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Comment count is 15
StanleyPain - 2016-12-17

I sure am glad they delayed this game another two years or whatever to crowbar first-person shooter bullshit into it because, man, when I am playing games like Freelancer or Elite or whatever my first through was "Gee, I wish was playing Doom instead, but oh well!"


Mr. Purple Cat Esq. - 2016-12-17

Star citizens development is such an epic clusterfuck. I'm a game dev and I've been following it with morbid fascination (like watching a slow motion train-wreck) since the 1st announcements. From the very start Chris Roberts who it seems knows nothing technically relevant to modern games made a graphical demo in cryengine (a bafflingly bad choice) with a bunch or art assets he had paid random artists to make.
And then they got a load of funding and didnt start again with a proper plan, and things just continued in that vain.

I've never worked in AAA and never want to. But having worked for some big corps and seen how incredibly disorganized and wasteful they usually are. I'm really curious, is this what AAA game development is always like? And star citizen is just the first example of an AAA game whos development is open to the public so we can see the disaster unfolding the in real time?
The recent Doom video corroborates this, where they plughed 1000's of highly paid manhours into a fundamentally flawed idea for a Doom game and then scrapped it all and started over (and actually made something good the 2nd time)

Also, I wish by some miracle star citizen actally gets finished enough to play and not be a totally shit mess. I would really love to play it in that case. Maybe, if AAA development *is* actually usually this messy then maybe in a few years they will shit out a decent product as does happen with AAA games.


Architeuthis Tux - 2016-12-17

I spent my time in the fun mines through the 90's working on rag-tag volunteer game stuff and sometimes even managed to get paid. I saw a lot of Roberts' style of visionless-vision.

Those days are thankfully long past me, I no longer do work that relies on anyone but myself. But I've got friends in the trenches, including one guy who worked on one of the biggest, triplest A games around. (Who has since moved on to tech pastures where crunch time is not a planned feature of development.) I'm sure there were dead-ends along the way to release, but he never said anything about this sort of bullshit -- and he sure as hell would have if it'd been going on.

TL;DR, a semi-educated "I don't think this is normal, no."


glasseye - 2016-12-17

It's already a pretty fun playable space arena game with great art assets, albeit limited in scope currently.


Mr. Purple Cat Esq. - 2016-12-18

@glasseye
So, lots of backers say that. I dont know what game they're playing.. As I said I've been following the development closely (and I played it when it was free for a while there)
In my opinion the flight mechanics are just awful, its hard to describe how bad they are. It doesnt feel like a proper sim, it doesnt feel like a nice arcade system like elite dangerous. What it really reminds me of is an old mod for quake that let you pilot a gunship. You just feel totally disconnected or like your ship is just a paper thing mesh. From following the development I think chris roberts had this fully simulated physics based mechanics idea in his head. then his drones implemented his idea verbatim. Then they just left it like that even though it completely sucks. Thats not how you make a good game, you have to build your initial idea in as simple a way as possible and then iterate on it and tweak it again and again and again, until you have something that feels good.
The flight mechanics are the absolute core mechanics of a space game they should have gotten right at the very beginning of development, just using box models. I dont think they ever did that.
Also other core stuff like the projectiles seem like paper thin illusions too. They dont seem to issue from your ship or connect to other ships properly. Its hard to know when if or where from you're being fired from. you'll just suddenly insta-die for seemingly no reason, and then a loads of weird buggy shit will happen.
I dont know if they have fixed joystick support by now but thats another example of not implementing the absolute fundaments of your game, the controls are where everything starts. You should implement those 1st and get them super tight. The fact that they didnt do that is very telling.
The bugs.. so many bugs. When software is not architected right, is not started off on the right foot, it will introduce technical debt and make it so that when you try to fix a bug you will end introducing 2 more, making fixing the game a Sisyphusian task, that certainly seems to be the case here.


glasseye - 2016-12-18

I don't know about you, but I expect pre-alpha / early access games to be buggy.

I've never had any problems using my joystick with Star Citizen.

Apparently 2.6 has some big changes to the flight model. I haven't been following it closely so I don't know the details.


Mr. Purple Cat Esq. - 2016-12-18

@glasseye. You should expect a lot of bugs around the alpha stage. When all the features and content have been thrown in by lots of people and your game is now really big and complicated.
You shouldnt expect them at the very beginning of the development process. And not in absolutely fundamental systems. That stuff needs to be rock solid at the start to give you a reasonable base to build on.


Scrotum H. Vainglorious - 2016-12-17

Why won't it let me enter a dollar amount in the description?


bawbag - 2016-12-17

You need to use $ instead.


Ugh - 2016-12-17

derek smart
derek smart
derek smart


SolRo - 2016-12-17

I imagine that if it was a flawlessly choreographed and produced event then this video would instead be bitching and moaning about how SC wasted precious game funds on a stupid livestream.

no matter what they do, they will be wrong.


StanleyPain - 2016-12-17

Well, no, because even without the technical difficulties they didn't actually show what they were saying they were going to show which was footage of the supposed stand-alone, offline single player campaign they are developing for SC which is reason number #346 they are asking for money/time/whatever. Basically they just asked for money and then were like "Hey, check out this Halo clone we are making that is going to be in the game too."


SolRo - 2016-12-17

my understanding is that 140 million is a small amount for developing a large, online, AAA game.

EverQuest 1, made almost 20 years ago, cost about 100 million to make without adjusting for inflation.


Architeuthis Tux - 2016-12-17

No.

http://kotaku.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-big-video-ga me-1501413649


Architeuthis Tux - 2016-12-17

That was a reply to SolRo above.


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