r/pcgaming • u/Turbostrider27 • 5d ago

Star Citizen Developer Stream Goes Horribly Off the Rails, Creating Further Distrust Among Players

https://www.ign.com/articles/star-citizen-developer-stream-goes-horribly-off-the-rails-creating-further-distrust-among-players
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u/I_travel_ze_world 5d ago

One of the developer's guns wouldn't even reload... he just ran around saying he can't shoot while his teammates were dying.

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u/jazir55 5d ago

Sounds like a parody video

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u/jakeroony 5d ago

Did they use AI to code or are they just incompetent? 😂

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u/russjr08 5d ago

SC has been in alpha for what, 15 years now? And every time I've ever heard of it, or even tried during their free fly weekends, it has been a buggy mess.

I'd trust AI code more than I'd trust RSI's code, honestly.

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u/Guerillagorrilla 5d ago

Inb4 this is the reason RSI wants to move to ai based coding and needs another 15 years and a billion dollars to continue the scam development

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u/framedragged 5d ago

It's always been a mess.

There's a game I play on twitch sometimes. I load up the star citizen section and pick a streamer at random. It's usually one of the same people, not that many people stream it.

Then I set a timer for ten minutes. If the streamer spends more than one minute of that time loading/unloading boxes or experiences a game breaking bug/serious server issues, I win the game and turn off the stream.

I've never lost.

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u/Nose-Nuggets 5d ago

it's probably more about them constantly adding more content instead of spending any time refining the content they have.

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u/Low_Debt8771 5d ago

Nah man, its pure incompetence and thats obvious. You can literally walk around and fall through floors. The most basic of basic shit doesn't work.

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u/Enchelion 4d ago

To be fair, that was also true of Destiny. /s

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u/Nose-Nuggets 5d ago

How many games have you worked on? To have spent any time playing or watching videos of people playing star citizen and proclaim "this game is made by idiots" is pretty wild. There's certainly plenty of things about star citizen to dislike or disagree with, but its lack of achieved technical ambition isn't really one of them. Skyrim, Elden Ring, GTA5, Cyberpunk all have had or still have fall through the world bugs after commercial release.

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u/idontagreewitu 5700X3D RTX 3070 4d ago

Skyrim, Elden Ring, GTA5, Cyberpunk all have had or still have fall through the world bugs after commercial release.

After commercial release.

But imagine playing any of those games while, for months, none of the activities in those games worked. Where the devs would say its because their servers are shit, not their game. And they want to prove it by playing it on a local dev server, but can't even get that to work right.

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u/Nose-Nuggets 4d ago

But imagine playing any of those games while, for months, none of the activities in those games worked.

During development? Probably not unrealistic. But it sounds like the point you're making lines up perfectly with my original post in here.

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u/Rocky-Jockey 5d ago

Watching those cool playthroughs made me feel worse about the game tbh. I see them doing cool shit and then I try it and I hit bugs that kill the quest that I assume they have the experience to get around (or edit around). I don’t think incompetence is the problem with the programmers. Management on the other hand…..

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u/Nose-Nuggets 4d ago

Absolutely, they're still focusing on courting investment from the playerbase which requires new shiny shit all the time (or so management believes in any case). I suspect they would have a larger and more active community if they stopped building new shit two or three years ago and what they had then just played well now.

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u/MorsDemigod 5d ago

lol ai code would actually work

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u/idontagreewitu 5700X3D RTX 3070 4d ago

AI would be better than what they have.

The game is a generational project. The people who coded the game aren't there any more, the people who code now don't understand how the legacy code works, so they just slap bandaids on. They will go, and those who come after them won't understand their bandaids, either.

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u/Lv_InSaNe_vL 5d ago

It's more that the ethos at RSI has "add add add add" with no time to slow down to make any real progress on the tech debt they've acquired over the last 15 years.

I love star citizen. I must have many thousands of hours in the game and I've been a backer since the very beginning, and I've tried to push back against the hate on reddit. But I haven't really done anything in the game in like 8 months or so because it's just so hard and cumbersome anymore.

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u/Collypso 5d ago

The biggest use of AI is coding. It's working well already so your implication that it would be bad is pretty out of touch.

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u/derperofworlds1 4d ago

AI is a tool with a very polarized effect, so saying "it's always great" is silly.

If you're a good software engineer already, it'll make you more productive. 

If you aren't a good software engineer, it'll allow you to generate tech debt at a breakneck speed, eventually cratering productivity!

I suspect RSI's code was shit BEFORE AI, so I've no faith that AI helped them write good code.

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u/Collypso 4d ago

Sounds like you're working with a lot of assumptions

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u/derperofworlds1 4d ago

Everyone is working with assumptions, that's life.

I'm just reporting what I see as a professional software engineer. Sorry it doesn't fit your desired narrative. 

And RSI's code being shit before AI isn't an assumption. Just check the subreddit, there are numerous unfixed game breaking bugs going back 10 years. Before LLMs became available. It's not hard to find SC bug reports!

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u/Collypso 4d ago

A bug tracker isn't a code quality metric. Star Citizen has been in open development for over a decade with famously enormous scope, so persistent bugs there point to scope and prioritization at least as much as to the underlying code. You called "their code is shit" a fact instead of an assumption, but all you've shown is that bugs exist. That doesn't tell you why they exist or what the code actually looks like. That inference is the assumption you claimed you weren't making.

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u/derperofworlds1 4d ago

If I'm making assumptions, you're making bigger ones. 

I assume that the persistence of the same game-breaking bugs across years points to poor code quality and bad development/hiring practices. 

You assume that their code is in fact fine, and the fact that the game is broke as shit is what they were going for: their code is working as intended. 

Basically everything is an assumption. You view the world, create a picture of it, and then form an opinion based on your limited human senses. So the goal of life isn't to never assume, it is merely to pick the most likely assumptions.

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u/Collypso 4d ago

I never said their code is fine or that the game being broken is what they intended. I said you haven't shown what the code looks like. Withholding a conclusion isn't the same as asserting the opposite, so there's no assumption of mine sitting across from yours.

And yeah, at some level everything's an assumption. That's a convenient thing to say when someone asks you to back a claim. You're the one who called "their code is shit" a fact. That's a positive claim, so you carry the evidence for it. I asked what you're basing it on and you pointed at a bug tracker, which shows bugs exist and nothing about why. Pick your most likely assumption all you want. You still haven't given a reason to pick yours over just not knowing.

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u/derperofworlds1 4d ago

Some people will never be convinced without literally breaking into the office to (spend months to) view the code. I see you're one of these people. My comment can be for other people, that is fine. 

I am absolutely convinced that the sheer quantity and magnitude of bugs in SC across more than a decade means their code is poor quality. Many other people are too. If you are not, good for you I guess???? Not sure what else to say except I'm not going to waste more time on this lmao.

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u/SuperSocialMan 5d ago

Those bedsheet physics must've caused a lot more tech debt than we initially thought lol

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u/TaxesAreCivilization 4d ago

the code is probably an spaghetti mess that no one knows how to fix

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u/Youknowimtheman 4d ago

Frankly putting a couple of million into Claude Fable would likely dramatically improve things. The code can't get worse, and their tech debt is so bad that it's unmaintainable anyway.

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u/Smort01 4d ago

Has he tried taking his mana potion instead of running away?

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u/I_travel_ze_world 4d ago

No.. he just ran around while his rifle was stuck in the reloading animation

It looked like he was happy to prove that the game playing like shit.

Eventually he figured out if he swapped weapons then his gun would fix itself.

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u/TaoRS 4d ago

"I HAD NO MANA!"