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

[Norfleet]

Even the lawsuits are vaporware.

 

[rolandz_Baton_PROD]

i'm bit of a boomer regarding star citizens, but what's the status of the game? What about all of the followers that poured millions into the game's development? haven't been following the news lately.

 

[fantadomat]

what's the status of the game

it is nearly finished,it will come out soon....

 

[Grauken]

what's the status of the game

it is nearly finished,it will come out soon....

They just need a bit more money to finish the last 1%

 

[Beastro]

what's the status of the game

it is nearly finished,it will come out soon....

They just need a bit more money to finish the last 1%

Then more for the last .1%

.... then the last .01%

.... then....

 

[Danikas]

 

[Perkel]

i'm bit of a boomer regarding star citizens, but what's the status of the game? What about all of the followers that poured millions into the game's development? haven't been following the news lately.

Star Citizen:
- 1 fully featured system with few planets and bases and they are about to release second one (but not full)

SQ42:
- planned beta for end of this year if it won't slip.

 

[Fishy]

what's the status of the game

it is nearly finished,it will come out soon....

They just need a bit more money to finish the last 1%

Then more for the last .1%

.... then the last .01%

.... then....

They're in the process of polishing the pipelines, but don't worry, once that's done, they'll just need a week or two to pump out those 99 missing star systems.

 

[Curratum]

They said that the star systems will be scaled down dramatically even when the supposed release version is out.

 

[Peachcurl]

Even the lawsuits are vaporware with this game.

Even the lawsuits are vaporware.

Even the comments are procedurally generated content.

 

[Verylittlefishes]

This guy looks like fraud to me even by looking at photos.

And what is this?

So he just bought a manor from crowdfunded money and not released the gaem? Amazing.

 

[justincz]

 

[Gerrard]

This CryEngine apparently is not suited for RPGs MMOs Shooters strategy or isometric games.

But besides that its great.

Yeah, apparently it's really good for... interior and building dev presentations.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

This CryEngine apparently is not suited for RPGs MMOs Shooters strategy or isometric games.

But besides that its great.

It is photorealistic, which is great if you are into walking simulators. Also, the name of the thing is Cry Engine. They knew what they were doing. LOL.

 

[Grotesque]

 

[AN4RCHID]

Hopefully the COVID-19 situation does not lead to delays

 

[Lutte]

If I was chris roberts this would be the moment I would chose to have an excuse to cancel the development of the game. You could go with this narrative :

> because of the economic recession, donations aren't sustaining the game development anymore and we have to shut down the studio

and I bet the fanboys would lap this up.

Better doing it now than doing it when everything is fine. During a crisis news about some dork video games development being stopped would be mostly ignored. Don't let a good crisis go to waste.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

If I was chris roberts this would be the moment I would chose to have an excuse to cancel the development of the game. You could go with this narrative :

> because of the economic recession, donations aren't sustaining the game development anymore and we have to shut down the studio

and I bet the fanboys would lap this up.

Better doing it now than doing it when everything is fine. During a crisis news about some dork video games development being stopped would be mostly ignored. Don't let a good crisis go to waste.

How about: Hey guys I got covid! things are bleak; sorry, but I need to pull the plug.

 

[Peachcurl]

If they'd want to pull the plug and shift some blame, sure.

But why would they want to pull the plug in the first place? I don't really believe the whales have dried up yet.

 

[Grotesque]

 

[Infinitron]

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/...orum/3/thread/roadmap-roundup-april-17th-2020

Roadmap Roundup | April 17th 2020

Happy Friday, everyone!

Each and every week, we accompany the Roadmap update with a brief explanatory note to give you insight into the decision-making that led to any changes. This is part of an effort to make our communications more transparent, more specific, and more insightful for all of you who help to make Star Citizen and Squadron 42 possible.

With that said, let’s go ahead and dive into this week’s Roadmap Roundup!

-CIG Community Team

Notable Changes for April 17th, 2020

Server to Client Actor Networking Rework
Support for Server Meshing development has been highlighted as high priority across all involved teams. As a result, Server Meshing support work was prioritized and scheduled for Q2, resulting in Server to Client Actor Networking Rework tasks to be shifted back one quarter to Alpha 4.1.

Death Animation Improvements
Further work was required on the physics side for these improvements, and physics support priority was given to Body Dragging. While Body Dragging will maintain its intended release in Alpha 4.0, Death Animation Improvements will move back one quarter to Alpha 4.1.

PVP Bounties
After confirming with the team working on this card, we've determined the tasks included largely consist of preliminary work for Bounty Hunting improvements that are coming in a later quarter. This Epic was not intended to be displayed publicly at this time, resulting in its removal from the Roadmap. We expect to add additional Bounty Hunter themed cards in the future as front-facing features release dates are decided upon.

Crusader & Orison Landing Zone
We have had to move both Crusader and its landing zone, Orison, back to the end of the year as the team required more time to create these locations. The reasons for this move are threefold: 1) the re-prioritization with focus on GrimHex and other environmental work in progress, 2) the additional time it took to complete New Babbage, and 3) delays from transitioning to a new work-from-home environment due to the current COVID-19 pandemic. As Alpha 4.2 is not yet visible on the roadmap, we will be removing these cards for the time being, but we expect to re-surface them for the 4th quarter in the near future.

These cards have shifted to align with the Crusader & Orison Landing Zone moves:

• Mission Giver: Lisa Gibbs
• Mission Giver: Devin Bautista

The following cards have been added to the PU Roadmap under the Alpha 4.0 column:

• New Babbage – Shop Additions | Introducing a novelty Kiosk in the New Babbage spaceport interior which will sell souvenirs and knick-knacks. Also coming to the spaceport is The Factory Line, a flagship store for microTech, which sells their top of the line products, such as mobiGlas, simpods and various computer-related items.
• Elevator Panel Updates | The utilitarian elevator panels are being updated to use interactable screens, as previously this was done through player inner thought.
• Heightmap Improvements | Updates are being made to all the heightmaps used on planets and moons to fully take advantage of their higher resolution. This will mean more detail can be utilized during the painting process.
• Cutlass Blue | Building, balancing, and implementing the reworked police/militia patrol variant of the Drake Cutlass into the game.

https://www.pcgamer.com/star-citizen-players-arent-pleased-with-recent-roadmap-changes/

Star Citizen players aren't pleased with recent roadmap changes
Removals and delays haven't gone down well.

Game development roadmaps are rarely set in stone, but some recent changes to Star Citizen's has ruffled the feathers of its community of interstellar pilots.

A roadmap roundup, posted late last week, highlighted some of the notable changes to the upcoming Alpha 4.0 update, expected in June, including a few items that have been pushed back or removed until a later date.

The server to client actor networking rework is one such feature, which has been delayed until 4.1. Players and AI characters are handled by the client, which means when you perform an action, the local client does the action and then sends the information to the server, at which point other players see it happen. It's apparently been a problem when it comes to tackling cheating, and it also means players see a lot of rubber banding from players with poor connections. With the rework, this will be handled server-side.

According to the community team, this has been pushed back because the devs are instead focused on getting server meshing support working. Server meshing means that Star Citizen's worlds and stations will all have their own servers, which will then be connected seamlessly. The rework has been rescheduled for the second quarter of 2020.

"Great! More stuff delayed! What about gameplay loops though? 4.0 is not even out yet and you already delayed the most important one: Server to Client Actor Networking Rework," reads the top comment from futurewazzup. "Desync and stuter [sic] is AWFUL right now, when playing with friends, every character jitters and lags."

Other changes include death animation improvements being delayed, PvP bounties being removed from the roadmap (this card was apparently not meant to be public), and delays for both the new world, Crusader, and its landing zone, which will now be appearing in 4.2 at the end of the year.

As well as changing priorities, Star Citizen's developers have also had to shift to working from home, which naturally creates some unexpected obstacles. There hasn't been much understanding in the comments.

"COVID pandemic is indeed a tragedy," acknowledges one player. "However, this wave of delays is just another set compounding on top of the previous ones before COVID was ever a thing."

"Covid or not. This is just bad," reads another comment. "I'm sorry."

It's not all delays, though. Some new cards have been added to the 4.0 column, including a souvenir shop in New Babbage and elevator panel updates. Not quite as exciting as a new world.

Usually the announcement of delays doesn't produce this much vitriol, but Star Citizen has been in development for almost a decade and is the highest crowdfunded videogame in history. The changes in scope, the separation of the sandbox and Squadron 42, and all the legal drama seem to be wearing down the community. Neither the sandbox or the singleplayer campaign have release dates.

 

[Fishy]

Here, I'll save you the suspense. If month X news reads like:

Star Citizen players aren't pleased with recent roadmap changes
Removals and delays haven't gone down well.

It means that month X+3 news will read like:

Star Citizen releases new concept ship and sets new quarterly crowdfunding record.

Oh, spoilers btw. Don't read the above if you want it to be a surprise.

 

[Jigawatt]

Netcode delayed again.

I'm in constant awe of how incompetent the programmers on this project are. It's one thing for the top levels of management to want to stall (why finish a game and open up to disappointment when you can make so much cash selling jpgs?) but what on earth are these code monkeys doing? Maybe they're in on it and just cashing paychecks while shitposting and occasionally alt-tabbing back to the IDE but I don't know. Fresh grads in way over their head maybe?

 

[Lutte]

Netcode delayed again.

I'm in constant awe of how incompetent the programmers on this project are. It's one thing for the top levels of management to want to stall (why finish a game and open up to disappointment when you can make so much cash selling jpgs?) but what on earth are these code monkeys doing? Maybe they're in on it and just cashing paychecks while shitposting and occasionally alt-tabbing back to the IDE but I don't know. Fresh grads in way over their head maybe?

They promised something that is literally impossible to make with their tech choices.
Star Citizen can barely run with handfuls of players in a same map.

Now, think long and hard about their sim-like promises of capital ship being manned by a ton of people all running in a real time action game. Try to imagine SC engine featuring a fight with multiple capital ships.

Well, imagining it is the only thing you can do because this will never, ever work, ever.
It's in their interest to never release because if they do release something it won't be star citizen but something entirely different in nature. Like a dumb sandbox with three quests and enclosed space maps featuring deathmatches.

You can't use cry engine for what they want to do. You can use it to make pretty pictures, which is the only reason why SC became as big as it is.

Star citizen is entirely depending on the "pc master race" sentiment. Most people gave their money away for the reason of having the most impressive graphics and feeling like we were returning to the days of the first Crysis game when PCs still were vastly superior to consoles in terms of visuals.
What they don't realize is that the tech choices made for the prettiest picture doesn't work for that scale.
SC is an eternal tech demo for graphics whores who thought you could build a massive scale game with a pretty first person shooter engine.

 

[Perkel]

I'm in constant awe of how incompetent the programmers on this project are. It's one thing for the top levels of management to want to stall (why finish a game and open up to disappointment when you can make so much cash selling jpgs?) but what on earth are these code monkeys doing? Maybe they're in on it and just cashing paychecks while shitposting and occasionally alt-tabbing back to the IDE but I don't know. Fresh grads in way over their head maybe?

Because it is really fucking hard and new like most of SC things when it comes to tech.

Basically once they implement it player instancing will be limited only by game designers not by technology. So bigger ship will have its own server and if it will reach some huge number of players it will have its second or third server all dynamically done without any problem for player who won't notice people being de-spawned and so on. So space battles will be limited mostly by hardware of players who will have to render shitload of ships.
Right now servers are static.

Usually in mmo games servers are static, meaning there is limit to amount of players and servers statically either are divided by area. They need to run whatever there are players or not because you never know if player will teleport suddenly to some location.

In SC it is the other way. Each character has a server of its own and if you go somewhere you still have your own server following you. When you meet someone then this is where your server or his server takes your instance or his and combine (meshing) on the fly. This frees up one server leaving both player using only one server.

Question:server meshing means that CIG has every planet and every space station running on its own server, which are seamlessly connected. How many servers does CIG have to handle this mass permanently? because there are more and more star systems to come

Clive Johnson CIG@cjohnson
We use Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) for our server hosting. I don't know the exact numbers but they have tens of thousands of servers available in each region, and we can add as many of these as we want to our network within a matter of minutes. That's a crazy amount of computing power, right at our fingertips. It's definitely more than we would need for each planet and space station, in every star system, to have their own server.

However, the thing to remember is that having servers tied to specific in-game locations is just a temporary stepping stone on the way to the full server meshing implementation. My guess and my hope is that we'll have left this temporary solution behind by the time new systems start coming online, but I'm not entirely sure how everything lines up on the roadmap, so I might be wrong about that.

The reason we're considering having per location servers as a stepping stone at all, is that it would allow backers to begin testing parts of server meshing before all the other work on it has been completed. To start with, we'd put the boundaries between servers out in deep space so that they could only really be crossed during Quantum Travel. That would really limit, how often players and other entities transition between servers, the kinds of entities that need to transition, as well as what can be happening during a transition. As bugs are fixed and we gain confidence with the technology, we may divide locations between more servers. Ultimately though, the idea is not to have any fixed server boundaries. Instead a server will manage the game for a cluster of players. As the cluster spreads out, the area the server manages will grow, and as the players in a cluster bunch up, the area managed by the server shrinks. When clusters of players belonging to different servers overlap, the servers will decide whether to transition players between them, or even to break out a new cluster of players and spin up another server to handle it. In this version of server meshing, servers will only be assigned to locations where there are players, greatly reducing the number of servers we would otherwise need, and allowing the game to scale to higher player counts much more cheaply.

Question:So my question at this point, then, is if you have a new server spin up due to the number of players in one area, will they all still be able to see one another, or will it work somewhat like today's implementation (but faster) where they're segregated?

Clive Johnson CIG@cjohnson
Yes, players on different servers should still be able to see and interact with each other. To try and keep latency down we'd ideally migrate players that are interacting or close to each other to the same server. That's a latency optimization problem for the future though.

It's always great to read your posts about the upcoming server tech.  
But there are still few things that i'm scared about.

1. Let's say i'm in a spacestation with about 50 other players wich would be serverinstance1 for example. Then there is a Spaceship near the spacestation with 50 other players in it wich would be serverinstance2. Everyone can see each other. That means i'll get all the state updates from all players from 2 different servers at the same time?!
   
   
2. Now a battle between the players on serverinstance1 and serverinstance2 brakes out and everyone is shooting each other (from the cargo doors of the ship and a landing pad from the spacestation for example.). How will the servers be able to handle 100+ projectiles per second to transfer between each other without a noticeable delay?
   
   
3. And when there are actions on 2 different servers overlapping or interacting with each other. Can they get desync like players in every game can get? Of cause not because of the network connection but because of different simulation speeds and calculation stalls etc.
   

Clive Johnson CIG@cjohnson

1. Yes.
   
   
2. Projectiles such as bullets, lasers and plasma bolts aren't networked, since they fire in straight lines. Only the fire event that creates the projectile needs to be networked. There was a clip in a recent ATV (don't have the link to hand, sorry) talking about the projectile manager and some significant optimisations made in that area.
   
   
3. Yes, desyncs are a very real possibility. Ideally we'll migrate players that are interacting together into the same server to reduce this problem. In your 50 vs 50 scenario it's likely that the battle will break up into smaller groups of, say, 10 vs 10. Even if all those smaller groups are in close physical proximity, you only really care about avoiding desyncs with the players you are currently engaged with. When we can't co-locate interacting players on the same server, we'll fudge it with typical networking smoke-and-mirrors. That shouldn't really be any worse than players interacting in a peer-to-per game. Once server meshing is implented I think a lot of the network team's time will be spent on making the networked experience feel as good as possible.