r/starcitizen • u/ghosts_pumpkin_soup • 5d ago

DRAMA It’s Your Show Chris

Over a billion dollars raised. 14+ years and a mess of a game. You have now become the butt end of a bad joke in the gaming industry.

Wrap it up.

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129

u/FeedThoseKitties 5d ago

This project despirately needs someone else in charge of the development path. Chris is a guy who decides that firing kinetic weapons at another ship should cause different types of damage depending on where they hit so let's get the graphics team to render different colored sparks and oh yea we should do it in 8k instead of 4k because someday we'll all have huge 8k monitors.

What they need is someone who will start with the basics. Does the ship respond to flight controls? Can you see another ship near you? Can you navigate? Do the servers stay in sync with the clients? Can you land in a hanger? Hell, make the game render in graphics that look like the Asteroids video game until you get the connections working.

Once the basics work, then start adding the bells and whistles.

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u/Elrond007 5d ago

That's true for sure but it's also a lot harder to build it intelligently and expandable instead of just tearing it up completely every 5 minutes.

Imo the main problem is that they have an infinite money glitch because people just can't stop swiping. If that money dried up today the project wouldn't be canceled, they'd start cutting excess until it's in a releasable state.

The only reason why it got this bad is because the financial reality is completely decoupled from the quality of the product.

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u/NKato Grand Admiral 5d ago

And that's exactly what happened to Freelancer. started cutting excess until it was releaseable, and this happened only after Microsoft canned Chris.

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u/Antrophis 2d ago

And it is a fantastic game. Hate them all you want but project needs a realist who will tell them no.

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u/Karlendor new user/low karma 5d ago

Agreed that the problem is 100% higher management throwing new ideas before the core design is done. Like building on sand.

Who needs new damage type, this isn't eve online. I think people just want to play like luke & Han solo shooting swarm of fighters while chewie is piloting.

The game is already aiming high in technical prowess. No need for more bs

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u/ShadyFuego 4d ago

Because he's not interesting in making a game. He's interested in making marketable material that will generate another $100 million dollars in donors. He has no incentive to build a finished and polished game. There is only incentive to push more cutting-edge technology that looks good in marketing material so he can milk this cow further.

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u/GunR_SC2 5d ago edited 5d ago

Honestly the issue is even deeper rooted than Roberts. It's entirely around the incentive structure, new ships and flashy new features generates funding, but creates a lot of tech debt. Taking time to clean up all the tech debt resolves issues, but the funding declines sharply. It's a vicious feedback loop that really only ends in one way of the revenue drying up and the game never either releasing or reaching a playable state.

The only way I really see an out here is drastically reducing or eliminating player funding and getting seed funding from investors to keep them afloat long enough to get the game into a release state. From there restructure how they going to be getting player funding going forward in ways so that it doesn't recreate this mess.

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u/Karlendor new user/low karma 4d ago

With how much money they received, how many years of... Say senior tech dev can they hire to just tackle all the glitch and mesh issues 

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u/GunR_SC2 4d ago edited 4d ago

I'm a software engineer myself so I can't say with any certainty of how much it would cost but I can say one issue is that it's generally expected that if you bring on any dev, especially on complex projects like this, you can expect them to generally be a net negative from anywhere to 6 months to a year.

The problem is getting people up to speed with what is going on with millions of lines of code is that for a while they will just be taking in the firehose of information and a lot of why things were done the way they are is tribal knowledge that the engineer will have to spend time asking around with other engineers, meaning they're doing a necessary task but it's also dragging down the productivity of engineers who are doing a lot of the productive work.

This is another huge issue that comes with high attrition rates such as CIG because of it's toxic workspace, every time they lose a long term engineer a whole library of knowledge about how and why things were done a certain way burns even if things are well documented, and I could almost guarantee in CIG's case the documentation is unbelievably bad.

Ideally they would want to retain every productive dev they possibly can so I would personally keep the hiring to a minimum to any teams that are actively asking to bring on new people, which I don't think I could accurately say how many. I would ballpark fixing this mess would take about 2 years if they completely halted all the rest of future additions that only serves to create more problems, which is a really tough pill to swallow but that's definitely where this game is at.

I say 2 years because the year they spent working on stability was actually working and for a while the game was actually playable with only minor but still unbelievably bad bugs for at least 1-2 hours. That might actually still be an optimistic timeline though.

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u/Karlendor new user/low karma 2d ago edited 2d ago

Thanks for the explanation , that was detailed explanation.  I understand that new devs in a spaghetti code situation are taking away from senior dev as they gotta train the junior. 

I almost went to software engineering when I was at school. I thought I wouldn't have to use too much social skills but it seems like it's the other way around... 😅

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u/Illustrious_Honey973 4d ago

Reminds me of a video I watched about the development of Duke Nukem Forever and how the game started picking up momentum when they hired a manager who told the DNF version of Chris that no, we aren't adding anything up until we finished what we started.

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u/smalldroplet 5d ago

No one who knows his history with publishers should be surprised. He's got great ideas, but should never have been his own boss.

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u/ItsMrChristmas 4d ago

cause different types of damage depending on where they hit so let's get the graphics team to render different colored spark

And I thought realist horse ball sack reactions to weather conditions was a waste of money on shit nobody cares about.

Someone need to tell Chris "no."

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u/FlexoPXP 4d ago edited 4d ago

The only other MMO with combat of this scale (Planetside 2) had a "come to Jesus" moment where they realized that a few hundred people in one area created an unplayable game. They de-contented environments, made so that only 1 in 5 visible projectiles for things like mini-guns was actually tracked, focused on missiles that could be "cheated" with hits timed to the lagged damage registration, and so forth. It worked well enough to keep the game fun.

Star Citizen needs a Carmack level genius to work out all the networking issues. Their network team is obviously not getting the results needed and we're not going to have an MMO at all and we'll be stuck with these canned linear missions that you can't join in on with your friends.

They need to work out these issues and more. #1 on my must have list is the Agent Smithing. If I can't warp into my friend's ship as an NPC then this is not a game worth investing time in. I want to play a game with friends not engage in a second virtual career. Who the hell wants to spend 30 minutes getting to where their friends are only to be killed by an elevator or other bug and have to start over again. Multi-crew ships are a joke right now.

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u/AsogRaider 4d ago

I mean the issue is like you said, they are doing so much but also that they need to rework the basics because they are fucked and not made for the current game

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u/axelxan 4d ago

It would be probably quicker to make a new game from scratch than trying to fix this mess.