Creatives vs. Engineers

stockish · Aug 31, 2023

Issue #2, basically every esport and gaming house lol

M4cex · Aug 31, 2023

I've heard some rumors about Server Meshing (Dynamic? Tier0?) passing some sort of test with Evocati this year. Not sure if it's true or if it even matters yet. Either way SM was always the part I was/am most skeptic about but is also probably the biggest thing that has to happen for SC to ever get anywhere.

Aramsolari · Aug 31, 2023

I agree with all your points.....however...

If CIG gives up on Server Meshing, the game's dead in the water. Without it, we'll be stuck on 50 man servers doomed to pilot our expensive Idrises/Javelins/etc solo.

Might as well play a single player game like Starfield at that point.

Thalstan · Aug 31, 2023

M4cex said:
I've heard some rumors about Server Meshing (Dynamic? Tier0?) passing some sort of test with Evocati this year. Not sure if it's true or if it even matters yet. Either way SM was always the part I was/am most skeptic about but is also probably the biggest thing that has to happen for SC to ever get anywhere.

Evocati can’t talk about what they have done, so while some testing may have been done with server meshing, no one will be able to say. They may or may not have been told they were even testing server meshing, leading to some speculation that they were…and who knows.

That said, people have been hinting at a 4.0 test this winter. We have no idea if this is true or not, and even if CR came out tomorrow and said it was, I would take it with a grain of salt because he says a lot of things. That said, it’s possible. It might be a year late, but it’s possible. However, just like with PES, I would expect it to be several quarters of testing and patching to get it in a fairly decent place. So even if they started testing in December (again speculation), I would not expect it to be in a stable place before July/August of 2024, and it might even be later.

that said, once SM is in, many systems can be added with ease once they are complete. Many of the systems used in SQ42 might be fully fleshed out, waiting for the SQ42 game to be released so they can add them (Odin and surrounding systems) to SC. Nyx might also be easy enough to implement as Dalamar is already built.

that said, SC has been a pack of dreams with us telling ourselves what is coming will save the game and be the holy grail tech for over 5 years. At some point, we need to accept SC for what it is, and recognize that while it may change in the future, nothing is guaranteed.

NaffNaffBobFace · Aug 31, 2023

Welcome back ColdDog, I'd rather you don't go away again so I 'ain't saying nothing! :-D

Aramsolari · Aug 31, 2023

Whatever it is, I highly doubt we're seeing Server Meshing or even Pyro this year.

Haven't lost faith in SC or anything like that. I just think the likelihood of me scoring a coffee date with Ana de Armas is higher than that of CIG releasing SM/Pyro this year.

Lorddarthvik · Aug 31, 2023

ColdDog said:
Hey folks,
Been a while since I have said any of my "negative" shit, but I think we need to have a conversation. Prepare your snowflake minds because I am going to unload on ya'all. I have skin in this game, just like every other person here... I'd like to see my Kraken someday, but I don't think we're going to make it unless some crap changes at CIG.

Issue #1
Chris Roberts should not be running the engineering department. He is a figurehead... an idea guy. He may be the man in charge, but a true leader knows when to shut up and stop asking for the engineering team to turn lead into gold. High expectations are reasonable; not taking no for an answer is terrible.

Issue #2
Creatives should have NO say in the budget. Ever wonder why a creative house is so messy? Maybe not, but they are all over the place, just like this game (StarCitizen). They are great at coming up with ideas but bad at making logical decisions - particularly budget/money decisions because they think throwing money at a problem fixes it. It does not... 1000 regular people saying yes all the time will get it wrong, and 10 of the right people will get it right.

Issue #3
Engineers need the ability to say no; if management does not listen, then the project will fail. I think CIG is creative-driven and not engineering-driven. Creatives provide the destination, engineering builds the path, and sometimes, there are roadblocks - just like server meshing. I am not saying creatives are bad, I am saying creatives have a different role than engineering.

Issue #4
It's time to give up on server meshing.

So as I said, Chris Roberts is a visionary; he is not someone to make it happen, thus the state of this game. Years have gone by, we've bounced from here to there, and we're still in alpha... I mean a bad alpha - this game is barely playable.

This company has nothing but headwinds, tech-debt + a bad economy = bad future unless something changes.

I have no idea what is going on at CIG, but after 10 years of this crap, they need to change direction fast they will just be a footnote of what not to do and we the backers, will be holding the bag. I hope Chris Roberts likes his millionaire status because it will not last if this game fails, When the trust fails, the downfall will take weeks, not years.

CD

Welcome back!

You forgot to add the snowflake bashing lol

While you are kinda correct about a lot of it, you conflate Management with Creatives. That's just not how the world works.... These are two very different and separate entities and should be treated as such to get to an actually intelligent conclusion.

#1
It has been said a million times that CR should take a step back from direct interference in day to day decisions and let the people do their jobs. True. I agree.
Problem is that he doesn't just have a vision he wants exactly replicated, he also believes he is still a developer. He stated in some interviews that he still writes code ffs.
It just doesn't fit into the flow! You know how I know for certain this doesn't work? When I started out as a VFX/3D artist I worked under a boss for 5 years who was exactly like this. Every single thing we did had to go through his hands, and be adjusted by him to his liking. Everything. The company is still around but they never got anywhere and to this day it's it's not a nice place to work at.

#2
I could elaborate on your overly generalized statement of creatives never ever should have a say in the budget, but I can't be arsed. The short answer is, Creatives KNOW you can't fix things by throwing more money at it. MANGAMENT believes that's the solution to everything.
Engineers, just like actual creatives, will do the best possible job they can, and get told by Management that they don't have the budget for it, and need to make things work cheaper, thus ending with an inferior product. They don't have a say in the budget either.

Now here comes CIG. They have a Creative and Mangament-boss in the same person. That's the issue. CR is no manager! This shouldn't happen!

Still, input is paramount. Both from engineers and creatives. If you don't allow input from creatives ever in the budget, what you get in the best case is a bubble shaped box on wheels with 2 seats, and a 0.7liter 3 cyl engine. All in black. No F250, no 'vettes. In the real world you'd get to walk instead of owning a car, or owning anything really... What you get is gray cracking concrete breadline communism.

#3
Yes, CIG is creative driven. Like everything in the entertainment industry, as it should be, duh. When it isn't, you get The Avangers 7, COD19, FOrtnite6... You get TRASH.
BUT, yes everybody needs the ability to say no when they have a valid argument, not just engineers. Or at least say it some form, like Not Now, because it can't be done in a fashion that would make budgetary or logical sense.
Looking at what is getting worked on and pushed aside at CiG, they definitely don't allow for much of this.

#4
Server Meshing HAS to happen. It doesn't need to happen the way CR imagines it, but in general the game is dead without some form of much larger and smoother server and player handling. This is not a question, it has to be done or the game is done for. Without it, you don't have an MMO, you have a small indi game that should have been done at the 5mil mark, not the 500mil mark we are way past now.

As for the bad economy and tech debt.. The tech, sure, that is and will remain a huge issue.
The economy will hold up for a while yet, according to sales, I don't think they'll abruptly just run out of money. The whole industry is secretly jealous of them raking in this cash with this little to show, and with such bad rep. Someone would jump in and buy it out.

NOW, for some actual snowflake bashing, or call it ranting:

What 99.9999999% of the players, including our leader and most of you lot, fail to or just don't want to accept is that getting new planets, ships, weapons, and some broken basic game loops added is NOT progress. These things don't require new knowledge, innovation or even problem solving, these are exactly the things you CAN throw more money at and make it more, faster, better.
Adding a new system/Pyro would be only the result of the REAL progress behind the scenes, not the actual progress itself. Do I want to see pyro happen? Hell yes, stanton is getting really stale after 10 years, but unless it's paired with server meshing, it's yet another sign of failure, not progress.

Progress is backend streaming.
Progress is persistence, aka basic bitch database handling, of at least my fucking inventory.
Progress is a full netcode rewrite so the game don't desync after every 5 seconds and has 10 second lag with the supposedly 50ms ping I have. Progress is Server Meshing. Progress is when the backend Ai (Quanta or whatever the hell they call it) finally starts doing something on screen and effecting the playsession.
Progress is rewriting the whole render pipeline to be parallel processing capable!
Progress is when the elevator doesn't kill you anymore because they finally clean up the utterly retarded server-based physics!
Out of all this we got 2 done in the last 5-6 years. That's not progress, that's a bad joke!
Yeah but they had to establish a their new studio and and and... yeah fcuk off. Devs break off from studios all the time, make their own, and have full AAA beating titles out in 3 years. That's no excuse. The difference is, those devs don't try to reinvent the wheel every time. It's time that CIG learns from that.

But anyways, I'm off to buy some jpegs cos SC is still the best reinvention of the wheel I've seen in 2 decades.

Richard Bong · Aug 31, 2023

Here is the biggest problem, imho, they are using the "ooh shiny" method of development.

the second biggest problem is they have no clear definition of what finished or even beta looks like.

Deroth · Aug 31, 2023

@Lorddarthvik pretty much hit every point I was planning on, but sometimes I like to repeat things in just another way.

When did 'engineers' stop being creatives? All the decent to best ones I've ever known, particularly when speaking about coders/software engineers, are just Creatives with Technical Knowledge and Experience. The low end, mass-produced, 'engineers' are the ones churning out a new cash-grab mobile game every quarter that is essentially the same game but with a new UI they outsourced to someone else to do in 1-2 weeks, do government contract work where they spend a year+ to make a HTML page that looks like something a kid in elementary school did as a school project after taking a weekend coding course, or are government consultants getting paid millions to lie to GSs with no technical knowledge that MySQL is capable of handling Enterprise level projects (even the people responsible for creating or maintaining it clearly state every time they're asked that MySQL is NOT for Enterprise level projects, it is for learning the fundamentals of SQL or for small scale projects.)

When did CR stop being an 'engineer'? He started out as a programmer, who was also very creative, and as was pointed out, he keeps up on his coding knowledge so that he technically is capable of working on SC.

It is quite common for new companies to be founded and ran successfully by creative types, one of the first companies I worked for after getting out of the military was founded by a creative type that was also a software engineer, it was great until he got sick of constantly having to deal with 'manager' types calling themselves 'Leaders' but couldn't lead a child out of a paper bag even with a load of cookies and candy, so decided to sell the company and retire.

I've said this before, but from my perspective the greatest mistake made for SC was choosing to go with CryEngine. It was dead in the water for YEARS due to bad management and business practices so it fell far behind all the comparable/competitor engines. This forced CIG to have to develop systems that are now integral parts of the competitors' engines instead of being able to focus just on developing the game itself. They hoped that by using Lumberyard some of this would be made up, but Amazon didn't take up nearly as much of the slack of that as they CIG appeared to be hoping for. Now CIG is so far into it they seem to be locked in to having to develop all of these systems so they can make SC work the way they intended it to, while hoping Lumberyard can live on long enough as O3DE for them to turn around to license out these systems to bring in long-term reoccurring supplemental revenue (which is dependent on developers actually choosing Lumberyard/O3DE as their engine for their MMOs.)

Richard Bong said:
Here is the biggest problem, imho, they are using the "ooh shiny" method of development and have no clear definition of what finished or even beta looks like.

The 'ooh shiny' is to keep generating revenue, the backend work won't generate revenue until it is a finished product that can be licensed out and when they talk about the backend processing progress in their videos people get bored very quickly then start complaining about that time being wasted instead of talking about the latest 'ooh shiny'.

Richard Bong · Aug 31, 2023

Deroth said:
@Lorddarthvik pretty much hit every point I was planning on, but sometimes I like to repeat things in just another way.

When did 'engineers' stop being creatives? All the decent to best ones I've ever known, particularly when speaking about coders/software engineers, are just Creatives with Technical Knowledge and Experience. The low end, mass-produced, 'engineers' are the ones churning out a new cash-grab mobile game every quarter that is essentially the same game but with a new UI they outsourced to someone else to do in 1-2 weeks, do government contract work where they spend a year+ to make a HTML page that looks like something a kid in elementary school did as a school project after taking a weekend coding course, or are government consultants getting paid millions to lie to GSs with no technical knowledge that MySQL is capable of handling Enterprise level projects (even the people responsible for creating or maintaining it clearly state every time they're asked that MySQL is NOT for Enterprise level projects, it is for learning the fundamentals of SQL or for small scale projects.)

When did CR stop being an 'engineer'? He started out as a programmer, who was also very creative, and as was pointed out, he keeps up on his coding knowledge so that he technically is capable of working on SC.

It is quite common for new companies to be founded and ran successfully by creative types, one of the first companies I worked for after getting out of the military was founded by a creative type that was also a software engineer, it was great until he got sick of constantly having to deal with 'manager' types calling themselves 'Leaders' but couldn't lead a child out of a paper bag even with a load of cookies and candy, so decided to sell the company and retire.

I've said this before, but from my perspective the greatest mistake made for SC was choosing to go with CryEngine. It was dead in the water for YEARS due to bad management and business practices so it fell far behind all the comparable/competitor engines. This forced CIG to have to develop systems that are now integral parts of the competitors' engines instead of being able to focus just on developing the game itself. They hoped that by using Lumberyard some of this would be made up, but Amazon didn't take up nearly as much of the slack of that as they CIG appeared to be hoping for. Now CIG is so far into it they seem to be locked in to having to develop all of these systems so they can make SC work the way they intended it to, while hoping Lumberyard can live on long enough as O3DE for them to turn around to license out these systems to bring in long-term reoccurring supplemental revenue (which is dependent on developers actually choosing Lumberyard/O3DE as their engine for their MMOs.)

The 'ooh shiny' is to keep generating revenue, the backend work won't generate revenue until it is a finished product that can be licensed out and when they talk about the backend processing progress in their videos people get bored very quickly then start complaining about that time being wasted instead of talking about the latest 'ooh shiny'.

The ooh shiny I was referring to is the feature creep and ever shifting priorities.

Deroth · Aug 31, 2023

Richard Bong said:
The ooh shiny I was referring to is the feature creep and ever shifting priorities.

'Feature Creep' ended years ago, what people are calling 'Feature Creep' for quite a while now would be more accurately described as 'Technical Debt'.
As Lorddarthvik pointed out quite well, the issues that're actually holding everything up is all the development and reworks of backend processes and systems (as well as asset generation and so much more) required to make SC run as a proper MMO from an engine that wasn't properly designed to work for MMOs ('multiplayer capable' is not the same thing as MMO) then was cobbled by Amazon to somewhat work for limited scope MMOs before turning it over to be open source.

If you look at Lumberyard, a total of ten games have been announced to use it since 2015, two are SQ42 and SC, one was Amazon's New World (which many players in here can speak to), three have been cancelled, one switched from Lumberyard to Unity, another was developed by Amazon in partnership with another company (and this game does not look to be doing well), and the remaining two look to have done very poorly in sales and reviews.
Then there is O3DE, which is what Lumberyard is known as now and CIG may be forced to at some point as it is no longer supported so licensing 3rd party modules for it would be pointless, so far the only game I've been able to find that had announced using it was mentioned above (started in Lumberyard, switched to O3DE, and is now using Unity), everything else is just tech demos with no future plans attached to them. So it seems to me nobody is wanting to touch it until they see what CIG does in regards to the Lumberyard to O3DE change that happened about two years ago.

Edit/Update:
I just noticed CIG finally removed Lumberyard from the launcher's splash window, so guess they did officially cut ties, don't play to switch to O3DE, and are going forward calling their own engine, that forked from CryEngine and Lumberyard, as 'StarEngine'. There are advantages to this, but that also adds more potential technical debt as they're currently the only ones using it or developing tools and assets for it, before it will be in a state to be used to creating additional games or marketing the engine to other developers.

Richard Bong · Aug 31, 2023

Deroth said:
'Feature Creep' ended years ago, what people are calling 'Feature Creep' for quite a while now would be more accurately described as 'Technical Debt'.
As Lorddarthvik pointed out quite well, the issues that're actually holding everything up is all the development and reworks of backend processes and systems (as well as asset generation and so much more) required to make SC run as a proper MMO from an engine that wasn't properly designed to work for MMOs ('multiplayer capable' is not the same thing as MMO) then was cobbled by Amazon to somewhat work for limited scope MMOs before turning it over to be open source.

If you look at Lumberyard, a total of ten games have been announced to use it since 2015, two are SQ42 and SC, one was Amazon's New World (which many players in here can speak to), three have been cancelled, one switched from Lumberyard to Unity, another was developed by Amazon in partnership with another company (and this game does not look to be doing well), and the remaining two look to have done very poorly in sales and reviews.
Then there is O3DE, which is what Lumberyard is known as now and CIG may be forced to at some point as it is no longer supported so licensing 3rd party modules for it would be pointless, so far the only game I've been able to find that had announced using it was mentioned above (started in Lumberyard, switched to O3DE, and is now using Unity), everything else is just tech demos with no future plans attached to them. So it seems to me nobody is wanting to touch it until they see what CIG does in regards to the Lumberyard to O3DE change that happened about two years ago.

Edit/Update:
I just noticed CIG finally removed Lumberyard from the launcher's splash window, so guess they did officially cut ties, don't play to switch to O3DE, and are going forward calling their own engine, that forked from CryEngine and Lumberyard, as 'StarEngine'. There are advantages to this, but that also adds more potential technical debt as they're currently the only ones using it or developing tools and assets for it, before it will be in a state to be used to creating additional games or marketing the engine to other developers.

No, I'm talking about feature creap.
For example, moving from the original "rest stops" to the bigger and grander stations we have now.

From the ground bases we have in Stanton to the ground bases we have been shown for Pyro.

Taking Pyro from the uninhabitable system it was, to the way it is currently displayed as.

Etc.

Deroth · Aug 31, 2023

Richard Bong said:
No, I'm talking about feature creap.
For example, moving from the original "rest stops" to the bigger and grander stations we have now.

From the ground bases we have in Stanton to the ground bases we have been shown for Pyro.

Taking Pyro from the uninhabitable system it was, to the way it is currently displayed as.

Etc.

The original rest stops were always a placeholder that were unsuitable for their long-term intended purpose, as more functionality that has been planned for a very long time gets implemented the stations will continue to grow and be reworked to support them. This falls under 'Technical Debt' as the more efficient approach is typically to not develop the stations, cities, ground bases, etc. until all the supporting features were developed so that these locations wouldn't need to be replaced, updated, or reworked.
Pyro was always stated to be 'mostly uninhabitable', but with a limited number of 'safe' locations, not made from pre-fabs but from what materials were available and by people not affiliated with the UEE, so if they didn't look different then that would cause a long list of complaints from players about not being according to lore and being too repetitive.

It seems like you're arguing for SC to be just like E:D's a mile wide but an inch deep setup where no matter where you go, what you do, or how far you travel, everything looks repetitive?

Richard Bong · Sep 1, 2023

Deroth said:
The original rest stops were always a placeholder that were unsuitable for their long-term intended purpose, as more functionality that has been planned for a very long time gets implemented the stations will continue to grow and be reworked to support them. This falls under 'Technical Debt' as the more efficient approach is typically to not develop the stations, cities, ground bases, etc. until all the supporting features were developed so that these locations wouldn't need to be replaced, updated, or reworked.
Pyro was always stated to be 'mostly uninhabitable', but with a limited number of 'safe' locations, not made from pre-fabs but from what materials were available and by people not affiliated with the UEE, so if they didn't look different then that would cause a long list of complaints from players about not being according to lore and being too repetitive.

It seems like you're arguing for SC to be just like E:D's a mile wide but an inch deep setup where no matter where you go, what you do, or how far you travel, everything looks repetitive?

SC isn't even an inch deep and It is entirely repetitive.

The statement when the stations were redone was "because the stations didn't look epic enough."

NaffNaffBobFace · Sep 1, 2023

Richard Bong said:
The statement when the stations were redone was "because the stations didn't look epic enough."

Was that when the Cry-Astro was replaced with the R&R?

Because I'm pretty sure it was to introduce hangars, interiors, shops and food access points, spawn points etc...?

Super interesting though, can you link us to the statement it was purely for aesthetics?

Sky Captain · Sep 1, 2023

Welcome back! I have no big concerns about CIG tackling unforeseen development obstacles so long as they are straight forward about those with the community who has been crowd-funding them. Its important that CR continue to give us a fair view of these issues, and hopefully he will use the upcoming Citizencon as a next platform to update us on those effectively. Regarding Squadron 42 holding back features from Star Citizen, that's totally been understandable, but its time to see some good news about it. Here's to seeing SQ42s release soon.

Richard Bong · Sep 1, 2023

NaffNaffBobFace said:
Was that when the Cry-Astro was replaced with the R&R?

Because I'm pretty sure it was to introduce hangars, interiors, shops and food access points, spawn points etc...?

Super interesting though, can you link us to the statement it was purely for aesthetics?

It was the video that introduced the new stations. The shops were in the "Rest Stops." In fact the interior layout of the "Rest Stops" were better and more logically laid out than they are now.

Lorddarthvik · Sep 1, 2023

Richard Bong said:
It was the video that introduced the new stations. The shops were in the "Rest Stops." In fact the interior layout of the "Rest Stops" were better and more logically laid out than they are now.

Yeah I memba that, I actually really liked the diversity of large and small practical easy to navigate stations. I miss the Rest Stops, now everything is just a huge freakin spacestation.
Back then they gave the reason of unifiying the hangar/ship storage/later cargo loading, thus the reason we lose PortO as well and only get enclosed hangars now. I don't get why that meant having to increase size 50x and redesign the interior to be illogical and harder to navigate, but sure, I'm no game dev, what do I know...

NaffNaffBobFace · Sep 1, 2023

Richard Bong said:
It was the video that introduced the new stations. The shops were in the "Rest Stops." In fact the interior layout of the "Rest Stops" were better and more logically laid out than they are now.

Lorddarthvik said:
Yeah I memba that, I actually really liked the diversity of large and small practical easy to navigate stations. I miss the Rest Stops, now everything is just a huge freakin spacestation.
Back then they gave the reason of unifiying the hangar/ship storage/later cargo loading, thus the reason we lose PortO as well and only get enclosed hangars now. I don't get why that meant having to increase size 50x and redesign the interior to be illogical and harder to navigate, but sure, I'm no game dev, what do I know...

Cheers you two, I have absolutely no memory of smaller stations - I know they added elevators for the Cargo decks and stuff which ballooned some of them but can't recall...

I like Long Forest and Faint Glen, they are both quite self contained, were the old rest stops like those...?

Creatives vs. Engineers

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