Star Citizen Central

[Shadoko]

Remember these are the same guys that put in redout and blackout effects in a spacesim.

To be fair, Elite has those, but you have to really try (i.e pull of a high-g turn in a Mamba at full speed with flight assist off, or nosedive towards an 8g planet) to get them.

[Det.Bullock]

Remember these are the same guys that put in redout and blackout effects in a spacesim.

To be fair, Elite has those, but you have to really try (i.e pull of a high-g turn in a Mamba at full speed with flight assist off, or nosedive towards an 8g planet) to get them.

Which would be fine if SC did that too but last time I bothered with a free weekend you got them every time you pulled the stick a bit too hard.

[Shadoko]

I bothered with a free weekend you got them every time you pulled the stick a bit too hard.

Yeah, that is ridiculous.

I mean again this is the year 2900 you should at bare minimum have suits and medication that protects you, if people in the Expanse can take 10g withouth blacking out, people in SC should too.

[Viktor]

I expect Alpha 3.9.0 going PTU next week although it would be great to get it for testing upcoming weekend already.

The game IMO requries some survival elements so it will be interesting to see what kind of difference upcoming changes will make even in very unbalanced state.

[TheDreamlord]

The game IMO requries some survival elements

Why???
/20questionmarks

[Viktor]

Why???

/20questionmarks

I like the idea that I would need to prepare and plan before I go to do tasks like exploring, salvaging, mining, etc; what gear I take with me, what’s the weight and how much noise they make, how long time I can stay to survive, etc.

[TheDreamlord]

There is nothing to explore yet, but they have started implementation on “survival” mechanics. Mkay.

[Viktor]

There is nothing to explore yet, but they have started implementation on “survival” mechanics. Mkay.

I don’t see why survival mechanisms wouldn’t be useful in current alpha versions already. There are enough different kind of planets, moons and other locations and situations to start test those mechanisms.

[greywar]

I like the idea that I would need to prepare and plan before I go to do tasks like exploring, salvaging, mining, etc; what gear I take with me, what’s the weight and how much noise they make, how long time I can stay to survive, etc.

And I totally agree that you should have the option to turn all that on. So I can leave them off.

[TheDreamlord]

Spectrum - v4.1.8

A roadmap for a new roadmap!
Shocker. Shocker I tell ya!

[Skalpadda]

A roadmap for a new roadmap!

I thought Squadron 42 was the thing they had actually released?

googles

It’s a single player campaign “set in the universe of Star Citizen”. I thought they were making a mega MMO?

googles more

So, unless Wikipedia is lying to me or I’m massively misunderstanding things there’s:

1. Hangar module, where you can gawk at pretty models and walk around your ship. Released, but sounds more like a fancy model viewer than a game.

2. Arena Commander, which sounds like a simplistic space sim/tech demo. Released.

3. Star Marine, an FPS (why on earth?). Seems to have been released in 2016 after a lot of development woes. Sort of? I looked up a video from last year and it looks really rough.

4. Persistent Universe. This is the MMO-y bit I guess? Seems a very rough alpha was released to backers in 2015 and it’s been continuously updated but still in alpha?

5. Squadron 42, a single player/co-op story campaign. Doesn’t seem to be released to backers at all? Initial release date 2014 and now planned for beta in Q3 2020… maybe.

Development started in 2010, apparently, crowdfunding in 2012. Some simple games/demos and a 5-year alpha doesn’t sound like much to show for 10 years of development and… 300 million dollars in crowd funding!?

Okay, I guess I’m the only one who hasn’t been keeping up at all. I just thought it sounded like they massively overpromised with the kickstarter and it seemed shady as hell to sell virtual ships for thousands of dollars, but I think I see what the massive fuss has been about.

[Vheissu]

To add to your list, there is also:

Spectrum (linked above)- A new social media platform developed in-house.
and
The Star Citizen video series - At one point they had almost a dozen weekly shows interviewing staff fans and so on. They cut back on this pretty severely a while back, probably because it was getting expensive and they were running out of content to present.

All in all, it’s a glorious example of project management bloat. I’m not sure we’ll ever see see a sober retrospective on the original game’s development a la Gamasutra, which is a pity because I’m sure there are a lot of lessons to be learned from it all.

I’m kinda curious about Squadron 42, since they spent a ton of time doing film shoots and motion capture with some rather decent B-list actors for it about 5 years ago. Had the promise to be some entertaining sci-fi, but they have been sitting on the footage for an awfully long time now.
I didn’t know Star Marine was officially released though, so you probably know more than I do!

[Skalpadda]

Spectrum (linked above)- A new social media platform developed in-house.

But why?

At one point they had almost a dozen weekly shows interviewing staff fans and so on

Why? I mean yes, update the community makes sense and it’s ongoing marketing, but that sounds like a silly amount of stuff to produce.

I didn’t know Star Marine was officially released though, so you probably know more than I do!

I was literally just reading the Wikipedia article. I googled “Star Marine” and didn’t get many relevant hits on page one, which is probably telling. The video I found (by searching directly on YouTube for “Star Marine Star Citizen”) looked like a pretty ropey team shooter on an enclosed map with terrible animations. Basically just “run around and shoot people in corridors”. I don’t know if it was really representative (it was from this year), but it looked bad.

I was curious so went to look for some gameplay of the Persistent Universe stuff today as that seems to be the meat of what’s playable. There’s a game there and it looks…shiny. Nice environments with fancy CryEngine lighting, and it is pretty impressive to see someone go seamlessly from huge open environments on a planet with detailed architecture into a space ship, take off and go to a different planet. But it looked sterile and lifeless and none of the gameplay looked particularly fun or special aside from the scale and seamlessness.

And I came across one video where someone was just talking about pros and cons of the game, and he broached the ship sales, admitting that he found it hard to control his impulse to buy ships for more money than he should. Not that it had ruined his life or anything, but he sounded troubled by it. It made me a little sad. It’s a shitty business model.

Cloud Imperium seems an apt name. I don’t know if there’s similar in English but in Swedish we have the expression “building air castles”, meaning making something imaginary or intangible, getting lost in daydreams. Clearly they’ve actually made things, but the dreams they’ve been selling still don’t seem to really exist in any tangible way, 8 years later.

[LexW]

I don’t know if there’s similar in English but in Swedish we have the expression “building air castles”, meaning making something imaginary or intangible, getting lost in daydreams.

It’s not a common phrase but I’ve heard “building castles in the sky” (or more rarely, “air”) in English, meaning essentially the same thing. It may of course be an English derivation of the Swedish - there are a lot of phrases from the US that are derivations phrases in other languages.

I see it’s listed in some internet idiom directory - https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/build+castles+in+the+sky

Unfortunately my English idiom/slang dictionary set (three huge books) is long lost or I’d check in there to see if they had an origin point. Anyway yes that sounds appropriate.

[Skalpadda]

It’s very possible we stole it from the Germans or something.

[Det.Bullock]

I remember the expression used in an excerpt from Little Women I read in high school, if that helps.
The expression also exists in standard Italian.

[Chaz]

Okay, I guess I’m the only one who hasn’t been keeping up at all. I just thought it sounded like they massively overpromised with the kickstarter and it seemed shady as hell to sell virtual ships for thousands of dollars, but I think I see what the massive fuss has been about.

Actually the original Kickstarter which I funded for $20 wasn’t too bad. It was essentially going to be a modern update of Freelancer. Land-able planets and all that stuff wasn’t even going to be a thing, but then the money started pouring in and ever more ridiculous stretch goal features started getting piled on top, even after the KS had finished in order to keep the cash flowing in. Then Roberts seemed to be in some sort of stupid competition with Elite Dangerous. They’re going to have land-able planets, so we must too, etc. And it just keeps going. They still seem to be dreaming up fancy new features to add even now, when they don’t even have a base game as such to hang it all on. After 10 years it’s still nothing more than an ever expanding tech demo.

[Mac4]

I don’t know if there’s similar in English but in Swedish we have the expression “building air castles”

The phrase occurs in a number of European languages, said to be quite old in some of them; various sources trace it to a Latin expression atrributed to St. Augustine, in aere aedificare, “to build in the sky”; the “castles” would then seem to have been added by inference.

As suggested above, the phrase “to build castles in the air,” or, less frequently, in the sky, does seem to be attested to in English. An obsolete equivalent is given as building “castles in Spain,” whereas the more common modern equivalent I guess would have to be “pie in the sky.” Of anarcho-syndicalist origin, I find now, ha! what do you know

Now where’s my off-topic icon when I need it

[Skalpadda]

I seem to remember even the kickstarter started to balloon like mad, even before they kept it going. In general it seems the crowd funded games that have succeeded are the ones that stayed focused on delivering the initial pitch and using extra money to make more content that fit within the original design, while the ones that went mad with expanding stretch goals into more and more features have almost universally been troubled in one way or another.

The phrase occurs in a number of European languages, said to be quite old in some of them; various sources trace it to a Latin expression atrributed to St. Augustine, in aere aedificare, “to build in the sky”; the “castles” would then seem to have been added by inference.

The Swedish one is “bygga luftslott”, which could be both castles in the air or castles made of air.

[greywar]

I seem to remember even the kickstarter started to balloon like mad, even before they kept it going.

True… this was one where the interest and funding levels were so high that they had to keep coming up with new stretch goals… some days they had to invent them literally multiple times in a 24 hour period.

Was real “uncharted territory” stuff and we are seeing the result.