If only I could use stretch goals, and future ambitions of greatness to never be responsible or accountable for my adult responsibilities.
It's all relative, though. What are your responsibilities? There's a big difference between driving around and putting trash bags in the back of a truck, and creating something that some have noted as being "impossible". I'm sure you land somewhere on that sliding scale of complexity, but I'd also be willing to bet that you've missed your share of deadlines, and if you haven't then my guess is that you're being very liberal with your estimates.
We all miss deadlines I don't think that's being debated. What is being debated is that when you miss your deadlines as often and as badly as CIG does you would have been fired a long time ago.
How many times do they need to miss their deadlines or push back a deadline while cutting out a feature only to miss that deadline again and rinse and repeat before they are held accountable for their shitty planning?
Are they? They've only started publishing schedules of either feature sets under development. So that's the true tale of how much they're actually missing their targets by. The problem with your statement about shitty planning is that it only takes one person to derail a release. They could be successful with 90% of their development tasks, but 9% could be late and 1% could be blocking. If we don't have visibility to that granularity of detail, then there really isn't a way to say.
It might be interesting to go back and check the 2.x scheduled versus actual. I'm sure someone had to do this somewhere.
Either way, let's say that there are 200 people actively working on SC. This of it like this, so in order to plan successfully, we would need to have 200 people quoting 40 hours per week for the next 3 months. So that's like 96000 hours that need to be quoted. Generally speaking, people tend to suck at estimating time for work that exceeds a couple days, so when we're talking about scheduling 3 months at a time, the risk is huge! Also, when a particular release is at risk, we can't be sure that they don't simply roll new features on top of the existing feature set for that release, increasing the scope of the release intentionally. This is where it would have been useful to have those schedules back in the beginning.
That's my disjointed rant. Whatever the case is, there appears to be positive progress and they are now showing stuff that we haven't see before, and their most recent ATV said they were in their final stages of testing, so that all points to a positive. What does this release represent on the whole? No freakin' idea! Someone who is more dedicated than me can tackle that one. I can tell you it's more than 16% though, for sure.
Ok, with a background as a software developer, and now head of project management at a software company, I can tell you that the larger the collective team is, the easier it is to estimate average throughput. To avoid that risky parts of the project derails you, you move those parts up front, so you finish those first, thus leaving the safe parts for last effectively securing you against slipping deadlines. Software development project management 101.
If this was a project manager on my team making these estimates, he would be looking for a new job. That simple.
Interesting. I never would have thought that. What sort of methodology are you working under? Honestly, I haven't been involved with projects which were over, say, 20 or 30 people, on the software side of things. So we're bouncing between team sizes of 10-20 fairly regularly on projects. So the variance certainly isn't large enough to give a great anecdotal account, but based on what I've read, and see in those teams I would have thought differently. However, we are Agile, so we would tackle items based on priority and not complexity. That being said, I'm sure that within each sprint there is some amount of focus on work deemed as being problematic or complex for that given sprint.
Thanks for the insight though! That's actually a pretty cool, if not counter-intuitive insight
If only I could use stretch goals, and future ambitions of greatness to never be responsible or accountable for my adult responsibilities.
It's all relative, though. What are your responsibilities? There's a big difference between driving around and putting trash bags in the back of a truck, and creating something that some have noted as being "impossible". I'm sure you land somewhere on that sliding scale of complexity, but I'd also be willing to bet that you've missed your share of deadlines, and if you haven't then my guess is that you're being very liberal with your estimates.
We all miss deadlines I don't think that's being debated. What is being debated is that when you miss your deadlines as often and as badly as CIG does you would have been fired a long time ago.
How many times do they need to miss their deadlines or push back a deadline while cutting out a feature only to miss that deadline again and rinse and repeat before they are held accountable for their shitty planning?
Are they? They've only started publishing schedules of either feature sets under development. So that's the true tale of how much they're actually missing their targets by. The problem with your statement about shitty planning is that it only takes one person to derail a release. They could be successful with 90% of their development tasks, but 9% could be late and 1% could be blocking. If we don't have visibility to that granularity of detail, then there really isn't a way to say.
It might be interesting to go back and check the 2.x scheduled versus actual. I'm sure someone had to do this somewhere.
Either way, let's say that there are 200 people actively working on SC. This of it like this, so in order to plan successfully, we would need to have 200 people quoting 40 hours per week for the next 3 months. So that's like 96000 hours that need to be quoted. Generally speaking, people tend to suck at estimating time for work that exceeds a couple days, so when we're talking about scheduling 3 months at a time, the risk is huge! Also, when a particular release is at risk, we can't be sure that they don't simply roll new features on top of the existing feature set for that release, increasing the scope of the release intentionally. This is where it would have been useful to have those schedules back in the beginning.
That's my disjointed rant. Whatever the case is, there appears to be positive progress and they are now showing stuff that we haven't see before, and their most recent ATV said they were in their final stages of testing, so that all points to a positive. What does this release represent on the whole? No freakin' idea! Someone who is more dedicated than me can tackle that one. I can tell you it's more than 16% though, for sure.
I'll agree with you that people suck at estimating timeframes for long term but should it really be this bad? Also shouldn't the managers be keeping the team on track and pushing to get the deadlines done?
Again I'm not arguing that things get delayed but that with CIG features seems to get delayed for weeks/months and then features cut out and then still get delayed even more. I wish I could do those kinds of things at my job and not worry about losing my job
I'll agree with you that people suck at estimating timeframes for long term but should it really be this bad? Also shouldn't the managers be keeping the team on track and pushing to get the deadlines done?
It's not managers, it's producers. It's not CR doing timeframes, he might want to say "I want this by next month" but it's the producers, I think CIG has over 20 world-wide in many teams and areas that will translate it into scheduling and so forfh.
You have a project as complex as SC; you have one ideology where if something isn't good enough it will be pushed back or even refactored until it is, it's obvious that timeframes will float a lot.
It's simply how the company works, the only issue here is how they communicated their estimates to the public instead of keeping internal deadlines to themselves or announcing generous timeframes to the public.
Time for a correction again, this time for "deadlines" -
"The estimates we provide are just that: estimates. [...] it is important to understand that in many cases (especially with groundbreaking engineering tasks) these estimates are often subject to change due to unforeseen complexity in implementing features."
and ...
"We base our estimates, again, on our experience, but we also know that it’s possible for a single bug to cause a delay of days or weeks [...]"
So that should be clear as crystal then. It's neither deadlines nor promises, but ESTIMATES. If people continue to talk about these schedules in the way they've done so far, I think CIG will just pull the whole thing back to be internal only.
Time for a correction again, this time for "deadlines" -
"The estimates we provide are just that: estimates. [...] it is important to understand that in many cases (especially with groundbreaking engineering tasks) these estimates are often subject to change due to unforeseen complexity in implementing features."
and ...
"We base our estimates, again, on our experience, but we also know that it’s possible for a single bug to cause a delay of days or weeks [...]"
So that should be clear as crystal then. It's neither deadlines nor promises, but ESTIMATES. If people continue to talk about these schedules in the way they've done so far, I think CIG will just pull the whole thing back to be internal only.
heh they don't even use estimates, more like WAG's (Wild Ass Guess) I was sat in that crowd when we were told 3.0 would be out for Christmas, over 7 months ago.
“Nevertheless, the human brain, which survives by hoping from one second to another, will always endeavor to put off the moment of truth. Moist” ― Terry Pratchett, Making Money
For me, it's less about estimates and more about delivered content.
I don't necessarily care about deadlines or estimates, as long as I see a promising development trajectory. I don't see that with SC anymore.
I backed in 2013, now exactly 4 years ago. The idea back then was to release the hangar module in 2013, with the rest of the game coming in 2014.
Keep in mind that the initial pitch included 50 explorable systems, a full single player campaign, multiple gameplay systems (mining/trading/industry), a persistent universe with a rich economical simulation, a modding tools suite allowing people to create and submit their own ships. All of this was pitched in 2012, for realease in 2014, with the initial budget.
We got the hangar module in 2013, which was a pretty substantial release (we didn't have anything before). In 2014, we got the dogfighting module. In 2015, we got the persistent map. 2 years later, in 2017, we may be getting another substantial release later this year with 3.0 (hopefully introducing trading and some missions?).
At this pace, it will likely take 4+ more years to get the feature set that was pitched for 2014.
For me, it's less about estimates and more about delivered content.
I don't necessarily care about deadlines or estimates, as long as I see a promising development trajectory. I don't see that with SC anymore.
I backed in 2013, now exactly 4 years ago. The idea back then was to release the hangar module in 2013, with the rest of the game coming in 2014.
Keep in mind that the initial pitch included 50 explorable systems, a full single player campaign, multiple gameplay systems (mining/trading/industry), a persistent universe with a rich economical simulation, a modding tools suite allowing people to create and submit their own ships. All of this was pitched in 2012, for realease in 2014, with the initial budget.
We got the hangar module in 2013, which was a pretty substantial release (we didn't have anything before). In 2014, we got the dogfighting module. In 2015, we got the persistent map. 2 years later, in 2017, we may be getting another substantial release later this year with 3.0 (hopefully introducing trading and some missions?).
At this pace, it will likely take 4+ more years to get the feature set that was pitched for 2014.
In before the usual suspects arrive with their "but the scope changed" argument
A creative person is motivated by the desire to achieve, not the desire to beat others.
In before the usual suspects arrive with their "but the scope changed" argument
Because it did.
And i'm glad it did, if the original pitch was released within the timeframe it was intended to, the game was going to rely on a more superficial and scripted "make-believe" approach.
It's an alpha with people paying subscriptions, never thought I'd see the day.
Either way you can rest easy about the sub since you haven't picked up that it funds the video development features and so forth; people are not paying for an alpha.
Two facts remain. 1. The game is in alpha. 2. It has an optional subscription system.
I took it for granted everyone already knows what the subscriptions are for. Does that not make it a sub? Tell me something I don't know like what other MMO's in alpha have a subscription system.
A third fact. 3: some people subscribe to National Geographic.
Does this not mean that people have to subscribe to National Geographic to play the alpha.
By your logic yes!
Reality: no sub needed to play the alpha. And they have said no sub needed to play SC.
The sub may as well be a sub to National Geographic!
Reality: no sub needed to play the alpha. And they have said no sub needed to play SC.
Indeed. We who have subscribed since day one (December 2012 was the first month) have contributed to pay for the video shows CIG produce. This money doesn't go to the game development but to make community content. This content everybody benefit from, not only subscribers but all backers and even non-backers. So those who don't subscribe have really nothing to complain about.
If only I could use stretch goals, and future ambitions of greatness to never be responsible or accountable for my adult responsibilities.
It's all relative, though. What are your responsibilities? There's a big difference between driving around and putting trash bags in the back of a truck, and creating something that some have noted as being "impossible". I'm sure you land somewhere on that sliding scale of complexity, but I'd also be willing to bet that you've missed your share of deadlines, and if you haven't then my guess is that you're being very liberal with your estimates.
We all miss deadlines I don't think that's being debated. What is being debated is that when you miss your deadlines as often and as badly as CIG does you would have been fired a long time ago.
How many times do they need to miss their deadlines or push back a deadline while cutting out a feature only to miss that deadline again and rinse and repeat before they are held accountable for their shitty planning?
Are they? They've only started publishing schedules of either feature sets under development. So that's the true tale of how much they're actually missing their targets by. The problem with your statement about shitty planning is that it only takes one person to derail a release. They could be successful with 90% of their development tasks, but 9% could be late and 1% could be blocking. If we don't have visibility to that granularity of detail, then there really isn't a way to say.
It might be interesting to go back and check the 2.x scheduled versus actual. I'm sure someone had to do this somewhere.
Either way, let's say that there are 200 people actively working on SC. This of it like this, so in order to plan successfully, we would need to have 200 people quoting 40 hours per week for the next 3 months. So that's like 96000 hours that need to be quoted. Generally speaking, people tend to suck at estimating time for work that exceeds a couple days, so when we're talking about scheduling 3 months at a time, the risk is huge! Also, when a particular release is at risk, we can't be sure that they don't simply roll new features on top of the existing feature set for that release, increasing the scope of the release intentionally. This is where it would have been useful to have those schedules back in the beginning.
That's my disjointed rant. Whatever the case is, there appears to be positive progress and they are now showing stuff that we haven't see before, and their most recent ATV said they were in their final stages of testing, so that all points to a positive. What does this release represent on the whole? No freakin' idea! Someone who is more dedicated than me can tackle that one. I can tell you it's more than 16% though, for sure.
Ok, with a background as a software developer, and now head of project management at a software company, I can tell you that the larger the collective team is, the easier it is to estimate average throughput. To avoid that risky parts of the project derails you, you move those parts up front, so you finish those first, thus leaving the safe parts for last effectively securing you against slipping deadlines. Software development project management 101.
If this was a project manager on my team making these estimates, he would be looking for a new job. That simple.
These estimates are coming from the people doing the tasks.
If their jobs are on the line they will pad the estimates. And when you say: it will take half that time they will say well if you say so but don't blame us. So you will have to fire yourself.
There are methodologies that can be used that "add intelligence" to the estimates.
However working in an established company surrounded by a sophisticated support cocoon is very different from starting from scratch. And with no guaranteed funding even harder.
Its hard. And I have been involved in setting up multi-company, multi-country projects and am - amongst other things - an accredited, qualified PM that has worked in multiple countries.
Your example of doing the risky stuff first - they probably started that as soon as they could. However what you say about low risk stuff doesn't follow. Take e.g. writing descriptions of planets. If they had dedicated people doing this then starting on day 1 or day 500 would make no difference to the schedule risk. There would be a financial cash flow implication. And - maybe - they decided they needed some "low risk guaranteed wins" to show backers and so some low risk stuff had to be done. That's a business management issue btw.
The reality however is that it probably just "grew". You try to do it in a structured way but its hard.
Some truisms:
One of the most common reasons projects are delayed is not getting the staff needed on time especially at start-up. (Getting staff is non-trivial.)
Whilst people make very poor estimators its amazing how everyone is an excellent project manager! (And as a result far to many people who are good at their jobs go on to become poor PMs.)
So - in the early days - when funding was much tighter and hypothetical questions like: do we rent an office or hire a project manager; do we buy the software we need or hire a project manager; do we hire some programmers or hire a project manager .....
So - since everyone is an excellent PM you wouldn't have had to fire yourself since neither you (nor I) would have been hired.
Getting the whole show off the ground will have been hard and "haphazard". And - now - they have put in place a simple (and cheap) system. Could it be better? Absolutely. Would it be worthwhile to put a better system in place "today". Probably not.
It is what it is. As @CrazKanuk says we are now seeing positive progress. The proof will be when it releases. What it all means in the grand scheme of things time will tell.
These estimates are coming from the people doing the tasks.
Yeah people fail to understand this so much!
This is the producers on all the 4 studios going with meetings with teams and specific developers to get the estimates and timeframes for every feature and tasks that they have in their hands.
Those developers give the producers the timeframe they estimate until they finish their work, and then it's when producers themselves go into meetings to put together the schedules and the estimates for the actual release of something.
When the estimate is very inaccurate it falls in a lot of dependencies, and so many factors that will accumulate to the end reality.
Now how to fix this? Is not sharing with the backers the dates the team works with and take one approach more like Elite Dangerous, announce a date when the release is very close to happening.
If only I could use stretch goals, and future ambitions of greatness to never be responsible or accountable for my adult responsibilities.
It's all relative, though. What are your responsibilities? There's a big difference between driving around and putting trash bags in the back of a truck, and creating something that some have noted as being "impossible". I'm sure you land somewhere on that sliding scale of complexity, but I'd also be willing to bet that you've missed your share of deadlines, and if you haven't then my guess is that you're being very liberal with your estimates.
We all miss deadlines I don't think that's being debated. What is being debated is that when you miss your deadlines as often and as badly as CIG does you would have been fired a long time ago.
How many times do they need to miss their deadlines or push back a deadline while cutting out a feature only to miss that deadline again and rinse and repeat before they are held accountable for their shitty planning?
Are they? They've only started publishing schedules of either feature sets under development. So that's the true tale of how much they're actually missing their targets by. The problem with your statement about shitty planning is that it only takes one person to derail a release. They could be successful with 90% of their development tasks, but 9% could be late and 1% could be blocking. If we don't have visibility to that granularity of detail, then there really isn't a way to say.
It might be interesting to go back and check the 2.x scheduled versus actual. I'm sure someone had to do this somewhere.
Either way, let's say that there are 200 people actively working on SC. This of it like this, so in order to plan successfully, we would need to have 200 people quoting 40 hours per week for the next 3 months. So that's like 96000 hours that need to be quoted. Generally speaking, people tend to suck at estimating time for work that exceeds a couple days, so when we're talking about scheduling 3 months at a time, the risk is huge! Also, when a particular release is at risk, we can't be sure that they don't simply roll new features on top of the existing feature set for that release, increasing the scope of the release intentionally. This is where it would have been useful to have those schedules back in the beginning.
That's my disjointed rant. Whatever the case is, there appears to be positive progress and they are now showing stuff that we haven't see before, and their most recent ATV said they were in their final stages of testing, so that all points to a positive. What does this release represent on the whole? No freakin' idea! Someone who is more dedicated than me can tackle that one. I can tell you it's more than 16% though, for sure.
I'll agree with you that people suck at estimating timeframes for long term but should it really be this bad? Also shouldn't the managers be keeping the team on track and pushing to get the deadlines done?
Again I'm not arguing that things get delayed but that with CIG features seems to get delayed for weeks/months and then features cut out and then still get delayed even more. I wish I could do those kinds of things at my job and not worry about losing my job
I don't think it's as simple as that. I just got off a project which was delayed for a number of months, multiple times. Then, just now, it was delayed indefinitely until we can figure out unanticipated tech problems.
I can't really comment on what's acceptable here, but they are apparently doing unprecedented work. It was quoted as being impossible from an industry veteran who's a genius. So I don't really know what the expected time to complete that would be. I think I'll draw the coffee break card.
If only I could use stretch goals, and future ambitions of greatness to never be responsible or accountable for my adult responsibilities.
It's all relative, though. What are your responsibilities? There's a big difference between driving around and putting trash bags in the back of a truck, and creating something that some have noted as being "impossible". I'm sure you land somewhere on that sliding scale of complexity, but I'd also be willing to bet that you've missed your share of deadlines, and if you haven't then my guess is that you're being very liberal with your estimates.
We all miss deadlines I don't think that's being debated. What is being debated is that when you miss your deadlines as often and as badly as CIG does you would have been fired a long time ago.
How many times do they need to miss their deadlines or push back a deadline while cutting out a feature only to miss that deadline again and rinse and repeat before they are held accountable for their shitty planning?
Are they? They've only started publishing schedules of either feature sets under development. So that's the true tale of how much they're actually missing their targets by. The problem with your statement about shitty planning is that it only takes one person to derail a release. They could be successful with 90% of their development tasks, but 9% could be late and 1% could be blocking. If we don't have visibility to that granularity of detail, then there really isn't a way to say.
It might be interesting to go back and check the 2.x scheduled versus actual. I'm sure someone had to do this somewhere.
Either way, let's say that there are 200 people actively working on SC. This of it like this, so in order to plan successfully, we would need to have 200 people quoting 40 hours per week for the next 3 months. So that's like 96000 hours that need to be quoted. Generally speaking, people tend to suck at estimating time for work that exceeds a couple days, so when we're talking about scheduling 3 months at a time, the risk is huge! Also, when a particular release is at risk, we can't be sure that they don't simply roll new features on top of the existing feature set for that release, increasing the scope of the release intentionally. This is where it would have been useful to have those schedules back in the beginning.
That's my disjointed rant. Whatever the case is, there appears to be positive progress and they are now showing stuff that we haven't see before, and their most recent ATV said they were in their final stages of testing, so that all points to a positive. What does this release represent on the whole? No freakin' idea! Someone who is more dedicated than me can tackle that one. I can tell you it's more than 16% though, for sure.
I'll agree with you that people suck at estimating timeframes for long term but should it really be this bad? Also shouldn't the managers be keeping the team on track and pushing to get the deadlines done?
Again I'm not arguing that things get delayed but that with CIG features seems to get delayed for weeks/months and then features cut out and then still get delayed even more. I wish I could do those kinds of things at my job and not worry about losing my job
I don't think it's as simple as that. I just got off a project which was delayed for a number of months, multiple times. Then, just now, it was delayed indefinitely until we can figure out unanticipated tech problems.
I can't really comment on what's acceptable here, but they are apparently doing unprecedented work. It was quoted as being impossible from an industry veteran who's a genius. So I don't really know what the expected time to complete that would be. I think I'll draw the coffee break card.
I will see your coffee break card and unleash the narnope!
I can't really comment on what's acceptable here, but they are apparently doing unprecedented work. It was quoted as being impossible from an industry veteran who's a genius. So I don't really know what the expected time to complete that would be. I think I'll draw the coffee break card.
It is funny how people keep bringing that blow hard idiot up. To his defence though, he never said it was impossible, just impossible with the approach chosen, the main issue being using CryEngine as a starting point.
Yeah, at project start you wound be blind when doing estimations. You have no chance of esimating the actual end date of the project as a whole. But on the short term you will be fully able to set up goals and meet them. That is how you eat an elephant. One bite at a time.
I can't really comment on what's acceptable here, but they are apparently doing unprecedented work. It was quoted as being impossible from an industry veteran who's a genius. So I don't really know what the expected time to complete that would be. I think I'll draw the coffee break card.
It is funny how people keep bringing that blow hard idiot up. To his defence though, he never said it was impossible, just impossible with the approach chosen, the main issue being using CryEngine as a starting point.
Yeah, at project start you wound be blind when doing estimations. You have no chance of esimating the actual end date of the project as a whole. But on the short term you will be fully able to set up goals and meet them. That is how you eat an elephant. One bite at a time.
The quotes verbatim from the "genius" (?) (industry veteran i can agree with):
"Without disrespect to anyone, I’m just going to say it: it is my opinion
that, this game, as has been pitched, will never get made. Ever. There
isn’t a single publisher or developer on this planet who could build
this game as pitched, let alone for anything less than $150 million."
"Do you have any idea what those games cost to make and how long they
took? Do you know how many games which cost $50 million to make took
almost five years to release? And they were nowhere in scope as Star Citizen?"
Funny that we are now over 150 M$ and not yet at 5 years (Kickstarter: Oct 2012).
I can't really comment on what's acceptable here, but they are apparently doing unprecedented work. It was quoted as being impossible from an industry veteran who's a genius. So I don't really know what the expected time to complete that would be. I think I'll draw the coffee break card.
It is funny how people keep bringing that blow hard idiot up. To his defence though, he never said it was impossible, just impossible with the approach chosen, the main issue being using CryEngine as a starting point.
Yeah, at project start you wound be blind when doing estimations. You have no chance of esimating the actual end date of the project as a whole. But on the short term you will be fully able to set up goals and meet them. That is how you eat an elephant. One bite at a time.
Yeah, I make sure to throw that comment in there whenever possible. It's more a twisting of the knife than anything substantial, though That being said, he's obviously an authority on games that will never be made, so I guess I can see how people would believe him.
Yeah, that's basically what I had said earlier. We're actually not bad at estimating tasks that are a few hours or a day, but beyond that the risk of giving a bad estimate increases significantly. So am I blown away that they got release dates wrong when they gave them like a week into the initial funding? Nope! I mean you're a Project Manager, so you know damn well that's the reason why they don't announce products that aren't in late development or final testing (like 6 months to a year out). That being said, it still doesn't seem to stop PMs from wanting to put together a fancy gantt chart to show when they think the project will be done.
There was another developer, which is respected in the industry (contrary to the "Internet Warlord"), who wrote a larger article on Massively OP about his opinions of Star Citizen a couple of years ago. I can't find it just now but will keep looking and add a link to it below if I find it. This article was not an attack on the game but a calm and balanced opinion from another developer.
However, he said (if I remember correctly), that he didn't believe CIG could make objects with the necessary precision needed to render things like ships and pilots in them half a solar system away, without flicker or mismatch between smaller details. He also said that (if I remember correctly) he didn't believe seamless transition from space to ground was doable, as CIG said they'd do it, so he recommended they should keep the (then) current load screen tech through clouds.
Both of these cornerstone technologies are now in Star Citizen.
The point I want to make here is that it's not only gamers who are sceptical to the goals of Star Citizen, but also the gaming industry. It hasn't be done before so it must be impossible ... CIG has shown that they've solved the underlying problems with today's games. There are no traditional "maps" in Star Citizen. There's no need to divide areas up in maps, since true 64-bit, combined with CIG's zone tech. and more, makes a whole star system one big map - seamlessly from the star itself to a small pebble on the ground on a moon millions of miles away. Not only that, but you can gameplay inside a ship (FPS for instance) while you're travelling the distance between the star and the pebble.
I understand people are sceptical to this but it's in there now and so people need to recognize the truth and give CIG credit for doing what they set out to do. IMO this is also why we should trust that they also will implement the rest of what they've promised. There's no reason to distrust them at this point. They're hard working to deliver this game.
Edit: Found the article here. The comments are written by James Hicks, developer of Ascent: The Space Game. I apologize in advance if I've cited him incorrectly but I fetched it from a two-year old memory of what I read. The essence in what he said should be the same though.
>>>>> There was another developer, which is
respected in the industry, who
wrote a larger article on Massively OP about his opinions of Star
Citizen a couple of years ago. >>>>>
There was another developer, which is respected in the industry (contrary to the "Internet Warlord"), who wrote a larger article on Massively OP about his opinions of Star Citizen a couple of years ago. I can't find it just now but will keep looking and add a link to it below if I find it. This article was not an attack on the game but a calm and balanced opinion from another developer.
However, he said (if I remember correctly), that he didn't believe CIG could make objects with the necessary precision needed to render things like ships and pilots in them half a solar system away, without flicker or mismatch between smaller details. He also said that (if I remember correctly) he didn't believe seamless transition from space to ground was doable, as CIG said they'd do it, so he recommended they should keep the (then) current load screen tech through clouds.
Both of these cornerstone technologies are now in Star Citizen.
The point I want to make here is that it's not only gamers who are sceptical to the goals of Star Citizen, but also the gaming industry. It hasn't be done before so it must be impossible ... CIG has shown that they've solved the underlying problems with today's games. There are no traditional "maps" in Star Citizen. There's no need to divide areas up in maps, since true 64-bit, combined with CIG's zone tech. and more, makes a whole star system one big map - seamlessly from the star itself to a small pebble on the ground on a moon millions of miles away. Not only that, but you can gameplay inside a ship (FPS for instance) while you're travelling the distance between the star and the pebble.
I understand people are sceptical to this but it's in there now and so people need to recognize the truth and give CIG credit for doing what they set out to do. IMO this is also why we should trust that they also will implement the rest of what they've promised. There's no reason to distrust them at this point. They're hard working to deliver this game.
Edit: Found the article here. The comments are written by James Hicks, developer of Ascent: The Space Game. I apologize in advance if I've cited him incorrectly but I fetched it from a two-year old memory of what I read. The essence in what he said should be the same though.
I understand what you are saying, and to a certain degree, you are right to say it.
But I also disagree with it.
How do we really know that they solved those issue's, when all you have to play with are small, modular sections of the overall game? Do they even have a solar system completed, in game, right now for players to explore? Can you actually walk out of a building on a planets surface, get into a ship, lift off, fly out of the planets atmosphere, and travel millions of miles to another planet, fly through its atmosphere, and fly around the planet (or moon if you prefer) to find said pebble in game right now?
Just because they claim to have sorted out those problems, and just because they show little scripted video's, does not mean they really have, and until the game as a whole is available to play around in, who really knows?
A creative person is motivated by the desire to achieve, not the desire to beat others.
Most of what you ask is in the current Alpha 3.0 build of the Persistent Universe, except the full solar system. You can't play it yet but soon. The main thing is that CIG have developed it. You can choose to believe that or not and see for yourself in August. I don't agree that the seamless transition from ground to space, that we saw in the latest AtV, was scripted - unless you mean that a developer/player doing that operation is equal to a script.
Comments
Interesting. I never would have thought that. What sort of methodology are you working under? Honestly, I haven't been involved with projects which were over, say, 20 or 30 people, on the software side of things. So we're bouncing between team sizes of 10-20 fairly regularly on projects. So the variance certainly isn't large enough to give a great anecdotal account, but based on what I've read, and see in those teams I would have thought differently. However, we are Agile, so we would tackle items based on priority and not complexity. That being said, I'm sure that within each sprint there is some amount of focus on work deemed as being problematic or complex for that given sprint.
Thanks for the insight though! That's actually a pretty cool, if not counter-intuitive insight
Crazkanuk
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Again I'm not arguing that things get delayed but that with CIG features seems to get delayed for weeks/months and then features cut out and then still get delayed even more. I wish I could do those kinds of things at my job and not worry about losing my job
You have a project as complex as SC; you have one ideology where if something isn't good enough it will be pushed back or even refactored until it is, it's obvious that timeframes will float a lot.
It's simply how the company works, the only issue here is how they communicated their estimates to the public instead of keeping internal deadlines to themselves or announcing generous timeframes to the public.
"The estimates we provide are just that: estimates. [...] it is important to understand that in many cases (especially with groundbreaking engineering tasks) these estimates are often subject to change due to unforeseen complexity in implementing features."
and ...
"We base our estimates, again, on our experience, but we also know that it’s possible for a single bug to cause a delay of days or weeks [...]"
So that should be clear as crystal then. It's neither deadlines nor promises, but ESTIMATES. If people continue to talk about these schedules in the way they've done so far, I think CIG will just pull the whole thing back to be internal only.
Source: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/schedule-report (under Caveats)
Viking
Ok lets turn it around and only give cig what money I think they need.
MAGA
Viking
― Terry Pratchett, Making Money
I don't necessarily care about deadlines or estimates, as long as I see a promising development trajectory. I don't see that with SC anymore.
I backed in 2013, now exactly 4 years ago. The idea back then was to release the hangar module in 2013, with the rest of the game coming in 2014.
Keep in mind that the initial pitch included 50 explorable systems, a full single player campaign, multiple gameplay systems (mining/trading/industry), a persistent universe with a rich economical simulation, a modding tools suite allowing people to create and submit their own ships. All of this was pitched in 2012, for realease in 2014, with the initial budget.
We got the hangar module in 2013, which was a pretty substantial release (we didn't have anything before). In 2014, we got the dogfighting module. In 2015, we got the persistent map. 2 years later, in 2017, we may be getting another substantial release later this year with 3.0 (hopefully introducing trading and some missions?).
At this pace, it will likely take 4+ more years to get the feature set that was pitched for 2014.
A creative person is motivated by the desire to achieve, not the desire to beat others.
And i'm glad it did, if the original pitch was released within the timeframe it was intended to, the game was going to rely on a more superficial and scripted "make-believe" approach.
Does this not mean that people have to subscribe to National Geographic to play the alpha.
By your logic yes!
Reality: no sub needed to play the alpha. And they have said no sub needed to play SC.
The sub may as well be a sub to National Geographic!
Viking
If their jobs are on the line they will pad the estimates. And when you say: it will take half that time they will say well if you say so but don't blame us. So you will have to fire yourself.
There are methodologies that can be used that "add intelligence" to the estimates.
However working in an established company surrounded by a sophisticated support cocoon is very different from starting from scratch. And with no guaranteed funding even harder.
Its hard. And I have been involved in setting up multi-company, multi-country projects and am - amongst other things - an accredited, qualified PM that has worked in multiple countries.
Your example of doing the risky stuff first - they probably started that as soon as they could. However what you say about low risk stuff doesn't follow. Take e.g. writing descriptions of planets. If they had dedicated people doing this then starting on day 1 or day 500 would make no difference to the schedule risk. There would be a financial cash flow implication. And - maybe - they decided they needed some "low risk guaranteed wins" to show backers and so some low risk stuff had to be done. That's a business management issue btw.
The reality however is that it probably just "grew". You try to do it in a structured way but its hard.
Some truisms:
One of the most common reasons projects are delayed is not getting the staff needed on time especially at start-up. (Getting staff is non-trivial.)
Whilst people make very poor estimators its amazing how everyone is an excellent project manager! (And as a result far to many people who are good at their jobs go on to become poor PMs.)
So - in the early days - when funding was much tighter and hypothetical questions like: do we rent an office or hire a project manager; do we buy the software we need or hire a project manager; do we hire some programmers or hire a project manager .....
So - since everyone is an excellent PM you wouldn't have had to fire yourself since neither you (nor I) would have been hired.
Getting the whole show off the ground will have been hard and "haphazard". And - now - they have put in place a simple (and cheap) system. Could it be better? Absolutely. Would it be worthwhile to put a better system in place "today". Probably not.
It is what it is. As @CrazKanuk says we are now seeing positive progress. The proof will be when it releases. What it all means in the grand scheme of things time will tell.
This is the producers on all the 4 studios going with meetings with teams and specific developers to get the estimates and timeframes for every feature and tasks that they have in their hands.
Those developers give the producers the timeframe they estimate until they finish their work, and then it's when producers themselves go into meetings to put together the schedules and the estimates for the actual release of something.
When the estimate is very inaccurate it falls in a lot of dependencies, and so many factors that will accumulate to the end reality.
Now how to fix this? Is not sharing with the backers the dates the team works with and take one approach more like Elite Dangerous, announce a date when the release is very close to happening.
I don't think it's as simple as that. I just got off a project which was delayed for a number of months, multiple times. Then, just now, it was delayed indefinitely until we can figure out unanticipated tech problems.
I can't really comment on what's acceptable here, but they are apparently doing unprecedented work. It was quoted as being impossible from an industry veteran who's a genius. So I don't really know what the expected time to complete that would be. I think I'll draw the coffee break card.
Crazkanuk
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Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
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Yeah, at project start you wound be blind when doing estimations. You have no chance of esimating the actual end date of the project as a whole. But on the short term you will be fully able to set up goals and meet them. That is how you eat an elephant. One bite at a time.
The quotes verbatim from the "genius" (?) (industry veteran i can agree with):
"Without disrespect to anyone, I’m just going to say it: it is my opinion that, this game, as has been pitched, will never get made. Ever. There isn’t a single publisher or developer on this planet who could build this game as pitched, let alone for anything less than $150 million."
"Do you have any idea what those games cost to make and how long they took? Do you know how many games which cost $50 million to make took almost five years to release? And they were nowhere in scope as Star Citizen?"
Funny that we are now over 150 M$ and not yet at 5 years (Kickstarter: Oct 2012).
Seems to me they DID set goals
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals
and are slowly but surely working through the list. Capturing the elephant first (then copying it and releasing it back into the wilds unharmed) took a bit longer than planned.
Have fun
Yeah, I make sure to throw that comment in there whenever possible. It's more a twisting of the knife than anything substantial, though
Yeah, that's basically what I had said earlier. We're actually not bad at estimating tasks that are a few hours or a day, but beyond that the risk of giving a bad estimate increases significantly. So am I blown away that they got release dates wrong when they gave them like a week into the initial funding? Nope! I mean you're a Project Manager, so you know damn well that's the reason why they don't announce products that aren't in late development or final testing (like 6 months to a year out). That being said, it still doesn't seem to stop PMs from wanting to put together a fancy gantt chart to show when they think the project will be done.
Crazkanuk
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Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
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However, he said (if I remember correctly), that he didn't believe CIG could make objects with the necessary precision needed to render things like ships and pilots in them half a solar system away, without flicker or mismatch between smaller details. He also said that (if I remember correctly) he didn't believe seamless transition from space to ground was doable, as CIG said they'd do it, so he recommended they should keep the (then) current load screen tech through clouds.
Both of these cornerstone technologies are now in Star Citizen.
The point I want to make here is that it's not only gamers who are sceptical to the goals of Star Citizen, but also the gaming industry. It hasn't be done before so it must be impossible ... CIG has shown that they've solved the underlying problems with today's games. There are no traditional "maps" in Star Citizen. There's no need to divide areas up in maps, since true 64-bit, combined with CIG's zone tech. and more, makes a whole star system one big map - seamlessly from the star itself to a small pebble on the ground on a moon millions of miles away. Not only that, but you can gameplay inside a ship (FPS for instance) while you're travelling the distance between the star and the pebble.
I understand people are sceptical to this but it's in there now and so people need to recognize the truth and give CIG credit for doing what they set out to do. IMO this is also why we should trust that they also will implement the rest of what they've promised. There's no reason to distrust them at this point. They're hard working to deliver this game.
Edit: Found the article here. The comments are written by James Hicks, developer of Ascent: The Space Game. I apologize in advance if I've cited him incorrectly but I fetched it from a two-year old memory of what I read. The essence in what he said should be the same though.
Viking
There was another developer, which is respected in the industry, who wrote a larger article on Massively OP about his opinions of Star Citizen a couple of years ago.
>>>>>
This one?
Have fun
PS:
I see you found it yourself.
But I also disagree with it.
How do we really know that they solved those issue's, when all you have to play with are small, modular sections of the overall game?
Do they even have a solar system completed, in game, right now for players to explore?
Can you actually walk out of a building on a planets surface, get into a ship, lift off, fly out of the planets atmosphere, and travel millions of miles to another planet, fly through its atmosphere, and fly around the planet (or moon if you prefer) to find said pebble in game right now?
Just because they claim to have sorted out those problems, and just because they show little scripted video's, does not mean they really have, and until the game as a whole is available to play around in, who really knows?
A creative person is motivated by the desire to achieve, not the desire to beat others.
Viking