Star Citizen Megathread v. procedurally-generated deadlines - Games

[QUOTE=Lord Hayden;52239882]Aren't stretch goals designed to be for when you are ahead of schedule and can push further for additions to the final deliverable? I thought stretch goals were the one thing you'd specifically [i]not[/i] push back a release date for? EDIT: Just to clarify, I'm happy they did it, I think it'll add a lot more to the 3.0 release, I just don't particularly understand why they used the term 'stretch goal' for some particular things.[/QUOTE] because rampant scope creep is a thing CIG does best, but they're in the [I]very[/I] rare position of having customers that don't seem to care much (nor do they have a contractual deadline to meet for release). still wish they'd stop adding things at some point, though, and just push to a releasable state. then return and go mental with extra content.

certain features like planets work best if you integrate them sooner rather than later (or you end up with elite dangerous) but there are a lot of things that dont work like that which would be far better suited just being held off while they focus on releasing the meat of the game.

Wait they're getting rid of $0 CCU's? As in already purchased ones are being deleted, or new ones will have a mandatory $5 charge? Because if it's the former I'm gonna flip shit.

Originally, Levski was pencilled into the 3.0 goals as "we want this, but we'll cut it if it delays the schedule". This is what made it a "stretch goal" in the schedule, if it wasn't ready it was to be bumped to the next content patch. Priorities have now changed and Levski is now a confirmed target feature/content of 3.0 instead of a stretch goal, and the schedule was bumped out a week or two in order to accomodate the extra time it needs instead of rainchecking it. [QUOTE=mu ha ha;52240167]I'm thinking about upgrading my merchantman to an endeavor now that it's the same price.. I would have to pay $5, wait for it to come on sale and then wait for it to become flight ready, but once it's out, I'm thinking it would be a good HQ for operations. Should i do it ASAP or wait a bit and perhaps play around with the merchantman first?[/QUOTE] If you want a big science ship that can take different role-specific modules instead of a big trading-focused Banu ship, then go for it. But consider the following details: - It has grown considerably larger since the concept sale; CIG does not have the exact size but it is now closer to the size of a Polaris (155m) than its published length of 100m. The Endeavour's concept-blurb length is 200m. - It is still going to be a long time before either ship is ready. As of [URL="https://robertsspaceindustries.com/schedule-report"]the current schedule[/URL], it isn't slated to have more work done on it (due to higher-priority ships coming first) until October, and it's estimated to take them at least until May 1st, 2018. The Endeavour is not even slated to begin post-concept work in 2017 as of the current schedule. - Both of these ships are fairly large multicrew ships and will have a relatively high crew count to maintain. The Endeavour's published specs list a max crew of 16 people, while the MM, in its 100m concept specs, lists 8 but that is sure to increase with its increased size. - The Endeavour is a research platform with module options to turn it into a floating hangar/base, a hospital ship, a floating hydroponics lab, a drug lab (for criminal operations), an equipment-tweaking platform (how a supercollider allows you to do this, I don't know), and even a space telescope platform for exploration (finding rogue celestial objects by comparing starfield photos and looking for what moves between exposures, among other things, according to the concept sale). - By comparison, the Banu Merchantman is a merchant ship with living quarters for the crew and is designed to excel in every way in its primary function, including resilience and comfort. There will likely be options to transform the MM's role into something else (e.g. filling the cargo space with science shit and turning it into a Banu-themed exploration/research platform or something) as it's developed, since the Banu are a race that devotes incredible effort into caste-like career specialization, but until CIG actually reveals that it's speculation with no hard details as to what those options could be if they're even coming. What matters is what [I]you[/I] want to do, because every ship in SC is geared towards certain roles while being capable of adequately handling most general tasks, so the "best" ship is the one that's good at what you want to do and the size/crew count that works for you and is within your pledge/credit budget. [editline]17th May 2017[/editline] [B]Also, on the CCU thing,[/B] CIG has changed their minds on the process, and they're tackling the issue in a different way instead of hamfistedly applying a $5 surcharge on CCUs. [URL="https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/1/thread/spaceship-prices/175177"]Zyloh explains the entire problem, the rationale, and the solution they will be implementing.[/URL] I'm going to copy it here in full because I think it's really important to see the entire explanation, so don't bug me for making this post so fucking huge. [QUOTE]Hey everybody, On Friday we mentioned that we’d be making some changes to the CCU system with the Eclipse sale. Rather than raising the price of CCU's, we’ve decided to take a different approach. The CCU and ‘melt’ systems were created to give backers the kind of choices they wouldn’t get from a normal publisher. We knew that concept ships were going to change as the game’s systems were built out and balanced after their initial sale. So early on we ensured that backers could melt a pledge for the full amount of credit put towards that pledge, and then use that full amount of credit towards a different pledge. However a problem occurred when people wanted to keep elements of their original game package – say the physical goods, or the LTI on the ship, as melting destroyed the whole package. This created a major Customer Service overhead, where we had to add and change packages manually. So the CCU system was developed to allow backers to keep the current features of their game package, but swap out the digital ship. Between these two systems, in many cases it has become a game itself to navigate the system to end up with the ship of your dreams, but has also enabled some exploits that do not benefit all backers. We have identified an issue related to the stockpiling of $0 CCU's. As we previously stated, there are more than 1.1 million unused CCUs in the system today. 1.05 million of these are $0 ‘cross trades’ and the vast majority of these are held, unused, by significantly less than one percent of Star Citizen backers. Some people have thousands of $0 CCU's on their account at this time, which is clearly an abuse of the system. A very small number of users are creating a scenario where they can get a limited ship in the future, without having put any value towards the right to do so. With a stock of $0 CCUs on their account, they can generate ships to sell to other users for their own profit. There is also a potential design issue related to the number of ships in the universe at launch. We are getting to the point where we need to drill down deeper on things like ship rarity, overall dispersion and the like. When we don’t know how many ships may be present at launch, this makes it much more difficult. The implications there are far-reaching: if Carracks are the most popular ship then we need to put more resources on exploration… if Buccaneers are everywhere then we need to build missions that will be challenging and fun for Bucc pilots. It’s something that touches every part of Star Citizen. All of that said: we’ve spent some time thinking about options to address this, which don’t include an extra charge. While we need to end the abuse of the $0 CCUs, we understand that these systems help all backers and reassure people who are just starting the game. We’ve settled on a plan that will eliminate $0 CCUs without impacting the benefits of the CCU and melting systems in general. The first part is very simple, we will eliminate the $0 CCU from concept sales starting with this week’s sale. If you have a ship of equivalent value and you want to use store credit, you can of course melt it and purchase the store credit version. This should greatly reduce stockpiling of CCU's. The second part is longer term, but very important: we will plan for a process to expire the unused $0 CCUs from the system. We want existing CCUs to be used as intended: to pick a ship that works for you, and not as a permanent ‘anything goes’ option. This will not happen immediately, but as we approach 3.0 it will be an important part of this process. And we want you to know in advance that this is coming. This simple solution should address the issues we've discussed here. Our goal is to make Star Citizen the best game it can be for all players. As always, we thank you for your support.[/QUOTE] [B]TL;DR[/B] CCUs were intended to make getting the ship you want easy without having to melt if you had an equal-priced ship, but a tiny segment of backers are stockpiling thousands of them and potentially using them to generate personal profit off CIG's back on the grey market. CIG needs the massive stockpiles of $0 CCUs to go away for scheduling priority reasons as well as the abusive aspects of the grey market, so as of the Aegis Eclipse concept $0 CCUs will no longer be offered going forward, and, [I]at a near-future date[/I], CIG is going to roll out a gradual process to begin expiring the CCU stockpile to stem the abuse.

[QUOTE=elixwhitetail;52234433]I volunteered to write the rejection letter[/QUOTE] Still better than what I did when it came to responding to ban appeals in the RC. [img]http://i.imgur.com/DjCrZQe.png[/img]

[QUOTE=Mattk50;52240897]certain features like planets work best if you integrate them sooner rather than later (or you end up with elite dangerous) but there are a lot of things that dont work like that which would be far better suited just being held off while they focus on releasing the meat of the game.[/QUOTE] There's a lot of changes that make sense - like deciding to spend more time upgrading the engine, completely redoing a lot of the netcode, revamping the interaction system, adding procedural planets, improving the toolbox accessible to designers and artists and so on. These changes I mentioned though are all more of architectural changes that enhance the ability to add actual features - scope creep or delays for this stuff totally makes sense. The same doesn't apply for just general features, imo. But, the caveat here is that I'm not a game developer (hell, I'm hardly even a developer/programmer at all) and there's a lot more stuff that I [I]don't[/I] know than stuff I know. [sp]I only know scope creep, though, because fuckin NASA loves themselves some scope creep and it fucks with our contracts and my software dev work lol[/sp]

if they don't want people to hoard CCUs why don't $0 ones just expire when the sale ends

I'm thinking about upgrading, what do you think is better a Freelancer or a Constellation (any variant). I want a ship which is good solo as well as with a party of people and I defo want one of those podracer things I saw in a tech demo on my ship. I also want a decent amount of maneuverability and weapon power. I am really stuck with this choice

[QUOTE=joshthesmith;52246038]I'm thinking about upgrading, what do you think is better a Freelancer or a Constellation (any variant). I want a ship which is good solo as well as with a party of people and I defo want one of those podracer things I saw in a tech demo on my ship. I also want a decent amount of maneuverability and weapon power. I am really stuck with this choice[/QUOTE] The Freelancer is like a moving van to the Connie's semi - it's smaller but the crew demands are fewer. It depends on how ambitious you want to be. It also has a smaller capacity for max crew - a Connie can be expected to use use 5+ people if everyone gets into a turret or a crew station, once multicrew role differentiation is fleshed out. The Connie is more versatile and has a snub fighter it can launch for harassment/support (may not apply to the Connie Taurus without additional in-universe equipment purchase), while the 'lancer has its own guns and missiles and is supposed to pack a reasonable enough punch to defending itself against fighters. I'd say a Freelancer is better as a solo ship, since a Connie suffers in combat if its turrets aren't manned. Bigger isn't always better, since the running costs (and profit potential) will be higher for a larger ship. However, if you can handle AI crew (once that's a thing), a Connie might be more your speed if you're looking for a versatile boat that your friends can jam on when you're all together. [video=youtube;xKRX0ZwzXqk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKRX0ZwzXqk[/video] [t]https://robertsspaceindustries.com/media/uqceivqlombzor/source/Aegis-Eclipse-L4-Piece-2-Hangar-Presentation-007.jpg[/t] The Aegis Eclipse concept sale begins tomorrow, but a special presale has begun for Concierge. The concept sale materials have not been released, but the ship is available for sale to Concierge, warbond (new cash only) $250 with LTI. [QUOTE]Armed with multiple torpedoes and state-of-the-art scan diffusing technology, the Aegis Eclipse has been the UEE’s best, and least known, protection. It is the Navy’s top choice in border defense and a preferred first-strike weapon against the Vanduul. Now, in an effort to increase transparency with the Xi’an, the Eclipse is declassified and available for purchase by Citizens. [IMG]https://robertsspaceindustries.com/media/6287yxauec1g9r/tavern_upload_square/Eclipse-Patch-Sml.png[/IMG] PLEASE NOTE: The ‘First Wave’ War Bond SKU will be available exclusively during this 24-hour preview for Concierge members. The ship includes a unique serial stamp, an additional in-game poster featuring the Project Eclipse logo, an alternate ship skin and a Clearance Level Ultra forum badge. Ships sold after the preview, starting Friday May 19, will not include the forum badge. Additional data and technically specifications will be made available as part of the event. You are receiving this advanced notice because of your status as a loyal UEE Citizen. Until the official announcement, this information is classified ULTRA and should not be shared with non-Citizens.[/QUOTE] [QUOTE]You are receiving this advanced notice because of your status as a loyal UEE Citizen. Until the official announcement, this information is classified ULTRA and should not be shared with non-Citizens.[/QUOTE] :dogsleep:

[QUOTE=BANNED USER;52241177]Still better than what I did when it came to responding to ban appeals in the RC. [img]http://i.imgur.com/DjCrZQe.png[/img][/QUOTE] I'll be sure to use this the next time I get banned

Thanks for that, went and got the lancer. Saw that the turret mounts are S5 Weird because I got some m6a's (S4) to stick on the manned turret points and they do not appear in the ship customization? Am I doing something wrong here

I don't think it means you can put S5 guns on the mount. It means the attachment point is S5. A manned turret in an S5 slot reduces the gun size to S3 (-2 size class). A gimbal mount reduces size by 1, as does making something a dual mount. I don't have a Freelancer owner so any 'lancer owners can give a better answer, but if you get some S3s on REC you'll probably find they'll attach. I hope you didn't buy them in Voyager Direct.

Making it so people with cash get early access is very meh to me. I love this game in every way. but this sale + marketing has been the worse so far. i was going to upgrade my ship to this (or even melt it) but i can't do that. so i miss out on the early serial's and the forum badge. Not only that but there wasn't a heads up on the bonuses either. Very meh.

They started the Warbond program to bring in fresh cash because people were using the melt and buyback system [I]too[/I] much, so I can't blame them for the extra little incentives. They've had these cash-only-for-24-hours sales before, and all it does is give the people with no impulse control/people who had already decided they were going to buy it a chance to lock themselves in and feel a sense of exclusivity. I'm not sure about tying a unique skin and, more egregiously, a forum badge, to it. That just encourages whale elitism. It was tolerable when it was just the generalized pledge level badges, based on the original Kickstarter-era tiers, and most badges have been obtainable by anyone (beat the web minigames, get fooled by the Big Benny ship skin on 4/1). Now you've got a badge that says "I threw down $250 on a ship after already spending a grand" and that's going to incentivize the wrong kind of whale behaviour. They've done the "unique serials to Warbond presale" thing before, but AFAIK it was also open to subscribers and wasn't as expensive and didn't come with the extra goodies, so it was less of a whale bait sale.

It really is impressive on how fast they're improving the engine, what they're doing with fog is similar to Natural Selection 2's atmospherics, just on steroids. The game just keeps getting prettier and prettier, but at what cost. [QUOTE=Ott;52246327]I'll be sure to use this the next time I get banned[/QUOTE] You seem to misunderstand, that's how I replied to people I permabanned when I was a mod, it's not really useful to anyone who gets banned. It was me being a smarmy dick.

[QUOTE=elixwhitetail;52246487]I don't think it means you can put S5 guns on the mount. It means the attachment point is S5. A manned turret in an S5 slot reduces the gun size to S3 (-2 size class). A gimbal mount reduces size by 1, as does making something a dual mount. I don't have a Freelancer owner so any 'lancer owners can give a better answer, but if you get some S3s on REC you'll probably find they'll attach. I hope you didn't buy them in Voyager Direct.[/QUOTE] Luckily no just with REC but thanks for the info, I will have to keep it in mind. Standard cannons are pretty decent anyway ty for info

Is there an archive somewhere of gifs from various things shown in around the verse and such stuff? I feel i've missed a lota stuff since i have only watched the latest one or two months worth of any gameplay, while the last thing i saw before that was the sand planet.

Reddit might have something like that, but I'm not aware of any organized collection. Sometimes people make supercuts, like this one from a month ago that shows off a lot of good stuff, including the Javelin. [video=youtube;QdhqiF9tRYA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdhqiF9tRYA[/video]

Yea i have watched a few of those. But i am particularly interessted in gifs since they are easy to share with others.

[QUOTE=icefox;52246525]Making it so people with cash get early access is very meh to me.[/QUOTE] man I misread the point of the message at first, but still there wasn't really any 'early access' except to some worthless bragging rights ship serial numbers the Concierge forum always seems to bitch about being given concierge-only deals that cost extra money, though I didn't even care to check the fallout of this thing's announcement

[video=youtube;oZIzExVmZMo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZIzExVmZMo[/video] [video=youtube;QPn3_raqtjw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPn3_raqtjw[/video] [video=youtube;dfHelHfUnaM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfHelHfUnaM[/video] [URL="https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/engineering/15921-Q-A-Aegis-Eclipse"]Aegis Eclipse Q&A[/URL] [URL="https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/spectrum-dispatch/15920-Clean-Shot-The-Baker-Backup"]Security on the Xi'An-UEE border is tightening significantly[/URL] for undisclosed reasons. [I]Great[/I].

Was thinking of making a drinking game where you have to take a shot every time someone someone mentions Item 2.0 in ATV, but I don't want to die of liver failure.

[QUOTE=Lord Hayden;52275803]Was thinking of making a drinking game where you have to take a shot every time someone someone mentions Item 2.0 in ATV, but I don't want to die of liver failure.[/QUOTE] Don't worry, you're about to hear that 200 more times when CIG misses the deadline yet again

[QUOTE=MendozaMan;52276104]Don't worry, you're about to hear that 200 more times when CIG misses the deadline yet again[/QUOTE] Good ol' Chris [URL="https://youtu.be/wnPm3h6sl84?t=107"]"Whaddaya Know, Haddi-Man"[/URL] Roberts.

[QUOTE=MendozaMan;52276104]Don't worry, you're about to hear that 200 more times when CIG misses the deadline yet again[/QUOTE] Can they really miss a deadline though? Don't they just move it like they have been for the last couple years? EDIT: So, hearing about how the delta patcher is in QA now, what are the chances we might actually start seeing weekly builds after 3.0 drops? If we started getting consistent updates after 3.0 I'd be damn happy, regardless of how buggy they can be.

[QUOTE=Lord Hayden;52277297]So, hearing about how the delta patcher is in QA now, what are the chances we might actually start seeing weekly builds after 3.0 drops? If we started getting consistent updates after 3.0 I'd be damn happy, regardless of how buggy they can be.[/QUOTE] Unlikely, unless it was some sort of special Evocati-like division or CIG was doing rapid rebalancing passes (and that's more a beta thing). The full QA checklist, which is to say QA exhaustively testing [I]everything[/I] in the game, and as I understand it something that is required on every live build before it's greenlit, is massive. It takes several people an entire day to do. A release is a major undertaking. The bandwidth reduction isn't the only consideration in pushing builds to live. Concievably, I could see weeklies on PTU once the game's moving closer to beta, when the netcode overhaul's mostly polished and Stanton's out and the big things they're working on are career gameplay, but not any sooner.

Just skimmed over the 3.0 schedule report and damn, there's a lot of stuff scheduled for the next couple days. Next schedule report is going to be an interesting one.

[QUOTE=Lord Hayden;52275803]Was thinking of making a drinking game where you have to take a shot every time someone someone mentions Item 2.0 in ATV, but I don't want to die of liver failure.[/QUOTE] [video=youtube;qkCuBdPpj18]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkCuBdPpj18[/video] Let's just imagine how anyone would've managed through this weeks drinking game, just from he title. EDIT: I really enjoyed this ATV (I always skip Turbulent's segment, I've got very little interest in Spectrum/Website updates). Everyone talks about how Item 2.0 has been the key to everything for so long, but hearing and seeing how it actually ties in with [i]so many[/i] features in depth instead of just "It's important and does lots" was really good. It also gives me a lot more hope for moddability in the future without having to study programming etc. for a few years. Seems like a lot of custom content could be controlled through Item 2.0s editor, and from the way they described it and showed the Item 2.0 editor, it could transfer over to a node based editor similar to Unreal's blueprint system. Speaking of which, I've always wondered where SC would be today if Chris had decided to develop on Unreal or Unity instead of CryEngine/Lumberyard. Every time someone mentions "Stock CryEngine does so and so and we needed to work around that so we had to recode the entire thing" I just hear that as "CryEngine has stupid logic no other engine uses, so we made it like other engines", although it could be the same with other engines too.

[QUOTE=Lord Hayden;52302358]Speaking of which, I've always wondered where SC would be today if Chris had decided to develop on Unreal or Unity instead of CryEngine/Lumberyard. Every time someone mentions "Stock CryEngine does so and so and we needed to work around that so we had to recode the entire thing" I just hear that as "CryEngine has stupid logic no other engine uses, so we made it like other engines", although it could be the same with other engines too.[/QUOTE] Unity would have been unsustainable for the absurd scope they have. If they went with Unreal, they would have been with Unreal Engine 3, as Star Citizen was before the release of UE4. Moving to UE4 would have required a from the ground re-write as well, so that wouldn't have been a graceful choice. Then of course they could have written their own engine from scratch. CryEngine wasn't exactly a [I]great[/I] choice, but there weren't really any great choices available. For the stupid crazy absurd "if you ask, it's on the feature list" scope of Star Citizen, no matter what engine they would have gone with it would have required massive and fundamental rewrites. There are simply no off the shelf and mature engines that support the lunacy of Star Citizen. At this point their version of CryEngine is practically its own engine, and considering how long the project has gone on, and how far the scope has been pushed, it's arguable that with hindsight a scratch built engine may have been the best way to go from a technological perspective. However, I don't think they would have raked in money hand over fist with sales of JPGs because they would be flyable so much later and having the playable mess that is the hangar, Arena Commander, and Port Olisar, has been a huge boon keeping the money coming in. Without that money, they wouldn't be able to hire the engine talent they have now, so it becomes a chicken or the egg problem and you come back to the idea that perhaps the best way they could lift themselves by their own bootstraps was to do exactly what they did.

Whats the size of the alpha to nowadays?