Comment by sleepingadmin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sleepingadmin | Hacker News Reader

Star Citizen upsets me. It's in theory the video game I want, but never pre-order something like this. It should have been out in 2014. Here it is 8 years overdue.

Don't care what the budget was or anything. The most AAA of games can be produced in less than that time. It's very obvious it's not coming. So sad.

What makes me still curious about star citizen is why? Money was obviously not the problem. You can't blame software development framework. Waterfall vs agile doesn't matter. The least efficient processes would have delivered now. Even deadly things like micromanagement cannot be the cause because eventually you would deliver. I also suspect it's not a scam, there are employees there.

So what exactly was the failure? What exactly would cause them to never deliver?

>We can't allow for individualism... what you want is people who are positive, can do, and want to work as a team, not always trying to go 'This won't work' or 'It's about me'. - Roberts

>The race isn't finished yet. Wait till the finish line is crossed and then I'll say people can make judgements about whether it was the right way or not. - Roberts

So let's make it clear here. We can make the judgement. It didn't work. Those devs were right.

Chris Roberts most likely pushed out or fired those people who said 'this wont work' and better yet created a toxic work environment where people who were left couldn't speak up and say it wouldn't work. His toxic culture creates incompetence. The blame obvious lay entirely at the feet of Chris Roberts.

Scoping dogs many game developers. It's not solely a ego or leadership thing, indies do it to themselves too.

The problem is that game scope blows up much faster than you expect because it's disproportionately based on how many contradictions appear in the initial design. That is, if you introduce overlapping systems like "can traverse spaceship interior and exterior on foot", "can open and close doors and airlocks", and "other players respond to physics", every way in which one system has been hacked into being (which is most of them, in games) will carry over to hacks in the others, with correspondingly more time spent on assets, testing, bugfixes, etc. Repeat that across an "everything" game and you automatically get an impossible project that could only be achieved with a much more intensive simulation everywhere(which would exceed any plausible computation budget). The design has to put its foot down somewhere and say "we aren't going there" to resolve whatever contradictions it can. For example, replacing fully traversable environments with cutscenes and UI, or replacing lengthy animations with iconography. The games that can justify going really deep into their simulation end up being pretty niche, like Dwarf Fortress.

But actually making the resolution to settle on a more streamlined focus that would cohere well also breaks the hype of "sheer possibility". As long as you keep adding more, more continues to seem possible. Both creators and fans like staying in that zone. Nobody likes cutting their sunk costs, so they will rush to justify keeping stuff that doesn't work in the game until the project is cancelled due to lack of progress.

I think the problem was/is feature creep. I've been following the game since the original pitch, but never bought into it. The original pitch changed incredibly quickly due to how much money they got, and it seemed like that changing scope never really slowed down. Every time I would check in on it, it would seem like they were promising large new features every 6 months, or in some cases what seemed like entire games (their online multiplayer FPS).

>I think the problem was/is feature creep. I've been following the game since the original pitch, but never bought into it.

I feel that comes into the waterfall vs agile. Even with extreme levels of feature creep, it would have delivered already.

> The original pitch changed incredibly quickly due to how much money they got, and it seemed like that changing scope never really slowed down. Every time I would check in on it, it would seem like they were promising large new features every 6 months, or in some cases what seemed like entire games (their online multiplayer FPS).

When I consider Ludum Dare, people make working basic video games in a weekend. You can tack on features later, improve things here and there. You might have technical debt that needs repairing as you go but being 8 years past the deadline this can't explain it. It's too much time.

If I was alone and started building star citizen back in 2010. I would have delivered something...

> If I was alone and started building star citizen back in 2010. I would have delivered something...

But how many Lambos could you buy on the money from your 'something'?

/s

The best example I can think of to illustrate feature creep was the face expression tracking. I read they were working on something where your webcam could see your face and map the expressions onto your character in game. The fact that that went so far to be publicly known illustrates some kind of organizational disfunction.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa959z/star-citizen-says-its...

>>What exactly would cause them to never deliver

concurrency issues, latency issues, poor database schemas, scaling issues, there's a lot of reasons internet scale things can grind to a halt.

>concurrency issues, latency issues, poor database schemas, scaling issues, there's a lot of reasons internet scale things can grind to a halt.

With such a budget, you can solve these problems within 8 years.

I would bet my net worth that you(anonymous HN account 'newacc9') could have solved these problems in 8 years. You might even need to have gone to university and gotten a compsci degree to learn about all these things and still have had over 4 years to solve it.

I feel like it cant be a technical thing.

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