Since I haven’t seen anyone post this, I thought I’d share the new Star Engine demo video from Cloud Imperium Games.

  • I am in shock at the number of people upvoting positive comments about this scam project. Until they refund all the people they defrauded to get the project off the ground, they will continue to be dragged down by their own fucking karma.

    Suckers want to spend money on it now, knowing everything we know now? That’s on you. But plenty of us didn’t know we were being conned at the time.

    •  Cagi   ( @Cagi@lemmy.ca ) 
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      Spending more than a basic access package is absolute stupidity and those that do it and regret it have no one to blame but themselves. I spent $45 dollars and play the exact same game and can buy most of those expensive ships with in game money after a few days of playing.

      I have had hundreds of hours of great times in Star Citizen. Your anecdotal experience and very emotional hatred for this project because of your own bad financial choices doesn’t make my good experience, the most common experience, untrue. The massive, growing number of active users trumps your loud minoroty’s passionate hatered. Hatered 100% based on hot, salty tears because you wasted your own money on pretend spaceships like a spoiled child, not based on an objective look at things. You were 100% informed about the realities of this project, you just ignored it. I know this because I’ve been following it too and didn’t spend buckets of money on a videogame that isn’t even done yet. Because that would be really irresponsible of me.

      This game keeps making money and keeps adding more users. This is because it is fun to play for more people than not. Otherwise they would be failing after this many years. Grow up, get a life, focus on games you like, ignore the ones you don’t like a healthy adult. Don’t spend money on speculative projects if you don’t want the project to change, caveats have been everywhere saying as much since day one. The only person that lied to you was you.

      • I personally don’t like the game at all. Some mechanics are interesting, but the game being pay to win and “shit on new players all you want, there is no consequences” just makes me never want to start it again. I really thought there would be some semblance of PvE possible, but you’re always in a PvP setting.

        That being said though, while I do hate the dev process, and find it disingenuous, it’s not a scam at all.

        •  Cagi   ( @Cagi@lemmy.ca ) 
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          Not enjoying the game is a fair criticism. It is slow paced and there is no pvp off switch, only things you can do to minimize risk by learning best practices. It’s not for everyone. It’s going for a sci-fi second life vibe, it’s not very gamey. I don’t think everyone expects that. And the prototype criminality system is rather useless right now, you’re right, so you get griefers and undeserved fines here and there. I can still have a lot of fun despite these things, but I can totally see it being not worth everyone’s time, especially for the lesser flushed out jobs. I have had my share of bug induced rage quits.

          But yeah, they are making a huge game in good faith, any claim of it being a scam is childish. Any claim that it’s not fun is a valid opinion if they’ve actually tried it.

          They know whale hunting is paying for the game, without them it’d be a tiny, indy, space game we’d have all forgotten about by now like they thought they’d make back in the original in Kickstarter. Some people have better stuff than me because they earned it, some just bought it, but it’s more RPG than competitive shooter and the in-game progression is fair so far so it hasn’t been world breaking yet, plus it ads a lot of diversity and multicrew options right out the gates. So it’s not great, but it’s less shady than premium currencies, battle passes, or loot boxes to me.

    • I will never let myself live down the stupidity and shame of falling for their bullshit not once, but twice. I’m ~$150 poorer thanks to my impressionable college-brain thinking their “complete in a few years” line back in 2014 was even remotely possible.

          • It’s sort of how I try to view my past fuckups: I can’t change the past by feeling like an idiot for making some mistake, but I can try to learn to not make the same mistakes again (and instead make new and exciting mistakes) and learn to “forgive myself” in a sense.

            Fuckups are inevitable parts of life, and beating myself up over mistakes won’t stop me from making new ones. I do need to learn from them when I make them, so I might as well do it in a way that’s less unpleasant and doesn’t require carrying around an ever-growing pile of memories labeled “I’m an idiot for doing […]”

    • I prefer that they are spending the money one actually developing advanced/new engine technologies than just releasing a half baked cames and a huge profit.

      They got loads more money than they expected and increased the scope to match.

      (I agree on the pricy ships though)

      Even if they went bust and the game failed, I would be happy if other big studios got the engine.

    • Before Star Citizen got announced, I tried to get up a project that would’ve been better, bigger, and far more revolutionary… only I didn’t lie about it, so funding fell on blank stares at best, and a bunch of insults at worst.

      Congrats, you voted with your wallet to get conned, so you got what you voted for. Same with No Man’s Sky.

      The average citizen has no vision or perception of the costs involved, so you either con people, or nothing gets done.

      • Are you a well-known developer though? One of the reasons why Starfield attracted so much attention was the name Chris Roberts attached to it. As flawed as his legacy is, he’s a household name in the industry. Are you? What was your project about? How big was your team?

        • Precisely, you just described what’s needed to pull a con. My project was just an engine capable of running a real-scale galaxy with consistent time travel, we had no great concept artists capable of churning out eye candy marketing material. Should have made it a solo project about digging mines, or something.

    •  shrugal   ( @shrugal@lemm.ee ) 
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      Always have been, that’s why calling it a scam has always been ridiculous. You can think about the feasibility of the project and quality of their decisions what you want, but they were always very honest and transparent about the work they are doing and the huge goal they are chasing.

    •  Cagi   ( @Cagi@lemmy.ca ) 
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      We’ve been trying to tell y’all this for years, we just want you to have fun and not listen to horrendous “journalists” that smear Star Citizen for clicks. But you don’t create multiple offices across the world with over 1000 full time employees and dozens of third party contractors if you’re trying to scam your fans. You also can’t create a AAA studio from the ground up in just a few years. This studio started with 8 people in a basement and it grew slowly, because you have to. Only so many people are looking for work at a time and only so many of them are hirable. It took them 10 years just to have as many devs as other AAA studios, but they knew they had the budget to go AAA from early on. So for a long time there weren’t enough people to deliver a game of this scope in a reasonable time. They knew it, we knew it, it was part of the plan. They were hiring like mad across the world for years and years because the payoff in the end will be a well supported AAA game like no other. Now that they are chugging along at full speed, people are starting to see what the rest of us have been trying to show you. Yes, Chris Roberts wants to be a billionaire CEO. But he also wants to build a rad game in good faith and has the money to do so.

      So yeah, it’s taken a while and will be a while still, but it’s a genuinely fun game to play, even now. If it goes belly up tomorrow I’ve already got my money’s worth of enjoyment out of it. Every quarter, new massive updates drop. Once Squadron 42 is launched and running smoothly I think it will change a lot of hearts and minds. Just play SC during a free fly week. It’s janky as early access games always are, but genuinely a fun time.

      You should all be angry at the shitty hit pieces that deprived you guys of quality online scifi shenanigans by lying to you about this game and remember gaming news isn’t always good journalism, sometimes reputable sites will post tabloid garbage because there are no rules, only shareholders and click quotas.

        • I mean, no? Version numbers don’t dictate the release readiness of something.

          You want them to just call what they have now 1.0, before they implement the Alpha 4.0 features shown there? Because that’s the gist of what you said.

            • Usually yes if you use only numbers, but when you use alpha/beta/release cycles etc, it’s not that uncommon to have them start from 1.0 as well.

              As an example, the fifth phase of minecraft dev started with “Minecraft Alpha v1.0.0” and once it got to v1.2.6, the next was “Minecraft Beta v1.0.0”. The proper Minecraft 1.0 came after Beta 1.8.1.

            • That was a standard that existed because of older, ‘linear’ SDLCs. It stopped being the case when Agile development took over. When you’re using Waterfall, and all your milestones are planned out before a single line of code is written, you can do that.

              Modern software development doesn’t work like that, and it’s silly to use nth-degree nested decimals (0.1.0, 0.1.1.2) when you can just use 1.1, 2.13, etc, and call something RC1.0 and 1.0 on release without bothering with internal version numbers or project codenames (or just keep the working version numbers anyways).

    • I also noticed reflections in the water near the edges of the screen don’t show properly,

      It’s called screen-space reflections: Things that aren’t on screen don’t reflect because, well, they’re not rendered. The alternative is either not having reflections, having the “screen” not be a rectangle but the inside of a sphere, or, and that’s even more expensive, raytracing.

      It’s a bog-standard technique and generally people don’t notice, which is why it’s good enough. Remember the rule #1 of gamedev: Even if not in doubt, fake it. It’s all smoke and mirrors and you want it like that because the alternative is 1fps.

        • Well yes I was answering under the assumption of “eradicate 100% of artefacts”, and as long as you don’t render all the perspectives there’s always going to be some angle somewhere that you’re missing.

          Practically everything in rendering is a terrible hack (including common raytracers as they’re not spectral) but realism is overrated, anyway.