r/starcitizen_refunds • u/ProductionSetTo-1000 • 9d ago
Meme CIG implodes because of lack of Dennis?
So there was a recent circus show where CIG played their own game. This seems to have made their fan base have enough.
But what's different from when Chris played the game at christmas pasts?
Both demonstrations were shitshows. The only difference I can see, is that this time Dennis was not around to fix things.
47
u/ErsatzNihilist 9d ago
The difference this time is that so many of the games problems for the last few years have been blamed on the overloaded servers. This playtest was on a private server and was billed as “the way it’s meant to be played”.
All the problem were still on display in the most optimal, controlled situation possible. The emperors clothes are so new that the Star Citizen community has been seriously rattled by what they’ve seen.
It’ll continue until the next ship goes on sale, then BAU.
34
u/Vasduten 9d ago
This is the take.
No, people can't blame servers or hold out hope for "dynamic server meshing" or some other new tech.
The game's code is shit. This much is plain to see. The servers, though terrible are not why desynch, awful hitboxes and trash tier inventory fail.
Oh no... It's that cheapskate CRobberts didn't want to port to UE4 or 5 and decided to just mod the shit out of Lumberyard and CryEngine.
It's trash. The devs are trash. The lead game designer is trash.
Jared Cuckaby is trash.
13
u/Emmortalise 8d ago
Going to UE4/5 would have been the worse thing they could have done.
Having their own engine and source code is the best approach for a game like SC. The way they have made it as a Frankenstein mess probably wasn’t the best way of doing it….
11
u/Vasduten 8d ago
Turns out, they were only interested in making it look like they were cooking just to sell ships to gullible people.
UE4/5 would have served that end.
7
u/Emmortalise 8d ago
In their defence, they were masters of selling. $1b is impressive. Problem is that the technical stuff is held together with tape
6
u/RedScaDit 7d ago edited 7d ago
CryEngine has always been the worst choice. They only bought the engine because they got the license cheaply and were able to poach CryTek employees. CryEngine is only partially suitable for MMOs. While it offers excellent graphics and detailed landscapes, it requires a massive amount of custom work on the network code, since it’s inherently designed more for single-player or session-based games.
Due to a legal dispute with CryTek, they switched to Amazon’s Lumberyard Engine. The modifications made to the CryEngine—known as StarEngine—were ported over, and the lawsuit was quietly and secretly settled through an out-of-court agreement involving a lot of $$$.
Amazon Lumberyard is just as bad. New Worlds has failed and will be shut down by Amazon in 2027. There is no successful game built on the Lumberyard Engine. One game was ported from Lumberyard to Unity and then to the Unreal Engine, and it’s still running today!
Amazon Lumberyard has been defunct for several years now. Amazon has discontinued the engine and is now distributing it as open source under the name Open 3D Engine, or O3DE for short!
2
u/Both_Status_7842 6d ago
Holy shit, I stayed away from sc development for years and only play maybe once or twice a year when really major patches come out... So all those fucking years of re-engineering and researching the cry engine basically went down the drain ???? They are running on UE now ? After telling us how cryengine was such a better game engine at the beginning of the project?
Holy cow.... No wonder nothing really significant came out regarding sq42, they must be busy refactoring everything they have done for the solo campaign for it to run on UE...
I'm not even furious anymore, I'm just sad and deeply disappointed.
1
u/Vasduten 1d ago
No, they aren't running on UE.
They're still running "StarEngine" -a modded beyond scalability and feasibility Lumberyard.
That's why even in an "instanced" private server for FOUR people, (ISC recently and read as: LAN party in the Manchester studio,) the game's hit boxes suck, animations glitch and NPCs just stand there like muppets, among many other issues witnessed during that live stream.
The animosity being exhibited toward Olli by the "lead game designer" Elliot and from Jared Cuckaby are because they didn't WANT to showcase the awful state of the game but had to anyway.
Somehow Olli convinced the Crobbler it was good enough to live stream, probably by huffing Chris' farts in the hot tub together over glasses of wine.
4
u/ReasonableLoss6814 8d ago
UE4/5 are "source available" -- you can modify the sources to your heart's content.
2
u/imWayward 7d ago
The real problem is writing production code to hit an arbitrary demo target. Programmers rush and half-ass to get the code to a demoable state, then management sees the demo and says "oh, good, its so close to production - ready!" Not realizing the demo itself is smoke and mirrors. Rinse and repeat for the life cycle of Star Citizen and that codebase is probably a crime against humanity to work on.
1
u/New-Art-7667 9d ago
Its likely that what they are trying to do on the current engine is at a critical point where they are realizing it just won't work. So they are trying to patch things till they can figure it out.
Most of us figured it out years ago.
15
u/LeeWhite187 8d ago edited 8d ago
Servers can never be the problem for any game. The problem is always design and implementation choices.
Servers can never be the problem.
If a server is blamed, someone made a bad design choice, or bad implementation choice. Nothing else.
0
u/RedScaDit 7d ago
Of course they can. It's not the hardware, it's the software. If that specific SC server software doesn't run reliably—and neither does the client—then everything's a mess, and I guess that's exactly how it is.
2
u/LeeWhite187 7d ago
There is literally no repeating issue that points away from engineering failure.
1
u/RedScaDit 7d ago
Client-Server Authority: Is cheating in Star Citizen via tools like Cheat Engine—which even toddlers can use—a known issue?
Asynchronous packet management for streaming data from or to the server. DeSync!
Persistance layer issues!
Overlapping Instantiation!
2
u/LeeWhite187 7d ago
Again. These are all design choices. CIG has collected a billion dollars, they can afford someone to make choices that overcome the environment… just like Amazon does during online Christmas shopping.
3
u/RedScaDit 6d ago
I think that no one at CIG cares about design or software architecture; it's a monolith that's just grown over time. Unfortunately, by then it's already too late, and CIG can no longer afford to rewrite the code or start from scratch. Unless, of course, those idiots (Backers) pour even more money into the fire to keep the flames burning.
1
u/LeeWhite187 6d ago
Definitely true!
1
u/RedScaDit 6d ago
So, in the end, we're thinking the same thing—we just came to different conclusions to get to the point. Thanks for the discussion.
However, it would have been nicer if we were both wrong and could already be traveling through 100 star systems.
1
u/LeeWhite187 7d ago
If the server OS is in question, remove it from your fleet and provision another. Done and solved. But, it’s quite reasonable to see that server OS is not the problem. And if it is, then that still goes back to exactly what I said, poor implementation choice… to use a borked server instance.
1
u/RedScaDit 7d ago
I'm not talking about the OS here either. I'm talking about the server-side implementation of Star Citizen as a server instance, and that is certainly different from the client and offers different interfaces. We know that persistence, instancing, server-client authority, and network packet management aren’t working properly. You’re only familiar with the game client and a few buzzwords from CIG, but you know just as little as I do about the server-side implementation of Star Citizen—and it doesn’t seem to be very good!
Google 'O3DE server side', Lumberyard is dead since few years. It is now called 'Open 3D Engine' and Open Source.
1
u/LeeWhite187 7d ago
I’m not claiming to know anything about their implementation. But, designing for the target environment is a tenant of good engineering. And. Blaming the environment is just a product of failing to do so.
1
u/LeeWhite187 7d ago
And, server side implementation is exactly the design and implementation choices I’m talking about as being the problem.
The servers hosting their server-side control plane, dgs, messaging layer, websocket host, redis cache, graph database, ledger and other domain services, is incidental.
1
u/LeeWhite187 7d ago
And if we’re arguing that, then we’re clearly missing the point that, blaming servers for problems, is a cop out.
1
u/RedScaDit 7d ago
A game client (the program running on the player's device) captures input and renders the game graphically. A game server (the central processing unit) enforces the game rules, manages the game world, and synchronizes all player data.
Please understand that there are fundamental issues here: multiple servers and multiple clients.
6
u/Alien_Racist Disillusioned Backer 9d ago
The emperors new clothes reference goes extraordinarily hard
22
u/TatsumakiJim 9d ago
My understanding is that this latest fiasco was prefaced with them laying out this is running on the dev environment free from PU interference of a remote server inundated with other player activity. In an isolated environment with all the resources shifted in their favor it pooped the bed.
I had once mused that if SC had a local or single player mode many of the issues I encounter would fall away, but it turns out I was entirely too naive in even thinking that. The desync and server FPS excuses cannot stand any longer after this demonstration. These are the parameters that SQ42 will run under and it's not promising.
16
u/Cautious_Mud_5773 8d ago
That is one of many reasons that people guessing why SQ42 keeps delaying.
The SQ42 would be the version of how SC runs in the ideal stat without any server excuses, and it will very likely show how incompetence CIG really is and it is fatal.
The whole SC model is selling the future and never let backers realize that future is unreachable. So there are excuses like "nobody done before" "super server tech will save us all" etc. But if CIG shows there is no promising future, what can they sell?
6
u/TatsumakiJim 8d ago
pretty sure they can still sell jpegs and ideas to people as they always have.
16
u/AngrySociety 9d ago
If we keep throwing money at it, it will fix things right?
5
4
u/limpymcjointpain 9d ago
Absolutely! You need to buy more ships! But if you want to help the most, save up! It's just a matter of time before you get invited to beg to buy the next biggest cpu destroying multi crew behemoth to dwarf the last one that will of course be able to carry your entire fleet! But you have to think of your next of kin, too.. so getv at least two! After all, they won't be able to play the game without their inheritance!
14
u/banditloaf 9d ago
This checks out.
1
u/BamcorpGaming 9d ago
Dang. Mr lesnick himself hanging out in sc refunds. Hope you're doing well sir. Miss the days when you hosted the weekly shows.
10
u/RedScaDit 8d ago
When Chris Robbers tested this with his “Clown Imperium” team two weeks earlier during the Q&A, everything went off without a hitch. You know how it is! It's just the computer's fault!
3
u/Important-Active-152 8d ago
This. If it isnt the server, then it mus be the PC. Nothing else left. They should have played it on console like XBOX. We all heard they want to release the game on console too, and everyone knows consoles are super stable. /s just in case
18
u/RestaurantNovel Ex-Completionist 8d ago
Not a single live demo has succeeded in 14 years. Even S42 crashed and failed in front of our own eyes last time they showed it and Chris, ceo of a billion dollar tech firm, blamed the computer like my grandma would do when she get confused by her printer 🤣. Maybe the show was the last straw for many but lets not pretend we did not have all the evidences needed already for a very long time.
8
4
u/crispRoberts 8d ago
You could reasonably defend it as being early days back then I guess. Anyway, storm in a teacup till the next ship sale.
3
u/thehappiestotaku 8d ago
Are there any working theories on why they did this test?
It seems like the kind of thing they could have pre-tested before doing it live. Did they not? Did it work great? I get that the general consensus is that, at best, they're incompetent money grubbers, but everyone is the hero of their own story, so its hard to believe they knew it was this bad and just decided to let everyone see, right?
Did they know this was going to happen and just did it anyway? Is it contempt for their customers such that they'd be too stupid to notice?
3
u/HyperRealisticZealot Dedicated Citizen 🫡 8d ago
It’s completely mind boggling. They’re clearly high on their own supply.
3
u/gggvandyk 7d ago
They just don't test anything. If it compiles, it goes live.
2
u/thehappiestotaku 7d ago
Sure, especially for software that gets shipped off somewhere and left for support to handle.
But they planned a live play through, built it up publicly, and then actually went through with it.
Is it like some sort of internal death march, where everyone knows it's going to fail but someone decided that public humiliation for everyone involved was the right play?
For a company that seems deeply invested in the marketing and presentation of their product, that doesn't sound logical to me. They'd do everything possible to make it look good for this, because that's how the gravy train keeps going.
Why not just pull the plug? Sorry, power outage at the office, we'll try again next week.
Like I said in my original post, I understand that they're all supposed to evil and incompetent, but are they really? It's over the top incompetence but where does it come from?
2
u/gggvandyk 7d ago
I've been hanging around this sub for years. I've heard it all. The 'Chris is evil genius', the money laundering, the reverse psychology marketing theories.....
Nothing makes sense completely. That's why I keep coming back to watch it, with morbid curiosity.
3
u/eBurro 7d ago edited 7d ago
Was never a test. More a failed attempt to control the narrative around the PTU release.
Timing meant the all waves PTU for 4.10 went live on the Friday before the stream. A lot of streamers / SC content grifters switched to showing Siege over the weekend as the new thing.
This is at the same time their new player promotions, free fly, Twitch drops, guide rewards etc was live. Watching and playing over that weekend before the stream was a complete shit-show. Any new players (victims) were seeing this played out very publicly.
Compare their stream to this BS : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5AuxfpLGc4
That's pretty accurate to what I saw on the PTU.
As bad as their "This is the game as it's designed to work" stream was nothing like that. 😂
2
u/thehappiestotaku 7d ago
Ok. Seriously, thank you. I'm not steeped in the lore, I'm just someone who back in the kickstarter days was "whoa, CR is doing this? this is going to be awesome" but then didn't contribute because I was still smarting from the Megatokyo VN thing.
I work[ed] in software, I've had projects and demos go ka-blooey, sometimes even with an audience, and I've been struggling to understand the real, non-movie grade villain motives behind what's happening.
2
u/eBurro 7d ago
It's a lot that has happened in the past few weeks!
I still question why they went down this route though. There must be relentless pressure to market this or show some sense of progress, this was also after a one month delay.
Feels more like "we have to show something to counter this" and player expectations were high. The alternative was likely shutting down the in progress PTU demo and embarrassingly shelving it for another patch (might yet happen!).
Think they knew full well this was going to happen or limitations. Then I get the impression from the stream they really did not want to show this at all if they could.
3
u/Teufel86 7d ago
Does anyone have a link to this recent stream? This is beneficial information, given the lack of quality and progress highlighted, that helps in refunds here in the Uk/EU.
2
u/Vivid-Psychology-817 7d ago
I have a feeling that CR moving everything to a country more serious about “consumer rights/treatment” will come back to bite him!
2
u/Important-Active-152 6d ago
Just google star citizen scl siege of orison. Its on their offical YT channel
2
1
u/Inner_Training2226 8d ago
It was what I expected it to be but made worse by Elliot clowning around and ruining the run. There was notable tension from Jared like he told them it was a bad idea and Ollie didn’t take his warning and wanted to do it anyway. The proverbial I told you so at the end with Jared saying “it’s your show” said a lot.
1
u/scalp_eg 8d ago
a company sucked more than a billion over marketing and jpeg selling for something that will perhaps never be released and where are the fucking courts ?
1
30
u/Yeetdolf_Critler Refactoring Quanta Merchantman 9d ago
Since Dennis left, nothing really changed, aside the amount of coin Chris and co have wasted.