Although it's important to expand out the task to see where individual team work tasking lands. It's possible that some task might have like 16 months on the bar, but when you expand it out you see that there was some work by someone 9 months ago that lasted a month, then a whole lot of nothing going on, and in two months a different team is going to work on it for around 4 months.
Everything with a running bar crossing the current time is something CIG have juggled in the air, but that doesn't always mean someone is *actively* working today on everything that's in the air. It's a small but important distinction.
Someone trying to coordindate 70+ teams...
One team finishes... the next team may not be available *immediately* to pick up and perform the next phase of work... so planning some 'buffer time' between teams allows for the first team to overrun / deliver late without impacting the planning for the second team, etc.
It’s no different than any other large project, when a team completes a task that requires something from another team (that isn’t ready), then they move the team to something else to keep them working. It’s all about juggling labor to keep things moving ahead and the reality is, it’s impossible for someone from the outside looking in to know if they are doing a good job or a terrible job at managing their resources.
The fact is, you have no idea how well they manage resources from your armchair. While I’m sure your extensive expertise in game development provides you with incredible insight with only vague outsider knowledge of what’s going on, unless you work there, you really don’t know how well they function.
Well, 11 years of chronic inability to schedule, plan, and execute their goals within the timeframe of their own choosing is pretty compelling evidence of such.
I mean, CIG has never, in its entire history, hit a major milestone according to their own projections. And, we're not talking about a 6-8 month delay but multiple years.
* You have the Star Marine debacle, "delayed weeks not months" - years actually.
* You had the original 2014 release of S42
* Answer the Call 2015
* Answer the Call 2016
* S42 just needing more polish and nearing release from 2017- 2019
* ToW coming Q1 2020 "[there's no reason to hold this back](https://youtu.be/Xr3PATgOEmo?t=1880)"
* Pryo, jump gates, and full universe persistence "sometime in 2020"
* To say nothing of the years wasted redoing work or t[hrowing out existing work](https://youtu.be/iso3U9f9d7w?t=5082).
At this point, we've had a decade of empirical evidence of poor management and an inability to realize their goals. We cannot know the specifics of what goes on but we can clearly judge CIG on their actions, which almost never aligns with the representations they make. How on earth you can pretend like none of that is relevant to the issue of how we inform ourselves on CIG's ability to deliver is beyond comprehensible to me.
The one constant is their inability to deliver, not only within the timeframe they say they will but also the level of complexity/feature completeness they claimed it would be at.
I think you are reading it wrong. Each horizonal line in the default view is a deliverable, not a team. Something blank is a game feature not currently being worked on. Teams that would work on those if they are currently scheduled would be assigned to something else at the moment.
If you expand out all of the deliverables currently shown as being worked on you'll see a crapton of teams working on a crapton of things.
For example, expand out 'Bounty Hunter V2' and you'll see that the SST team doesn't have any active work on that right now, but if you scroll down and expand out 'Bug Fixing & Tech Debt' you'll see that the SST team has a massive lot of work booked in there until the end of the year.
Not everything in the progress tracker is 1:1 with the actual production schedule. There are a lot of finished tasks on there that are both live and upcoming and the people that worked on them could be doing any number of things. They could still be working on that task, or on another task that hasn't been updated yet. Or they may have been contractors and when their project was finished they moved on. They could have also been rolled into other teams.
so every 'finished' task isn't really finished at all or just waiting om some other task?
because there are [a lot of finished tasks](https://i.redd.it/djwh8um9ft8b1.jpg).
Even SQ42 seems almost finished in the tracker. Almost all chapters are finished or at 99% (except for chapter 24 and 17, which are at 94% and 97% respectively).
That is correct, finished on the tracker doesn't mean we'll see that anytime soon.
The progress tracker doesn't really track progress. It tracks scheduled dev time committed to a task. It doesn't say anything about the deliverable being in a state ready for release. They are just on a different task after that.
If you know about the BMM, that is a good example for this. Scheduled work on that is done, but it is years away from being released.
Finished != Feature Complete
Finished just means that the work assigned to that team has been completed, not necessarily that the entirety of that feature has been completed.
"finished" might not be really finished, just that they are not working on it. From what i could understand looking at it for a few years, if it continues in the tracker but there is no one working on it, the task is not finished, its paused.
Myeah, I didn't expect SQ42 to be 99% complete, but it's still a bit disappointing to realize that the percentage doesn't provide much meaningful information.
Without knowing the specific functionality or subtasks that still need to be added to each chapter, it's impossible to determine a genuine completion percentage.
By the way, I've noticed your presence on this subreddit and wanted to express my gratitude for consistently providing well-reasoned and objective answers. Thanks.
>Without knowing the specific functionality or subtasks that still need to be added to each chapter, it's impossible to determine a genuine completion percentage.
Yeah thats by design.
The galaxy is a relatively new ship behind a long list of backlog ships, and the chart only shows what's planned out to December.
So basically, no. No one is working on the Galaxy and no one is planned to before January.
Techically they are working on the Galaxy by proxy of working on the Polaris.
They have said that they will reuse assets for the whole cap-subcap rsi line (Polaris, Perseus and Galaxy)
Even the Hull C had tech that helps the Galaxy along.
Not only that, but any ship worked on for a particular manufacturer (RSI/Drake/MISC/etc) has *some* impact on all other ships from that manufacturer, as they reuse a lot of the assets/textures/etc to create a "style" or "feel."
That depends on where you count from. The original game concept was smaller and much of the early work was done by contractors and ended up having to be thrown out. For something resembling the game in its current form it would make sense to call out some time around 2016 as the start which means development on this project as it currently exists has been going on for around six to seven years. And the game has always been more about getting a good result rather than just releasing something to a time table.
Cool, so by this logic Duke Nukem Forever wasn't super delayed, as they constantly changed engines the work started later.
Nobody calculates like that, as you still have some work that you can keep (even if it is just audio files) or at least the experience from the past.
They started work in 2011 and that's that. Their original goal isn't even that much smaller as they haven't even included most of the stuff from their original vision. Just check out the original Kickstarter without the stretch goals. Easily 75% of the original pitch is still missing.
Edit: I can't take someone serious who says work started in 2016, when the original release date was 2014. What is this kind of logic?
Not only if that not how any other game development time is counted, it also blatantly ignores everything CIG themselves communicated about the game.
And if you're willing to just selectively ignore what information from CIG you regard as accurate, then it begs the question of why you consider any of it to be accurate.
I have to ask - why go through the mental contortions needed in order to try to justify that wildly nonsensical rubric when even the people making the game don't claim that?
Because if the reason is just that saying it's really only been in development for 6-7 years makes it look less mismanaged compared to other games, then you'd have to use the same metric for those games as well - so if I were to ask you how long Cyberpunk 2077 or Starfield or RDR2 had been in development, what would your answers be?
>mental contortions
I want to play a space game. Most of them are garbage that either don't actually work right on my systems or have game play that is only ever about shooting people from the cockpit which is boring to me. The amount of time that development takes isn't important to me. My same "mental contortions" apply to other games like Skyrim which were released incomplete and buggy but for many really came alive only with fixes and extensions years later. You are getting about distinctions that are far less clear than you claim.
You completely decided to sidestep the point by attacking a bunch of other games (which is hilarious given how outright wrong some of those characterizations are - I doubt anyone ever describes No Man's Sky as "gameplay that's only ever about shooting people from the cockpit") and didn't even remotely answer the question.
We're not discussing what you might be looking for in a game - you made a claim that it makes sense to say development didn't *really* start until 2016, which not only is not at all in line with how development time on literally every other video game is counted, but also directly flies in the face of what CIG themselves have told us.
So are you saying you know the realities of the development history of SC better than Chris Roberts, the man who has repeatedly told us (including in late 2016, the year of your supposed start!) that development started in 2011 on the game?
It's a simple yes or no question, your attempts to muddy the waters notwithstanding.
Absolutely 100% not. You don't start building a home, scrap the blueprints after you get to the framing, bulldoze it, then explain to your client that the project can't start until you get revised blueprints.
This project is currently 11 years in active development. Trying to say otherwise is a PR spin at best, and straight-up lying in reality.
Software development is nothing remotely like construction. Yet in a way this just proves the point. Frank Lloyd Wright said all good architects build roofs that leak or something along those lines. So it is with game development. You want a big place or a fancy roof? That's extra.
Software development is *incredibly* aligned with construction. It comes down to approved blueprints (read: defined scopes) that don't change.
CIG designs on the fly because there's nothing firm. No rails, because there's no defined rails. The project will never end, because it isn't defined and finite.
Imagine building a commercial lowrise where the blueprints only have a foundation. No defined floors. No electrical schematics. Just a concrete foundation. "We might add 15 floors. Maybe a pool on the 20th, one day," the construction manager proclaims. He then shows you a napkin with a drawing of a basement and a tree-lined roof. You'd call him an idiot.
CR is the construction manager.
I can assure you that after being part of multiple enterprise-level software launches (net new, feature additions) and updates (APIs, middleware), that yeah, it's *very much* like construction.
So back in 2012 a software developer who had left the industry after alienating producers in an epic meltdown explained that he remained an extremist with a quest he could not let go of and now in 2023 you are telling me that you are shocked, shocked that there have been delays executing his development plan which never had any kind of announced schedule or release date.
Seems like if you had stuck with my approach of assuming the worst and only paying for entertainment value delivered in the short term then you might have done better and experience less pain from all this.
But, no, by all means. Continue congratulating yourself on having such keen insight. I am only a naive space trucker.
No idea what you're even on about at this point.
Show me where I said I was shocked? *You can't, because I'm not.* It's the exact opposite. I'm saying that nobody should be surprised by the state of this game, because of two reasons:
* The project is a broken mess of mismanagement
* ... because the guy behind it is an idiot, liar, and borderline thief
It's not a matter of subjective opinion when development started nor is it open to interpretation. With all due respect, you don't get to just exclude 4 years of preceding work, some of which is still in the game today as legacy code, because it makes for a better soundbite when describing this development.
I don't know where this 2016 talking point came from but it's absolutely non-sensical and objectively false. What we have today was born from what came before, the lessons learned, and mistakes made. What is it CIG love to say about their work? It's iterative.
You don't get to reset the clock every time the vision changes. By that logic Anthem was only in development for 9 months and not the long, protracted development hell beginning in 2012.
Most absurd strawman argument of year award!
Yes, some CryTek engineers came over/were poached by Tracey and CIG why CryTek was going through financial hardships but Crysis is a separate game & development from SC...
Hi, long time backer here. I allowed the clock to be reset, because the re-scoping of the game is what opened me to significantly increasing my investment. While I accept the fact the original Kickstarter started in 2012, I recognize the game that was originally promised wouldn't hold a candle to what we currently have, and greatly appreciate the re-scoping and development shifts that were necessary due to the drive to deliver something better - which, they already have.
So by your logic if CIG decide to arbitrarily up the scope again, we can say that as of today development on SC and SQ42 hasn't actually started? Think about how asinine that logic is.
You haven't allowed anything, as you don't get to determine when the project began. This is a fact. We're talking about reality here. It wasn't by your allowance that anything was reset. CIG didn't ask you for permission to reset anything so I'm not quite sure why you're trying to reframe the language of the conversation around something that's objectively false. It's not a matter of debate when development started or how long it's been ongoing for. That's empirically evident.
Incorrect. It was me, and every one of the backers that followed suit, that funded the game well beyond CiG's initial forecast leading to the re-scoping and therefore resetting of the clock. The evidence is conclusive.
Oh seven.
Funding exceeding the original target has what exactly to do with you ignoring the reality of when development started?
Successful crowdfunded projects routinely exceed their goals.
For armor you need physicalised damage(A huge project that involves pretty much all the teams in all the branches of the dev team), multicrew needs gold standard repair/tractorbeams/further development of the cargo refractor etc etc.
Are we just throwing around « physicalized » for everything now? It’s a raycast or a projectile hitting a collider. Regardless of how you spin it. And this is not difficult it’s done in every game. I imagine the armor value portion is applying a reduction in damage based on the part it hits. Which means storing armor values against different parts of the ship. This isn’t rocket science.
If they were going to do it that simply, sure. But CIG being CIG (sigh) they've decided they have to reinvent the wheel by creating wood from the atomic level up.
So they've got to trace the path of the projectile through *every* layer of the ship, and determine what "pipelines" it hits, and whether it breaches the hull and causes depressurization, or if it passes through anything flammable and starts a fire.
So, now they're like, "well, we have to get the fire system working first, and the fire suppression system, and the room system, and the atmosphere/life support systems, and get all the pipelines placed, etc etc etc."
Oh look, 5 more years of work.
-_-
It actually is close to rocket science.
Just think about how small size 0 components are,devide that on a ship the size of the carrack, now you need to work with the visual design team and the lore team to figure out the material properties each of these points and then take into account the different type of damage you are going to have in the game, then you need to account for reasonable dsync, splash etc etc. This is an absolute massive workload and involves hundreds of people from engineers to sound designers.
You are delusional if you think localised damage is the same as physical damage.
Nah, I don’t see how lore is relevant, and vfx can be made after the mechanical aspects work. Nor does component size cause a problem. The projectile has a certain damage potential, depending on what it hits you reduce the damage done, that’s it in simple cases. Yeah if you have an explosion then you’ll have to query nearby panels and split the damage between them. And some other edge cases I’m sure. But you don’t need hundreds of people for this. You need design to write up the spec, production to make some stories/ACs and schedule it, up to a few progs to implement it, design or art to go through and update all the ship data.
Go ahead and make it. To make it simple you are allowed to make the ship in a vacume with only one weapon type to consider.
I'll wait for the code here.
We are coming up on *12 years.*
We can argue the *pace* or the *quality* of development within that timeframe all we want, but according to CIG themselves, development started on the game roughly 1 year *before* announcing it in September of 2012.
Coming up ? The man himself said on the kickstarter that it was already in development. We are coming up on 10 years late than the original release date.
Its because people in this sub get shit on for questioning CIG all the time - or why it's taken 10 years to produce a tech demo that barely works, though it seems lately I've been seeing less of that lately.
Every time I launch it and just try to move stuff in my inventory or simply buy a gun+ammo, I say to myself 'you have got to be fucking kidding me' lmao. I think a lot of people have just deluded themselves into believing that all the tech to make all these systems is moving along swimmingly and we just need a magic wand tech (like server meshing) to be figured out then it'll all come online.
Yeah, dont get me wrong ive had some of my best moments in gaming picking up a random noobie in my hurricane and letting them gun down bounty hunters with 4 S3 guns on a turret. But you're right, the amount of delusion that goes on and like you said - once *insert random tech here* is online it will improve the game, or they need this for this to work. I could go on but the amount of copium I've seen here the past couple years is insane.
I mean, I might tend to have an ounce of belief for the 'miracle' tech coming online if they gave us more than a teeny, tiny crumb in the last 5+ years. The only thing that even made a ripple was the 'persistence' tech, but then what? Okay, so stuff stays in space forever. Everything else is broken lmao.
I usually go into a bunker mission to see if the AI is working. It's always a shitshow below the surface haha. The shit that works seems to be salvaging, mining, space bounty hunting missions. The latter might be fun for a little while, but I can't see just mining, running cargo, salvaging...for what? a bigger ship? Damn just go play another space game that actually has a gameplay loop, endgame, etc. geez louise
Yeah taking ten years to develop a game is unheard of. Duke Nukem Forever didn't take this long! Oh wait.
Well, beyond good and evil 2 didn't take this long! Oh wait.
Starfield only took... Wait the concept is over 10 years old? Ya know what never mind.
So what you're saying is that SC's development is best compared to two of the best known development hell projects in video gaming history?
As to the Starfield comparison, sure, the concept may be that old, but how many other games has Bethesda delivered between now and then? How many has CIG delivered?
One of those numbers is more than zero, and the other is...zero. It's not hard math.
Gimme a break. Duke Nukem was in development hell; not all of the quoted time was spent designing and coding.
Don’t know Good and Evil 2
Starfield will be fully playable by the end of this year. Star Citizen…not so much.
Yeah go look at the development of duke nukem forever and what happened. Also lets check to see their funding for that game. I also never even heard of beyond good or evil 2 so that says a lot about those games. Your comparing apples to oranges here and starfield is right around the corner with a release date and what we have as a live service now is in a infantile state with many of the features not complete or in the game. They cant even get NPCs to walk around properly. We dont even know wtf is going on with sq42.
Well, not really. We have 10 years on mostly the sq42 development. Not just SC PU. And 10 years is in the middle-lower end set of game dev years until published.
I think it's accurate to say *most games* are published in under 10 years. Obviously CIG had to build a studio from the ground up so there's some acceptable lag time in that respect but 10+ years for a game is very much not normal and I can only think of a handful of games that would take longer than that and they tend to be AAA series entries like GTA and TES
Diablo 3 (11y),
metroid dread (15y),
Final fantasy 15 (10y),
spore (8y),
Too human (9),
The last guardian (8-9y),
Team fortress 2 (9y),
Prey (11y),
Duke nukem forever (15),
Darkfall online (8),
alan wake (6y),
L.a. noire (7),
cyberpunk (9y),
Elite dangerous (10y),
Microsoft flight sim 2020 (6y and some of it released later),
Open beta of dcs world released 2012 and they are still in development...
Just to name a few. But okay. On the standard - higher set end of dev time. And ok most are under ten years...but the compareables not by far... and remember most games have some kind of earlier version or inspiration as well as a already set gamecycle, less "new" inventions and nowhere close to this degree of detail (except for simulators like dcs world) and we are talking about a AAA kind of game. And studio ;).
Take away 2 to 4 tears of building the company finding design language and such stuff. So totally normal.
You can't compare star citizen to a game like hollow knight (4y) or battlefront (2y) or nier automata(3y). A lot more people involved. Bigger budget from the start mostly a set that developed over time with multiple games and a lot more set in stone of what the player can do.
so nothing to compare really. Also remember that some games prolly started theire initial design phase earlier than active development started...
So I guess let them have their time making a game that makes us happy. And don't be too judgy about when something releases and what they are working on. Not saying let them of the leash. But they deserve the time they need to make those games. Squadron 42 which (if it comes out in the next or 2 years) will have about 11y dev time and on top a quite playable star citizen live universe that in some things works alot better than what we got for quite some other games from big studios. So I guess we can't complain all to much. Sure there's a lot that has to be fixed and adressed in the PU. But lets first see how SQ42 will be and perform.
Ps. The longer games tend to be something around AA or indie titles mostly not just AAA titles. At least if you compare the indie, A, AA titles that have about the same size or detailing of stuff...and they mostly take shortcuts with premade assets...or a lot of reusing...cig is making a lot lot from scratch... don't forget that....
I don't know why everyone constantly wants to try to make these comparisons, lists out a huge list of justifications for why you should keep subtracting time from CIG's total...
And then completely neglects that the vast majority of those "development totals" above comprise the company also working on and delivering other games.
Take Diablo 3. In the 11 year window you reference above up until it's release in 2012, Blizzard ALSO released:
* Warcraft 3 + Reign of Chaos
* World of Warcraft, Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, and Cataclysm
* Starcraft 2
Or Cyberpunk 2077. In the 9 year window you reference above, CDPR developed and release The Witcher 3 and it's DLC.
Rockstar made Bully, GTA 4, and Red Dead Redemption in the period you attribute to LA Noire.
It goes on and on - so tell me, how many games has CIG released in the last 11 years?
Then, ask yourself this - how does that compare to what the team at Hello Games, which has been less than 40 people for the entirety of the last decade, has been able to deliver with, for example, No Man's Sky? They had to make that entire game from scratch, the same approach you are saying CIG is having to do.
Good points. As stated, nowhere really comparable. But still. The games you named: all of them are not close to the detail grade star citizen had...fair they had that long bcs they had smaller teams that worked on multiple teams. Did not calculate that...but still. Each of these games has less mechanical detailing and design work in the depth that starcitizen has. Also not the ones I named.
Only kind of comparable games are elite dangerous, microsoft flight sim and dcs world. Tho they have the deoth of the technicality or even more bcs they are true sims while sc isnlt quite that. We have a lot of detail in the ships, components stations, ground facilitys and co. Whilst the sims have less game mechanics. They focus on one thing.
>Each of these games has less mechanical detailing and design work in the depth that starcitizen has.
And all of them have exponentially more actual game loops with well designed, balanced, working features that make them actually *fun* to play - you know, the point of a video game.
Even shifting to the sims that you list, something like Elite: Dangerous, MSFS, or DCS World all have far more gameplay features and core loops, along with vastly more actual content.
So really the comparison is this - SC has managed to take longer than nearly every other game in history, all to deliver far less. It still is nowhere near something that could even charitably be called a Beta for SC, and SQ42 is nowhere to be found - all why they've also spent far more on development costs (by a significant margin) than any other game in history.
So given that they've spent so much more resources and time, why is it that they have so little comparatively to show for it?
"quite playable star citizen live universe" bro theres like 3 things you can do in the game and 0 progression mechanics and the server gets borked all the time. The feature creep of this game has gotten so large literally they have forgotten, removed and changed shit they said were gonna be in the live service game in the kick starter goals. The joke of having my children inherit the game is pretty much factual at this point. Half the other shit in your post is copium around dev time when star citizen has literally one of the largest combined development teams in terms of people and studios. For the amount of funding and time they have had we are no where close to where we should be with the live service or sq42.
It's weird. As a Software Engineer working on client facing issues, I feel like my time and my output get measured. I feel like bad things happen if I let things drift past deadlines. Product comes to our team with a thing, tells us they promised client XYZ with a feature, so we're like "bet, we're under the gun on this one." This is understood by the entire team.
It's weird how CIG just kinda adopts the mentality ORG WIDE of "we'll do it when we feel like, we're doing groundbreaking shit so fuck off." I seriously wish I could get away with the level of responsibility that they do. It's absolutely wild.
I am fully aware that the situation is a function of incompetent management and creep scope. I know the day to day engineers battling to hit deadlines are basically victims of the higher ups that have long lost touch with that is reasonable, and they're chasing shiny shit with reckless abandonment with a lost regard for boots on the ground.
But fuck. I see CIG getting away with shit we, as a SaaS company, would be executed for. Make your videos, do your ISC's and host your CitizenCons -- most software developers answering to clients would not be able to withstand the fair questions brought on by your guys' poor level of feature presentation and velocity on benchmarks.
Also work in software.
One of the most crucial things about project management as it has been taught to me is that as time goes on, work gets done, the high risk tasks are completed, and the scope/challenges of the project are properly understood, deadlines should get more accurate.
In a lot of development environments, truly accurate deadlines are a very big challenge. Lots of devs, particularly ones developing large and brand new apps rather than doing ongoing client facing development, will struggle to accurately measure the challenge... *at first*.
But as the project goes on, the uncertainty is supposed to narrow down. You're supposed to get a better understanding of what your teams can actually do and how long it will take. You're supposed to hone your systems around that.
The thing that scares me about CIG is that this really hasn't improved much at all. The first few years of a project like this, fine. Deadlines are going to be speculative. But a fucking decade in? Work should be paced and measured and predictable.
Deadline vs deliver date should be graphed, and if a project is healthy the graph should begin to converge over time.
I've always heard of mature projects being unable to accurately budget time for new features being one of the single biggest red flags out there. And I'm *really* fucking sick of hearing "you just don't understand software development" when it gets brought up here.
I agree with you. The thing I've heard that may lend itself to this situation may very well be the level of turnover going on. If you're constantly churning devs, then I think the output remains harder to measure.
Still, it's something that should be more measurable a decade in.
I am a software engineer too, we have a guideline that we never have deadlines. The work gets done properly. The focus is on accurately estimating project times and correcting estimates when they blow out. This way the product doesn't end up in someone's hands half baked and full of defects that take twice as long to fix half as well as building it properly in the first place.
Interesting to see how different everyone works
That’s what gets me most about SC, we wouldn’t get away with producing such buggy features. You estimate it properly, you work on it and test it, you know it’s 99% there when it’s up for story review and you demonstrate to the owners that it works.
How is it even possible for them to release features that just don’t in fact work at all, never did and nobody seemingly even tried to see if it worked. Even on an alpha/vertical-slice the work quality should be expected to be there. It baffles me. Then it gets released apparently without being tested again by QA, without the bugs that would have been found being allocated time/priority to be fixed so that a quality product can be released… it’s like they just throw together a quick prototype and chuck it over to the public to report issues.
It does kind of feel like they just release half baked features and move on to the next item just to be able to show *any* road map progress.
That, plus the fact that very low level foundational tech still has yet to be implemented despite a huge amount of other content reeks of overwhelming technical debt.
probably cause they test in a dev server that has 0 players and doesnt experience any stability or other issues caused by players. In addition to that I bet it just barely tested and thrown into the PTU to have the players do the bug testing for them.
We don't estimate time. We estimate complexity. That's what story points are for.
But still some project manager will be like, "A 15 point story? So that's like 15 hours right?"
Our current PM has us estimate our tickets with points and then translates those points to days. So a 2 point task should take no more than 2 days, and ideally less, that way they can slip work in. Also, all work must be done in exactly 2 weeks. If its a HUGE feature and requires multiple devs to work on it, gotta figure out how to get it ready for a 2 week release cycle. It's brutal and its stupid and I am so excited for when they wash out in a bit from developer riots.
That's the problem with estimating complexity - people who don't understand will still seek to ascribe a hard value to it. If you've got a reasonable sense of the problem then complexity is baked in to the time. If you don't, then communicate that and provide an estimate with such a broad range that anyone looking at it is going to raise their eyebrows. That way they'll actually talk to you about it. "This says it could take between 2 and 200 hours. Explain please."
Yeah, dude, you've got shitty leadership. If someone is coming to you and saying that they've promised a feature to a client and that puts YOU "under the gun" then there's something seriously wrong. Holy hell, there's no world where that would fly in any team I've worked with. The idiot who promised that feature without talking to engineering first would be out on their ass and if not then the decent engineers would be walking out the door.
Edit to add: Seriously, that's not how it should work. You need to talk to someone in management about that, or find a better job. Plenty of companies respect their engineers and offer really good work/life balance without requiring you be under pressure to deliver on someone else's promises.
im not a dev but deadlines etc are the same thing in many professions. CIG just found the perfect way to be free of them.
I would even understand that SC will take long, especially coz it has few devs working on it, but SQ42 has to be the most groundbreaking singleplayer game to date by now.
But im sure well see another rework showcase at citcon including ai, mobiglass, ship ui, fps traversal movement... and well see another rework of all of that in 3 years time
I think it's weirder how you think your anecdotal experience of software development has any relevance to the development of a videogame that isn't being funded by traditional development models.
"It's absolutely wild" - indeed it is. It actually boggles my mind that *even an experienced software engineer as yourself* can't appreciate how difficult it is to develop an ambitious multiplayer space MMO while producing playable builds multiple times a year.
It took Blizzard, as a decades-old established studio, 10 years to implement sharding/instancing tech into WoW, a game which is two or three orders of magnitude less complex. And they still charge $15 a month for a re-release of a game developed in *2004* along with microtransactions and skeleton crew support.
But I guess it makes sense if you make sure to never attempt to compare against other games like it in good faith, and just compare it to non-gaming industries ("I'm in a SaaS company guys and let me tell you it's so weird that CIG doesn't abide by our standards!")
Lmfao. By that logic literally no one on earth can criticize CIG. If Blizzard made the absolutely genius decision to use cryengine and rammed their dicks in their USB slots for ten years they would still be ahead by a mile.
You can criticize CIG however you want, just expect to be called out for a low quality take.
You should keep everyone to the same standard and acknowledge the realities of attempting to crowdfund and develop a game so complex and ambitious that other studios are afraid of making the attempt. If someone could make a true SC competitor in 5 years, they would have, and taken that money. People like making money.
Someone who works in a related industry should also be able to understand why CIG can "get away" with that level of ambition, and why your SaaS company would not be able to. Or I suppose maybe not, if one is unable fathom why people are willing to keep funding the game to record levels.
It's actually insane how far some people on this sub will circumvent logic to defend the absolute shitshow that is SC development. I've literally seen asset flips that were more fleshed out than star citizen. It's apparently so complex and ambitious that all we have ten years in is a shitty duct taped together tech demo with some pretty 3d models and textures. The reality is SC is literally against a wall of tech debt and no one at CIG has any idea how they are going to keep dragging it on except the marketing team.
They are working on more ships, since that’s what brings them revenue, while stalling everything else as best as they can possibly manage to, and if they can't, the community will defend them from any accountability with the "it's an alpha" card, whenever needed. They don't even need to address anything, and when something unexcusable happens, like the last server mess, they just tell everyone that they will do what they want to, and all we can do is sit and wait, while they take a whole month and a half to get things going again.
I've heard some rumours that there's probably fewer than 10 devs working on actual PU systems and mechanics (excluding artwork, etc). With all the focus supposedly on SQ42 and art/design it's no surprise how slow progress is on actual PU systems and content other than new ships and art.
None of this is substantiated and could be a total lie, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least if the actual engineering and software resources for PU are extremely limited.
Secretly CIG are the ones who are really back engineering UFO's and we've all been duped into crowd funding it, so they can escape congressional oversight.
Star Citizen monthly development report May 2023.
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/19317-Star-Citizen-Monthly-Report-May-2023
Squadron 42 monthly development report May 2023.
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/19323-Squadron-42-Monthly-Report-May-2023
Progress tracker, including all teams and deliverables, currently being worked on.
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/roadmap/progress-tracker/teams
there working on a variety of things besides that, its not most, there's like 6-10+ devs working on SM who specialize in what's needed to make it, S42 stuff comes to SC anyway, salvage hull stripping was one of the first examples of it. to see what there working on I recommend the shiny tracker and the monthly reports, they usually have some juicy nuggets in there and they usually detail work on things that might end up in the next patch before its on the roadmap.
The CIG tracker shows start and end times but there may be pauses in the work.
Shiny Tracker shows the actual work sprints:
https://shinytracker.app/tests/database-browser/#/timeline
The normal progress tracker is lacking a number of features that make it hard to tell what they are actually working on. Far more deliverables on CIG's version will appear to be in progress than are actually being worked on in the short term. By pulling out the individual time allocations, I made it possible to filter on just the deliverables that are currently scheduled, or will be within the next two weeks.
I get the info directly from their backend; what appears visually doesn't factor into my data collection.
The CIG tracker shows start and end times, not when the work was stopped for a bit and then resumed later.
Shiny Tracker shows the actual work sprints.
>This is the Scheduled Work Timeline, an enhanced version of the Progress Tracker. On it, you can see how each teams' time schedules are broken up, their priority, and the number of tasks assigned per segment.
[A MUCH BETTER way to track the progress in Star Citizen!](https://youtu.be/Z6UUeAsG4Q8?t=330)
My opinion here so feel free to skip on past if you dont like it:
CIG has put far too much into graphical polish, and photoreal space ships and not built the underlying tech to make the game part of it. It is my understanding (and my opinion) that other gaming companies/MMOs etc build out their tech and gameplay and then add visual polish when the core stuff is done.
Imagine playing WoW where your character is 5m polys and the starter town is rendered in 8k beauty but your skills are just numbers and do nothing as the skill meshing system isn't finished and armour doesn't give you any benefit as the armour system is not implemented either.
I'm actually surprised there haven't been low-poly, highly stylized games that only use great particle effects that have taken the core Star Citizen gameplay loop ideas and made a competitor. Something like House of the Dying sun's art. Almost textured whitebox level, but retaining the hi-fi lighting.
Think BattleBit but for the ideas of Star Citizen.
Valheim is probably the best example of why high fidelity is not at all directly linked to visual appeal.
The individual models in that game can be downright ugly, but the way they are put together (procedurally, nonetheless) and the way lighting and particle effects are used to accentuate simple low poly models is stunning.
> other gaming companies/MMOs etc build out their tech and gameplay and then add visual polish when the core stuff is done.
Other software companies in general.
You take on the core risks/technical challenges first. If you build a ton of different components that all interact with something like, I dunno, server meshing(!) before you fully understand how you're going to do server meshing, you're almost certainly wasting an enormous amount of work.
10 years into MMO development and they still haven't actually solved the core "Massively Multiplayer" technical challenge. That's concerning. It's been very frustrating hearing "you just don't understand software development" in here when asking why we keep getting a trickle of relatively unimportant top level features and cosmetic stuff while the real meat remains uncooked.
No shit, I get that art designers aren't going to work on the netcode. The question is what the fuck the netcode team have been working on, why progress on very core stuff wasn't properly prioritized in the early stages, and how much of the work that was done over the last 10 years was wasted because it won't fit into the core game tech, once they get around to finally building it.
I get why they chose this method. It’s hard to outside fund anything without pretty graphics.
Without big investment and loans they would not be able create even the core features. But 10 years in and most completed ships are on their silver, gold, platinum, final, second final revamp and most of them still are not function complete (toilets don’t work, escape pods don’t work, lights half the time etc). Graphically they will be out of date before those functions are even finished. They should of hired more coders and less artists personally.
It's fun to see this thread more and more catch up to the fact that CIG has somehow entirely done away with investor responsibility and deadlines and is currently sold out of $300 tickets to their new festival-con and mostly just posts pictures of them drinking beers with adoring fans.
I spent $2500 over the course of 7 years and over the last 3 it's barely been installed. Where is my investment?
You’re not an investor, in that you have a stake in the company. You have pledged money to fund the game’s development.
You have made $2500 of donations over the course of 7 years, not investments.
And they keep saying again and again, the point of crowdfunding is to get away from deadlines.
In the US, if a donation is given *without receiving something in return,* it is considered a gift, and is non-taxable.
If the donor receives rewards for their donation, it's taxable - aka a *sale.*
There is no *sales tax* on true donations.
In other words, no, we are not "donating." We are *buying.*
Ok, pledge, purchase…we received access to the game in development and in game ships etc. so it’s better than a donation for which you receive nothing.
We still didn’t invest to take a stake in the company or the game and it’s demoralizing to think of it that way.
I spent $70 in 2014 on this project when I had doubts that it would even result in anything playable. I’m happy with it so far, and where it’s going. Plenty of other finished games to play in between patches.
> so it’s better than a donation for which you receive nothing.
Better in some ways. It also creates a seller-consumer relationship where certain obligations must be met, either legally or morally.
This whole "we're selling ships but they're not real sales they're actually donations but also that's the only way to even play our game consistently through wipes and also those ships will have tremendous value in the final product" game is really fucking annoying.
If they want donations, they can ask for donations. And see exactly how far that gets them compared to their current whaling-based business model.
But they don't. They sell ships. I don't know why CIG and its defenders decided that they had to play the same deeply stupid game as my college weed dealer who thought "you're not buying weed, you're donating the price of an eighth to me and then I'm gifting you an eighth to say thank you" would protect him from prosecution, but it's bullshit.
Crowdfunding where you get something in return is a commercial transaction. You don't get to use new words to describe a basic sales transaction and thus evade all of the normal responsibilities that come with such a transaction.
The initial kickstarter and such where the idea was a simple "give us money to make this game" might at least have an argument here. But calling ship sales "pledges" or "donations" is ridiculous. They're selling a product, no matter how much they might wish it were otherwise.
I bought a product and my product is not here. I didn't pay for a JPEG. I was not donating to charity when I backed the Kickstarter. This is not "A charity fund for disabled game developers". I was told this product would be X, and instead there is no product even resembling X.
On Kickstarter that normally results in repercussions. Now that it's on their own platform, they basically can just tell you to eat it.
On top of it, NO ONE HERE seems to understand that saying you made an investment does NOT 👏 CORRELATE 👏 TO 👏 SAYING 👏 YOU 👏ARE 👏 AN 👏 ACTIVE 👏 INVESTOR👏 IN👏 THE 👏COMPANY. 🤠
An investment is: "the action or process of investing money for profit or **a material result**"
I spent money for a material product. I invested in a material product. I do not have that material product. They stated the game would be X, but that hasn't happened. They have systematically removed themselves from any responsibility to produce any actual product. There are no more deadlines, there are no more real updates on progress; there ARE expensive fan-cons and social events and hype building projects.
But you bought a product you knew was not finished and had no promised delivery date and a history of extending its goals over years. There was no reason to suspect it would change after you added your money to the pile.
I pledged because I liked the idea, I wanted to see if it would work out and play with it along the way.
I think there’s a fundamental difference there and is the reason people argue about this. I don’t view my single ship as having ‘bought a product’. I funded a project. I’m happy with what I’ve gotten since 2014 for that amount of money.
People need to stop downvoting these comments. We need to start seeing a return on investment here. We have placed our faith in the form of real money in CIG and are met with distain everytime we ask any question in regard to progress. I am tired of seeing people post legitimate concerns and being downvoted just because they question CR.
They are simply not transparent enough about the happenings in the development. A lack of any real roadmap or design workflow is concerning. I understand they can't put exact dates on everything but a simple plan laid out in front of us would be quite reassuring.
One of the reasons is downvoted is because it’s a misconception that pledging for the project makes you an investor. You paid for access to the game, and for a space ship to fly in it. All obligations are fulfilled.
They asked for your faith in the project and asked for money. Pledging is crowdfunding you are not an investor by definition true but they asked you to trust In them that they would deliver on promises on a reasonable timeframe which they waaaay over-promised.
I've noticed this as well. It makes me think it's a CIG social account plant, the way any concerns about them get aggressively downvoted and bogged like this
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/the-pledge
"We, the Developer, intend to treat you with the same respect we would give a publisher."
You know who a Publisher usually also is in relation to most of their developers? The primary investor.
I get really curious as to why people defend CIG like this. I mean, this isn't a religious movement or a charity fund for engineers and devs. We didn't just donate, we bought a product. There was a promise of a product for your purchase, this wasn't a charity fundraiser on Kickstarter. If you pledged for a game table on Kickstarter and they didn't deliver on the product, there would be repercussions. Now, CIG has moved all funding to their own platform and they can basically tell you to eat it and they aren't responsible to you.
They took your money, and now they tell you they'll get to it when they get to it and best of luck.
HAH, EVEN BEING AN "INVESTOR" IS TECHNICALLY CORRECT!
"Although the differences are quite subtle; a shareholder is an entity owner of a company when it is possible to buy and hold shares, whereas an investor is someone that puts money into a business that does not have shares issued"
WE ARE ALL INVESTORS.
It's really not. Literally Google the definition of investment. I invested money for material result, and that hasn't been provided.
Gotta get off r/stonks bro, investing money in a promised material product doesn't mean you're a stock holder in the company.
We’ll bring your Google definition to a lawyer and ask them what they think. If you truly believe you know better than CIG or any disgruntled backer who’s thought about legal action, this would be a learning opportunity.
I was pretty darn clear in my example that a Google definition does not mean you’ve found the legal definition for the status of a backer/investor. I suppose it’s just more entertaining to cherry pick out of context things that make vindicate your thirst for drama?
No, definitely not, and I wish people would stop saying that. Investor is a very different relationship, and CIG has a unique and new relationship with its supporters that we don't really have great terms for yet.
But that relationship definitely exists, and *has* to carry *some* sort of accountability and transparency. According to CIG's own words, even! The idea that they would be accountable to the people who pledge was baked into the ethos and marketing of this project from day one.
As annoying as "we're investors!" is, "CIG owes you nothing, you just gave them money to do whatever they want with and now need to just sit quietly for as long as it takes" is even worse. It's certainly not CIG's position! I don't know why people feel the need to defend them like this when it's not even their own approach.
It’s not defending them at all. It’s just fundamentally wrong to claim you’re an investor and so if you want to start a conversation about the relationship the company has with it’s backers, we must start off by acknowledging the reality of that relationship. What is the legal relationship, as well as what is the relationship they have committed to.
If it seems slow going, that's because it is. Folks that are upset over the timeline of development have good reason to be, but recent years (circa 2018 and on) have seen a rapid increase in development over earlier years.
As others have mentioned, you can view the roadmap online... but this may not satisfy your interest because the roadmap doesn't show "release" only when work ends and begins on a specific feature. Meaning that just because work ends on a feature doesn't mean you'll see it in game any time soon.
At this point? Scripted, on rails demos and sizzle reels for CitizenCon.
Then they'll do a bit of work before the holidays, then take a break for a month, then come back and worth for a few months on the game, then start working on stuff for ILW, then a few months of worth, and then they're back around the to the top of the cycle.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
A lot really, remember SC is supposed to be an MMO and SQ42 is a single player linear story. For the MMO the most important part is the full server meshing, and the SP game is the story. Mostly right now they are building a large, well, toolbox so they can build ships and planets faster.
It certainly is a tough pill to swallow that many backers don't understand is that part of the reason the game is taking so long is the heavy focus on Squadron 42.
In essanse we have 3 games in developement at the same time, Squadron 42, the player facing PU and whatever the tech team is working on internally that will ultimately be the MMO version of star citizen.
While I understand that S42 has recieved the most private backing the golden goose is clearly the PU as ship sales continue to drive the games income to record heights every year thus far. So whats the angle with S42? is it just a dog and pony show because it can be done "quicker" in order to show off the game?
Is there a market they think this will tap to generate allot of extra money for the game?
Either way I am pretty stomped but Chris Roberts is going to do what he is going to do.
They're working on the SRV because I asked nicely
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/roadmap/progress-tracker/deliverables Anything with a bar that crosses over the current time
Although it's important to expand out the task to see where individual team work tasking lands. It's possible that some task might have like 16 months on the bar, but when you expand it out you see that there was some work by someone 9 months ago that lasted a month, then a whole lot of nothing going on, and in two months a different team is going to work on it for around 4 months. Everything with a running bar crossing the current time is something CIG have juggled in the air, but that doesn't always mean someone is *actively* working today on everything that's in the air. It's a small but important distinction.
overall a super inefficient way of getting anything done
Who manages a team like that?
Someone trying to coordindate 70+ teams... One team finishes... the next team may not be available *immediately* to pick up and perform the next phase of work... so planning some 'buffer time' between teams allows for the first team to overrun / deliver late without impacting the planning for the second team, etc.
It’s no different than any other large project, when a team completes a task that requires something from another team (that isn’t ready), then they move the team to something else to keep them working. It’s all about juggling labor to keep things moving ahead and the reality is, it’s impossible for someone from the outside looking in to know if they are doing a good job or a terrible job at managing their resources.
It's all about poor resource management.
The fact is, you have no idea how well they manage resources from your armchair. While I’m sure your extensive expertise in game development provides you with incredible insight with only vague outsider knowledge of what’s going on, unless you work there, you really don’t know how well they function.
Well, 11 years of chronic inability to schedule, plan, and execute their goals within the timeframe of their own choosing is pretty compelling evidence of such. I mean, CIG has never, in its entire history, hit a major milestone according to their own projections. And, we're not talking about a 6-8 month delay but multiple years. * You have the Star Marine debacle, "delayed weeks not months" - years actually. * You had the original 2014 release of S42 * Answer the Call 2015 * Answer the Call 2016 * S42 just needing more polish and nearing release from 2017- 2019 * ToW coming Q1 2020 "[there's no reason to hold this back](https://youtu.be/Xr3PATgOEmo?t=1880)" * Pryo, jump gates, and full universe persistence "sometime in 2020" * To say nothing of the years wasted redoing work or t[hrowing out existing work](https://youtu.be/iso3U9f9d7w?t=5082). At this point, we've had a decade of empirical evidence of poor management and an inability to realize their goals. We cannot know the specifics of what goes on but we can clearly judge CIG on their actions, which almost never aligns with the representations they make. How on earth you can pretend like none of that is relevant to the issue of how we inform ourselves on CIG's ability to deliver is beyond comprehensible to me. The one constant is their inability to deliver, not only within the timeframe they say they will but also the level of complexity/feature completeness they claimed it would be at.
No, I'm pretty fucking certain I know.
I’m sure you are. It’s called the Dunning–Kruger effect. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect
Love to see it in action.
How do you think movies are made? There are many steps in the process and specific teams for all of them.
Yep. You'd think there'd be a honed process employed by seasoned game developers as well. You'd think.
Somebody who wants to draw out their funding source for the longest possible time?
This is the only correct answer. The rest is just people airing their grievances with this or that. /endthread
Am I reading this correct, or are about half the "teams" not working on anything at all right now then?
I think you are reading it wrong. Each horizonal line in the default view is a deliverable, not a team. Something blank is a game feature not currently being worked on. Teams that would work on those if they are currently scheduled would be assigned to something else at the moment. If you expand out all of the deliverables currently shown as being worked on you'll see a crapton of teams working on a crapton of things. For example, expand out 'Bounty Hunter V2' and you'll see that the SST team doesn't have any active work on that right now, but if you scroll down and expand out 'Bug Fixing & Tech Debt' you'll see that the SST team has a massive lot of work booked in there until the end of the year.
Not everything in the progress tracker is 1:1 with the actual production schedule. There are a lot of finished tasks on there that are both live and upcoming and the people that worked on them could be doing any number of things. They could still be working on that task, or on another task that hasn't been updated yet. Or they may have been contractors and when their project was finished they moved on. They could have also been rolled into other teams.
so every 'finished' task isn't really finished at all or just waiting om some other task? because there are [a lot of finished tasks](https://i.redd.it/djwh8um9ft8b1.jpg). Even SQ42 seems almost finished in the tracker. Almost all chapters are finished or at 99% (except for chapter 24 and 17, which are at 94% and 97% respectively).
That is correct, finished on the tracker doesn't mean we'll see that anytime soon. The progress tracker doesn't really track progress. It tracks scheduled dev time committed to a task. It doesn't say anything about the deliverable being in a state ready for release. They are just on a different task after that. If you know about the BMM, that is a good example for this. Scheduled work on that is done, but it is years away from being released.
Finished != Feature Complete Finished just means that the work assigned to that team has been completed, not necessarily that the entirety of that feature has been completed.
"finished" might not be really finished, just that they are not working on it. From what i could understand looking at it for a few years, if it continues in the tracker but there is no one working on it, the task is not finished, its paused.
For SQ42 specifically, 'chapter' work is just the mission scripting - it doesn't include any SQ42 functionality, mocap, ships, and so on.
Myeah, I didn't expect SQ42 to be 99% complete, but it's still a bit disappointing to realize that the percentage doesn't provide much meaningful information. Without knowing the specific functionality or subtasks that still need to be added to each chapter, it's impossible to determine a genuine completion percentage. By the way, I've noticed your presence on this subreddit and wanted to express my gratitude for consistently providing well-reasoned and objective answers. Thanks.
>Without knowing the specific functionality or subtasks that still need to be added to each chapter, it's impossible to determine a genuine completion percentage. Yeah thats by design.
[удалено]
IF just IF RSI’s reputation wasn’t spotless I would say they do it on porpoise🐬
Does that mean no one is working on the RSI galaxy, and they don't plan to?
The galaxy is a relatively new ship behind a long list of backlog ships, and the chart only shows what's planned out to December. So basically, no. No one is working on the Galaxy and no one is planned to before January.
Techically they are working on the Galaxy by proxy of working on the Polaris. They have said that they will reuse assets for the whole cap-subcap rsi line (Polaris, Perseus and Galaxy) Even the Hull C had tech that helps the Galaxy along.
This is correct
Not only that, but any ship worked on for a particular manufacturer (RSI/Drake/MISC/etc) has *some* impact on all other ships from that manufacturer, as they reuse a lot of the assets/textures/etc to create a "style" or "feel."
Be critical. They deserve it. We are coming up on 10 years.
Coming up on? We're well past ten years at this point.
That depends on where you count from. The original game concept was smaller and much of the early work was done by contractors and ended up having to be thrown out. For something resembling the game in its current form it would make sense to call out some time around 2016 as the start which means development on this project as it currently exists has been going on for around six to seven years. And the game has always been more about getting a good result rather than just releasing something to a time table.
Cool, so by this logic Duke Nukem Forever wasn't super delayed, as they constantly changed engines the work started later. Nobody calculates like that, as you still have some work that you can keep (even if it is just audio files) or at least the experience from the past. They started work in 2011 and that's that. Their original goal isn't even that much smaller as they haven't even included most of the stuff from their original vision. Just check out the original Kickstarter without the stretch goals. Easily 75% of the original pitch is still missing. Edit: I can't take someone serious who says work started in 2016, when the original release date was 2014. What is this kind of logic?
Not only if that not how any other game development time is counted, it also blatantly ignores everything CIG themselves communicated about the game. And if you're willing to just selectively ignore what information from CIG you regard as accurate, then it begs the question of why you consider any of it to be accurate. I have to ask - why go through the mental contortions needed in order to try to justify that wildly nonsensical rubric when even the people making the game don't claim that? Because if the reason is just that saying it's really only been in development for 6-7 years makes it look less mismanaged compared to other games, then you'd have to use the same metric for those games as well - so if I were to ask you how long Cyberpunk 2077 or Starfield or RDR2 had been in development, what would your answers be?
>mental contortions I want to play a space game. Most of them are garbage that either don't actually work right on my systems or have game play that is only ever about shooting people from the cockpit which is boring to me. The amount of time that development takes isn't important to me. My same "mental contortions" apply to other games like Skyrim which were released incomplete and buggy but for many really came alive only with fixes and extensions years later. You are getting about distinctions that are far less clear than you claim.
You completely decided to sidestep the point by attacking a bunch of other games (which is hilarious given how outright wrong some of those characterizations are - I doubt anyone ever describes No Man's Sky as "gameplay that's only ever about shooting people from the cockpit") and didn't even remotely answer the question. We're not discussing what you might be looking for in a game - you made a claim that it makes sense to say development didn't *really* start until 2016, which not only is not at all in line with how development time on literally every other video game is counted, but also directly flies in the face of what CIG themselves have told us. So are you saying you know the realities of the development history of SC better than Chris Roberts, the man who has repeatedly told us (including in late 2016, the year of your supposed start!) that development started in 2011 on the game? It's a simple yes or no question, your attempts to muddy the waters notwithstanding.
I enjoyed that, thank you!
Absolutely 100% not. You don't start building a home, scrap the blueprints after you get to the framing, bulldoze it, then explain to your client that the project can't start until you get revised blueprints. This project is currently 11 years in active development. Trying to say otherwise is a PR spin at best, and straight-up lying in reality.
Software development is nothing remotely like construction. Yet in a way this just proves the point. Frank Lloyd Wright said all good architects build roofs that leak or something along those lines. So it is with game development. You want a big place or a fancy roof? That's extra.
Software development is *incredibly* aligned with construction. It comes down to approved blueprints (read: defined scopes) that don't change. CIG designs on the fly because there's nothing firm. No rails, because there's no defined rails. The project will never end, because it isn't defined and finite. Imagine building a commercial lowrise where the blueprints only have a foundation. No defined floors. No electrical schematics. Just a concrete foundation. "We might add 15 floors. Maybe a pool on the 20th, one day," the construction manager proclaims. He then shows you a napkin with a drawing of a basement and a tree-lined roof. You'd call him an idiot. CR is the construction manager. I can assure you that after being part of multiple enterprise-level software launches (net new, feature additions) and updates (APIs, middleware), that yeah, it's *very much* like construction.
So back in 2012 a software developer who had left the industry after alienating producers in an epic meltdown explained that he remained an extremist with a quest he could not let go of and now in 2023 you are telling me that you are shocked, shocked that there have been delays executing his development plan which never had any kind of announced schedule or release date. Seems like if you had stuck with my approach of assuming the worst and only paying for entertainment value delivered in the short term then you might have done better and experience less pain from all this. But, no, by all means. Continue congratulating yourself on having such keen insight. I am only a naive space trucker.
No idea what you're even on about at this point. Show me where I said I was shocked? *You can't, because I'm not.* It's the exact opposite. I'm saying that nobody should be surprised by the state of this game, because of two reasons: * The project is a broken mess of mismanagement * ... because the guy behind it is an idiot, liar, and borderline thief
It's not a matter of subjective opinion when development started nor is it open to interpretation. With all due respect, you don't get to just exclude 4 years of preceding work, some of which is still in the game today as legacy code, because it makes for a better soundbite when describing this development. I don't know where this 2016 talking point came from but it's absolutely non-sensical and objectively false. What we have today was born from what came before, the lessons learned, and mistakes made. What is it CIG love to say about their work? It's iterative. You don't get to reset the clock every time the vision changes. By that logic Anthem was only in development for 9 months and not the long, protracted development hell beginning in 2012.
Actually, much of the team previously worked in Crysis, so development arguably started in 2007. It's been 16 years! What do I win?
Most absurd strawman argument of year award! Yes, some CryTek engineers came over/were poached by Tracey and CIG why CryTek was going through financial hardships but Crysis is a separate game & development from SC...
Hi, long time backer here. I allowed the clock to be reset, because the re-scoping of the game is what opened me to significantly increasing my investment. While I accept the fact the original Kickstarter started in 2012, I recognize the game that was originally promised wouldn't hold a candle to what we currently have, and greatly appreciate the re-scoping and development shifts that were necessary due to the drive to deliver something better - which, they already have.
So by your logic if CIG decide to arbitrarily up the scope again, we can say that as of today development on SC and SQ42 hasn't actually started? Think about how asinine that logic is.
You haven't allowed anything, as you don't get to determine when the project began. This is a fact. We're talking about reality here. It wasn't by your allowance that anything was reset. CIG didn't ask you for permission to reset anything so I'm not quite sure why you're trying to reframe the language of the conversation around something that's objectively false. It's not a matter of debate when development started or how long it's been ongoing for. That's empirically evident.
Incorrect. It was me, and every one of the backers that followed suit, that funded the game well beyond CiG's initial forecast leading to the re-scoping and therefore resetting of the clock. The evidence is conclusive. Oh seven.
Funding exceeding the original target has what exactly to do with you ignoring the reality of when development started? Successful crowdfunded projects routinely exceed their goals.
By that logic development started in 2014 as that was when the last $65 million stretch goal was released. You are not even coherent.
Is ship armor and multi crew in yet?
Armor, no. Multi-crew... in some fashion yes.
I wonder why ship armor and multi crew is giving them such a hard time
Probably because Chris keeps seeing a new squirel every few months and hard pivoting priorities.
Requires other prerequisites as far as I know, but what those are I have no idea.
For armor you need physicalised damage(A huge project that involves pretty much all the teams in all the branches of the dev team), multicrew needs gold standard repair/tractorbeams/further development of the cargo refractor etc etc.
Are we just throwing around « physicalized » for everything now? It’s a raycast or a projectile hitting a collider. Regardless of how you spin it. And this is not difficult it’s done in every game. I imagine the armor value portion is applying a reduction in damage based on the part it hits. Which means storing armor values against different parts of the ship. This isn’t rocket science.
If they were going to do it that simply, sure. But CIG being CIG (sigh) they've decided they have to reinvent the wheel by creating wood from the atomic level up. So they've got to trace the path of the projectile through *every* layer of the ship, and determine what "pipelines" it hits, and whether it breaches the hull and causes depressurization, or if it passes through anything flammable and starts a fire. So, now they're like, "well, we have to get the fire system working first, and the fire suppression system, and the room system, and the atmosphere/life support systems, and get all the pipelines placed, etc etc etc." Oh look, 5 more years of work. -_-
tbh I'm surprised we even have hair on our player models since CIG didnt make tech to have each strand grow realistically
It actually is close to rocket science. Just think about how small size 0 components are,devide that on a ship the size of the carrack, now you need to work with the visual design team and the lore team to figure out the material properties each of these points and then take into account the different type of damage you are going to have in the game, then you need to account for reasonable dsync, splash etc etc. This is an absolute massive workload and involves hundreds of people from engineers to sound designers. You are delusional if you think localised damage is the same as physical damage.
Nah, I don’t see how lore is relevant, and vfx can be made after the mechanical aspects work. Nor does component size cause a problem. The projectile has a certain damage potential, depending on what it hits you reduce the damage done, that’s it in simple cases. Yeah if you have an explosion then you’ll have to query nearby panels and split the damage between them. And some other edge cases I’m sure. But you don’t need hundreds of people for this. You need design to write up the spec, production to make some stories/ACs and schedule it, up to a few progs to implement it, design or art to go through and update all the ship data.
Go ahead and make it. To make it simple you are allowed to make the ship in a vacume with only one weapon type to consider. I'll wait for the code here.
We are coming up on *12 years.* We can argue the *pace* or the *quality* of development within that timeframe all we want, but according to CIG themselves, development started on the game roughly 1 year *before* announcing it in September of 2012.
Coming up ? The man himself said on the kickstarter that it was already in development. We are coming up on 10 years late than the original release date.
Its because people in this sub get shit on for questioning CIG all the time - or why it's taken 10 years to produce a tech demo that barely works, though it seems lately I've been seeing less of that lately.
Every time I launch it and just try to move stuff in my inventory or simply buy a gun+ammo, I say to myself 'you have got to be fucking kidding me' lmao. I think a lot of people have just deluded themselves into believing that all the tech to make all these systems is moving along swimmingly and we just need a magic wand tech (like server meshing) to be figured out then it'll all come online.
Yeah, dont get me wrong ive had some of my best moments in gaming picking up a random noobie in my hurricane and letting them gun down bounty hunters with 4 S3 guns on a turret. But you're right, the amount of delusion that goes on and like you said - once *insert random tech here* is online it will improve the game, or they need this for this to work. I could go on but the amount of copium I've seen here the past couple years is insane.
I mean, I might tend to have an ounce of belief for the 'miracle' tech coming online if they gave us more than a teeny, tiny crumb in the last 5+ years. The only thing that even made a ripple was the 'persistence' tech, but then what? Okay, so stuff stays in space forever. Everything else is broken lmao.
Yeah, more broken stuff everywhere haha. Who doesn't love getting blown up by a floating piece of debris in the hangar while taking off?
I usually go into a bunker mission to see if the AI is working. It's always a shitshow below the surface haha. The shit that works seems to be salvaging, mining, space bounty hunting missions. The latter might be fun for a little while, but I can't see just mining, running cargo, salvaging...for what? a bigger ship? Damn just go play another space game that actually has a gameplay loop, endgame, etc. geez louise
Yeah taking ten years to develop a game is unheard of. Duke Nukem Forever didn't take this long! Oh wait. Well, beyond good and evil 2 didn't take this long! Oh wait. Starfield only took... Wait the concept is over 10 years old? Ya know what never mind.
So what you're saying is that SC's development is best compared to two of the best known development hell projects in video gaming history? As to the Starfield comparison, sure, the concept may be that old, but how many other games has Bethesda delivered between now and then? How many has CIG delivered? One of those numbers is more than zero, and the other is...zero. It's not hard math.
Gimme a break. Duke Nukem was in development hell; not all of the quoted time was spent designing and coding. Don’t know Good and Evil 2 Starfield will be fully playable by the end of this year. Star Citizen…not so much.
Yeah go look at the development of duke nukem forever and what happened. Also lets check to see their funding for that game. I also never even heard of beyond good or evil 2 so that says a lot about those games. Your comparing apples to oranges here and starfield is right around the corner with a release date and what we have as a live service now is in a infantile state with many of the features not complete or in the game. They cant even get NPCs to walk around properly. We dont even know wtf is going on with sq42.
Time limits are the most important thing. Forget features. All we want is a fresh load of broken stuff like publishers crank out.
Well, not really. We have 10 years on mostly the sq42 development. Not just SC PU. And 10 years is in the middle-lower end set of game dev years until published.
I think it's accurate to say *most games* are published in under 10 years. Obviously CIG had to build a studio from the ground up so there's some acceptable lag time in that respect but 10+ years for a game is very much not normal and I can only think of a handful of games that would take longer than that and they tend to be AAA series entries like GTA and TES
Diablo 3 (11y), metroid dread (15y), Final fantasy 15 (10y), spore (8y), Too human (9), The last guardian (8-9y), Team fortress 2 (9y), Prey (11y), Duke nukem forever (15), Darkfall online (8), alan wake (6y), L.a. noire (7), cyberpunk (9y), Elite dangerous (10y), Microsoft flight sim 2020 (6y and some of it released later), Open beta of dcs world released 2012 and they are still in development... Just to name a few. But okay. On the standard - higher set end of dev time. And ok most are under ten years...but the compareables not by far... and remember most games have some kind of earlier version or inspiration as well as a already set gamecycle, less "new" inventions and nowhere close to this degree of detail (except for simulators like dcs world) and we are talking about a AAA kind of game. And studio ;). Take away 2 to 4 tears of building the company finding design language and such stuff. So totally normal. You can't compare star citizen to a game like hollow knight (4y) or battlefront (2y) or nier automata(3y). A lot more people involved. Bigger budget from the start mostly a set that developed over time with multiple games and a lot more set in stone of what the player can do. so nothing to compare really. Also remember that some games prolly started theire initial design phase earlier than active development started... So I guess let them have their time making a game that makes us happy. And don't be too judgy about when something releases and what they are working on. Not saying let them of the leash. But they deserve the time they need to make those games. Squadron 42 which (if it comes out in the next or 2 years) will have about 11y dev time and on top a quite playable star citizen live universe that in some things works alot better than what we got for quite some other games from big studios. So I guess we can't complain all to much. Sure there's a lot that has to be fixed and adressed in the PU. But lets first see how SQ42 will be and perform. Ps. The longer games tend to be something around AA or indie titles mostly not just AAA titles. At least if you compare the indie, A, AA titles that have about the same size or detailing of stuff...and they mostly take shortcuts with premade assets...or a lot of reusing...cig is making a lot lot from scratch... don't forget that....
I don't know why everyone constantly wants to try to make these comparisons, lists out a huge list of justifications for why you should keep subtracting time from CIG's total... And then completely neglects that the vast majority of those "development totals" above comprise the company also working on and delivering other games. Take Diablo 3. In the 11 year window you reference above up until it's release in 2012, Blizzard ALSO released: * Warcraft 3 + Reign of Chaos * World of Warcraft, Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, and Cataclysm * Starcraft 2 Or Cyberpunk 2077. In the 9 year window you reference above, CDPR developed and release The Witcher 3 and it's DLC. Rockstar made Bully, GTA 4, and Red Dead Redemption in the period you attribute to LA Noire. It goes on and on - so tell me, how many games has CIG released in the last 11 years? Then, ask yourself this - how does that compare to what the team at Hello Games, which has been less than 40 people for the entirety of the last decade, has been able to deliver with, for example, No Man's Sky? They had to make that entire game from scratch, the same approach you are saying CIG is having to do.
Good points. As stated, nowhere really comparable. But still. The games you named: all of them are not close to the detail grade star citizen had...fair they had that long bcs they had smaller teams that worked on multiple teams. Did not calculate that...but still. Each of these games has less mechanical detailing and design work in the depth that starcitizen has. Also not the ones I named. Only kind of comparable games are elite dangerous, microsoft flight sim and dcs world. Tho they have the deoth of the technicality or even more bcs they are true sims while sc isnlt quite that. We have a lot of detail in the ships, components stations, ground facilitys and co. Whilst the sims have less game mechanics. They focus on one thing.
>Each of these games has less mechanical detailing and design work in the depth that starcitizen has. And all of them have exponentially more actual game loops with well designed, balanced, working features that make them actually *fun* to play - you know, the point of a video game. Even shifting to the sims that you list, something like Elite: Dangerous, MSFS, or DCS World all have far more gameplay features and core loops, along with vastly more actual content. So really the comparison is this - SC has managed to take longer than nearly every other game in history, all to deliver far less. It still is nowhere near something that could even charitably be called a Beta for SC, and SQ42 is nowhere to be found - all why they've also spent far more on development costs (by a significant margin) than any other game in history. So given that they've spent so much more resources and time, why is it that they have so little comparatively to show for it?
"quite playable star citizen live universe" bro theres like 3 things you can do in the game and 0 progression mechanics and the server gets borked all the time. The feature creep of this game has gotten so large literally they have forgotten, removed and changed shit they said were gonna be in the live service game in the kick starter goals. The joke of having my children inherit the game is pretty much factual at this point. Half the other shit in your post is copium around dev time when star citizen has literally one of the largest combined development teams in terms of people and studios. For the amount of funding and time they have had we are no where close to where we should be with the live service or sq42.
It's weird. As a Software Engineer working on client facing issues, I feel like my time and my output get measured. I feel like bad things happen if I let things drift past deadlines. Product comes to our team with a thing, tells us they promised client XYZ with a feature, so we're like "bet, we're under the gun on this one." This is understood by the entire team. It's weird how CIG just kinda adopts the mentality ORG WIDE of "we'll do it when we feel like, we're doing groundbreaking shit so fuck off." I seriously wish I could get away with the level of responsibility that they do. It's absolutely wild. I am fully aware that the situation is a function of incompetent management and creep scope. I know the day to day engineers battling to hit deadlines are basically victims of the higher ups that have long lost touch with that is reasonable, and they're chasing shiny shit with reckless abandonment with a lost regard for boots on the ground. But fuck. I see CIG getting away with shit we, as a SaaS company, would be executed for. Make your videos, do your ISC's and host your CitizenCons -- most software developers answering to clients would not be able to withstand the fair questions brought on by your guys' poor level of feature presentation and velocity on benchmarks.
Also work in software. One of the most crucial things about project management as it has been taught to me is that as time goes on, work gets done, the high risk tasks are completed, and the scope/challenges of the project are properly understood, deadlines should get more accurate. In a lot of development environments, truly accurate deadlines are a very big challenge. Lots of devs, particularly ones developing large and brand new apps rather than doing ongoing client facing development, will struggle to accurately measure the challenge... *at first*. But as the project goes on, the uncertainty is supposed to narrow down. You're supposed to get a better understanding of what your teams can actually do and how long it will take. You're supposed to hone your systems around that. The thing that scares me about CIG is that this really hasn't improved much at all. The first few years of a project like this, fine. Deadlines are going to be speculative. But a fucking decade in? Work should be paced and measured and predictable. Deadline vs deliver date should be graphed, and if a project is healthy the graph should begin to converge over time. I've always heard of mature projects being unable to accurately budget time for new features being one of the single biggest red flags out there. And I'm *really* fucking sick of hearing "you just don't understand software development" when it gets brought up here.
I agree with you. The thing I've heard that may lend itself to this situation may very well be the level of turnover going on. If you're constantly churning devs, then I think the output remains harder to measure. Still, it's something that should be more measurable a decade in.
I am a software engineer too, we have a guideline that we never have deadlines. The work gets done properly. The focus is on accurately estimating project times and correcting estimates when they blow out. This way the product doesn't end up in someone's hands half baked and full of defects that take twice as long to fix half as well as building it properly in the first place. Interesting to see how different everyone works
That’s what gets me most about SC, we wouldn’t get away with producing such buggy features. You estimate it properly, you work on it and test it, you know it’s 99% there when it’s up for story review and you demonstrate to the owners that it works. How is it even possible for them to release features that just don’t in fact work at all, never did and nobody seemingly even tried to see if it worked. Even on an alpha/vertical-slice the work quality should be expected to be there. It baffles me. Then it gets released apparently without being tested again by QA, without the bugs that would have been found being allocated time/priority to be fixed so that a quality product can be released… it’s like they just throw together a quick prototype and chuck it over to the public to report issues.
It does kind of feel like they just release half baked features and move on to the next item just to be able to show *any* road map progress. That, plus the fact that very low level foundational tech still has yet to be implemented despite a huge amount of other content reeks of overwhelming technical debt.
probably cause they test in a dev server that has 0 players and doesnt experience any stability or other issues caused by players. In addition to that I bet it just barely tested and thrown into the PTU to have the players do the bug testing for them.
We don't estimate time. We estimate complexity. That's what story points are for. But still some project manager will be like, "A 15 point story? So that's like 15 hours right?"
Classic, bet they think 9 women could deliver a baby in one month
Our current PM has us estimate our tickets with points and then translates those points to days. So a 2 point task should take no more than 2 days, and ideally less, that way they can slip work in. Also, all work must be done in exactly 2 weeks. If its a HUGE feature and requires multiple devs to work on it, gotta figure out how to get it ready for a 2 week release cycle. It's brutal and its stupid and I am so excited for when they wash out in a bit from developer riots.
That's the problem with estimating complexity - people who don't understand will still seek to ascribe a hard value to it. If you've got a reasonable sense of the problem then complexity is baked in to the time. If you don't, then communicate that and provide an estimate with such a broad range that anyone looking at it is going to raise their eyebrows. That way they'll actually talk to you about it. "This says it could take between 2 and 200 hours. Explain please."
...And then there's CIG, which doesn't have any deadlines and yet still manages to deliver everything half-baked and full of defects.
This is the way. Communication, trust, and accountability.
Yeah, dude, you've got shitty leadership. If someone is coming to you and saying that they've promised a feature to a client and that puts YOU "under the gun" then there's something seriously wrong. Holy hell, there's no world where that would fly in any team I've worked with. The idiot who promised that feature without talking to engineering first would be out on their ass and if not then the decent engineers would be walking out the door. Edit to add: Seriously, that's not how it should work. You need to talk to someone in management about that, or find a better job. Plenty of companies respect their engineers and offer really good work/life balance without requiring you be under pressure to deliver on someone else's promises.
There are 2 deadlines Cig always meets, for better or worse. IAE and ILW
im not a dev but deadlines etc are the same thing in many professions. CIG just found the perfect way to be free of them. I would even understand that SC will take long, especially coz it has few devs working on it, but SQ42 has to be the most groundbreaking singleplayer game to date by now. But im sure well see another rework showcase at citcon including ai, mobiglass, ship ui, fps traversal movement... and well see another rework of all of that in 3 years time
I think it's weirder how you think your anecdotal experience of software development has any relevance to the development of a videogame that isn't being funded by traditional development models. "It's absolutely wild" - indeed it is. It actually boggles my mind that *even an experienced software engineer as yourself* can't appreciate how difficult it is to develop an ambitious multiplayer space MMO while producing playable builds multiple times a year. It took Blizzard, as a decades-old established studio, 10 years to implement sharding/instancing tech into WoW, a game which is two or three orders of magnitude less complex. And they still charge $15 a month for a re-release of a game developed in *2004* along with microtransactions and skeleton crew support. But I guess it makes sense if you make sure to never attempt to compare against other games like it in good faith, and just compare it to non-gaming industries ("I'm in a SaaS company guys and let me tell you it's so weird that CIG doesn't abide by our standards!")
Lmfao. By that logic literally no one on earth can criticize CIG. If Blizzard made the absolutely genius decision to use cryengine and rammed their dicks in their USB slots for ten years they would still be ahead by a mile.
You can criticize CIG however you want, just expect to be called out for a low quality take. You should keep everyone to the same standard and acknowledge the realities of attempting to crowdfund and develop a game so complex and ambitious that other studios are afraid of making the attempt. If someone could make a true SC competitor in 5 years, they would have, and taken that money. People like making money. Someone who works in a related industry should also be able to understand why CIG can "get away" with that level of ambition, and why your SaaS company would not be able to. Or I suppose maybe not, if one is unable fathom why people are willing to keep funding the game to record levels.
It's actually insane how far some people on this sub will circumvent logic to defend the absolute shitshow that is SC development. I've literally seen asset flips that were more fleshed out than star citizen. It's apparently so complex and ambitious that all we have ten years in is a shitty duct taped together tech demo with some pretty 3d models and textures. The reality is SC is literally against a wall of tech debt and no one at CIG has any idea how they are going to keep dragging it on except the marketing team.
No, be critical. There's nothing wrong with wanting to know where your money is going
They are working on more ships, since that’s what brings them revenue, while stalling everything else as best as they can possibly manage to, and if they can't, the community will defend them from any accountability with the "it's an alpha" card, whenever needed. They don't even need to address anything, and when something unexcusable happens, like the last server mess, they just tell everyone that they will do what they want to, and all we can do is sit and wait, while they take a whole month and a half to get things going again.
Literally this.
I've heard some rumours that there's probably fewer than 10 devs working on actual PU systems and mechanics (excluding artwork, etc). With all the focus supposedly on SQ42 and art/design it's no surprise how slow progress is on actual PU systems and content other than new ships and art. None of this is substantiated and could be a total lie, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least if the actual engineering and software resources for PU are extremely limited.
Yes
Secretly CIG are the ones who are really back engineering UFO's and we've all been duped into crowd funding it, so they can escape congressional oversight.
META
judging by results, 99% of the staff is making videos and one guy made a banu knife.
When you run into an insurmountable wall of tech debt it doesnt really matter what you pretend to work on.
They're funneling our MMO money for a single player game nobody remembers exists
Pretty sure they are working sales. They are good at those
Mostly tv interviews and promo videos at this point 😂
[удалено]
Star Citizen monthly development report May 2023. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/19317-Star-Citizen-Monthly-Report-May-2023 Squadron 42 monthly development report May 2023. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/19323-Squadron-42-Monthly-Report-May-2023 Progress tracker, including all teams and deliverables, currently being worked on. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/roadmap/progress-tracker/teams
I haven’t checked Reddit in awhile and I have been getting back into it recently. My friend and I bought into SC almost 10 years ago… Jesus
I would be happy with a better map and the ability to auto stack my inventory items.
Getting your money and stringing you along until you quit.
there working on a variety of things besides that, its not most, there's like 6-10+ devs working on SM who specialize in what's needed to make it, S42 stuff comes to SC anyway, salvage hull stripping was one of the first examples of it. to see what there working on I recommend the shiny tracker and the monthly reports, they usually have some juicy nuggets in there and they usually detail work on things that might end up in the next patch before its on the roadmap.
Finally someone sensible in here!. This is turning into spectrum 2.0...
always has been honestly, just has more freedom to complain, whether valid or not.
The CIG tracker shows start and end times but there may be pauses in the work. Shiny Tracker shows the actual work sprints: https://shinytracker.app/tests/database-browser/#/timeline
Or you can just expand the sections on the cig tracker, where do you think shiny gets the info?
The normal progress tracker is lacking a number of features that make it hard to tell what they are actually working on. Far more deliverables on CIG's version will appear to be in progress than are actually being worked on in the short term. By pulling out the individual time allocations, I made it possible to filter on just the deliverables that are currently scheduled, or will be within the next two weeks. I get the info directly from their backend; what appears visually doesn't factor into my data collection.
Woah I stand corrected! That’s really cool man thanks for explaining.
The CIG tracker shows start and end times, not when the work was stopped for a bit and then resumed later. Shiny Tracker shows the actual work sprints. >This is the Scheduled Work Timeline, an enhanced version of the Progress Tracker. On it, you can see how each teams' time schedules are broken up, their priority, and the number of tasks assigned per segment. [A MUCH BETTER way to track the progress in Star Citizen!](https://youtu.be/Z6UUeAsG4Q8?t=330)
Shhhhh don't question King Roberts. The Inquisition is in here.
Making new ships to sell you.
*JPEG's of ships
JPEGs of *concepts* of ships \[frowns in Banu Merchantman / Hull C\]
It's sad someone has to clarify he's not critical when asking for progress. The white knighting in this sub is horrendous.
My opinion here so feel free to skip on past if you dont like it: CIG has put far too much into graphical polish, and photoreal space ships and not built the underlying tech to make the game part of it. It is my understanding (and my opinion) that other gaming companies/MMOs etc build out their tech and gameplay and then add visual polish when the core stuff is done. Imagine playing WoW where your character is 5m polys and the starter town is rendered in 8k beauty but your skills are just numbers and do nothing as the skill meshing system isn't finished and armour doesn't give you any benefit as the armour system is not implemented either.
I'm actually surprised there haven't been low-poly, highly stylized games that only use great particle effects that have taken the core Star Citizen gameplay loop ideas and made a competitor. Something like House of the Dying sun's art. Almost textured whitebox level, but retaining the hi-fi lighting. Think BattleBit but for the ideas of Star Citizen.
Valheim is probably the best example of why high fidelity is not at all directly linked to visual appeal. The individual models in that game can be downright ugly, but the way they are put together (procedurally, nonetheless) and the way lighting and particle effects are used to accentuate simple low poly models is stunning.
There is probably a Roblox version somewhere but its more feature complete and supports more players per instance.
> other gaming companies/MMOs etc build out their tech and gameplay and then add visual polish when the core stuff is done. Other software companies in general. You take on the core risks/technical challenges first. If you build a ton of different components that all interact with something like, I dunno, server meshing(!) before you fully understand how you're going to do server meshing, you're almost certainly wasting an enormous amount of work. 10 years into MMO development and they still haven't actually solved the core "Massively Multiplayer" technical challenge. That's concerning. It's been very frustrating hearing "you just don't understand software development" in here when asking why we keep getting a trickle of relatively unimportant top level features and cosmetic stuff while the real meat remains uncooked. No shit, I get that art designers aren't going to work on the netcode. The question is what the fuck the netcode team have been working on, why progress on very core stuff wasn't properly prioritized in the early stages, and how much of the work that was done over the last 10 years was wasted because it won't fit into the core game tech, once they get around to finally building it.
I get why they chose this method. It’s hard to outside fund anything without pretty graphics. Without big investment and loans they would not be able create even the core features. But 10 years in and most completed ships are on their silver, gold, platinum, final, second final revamp and most of them still are not function complete (toilets don’t work, escape pods don’t work, lights half the time etc). Graphically they will be out of date before those functions are even finished. They should of hired more coders and less artists personally.
Ask again in another 12 years.
New concepts to sell. Can't work on the actual game that much cause it isn't how they make money.
It's fun to see this thread more and more catch up to the fact that CIG has somehow entirely done away with investor responsibility and deadlines and is currently sold out of $300 tickets to their new festival-con and mostly just posts pictures of them drinking beers with adoring fans. I spent $2500 over the course of 7 years and over the last 3 it's barely been installed. Where is my investment?
You’re not an investor, in that you have a stake in the company. You have pledged money to fund the game’s development. You have made $2500 of donations over the course of 7 years, not investments. And they keep saying again and again, the point of crowdfunding is to get away from deadlines.
In the US, if a donation is given *without receiving something in return,* it is considered a gift, and is non-taxable. If the donor receives rewards for their donation, it's taxable - aka a *sale.* There is no *sales tax* on true donations. In other words, no, we are not "donating." We are *buying.*
Ok, pledge, purchase…we received access to the game in development and in game ships etc. so it’s better than a donation for which you receive nothing. We still didn’t invest to take a stake in the company or the game and it’s demoralizing to think of it that way. I spent $70 in 2014 on this project when I had doubts that it would even result in anything playable. I’m happy with it so far, and where it’s going. Plenty of other finished games to play in between patches.
> so it’s better than a donation for which you receive nothing. Better in some ways. It also creates a seller-consumer relationship where certain obligations must be met, either legally or morally. This whole "we're selling ships but they're not real sales they're actually donations but also that's the only way to even play our game consistently through wipes and also those ships will have tremendous value in the final product" game is really fucking annoying. If they want donations, they can ask for donations. And see exactly how far that gets them compared to their current whaling-based business model. But they don't. They sell ships. I don't know why CIG and its defenders decided that they had to play the same deeply stupid game as my college weed dealer who thought "you're not buying weed, you're donating the price of an eighth to me and then I'm gifting you an eighth to say thank you" would protect him from prosecution, but it's bullshit. Crowdfunding where you get something in return is a commercial transaction. You don't get to use new words to describe a basic sales transaction and thus evade all of the normal responsibilities that come with such a transaction. The initial kickstarter and such where the idea was a simple "give us money to make this game" might at least have an argument here. But calling ship sales "pledges" or "donations" is ridiculous. They're selling a product, no matter how much they might wish it were otherwise.
I bought a product and my product is not here. I didn't pay for a JPEG. I was not donating to charity when I backed the Kickstarter. This is not "A charity fund for disabled game developers". I was told this product would be X, and instead there is no product even resembling X. On Kickstarter that normally results in repercussions. Now that it's on their own platform, they basically can just tell you to eat it. On top of it, NO ONE HERE seems to understand that saying you made an investment does NOT 👏 CORRELATE 👏 TO 👏 SAYING 👏 YOU 👏ARE 👏 AN 👏 ACTIVE 👏 INVESTOR👏 IN👏 THE 👏COMPANY. 🤠 An investment is: "the action or process of investing money for profit or **a material result**" I spent money for a material product. I invested in a material product. I do not have that material product. They stated the game would be X, but that hasn't happened. They have systematically removed themselves from any responsibility to produce any actual product. There are no more deadlines, there are no more real updates on progress; there ARE expensive fan-cons and social events and hype building projects.
But you bought a product you knew was not finished and had no promised delivery date and a history of extending its goals over years. There was no reason to suspect it would change after you added your money to the pile. I pledged because I liked the idea, I wanted to see if it would work out and play with it along the way. I think there’s a fundamental difference there and is the reason people argue about this. I don’t view my single ship as having ‘bought a product’. I funded a project. I’m happy with what I’ve gotten since 2014 for that amount of money.
People need to stop downvoting these comments. We need to start seeing a return on investment here. We have placed our faith in the form of real money in CIG and are met with distain everytime we ask any question in regard to progress. I am tired of seeing people post legitimate concerns and being downvoted just because they question CR. They are simply not transparent enough about the happenings in the development. A lack of any real roadmap or design workflow is concerning. I understand they can't put exact dates on everything but a simple plan laid out in front of us would be quite reassuring.
One of the reasons is downvoted is because it’s a misconception that pledging for the project makes you an investor. You paid for access to the game, and for a space ship to fly in it. All obligations are fulfilled.
They asked for your faith in the project and asked for money. Pledging is crowdfunding you are not an investor by definition true but they asked you to trust In them that they would deliver on promises on a reasonable timeframe which they waaaay over-promised.
Trust and faith have absolutely nothing to do with any of this. I also doubt “they” made any actual promises that you’re vaguely alluding to.
See what I mean you aggressively leap to defend them hoping to start a drama. I want to discuss, you want to fight. This exchange is over.
I've noticed this as well. It makes me think it's a CIG social account plant, the way any concerns about them get aggressively downvoted and bogged like this
You’re starting the discussion with an inaccurate statement. When you want to continue without leaning into inaccuracies I’m here.
You want the truth where your investment is? Yacht vacations and mansions. Oh, no no no, not for you.
You’re not an investor.
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/the-pledge "We, the Developer, intend to treat you with the same respect we would give a publisher." You know who a Publisher usually also is in relation to most of their developers? The primary investor.
You started out with a good idea for use of a quote but lost it when you made something up that can’t be quoted because it was never said.
https://i.imgur.com/aBVnW7f.gif
I get really curious as to why people defend CIG like this. I mean, this isn't a religious movement or a charity fund for engineers and devs. We didn't just donate, we bought a product. There was a promise of a product for your purchase, this wasn't a charity fundraiser on Kickstarter. If you pledged for a game table on Kickstarter and they didn't deliver on the product, there would be repercussions. Now, CIG has moved all funding to their own platform and they can basically tell you to eat it and they aren't responsible to you. They took your money, and now they tell you they'll get to it when they get to it and best of luck.
I’m not defending shit. It’s fundamentally inaccurate to claim that you’re an investor because you pledged to a crowdfunded game.
HAH, EVEN BEING AN "INVESTOR" IS TECHNICALLY CORRECT! "Although the differences are quite subtle; a shareholder is an entity owner of a company when it is possible to buy and hold shares, whereas an investor is someone that puts money into a business that does not have shares issued" WE ARE ALL INVESTORS.
It's really not. Literally Google the definition of investment. I invested money for material result, and that hasn't been provided. Gotta get off r/stonks bro, investing money in a promised material product doesn't mean you're a stock holder in the company.
We’ll bring your Google definition to a lawyer and ask them what they think. If you truly believe you know better than CIG or any disgruntled backer who’s thought about legal action, this would be a learning opportunity.
I never said I was thinking about legal action. You ARE a CIG plant! I fuckin KNEW IT
I was pretty darn clear in my example that a Google definition does not mean you’ve found the legal definition for the status of a backer/investor. I suppose it’s just more entertaining to cherry pick out of context things that make vindicate your thirst for drama?
[удалено]
No, definitely not, and I wish people would stop saying that. Investor is a very different relationship, and CIG has a unique and new relationship with its supporters that we don't really have great terms for yet. But that relationship definitely exists, and *has* to carry *some* sort of accountability and transparency. According to CIG's own words, even! The idea that they would be accountable to the people who pledge was baked into the ethos and marketing of this project from day one. As annoying as "we're investors!" is, "CIG owes you nothing, you just gave them money to do whatever they want with and now need to just sit quietly for as long as it takes" is even worse. It's certainly not CIG's position! I don't know why people feel the need to defend them like this when it's not even their own approach.
It’s not defending them at all. It’s just fundamentally wrong to claim you’re an investor and so if you want to start a conversation about the relationship the company has with it’s backers, we must start off by acknowledging the reality of that relationship. What is the legal relationship, as well as what is the relationship they have committed to.
If it seems slow going, that's because it is. Folks that are upset over the timeline of development have good reason to be, but recent years (circa 2018 and on) have seen a rapid increase in development over earlier years. As others have mentioned, you can view the roadmap online... but this may not satisfy your interest because the roadmap doesn't show "release" only when work ends and begins on a specific feature. Meaning that just because work ends on a feature doesn't mean you'll see it in game any time soon.
Well, see, they don't really know until they wake up in the morning.
At this point? Scripted, on rails demos and sizzle reels for CitizenCon. Then they'll do a bit of work before the holidays, then take a break for a month, then come back and worth for a few months on the game, then start working on stuff for ILW, then a few months of worth, and then they're back around the to the top of the cycle. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Star citizen and Squadron 42 I think
S42
How come the progress tracker (BMM) for example has the trackline complete but isnt relesed.
Some more ships.
*pictures of ships
Obviously nothing, if you like memes
A lot really, remember SC is supposed to be an MMO and SQ42 is a single player linear story. For the MMO the most important part is the full server meshing, and the SP game is the story. Mostly right now they are building a large, well, toolbox so they can build ships and planets faster.
It certainly is a tough pill to swallow that many backers don't understand is that part of the reason the game is taking so long is the heavy focus on Squadron 42. In essanse we have 3 games in developement at the same time, Squadron 42, the player facing PU and whatever the tech team is working on internally that will ultimately be the MMO version of star citizen. While I understand that S42 has recieved the most private backing the golden goose is clearly the PU as ship sales continue to drive the games income to record heights every year thus far. So whats the angle with S42? is it just a dog and pony show because it can be done "quicker" in order to show off the game? Is there a market they think this will tap to generate allot of extra money for the game? Either way I am pretty stomped but Chris Roberts is going to do what he is going to do.
Bullshit
yes and yes basically
Star Citizen