They never claimed it would be the game, gg hyperbole, it was known as the biggest update the game and expansion the game has ever gotten and that it undoubtfully is.
The schedule of 3.0 and its listed feature-set have indeed released, with 2 pushbacks being the network bind early on and the character customization.
So yeah, it may come late, as it does, but what is claimed as what's set to be delivered will be, that's all that matters (*to those who have backed and care about the game).
They never claimed it would be the game, gg hyperbole, it was known as the biggest update the game and expansion the game has ever gotten and that it undoubtfully is.
The schedule of 3.0 and its listed feature-set have indeed released, with 2 pushbacks being the network bind early on and the character customization.
So yeah, it may come late, as it does, but what is claimed as what's set to be delivered will be, for the frustration of those who pursue the conspiracies that is all "fake" and will never release.
you might want to go re-watch some of those videos they ere throwing around during the conventions in 2016 I htink and listen to the hype they had going and what they were selling to the people who are still left that are/were willing to keep funding this niinsense.
End of the day if fubding stopped RIGHT NOW what would you expect for a finished product?
how much noire would you realistically expect to see if they didnt get another dime delivered to them .e. how much momney of the 175 million or whatever it is is left and what will it buy?
The ONLY thing fanboys of this debacle have to hang their hats on are is that theyre are enough fools left willing to keep buying ships or subbing for 'insider news' or whatever othr crap they throw good money after bad for\ that they dream of limitless funding. Its the greatest irony in gaming history. With ALL the money this thing hs (allegedly) raised what we have seen and whatthey keep watering down is laughable especially conisdering the pig in a poke this guy was selling 5 or 6 years ago for 2 or 3 mimllion dollar budget.
and save the 'the scope has changed' crap. the more times they redo a list the less 'scope' there is. Whenn all is said and done they probably wont even have what was ORIGNIALLY promised for the tiny budget.
you might want to go re-watch some of those videos they ere throwing around during the conventions in 2016 I htink and listen to the hype they had going and what they were selling to the people who are still left that are/were willing to keep funding this niinsense.
Game developers driving hype for their game? How dare them?!
Seriously the nature of your argumentation is mostly hollow, hyperbole. You mostly resort to is laying attacks against the fans in literally every post you do, "the fanboys this, the fanboys that".
To the facts it stands, independent of your pursuing for the dismissal of anything SC related, the schedule of 3.0 vs the 3.0 that released (that is what this and the other thread are about) was pretty much the (late) delivery of what was listed as part of the update, and that was point, naysay all day but what is stated as what's going to be delivered in the production schedules they started doing with 2.6, tends to be.
The biggest highlight is pushback of Network Bind Culling to 3.2 as it won't be completed in time and the couple of task-completed features now undergoing Polish.
Breakdown of the 3.1 changes:
Character Customizer moved to the Polish Stage. The IFCS Balance / Tuning moved to the Polish Stage. Visor and HUD Displays moved to the Polish Stage. All the Weapons & Items category moved to the Polish Stage. Network Bind Culling moved to 3.2.
With that, Alpha 3.1 has been branched out, with the Evocati rollout intended to happen next month.
There are some stuff on that list that SHOULD have been LONG done already,like 2 years ago.It more or less says what the team has NOT been working on>>the GAME,but working more on cash shop ideas instead and marketing videos. Like from the very first few weeks there should have been a team working on characters and lighting,what were those teams doing all this time?
Ship balance...WTF !!
All this time Chris and team have been bantering around NO p2w,no advantage from different ships,now it needs balancing...lmao my god,this Chris guy has always been full of crap.
This just confirms the game most certainly is NOT immersive,it is cash shop in space and nothing more,the entire premise was cash shop as soon as Chris saw how much money this could roll in,good luck enjoying your p2w game,should be fun.../not.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
There are some stuff on that list that SHOULD have been LONG done already,like 2 years ago.It more or less says what the team has NOT been working on>>the GAME,but working more on cash shop ideas instead and marketing videos. Like from the very first few weeks there should have been a team working on characters and lighting,what were those teams doing all this time?
Ship balance...WTF !!
All this time Chris and team have been bantering around NO p2w,no advantage from different ships,now it needs balancing...lmao my god,this Chris guy has always been full of crap.
This just confirms the game most certainly is NOT immersive,it is cash shop in space and nothing more,the entire premise was cash shop as soon as Chris saw how much money this could roll in,good luck enjoying your p2w game,should be fun.../not.
Interesting because in the other - development update - thread I just responded to a comment copied from a Reddit thread about how ships etc. shouldn't be being worked on.
The reality - however - is that in the very first few weeks: there was no team; there was no HR department to hire the team; no finance department to pay HR staff to hire a team; no buildings or kit for the non-existent finance staff to use. And so on. WTF you mean games are not just created by coders - go figure!
And the money was limited. Which is one of the huge drawbacks of using crowdfunding. You get some money - hurray - but do you hire a big team and potentially have to get rid of most of them when flow of money dries up. WTF you would surely say at that point - bad money management. As well as WTF they should have been focusing on marketing not doing the coding stuff!
Keeping it small on day 1 though means they have to cope with people saying WTF they should have been working on it from day 1 as well as the people saying WTF they shouldn't be working on this stuff at all.
And how a not yet released game can be p2w at this point - especially when we have no idea how easy or hard it will be to earn anything in game - well the only comment for that is WTF.
The biggest highlight is pushback of Network Bind Culling to 3.2 as it won't be completed in time and the couple of task-completed features now undergoing Polish.
They always have largest problems with the core tech.
Ofc core tech is the hardest to implement so in a way it's expected. But after long development time, and after 3.0 release, it's still the same problem that they could likely develop other parts of the game faster but core tech is always 1-2 years away from being finished enough.
If theres something that makes the haters fuming is Star Citizen continuous development and making millions by showcasing it.
It nulifies and shatters all their FUD and hopes of seing CIG collapse.
It's a bliss to see this kind of transparent development and the big reason Star Citizen keeps on going.
HUH? Newsflash SC already has collapsed, at least the GAME. The money generating machine however is going on full force.
But its interesting you said CIG and NOT Star Citizen. So maybe you know star Citizen isnt going to happen either at least not in any form they claimed it would exist.
If theres something that makes the haters fuming is Star Citizen continuous development and making millions by showcasing it.
It nulifies and shatters all their FUD and hopes of seing CIG collapse.
It's a bliss to see this kind of transparent development and the big reason Star Citizen keeps on going.
HUH? Newsflash SC already has collapsed, at least the GAME. The money generating machine however is going on full force.
But its interesting you said CIG and NOT Star Citizen. So maybe you know star Citizen isnt going to happen either at least not in any form they claimed it would exist.
Already? I must have missed the ELE
CIG is the company doing both Star Citizen and Squadron 42 duh...
Give it a few months and there will be a big update about how network culling will be pushed back to 3.3 because they didn’t have time.
At which point they'll decide because they have to rewrite huge swathes of code for server meshing they might as well postone bind culling until after... cue another 18 months.
They always have largest problems with the core tech.
The network tech does seem to be a large problem.
They seem to have been trying to hire network engineers, as well engineers in several other areas for years (https://cloudimperiumgames.com/jobs) but as it is well known, talent is engineering is the hardest to hire (there can be a competition of offers on several areas).
I think they have 5 network engineers, some of them on Austin that do not develop tech yet maintain the network of the live service of the game, and 2/3 of them in the UK yes doing the network rewrites and new tech in that front.
Network shows to be the missing large piece of tech when it comes to the game (aside of container streaming that is another dept), but it shows the network engineering team is slacking behind, either overworked or just being pushed to deliver in unreasonable timeframes.
Kingdom Come Deliverance raised a fraction, a true fraction of SC. They managed to crank out a game. CIG's 450 employees cannot all be working on coding. If so, the game would be done. Odds are, his employees, all 450 of them, work or worked for him as temps and other miscellaneous jobs. We've been down this road before. We do not have those numbers. And we never will. So that is a fruitless discussion.
But a comparison between games isn't so fruitless.
Not seen e.g. the F42 company reports.
As for your "cannot all be working on coding" comment have you no idea of the different roles that are needed to create a game - any game. Artists, scriptwriters; QA / testers; even payroll staff!
Now Kingdom Come Deliverance. Solid game. Did you just forget to mention that that the KS money was only used to create a "pitch" though? A pitch that led to the Czech billionaire Zdenek Bakala backing the game. Or were you trying to imply that KCD was made for a fraction of what SC has made?
And yes it does make a difference a team has all the money at the start. They can go out and hire a full team. They don't have to worry about the need to get an alpha out to keep the funds coming in etc. etc. etc. Its going to be altogether more efficient - and so like-for-like it should be cheaper. I don't think that is what you were implying though.
Them there comparisons can be very useful though.
I did not fail to mention it. I just didn't know the game was backed by Bakala. Unlike may of you in the know, I read a few of these forum threads, but do not keep up with the industry insides as closely as other members here. That is why I pose questions, many of which get answered. And I am thankful for the information. I try not to be biased, but with a few friends in the industry slamming CIG, it is difficult.
That is interesting about KCD. Any idea how much Bakala invested?
As for coding, I do realize there are many working components to a studio, including artists, payroll/HR, programmers, etc. I just used the term in a general sense.
Your last paragraph doesn't make sense to me though. (And please correct me if I'm off base here.) But, didn't SC get a boatload of money upfront through their kickstarter? Something like 90 million? And wasn't that eons ago? To me, if KCD had a source pool, I doubt it was as much as SC, therefore, SC should be in a better place than KCD.
Your last paragraph doesn't make sense to me though. (And please correct me if I'm off base here.) But, didn't SC get a boatload of money upfront through their kickstarter? Something like 90 million? And wasn't that eons ago? To me, if KCD had a source pool, I doubt it was as much as SC, therefore, SC should be in a better place than KCD.
No, SC got 2 million in its KS, it took years until they got that amount of money. KCD is known to have been backed by that billionaire, I don't think it is known any numbers in that relationship.
And it's rather logical, KCD compares heavily to Skyrim even in terms of world and content, but when we compare Skyrim as 85million budget to KCD kickstarted numbers I'd say the real number must be far higher.
As for your last bit, disagreeing there, if SC was only and purely focused as the dev and release of SQ42, then sure I'd agree, and perhaps if that was the case that SQ42 would have been released by now.
Kingdom Come Deliverance raised a fraction, a true fraction of SC. They managed to crank out a game. CIG's 450 employees cannot all be working on coding. If so, the game would be done. Odds are, his employees, all 450 of them, work or worked for him as temps and other miscellaneous jobs. We've been down this road before. We do not have those numbers. And we never will. So that is a fruitless discussion.
But a comparison between games isn't so fruitless.
Not seen e.g. the F42 company reports.
As for your "cannot all be working on coding" comment have you no idea of the different roles that are needed to create a game - any game. Artists, scriptwriters; QA / testers; even payroll staff!
Now Kingdom Come Deliverance. Solid game. Did you just forget to mention that that the KS money was only used to create a "pitch" though? A pitch that led to the Czech billionaire Zdenek Bakala backing the game. Or were you trying to imply that KCD was made for a fraction of what SC has made?
And yes it does make a difference a team has all the money at the start. They can go out and hire a full team. They don't have to worry about the need to get an alpha out to keep the funds coming in etc. etc. etc. Its going to be altogether more efficient - and so like-for-like it should be cheaper. I don't think that is what you were implying though.
Them there comparisons can be very useful though.
I did not fail to mention it. I just didn't know the game was backed by Bakala. <snip>
OK.
As for the last paragraph @MaxBacon answered that bit - it wasn't a boatload of money. If they had had $90M on day 1 I am sure they would have done things differently but what they had - well that would fund the current team size for .... well 450 @ $5000 is over $2M.
This is a crowdfunding issue - its not specific to SC. For games check out SotA or Mark Jacob's comments on CU etc. The team hopes that money comes in but it might not - for a week or a few months. Which tempers - it must temper - how you proceed.
What KCD will have done is produce a plan of work, estimated how long it would take with a team of 300 or whatever. Costed it - so much for staff, offices, software etc. added something for risk and they went looking for a backer who could fund the $85M or whatever. And - Zdenek Bakala in this case - will have looked at the plan, maybe added his own risk to the potential spend and maybe some "control gates" that would release chunks of funding. And it worked. You adopt a very different approach though when you know you have the funding.
Crowdfunding though - the teams don't have that luxury. They make decisions at the time based on what they believe to be best at the time. Influenced inevitably by how much money they have left in the bank. We can second guess with hindsight to our hearts content but in reality they are juggling multiple plates in the air. And whilst some people don't believe some are needed e.g. "marketing" the reality is that they are all needed. For without money nothing happens.
Core tech optimization (network culling), is something I'm worried about and have been from the start. You can't have a lot of detail in a game without turning it into a lag fest. I don't remember ever seeing a highly detailed game master that on land and in space. You don't keep pushing back major problems or they will make it into launch.
It's a core mechanic meaning a foundation for the game and pushing back a core anything for a game means at some point you will have to redo everything to conform to the fix or compromise and except the fact that you just have to learn to live with the problem to some degree. ESO still has problems with lag, poor optimizations, and long loading screens, especially after new DLC to this day because optimization appeared to be a low priority. TSW pushed back optimazed combat mechanics and now have the same problem, they did what they could to make it better but it's still a core problem with the game, imo.
Hopefully I'm wrong and the game will one day run as smooth as butter with 1000 pilot battles going on over cities but time will tell for sure.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Core tech optimization (network culling), is something I'm worried about and have been from the start. You can't have a lot of detail in a game without turning it into a lag fest. I don't remember ever seeing a highly detailed game master that on land and in space. You don't keep pushing back major problems or they will make it into launch.
It's a core mechanic meaning a foundation for the game and pushing back a core anything for a game means at some point you will have to redo everything to conform to the fix or compromise and except the fact that you just have to learn to live with the problem to some degree. ESO still has problems with lag, poor optimizations, and long loading screens, especially after new DLC to this day because optimization appeared to be a low priority. TSW pushed back optimazed combat mechanics and now have the same problem, they did what they could to make it better but it's still a core problem with the game, imo.
Hopefully I'm wrong and the game will one day run as smooth as butter with 1000 pilot battles going on over cities but time will tell for sure.
Wait, 1000 pilot battles visible over a city full of NPCs and player characters isn't actually something they're trying to achieve, right? That was hyperbole?
Core tech optimization (network culling), is something I'm worried about and have been from the start. You can't have a lot of detail in a game without turning it into a lag fest. I don't remember ever seeing a highly detailed game master that on land and in space. You don't keep pushing back major problems or they will make it into launch.
It's a core mechanic meaning a foundation for the game and pushing back a core anything for a game means at some point you will have to redo everything to conform to the fix or compromise and except the fact that you just have to learn to live with the problem to some degree. ESO still has problems with lag, poor optimizations, and long loading screens, especially after new DLC to this day because optimization appeared to be a low priority. TSW pushed back optimazed combat mechanics and now have the same problem, they did what they could to make it better but it's still a core problem with the game, imo.
Hopefully I'm wrong and the game will one day run as smooth as butter with 1000 pilot battles going on over cities but time will tell for sure.
And this is something they've been struggling with since pre 2.6. Network culling was once again pushed back, this time from 3.1 to 3.2 and as it's a feature people have been counting on to improve performance there has been plenty of annoyance about its new delay.
Clive Johnson:
We decided it was necessary to push Bind Culling back for the following reasons:
1) Progress has been slower than we had hoped, partly due to taking
longer than anticipated to convert the last few places in the code that
were using old-style Aspects and RMIs to Serialized Variables and Remote
Methods, and then completely strip those legacy systems from the
network code. That was a necessary step because we didn't want to have
to implement Bind Culling for both the old and new systems. I'm not
embarrassed to tell you there was some dancing and a few air-punches on
my part when the last line of that old code was deleted.
2) There wouldn't have been enough time left before 3.1 for the
network and gameplay programmers to deal with the issues we’re expecting
the introduction of Bind Culling to cause.
3) Bind Culling would result in clients streaming entities in and out
based on distance, but without asynchronous Object Container Streaming
it was always a gamble whether the resulting synchronous loading stalls
would be worse or better than what players experience now. The plan was
to get Bind Culling working, see what the impact on player experience
was and then make the call whether to turn it on for 3.1.
4) Range-based Serialized Variable Culling was our backup plan in
case Bind Culling didn't make it into 3.1. You may remember that we were
working on SV Culling for 3.0 but that it wasn't quite ready in time.
Well, it was the first thing we tackled when we came back at the start
of the year, and has been working in our development branch for several
weeks now (not the branch 3.0.1 was taken from). SV Culling already
gives us a lot of the performance gain we would expect from Bind Culling
so the urgency for the later has dropped significantly.
5) The network team is needed for other tasks that have increased in priority since they were first added to our schedule.
I'm not sure what he's saying here. He starts off saying progress is slower and they've been working on other stuff. Then he says but it's ready but they delayed it because they were unsure how it would affect things. He then says they need object container streaming else performance would be worse. Then he says they have a backup plan which they have been working on instead of bind culling and that's already in the dev branch with better performance than they anticipated so bind culling is now on the back seat (despite him saying it's ready but delayed). And then he rounds it off saying the team are working on other stuff entirely.
Is he confused or is he trying to confuse everyone else?
Is he confused or is he trying to confuse everyone else?
So he says it goes slower than expected, but you read context as point 2), even if ready there wouldn't be enough time to deal with the expectable issues from including it in 3.1, if that's the case then it would become a waste of time just to have to remove it so the update could release in time.
The point 3) is more complex and it seems this has dependencies in a way they can't assure how will that impact performance without the dependency work finished.
The point 4) well, is what he said, another solution they have tackled in and from what he says already gives them the performance gains they wanted from bind culling, so it's a case of different means to the same end.
In any way what I hope is that 3.1 does come with some needed gain in client performance, either that is SV Culling or Bind Culling.
We decided it was necessary to push Bind Culling back for the following reasons:
1) Progress has been slower than we had hoped, partly due to taking
longer than anticipated to convert the last few places in the code that
were using old-style Aspects and RMIs to Serialized Variables and Remote
Methods, and then completely strip those legacy systems from the
network code. That was a necessary step because we didn't want to have
to implement Bind Culling for both the old and new systems. I'm not
embarrassed to tell you there was some dancing and a few air-punches on
my part when the last line of that old code was deleted.
2) There wouldn't have been enough time left before 3.1 for the
network and gameplay programmers to deal with the issues we’re expecting
the introduction of Bind Culling to cause.
3) Bind Culling would result in clients streaming entities in and out
based on distance, but without asynchronous Object Container Streaming
it was always a gamble whether the resulting synchronous loading stalls
would be worse or better than what players experience now. The plan was
to get Bind Culling working, see what the impact on player experience
was and then make the call whether to turn it on for 3.1.
4) Range-based Serialized Variable Culling was our backup plan in
case Bind Culling didn't make it into 3.1. You may remember that we were
working on SV Culling for 3.0 but that it wasn't quite ready in time.
Well, it was the first thing we tackled when we came back at the start
of the year, and has been working in our development branch for several
weeks now (not the branch 3.0.1 was taken from). SV Culling already
gives us a lot of the performance gain we would expect from Bind Culling
so the urgency for the later has dropped significantly.
5) The network team is needed for other tasks that have increased in priority since they were first added to our schedule.
I'm not sure what he's saying here. <snip>
The internal plan was: remove old-style code; enabling bind culling to be done on new-style code only; release 3.1.
Removal of "old-style code" was "slower than hoped" - but is now finished. Due to the delay however they didn't finish the bind-culling work for 3.1 - they haven't worked out the best solution yet.
"Range-based Serialized Variable Culling" was planned for 3.0 .... but missed the 3.0 release. It is now finished.
SVC offers a chunk of the network improvement. Bind culling should give them more but today: SVC is finished, BC isn't. So SVC goes into 3.1.
The team is going to be doing something else now so BC, presumably, won't be in 3.2.
My guess would be that they will monitor what improvements SVC on its own provides, what issues they have etc. and use this data to shape the BC solution they go with. Just my guess however.
They haven’t been able to work out the best method to implement bind culling since end of 2016 or so. Don’t hold your breath on them figuring it out anytime soon
Core tech optimization (network culling), is something I'm worried about and have been from the start. You can't have a lot of detail in a game without turning it into a lag fest. I don't remember ever seeing a highly detailed game master that on land and in space. You don't keep pushing back major problems or they will make it into launch.
It's a core mechanic meaning a foundation for the game and pushing back a core anything for a game means at some point you will have to redo everything to conform to the fix or compromise and except the fact that you just have to learn to live with the problem to some degree. ESO still has problems with lag, poor optimizations, and long loading screens, especially after new DLC to this day because optimization appeared to be a low priority. TSW pushed back optimazed combat mechanics and now have the same problem, they did what they could to make it better but it's still a core problem with the game, imo.
Hopefully I'm wrong and the game will one day run as smooth as butter with 1000 pilot battles going on over cities but time will tell for sure.
Wait, 1000 pilot battles visible over a city full of NPCs and player characters isn't actually something they're trying to achieve, right? That was hyperbole?
I'm honestly asking.
Big battles in space is what a lot of people have been asking for. I think that 1000 ship battle was used more by Star Citizens than by CIG. But last I heard they were shooting for maybe 35 ships in the same area.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Game optimization sounds like a big problem they don't really know how to deal with at this point so they delay it. What could be more important than players flying in a game that runs smooth as butter? I hope they focus on this rather than work around it.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Comments
The schedule of 3.0 and its listed feature-set have indeed released, with 2 pushbacks being the network bind early on and the character customization.
So yeah, it may come late, as it does, but what is claimed as what's set to be delivered will be, that's all that matters (*to those who have backed and care about the game).
End of the day if fubding stopped RIGHT NOW what would you expect for a finished product?
how much noire would you realistically expect to see if they didnt get another dime delivered to them .e. how much momney of the 175 million or whatever it is is left and what will it buy?
The ONLY thing fanboys of this debacle have to hang their hats on are is that theyre are enough fools left willing to keep buying ships or subbing for 'insider news' or whatever othr crap they throw good money after bad for\ that they dream of limitless funding. Its the greatest irony in gaming history. With ALL the money this thing hs (allegedly) raised what we have seen and whatthey keep watering down is laughable especially conisdering the pig in a poke this guy was selling 5 or 6 years ago for 2 or 3 mimllion dollar budget.
and save the 'the scope has changed' crap. the more times they redo a list the less 'scope' there is. Whenn all is said and done they probably wont even have what was ORIGNIALLY promised for the tiny budget.
Seriously the nature of your argumentation is mostly hollow, hyperbole. You mostly resort to is laying attacks against the fans in literally every post you do, "the fanboys this, the fanboys that".
To the facts it stands, independent of your pursuing for the dismissal of anything SC related, the schedule of 3.0 vs the 3.0 that released (that is what this and the other thread are about) was pretty much the (late) delivery of what was listed as part of the update, and that was point, naysay all day but what is stated as what's going to be delivered in the production schedules they started doing with 2.6, tends to be.
There will be excuses as to why what they said, didn't actually mean what they said it meant, at the time they said it.
The cash shop to take your money for updates, demos, broken promises, good intentions and cake is working like a charm....a snake charm that is.
It nulifies and shatters all their FUD and hopes of seing CIG collapse.
It's a bliss to see this kind of transparent development and the big reason Star Citizen keeps on going.
The biggest highlight is pushback of Network Bind Culling to 3.2 as it won't be completed in time and the couple of task-completed features now undergoing Polish.
Breakdown of the 3.1 changes:
Character Customizer moved to the Polish Stage.
The IFCS Balance / Tuning moved to the Polish Stage.
Visor and HUD Displays moved to the Polish Stage.
All the Weapons & Items category moved to the Polish Stage.
Network Bind Culling moved to 3.2.
With that, Alpha 3.1 has been branched out, with the Evocati rollout intended to happen next month.
Like from the very first few weeks there should have been a team working on characters and lighting,what were those teams doing all this time?
Ship balance...WTF !!
All this time Chris and team have been bantering around NO p2w,no advantage from different ships,now it needs balancing...lmao my god,this Chris guy has always been full of crap.
This just confirms the game most certainly is NOT immersive,it is cash shop in space and nothing more,the entire premise was cash shop as soon as Chris saw how much money this could roll in,good luck enjoying your p2w game,should be fun.../not.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
The reality - however - is that in the very first few weeks: there was no team; there was no HR department to hire the team; no finance department to pay HR staff to hire a team; no buildings or kit for the non-existent finance staff to use. And so on. WTF you mean games are not just created by coders - go figure!
And the money was limited. Which is one of the huge drawbacks of using crowdfunding. You get some money - hurray - but do you hire a big team and potentially have to get rid of most of them when flow of money dries up. WTF you would surely say at that point - bad money management. As well as WTF they should have been focusing on marketing not doing the coding stuff!
Keeping it small on day 1 though means they have to cope with people saying WTF they should have been working on it from day 1 as well as the people saying WTF they shouldn't be working on this stuff at all.
And how a not yet released game can be p2w at this point - especially when we have no idea how easy or hard it will be to earn anything in game - well the only comment for that is WTF.
Ofc core tech is the hardest to implement so in a way it's expected. But after long development time, and after 3.0 release, it's still the same problem that they could likely develop other parts of the game faster but core tech is always 1-2 years away from being finished enough.
But its interesting you said CIG and NOT Star Citizen. So maybe you know star Citizen isnt going to happen either at least not in any form they claimed it would exist.
CIG is the company doing both Star Citizen and Squadron 42 duh...
90 days
They seem to have been trying to hire network engineers, as well engineers in several other areas for years (https://cloudimperiumgames.com/jobs) but as it is well known, talent is engineering is the hardest to hire (there can be a competition of offers on several areas).
I think they have 5 network engineers, some of them on Austin that do not develop tech yet maintain the network of the live service of the game, and 2/3 of them in the UK yes doing the network rewrites and new tech in that front.
Network shows to be the missing large piece of tech when it comes to the game (aside of container streaming that is another dept), but it shows the network engineering team is slacking behind, either overworked or just being pushed to deliver in unreasonable timeframes.
That is interesting about KCD. Any idea how much Bakala invested?
As for coding, I do realize there are many working components to a studio, including artists, payroll/HR, programmers, etc. I just used the term in a general sense.
Your last paragraph doesn't make sense to me though. (And please correct me if I'm off base here.) But, didn't SC get a boatload of money upfront through their kickstarter? Something like 90 million? And wasn't that eons ago? To me, if KCD had a source pool, I doubt it was as much as SC, therefore, SC should be in a better place than KCD.
And it's rather logical, KCD compares heavily to Skyrim even in terms of world and content, but when we compare Skyrim as 85million budget to KCD kickstarted numbers I'd say the real number must be far higher.
As for your last bit, disagreeing there, if SC was only and purely focused as the dev and release of SQ42, then sure I'd agree, and perhaps if that was the case that SQ42 would have been released by now.
As for the last paragraph @MaxBacon answered that bit - it wasn't a boatload of money. If they had had $90M on day 1 I am sure they would have done things differently but what they had - well that would fund the current team size for .... well 450 @ $5000 is over $2M.
This is a crowdfunding issue - its not specific to SC. For games check out SotA or Mark Jacob's comments on CU etc. The team hopes that money comes in but it might not - for a week or a few months. Which tempers - it must temper - how you proceed.
What KCD will have done is produce a plan of work, estimated how long it would take with a team of 300 or whatever. Costed it - so much for staff, offices, software etc. added something for risk and they went looking for a backer who could fund the $85M or whatever. And - Zdenek Bakala in this case - will have looked at the plan, maybe added his own risk to the potential spend and maybe some "control gates" that would release chunks of funding. And it worked. You adopt a very different approach though when you know you have the funding.
Crowdfunding though - the teams don't have that luxury. They make decisions at the time based on what they believe to be best at the time. Influenced inevitably by how much money they have left in the bank. We can second guess with hindsight to our hearts content but in reality they are juggling multiple plates in the air. And whilst some people don't believe some are needed e.g. "marketing" the reality is that they are all needed. For without money nothing happens.
It's a core mechanic meaning a foundation for the game and pushing back a core anything for a game means at some point you will have to redo everything to conform to the fix or compromise and except the fact that you just have to learn to live with the problem to some degree. ESO still has problems with lag, poor optimizations, and long loading screens, especially after new DLC to this day because optimization appeared to be a low priority. TSW pushed back optimazed combat mechanics and now have the same problem, they did what they could to make it better but it's still a core problem with the game, imo.
Hopefully I'm wrong and the game will one day run as smooth as butter with 1000 pilot battles going on over cities but time will tell for sure.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
I'm honestly asking.
Clive Johnson:
1) Progress has been slower than we had hoped, partly due to taking longer than anticipated to convert the last few places in the code that were using old-style Aspects and RMIs to Serialized Variables and Remote Methods, and then completely strip those legacy systems from the network code. That was a necessary step because we didn't want to have to implement Bind Culling for both the old and new systems. I'm not embarrassed to tell you there was some dancing and a few air-punches on my part when the last line of that old code was deleted.
2) There wouldn't have been enough time left before 3.1 for the network and gameplay programmers to deal with the issues we’re expecting the introduction of Bind Culling to cause.
3) Bind Culling would result in clients streaming entities in and out based on distance, but without asynchronous Object Container Streaming it was always a gamble whether the resulting synchronous loading stalls would be worse or better than what players experience now. The plan was to get Bind Culling working, see what the impact on player experience was and then make the call whether to turn it on for 3.1.
4) Range-based Serialized Variable Culling was our backup plan in case Bind Culling didn't make it into 3.1. You may remember that we were working on SV Culling for 3.0 but that it wasn't quite ready in time. Well, it was the first thing we tackled when we came back at the start of the year, and has been working in our development branch for several weeks now (not the branch 3.0.1 was taken from). SV Culling already gives us a lot of the performance gain we would expect from Bind Culling so the urgency for the later has dropped significantly.
5) The network team is needed for other tasks that have increased in priority since they were first added to our schedule.
I'm not sure what he's saying here.
He starts off saying progress is slower and they've been working on other stuff.
Then he says but it's ready but they delayed it because they were unsure how it would affect things.
He then says they need object container streaming else performance would be worse.
Then he says they have a backup plan which they have been working on instead of bind culling and that's already in the dev branch with better performance than they anticipated so bind culling is now on the back seat (despite him saying it's ready but delayed).
And then he rounds it off saying the team are working on other stuff entirely.
Is he confused or is he trying to confuse everyone else?
The point 3) is more complex and it seems this has dependencies in a way they can't assure how will that impact performance without the dependency work finished.
The point 4) well, is what he said, another solution they have tackled in and from what he says already gives them the performance gains they wanted from bind culling, so it's a case of different means to the same end.
In any way what I hope is that 3.1 does come with some needed gain in client performance, either that is SV Culling or Bind Culling.
Removal of "old-style code" was "slower than hoped" - but is now finished. Due to the delay however they didn't finish the bind-culling work for 3.1 - they haven't worked out the best solution yet.
"Range-based Serialized Variable Culling" was planned for 3.0 .... but missed the 3.0 release. It is now finished.
SVC offers a chunk of the network improvement. Bind culling should give them more but today: SVC is finished, BC isn't. So SVC goes into 3.1.
The team is going to be doing something else now so BC, presumably, won't be in 3.2.
My guess would be that they will monitor what improvements SVC on its own provides, what issues they have etc. and use this data to shape the BC solution they go with. Just my guess however.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey