Star Citizen Online - The search for more money

Pasteton said:

That's crazy. Has any mmo cost more?
Man I wonder what Macquaud would do if he had 140 mil for pan'theon

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SWTOR was reported to have cost between 150-200 million which made it the most expensive video game ever made at the time. GTA5 came along later with a 265 million price tag and took that crown. So Star Citizen is rapidly closing on most expensive game ever made territory.

WoW only cost ~$64 million to develop originally. About $200 million in upkeep over the first 4 years. I'd like to know how much of that was employee bonuses though. Blizzard apparently handed them out like crazy when WoW took off (A buddy of mine @ Blizz bought a new house at a Porsche with his)

Pasteton said:

Man I wonder what Macquaud would do if he had 140 mil for pan'theon

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Dirtbikes and pills?

Well, I suspect that next year could be even bigger for them too. Patch 3.0 is apparently when the PU starts to look like a real game. Landing on planets, improved net code, items 2.x, improved PvE content, etc, or so we've been told. The holiday stream was a total disaster, but the 2.6 patch itself is pretty good. Obviously, there are still a lot of bugs (being an alpha test patch), but the Star Marine module is starting to look like a decent foundation, and the graphical improvements are noteworthy. I'm still on the fence about the flight model changes, however, and need more time with it. I've been busy as shit this week and every time I go to play on the PTU, there is another version to download.

Well, at this point, I'm just watching and hoping they pull it off. No sense getting all militant on either side, imo. Meanwhile they are making good progress with the engine:

anything they accomplish at this point cannot be considered "good progess"

more like "this is all there is?"

im not gonna humor that attempt at equivalency

Dandai said:

What was the last thing you made big swag?

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His morning shit, which still had more meat on it than Star Citizen.

Blackwulf said:

Well, at this point, I'm just watching and hoping they pull it off. No sense getting all militant on either side, imo. Meanwhile they are making good progress with the engine:

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Yea "great progress" looks like that player is rubber banding over and over.

Palum said:

Yea "great progress" looks like that player is rubber banding over and over.

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Uh, it's a looped GIF?

Pyros said:

Well I assume it's a lightning demo or something, but the gif actually has 3 phases then a loop, and the links between all 3 phases(basically each room the character is in) look very disjointed and the background resets weirdly. I assume it's intended because the only point is to show dynamic lightning and not continuity or whatever, just looks weird as shit to make the gif like this, or the demo like this. Why isn't he just running through the 3 rooms in one go?

Anyway until you have something that actually ressembles a full game being playable, you're not gonna please any of the saltier people. And honestly, I can't blame anyone for thinking this is going to end badly, considering the speed of progress.

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That's a GIF someone made of in game footage. You could recreate it in alpha right now.

Edit - I mean the thing that's cool about it is that it shows off the separate physics zones they've added to the engine - You have a guy running on the floor of the Caterpillar while it's spinning (because artificial gravity) - that's 1 physics zone. Then you have the space outside the ship - that's another physic's zone. The guy in the ship perceives the world as being stable with the world spinning past the open cargo bay doors, and everyone outside the ship can see that it's spinning. It's just kind of a neat image. And yeah, the GIF is shitty quality.

Here's some in game footage from a few builds ago. The guy's who made it are playing around in that same ship, so you can see it in non GIF format


Btw Alpha 2.6 went live today - not sure how the servers will handle the holiday slam, but here are the notes - lots of new stuff:
Star Citizen Alpha 2.6.0 - Roberts Space Industries

Also:

Happy Holidays

P.S. CIG switched SC from CryTek's CryEngine to Amazon's Lumberyard. Conversion is complete with the launch of 2.6. They also switched any planned hosting from Google Compute to Amazon's which is already fully integrated with Lumberyard as Lumberyard as an engine is actually meant for online playing unlike the original CryEngine which blew at it.

a_skeleton_03 said:

Even if this is the best move ever made can't you see how worrying that is this far in development?

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Yeah, seems pretty outta the blue. Makes you wonder how much it has to do with Crytek going down the drain, etc. I'm hoping it just has a lot to do with using the integrated networking stuff that Amazon has been building.

Well I'm not Sean Tracy (CIG's Technical Director) so I can't explain the ins/outs and hows/whys of it and I'm not going to pretend that I can do any of that.

All I know is their branch of CryEngine was so radically different from CryTek's that it ended up causing major delays due to knock on effects on other code. Remember CIG stripped a lot of core functions out and siloed them while CryTek continued to use a fully integrated code for everything. That integration made SC impossible to accomplish and by mid this year they could no longer bring code in from CryEngine at all. It was just too radically different.

Reading the press release makes me think CIG was planning for this move to Lumberyard since last year. Nobody can suddenly announce oh we just completed integration to a new code base in a few months. Seriously how often has CIG been able to pull off something like that? Does that even sound logical or reasonable to you? It doesn't to me. So I would assume they have been doing this for a very long time they just didn't let the cat out of the bag until today.

We should hear more details after the holidays. I'm sure people will pepper Sean non-stop with questions on wtf they did... did they waste time/effort on conversions that can't be used or were those conversions a move to Lumberyard this whole time. Not a fucking clue at this point. It's all speculation.

EDIT: Oh and CryTek is imploding again so expect a few more senior people to join CIG's engine team soon.

Got to imagine that's why they haven't said shit about SQ 42. Engine swap in that is prob way more intensive than the normal SC stuff. Who knows though.

I don't disagree that it's a legit talking point to discuss how they hid this as long as you can agree that every time they announced a major direction change in the project everyone lost their collective shit. This board included. I mean I can go back 20 pages and directly quote some of you yelling when I mentioned something benign like that 2.6 includes revamped flight model changes. That might have been you but I'm too lazy to go check. And no it's not rational to me when you state to me omg it's 4 years in production. No shit. Most games with a 1/10th of the features take that long. I'm the one that pointed that out a year and a half ago and how they will need a minimum of about 2 more years on top of what they then suggested as a release date. And I was right.

It's interesting to me listening to this hapless rhetoric because all I read in other threads is how this developer or that developer has done a shit job because they didn't spend enough time on features/story/direction etc. Then I come here and it's the exact opposite. It's taking too long. They are spending too much time on the engine. Where's the game. Aren't you concerned? No I'm really not. They are laying the foundation for the game and part of that foundation are the toolsets and new direction in coding that they have been going. Features you expect to actually play with and interact with goes on top of that.

What I'm saying is stop trying to seem sane by claiming that the cart comes before the horse.

And no I don't think they have hoodwinked everyone for 12 months with a fake engine and all of that code change was for show. If that's the case why is everything they have shown us thus far lined up with everything they have released. It doesn't make any logical sense. This is a company that purposefully refused for a year to fix the tutorial, which might I remind you could be used to induct newbies, because it's a waste of coding time when they could have polished the ever living shit out of it and made the game look like more than it is. If they have been trying to hoodwink people they have done a goddamn awful job of it. Until we know more details I'm going on the assumption that a bulk of their engine change for the past year has been a move to allow Lumberyard integration and the upcoming network and AI code change while at the same time doing all the other major coding changes and toolset creation for world building that they are using for 3.0.

So it's not that you're wrong because we really don't know. It's just that what you wrote doesn't make any sense logically, is based on no evidence apart from a press release with no details and lacks rational critical thinking by looking at possibilities.

TLDR: I think you have some good shit and whatever it is I want some.

EDIT: clarity