There are no doubts star citizen has wasted money got things wrong and so on. Star marine outsource an easy example, planet stations another. What is much harder to know is how normal this is or not in game development. The biggest issue though for me is the money has gone the game is nowhere near a finished product unless they hiding everything.
Forbes fact checking - Yes, court docs are public
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I'm inclined to agree, but I can say definitively this is normal in game development, as it is normal in most software development projects. It is not best practices, just normal. Scope creep and feature creep are too, which is why those terms are as old as Mount Everest. Sometimes it's referred to as "Kitchen Sink Syndrome", and it's a communicable disease that will make many iterations through a company before an inoculation method is found.
I agree most software development projects have a plethora of attempted enhancements and wrong directions when the project has a set budget and known projected goals. This is compounded significantly when projects are kick started as the project scope expands drastically with the increase funding. In fact if you go over any project on Kickstarter you'll see the very design philosophy with in the web site is to fund scope creep and enhanced project goals which has lead to significant project failure (SC could easily have been one if they where not able to find new revenue streams with the success of their ship sales)
I personally was very worried when CIG took the project off its initial kickstarter stated goals and started moving in this direction as it was well outside the original stated game design and seemed to be over flushed with cash and no true direction. This changed with 2.0 and we are starting to see the final game shaping up, but the huge success really is the cause of the delay for the game we have now and will have when closer to completion is no where near what we were promised initially. I for one am over joyed with the new direction even if its taking over a decade to achieve.
I personally was very worried when CIG took the project off its initial kickstarter stated goals and started moving in this direction as it was well outside the original stated game design and seemed to be over flushed with cash and no true direction. This changed with 2.0 and we are starting to see the final game shaping up, but the huge success really is the cause of the delay for the game we have now and will have when closer to completion is no where near what we were promised initially. I for one am over joyed with the new direction even if its taking over a decade to achieve.
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Grimm_Reaper
Space Marshal
From what I see, if they wan't they can roll out the game as is. They can move it to beta, polish it, create a jumpgate to connect galaxies create more missions within the exisitng planets and cities and it will have more content than Anthem, ED, warframe etc. The roll out can include mining, cargo transport, passenger transport, bounty hunting, FPS and space battles (escorts vs pirates). Vaandul can randomly spawn at border sites with no access to their planet and area until a future update.
Honestly even if CR bows out due to personal issues, CIG is big enough to continue without him. I'm not saying he will, I'm just finding it funny that people think the whole endeavor will fail without him at the helm.
Anyway I think what really held SC back more than anything else was the decision to switch from Cryengine to Lumberyard. I heard that there was quite a bit of content that had to be tossed out (ie. Terra landing zone) because of that. Granted a lot of that demo stuff now looks really dated so I'm actually glad they did that. Anyway I think they'll be full steam ahead with the PU after SQ42. I've said it before but my biggest worry is server meshing, without that...this whole thing is dead in the water.
Yeah that's the stuff I worry about....not CR/Sandi's kink. Who gives a shit.
Anyway I think what really held SC back more than anything else was the decision to switch from Cryengine to Lumberyard. I heard that there was quite a bit of content that had to be tossed out (ie. Terra landing zone) because of that. Granted a lot of that demo stuff now looks really dated so I'm actually glad they did that. Anyway I think they'll be full steam ahead with the PU after SQ42. I've said it before but my biggest worry is server meshing, without that...this whole thing is dead in the water.
Yeah that's the stuff I worry about....not CR/Sandi's kink. Who gives a shit.
Oooh, I didn't hear about that. I clicked your link but i couldn't find any details on it, could you substantiate with a bit more info? :)
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I don't think this is really going to be a big problem for CIG. If it is, just point them in the direction of Unigen Corp if they start having problems. Unigen is not a gaming company, they're a rendering technology company. There are some other gaming companies using their software libraries. I'm not really very familiar with them, but I looked at it for a different reason, the product is used for industrial and scientific simulations.
Eh I must have linked the wrong video. Anyway there was a demo video posted years ago that purported to be the Terra landing area. For the longest time, Terra Prime was to be what Arccorp is now. The shiny ecumenopolis for players to be based out of. The folks at CIG also said that it was pretty advanced and a great peek as to what's to come. Anyway we've heard absolutely nothing about Terra ever since. There were a bunch of rumors floating around that it all had to be scrapped due to the switch over to planetary landings and the Lumberyard Engine. CR claimed a lot of the assets were reused and no progress was loss but consider this....that was 6 years ago. I may be talking out of my ass but I believe if they had any progress, they would have pumped out more demos already. I mean CIG is notorious for that after all...new demo/trailer, more ships sold amirite? Anyway I believe all of that was binned, I'm sure the concept art will be kept but yeah. I'll love to be proven wrong though.
It's not about rendering though....nothing to do with graphics, more to do with server overloading. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the problem lies with the load placed on the servers when thousands of players all decide to play in the same area at the same time? Single servers simply can't handle the load period. Hence the whole meshing of servers thing. Folks who played EVE Online know what I'm talking about. EVE Online simplified it by making the game non-twitch based and the usage of cheats like Time-dilation (Time slows down so the servers can handle it). When a big battle happens, additional servers would be assigned to the areas that need it. EVE Alliances are even known to contact the game admins to inform them of the systems to prioritize for an upcoming big battle.
SC takes it to a whole other level as it is twitch based and the multicrewed ships add in another level of complication. Anyway I believe this is their biggest challenge. If they can pull it off and truly deliver on an acceptable single server gaming experience, they'll have pull offed a miracle. If they can do that, everything that comes after will be easy, until then everything is trivial (FOIP, new ships, bikes, whatever...all a waste of resources IMO).
If they roll out the game as is, it will definitely go down as a failure. They are even now pedalling huge ships which have no chance of working without quality server meshing.
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Thanks for the video,, much appreciated. I watched, read the description and noted the date it was uploaded, 6 Sep 2013...
Based on what I see, I have a slightly different angle:
The context of the work contained in that video was that the last day of the Kickstarter was November 19th 2012. The demo was released September 6th 2013, only 9 months and 17 days later...
As the technology and mechanics and scale of the game have become more powerful I don't doubt they had to abandon a lot of previously created assets, but I think it happened a long time before the switch to Lumberyard. Think about it: would any asset created only 9 months after the Kickstarter be able to handle what SC has become? They've had to rebuild the 300i, the Cutlass, and all of the early ships have now had revamps to bring them in line with the game today, some minor like the Perfect Aurora, some drastic like the Crummy Mustang which was essentially a brand new ship... Could that terra Landing Zone have handled Server Meshing? The Inner thoughts system? The new Cargo mechanics? Could you land a Reclaimer there?
I don't think it would have been able to be incorporated even if CIG has stuck with CryTech. It's not bad work, not bad at all, but it's work based on what the game would have been if it had launched a year later in 2014.
I don't think you are wrong that a bunch of early stuff, if not all, went to the wall (farewell my aggressively styled 350R), but I don't think it was Lumberyard that was the reason for it.
However I admit I too may be talking out of my ass, as well
we just don't know. Best not to say stuff like we do, though 
We'll see. I do acknowledge that the game is behind schedule. You don't need a rag like Forbes or anti-Star Citizen trolls to tell you that. That said, I'm cautiously optimistic and I think CIG will be vindicated in the long run. It's just been soooo long (I'm a 2012 backer).
Haha. Half the fun of supporting a game in development is to be able to do just that.
DorianSkyphire
Space Marshal
My only concern (which is a bit stronger than how I feel really, but the word is appropriate), is in the interest of transparency, all employee salaries should be posted, if not by name, by job title. In the case of executives (VP and higher), the title kind of gives away who it is, but whatever. I can generally get that information from any other company I have invested in, or would want to invest in. It's not an unreasonable ask.
Grimm_Reaper
Space Marshal
Problem with that is in an industry with rampant poaching of employees, any of the other bigger developers and publishers could poach CIG employees by giving them a better deal.
DorianSkyphire
Space Marshal
That is a risk for ANY tech related career/industry/company. I'm pretty sure that most people, let alone competitors, could have a ballpark idea for what most job titles are paid at CIG without a lot of effort. The senior execs are the only ones that have a fog of war around them, when it comes to salary/benefits ;)
What really irks me is CR's decision to appoint Sandi Gardiner as VP of Marketing or whatever. I mean ex-Model/C-grade Actress turned executive? In a publicly listed company that sort of nepotism would turn all sorts of heads. I work in the film industry and the running joke is that when high flying directors/producers want to get their significant others on the company payroll they make them an 'associate producer'. I have nothing against her personally but that sort of appointment just gives easy ammo to the anti-SC crowd. The Forbes piece is shit but their comments about Roberts/Gardiner's murky finances has some merit.
Correct @NaffNaffBobFace that was what was being produced by sub contractors when the game was still with in the initial development scope. Changing the game from Crytek to Lumberyard did not do much as Amazon bought the source code of Crytek engine. The nice thing about Amazon buying the Crytek source code is it allows them to integrate their AWS severs into the server layer of the engine which gives it an advantage over other engines like Unreal and Unity. While I am not sure how much CIG is using this feature if at all due to their working on their own server mesh technology it will help other game studios in the future.
Currently, SC servers are like all the other game servers in that they handle a fixed game world, in this case, the whole persistent universe. Much like Dice's Battlefield 4 handles 64 players on a single map or Valves Counter-Strike. CIG could go the direction of having each server handle prefixed game worlds like one server handling only Area 18, another handling the planet of Arc Corp with others handling anticipated chunks of their universe. And while this would be easy to spin up it would be highly wasteful given the size of the planned SC universe and how spread out the player population can get with the vast majority of the servers having no Players on them at all and others being overloaded because it became a hot spot of player interaction. CIG is attempting to address this by allowing the servers to divide up the game worlds dynamically and so if Test has a meet up on Grim Hex as we start to stumble there the server would shrink the game world it is handling to try and keep stable. Going from say the area around Crusader to possibly just a 10 Km area around Grim Hex while other servers either take up the remaining area around Crusader or new servers are brought online to handle the area if there are any players in it. This doesn't mean that Grim Hex will be able to scale upward to 10's of thousands of drunk Test pilots crashing into things as there will an upper limit due to hardware limitations but it should allow for a more seamless experience then we get with zone loading as we currently see in games like World of Warcraft or Eve-Online.
It is not just thousands of players its tens if not hundreds of thousands of objects the servers have to track and validate along with AI subroutines. Eve does accomplish this with what they call time-dilation which allows the server more time to calculate the state change for the next game tick. In fact, you can think of a server tick as the same thing as your client fps as its the redrawing and validating of the game state. While the server doesn't need to calculate shadows and other graphics effects it still needs to track all object locations, collision detection, update physic objects update all the clients with the state of the game world as well as retain multiple ticks due to network latency for recalculating post tick hit detection (allows you to put your crosshairs on where the object is currently rendering instead of having to predict where the object will be when your client update pack is processed by the server).
Currently, SC servers are like all the other game servers in that they handle a fixed game world, in this case, the whole persistent universe. Much like Dice's Battlefield 4 handles 64 players on a single map or Valves Counter-Strike. CIG could go the direction of having each server handle prefixed game worlds like one server handling only Area 18, another handling the planet of Arc Corp with others handling anticipated chunks of their universe. And while this would be easy to spin up it would be highly wasteful given the size of the planned SC universe and how spread out the player population can get with the vast majority of the servers having no Players on them at all and others being overloaded because it became a hot spot of player interaction. CIG is attempting to address this by allowing the servers to divide up the game worlds dynamically and so if Test has a meet up on Grim Hex as we start to stumble there the server would shrink the game world it is handling to try and keep stable. Going from say the area around Crusader to possibly just a 10 Km area around Grim Hex while other servers either take up the remaining area around Crusader or new servers are brought online to handle the area if there are any players in it. This doesn't mean that Grim Hex will be able to scale upward to 10's of thousands of drunk Test pilots crashing into things as there will an upper limit due to hardware limitations but it should allow for a more seamless experience then we get with zone loading as we currently see in games like World of Warcraft or Eve-Online.
I think most people would agree nothing about Star Citizen since its epic crowd funding is normal, the fact that Chris Roberts original plan was miniscule in comparison to what we have today because of the enormous amounts of player funding they had to re-imagine the entire game and basically start over. That could also be its biggest problem as well because the scale of this game is so insanely large and dynamic many people wonder if they can pull it off, at least the version they have sold us the backers. Its a smart bet due to funding and time constraints it will most likely be smaller in scale in the beginning and some promises and goals won't be implemented at its release I would almost bet on it myself but that doesn't mean it wont eventually reach its goal.
Sounds like it is political to me. Its a hit job, pure and simple... but today, if you are in the public, no matter what you do, you are hosed. My mortgage is online, speeding tickets, and who knows what else. Something needs to change with our PII being spread all over the internet. For a felon or child predator, okay... but for Valhalla sake, this other crap needs to be private - mortgage, speeding tickets, etc. My son's generation is hosed.
Nicotine
Space Marshal
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Think Forbes have other computer related issues to worry about right now!
Breaking news: Bank-card-slurping malware sneaks into Forbes' mag subscription website
Dead-tree devotees who recently signed up may want to check their statements
www.theregister.co.uk
Breaking news: Bank-card-slurping malware sneaks into Forbes' mag subscription website
Dead-tree devotees who recently signed up may want to check their statements
Breaking news: Bank-card-slurping malware sneaks into Forbes' mag subscription website
Dead-tree devotees who recently signed up may want to check their statements
www.theregister.co.uk