Chris Roberts Back in your wallet - STAR CITIZEN

[Jeff Kelly]

 

The jerking of the ship is probably caused by the physics engine waking up and suddenly deciding that it has to apply physics modelling to the ship.

[Yegolev]

Thread again delivers.  I'm excited to enter this new phase.

[Tmon]

Thread again delivers.  I'm excited to enter this new phase.

Yes, the returns on my $0 investment in this game have far exceeded my expectations.

[Ruvaldt]

Clearly this is just another feature.  Your pilot has Space Parkinson's and you need the services of another player to perform a stem cell research mini-game to cure it.

[Velorath]

Speaking of features, this is the kind of cutting edge technology $107 million allows them to develop:

Hi everyone, a new year starts with new technological challenges. We released 2.0 in December and 2.1 in January, each accompanied by a PTU phase before they went live. Star Citizen nowadays has a size of ~30GB, which means that with the current patch model, the backers have to download a load of data (Especially on the PTU where we want as many people as possible to make the game stable prior to going live). The size is the same internally for us, as even a 1GBit LAN connection cannot transfer 30 GB instantly. Hence we in Frankfurt collaborated with our Austin engineers on how to tackle this problem. We came up with a good solution in which we all believe in and have started to implement. The idea is to design a system which knows your local data, knows what data should be in the build, and then selectively downloads and updates your local data set to match the one of the build. For example, if between two PTU release, zero textures are changed, then no texture will be downloaded, reducing the required download by several GB. We hope to start testing this system soon internally and then extend it to our public releases as well. Unfortunately, as this is part an integration process which often tend to have many small issues which add up to a lot of time, I can only give you Soon™ as an estimate.

[HaemishM]

... the fuck?

Are they really trying to claim that they came up with the idea for incremental patching and checksums all by themselves and that that is somehow an idea they had never considered before this moment? I mean, they must be proud of it if it's important enough that they comment on their web site about adding such a feature to their builds.

I just... gobsmacked. Absolutely gobsmacked.

[MahrinSkel]

I am not going to comment on anything said there. I am merely going to note that we were able to buy equivalent functionality, off the shelf and with a choice of multiple vendors at reasonable (for a *much* smaller budget) rates...in 2000. I haven't followed that particular sub-field lately, I suppose it is possible that there has been a regression or consolidation. Although, I think that Origin rolled their own in 1997, and they had an even smaller budget than ours (but a slightly different technical problem, as they were 2.5D instead of 3D).

--Dave

[Velorath]

Every time they've released an update (and apparently they've been doing it fairly frequently since 2.0 launched), players have been having to download the whole thing each time.

But hey, at least they don't put out updates unless it's for something important! Or not:

A lot of folks have asked why there isn't a public 'future feature list' for upcoming patches. It's because of how the development process for the PU works: for each patch, we have a set of things different team members are working on... so Sean might be working on EVA, and Daniel might be working on the Reliant, BHVR might be working on shopping and so on. But the cutoff is time based rather than feature based... so everything that's working on February Xth will be in 2.2, and everything that needs more work waits for 2.3. It's a system that lets us get more patches out, and spend the most amount of time on getting features right... but it also makes marketing the things a little harder. (The end result is that we know, for sure, what's "in" only a matter of hours before the patches go to the PTU.)

[fang]

Every time they've released an update (and apparently they've been doing it fairly frequently since 2.0 launched), players have been having to download the whole thing each time.

But hey, at least they don't put out updates unless it's for something important! Or not:

A lot of folks have asked why there isn't a public 'future feature list' for upcoming patches.

Amazing.

If they're forcing their customers to download the entire install every time even a single byte changes, then I wonder what they think the word "patch" means?

[HaemishM]

 

We only know what's going in the patch hours before we actually patch.

 

I can't imagine what could possibly go wrong with that strategy.

[Velorath]

Hey, you can't have delays when there aren't any deadlines on when things need to be done.

[ezrast]

I think that's more common than most people realize for software with rapid development cycles, especially games. Compiling patch notes is actually sort of a lot of work that nobody wants to do, and since the game is (a) in prerelease and (b) already utterly bug-ridden it's not like they can break anything important that isn't already in pieces.

The "our international team of expert engineers all put their heads together and reinvented rsync" bit is utterly, utterly though. Holy shitballs.

[apocrypha]

There is no feature creep.

[ezrast]

PART TWO

(still lots of gifs)

There is one more game mode (Arena Commander) that has actual spaceship content with things to shoot, I think. I may or may not get to it before free access ends. There's also a tutorial on taking off, landing, combat, etc, which actually looked like it was reasonably well-done except that I couldn't get through it because it was incredibly stuttery and the whole game would freeze up every few seconds, which never happened in any other mode. Oh well.

[Xuri]

If - while in space outside Port Olisar - you press 'B', aim towards one of the targets that appear in space somewhere around your ship, then hit the middle mouse button (I think), you will use quantum to go really fast, to some other small space stations and/or something, where you can fire weapons at things. Or people.

[HaemishM]

There is no feature creep.

My God, it's full of stars... oh wait, no, that's just some soulless plastic asshole in an over elaborate helmet.

[Sophismata]

Hey, I'm not dead! It's just taking a while to get through because still images really aren't enough to capture the glory that is Star Citizen, and also because the game is really bad.

You're doing God's work, son.

[IainC]

We only know what's going in the patch hours before we actually patch.

 

I can't imagine what could possibly go wrong with that strategy.

This isn't uncommon at all, especially for games that are still in an alpha/early beta state. Basically you have your sprint and then you release a build at the end of it. If you miss any sprint goals (which you do a lot in early development) then those features aren't going to be in the released build. There's going to be a lot of last minute commits and also a high chance that QA doesn't sign off on something that then has to be reverted. You generally only have a final, final list of what's actually in the build right before you start it going.

Obviously, once you are looking at gold release candidates and post-launch updates, it's a different story. If it looks like your feature is going to miss the sprint then your producer is going to suggest that you don't go home this week and put all those 'sleeping' and 'socialising' hours into work instead.

[Jeff Kelly]

Every sprint in an agile development cycle has a set of goals that you're likely to reach. A sprint also includes testing. The whole point of shorter stints is to have less time between a feature push and a test cycle to catch and fix bugs early.

If your development sprint is not running on a design -> develop -> text cycle and you literally don't know the features of the next push right until the end you're doing it wrong.

Early access doesn't mean that you can forego internal testing before you push a beta seed to your backers.

[slog]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Etun8gf4MgU

[Mithas]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Etun8gf4MgU

[HaemishM]

Whether you know what's in the patch at the last minute or not, you still don't TELL people that. It makes you look like complete fucking amateurs.

Oh... right.

[Jeff Kelly]

Seeing these pictures reminds me why Chris Roberts has such a bad reputation with publsihers. 70 million, three years of dev time and the 'vertical cut' he put out is full of glaring issues and it isn't even structured in a way that let's you iterate on design or game mechanics of a single part of a game.

In the time RSI made this aborted fetus of an alpha Frontier developments has managed a public alpha, several public betas, has put out the base game on three systems (Windows MacOS and XBox One), has already released the first expansion and is currently working on more content and a second expansion and they managed to sell E:D to 1.4 million people. All with  far smaller budget and team.

By that rate E:D might end up being more of a Star Citizen than Star Citizen if or when that finally is released.

[tmp]

... the fuck?

Are they really trying to claim that they came up with the idea for incremental patching and checksums all by themselves and that that is somehow an idea they had never considered before this moment? I mean, they must be proud of it if it's important enough that they comment on their web site about adding such a feature to their builds.

I just... gobsmacked. Absolutely gobsmacked.

To be fair it took Steam about this long to implement theirs, too

(though yeah, Valve didn't claim it was a new invention...)

[Draegan]

ED is not even a game. You can't compare them right now imo.

[Hutch]

If ED is not a game, but Star Citizen is a game, then the word has lost all meaning.

[HaemishM]

Star Citizen is a game... a con game. 

[Jeff Kelly]

ED is not even a game. You can't compare them right now imo.

Say what now?

[Pennilenko]

ED is not even a game. You can't compare them right now imo.

I am curious about what I have done for 600 hours, because according to you it could not have been playing a game.

[Falconeer]

I think Draegan just messed up the initials. He wanted to type SC and somehow came up with ED.

[Rendakor]

I certainly hope so. Because otherwise .

[Samprimary]

would you like to play a not game?

[IainC]

would you like to play a not game?

The only way to not win is to play.

[ajax34i]

No, I think he meant what he said. 

ED is a kid actually learning martial arts,
SC is the promise of Chuck Norris in person,

and he's saying "ED isn't even an adult yet, how can you compare with Chuck Norris?"

[Sir T]

ED can puncn you in the bollox. Cardboard cut out of Chuck Norris can't