds of CryEngine we decided that Amazon would be the best partner going forward for the future of Star Citizen.

Finally there was no ulterior motive in the timing of the announcement. The deal wasn't fully finalized until after the release of 2.5 and we agreed with Amazon to announce the switch and partnership upon the release of 2.6, which would be the first release on Lumberyard and AWS. If you have been checking out our schedule updates you would know that we originally had hoped to release 2.6 at the beginning of December, not Friday the 23rd!

I hope this clears up some of the speculation I have seen. We are very excited to be partnered with Amazon and feel this move is a big win for Star Citizen and by extension everyone that has backed the project.

p.s. I wont be replying to this as it is Christmas and I am meant to be enjoying a bit of time off with my family (and playing some games - you may see me pop into a Star Marine or AC match or two!)

p.p.s Happy Holidays All!

 

[:Flash:]

Nobody who has ever worked in software believes you can switch engines "in a day or so", even if they are branches of the same engine.

 

[Grotesque]

Nobody who has ever worked in software believes you can switch engines "in a day or so", even if they are branches of the same engine.

you are dead wrong. programmer wonder boy Bester is able to do it in an hour or so.

 

[toro]

The title is misleading. It's the same engine. They just added some hooks for Amazon Cloud stuff.

Kem0sabe is not wrong this time.

 

[Bester]

I remember giving CryEngine a try when it became open source half a year or so ago. It's so bare-bones that talking about engine here is almost exaggerating. It's a renderer without any high level functionality. It doesn't have occlusion culling for example, you have to manually set it up through invisible cubes. If they've been working on shitizen for all these years, they developed more tools internally than CryEngine initially had, so it's fair to say they have their own engine by now. It's possible to merge Lumberyard's scant commits into the main branch without much trouble, so they didn't switch engines, they just added stuff to theirs from another fork and called it a switch.

The fuzz - it's probably for some licensing reasons? Maybe they had a deal with crytek for x% and then they "switched" to Lumberyard so they could promote it in exchange for a lower y% and/or maybe a straight up grant.

Basically, whatever.

 

[Alienman]

So you can order ships through Amazon now ingame?

 

[Severian Silk]

This game seems really popular with a lot of people. Is it good? How does the gameplay compare to other sims?

 

[ERYFKRAD]

 

[Severian Silk]

 

[OndrejSc]

 

[toro]

 

[Kingston]

 

[Infinitron]

No comment: http://www.pcgamer.com/these-disappointed-no-mans-sky-players-are-turning-to-star-citizen/

These disappointed No Man's Sky players are turning to Star Citizen
Disillusioned with one space game, they're blasting off into another (unfinished) one.

Gamers hold a very particular vision of the future of entertainment. We were born too early to untangle dark matter and eclipse Alpha Centauri in our own intergalactic freighters, and while those fantasies can be teased and inflated by Star Wars or Star Trek, videogames are the only thing that can simulate them. A pure representation of life between the stars—docking on space stations, exploring planets, carving out a subsistence on the bleeding edge of reality—requires a profound amount of processing power, so for decades we settled for half-steps. Star Wars Galaxies, FreeSpace, Eve Online—all capable games, all leaving us with a desire for something more.

No Man’s Sky was supposed to be that game. A limitless, psychedelic vision of space, promising a dynamic universe with hours of mystery and curiosity spread across the void. It generated a massive amount of grassroots buzz centered on a few killer trailers, but when the faithful got their hands on the product, they found a nice, low-key procedurally generated survival game. Not bad, but it wasn’t going to carry anyone through the looking glass. 10 years ago, or even five years ago, No Man’s Sky probably would’ve been lauded, but in a moment where videogames seem so mouthwateringly close to delivering a singular, second reality (and the way the development team leaned into those hopes), disappointment was inevitable.

Like most people, a gamer and Reddit poster named Chris got interested in No Man’s Sky following its stellar showing at E3, and followed the development for a year before its 2016 release. "With each video and interview it appeared that the game was going to live up to the original trailer," says Chris. "That E3 trailer, and the hints of multiplayer dropped by Sean Murray in various interviews, was really the only bar I had personally set for the game. I figured I would get about 100 hours out of No Mans Sky."

Chris was equipped with a middling PC and an Xbox One, and decided to make the investment into a $600 Alienware Alpha to be ready for release day. After 20 hours with the game, he started having some serious doubts.

"The art assets were getting old: repetitive building design, lifeless NPC’s, repetitive flora, bizarre fauna—random mixes of reptile and mammal parts—the same terrain and single biomes," he says. "I never really felt like an explorer because over every horizon there was a landing pad, observatory, or trading post with several NPC’s casually glued to their chairs. Exploring the game was no longer fun for me. I can honestly say that it's not a horrible game, it was just marketed wrong, I think most people would agree with that. As I posted on Reddit, NMS actually felt like a Wii version of a space exploration game."

$600 to power a Wii survival game would probably leave me pretty annoyed. But Chris did now have a powerful PC lying around, and he decided to throw his weight behind Star Citizen—the other super ambitious, controversial space sim on the horizon. In a Reddit post he made three months ago titled "If I hadn’t met NMS, I probably wouldn’t have fallen in love with SC," he lays out his reasoning.

"After a few underwhelming weeks of NMS' ‘chill’ gameplay, I immediately started looking for something more to satisfy this craving for an awesome space sim that's been growing within me these past few years... and that's when I came across the [Star Citizen] 3.0 Demo. It was everything I thought I wanted from a space sim," he wrote. "Even in Alpha I am having a lot of fun and I'm excited to hop inside my Avenger each night and blast off into the 'Verse! So this is it, I think I've finally found the game; it took me a little longer than most, and I lost $60 along the way, but at least I made it!"

To be clear, Chris is only invested into Star Citizen for $80. He might not be nearly as optimistic if he had to plunk down the cash for a new machine like he did for No Man’s Sky. But it’s still interesting that he’s willing to risk disappointment on such a similar project. The dreams of Chris Roberts are cached in more experience, a larger team, and a different business model, but they aren’t that different from the hopes of Sean Murray. The logical reasons are all sound—Chris states he’s attracted to the lore, multiplayer, and the open-ended gameplay that No Man’s Sky lacks—but he still admits that this breed of hype is a little bit destructive.

"At the end of the day, gaming is one of my hobbies. I don’t mind spending money on my hobby, and I recognize that not every game is going to be great—that goes with anything in life," he says. "Hell, I took my family to a movie the other night which cost $40 in tickets and $30 in food, and the movie sucked. That was $70 for two hours of dissatisfaction. Needless to say, I don’t get worked up over ‘wasting’ money on videogames. I’m fortunate enough to say that losing $60 on a bad game won’t ruin my day."

However, there are other people who’ve migrated from No Man’s Sky to Star Citizen who won’t be quite as satisfied if Cloud Imperium Games fails to deliver. Another gamer named Jules has been playing PC games since the first Ultima and has dealt with more heartbreaks than the average dejected No Man’s Sky fan. Like Chris, he was drawn to Star Citizen late last year after Hello Games left him cold, but he’s not going to pull any punches if it fails to deliver.

"If Star Citizen does fail, I think it might finally make me hesitate to back games of that magnitude early on in the development cycle," he says. "Buying your way in is a new concept and I'm not sure it's all that positive in helping developers achieve their goals. If you can easily get funded but then still fall flat because you just didn't have a good game concept then there's something wrong with the new trend of funding games via buy-ins, crowd-funding and early access systems. I do think Star Citizen has a winner though and I hope they succeed!"

Jules and Chris have been chasing this fantasy for a long time. All they want to do is explore without any evidence of the machine behind the curtain. No invisible walls, no repetitive landscapes, no cut-corners or processor shortcomings to disturb the dream.

"I want to explore, that's my main motivation for a good space game," says Jules. "I'm actually not that enthusiastic about dozens of ship types and dog-fight PvP and all that. But I am very interested in a community of players interacting within a given universe with an economy and story unfolding. I was an old-school Star Wars Galaxies player and in its beginning it was an amazing game until they changed the fundamental way it worked. I hope for another game with that sort of expansive dynamics and gameplay where traders, explorers, and fighter pilots all have a place to share in the game's universe."

 

[hello friend]

A fool and his money, as they say.

 

[TheChickenKing]

"I want to explore, that's my main motivation for a good space game," says Jules. "I'm actually not that enthusiastic about dozens of ship types and dog-fight PvP and all that. But I am very interested in a community of players interacting within a given universe with an economy and story unfolding. I was an old-school Star Wars Galaxies player and in its beginning it was an amazing game until they changed the fundamental way it worked. I hope for another game with that sort of expansive dynamics and gameplay where traders, explorers, and fighter pilots all have a place to share in the game's universe."

I find this closing bit especially entertaining. The implication is that these individuals are looking to find this exploratory experience with Star Citizen, a game with fairly obvious engine problems that's having a hard time doing anything but PVP. The open universe hasn't been implemented on any meaningful level, nor has any sort of trading or economy. I suppose if these individuals expected to find any part of that experience with No Man's Sky then they truly are stupid, but I guess I've come to expect hope for better from people.