Star Citizen Online - The search for more money

Variise_sl said:

It's funny you mention that. That's exactly what happens. They are already experimenting internally with versions of the various textures/models based on the economy of a landing zone/planet. It will change quite drastically based on the economy. Lots of riffraff will appear in the open. People will try to shiv you for your trousers and boots.

Prepare your anus.

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I think the game is going to be good, but that sort of dynamic changes never really pan out. Fable, Black and White, Radiant AI in Oblivion: it never feels as cool and organic as they make it out to be.
In fact, working on several factions as a Troll in Everquest felt more to me as if the world had changed for my Troll then any AI I have seen since in newer games. The world and NPC's went from pretty damn hostile, to friendly and welcoming, including changed gameplay, like access to more cities, vendors wanting to sell and buy from me, and not being chased out of town by the guards. Certainly beat anything that fable could accomplish in that regard.

Mist_sl said:

MISC Reliant Now Available! - Roberts Space Industries


Reliant concept sale is up. Kind of a B-Wing clone. Combat variant isn't out yet.

Might melt one of my starter packages to buy it, so I have something with LTI to CCU into something else.

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It's already being called the Girlfriend ship. I can totally see why too. There isn't a single hard edge on it. Plus it's a two seater.

Not my cup of tea but it's interesting. Good to have variety. If anything nobody can say that the ships don't have a personality of their own.

The greatest game never played.

The live and test server is just a playground for testing final builds and clearly not all of them. A lot of the ships they are building appear to be fairly far along in the process. A lot further than many people believed. I think one reason is that a lot of those assets are needed for SQ42 and they want Chapter 1 tested by the end of this year. It makes sense that ships for that would be at least at this stage in development. The video and files don't even do them justice because people are loading them into standard CryEngine and not CIG's CryEngine which is heavily modified. So you are missing tons of textures, shaders, models and all kinds of other stuff that makes these things pretty.

I know Chris will be disappointed by this primarily because we see a shit version of what they actually have and he wanted us to see the final versions of a lot of these ships. They seem to be insanely close with some of them.

Time will tell how this plays out but clearly a lot of $$$ has been spent to make these ships and various assets a reality. The awesome thing is this is only bits and bobs. There is also all of the assets for planetside with two of them in the final stages (they wanted at least 3 by the initial launch of the PU) and the FPS module which is even further along.

Seeing this makes me think they can get all the work done on time but it's hard to judge since we can't see all of the aspects of the game.

I dunno, my biggest problem right now is the test combat mode (I guess that is supposed to be the SQ42 piece?) are just not fun to play. It's way too simcore with control mappings and while I'm sure I could fiddle with bullshit until it was fun to play, I just really don't have the time and energy to fuck around with control schemes on alpha.

I hope it gets better. The part I loved about freelancer was you had to be a good pilot but it was very approachable - it was built to be played as a game instead of directly mapped to flight controls in such a way to be 'realistically nonfunctional'. I just don't see that part yet.

Variise_sl said:

Time will tell how this plays out but clearly a lot of $$$ has been spent to make these ships and various assets a reality. The awesome thing is this is only bits and bobs. There is also all of the assets for planetside with two of them in the final stages (they wanted at least 3 by the initial launch of the PU) and the FPS module which is even further along..

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Thats sorta my issue with this game (and before anyone bites my head off, I have already bought into it). From reading articles about the industry, their current $83 million collected for funding is about $20 million short of what is considered the minimum budget for a tripple A game. Yet, a lot of time and development obviously goes into designing the ships for the game rather then move the GAME production forward. To me that is sorta worrying since there has been a long time now since they showed us anything besides more ships. Sure, Arena Commander was/is a fun tech demo, but this game is not a x-wing vs TIE fighter clone, it is supposed to be so much more and we have yet to see anything beyond the "enter the arena...FIGHT!". Hell even the FPS part is further along the the persistent universe according to their webpage which is all sorts of wrong.

Now, obviously they have a plan somewhere for putting it all together, but it seems to me that instead of doing the core game then expand they seem stuck in a "just put in another few millions and we will ALSO do this this and THIS!" grind without any end in sight.

Faith_sl said:

Thats sorta my issue with this game (and before anyone bites my head off, I have already bought into it). From reading articles about the industry, their current $83 million collected for funding is about $20 million short of what is considered the minimum budget for a tripple A game.

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I am not saying thatthis little graphis gospel, but if there is any truth in it, then their budget actually exceeds that of SWtOR, which was 300 million?

Again, not saying that they are spending their dollars wiser then other companies, but the fact that there is no publisher lending them money and they are avoiding retail makes those 83 million go a lot farther.

I'm sure they'll use the income generated from the single player game as any padding they need to "finish" the game assuming that's possible.

Faith_sl said:

Thats sorta my issue with this game (and before anyone bites my head off, I have already bought into it). From reading articles about the industry, their current $83 million collected for funding is about $20 million short of what is considered the minimum budget for a tripple A game. Yet, a lot of time and development obviously goes into designing the ships for the game rather then move the GAME production forward. To me that is sorta worrying since there has been a long time now since they showed us anything besides more ships. Sure, Arena Commander was/is a fun tech demo, but this game is not a x-wing vs TIE fighter clone, it is supposed to be so much more and we have yet to see anything beyond the "enter the arena...FIGHT!". Hell even the FPS part is further along the the persistent universe according to their webpage which is all sorts of wrong.

Now, obviously they have a plan somewhere for putting it all together, but it seems to me that instead of doing the core game then expand they seem stuck in a "just put in another few millions and we will ALSO do this this and THIS!" grind without any end in sight.

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Those are good concerns, and I share them to some extent. I'm pretty optimistic, though (see how that worked out for me with ESO, hah), and if you read between the lines, you realize that their various studios and teams are working on pretty different things. While they have guys in Santa Monica and Foundry 42 working on making ships, assets, Squadron 42, etc., they have the guys in Austin and the new Germany office working on all the MMO bits, including the networking and tweaking of Cryengine source code (basically rewriting it) so that it behaves like an MMO.

If you haven't yet, take a look through their most recent monthly report:April Monthly Report - Roberts Space Industries


If you read closely, you'll find snippets like this that might allay some of your worries:

We have other, longer term systems in the works that continue to progress closer towards completion. These systems are being worked on out of Austin with strong cross-over with Manchester and Denver (by our friends at Wyrmbyte).such as: Unique Global Entity ID system, Generic Instance Manager, Player Info Server, Presence Server, Universe Simulator, HUB Server, and Player Persistence. Much of this work is slated to have deliverables of first iterations in the month of May.the team is definitely making some solid progress!

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Someone who got ahold of the leaked data was able to rip out some of the FPS along with a semi-working build of Mobiglass.

Mist_sl said:

FPS is coming in June or July at the latest, not sure what you're talking about.

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Im sorry if I was not clear;

My point is that a project sold as a spaceship game in a persistant universe is launching a FPS module before the beta of the core game and while the persistent part is still in "design" mode unlike the rest of the parts that are in "development".

Yes, they have split the project between several contractors but this can lead to its own problems come implementation. While I agree that it is a smart move, it also requires a really really stern project manager that does not allow it to decent into the murky hell of spaghetti-code. Keeping a project split on several contractors and maintaining clear docmentation of the coding and such is actually very difficult to pull off.

I haven't played Arena Commander in a while but there seem to be a lot of unhappy voices on the forum about it. Were there patches that changed things not to people's liking?