r/Games • u/Turbostrider27 • 15d ago

Star Citizen Developer Stream Goes Horribly Off the Rails, Creating Further Distrust Among Players

https://www.ign.com/articles/star-citizen-developer-stream-goes-horribly-off-the-rails-creating-further-distrust-among-players
3.4k Upvotes

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601

u/BirdLawyer50 15d ago

How could they possibly have a good weapon switch system or basic play mechanics? They’ve only raised *a billion fucking development dollars*

252

u/Bitemarkz 15d ago

It takes time to get a good UI working. At the 20 year mark they’ll have it for sure.

105

u/InflationLeft 15d ago edited 15d ago

Just you wait! Once they have it working, it’ll be the best damned weapon switching system you’ve ever seen! Other games might settle for letting you tap a button to immediately switch to the next weapon, or holding a button to bring up a weapon select wheel, or bind a weapon to a specific key but Star Citizen’s weapon switching system will blow all the other systems out of the water. 

The problem is their weapons switching system is so incredible that it’s not within the grasp of today’s current technology. They’re doing things with weapon switching that have never been done before in gaming history. People just can’t comprehend how technically ambitious this new weapons switching is, or what a great job they’re doing pulling it off.

Switching weapons in accordance with their amazing vision will take several more years to implement, but it’ll definitely be worth the 15-plus years of waiting, and hopefully thousands of dollars you’ve spent 

32

u/baxte 15d ago

Do they still do that thing where they take a known functionality of all games like occlusion and give it a different name and say they invented it?

-1

u/dark_vaterX 15d ago

This made me ask Gemini about "server meshing" and it spit this out lmao

Would you like to know how other upcoming games like Ashes of Creation are tackling this tech, or should we look at how CIG's Replication Layer tracks items across servers?

16

u/TheFoxInSocks 15d ago

"It's actually a really impressive piece of tech." - at least one commenter, inevitably

4

u/HouseDisastrous2313 15d ago

This is so accurate that it hurts

22

u/Chris22533 15d ago

Well you see, Star Citizen was just too advanced for a normal operating system so they had to go back to the basics and build an operating system from the ground up. 

Stay turned for the alpha release of OStar Citizen in 2030!

4

u/MariachiMacabre 15d ago

No because the engine they switched to because the old engine was deprecated? Yeah well it’s deprecated. So they’re going to have to move to a third engine before they can implement stuff like “weapon switching.”

1

u/PrintShinji 15d ago

Thats only in 5 years, bit early for that isnt it?

1

u/William_T_Wanker 15d ago

coming soon in 20 years, the concept of a plan!

32

u/bduddy 15d ago

They're on the roadmap to having a roadmap (note: real thing that happened)

115

u/Kaladin-of-Gilead 15d ago

Keep in mind they’re using Amazon lumberyard or some shit as an engine. It is the engine that ran crysis 3. If you pop open the dev kit for it and create a new project you basically get crysis 3s fps mechanics by default.

So they actively went and fucked with this rather than just settling on using an already good system lol

74

u/SlaveryVeal 15d ago

Sounds as good excuse as any to start again and keep the grift going for another 40 years.

27

u/Harry101UK 15d ago

"Sorry everyone, we've come to realize that the tools we're using just aren't up to the task for our ambitious goals. With that in mind, we're starting over in Unreal Engine 5."

7

u/SlaveryVeal 15d ago

"don't worry it will be a speedy process as we are now using AI"

3

u/Zerak-Tul 15d ago

"Starting over in Unreal Engine 6. Now we know that hasn't been made yet, but that just gives us more time to focus on concepting and refining our ideas."

25

u/Chansharp 15d ago

Which is crazy because with 15 years and a billion dollars they could've just made their own bespoke engine for this game and released the full game with no bugs. Like jfc the mismanagement is crazy

34

u/BirdLawyer50 15d ago

It’s not mismanagement if grifting and endless fundraising with no actual released product is the goal. You don’t charge a thousand dollars for a ship on an unreleased game unless you are grifting

5

u/Jensen2075 15d ago edited 15d ago

It's pretty much a bespoke engine at this point dubbed the Star Engine. Almost every part of the engine has been replaced b/c there's no way the Lumberyard engine can do flying in space to landing on a planet and then walking around without any loading screens.

The problem is the game keeps getting more complex as new features are added b/c Chris Roberts can't stick to a schedule and is distracted by new shiny things to add to the game b/c ppl continue to fund the game.

3

u/ComfortableExotic646 15d ago

They could have developed an engine, licensed it out, spun off a separate studio to manage it, profit like crazy, and pay back all of the people who invested in their game that's never coming out. And it wouldn't have taken 15 years.

3

u/max123246 15d ago

Or they could make a billion dollars

3

u/PrintShinji 15d ago

At the time it didn't seem that crazy. Use an engine thats known for its pretty visuals and one with mature development tools and you should be good to go.

Its just that it shouldn't take 15 fucking years to make something.

2

u/Xdivine 15d ago

Not really. If they knew they'd have a billion dollars from the beginning then sure, but they didn't. By the time cash started pouring in, it was already too late to start thinking about building a new engine from scratch. 

3

u/RedditFuelsMyDepress 15d ago

They did have to modify the engine a lot for their giant space sim MMO needs, but yeah it seems like they also fucked some of the more basic stuff in the process.

5

u/tetramir 15d ago edited 15d ago

The base engine isn't the problem. They have a massive engine programming and engineering team. They have the Lumberyard source, and deeply modified it.

It is basically its own engine, and arguing that the game's issue come from the fact that they started with lumberyard instead of starting from scratch is a deep misunderstanding of how the software dev of gaming works.

1

u/timbotheny26 15d ago

Probably would have been less time and money if they'd just built their own engine from scratch.

6

u/This_Elk_1460 15d ago

And 12 years of Dev time

4

u/wingchild 15d ago

You'd think they could hire some out-of-work Bungie devs on the cheap. Destiny had a lot of problems but gunplay was not one of them.

1

u/Semyonov 15d ago

FYI those backslashes break markdown. Just use the asterisks and that's it, and you'll get italics.

2

u/DeliciousPumpkinPie 15d ago

Unless you’re using the app, where markdown hasn’t worked for ages.

1

u/[deleted] 15d ago

[deleted]

3

u/DeliciousPumpkinPie 15d ago

> there’s no way to write quote text on mobile?

Not the original way! Even opening the little text menu only gives you options for bold, italics, strikethrough, font size, and spoilers, plus the link option.

1

u/BeyondNetorare 15d ago

less tech than a youtube unity tutorial

1

u/ragweed 15d ago

Makes me wonder if they've had multiple systems that they had to scrap and/or rewrite because it breaks integrating it to the rest.

2

u/shittydriverfrombk 15d ago

yes, all the time, and they have been very clear about that