Star Citizen

[Regolyth]

It just occurred to me... I wonder if the reason AAA MMOs are costing so much is because they're trying to pay the enormous, bloated salaries of CEOs, presidents and other useless people who put their unneeded and damaging two cents into these games? I'll bet if that's 100% right, it's darn near close. Designers and artists are cheap. I should know, I am one. The actual workers can't be what's driving these prices so high, regardless of how many you have and how long these games are taking.

Oat, I actually just saw an ad for Destiny yesterday. It looks like it's on the consoles as well.

[Morreion]

It's possible, Rego- sort of like how the record companies and publishing companies add lots of middle men that need to be paid well for producing music & books.

[Regolyth]

It seems to me, that throughout history, too many other people make money on a creative person's work.

Of course, I guess this isn't really anything new. The world is full of leaches.

[Morreion]

You can race your Star Citizen spaceship today (Massively)

Before I get too deep into this news post, I'd like to take a moment to thank Cloud Imperium for releasing Star Citizen's racing module on ArcheAge's launch day.

Now that that's out of my system, let's see here. Arena Commander 0.9 is officially patchable right now. It brings with it the Murray Cup racing simulator, co-op play, leaderboards, and "too many bug fixes to list," according to CIG's announcement post.

Concept Sale: Unveiling the Aegis Reclaimer (Roberts Space Industries)

A dedicated salvage and reclamation platform, the Reclaimer is the perfect ship for venturing into the ‘Verse in search of riches and secrets. Whether you’re churning debris fields for raw ore or searching for lost artifacts, the Reclaimer is built for utility. The life of a salvager can be tough, but with technology like the Reclaimer behind you it can be a profitable way to make your living among the stars.

Aegis has built the perfect ship for those that want to write their own Star Citizen story. Equipped with a massive multi-tool arm, the Reclaimer can grab spaceborne salvage and then carry it aboard for processing. In addition to a large cargo hold, the hull is packed with reclamation equipment capable of processing and storing up to a Constellation worth of salvage!

The Reclaimer’s turrets are multi-use hardpoints which can be mounted with defensive guns, missile batteries, additional tractor beams, floodlights, scanners or other salvage-specific options. The ship carries an array of Surveyor-class drones for seeking out valuable items in the distant depths.

Additionally, it includes a manned cutter which may be deployed for EVA/recovery operations. We intend the game’s salvage mechanic to include a ‘search and recovery’ function in which players will exit their spacecraft in suits and maneuvering units to explore wreckage. Pocket spacecraft like the cutter will carry tools and supplies and transport recovered artifacts back aboard ship.

Star Citizen hits $54 million with a letter from Chris Roberts (Massively)

Star Citizen's ongoing funding drive has put the game up to $54 million now, and that means another feature off of the stretch goal page and into the full game. Chris Roberts addressed the community in a letter following this most recent landmark and explained that this level of funding will allow the game to launch with advanced AI behavior from NPCs in planetside environments. He also showed off a new video highlighting the Retaliator bomber, demonstrating the level of detail inside the ship that players can anticipate.

Roberts went on to detail the cannon that will be awarded to every backer who joins before the game hits $55 million and offered another poll for players to determine what rewards they'd prefer for the next million-dollar increment.

Star Citizen hits 55M in crowdfunding, sets a new Guinness record, and rolls out Arena Commander v0.9.1 (Massively)

Ready to command the heck out of the arena? Star Citizen has just rolled out the latest patch to the Arena Commander module, which includes the welcome introduction of customizable keybindings. If you find the default controls for dogfighting or racing to be not to your liking, you can change them now. The keybinds currently support mouse and keyboard options as well as joysticks and and controllers; moving forward, the team wants to allow for options like allowing double-tap bindings and device-specific tuning...

In more meta Star Citizen news, the game officially crossed the $55 million crowdfund threshold last evening. In his ensuing letter from the chairman, Chris Roberts noted that according to Guinness World Records, the game is now not just the largest crowdfunded game of all time but "the largest crowdfunded anything of all time!"

Stick and Rudder: Oh yeah, Star Citizen is a game I'm following! (Massively)

Maintaining interest is an ongoing challenge with Cloud Imperium's crowdfunding project, though, at least for me. That's not to say that Star Citizen has been dislodged from atop my most-anticipated-games list. It certainly has not been and will not be, barring some sort of divine Star Wars: Galaxies 2 intervention. But man: Do you guys ever get tired of following alphas and check out entirely for a while?

Star Citizen working to develop ships faster than before (Massively)

"We have been hard at work refining our process and improving our workflow so that we can develop ships more quickly and more efficiently than we have ever done before," the team writes. "The creation of new ships for Star Citizen is an incredibly complex and detailed process, so it made sense to move it to LA where Chris [Roberts] can maintain oversight and provide direction to everyone involved."

The report also touched on the fleshing out of Arena Commander, preparations for upcoming conventions, the hiring of new personnel, and improvements to ships' HUDs.

Star Citizen's Roberts: 'A working universe is much more interesting than just a battlefield' (Massively)

The latest milestone to fall by the wayside is $56 million, and the latest letter talks up the sci-fi sandbox's non-combat bells and whistles. Roberts writes that he's pleased to see the new Reclaimer salvage ship striking a chord with backers, as it confirms his "feeling that a working universe is much more interesting than just a battlefield."

He also mentions a community poll that determined the role for Star Citizen's initial fourth wave ship. "The results of the poll also confirmed my belief that the community understands the broader reach of Star Citizen: an overwhelming number of backers voted for the research and hospital ship!"

Inside Star Citizen's grey market (Eurogamer)
People are spending thousands of pounds on virtual spaceships for an unfinished game. We investigate.

"Kane" won't tell me how much he's made as a Star Citizen middleman. Like so many Spaniards affected by the economic crisis, he was recently made redundant, but the bills keep on coming. "These transactions are helping me in these difficult times," he says.

These days, the second-hand sale of virtual goods is a tired story. But what makes Star Citizen's grey market special is that in many cases the spaceships that are bought and sold can't be used in the game yet. They're just £1000 ideas, the promise of that most base fantasy: exploring the galaxy in your very own - and very exclusive - spaceship. Kane is just one of many making money out of a grey market fuelled by that promise - and it exists underneath the covers of Star Citizen's gargantuan success.

[Morreion]

How Ideas Take Flight: The Star Citizen Ship Pipeline (Star Citizen website)

How does a ship for Star Citizen go from a vague concept to a functional design in the game? That's a great question! It's also one with a concrete answer, as a new official blog on the site explains the whole design pipeline process for new Star Citizen ships, starting with the highest level of concept and moving on to the level where the ship is ready for everyone to take into space.

Star Citizen passes $60M in fundraising, becoming 'single, coherent vision' (Massively)

Star Citizen appears to be unstoppable, with the in-development space sim passing the $60,000,000 crowdfunding mark this past weekend.

The $60M barrier unlocked the Aegis Bulldog fighter stretch goal. Moving forward, Chris Roberts revealed the next few milestone goals: the Espera Prowler boarding ship ($61M) and the Genesis-class Starliner ($62M).

"I think I speak for everyone on the team when we say it really feels like Star Citizen is starting to go from a series of modules to a single, coherent vision," Roberts said before teasing "a few more surprises" before the year is out.

Star Citizen aims to redefine avatar death, combat realism (Massively)

This week Roberts and company have released another extensive design doc called Healing Your Spacemen, which greatly expands the original concept. "In the end, the team decided to run counter to the standard FPS mechanics of regenerating health and instantly respawning on death to make every fight a calculated decision that can have ramifications that impact your character and place in the 'Verse," Cloud Imperium says.

Character health involves a limb-based system featuring four levels of health for each limb, and the system deliberately avoids "the current trend of hiding behind cover for blood to clear off your screen and jumping back in the fight ready for more." The post also explains how characters may be dragged to safety and how the spaceflight portion of the game will include "a robust rescue system" that complements the character death and damage mechanics. Read all about it via the official site links below!

Star Citizen eclipses $63 million, adds pets (Massively)

Cloud Imperium has a lot to be thankful for, including the fact that Star Citizen surpassed the $62 and $63 million crowdfunding plateaus during Thanksgiving week. Chris Roberts has published a new celebratory letter in which he outlines the latest stretch goals (the Genesis-class Starliner at $62 million and the Reliant at $63 million).

Star Citizen opens up a $350 ship for sale (Massively)

Do you want to go out exploring with Star Citizen once it's actually possible to do so? It's one of the stated goals of the game, after all. If so, perhaps you'd like to do that exploration inside of the newly revealed Anvil Carrack, a ship that is available for purchase now for the not-at-all low price of $350. And you can't use it in any of the game's current modules once you do purchase it.

Get a closer look at Star Citizen's Gladiator bomber (Massively)

According to the description, "The Gladiator is the UEE Navy's premiere carrier-based torpedo-plane and space-to-ground dive bomber. Operating with Hornet escort fighters, Gladiators have seen service with great success in battles across known space. Rugged to a fault, the Gladiator is the most capable bomber chassis ever designed."

Star Citizen releases Arena Commander 1.0 (Massively)

Pilots, start your engines, for Star Citizen's Arena Commander 1.0 is here! Arena Commander is the next significant milestone for the modularly developed space sim. With AC 1.0, pilots can take their ships out for dogfighting or just to experience flight among the stars.

Arena Commander 1.0 also has the effect of growing Star Citizen's feature list. The team's tripled the number of flyable ships with 14 new vessels. Missiles were improved, while the game added a lobby system, a friends list, a ship signature system, a thruster power system, and a lateral g-force system. The team also improved many of the visuals, animations, and audio effects.

Star Citizen's Chris Roberts looks back on a year of growth (Massively)

2014 was a pretty big year for Star Citizen, and not just because the Arena Commander module went from its first release version to 1.0 over the course of the year. A recent letter from project head Chris Roberts states that over 2014 the studio has gone from having 70 employees in one location to 180 employees in four locations across the globe. He also notes the huge increases in funding that the game has seen from both new backers and old.

So what's in store for 2015? Big stuff for backers. The first episode of Squadron 42 and the beginnings of the game's persistent universe will be reaching backer hands, along with the first iterations of the FPS module. There's no exact timetable given, but the developers are certainly planning big for the year ahead. Take a look at the full letter for more statistics on the year past and the one just begun.

[Morreion]

Star Citizen Careers: Mining (Star Citizen official site)

Star Citizen’s ultimate objective is to present players with a vast, incredibly detailed universe where everyone can forge their own unique path through the stars. To that end, we’re going to great lengths to ensure that – whatever your interest – there’s an enormous amount of things for you to do and obstacles to overcome.

Star Citizen will support a diverse set of occupations, each with its own unique set of challenges and rewards. However, there is no artificial concept of a character having to select a specific profession or character progression based upon gradually incrementing numeric attributes. The only thing that dictates your success or failure at a given endeavor are the actual capabilities of you and your companions and the equipment you bring to bear...

When deciding upon a course of action, every miner has two basic options – working freelance or acting as an agent in the employ of another entity. Freelance miners elect which materials they want to procure and, after retrieval, set out to find the optimal trading port at which to unload them. While potentially the most lucrative, this approach exposes miners to the vagaries of the market, and if demand wanes during the acquisition of the materials the price eventually obtained might be insufficient to have warranted the effort and expense endured, especially if significant expenses were suffered in the form of costly NPC crew members having been utilized, fuel having been expended, or damage to the ship having occurred.

Miners working under contract for another entity remove most of the risk from their ledger, but in so doing often have to give up a significant portion of their cargo’s value in exchange for the benefit locking in a fixed price. Further, they risk a hit to their reputation if they are unable to procure the promised materials within the specified timeframe. The information gleaned from the TDD is of significant benefit in ascertaining whether the discount being offered is warranted by the security of a guaranteed contract...

Asteroid fields containing ore of varying purity levels litter most star systems, but prior to a miner engaging their quantum drive and making haste to begin extracting value from the environment, they must gain knowledge of those fields.

To this end, every solar system contains a variety of information considered public knowledge, including the location of major asteroid fields. The entry-level miner often begins their career via heading towards such well-known sites, but as would be expected the most valuable materials in such fields have typically long since been extracted. The remaining ore of value is often spread so thinly throughout a vast field that its retrieval requires more time and effort than more advanced miners are willing to endure. Valuable new fields are occasionally located and made known to the public, often resulting in a dramatic increase in mining activity…and soon thereafter a drop in prices on those materials contained in ample quantity within the field as players rush to exploit the freely available resource...

The mining occupation supports a variety of dedicated specialists, each of which has a critical role to play in the effort. As previously noted, one of the basic objectives in the design of the various occupations is breaking down large, complicated endeavors into a number of smaller jobs, each of which can test a dedicated player’s mettle in unique and interesting ways. This encourages but does not force players to act in concert with one another to accomplish larger tasks, as you’ll always have the option of simply doing it all yourself – however inefficient that might be – or, more likely, simply hiring NPC crew members to work alongside you. There’s a lot of thought and effort going into the hiring, evolution, simulation of motivations, and evaluation of such NPC crew members, but that’s a topic best left for another discussion.

Star Citizen adds progression to its dogfight module (MOP)

Star Citizen chairman Chris Roberts has posted a blurb outlining a new system called Rental Equipment Credits that is coming to Arena Commander’s 1.1 patch. In a nutshell, REC will enable a form of progression so that backers can test all of the game’s ships without pledging additional money.

Roberts says that REC or something like it has always been the goal for the game’s persistent universe, but until now it has been unavailable in the alpha dogfight module. “One of the design tenets of Star Citizen is that it needs to be a complete experience regardless of what you have purchased,” Roberts says. “Someone buying a starter package needs to have exactly as much potential as someone supporting development by pledging for a new ship or purchasing a new weapon. I do not want to make a game where you feel compelled to spend anything but time to continue playing.”

Star Citizen’s Roberts talks upcoming release schedule (MOP)

How big is 2015 shaping up to be for Star Citizen fans? Pretty freaking big, if Chris Roberts‘ latest Letter from the Chairman is any indication. “We are entering into the tightest schedule we’ve ever had for public releases,” Roberts writes. “In short order, you will see Arena Commander 1.1 (now with REC!), the FPS module, and the so-called social module, our first foray into the persistent universe.”

Building galaxies in Star Citizen's expanding universe (Polygon)

Currently there are about 320 people, including contractors, working out of six studios developing the game, Roberts says.

"The way I look at the way we run the business now is we size our staff and what we're working on based on what we bring in every month," he says. "So if we're bringing a good amount, which we have been doing for quite awhile, then OK, I can afford to have a 300 person team working on it. If we didn't bring in the same amount it would have to be 200 or 150, which is still a lot."

Of the six studios working on the game currently, four are internal. Los Angeles is the corporate headquarters and is working on space combat, he says. A studio in Austin, Texas is primarily leading work on the persistent universe. A studio in Manchester, run by Roberts' brother, is responsible for Squadron 42 and helping with space combat. And a new studio in Frankfurt is working on the game's core technology, like its use of the Crytek engine, and is helping with the other elements of the game.

On top of the internal studios, Illfonic, based in Denver, is taking lead on the first-person shooter mechanics and Behaviour Interactive in Montreal is helping with operations, the persistent universe and is tasked with building a lot of environments with all of the different planets. That team is also woking on future concepts for the game which include iOS apps and things like Hololens, Roberts says.

On top of that, they have contractors working out of China and Mexico. Every studio helps out with building ships, he says.

"We are trying to split up each studio so they have a focus and lead they do so we can kind of work in parallel, so there is some crossover," he says. "We have about 200 or just under on staff and about 120 or so on contract.

"It is very big."

[Morreion]

Star Citizen posts weapon design blog, music featurette, and more (MOP)

“The ultimate goal for Arena Commander (and ultimately a persistent universe) is that it will be simple for a player to pick up a ship, launch off into space and enjoy the experience,” CIG says. “At the same time, we are building a customization system that allows for near-infinite complexity and a constant sense of progression. You don’t have to drill down to specifics like weapons mounts or technology overclocking… but you can, and the game will reward you for it.”

Star Citizen’s sound designer weighs in on sound in space (MOP)

Sound designer Luke Hatton weighed in on this on the official forums, explaining that players will hear sounds from space, but they will be synthesized sounds from the computer of the ship, which will cut off when your ship takes enough damage. So you still get your dramatic sounds of ship destruction, but mostly because your onboard computer knows you want to hear it.

Fans Have Dropped $77M on This Guy’s Buggy, Half-Built Game (Wired)

I expected a little better from Wired- any game half-done is buggy and, well, half-done.

Star Citizen opens up concept purchases for the Aegis Vanguard (MOP)

The Aegis Vanguard is the official deep space fighter craft of the United Empire of Earth, capable of being fitted to serve as a bomber, long-range scout, patrol ship, or even a straight-up fighter killer. It’s also available for purchase until April 6th for $250, with the usual benefit of in-game decorations and lifetime insurance on the ship in the finished game. This ship is a concept purchase, though, so players will not yet be able to use the ship in the modules of the game currently available. Decide for yourself whether the ship’s stats justify its hefty real-world price tag.

Star Citizen releases alpha 1.1.1 and a design blog on breathing (MOP)

The second post is a high-level look at the design goals for the first person shooter module’s stances and breathing mechanics. “When we pitched a ‘living, breathing universe,’ we weren’t kidding,” CIG says. “Stamina and breathing will be an important part of Star Citizen’s FPS mode, simulated in order to make first person combat a much deeper and more tactical experience than many familiar FPS titles.”

A Hull for Every Job: The MISC Hull Series (Roberts Space Industries)

In short, the MISC Hull series of ships is how cargo gets from place to place. An inter-connected system of ships designed around the same principles and intended to share the same equipment and maintenance processes, MISC has created the Hull A through E to provide countless options for every type of merchant.

From the single-person Hull A to the super-massive Hull E bulk freighter, there’s a Hull for every job. Each ship includes a manned cab, a drive unit and a telescoping cargo spindle. When laden, the spindle expands to accept cargo pallets; while unloaded, the spindle unfurls for faster, more maneuverable travel.

Star Citizen’s cargo system sounds quite amazing (MOP)

If your gaming preferences begin and end with combat, you might find the latest Star Citizen design blog pretty boring. If, on the other hand, you value non-combat gameplay and wish that the MMO industry valued it, too, Star Citizen’s cargo system may pique your interest.

Cloud Imperium’s virtual world will allow players “to more fully interact with their environment than any previous space game.” Cargo will be used both to customize your surroundings and to build a shipping empire or work the black market. The blog outlines how previous genre games have separated the pilot from the cargo with icons and menus, whereas Star Citizen will allow “maximum interaction directly with in-game objects.”

[Regolyth]

May 7, 2015 17:59:36 GMT -5 Morreion said:

I expected a little better from Wired- any game half-done is buggy and, well, half-done.

Yeah, I was kind of thinking the same thing.

[Morreion]

Why Star Citizen Is Taking So Long (Kotaku)

Roberts, best known as the designer of Wing Commander and a pioneer of the space-sim genre, had announced Star Citizen in October 2012 with an ambitious crowdfunding drive (followed shortly by a Kickstarter) that made tons of lofty promises...In the original announcement, Roberts and his team said they’d complete Star Citizen by November of 2014, a date they seemed to still be targeting even after that $19 million landmark...


Two years later, they still don’t have much to show. Star Citizen has pulled in a staggering $87.5 million from fans, and over 200 people are currently working on the game in offices across four countries—in addition to contractors and third-party partners like Behaviour Interactive—but that promised November 2014 release date has come and gone. Today, players can access two parts of the game: A hangar for storing and observing spaceships, and a multiplayer dogfighting module called Arena Commander that contains multiple modes and a horde shooting section called Vanduul Swarm. It’s a fraction of what Roberts has promised over the past few years—an MMO-style sandbox universe with a complete single-player story, a complex economy, and countless star systems and planets to explore—and many fans have wondered why all those tens of millions of dollars haven’t led to more tangible results...


In 2013, Roberts and crew announced plans to break Star Citizen into modules—playable slices of the game each based around a feature like a hangar for ships or multiplayer combat—that would be gradually released over time. They’ve released two of these modules so far, but bigger chunks of the game—like social features and the first-person shooter module Star Marine—remain out of reach. Roberts says there’s a roadmap, and that they plan to have the game completed by the end of 2016. He’s also publicly declared that the ever-expanding feature creep is a good thing, writing in a letter on his website last month: “Is Star Citizen today a bigger goal than I imagined in 2012? Absolutely. Is that a bad thing? Absolutely not: it’s the whole damn point.”...


Still, people who have worked at Star Citizen development studio Cloud Imperium, speaking under condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about their work on Star Citizen, point to Roberts’ ambition and leadership style as one of the main causes of the game’s delays.

As an example, one high-level ex-employee shared the story of the Menu Helmet. At one point, according to that employee, Roberts decided he wanted players to have to find and wear an in-game helmet in order to gain access to the menu in Arena Commander. Some developers tried to shoot down the idea, noting that players would grow frustrated if they couldn’t find something as essential as a menu, but Roberts insisted, so a team of developers spent weeks making it work. Then, according to that source, Roberts tried it, only to realize that it wasn’t actually fun. So they scrapped the whole thing and went back to a regular menu system...


Ex-Cloud Imperium employees say Star Citizen’s development has been characterized by an abnormally high number of features added and scrapped, but Roberts defended the practice in our interview, pointing to the iterative design done by other big game studios like Rockstar and Ubisoft. “If I go and talk to people in the business,” he said, “they’ll have their stories about wasted effort or pain. It’s the same stories you get on all big projects and distributed projects… You tend to scale up on big projects because you’re trying to deliver a lot of stuff. But the bigger you get, the less efficient you’ll get and the more friction you’ll get in terms of trying to get things done.”

Still, some familiar with the game’s development believe that this is an unorthodox situation, and that Roberts’ ambition has led to all sorts of development complications. Two sources pointed to Star Citizen’s unusual first-person camera as an example of this. Usually, video games that use both first- and third-person perspectives display different animations based on how you’re perceiving the game—in Skyrim, for example, your sword swing will look a lot different in first-person than it does when you’re zoomed out of your character’s eyes. For Star Citizen, Roberts wants to maintain the same animations no matter which perspective a player uses—his goal, as always, was to be more ambitious than anything else out there.

But according to two high-level sources, this system has been messy and at times disorienting, leading to several overhauls and delays, including one that pushed the shooter module Star Marine back by months. One source said they had to scrap and redo player skeletons—a core part of the animation system—a whopping seven times. The ex-employees who spoke to me for this story say that Roberts’ love of high-concept features often took precedence over getting things done...


“The difficult thing is [the team] can’t all have the same vision as Chris Roberts because he always is thinking five, ten, or fifteen years into the future of what people would want to experience,” that employee said. “It’s hard for 200 people to create the content Chris envisions at the quality bar that he expects. He has nothing but the [most] talented developers around him. Unfortunately, time is their enemy, and it’s hitting them hard because the community is ranting and raving about when the release of the game is coming out, rather than being understanding that this is a whole new experience. I think it’s going to fail multiple times before Chris Roberts and his team of Avengers get it right.”

[dortmunder]

By the time it comes out we'll all be playing games in VR using some sort of chip in our brain to control things in game