Hey gang, Our company Cloud Imperium Games just had a major event in Germany - where we showed the progress of our MMO Space game. We just cut together a video of it, and I had to share it, the community behind this game is insane, it reminds me of us here on Clutchfans. If you feel like watching here it is - probably one of the most incredible things I have ever been a part of. [youtube]Dz1-l7yK5zg[/youtube] Hopefully we can live up to people's expectations. DD
Saw the livestream, and it was really nice. The crowd was pretty awesome. Good work with the hangar module. Looking forward to future updates from you guys.
I just watched a youtube video about this a day or three ago: Per the video, it is still in alpha because they are essentially creating a universe simulator (or as the host puts it, the Matrix).
lol. I think people who were eagerly awaiting its release have gone into retirement and their kids are eagerly awaiting its release now.
Ultimately it'll be good for this game that the hype died a bit... assuming it releases sometime in the near future.
I donated to the Kickstarter, played various releases of the game, follow it somewhat regularly, and I think this video does an OK job of summarizing things. Not a good job trying to be funny or entertaining IMO, but the info and overall summary seem about right. It isn't a scam (they are 100% trying to make a game...well two games), and for the project they're working on, it isn't that surprising that it takes so much money and so much development time. Especially since they basically started from scratch. They had to build up all these studios and workflows without the advantages other more established developers have. Having said that, I think various aspects of the project seem pretty mismanaged. I think I heard that various work was held up due a code refactor task Chris Roberts needed to complete...which seems like a terrible process. I'm sure CR likes to be involved, but he can't be that involved I think. Maybe just a isolated scenario, but it is various things like that which seem to push the game further and further away. Maybe they would have needed to write all their tools from scratch regardless, but I'm thinking going with CryEngine might have been a mistake as well. I'm sure there were good reasons why they went with CE vs something like Unreal Engine, but given how great UE5 looks, it makes me wonder what could have been if they chose a different tech base. I feel like the Star Citizen devs have to build stuff that other devs get for free from Epic via Unreal Engine. The way they sell and market ships is pretty terrible too IMO. I've yet to contribute anything more than my initial pledge (and a small subscription I briefly did at the VERY beginning), so it isn't like it is absolutely mandatory in order to have fun with the game. But I feel they know they can raise vast sums of money by just coming up with new ship ideas (even if those ships may or may not ever come out). There are some things about the game, even in it's incomplete state, which make it feel like no other game (in a good way). That usually lasts for about 5 minutes before it crashes or bugs out, but if they can somehow get it all together, it would be pretty special. No idea how likely that is at this point though. edit: Here's an example of stuff they work on: Complicated stuff. Maybe it shouldn't have taken so long (and I'm not sure why they initially used TypeScript, unless it was just a PoC), but they are trying to go crazy with the simulation stuff.
Initially using TypeScript could be a sign of a human resources issue. Even a PoC doesnt make sense if you already have the C# or C++ programmers on board, unless you’re bulding a web app. As for the video, the “Odin” stuff looks like a admin analysis tool for a game control room to help admin teams get a birdseye view of the universe (e.g. the economy trends) ... like how Westworld has a control room to keep an eye on the AI ... so they can zero-in on where to tweak the Quanta, assuming inputs can be tweaked by admins.
Some of it yes, some of it...hopefully no. Hopefully the source assets for everything are super high quality, so they shouldn't have to redo them much, if at all. They'll just have to rework the way the engine loads the assets into the game (including how they create lower resolution assets that are appropriate for in-game...which changes depending on the target hardware). Not trivial, but it wouldn't require a huge rework of the assets I think. And hopefully they're building this all with tools that help with that process. UE5, for example, is trying to let artists just plop their high quality source assets into the game, and the engine will do the rest of the work. It is a bit more complicated than that, but it shows it is (seemingly?) possible with good tooling. Transitioning from traditional lighting systems to full-on raytracing would be a pretty big change, but not sure they'll do that anytime soon (though hopefully they can build some things in now to help later). All the gameplay/server code should still be fine, though I'm guessing there's a lot of tech debt that requires refactoring (like the physics stuff Chris Roberts was doing I guess). Assuming good engineering practices and a clear roadmap/scope of what is coming down the line anyway...which is probably not a good assumption at all. They do seem to build stuff, show it off, then redo it all from scratch some time later (e.g., radar scanning). They also seem to script a lot of their public demos (at least to some degree), but then they have to actually put in the work at some point to make it all dynamic in a way that would actually work in a game. Honestly, I think a lot of the early 2010s stuff was scrapped anyway. Or at least heavily modified already. I think the current version of the game is largely based on work done for the 3.0 version, which was released in late 2017 IIRC. Prior to that, it seemed like they were just putting stuff together and trying to figure out what worked and what didn't work in terms of workflow processes and whatnot. They (in)famously contracted out some FPS stuff to an external studio, which worked on the systems for years IIRC, but Chris Roberts and crew decided to scrap all that work and redo it internally (to be fair, I believe the results were pretty poor, largely due to miscommunication). That would be highly entertaining. True. I'm not exactly sure what the requirements are for that app exactly, but I suppose it is possible that it was/is intended to be an internal web app. As you said, I believe the app allows the game designers to monitor and make changes to the dynamic universe. They have a studio that focuses on their web site and web platforms, which includes some fairly complex features, so maybe the intention was to have them own this project (at least the UI side of things). They're supposed to have some fancy 3d rendered star maps and whatnot, so maybe they were trying to leverage that stuff for this universe simulation tool. Not saying it makes a lot of sense, but I wonder if that's what they were trying to do. Plus as I alluded to earlier, they sometimes like to build things for public demos (and they did demo this feature to the public), then rebuild it later in a more "proper" way. It wouldn't surprise me if that's what happened here (i.e., CR wanted to show off universe simulation within 6 months, but only some web guys were available to implement the UI...so they did that instead of just waiting for other resources to be available).
Youtube recommended this video, which kinda shows the ways you can have fun with all these dynamic (yet buggy/janky) systems. The community does a great job of figuring out ways to make the game fun, despite how unfinished the game is. Don't know if development will ever succeed in making a fun game with good gameplay systems, but at least we have this.
