Star citizen has been in development hell for years. It looks like theyve reached the Sisyphusian point where X amount of work creates bugs that will take > X amount of time to fix.
Still I would love to be proved wrong and it comes out and is the best game ever of my fantasies. (Elite dangerous is too MMOey for my tastes)
What E:D does have is an amazing flight model, great visuals and a genuinely well-made physics engine that offers a surprising amount of realism. It's the most "you are a real pilot in a real spaceship" feeling game I've ever played. It just needs more depth to the actual game beyond that.
Edit: I played on a 34" ultrawide with TrackIR and the Warthog HOTAS. The immersion is staggering. Sadly my throttle has died so it's on hold until I can get a new set.
But see, the shear ridiculousness of Star Citizen's scope is the only reason I backed it. ...I've always dreamed of a hyper-realistic space simm that allowed you to do whatever you wanted. (Even in the alphas that have been released so far, I can do so many things that simply isn't possible in any other space game, ever made. In Elite: Dangerous you can't even get out of your seat.)
Of course, knowing that scope when I backed it, I understand the risk. I won't be shocked if it fails. And I won't really feel like I was slighted, or cheated. I put the money towards a thing I hope can be a thing, and maybe it will be. Maybe it won't.
That being said, the current lawsuit with Crytek is a super good reason to withhold funding them until it's resolved. There's so much shiftiness in there, and it's probably the first thing I've seen that could prematurely abort SC. It boggles the mind that they went the way they did to dodge licensing.
Yes, the development has been full of fits and starts, but they've also solved some amazing technical challenges. The 64-bit map size aspect was critical for having solar-system-sized maps with proper precision for multiplayer. The independent physics grids per ship implementation was a big deal. Also, they were able to pick up many of the core CryTek engine developers who had built the engine in the first place, and that's paid off with the rapid development of their procedural planet generation technology.
Sure, the development has been repeatedly behind schedule, and we've learned to pretty much ignore any projected deadlines they announce. But, they've got several hundred people working full-time on a pair of AAA-class games and the current alpha versions _are_ playable, so it's not just vaporware. They also have been posting the current project task planning info on the website for about the last year, with info drawn directly from their internal JIRA, and the community is watching that eagerly to calculate weekly progress update diffs. Supposedly CIG is aiming for quarterly patch releases this year based on what's ready at the time rather than a specific feature list target, with 3.1 due out this month. We'll see how that pans out, and if they can actually manage more consistent releases.
I pitched in for them to make the game of Chris Roberts' dreams, and I'm enjoying watching the development process. As long as they continue to make progress, I'm quite happy to sit back and wait for them to get it "right".
No. When something is very far away from you, it will probably not even be visible, if it does appear it will be very small. You will not be able to interact with it. From your perspective its position does not need to be precise.
With a sane game architecture for this kind of game you dont need higher precision floats. This has been done in loads of games. I mentioned KSP because a tiny team did this in Unity (not even their own engine)
Considering how it will instantly double all the payloads, this is something you'd particularly want to avoid for a multiplayer game.
I can only guess that they did this because they used cryengines built-in physics, and every ship in an instance is in the same phsyics 'world' (which is insane)
"The independent physics grids per ship implementation was a big deal"
Thats not a big deal. Its relatively trivial to do imo. You just have multiple physics 'worlds' and any bodies which protrude into another system are represented by kinematics in the other system. Transitioning from one system to another could look very weird, simply because the fantasy of the game does not cog with consistent physics, but they have not overcome this problem either.
I imagine implementing it whilst using cryengines built-in physics system may have been the truly colossal task. But why in gods name are they using cryengine (an engine strongly geared towards making crytek fps games) to make space game?
- 64-bit map sizes: https://www.gamersnexus.net/gg/2622-star-citizen-sean-tracy-...
- Multi-crew ships and physics grids: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/15...
Eg. For the 64bit precision one they have a decent amount of detail explaining what it is. But not why they are doing it when its not necessary. (I assume the only reason one could possibly do this is cus every ship in a game instance exists in the same phsyics world (which is a crazy bad implementation))
For example, one reason they might want higher precision is for editing and processing persistent data: a need that doesn't apparently have anything to do with the physics simulation, but subsequently ripples down into "well, if we want to allow editing in real-time, then..."
It is interesting work, but nothing that you would want to emulate as a best practice for making a Better Game. It's just a result of the software aspects being scoped and executed in such an uncompromising way. A good majority of the work to date has been on the organization-building work of teams and processes that can execute at this scale.
I don't have a very deep knowledge of game development, but my understanding is that they moved to Amazon's Lumberyard and just went through a lawsuit with Crytek over it.
One of the things that people seem to miss is that Star Citizen development functions a lot more like a SaaS, with recurring revenue, than a traditional game project, with a big-bang release. CIG (the company behind Star Citizen) averages about $90K PER DAY in backer revenue. This has been consistent for years. [1] The money comes from ship sales which, at the time of nearly all the sales, are nothing but polished art assets in various stages of development.
Given this context, their decision to produce polished art assets and prioritize playable releases over rewrites not only makes sense, it's smart.
[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tMAP0fg-AKScI3S3VjrD...
Edit: I've read your other replies in this thread and your dismissive attitude towards software development challenges looks a lot like inexperience. Since you offered your credentials as a "game-maker," I have to ask: is your game development experience as a professional software developer, working in a large team on commercial AAA products? Or is it smaller scale? I ask because decisions that are obvious and trivial for a hobbyist solving small problems look a lot different at scale.
Theres no excuse for that imo, if its the result of bad project management or whatever then so be it, its still a mess.
"decisions that are obvious and trivial for a hobbyist solving small problems look a lot different at scale."
What scale? Users? team size? Also, I dont see how either makes it ok to write crummy software. Give me an example.
Also in what way are the hobbyist problems small? Tiny teams (eg. the Dwarf fortress guys) have done some of the most groundbreaking plain old technically difficult work Ive seen.
I'm not saying Star Citizen development is perfect. They're doing a lot less automated testing than I prefer, the code they show in Bugsmashers isn't particularly well designed, and they would have benefited from adopting feature teams and timeboxed releases much sooner than they did.
But software development always looks easier from a distance than it is in reality. The problems are fractal, and don't make themselves known until you're deep in the middle of implementation. (This is why so many projects are under-estimated.) Your criticisms lack that nuance. You say they're writing crummy software, but you offer no evidence other than 50,000-feet hand-waving assertions. It comes across as either inexperience, or an axe to grind.
I think the project was just fundamentally flawed at the beginning because of the choice to use cryengine, and they never corrected it. They doubled down and poured huge amounts of great work after bad. At the very inception of any software project you need a very small handful of experts to decide some fundamental things eg. What language / framework / engine to use. What platforms it will be on, what networking model it will use.
In the case of star citizen, Chris Roberts picked cryengine himself (probably just cus cryengine games tend to look nice), even though he hadn't produced a game in years. It did make sense for the demo-video. As I said, it worked, he got funded, but after getting funded he should have scrapped that visual demo and hired a few experts to draw up a plan for how to realise the actual game. I would have been looking to headhunt people who were architects for battlefield or planetside. Instead it seems like CIG just started hiring everyone like crazy and dogpiling work ontop of the visual-demo.
It seems from their dev updates that the team is putting in a heroic effort trying to work through the issues, though it also looks like a perfect realization of the sunken cost fallacy.
"An unmitigated clusterfuck." "A mess." "Crummy software."
And now you're saying they chose the wrong engine? That's a Far Cry from being the Crysis you described, which makes it sound like choosing CryEngine makes a game Prey to any Monster Hunter Online. Sure, Crytek's in a State of Decay, but the CryEngine Kingdom's Come: Deliverance in the form of Amazon. The engine is still maintained, and still used for major games.
Okay, I'm resorting to bad wordplay now. I guess that means I'm done. I'll let you have the last word.
Edit: Maybe minus the space tigers...
For the Wing Commander community, they're inseparable despite the licensing.
Even from the very beginning it has looked like an unmitigated clusterfuck. (I decided to hold off funding it, I'm so happy I did) For the initial demo videos it looked like Roberts used his own money to hire artists to make lots of assets for the demo videos in Cry-engine.. Which is grand, makes sense + it worked, they got funded.
But then they continued developing that demo-video project into the full game!!! Which is baffling. The main thing is that Cry-engine is one of the worst engines I could imagine for this type of game, I imagined they'd be fighting it every step of the way and they have been. Another practice theyve had from the start is building the game backwards, Creating (extremely labour intensive) final AAA polished art assets before they've even decided what the mechanics are let alone built and tried them, god only knows how may assets they've had to scrap. I could go on and on, eg. completely retooling cry-engine to use 64 bit floats. Which must have been a gargantuan task + also completely unnecessary if you plan out your game right. (eg. look at Kerbal space program)