Chris Roberts Back in your wallet - STAR CITIZEN

[Sir T]

No debt? What? I expect they have lots of debt.

I assumed they would have had enough income up to now to run without credit. If they have done the classic move of borrowing lots of money with the expectation of getting all the cash via the marks, then they are in big big trouble and it would add another possible explanation to their panic.

[KallDrexx]

An actual letter from an actual lawyer, though this one directed towards RSI.

[Falconeer]

There's a typo in that letter. I know it's silly, but it always surprises me when I see stuff like that in apprently-so-important documents where every word has been chosen so carefully.

[satael]

That letter seems very concise and it will be interesting to see how Chris Roberts' (lawyer) responds to it and whether he can counter the points in that letter in any meaningful way. 

[Brolan]

This lawyer seems to know his business, maybe it will shut up the Roberts clan somewhat.

[HaemishM]

I fully expect Roberts to fire back in true Smart-ian fashion. 

[WayAbvPar]

I fully expect Roberts to fire back in true Smart-ian fashion. 

Not to be confused with smart fashion.

[jakonovski]

Smars Attacks!

[Lucas]

[Samwise]

An actual letter from an actual lawyer, though this one directed towards RSI.

Had to do a double-take on the address; my mom used to work for a different law firm in the same building.  Wonder if she knows this guy.

[Montague]

This lawyer seems to know his business, maybe it will shut up the Roberts clan somewhat.

Not shutting up the true believers on Reddit. Supposedly because the copy DS put up is unsigned means that it's not real or something like that. These people make the pre-release Warhammer Online fanboys look positively jaded and skeptical.

[Sir T]

Tell them if you open it in Adobe Illustrator you can see the layers, and that means its a forgery. 

[Pennilenko]

Is it me, or did Dmart just lead CR by the nose right into his litigious hands?

[Sir T]

Well, if he was planning that, all he would have to do is think "what would make ME reach for my lawyers and make an ass of myself?" and do exactly that.

[IainC]

Well, if he was planning that, all he would have to do is think "what would make ME reach for my lawyers and make an ass of myself?" and do exactly that.

A Lawyer's Office.

Serek (for it is he): I've got a plan to fuck with Chris Roberts!
Lawyer: Cool, let's hear it.
Serek: We need to goad him into doing something dumb and possibly actionable.
Lawyer: <nods>
Serek: Put yourself in his lawyer's shoes for a moment. Imagine that your client is a thin-skinned moron who likes to wave around pointless legal threats.
Lawyer: That's... a thing I can do...

[Lucas]

A "supercut" of a very cool portion of today's "Around the Verse" weekly show, involving explosions  and the so called "GOST" system, which is basically how the engine simulates damage to interiors when the ship is being hit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10TAH5LVCow&feature=youtu.be

Particles!!!!

[Samprimary]

You have have a bunch of rabid idiots who have already bought the game and would scream blue murder if forced to "pay for it again."

the best option for the game going forward would be to purposefully ignore what would please these rabid idiots.

[Ginaz]

So I take it Roberts didn't initiate legal action against The Escapist yet, contrary to his supposed "deadline" of last Monday?  I thought so.  What a fucking shit pump.

[Khaldun]

They're going to add legal action as a "stretch goal" and sell a virtual spaceship for space lawyering first before they do that.

[Samprimary]

Multicrew with your law firm partners in the Aegis Dynamics Barrator™ only $900 on the flash sale date and $1200 for the version with leather seating

[Samprimary]

unintentionally relevant

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10TAH5LVCow

[Falconeer]

That looks beautiful! Wouldn't it be great if one day someone made a videogame like that?!

[Jeff Kelly]

The letter from SD's lawyer sounds like something an actual lawyer would write.

Signifies the difference between an out-of-house counsel that has actual experience dealing with courts and civil/criminal suits and your in-house general counsel that usually only does contract stuff.

[IainC]

In all honesty, there is no reason they cannot make a game that does 90% of the core features they advertised, as well as some of the more crazy nitty gritty systems, for $90 Million.  I mean, as Falconeer posted above, you can make an engine that does all that core shit for almost no money.  Hell, battlefield 1942 did it forever ago.  Your basically just taking those mechanics and expanding them out to a huge, semi-persistent world.  That last part is the biggest challenge, but totally doable with modern tech.

This whole thing is falling apart specifically because of incompetence and mismanagement.  Nothing they originally promised is really that hard to do, especially with an AAA budget.

This isn't really true. Huge scale is a problem all on its own. Game engines don't scale infinitely, you can't just start by saying, ok, we'll open a map ten billion Unreal Units square and start from there. Bf1942 had big maps and a lot of interoperability but the maps weren't as big as solar systems and the structures didn't range in size from personal vehicles all the way up to capital spaceships. If you want to have big space battles then you build an engine that works well on the macro scale but has very little granularity, if you want FPS action then you get an engine with a high degree of precision but at a cost in performance that won't let you scale it past a certain point. There's a reason for all the design compromises in EVE Online and it's not just due to an ancient codebase.

[Merusk]

The use of "Unreal Units" is an excellent example because it underscores WHY this game can't be made as-sold.

Scale.

They want to offer seamless transitions from a personal to a galaxy-wide scale. So your units of measure are at the personal level. Let's say they "round up" to the nearest Decimeter for their standard unit.

A standard doorway is 9.2dm wide x 20.4dm high (~36") So you're already at 9 units x 20 units for each doorway. No big deal, right? Memory handles that just fine it's small potatoes.

A small ship, an interceptor, is 110 x 100 x 30 units. Ok, still nothing. See, this is working out great. Even the largest ships are only 3720 units long. No big deal!
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/ship-specs

Except now you have to get out at planetary, system and galaxy scales in the same units.

Mercury is one of our smaller planets and closest to the sun. It's 4,880km or 48.8 million dm wide. It sits 57.9km from the sun, that's 579 billion dm. Well shit, that's a lot of resolution there. Even if it's all empty it's a lot of big numbers.

But computers can handle all that. They're great at big numbers.

Except that's also a shitload of polygons to resolve at distances you'll never see them but they need to be tracked. Since it's "seamless" at all scales, the silverware, the glass of whiskey and your airline stewardess all need to be modeled and rendered and tracked across that half-trillion unit scale. For one tiny planet very near the star in one solar system. For one ship.

Yeah. good luck.

[Jeff Kelly]

You don't necessarily need to argue about interplanetary scale distances.

Your engine defines what you can do.

Bethesda used Gamebryo up to and including Skyrim because neither ID Tech nor Unreal could handle Open World RPG type stuff, being wholly optimized for First Person Shooters. Bethesda's games need to keep track of thousands of persitent in game objects. If you pick an object up it's never going to magically respawn, a killed enemy stays dead etc. Compare that to a first person shooter that at most has to keep track of maybe 64 objects at a time. Objects that get unloaded/despawned once you cross a loading point or travel a certain distance.

On the other hand RPGs never quite reach the visual fidelity or low latency gameplay you'd expect from a shooter because it has to spend more of the RAM to actually track persistent in game objects. This goes for all game realted infrastructure as well. The type of database and server architecture that fits perfectly to a Battlefield game are probably quite crap for an MMORPG. Blizzard took the better part of two years - after launch - to get its database and server structure in order and there are quite a few things it still can't do due to the initial assumptions and design decisions Blizzard made over ten years ago.

Or take GTA V as another example. The visuals in that engine look great and it performs competently. The resulting game is a jack of all trades type of deal though. Shooting mechanics aren't as crisp as they'd be on a dedicated 1st or 3rd person shooter. Driving mechanics aren't anywhere near of the type of mechanics you'd get in a Forza game. This is true for almost all of the game mechanics and mini games included in V. A $250 million+ effort. It also makes heavy use of resource management optimizations like how it aggressively despawns and unloads objects as soon as you look in a different direction.

Chris Roberts' claims for Star Citizen have always been a pipe dream from a technical standpoint.

[Jeff Kelly]

It's actually quite interesting how subtly - or not so subtly - developers design content in a way that gives you the illusion of a persistent world even though most things vanish once you reach certain checkpoints. The classic is blocking off acess to prior parts of a level. The ledge you can jump down but not climb back up. The door that closes and locks after you go through etc. Loading triggers that are conceiled by animations or in-game cut scenes. Even using respawn as a game mechanic so that you don't need to keep track of the things the player has already killed. The fact that Elite Dangerous only models the parts of the cockpit you can actually see.

That's also what I like about the switch to new gen, that it's no longer about just cranking up the graphical fidelity but making it so you can do more. There's a reason most last gen shooters had levels where you just had one path from A to B. That#s about the only thing those engines could handle given the graphical fidelity required.

Changes to those parts of the engines interests me more than just having 'more graphics'

[tmp]

If I remember both cases right, they're doing the (logical) thing that EVE is also doing to handle this -- they have the giant-ass space getting (either dynamically or in fixed manner) broken into smaller cells which are then handled like your typical scale game. It's not magic, just not something you see done often because most games don't do giant-ass settings as they have nowhere near the amount of hands needed to populate such thing with content.

Re: being defined by the engine, that hinges mainly on how much work you're willing to put in it, to enhance the basic functionality. Koreans been doing MMOs in Unreal for years while Western gamers were all like "lol, Unreal is only for shooters" (Lineage 2 was early case of that) Similarly see Dragon Age 3 grafted on Frostbite which originally comes with none of BioWare's usual gimmicks.

[Samwise]

Except that's also a shitload of polygons to resolve at distances you'll never see them but they need to be tracked. Since it's "seamless" at all scales, the silverware, the glass of whiskey and your airline stewardess all need to be modeled and rendered and tracked across that half-trillion unit scale. For one tiny planet very near the star in one solar system. For one ship.

Ehhh.  In real life, game engines handle that sort of thing by having "seams" where you can't see them.  Like, once a texture is far enough away from you that you can't literally can't detect the difference due to raster limitations, it shifts to a lower-res version.  Ditto for models.  So there are "seams" where fidelity is reduced, but for all practical purposes it's "seamless" because you can't see it happen.  Like having large seamless game worlds with no load times -- there are still "zones" that are being loaded and unloaded, it's just happening in the background before you get there so you have the illusion of continuity.  That particular sort of thing isn't revolutionary.

[jakonovski]

Seamless exploding corridor tech.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpXKH1ndjBs&feature=youtu.be

[Merusk]

Except that's also a shitload of polygons to resolve at distances you'll never see them but they need to be tracked. Since it's "seamless" at all scales, the silverware, the glass of whiskey and your airline stewardess all need to be modeled and rendered and tracked across that half-trillion unit scale. For one tiny planet very near the star in one solar system. For one ship.

Ehhh.  In real life, game engines handle that sort of thing by having "seams" where you can't see them.  Like, once a texture is far enough away from you that you can't literally can't detect the difference due to raster limitations, it shifts to a lower-res version.  Ditto for models.  So there are "seams" where fidelity is reduced, but for all practical purposes it's "seamless" because you can't see it happen.  Like having large seamless game worlds with no load times -- there are still "zones" that are being loaded and unloaded, it's just happening in the background before you get there so you have the illusion of continuity.  That particular sort of thing isn't revolutionary.

Between similar scales, yes. Solved problem. This is a difference of scales, though. There's some natural transition points but it's not just unloading and loading model assets and textures. It's the scale of the functions also changing on the fly. Your draw distance is what determines where things load/ unload.

Ok so change engines at those transition points:  Space to Solar System; Solar System to Planet ; Planet to Ship; Ship to Room

Unless I've misunderstood something they've sold that you'll be able to affect things on the Room Level from the Space Level. Modeling that a laser or missile that punctures a ship sends cargo/ people floating through space, right?

So how's that working? What's the engine that currently does THAT level of transition and model sharing between engine components? This isn't a solved problem, it's a new one. Modeling what happens at two levels at the same time. "Ship" and "Person/ Room" to decide what happens and what gets blown out, then pushing that to the 3rd level of "space."

All seamlessly without loading screens AND handled by a 2013 PC, since that's when shit started to go off the rails.  If that transition happens at the hull breach or docking port, how do you unload all of the ship as you're sucked out the hatch? What about when one ship rams another or two.. or three. Where does it determine, "Ok time to start modeling the glasses on ship#4 in ship #1, #2, & #3's machines as well." and how does it do that without fucking any of the play experience of all of those ships due to lag.

Now add on, "Oh by the way a 5 person carrier was one of those ships, so it's actually 8 people's machines. Also three fighters launched from the carrier while it was being rammed."

Yeah, these aren't solved problems.

[KallDrexx]

It essentially takes the scaling problem of Even (mini mini ships vs large space stations, vs extremely large ships vs planets and suns) and adds even more to it to go to the individual character level. 

[jakonovski]

They could maybe bodge it just by playing cosmetic effects like in that video.

[tmp]

Ok so change engines at those transition points:  Space to Solar System; Solar System to Planet ; Planet to Ship; Ship to Room

Unless I've misunderstood something they've sold that you'll be able to affect things on the Room Level from the Space Level. Modeling that a laser or missile that punctures a ship sends cargo/ people floating through space, right?

So how's that working? What's the engine that currently does THAT level of transition and model sharing between engine components? This isn't a solved problem, it's a new one. Modeling what happens at two levels at the same time. "Ship" and "Person/ Room" to decide what happens and what gets blown out, then pushing that to the 3rd level of "space."

IIRC they did a video a while ago which shown how they're dealing with this very issue. Should be some pages back in this thread.

"Ship" and "room" are interchangeable -- the "ship" is effectively bunch of rooms with some extra polygons that form the ship's outer skin. Stuff like cargo and crew is handled pretty much like flight simulators have been for years handling weapons, turrets and such attached to your aircraft; they exist as objects in "space" and move either along with their parent vessel or separately. It's not really a new thing.

The only real issue they had to solve was running into precision limits of 32-bit floating point numbers, which are normally used to hold coordinates of everything and run collision calculations and such, and force you to choose between good precision over relatively small area (your typical FPS/3PS level) or mediocre precision over large area (flight simulator)  They handle it through keeping track of object positions in two systems -- the usual 32-bit floats for high precision within small, local area where it matters, and 64-bit floats for rough(er) positioning in the giant-ass overall space. Pretty obvious approach and if there's anything that surprised me about it was they didn't start with implementing it, but only realized it'd be needed gods know how many months down the road.

[Merusk]

"Ship" and "room" are interchangeable -- the "ship" is effectively bunch of rooms with some extra polygons that form the ship's outer skin. Stuff like cargo and crew is handled pretty much like flight simulators have been for years handling weapons, turrets and such attached to your aircraft; they exist as objects in "space" and move either along with their parent vessel or separately. It's not really a new thing.

Ok, so what flight sim are you playing that's modeling the accountant's office in a 3-story skyscraper so that when I bomb him all of his papers go flying out the window and he lands on the sidewalk.

Because that's what we're talking about modeling and I want to see that game in action. It sounds awesome.

All of what you're describing were faked in sim games. Clever illusions. The missiles that fire are just polys that toggle off and on depending on what your status is. There's no physics of actually flying the missile from aircraft to aircraft. No rendering of bullets and modeling the impact. It's all rendering based on mathematical models, hit boxes and/ or probability tables.

Even in Multi-vehicle craft in FPS games you're just along for the ride. You're in viewer mode attached to a camera or a turret on a vehicle that's being piloted by one other person. Your travel is determined by that pilot person and reported back to where you're at and that's complex enough.

It's also not what Roberts is offering up. It's a series of nested rooms that gets crazy complex.