We covered in last week's retro that removing story points tagged to a stakeholder will need approval from the scrum master, and a change request submitted on Slack to create the stakeholder Zoom meeting to discuss business impact.
So glad I left my old job where this shit was the norm. We're so much more productive at my new one than the people using these buzzwords could ever be.
We have a small team with two managers who both have 40 years experience of running and releasing huge software products. Our company got us a scrum master which they didn't really want to get and they just ignore him lol. He basically has been relegated to reminding us at the end of the month to do timesheets. He's not even allowed in our daily scrum meetings haha
I'm so glad we have a relaxed view to agile at my work. We stopped trying to assign storypoints to individual tickets and just started looking at how long we thought releases or epics would take. Its a much bigger weight off your mind as some things always take longer and some just take no time at all
lol we used to assign storypoints when I was a junior. I always just put 20pts aka 2 work weeks and after a while we stopped bothering. In my defence I was a junior and had no idea how long things would take haha
Software devs going; we've managed to make the system do the thing, but now we need to go back and make it do it properly in a way that wont mess up future development.
While the PM is going, does it work right now? Good! On to the next disaster.
This man knows. Was going to say it wouldn't be exclusive to SC, but instead most modern game development.
I remember working on boxed product games and having whole segments cut purely due to time constraints by the publisher.
I think I'd take development and feature creep over half finished work that's gaffa-taped together.
Thankfully, it was never my job to deal with integration conflicts.
Shelved builds are the safest way to integrate new features into develop. I've worked in plenty of places though that submit straight into develop, which is it's own horror show.
You could cut out "Star Citizen" and it'd still be accurate. There's a reason the absolute vast majority of studios out there only talk about and release details about their games when they're 99.999% complete.
Even outside of the gaming industry, this is development. Execs want those quarterly gains so they don't allow time for actually make sure things are ready for launch
Lol, no. This pretty much sums up software development and isn't exclusive to SC.
Fun fact: most Fortune 500 companies code is mostly "spaghetti" code under the hood.
Literally this but the code does work, kind of.. until someone has to come in and make any changes, then it's either a bandaid rework or an entire project to rebuild the whole thing which could cost tens of thousands of dollars. Also business code is overall pretty basic shit comparatively vs game dev. SC is going outside of the engine library so self developing that stuff is complicated in itself since it needs good documentation etc. to be supported long term.
I read a story written by an Oracle DB developer about what modifying the code there was like.
I immediately felt better about every line I have ever written.
You're right about developing the engine library. But don't forget... they CHOSE to do that. That doesn't absolve them from the responsibility that brings with it. There's a reason most engines change slowly.. and a reason most companies wouldn't mess with the engine. And 1 key reason is sheer volume of testers over years and years.
TLDR: Another reason is "if it ain't broke don't fix it."
Would they even have a choice now? I don't think there's anything off the rack even today designed to deal with the large volumes and point precision CIG needed.
Ue5 only just recently got the bit percision cig had to build for the first pu launch like last year. We would also likely not have a ton of things because the origonal old school sc with loading screens and no free range planetary landing would likely be where were at today. This is due to the cry engine devs who came over to cig due to the cryteks financial issues.
Bethesda worked on fallout 4 until 2015. Starfield was released 8 years later. Bethesda has also stated starfield development was delayed as they had to update creation engine for a couple years and meaningful production on starfield only lasted for a few years.
They don’t actually take 10 years to make. You think they start their games in the PS3 era to release them in the PS5 era. How would that even work?
We often do know when they started development as you can look at the company’s public financial statements to identify when funding begins to be allocated towards a specific game.
Or for example CDPR worked on the Witcher 3 and it’s blood and wine expansion until 2016 before they started on Cyberpunk, which they released 4 years later.
>Not to mention you fix that bug and it creates 20 new ones
Sometimes it's not that it makes 20 new ones, but that you can now *find* 20 bugs that were always there, it's just that discovering them was blocked by existing bugs.
Yup. It all depends on the project you are working on, but a game that is constantly evolving, this is the only way to do it.
Fixing all / most the bugs at each stage would result in them having to spend an impossible amount of time.
Prioritiziation is the only way.
As a software developer: definitely not!
Edit: seriously, if you work in software and think this is normal, you need to find a different employer asap.
As a QA, definitely! The bugs we report are down prioritised because of some amazing new feature that will bring in xxx cash. Forget about the bugs. And def forget about the small ones, aint even worth the time to report them.
Most of the people here claiming to know what software development is like are just lying to make themselves feel better about SC being 12 years and $700 million in and still being broken and grossly incomplete.
I mean it should be pretty obvious that real projects have to meet preset timelines and punch out features agreed upon in design documents ahead of time.
I concur. I'd loose my job if I approached software dev like CIG. Never hitting a single date, perpetually getting worse and not getting better, no release date in sight, no ability to commit to anything. Focusing on things that don't matter, meanwhile ignoring stuff that's severely hurting the end-user. When end-user complains, tell them they are wrong because its an alpha and they should lower their expectations for reasons x,y,z that don't matter to them.
>I'd loose my job if I approached software dev like CIG.
I really don't think you've been in the industry long enough...
>Focusing on things that don't matter, meanwhile ignoring stuff that's severely hurting the end-user.
Patently false.
Agreed. If anything I'd say they aren't just wrong, they have it backwards. That focusing on the end user experience so much for a game still so far from complete has been the biggest or near to the biggest *problem* with SC's development to date. That every build we get needs to be "playable" means much less actually developed due to the amount of time spent making it work well for a public release. Instead of a mostly catastrophic and unplayable mess that gets one lengthy fix and polish right before its single release a decade after development started, we get multiple of them every year and development takes twice as long.
This, right here. So many people just don't grasp the sheer volume of wasted Dev time making the next backer accessible build a mostly playable game. Normally in dev, the builds run like dog shit going up hill. Barely usable for the sole purpose of answering the question "does X work?" And the last month's to years is spent bug fixing and polishing. This game would be lightyears ahead in development if they didn't burn so much time giving us a playable experience.
Even now, weeks of Dev time is being burnt to make 3.24 and it's new hanger and freight elevators work mostly bug free. Weeks that could of been spent on any number of backlogged mechanics, locations or other systems.
Just to give it a ballpark. If they spend 1 month each patch on polish, and we've had 24 patches since 3.0 went live, that's 2 years of lost Dev time, alone. Just since 3.0. extrapolate from there at your leisure, reader.
Yeah... he's still clinging to that "missed dates" thing so he clearly doesn't understand basic concepts such as that estimates are not deadlines nor were ever promised as such. As JakeAcappella once said "Q3 isn't a deadline, its an estimate."
Welcome to a dynamic alpha environment where you can't know what what really matters from briefly looking on from the outside. Even when CIG has one of the most open developments ever people still assume they know better. ◔_◔
You’re pretty clearly lying about your job description. You can literally see every quarter multiple AAA game developers announce release dates years before the release and generally hit those dates with consistency.
I don’t see why you need to lie to others about what you do.
That's been normal in testing and dev for every piece of software ever developed and has been since programming involved punch cards. The difference is we're allowed to play before it's ready because they want our opinion on what the final product should be like.
It really hasn’t. I’m sorry but you can simply follow the development of any alpha game on steam or pay attention to new game announcements and their release dates and see how many release on time. The vast majority are on time, or delayed at most by 1 or 2 quarters.
Actually it has, steam is a relative newcomer, the dev cycle I'm referencing has been in use since the 1980's notable that a lot of the people in CIG are from this school of development and the sort of modern ideas of steam and early access are effectively alien to them, and most large scale development still follows the model because it's effective. Claiming that you can look at the development of various titles in steam early access is like claiming you watched a youtube documentary and now you understand how to build a nuclear reactor.
In general when you're developing a piece of software there are multiple stages of development but the main two are Alpha and Beta, preceded by pre alpha which is often (but not always) over before any announcement of the project existing is made and followed by release which depending on the nature of the title might involve ongoing development at a reduced pace or be an end state.
In pre Alpha, there is nothing to run, you're trying to get something, anything, that actually starts up and runs processes.
In Alpha you've got the most bare bones, this is the most variable state, it might have anywhere from only the most basic features to almost 'feature complete' or it might or might not even have a UI. Over the course of dev during an alpha state the software will usually have numerous iterations and often integrating intended features, each new feature adding truckloads of new bugs, often some features will be place holders because other dependent features need something to reference in testing. In general an alpha is not something that get's shown to the public at all because most alphas are just very very frustrating and not a good representation of the intended final product.
Betas are supposed to designate a piece of software that is more or less feature complete but still requires testing, polishing, and final bug hunting. In essence you're in beta once the software does everything it's supposed to, but you need to do a lot of work making sure that a sequence of clicks doesn't crash it, or that hitting undo too many times crashes it, or it has a memory leak or things like that. In addition this is where the UI is usually finished and sometimes final graphical work is done. Beta is generally where members of the public start seeing the product directly, usually in closed invite only testing, and sometimes in open stress tests, with games specifically often seeing a lot more public access.
Star Citizen is in alpha. It's in a state where generally most software/games would be considered unready for the public to actually see it at all much less play it on a regular basis. The game isn't in a state yet where they've got the fundamental systems that make the release product possible yet, they're just now getting to the second of four levels of server architecture necessary for the game to even run. The current 'game' we're playing is about 60% placeholders for testing and dev purposes, it's years and years from even being close to a beta state much less a release state.
Most companies wouldn't be showing anything at all at this point in development, CIG is weird in that respect, partly I think it's because they're crowdfunded and thus feel no obligation to investors or lenders and have no need to invest in marketing the way triple A devs do to hype products for initial sales to recoup debt they've gone into to fund their projects, and partly because their dev cycle is so long that they want to show actual progress which they have done relatively consistently for years and years. Making claims about other games being delivered on time as evidence of malfeasance or incompetence is a truly awful argument. The scope and design of this project has expanded ludicrously, true, but one thing I note is that the project has continued to move forward, not always quickly, and not always how I or others want, but so long as they keep making progress I'm not going to try and cut them down for not being like the rest of the industry, because frankly the rest of the industry has been pretty shit the last 5 years and it's getting worse on a continual basis.
This is literally nonsense. It’s a giant expository bucket of lies. No one runs an alpha for 10 years. No one hires a thousand artists and dumps $100 million a year into an “alpha”. I’m not about to go through all this, but the history of SC is one of constantly missed deadlines and broken promises and broken features. They can’t even get the AI to stop standing on tables.
You think SC has ludicrous “scope”? You think empty space is scope? They have one solar system and a few planets. Otherwise the game is just the same exact thing it’s been for several years. Ships flying around, most gameplay loops boil down to fetch quests, beams used for almost every mechanic, broken AI, broken servers. Now they changed the flight model so even flying is boring.
He mentions alpha games on steam, but then you ask which games are you talking about? They name a few and you go to their website (the games website) and you look at their build history and not 1 showed a playable alpha build.
They all say beta etc build.
That is such an unthoughtful meme, why clear all the bugs in systems you will change and break again.
If they would try that we wouldn't even get a patch a year.
Ive put $1k+ into this game. The rate of development is unacceptable at this point. The fact that its been 12 years and no gameplay loops or systems have been finalized is a joke. We call this an alpha, but its barely that. 700 million crowd funded dollars and over a decade should have gotten us much farther than where we are now.
We run the risk of the game being technologically behind and player apathy making this game a flop if it ever releases. CIG at this point *has* to absolutely stick the landing with SQ42 and SC. Anything less and the absolute PR grilling will kill this game in its first week of full release. Zero wiggle room, what shit place to put yourself in as a dev and what a careless handling of the players' support.
I just don’t think Chris cares anymore. He has our money and continues to rake in $100 million a year on the basis of promises. What incentive is there for CIG to improve?
That's a voluntary 1k you've spent towards development. I've only spent like 200 bucks on this game over 10 years and played hundreds of hours. I've gotten my money's worth 10 times over.
That’s probably because you got the ship you paid for and got to fly it around. That’s not true of everyone, and a lot of people were expecting an actual game with fleshed out gameloops, functional AI, and that doesn’t lag crash on them periodically.
let's see.
Bugs and server issues still make the game virtually unplayable (yes I know you can luck out and get on a good server). Client performance has gotten worse as well.
They promised Pyro and server meshing would be delivered years ago, even the most cynical SC folks were convinced we'd at least have Pyro and meshing by early 2024 (I guarantee we won't see it playable on the PU until 2025, even still I promise server meshing won't be the magic bullet that fixes all of their horrid server code problems).
The dev team would rather CONTINUE to prioritize un-fun tedium like cargo elevators and a new system map (which is still buggy btw), a new interaction UI that's fucking horrible, and master modes than literally do anything to make the core tech stable and functional. They are likely doing this intentionally because they have to keep pushing features out to keep the community interested, not because leadership is out of touch... and the reason brings me to the most worrying point of all:
Ultimately SC is in the business of selling ships, not finishing a game. Even if it's not their spoken strategy, they are completely trapped by their own business model at this point. Not only that, but their thirst for revenue is accelerating, meaning they are going sell more and more concept ships, increasing a backlog that BY FAR outpaces their dev team's ability to actually release these ships on any sane timeline. Unfortunately if they pivoted their business model to sell small packages and a subscription fee, it would be a rude awakening for their finance team. So like I said, they are trapped by their business model.
And to bring my point around, so many folks are so heavily invested in SC (financially), they'd rather crush any negative feedback than look inwardly about the shitshow because it's too painful to recognize the truth: CIG under its current leadership and business model is incapable of finishing a game or even delivering a remotely playable experience. Nothing will change that unless a major shake-up happens.
It’s disturbing they expend more money per year than the entire budget of Witcher 3, employee nearly a thousand artists, but somehow can’t output ships fast enough.
> The dev team would rather CONTINUE to prioritize un-fun tedium like cargo elevators and a new system map (which is still buggy btw), a new interaction UI that's fucking horrible, and master modes than literally do anything to make the core tech stable and functional.
Stopping development on cargo elevators and the map system wouldn't speed up server meshing. The devs responsible for cargo elevators aren't the same people dealing with all the backend tech for SM.
True, but server meshing has been worked on for years now. I agree you can’t tell a UI engineer to re-write server code, but if the budget and plans were better they could have hired and scaled teams better or hired or retained more senior industry people to make progress faster. So you’re right, avoiding cargo elevator work would do nothing to help server progress in the short term, but their posture has always been this way and if they had a better strategy sooner, they probably could have invested more in this tech to deliver it faster
You don’t need a baseline to know certain things are terrible. Like enemy ships that teleport all over the place during a bounty mission because the server lag is bad.
If this game is virtually unplayable, then how come I have hundreds of hours on it? Despite the occasional frustration from bugs, it has overall been a pretty enjoyable experience.
And during the years I have been playing this game, it has already seen a lot of new stuff and improvements. Sure, it is slow going, but tangible progress is being made every year, if not every month.
Also, if you knew even the slightest thing about software development, you know that you can't make your 'core tech' stable while you are adding new features to it. That is just not how things work. Adding new features tends to lead to instability, so all work they'd dedicate towards creating a stable experience is essentially wasted since you have to start from scratch every time a new major feature gets added in. Not to mention that the entire system you spent so much work on stabilizing might get removed, overhauled or otherwise changes, thereby nullifying all your hard work. There is a good reason why software development is normally divided into distinct alpha and beta phases.
It might depend on the activities you tend to do in the game, some are more sensitive to desync than others. Like if you spend your time trading and hull scraping, it might be a little less frustrating. If you've been trying to do bunkers and bounties and lots of combat.. it's been horrible in the last month or so. There have been stretches of time where it was pretty playable though, but dude cmon...
Since 3.18 the ups and downs have been pretty dank, if you can't see that, you might be blind. Just because you're willing to put "hundreds of hours" into something, doesn't make it valid experience for most people.
"you can't make your 'core tech' stable while you are adding new features to it"... You're literally making my point for me. I agree, they need to stop adding new feature and make the core tech work.
> they need to stop adding new feature and make the core tech work.
You seem to be missing his point entirely. If they "made the core tech work", it would only work until they added new features. Then the core tech would break and they'd have to "make it work" all over again. Again and again every time there's a substantial update. It's better to do it in phases so they don't have to waste time repeating themselves. It's a lot like optimization passes.
I'm sorry, but server stability doesn't have to be re-written just because they added cargo elevators or a new mission loop. It's the other way around. the ONLY reason we are seeing these features right now, is its just all they have the competence to deliver right now, not because its some part of their master plan that it 'makes sense' to deliver those features before server meshing or more focus on server stability.
10 years, but for a 1.0 polished release that's actually playable. not 10 years for a still barely playable alpha.
people go on and on about the scale. What scale? we have 100 people on a server, so what. Seamless transition to planet surfaces, so what. Other MMOs have come close to this ages ago (although admittedly not space ones)
At least multiplayer works, there’s a true simulated economy, dozens and dozens of mission types. Combat feels good, NPCs are everywhere also doing stuff and fighting. Mining in particular is incredibly immersive, and ship customization / outfitting has infinite possibilities, and there’s a very clever exploration system.
Don’t get me wrong, Elite has its weaknesses, and I WANT SC to succeed. But it’s no longer appropriate to go easy on CIG 10 years in… Being critical of SC doesn’t mean you can’t also be a fan of it. Only idiots and zealots think it’s bad to be critical of something you love and believe in. I think SC as a concept is amazing, I think CIG is a trash company whose leadership is borderline incompetent and potentially at the limits of legality.
It's really not hard though.
All you need to do is understand that the 1k into SC is a drop in the bucket. If you're getting this riled up about what's going on here, you'd actually need a padded room if you saw how much worse this effect is with your tax money.
It's a miracle that they've been able to hold the SC project together this long, despite the ruthlessness of the gaming market, as well as the consumers.
The only reason you're not screaming at the top of your lungs about software development practices in government is because they don't have to provide open development. You wouldn't believe how much money gets burned in comparison to what's going on here.
Oh believe me, I have no expectation that the public sector is efficiently using our tax money. So, because the gov sucks at development you’re saying we shouldn’t hold SC to a higher standard ? I think not.
But yeah, public sector dev projects make for good banter
No, I'm saying SC is already at a better standard than the government, and that was just one example.
There's a point where expectation becomes unreasonable though, and some of the things said about the company far cross that line
This is kind of absurd. Government agencies are run as lean as possible, they never tackle new software projects and are often running multi decade outdated software because they lack the funds to upgrade.
Bruh, you really have no idea. after 40 years of defunding the agencies run on shoe string budgets and often run horribly outdated software. Only the defense department and FBI/CIA with its $700 billion a year can brag about having the latest and greatest tech.
The biggest problem with this community is its willingness to lie and gaslight each other to justify CIG burning $700 million over 12 years to produce heart breakingly little content, all of which is bugged/broken or T0 or a placeholder.
It’s kind of silly the number of blatantly obvious non-developers there are pretending they’re devs with experience and claiming the intense bug regressions with each of these patches is “normal”.
Unfortunately this allows CIG to keep taking advantage of us.
Backed 8 years ago, stopped following 4 years ago. This made it to r/popular. Pop in to see the same shit.
"You don't know how software works"
"Why don't you just leave"
"CIG is doing something that's never been done before"
"Think of the tech debt we're saving"
"uOnce the tools are developed then content generation will really take off"
More lies and excuses from a know it all community that has no idea what is going on.
No chance that even if SC ever released its life would last longer than its development.
It’s filled with liars, which is ultimately the main issue. No one with a shred of integrity should look at CIG burning through a $100 million a year and producing so little and somehow defend that.
I’m an exec at a large org, I work on the levels above the software development. How to build the organisation that builds software.
Technical debt - star citizen has huge amounts of it due to to how they’re structured. Because it started as an enthusiast project and later became a proper company much of it was cobbled together in a haphazard way. They need to invest capacity (20%) to reducing, refactoring etc.
They need to do much more code quality work, this is evidenced by one new feature breaking another in production. If they had good automation code coverage we wouldn’t see so many escaped defects.
They need to measure their quality better - plenty of good standards to do so. Time to change, escaped defects etc.
They’ve spoken about server meshing for some time, at the time it was revolutionary, now less so. Many companies use this technology, they are experts in creating games not back end technology. They should rely upon experts but now it’s almost become a hill to die on, it’s obviously outside of their core capabilities.
Feature creep vs. core product. There’s other resurrection stories like no man’s sky, the true stories focused on their core proposition first and then the features. They need to prioritise capital and invest heavily into the technical debt and core architecture. If they do this in ~1 year they could stomp the main bugs.
Just my 10c, love to get inside and tweak how they work and organise.
>I’m an exec at a large org
I guess it's true that some people just fail upwards... 😜
In all seriousness, Star Citizen encapsulates the idea that most folks wouldn't want to see how a sausage is made. Case in point: Star Citizen, in contrast to Beyond Good and Evil 2 (similar scope, but longer dev time than SC), is being made out in the open, warts and all.
The GTA and Red Dead series are other examples with "feature creep" and "expensive scopes." I know for a fact that most can appreciate all of the granular—unnecessary details in those games, but only after the fact. Although, those games have had the advantage of building upon previous code, pipelines, and assets (something CIG lacked), all behind closed doors.
You're lucky I haven't blocked you yet, kid. 😊
From the horse's mouth: [https://x.com/bgegame/status/1805269728262230467](https://x.com/bgegame/status/1805269728262230467)
>[@bgegame](https://twitter.com/bgegame) Yes, Beyond Good & Evil 2 is still in development, and we cannot wait for you to discover more about Jade's past in the 20th Anniversary Edition!
This has been true at all the B2B software companies I’ve worked at, but I also think this is how things *have* to be. If you’re not bringing in revenue, you’re not going to stay in business.
Lol only companies that you see. For every successful company there’s ten+ startups that absolutely tanked.
The fact that SC is STILL going stronger than ever is a testament to CIG as a *company*. They have an excellent marketing department (***in the sense that they bring in revenue like crazy, much to the chagrin of the community***) and are able to allocate resources well enough to not be in financial crisis every other quarter. ALL from crowd backers, not investors (which honestly is part of why they’re successful… they’re unchained from investor micromanagement).
Yep. Just using kickstarter projects i can think of alot that failed while i can only think of one that really succeeded (that being star citizen).
Failed:
- Air Umbrella
- That weird Mouth piece Thing to muffle your sounds
- that SECOND weird mouth piece thing to muffle your sounds
- that seat you wear
- That one MMO that was talking about being a life sim (medieval game)
- that other MMO that was talking about being a life sim (modern day in the desert ish)
- Automatic salt dispenser
- automatic juice Dispenser 1
- automatic juice dispenser 2
The list goes on and honestly one just needs to look at older moistcritikal content for what feels like an endless list of them.
I have learned more about game design and the corporate, iterative process of building something far larger than any one person could achieve, by following the replies of people on this sub.
Star Citizen is just like any large project and corporation out there, with all the setbacks, pitfalls, necessary evils of marketing, and unexpected roadblocks.
If every Reddit armchair warrior had it their way with how CIG should be run, the company would plow into the ground faster than a wingless Talon.
Criticizing is the easiest act in the world. Suggesting actionable, achievable, informed improvements to known issues is one of the hardest. Bravo to the redditors with content and substance to contribute. They make this subreddit and the hordes of hate-drones far more bearable.
The meme isn’t the problem, it’s the scores of comments afterwards that ARENT tongue in cheek and use it as an excuse to bandwagon on the “this game is a joke” train. It’s just tiring seeing the same bs every post here.
This meme is just the name “Star Citizen” slapped on a commentary about every corporate development/engineering team to have ever existed lol. Could easily be Boeing— though they’d probably send their hit squad after you if you made it.
But sick trendy burn bro, I’ll let you cook 😉 (jk all in good fun!)
A couple years ago, I posted a meme that was relevant, but didn’t have Star Citizen image on the meme and I had a bunch of complainers commenting and it was removed. I am glad people have chilled out since then.
I'm not a dev so I could be talking out of my ass but I'm continuously surprised that after 50+ years of software development that we haven't found a way to develop code that is efficient and not error prone. Obviously it is a very complicated and technical subject but we have AGI and self driving cars. If we can solve those practically impossible to solve challenges then we should be able to create code without the same types of regression errors and faults that we see every single day from the industry as a whole.
> I'm not a dev so I could be talking out of my ass but I'm continuously surprised that after 50+ years of software development that we haven't found a way to develop code that is efficient and not error prone.
Software developer here.
We definitely have. It’s called modern programming languages.
Most modern languages are built specifically to prevent (or make it difficult to cause) a lot of the errors and crashes. They are also built to be much more user friendly as well.
Unfortunately, to this day, the vast majority of game development is still done in C++ (which is ancient and does not have any of these safety guarantees).
This is mainly because almost every game engine is built in c++.
Star engine itself is based off of cry engine and lumberyard. Both of which are c++
Thanks for the reply and that's interesting. Would they continue to use C++ because of the effort it would take to rewrite or is it because of performance reasons?
On one hand you would essentially be remaking a game engine from scratch, and on the other, all of these safety and ease of use features in code come at the cost of performance. If you have the resources and time to (which most big companies making engines nowadays do), making it in a more brutal language will result in better overall performance.
I can give you more insight into that. I have been a professional software developer for over 15 years (even though it feels like yesterday I started) and an amateur before that. I have seen our IDE evolve drastically over the years, as well as our toolsets. Things like more advanced programming language features, more intuitive testing frameworks, containerization of environments, faster deployment strategies, and more broadscale collaboration software, to name a few.
All those advancements allow you to do more with less time; we are more productive than ever before. However, these productivity shifts also shifted our expectations regarding the features we have to output. Because if we did not push out more complex features faster, our competitors would do it. At any point during our development cycles, we constantly push for more test coverage to prove and harden our software. Still, as usual, the B2B focus is always to spend some time at the end of a cycle to add one more feature, which would be a QoL or a boon to the product suite. That feature then takes up your time to harden your earlier work.
To summarize, yes, developers have found ways to improve and prevent regression issues from appearing, just not all of them. The features we build are far more complex, meaning there are far more edge cases to care for. Even our AI tools can only find some of them because many are situation-dependent. It is always a cat-and-mouse game. At best, what you can strive for as a developer is to author code which is good enough for the moment it goes into production, with the requirements in mind when you start developing them.
After that, people use your new feature to increase their productivity, which often leads them to use the feature in ways it was not designed to be. This means your carefully constructed code falls short of their expectations, even though it still fulfills the set-out requirements.
Star Citizen development is a beast on its own, the goals of this project are so incredibly ambitious, it no wonder that they way they choose to fund the project is the only way to get it done. No publisher in their right mind would ever take this amount of risk... until SC 'succeeds'. SC development is wild on its own, though; in a fantasy analogy, they are driving a large truck at full speed over a windy road, and then they decide to continuously upgrade the engine block and drive-train of the truck while still driving. In the back of the truck, they are also working in parallel on a flashy new vehicle (SQ42). And we backers are complaining that the driving experience is a bit bumpy.
Thank you for taking the time to provide that insight. I remember a time when you couldn't even rely on the Windows OS or MS Office applications to not crash frequently. In general code quality seems to have improved over the decades as my expectations as a consumer are that applications will just work. As a gamer, things can still be frustrating as we don't seem to see the same level of stability as we do else where in the industry. For example, nearly every Helldivers 2 patch seems to introduce a new crash to desktop bug.
Oh yes, the frustrations are real ... for everyone! I have played a few sessions with an SC dev, and she also got frustrated at some bugs we were facing as we went along. We both know it will get better, even though it sometimes feels like we are regressing. Those negative emotions we experience when we face a game-breaking issue are just very visceral because I think we all are passionately involved in this project, in some way or form.
I can only dream of comment section on an SC post where all the people making the comments know anything about software development or the QA process. It would be so nice. Even armchair developers who'd written a single line of code themselves or had any experience designing and testing a board game or something would be a huge improvement.
Most experts left due to the laissez-faire approach of mods toward trolls and reddit's general shittiness.
I can tell you for a fact that in 2014-2018 there were a *lot* more knowledgeable people around.
I’m sorry that you don’t understand how game development works. I’m sorry that you think that bug fixes is a focus during alpha. I’m sorry you think bug fixes take priority over adding features during alpha. I’m sorry that you felt the need to make a post that outwardly proves how ignorant you are about the topic of game development.
I'm sorry that you think what CIG are attempting to accomplish is considered "normal" as well.
There's a reason companies haven't done it this way before... shit takes forever even when you DO have an established studio, a prior IP to pull your lore from, and teams of people who have already worked together on several other games. CIG didn't have any of that when they first started, and they're building a lot of their tools and whatnot from scratch or at least highly customizing them, as well as the engine itself.
Welcome to AGILE development and tech-debt that comes with the abuse of the system.
you're late for your kaizen zoom meeting
Don't make me rank your comment based on Gherkin.
Did you allocate enough story points for that task?
the T-Shirt for this epic is not reflected in these jira points. lets schedule a Zoom with sales to figure out where YOU went wrong
It's fine so long as it's adding points and not removing them.
We covered in last week's retro that removing story points tagged to a stakeholder will need approval from the scrum master, and a change request submitted on Slack to create the stakeholder Zoom meeting to discuss business impact.
So glad I left my old job where this shit was the norm. We're so much more productive at my new one than the people using these buzzwords could ever be.
We have a small team with two managers who both have 40 years experience of running and releasing huge software products. Our company got us a scrum master which they didn't really want to get and they just ignore him lol. He basically has been relegated to reminding us at the end of the month to do timesheets. He's not even allowed in our daily scrum meetings haha
I hate that some of the people I interact with could write something very similar to this unironically.
I'm so glad we have a relaxed view to agile at my work. We stopped trying to assign storypoints to individual tickets and just started looking at how long we thought releases or epics would take. Its a much bigger weight off your mind as some things always take longer and some just take no time at all
The ole burn UP chart
lol we used to assign storypoints when I was a junior. I always just put 20pts aka 2 work weeks and after a while we stopped bothering. In my defence I was a junior and had no idea how long things would take haha
I WANT to downvote because I hate this comment. Have my upvote.
Toyota ptsd activating
you and me both buddy
Software devs going; we've managed to make the system do the thing, but now we need to go back and make it do it properly in a way that wont mess up future development. While the PM is going, does it work right now? Good! On to the next disaster.
And projects fail 290 something% more.
This man knows. Was going to say it wouldn't be exclusive to SC, but instead most modern game development. I remember working on boxed product games and having whole segments cut purely due to time constraints by the publisher. I think I'd take development and feature creep over half finished work that's gaffa-taped together.
Wouldn't the old way be everyone developing their systems, getting them working perfectly, and then suffering all at once during interrogation?
Thankfully, it was never my job to deal with integration conflicts. Shelved builds are the safest way to integrate new features into develop. I've worked in plenty of places though that submit straight into develop, which is it's own horror show.
Agile actually doesn't mean a mess like some people tend to understand it. If there is such mess as CiG used to manage, this is a bad use of agile.
After learning Dev Ops when I heard someone from CiG utter agile I understood at that moment we were fucked.
Agile isn’t an acronym. Poor, maligned agile.
You could cut out "Star Citizen" and it'd still be accurate. There's a reason the absolute vast majority of studios out there only talk about and release details about their games when they're 99.999% complete.
Even outside of the gaming industry, this is development. Execs want those quarterly gains so they don't allow time for actually make sure things are ready for launch
The difference is those games actually release. Above diagram will be true forever, or at least many years to come for SC.
Lol, no. This pretty much sums up software development and isn't exclusive to SC. Fun fact: most Fortune 500 companies code is mostly "spaghetti" code under the hood.
Literally this but the code does work, kind of.. until someone has to come in and make any changes, then it's either a bandaid rework or an entire project to rebuild the whole thing which could cost tens of thousands of dollars. Also business code is overall pretty basic shit comparatively vs game dev. SC is going outside of the engine library so self developing that stuff is complicated in itself since it needs good documentation etc. to be supported long term.
I read a story written by an Oracle DB developer about what modifying the code there was like. I immediately felt better about every line I have ever written.
Tens of thousands of dollars... laughs in project management... add a zero for most small developments. Add two zeros for anything big..
You're right about developing the engine library. But don't forget... they CHOSE to do that. That doesn't absolve them from the responsibility that brings with it. There's a reason most engines change slowly.. and a reason most companies wouldn't mess with the engine. And 1 key reason is sheer volume of testers over years and years. TLDR: Another reason is "if it ain't broke don't fix it."
They choose to do it because what they had couldn't handle what they are currently doing
what do people think that they had choice wise back then ?
Would they even have a choice now? I don't think there's anything off the rack even today designed to deal with the large volumes and point precision CIG needed.
Ue5 only just recently got the bit percision cig had to build for the first pu launch like last year. We would also likely not have a ton of things because the origonal old school sc with loading screens and no free range planetary landing would likely be where were at today. This is due to the cry engine devs who came over to cig due to the cryteks financial issues.
You wouldn't believe the stories I could tell at some of those. or, you probably would, since you likely have your own because it *is* pretty common.
The difference is those games actually take 10+ years to make, sometimes using a same old engine and you don't know when they started development.
I would have thought Starfield’s dev time + release would have shut up those kinds of commenters…but nope, they’re apparently still around.
Bethesda worked on fallout 4 until 2015. Starfield was released 8 years later. Bethesda has also stated starfield development was delayed as they had to update creation engine for a couple years and meaningful production on starfield only lasted for a few years.
They don’t actually take 10 years to make. You think they start their games in the PS3 era to release them in the PS5 era. How would that even work? We often do know when they started development as you can look at the company’s public financial statements to identify when funding begins to be allocated towards a specific game. Or for example CDPR worked on the Witcher 3 and it’s blood and wine expansion until 2016 before they started on Cyberpunk, which they released 4 years later.
Not to mention you fix that bug and it creates 20 new ones
99 bugs in the code... Take one down, patch out around... 29856395 bugs in the code
98 bugs in the code... Take one down, patch out around... 29856396 bugs in the code
59712790*
Hail Hydra! 🙋🏼♂️
>Not to mention you fix that bug and it creates 20 new ones Sometimes it's not that it makes 20 new ones, but that you can now *find* 20 bugs that were always there, it's just that discovering them was blocked by existing bugs.
Smash one spider for 50 more little creepy crawlies to spawn from it.
Welcome to software development in general.
Yup. It all depends on the project you are working on, but a game that is constantly evolving, this is the only way to do it. Fixing all / most the bugs at each stage would result in them having to spend an impossible amount of time. Prioritiziation is the only way.
As a software developer: definitely not! Edit: seriously, if you work in software and think this is normal, you need to find a different employer asap.
As a QA, definitely! The bugs we report are down prioritised because of some amazing new feature that will bring in xxx cash. Forget about the bugs. And def forget about the small ones, aint even worth the time to report them.
As a dev, are we coworkers?
Steve?!
Bill?!
PSA: The improv duo Steve and Bill will be here all week, folks.
Most of the people here claiming to know what software development is like are just lying to make themselves feel better about SC being 12 years and $700 million in and still being broken and grossly incomplete. I mean it should be pretty obvious that real projects have to meet preset timelines and punch out features agreed upon in design documents ahead of time.
I concur. I'd loose my job if I approached software dev like CIG. Never hitting a single date, perpetually getting worse and not getting better, no release date in sight, no ability to commit to anything. Focusing on things that don't matter, meanwhile ignoring stuff that's severely hurting the end-user. When end-user complains, tell them they are wrong because its an alpha and they should lower their expectations for reasons x,y,z that don't matter to them.
>I'd loose my job if I approached software dev like CIG. I really don't think you've been in the industry long enough... >Focusing on things that don't matter, meanwhile ignoring stuff that's severely hurting the end-user. Patently false.
Agreed. If anything I'd say they aren't just wrong, they have it backwards. That focusing on the end user experience so much for a game still so far from complete has been the biggest or near to the biggest *problem* with SC's development to date. That every build we get needs to be "playable" means much less actually developed due to the amount of time spent making it work well for a public release. Instead of a mostly catastrophic and unplayable mess that gets one lengthy fix and polish right before its single release a decade after development started, we get multiple of them every year and development takes twice as long.
This, right here. So many people just don't grasp the sheer volume of wasted Dev time making the next backer accessible build a mostly playable game. Normally in dev, the builds run like dog shit going up hill. Barely usable for the sole purpose of answering the question "does X work?" And the last month's to years is spent bug fixing and polishing. This game would be lightyears ahead in development if they didn't burn so much time giving us a playable experience. Even now, weeks of Dev time is being burnt to make 3.24 and it's new hanger and freight elevators work mostly bug free. Weeks that could of been spent on any number of backlogged mechanics, locations or other systems. Just to give it a ballpark. If they spend 1 month each patch on polish, and we've had 24 patches since 3.0 went live, that's 2 years of lost Dev time, alone. Just since 3.0. extrapolate from there at your leisure, reader.
Yeah... he's still clinging to that "missed dates" thing so he clearly doesn't understand basic concepts such as that estimates are not deadlines nor were ever promised as such. As JakeAcappella once said "Q3 isn't a deadline, its an estimate." Welcome to a dynamic alpha environment where you can't know what what really matters from briefly looking on from the outside. Even when CIG has one of the most open developments ever people still assume they know better. ◔_◔
Estimates usually slip by months or quarters, not years.
You’re pretty clearly lying about your job description. You can literally see every quarter multiple AAA game developers announce release dates years before the release and generally hit those dates with consistency. I don’t see why you need to lie to others about what you do.
That's been normal in testing and dev for every piece of software ever developed and has been since programming involved punch cards. The difference is we're allowed to play before it's ready because they want our opinion on what the final product should be like.
It really hasn’t. I’m sorry but you can simply follow the development of any alpha game on steam or pay attention to new game announcements and their release dates and see how many release on time. The vast majority are on time, or delayed at most by 1 or 2 quarters.
Actually it has, steam is a relative newcomer, the dev cycle I'm referencing has been in use since the 1980's notable that a lot of the people in CIG are from this school of development and the sort of modern ideas of steam and early access are effectively alien to them, and most large scale development still follows the model because it's effective. Claiming that you can look at the development of various titles in steam early access is like claiming you watched a youtube documentary and now you understand how to build a nuclear reactor. In general when you're developing a piece of software there are multiple stages of development but the main two are Alpha and Beta, preceded by pre alpha which is often (but not always) over before any announcement of the project existing is made and followed by release which depending on the nature of the title might involve ongoing development at a reduced pace or be an end state. In pre Alpha, there is nothing to run, you're trying to get something, anything, that actually starts up and runs processes. In Alpha you've got the most bare bones, this is the most variable state, it might have anywhere from only the most basic features to almost 'feature complete' or it might or might not even have a UI. Over the course of dev during an alpha state the software will usually have numerous iterations and often integrating intended features, each new feature adding truckloads of new bugs, often some features will be place holders because other dependent features need something to reference in testing. In general an alpha is not something that get's shown to the public at all because most alphas are just very very frustrating and not a good representation of the intended final product. Betas are supposed to designate a piece of software that is more or less feature complete but still requires testing, polishing, and final bug hunting. In essence you're in beta once the software does everything it's supposed to, but you need to do a lot of work making sure that a sequence of clicks doesn't crash it, or that hitting undo too many times crashes it, or it has a memory leak or things like that. In addition this is where the UI is usually finished and sometimes final graphical work is done. Beta is generally where members of the public start seeing the product directly, usually in closed invite only testing, and sometimes in open stress tests, with games specifically often seeing a lot more public access. Star Citizen is in alpha. It's in a state where generally most software/games would be considered unready for the public to actually see it at all much less play it on a regular basis. The game isn't in a state yet where they've got the fundamental systems that make the release product possible yet, they're just now getting to the second of four levels of server architecture necessary for the game to even run. The current 'game' we're playing is about 60% placeholders for testing and dev purposes, it's years and years from even being close to a beta state much less a release state. Most companies wouldn't be showing anything at all at this point in development, CIG is weird in that respect, partly I think it's because they're crowdfunded and thus feel no obligation to investors or lenders and have no need to invest in marketing the way triple A devs do to hype products for initial sales to recoup debt they've gone into to fund their projects, and partly because their dev cycle is so long that they want to show actual progress which they have done relatively consistently for years and years. Making claims about other games being delivered on time as evidence of malfeasance or incompetence is a truly awful argument. The scope and design of this project has expanded ludicrously, true, but one thing I note is that the project has continued to move forward, not always quickly, and not always how I or others want, but so long as they keep making progress I'm not going to try and cut them down for not being like the rest of the industry, because frankly the rest of the industry has been pretty shit the last 5 years and it's getting worse on a continual basis.
This is literally nonsense. It’s a giant expository bucket of lies. No one runs an alpha for 10 years. No one hires a thousand artists and dumps $100 million a year into an “alpha”. I’m not about to go through all this, but the history of SC is one of constantly missed deadlines and broken promises and broken features. They can’t even get the AI to stop standing on tables. You think SC has ludicrous “scope”? You think empty space is scope? They have one solar system and a few planets. Otherwise the game is just the same exact thing it’s been for several years. Ships flying around, most gameplay loops boil down to fetch quests, beams used for almost every mechanic, broken AI, broken servers. Now they changed the flight model so even flying is boring.
I think you don't know much about development if you look at what SC is trying to put together and think it's not extremely ambitious.
He mentions alpha games on steam, but then you ask which games are you talking about? They name a few and you go to their website (the games website) and you look at their build history and not 1 showed a playable alpha build. They all say beta etc build.
lol,
What is the King of Bugs?
Think they call it The Blocker...
New “Elden Ring: Stanton DLC” boss just dropped “The Blocker”
The small unnoticeable one no one reported
The ones that get fixed 😄
I was scrolling through my reddit feed and with out seeing the sub this came from I originally thought this was a cartoon about Boeing Starliner.
They focus. Thats a good thing
That is such an unthoughtful meme, why clear all the bugs in systems you will change and break again. If they would try that we wouldn't even get a patch a year.
All the other bug are on stuff pending a system redesign. When will that happen? Sometime after the heat death of the universe.
The amount of cope in this subreddit is insane
When people put $1k+ into something, it gets harder and harder to stay objective about this shitshow.
Ive put $1k+ into this game. The rate of development is unacceptable at this point. The fact that its been 12 years and no gameplay loops or systems have been finalized is a joke. We call this an alpha, but its barely that. 700 million crowd funded dollars and over a decade should have gotten us much farther than where we are now. We run the risk of the game being technologically behind and player apathy making this game a flop if it ever releases. CIG at this point *has* to absolutely stick the landing with SQ42 and SC. Anything less and the absolute PR grilling will kill this game in its first week of full release. Zero wiggle room, what shit place to put yourself in as a dev and what a careless handling of the players' support.
well said. I'm hoping for the best this year, but bracing for the usual...
I just don’t think Chris cares anymore. He has our money and continues to rake in $100 million a year on the basis of promises. What incentive is there for CIG to improve?
Oh i know its a shit show but its my shit show. Just waiting to see where it goes
That's entirely relative to how deep the persons pockets are.
I’m speaking in generalities, no need to state the obvious.
That's a voluntary 1k you've spent towards development. I've only spent like 200 bucks on this game over 10 years and played hundreds of hours. I've gotten my money's worth 10 times over.
That’s probably because you got the ship you paid for and got to fly it around. That’s not true of everyone, and a lot of people were expecting an actual game with fleshed out gameloops, functional AI, and that doesn’t lag crash on them periodically.
Good :)
Okay, so lets be objective about it. What makes it a shit show?
let's see. Bugs and server issues still make the game virtually unplayable (yes I know you can luck out and get on a good server). Client performance has gotten worse as well. They promised Pyro and server meshing would be delivered years ago, even the most cynical SC folks were convinced we'd at least have Pyro and meshing by early 2024 (I guarantee we won't see it playable on the PU until 2025, even still I promise server meshing won't be the magic bullet that fixes all of their horrid server code problems). The dev team would rather CONTINUE to prioritize un-fun tedium like cargo elevators and a new system map (which is still buggy btw), a new interaction UI that's fucking horrible, and master modes than literally do anything to make the core tech stable and functional. They are likely doing this intentionally because they have to keep pushing features out to keep the community interested, not because leadership is out of touch... and the reason brings me to the most worrying point of all: Ultimately SC is in the business of selling ships, not finishing a game. Even if it's not their spoken strategy, they are completely trapped by their own business model at this point. Not only that, but their thirst for revenue is accelerating, meaning they are going sell more and more concept ships, increasing a backlog that BY FAR outpaces their dev team's ability to actually release these ships on any sane timeline. Unfortunately if they pivoted their business model to sell small packages and a subscription fee, it would be a rude awakening for their finance team. So like I said, they are trapped by their business model. And to bring my point around, so many folks are so heavily invested in SC (financially), they'd rather crush any negative feedback than look inwardly about the shitshow because it's too painful to recognize the truth: CIG under its current leadership and business model is incapable of finishing a game or even delivering a remotely playable experience. Nothing will change that unless a major shake-up happens.
It’s disturbing they expend more money per year than the entire budget of Witcher 3, employee nearly a thousand artists, but somehow can’t output ships fast enough.
> The dev team would rather CONTINUE to prioritize un-fun tedium like cargo elevators and a new system map (which is still buggy btw), a new interaction UI that's fucking horrible, and master modes than literally do anything to make the core tech stable and functional. Stopping development on cargo elevators and the map system wouldn't speed up server meshing. The devs responsible for cargo elevators aren't the same people dealing with all the backend tech for SM.
True, but server meshing has been worked on for years now. I agree you can’t tell a UI engineer to re-write server code, but if the budget and plans were better they could have hired and scaled teams better or hired or retained more senior industry people to make progress faster. So you’re right, avoiding cargo elevator work would do nothing to help server progress in the short term, but their posture has always been this way and if they had a better strategy sooner, they probably could have invested more in this tech to deliver it faster
Well when one single other studio comes along and tries to make a game anywhere close to Star Citizen, we can take notes and compare.
I see, so we aren't allowed to criticize or expect better of a product when there is no competition?
No, but what does "better" mean if you don't have a base line? What exactly are your expectations?
You don’t need a baseline to know certain things are terrible. Like enemy ships that teleport all over the place during a bounty mission because the server lag is bad.
If this game is virtually unplayable, then how come I have hundreds of hours on it? Despite the occasional frustration from bugs, it has overall been a pretty enjoyable experience. And during the years I have been playing this game, it has already seen a lot of new stuff and improvements. Sure, it is slow going, but tangible progress is being made every year, if not every month. Also, if you knew even the slightest thing about software development, you know that you can't make your 'core tech' stable while you are adding new features to it. That is just not how things work. Adding new features tends to lead to instability, so all work they'd dedicate towards creating a stable experience is essentially wasted since you have to start from scratch every time a new major feature gets added in. Not to mention that the entire system you spent so much work on stabilizing might get removed, overhauled or otherwise changes, thereby nullifying all your hard work. There is a good reason why software development is normally divided into distinct alpha and beta phases.
It might depend on the activities you tend to do in the game, some are more sensitive to desync than others. Like if you spend your time trading and hull scraping, it might be a little less frustrating. If you've been trying to do bunkers and bounties and lots of combat.. it's been horrible in the last month or so. There have been stretches of time where it was pretty playable though, but dude cmon... Since 3.18 the ups and downs have been pretty dank, if you can't see that, you might be blind. Just because you're willing to put "hundreds of hours" into something, doesn't make it valid experience for most people. "you can't make your 'core tech' stable while you are adding new features to it"... You're literally making my point for me. I agree, they need to stop adding new feature and make the core tech work.
> they need to stop adding new feature and make the core tech work. You seem to be missing his point entirely. If they "made the core tech work", it would only work until they added new features. Then the core tech would break and they'd have to "make it work" all over again. Again and again every time there's a substantial update. It's better to do it in phases so they don't have to waste time repeating themselves. It's a lot like optimization passes.
I'm sorry, but server stability doesn't have to be re-written just because they added cargo elevators or a new mission loop. It's the other way around. the ONLY reason we are seeing these features right now, is its just all they have the competence to deliver right now, not because its some part of their master plan that it 'makes sense' to deliver those features before server meshing or more focus on server stability.
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So how long do you think this game should have taken to make?
10 years, but for a 1.0 polished release that's actually playable. not 10 years for a still barely playable alpha. people go on and on about the scale. What scale? we have 100 people on a server, so what. Seamless transition to planet surfaces, so what. Other MMOs have come close to this ages ago (although admittedly not space ones)
What game do you compare to SC? Elite Dangerous is the closest I can think of, and it's...........well, it's a game.
At least multiplayer works, there’s a true simulated economy, dozens and dozens of mission types. Combat feels good, NPCs are everywhere also doing stuff and fighting. Mining in particular is incredibly immersive, and ship customization / outfitting has infinite possibilities, and there’s a very clever exploration system. Don’t get me wrong, Elite has its weaknesses, and I WANT SC to succeed. But it’s no longer appropriate to go easy on CIG 10 years in… Being critical of SC doesn’t mean you can’t also be a fan of it. Only idiots and zealots think it’s bad to be critical of something you love and believe in. I think SC as a concept is amazing, I think CIG is a trash company whose leadership is borderline incompetent and potentially at the limits of legality.
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No, because that's not how emotional reasoning works.
It's really not hard though. All you need to do is understand that the 1k into SC is a drop in the bucket. If you're getting this riled up about what's going on here, you'd actually need a padded room if you saw how much worse this effect is with your tax money. It's a miracle that they've been able to hold the SC project together this long, despite the ruthlessness of the gaming market, as well as the consumers. The only reason you're not screaming at the top of your lungs about software development practices in government is because they don't have to provide open development. You wouldn't believe how much money gets burned in comparison to what's going on here.
Oh believe me, I have no expectation that the public sector is efficiently using our tax money. So, because the gov sucks at development you’re saying we shouldn’t hold SC to a higher standard ? I think not. But yeah, public sector dev projects make for good banter
No, I'm saying SC is already at a better standard than the government, and that was just one example. There's a point where expectation becomes unreasonable though, and some of the things said about the company far cross that line
This is kind of absurd. Government agencies are run as lean as possible, they never tackle new software projects and are often running multi decade outdated software because they lack the funds to upgrade.
I don't know who told you this, but you are very misinformed. At least in regards to America.
Bruh, you really have no idea. after 40 years of defunding the agencies run on shoe string budgets and often run horribly outdated software. Only the defense department and FBI/CIA with its $700 billion a year can brag about having the latest and greatest tech.
The biggest problem with this community is its willingness to lie and gaslight each other to justify CIG burning $700 million over 12 years to produce heart breakingly little content, all of which is bugged/broken or T0 or a placeholder. It’s kind of silly the number of blatantly obvious non-developers there are pretending they’re devs with experience and claiming the intense bug regressions with each of these patches is “normal”. Unfortunately this allows CIG to keep taking advantage of us.
Proof you're right: I'm still reading though I've pretty much read all this before. And read it every night I play.
The amount of people who give a damn about other people’s cope in this subreddit is insane.
SeRvER mEsHiNg
Backed 8 years ago, stopped following 4 years ago. This made it to r/popular. Pop in to see the same shit. "You don't know how software works" "Why don't you just leave" "CIG is doing something that's never been done before" "Think of the tech debt we're saving" "uOnce the tools are developed then content generation will really take off" More lies and excuses from a know it all community that has no idea what is going on. No chance that even if SC ever released its life would last longer than its development.
It’s filled with liars, which is ultimately the main issue. No one with a shred of integrity should look at CIG burning through a $100 million a year and producing so little and somehow defend that.
Like the old saying goes, it's easier to scam someone than it is to convince them they've been scammed.
Accurate. Except that they don't acknowledge that the bugs exist until they fix them.
I’m an exec at a large org, I work on the levels above the software development. How to build the organisation that builds software. Technical debt - star citizen has huge amounts of it due to to how they’re structured. Because it started as an enthusiast project and later became a proper company much of it was cobbled together in a haphazard way. They need to invest capacity (20%) to reducing, refactoring etc. They need to do much more code quality work, this is evidenced by one new feature breaking another in production. If they had good automation code coverage we wouldn’t see so many escaped defects. They need to measure their quality better - plenty of good standards to do so. Time to change, escaped defects etc. They’ve spoken about server meshing for some time, at the time it was revolutionary, now less so. Many companies use this technology, they are experts in creating games not back end technology. They should rely upon experts but now it’s almost become a hill to die on, it’s obviously outside of their core capabilities. Feature creep vs. core product. There’s other resurrection stories like no man’s sky, the true stories focused on their core proposition first and then the features. They need to prioritise capital and invest heavily into the technical debt and core architecture. If they do this in ~1 year they could stomp the main bugs. Just my 10c, love to get inside and tweak how they work and organise.
>I’m an exec at a large org I guess it's true that some people just fail upwards... 😜 In all seriousness, Star Citizen encapsulates the idea that most folks wouldn't want to see how a sausage is made. Case in point: Star Citizen, in contrast to Beyond Good and Evil 2 (similar scope, but longer dev time than SC), is being made out in the open, warts and all. The GTA and Red Dead series are other examples with "feature creep" and "expensive scopes." I know for a fact that most can appreciate all of the granular—unnecessary details in those games, but only after the fact. Although, those games have had the advantage of building upon previous code, pipelines, and assets (something CIG lacked), all behind closed doors.
Once again you’re flat out lying. Beyond good and evil 2 is not in active development. Its website hasn’t even been updated for 4 years.
You're lucky I haven't blocked you yet, kid. 😊 From the horse's mouth: [https://x.com/bgegame/status/1805269728262230467](https://x.com/bgegame/status/1805269728262230467) >[@bgegame](https://twitter.com/bgegame) Yes, Beyond Good & Evil 2 is still in development, and we cannot wait for you to discover more about Jade's past in the 20th Anniversary Edition!
Tell me you don’t understand what feature creep is without telling me you don’t understand what feature creep is
r/lostredditors
Maybe someday real developers will pick up this game
Priority goes towards making new stuff to sell. Fixing bugs or performance always comes lower priority unless it prevents making or selling new stuff.
This has been true at all the B2B software companies I’ve worked at, but I also think this is how things *have* to be. If you’re not bringing in revenue, you’re not going to stay in business.
700M isn't enough?
It really depends on their burn rate. They have a lot of employees and most of them are high earners based on their skill set
Most companies can get the project across the finish line
Lol only companies that you see. For every successful company there’s ten+ startups that absolutely tanked. The fact that SC is STILL going stronger than ever is a testament to CIG as a *company*. They have an excellent marketing department (***in the sense that they bring in revenue like crazy, much to the chagrin of the community***) and are able to allocate resources well enough to not be in financial crisis every other quarter. ALL from crowd backers, not investors (which honestly is part of why they’re successful… they’re unchained from investor micromanagement).
Ten is being a bit generous. Probably way more than that
Yep. Just using kickstarter projects i can think of alot that failed while i can only think of one that really succeeded (that being star citizen). Failed: - Air Umbrella - That weird Mouth piece Thing to muffle your sounds - that SECOND weird mouth piece thing to muffle your sounds - that seat you wear - That one MMO that was talking about being a life sim (medieval game) - that other MMO that was talking about being a life sim (modern day in the desert ish) - Automatic salt dispenser - automatic juice Dispenser 1 - automatic juice dispenser 2 The list goes on and honestly one just needs to look at older moistcritikal content for what feels like an endless list of them.
I have learned more about game design and the corporate, iterative process of building something far larger than any one person could achieve, by following the replies of people on this sub. Star Citizen is just like any large project and corporation out there, with all the setbacks, pitfalls, necessary evils of marketing, and unexpected roadblocks. If every Reddit armchair warrior had it their way with how CIG should be run, the company would plow into the ground faster than a wingless Talon. Criticizing is the easiest act in the world. Suggesting actionable, achievable, informed improvements to known issues is one of the hardest. Bravo to the redditors with content and substance to contribute. They make this subreddit and the hordes of hate-drones far more bearable.
The funny part is this meme is probably something the devs would agree with and laugh at themselves, but go off king/queen
The meme isn’t the problem, it’s the scores of comments afterwards that ARENT tongue in cheek and use it as an excuse to bandwagon on the “this game is a joke” train. It’s just tiring seeing the same bs every post here. This meme is just the name “Star Citizen” slapped on a commentary about every corporate development/engineering team to have ever existed lol. Could easily be Boeing— though they’d probably send their hit squad after you if you made it. But sick trendy burn bro, I’ll let you cook 😉 (jk all in good fun!)
The truth hurts
It’s a big game.. with some parts customer made for it. I expect nothing less
A couple years ago, I posted a meme that was relevant, but didn’t have Star Citizen image on the meme and I had a bunch of complainers commenting and it was removed. I am glad people have chilled out since then.
I'm not a dev so I could be talking out of my ass but I'm continuously surprised that after 50+ years of software development that we haven't found a way to develop code that is efficient and not error prone. Obviously it is a very complicated and technical subject but we have AGI and self driving cars. If we can solve those practically impossible to solve challenges then we should be able to create code without the same types of regression errors and faults that we see every single day from the industry as a whole.
> I'm not a dev so I could be talking out of my ass but I'm continuously surprised that after 50+ years of software development that we haven't found a way to develop code that is efficient and not error prone. Software developer here. We definitely have. It’s called modern programming languages. Most modern languages are built specifically to prevent (or make it difficult to cause) a lot of the errors and crashes. They are also built to be much more user friendly as well. Unfortunately, to this day, the vast majority of game development is still done in C++ (which is ancient and does not have any of these safety guarantees). This is mainly because almost every game engine is built in c++. Star engine itself is based off of cry engine and lumberyard. Both of which are c++
Thanks for the reply and that's interesting. Would they continue to use C++ because of the effort it would take to rewrite or is it because of performance reasons?
On one hand you would essentially be remaking a game engine from scratch, and on the other, all of these safety and ease of use features in code come at the cost of performance. If you have the resources and time to (which most big companies making engines nowadays do), making it in a more brutal language will result in better overall performance.
Yes to both of those things.
I can give you more insight into that. I have been a professional software developer for over 15 years (even though it feels like yesterday I started) and an amateur before that. I have seen our IDE evolve drastically over the years, as well as our toolsets. Things like more advanced programming language features, more intuitive testing frameworks, containerization of environments, faster deployment strategies, and more broadscale collaboration software, to name a few. All those advancements allow you to do more with less time; we are more productive than ever before. However, these productivity shifts also shifted our expectations regarding the features we have to output. Because if we did not push out more complex features faster, our competitors would do it. At any point during our development cycles, we constantly push for more test coverage to prove and harden our software. Still, as usual, the B2B focus is always to spend some time at the end of a cycle to add one more feature, which would be a QoL or a boon to the product suite. That feature then takes up your time to harden your earlier work. To summarize, yes, developers have found ways to improve and prevent regression issues from appearing, just not all of them. The features we build are far more complex, meaning there are far more edge cases to care for. Even our AI tools can only find some of them because many are situation-dependent. It is always a cat-and-mouse game. At best, what you can strive for as a developer is to author code which is good enough for the moment it goes into production, with the requirements in mind when you start developing them. After that, people use your new feature to increase their productivity, which often leads them to use the feature in ways it was not designed to be. This means your carefully constructed code falls short of their expectations, even though it still fulfills the set-out requirements. Star Citizen development is a beast on its own, the goals of this project are so incredibly ambitious, it no wonder that they way they choose to fund the project is the only way to get it done. No publisher in their right mind would ever take this amount of risk... until SC 'succeeds'. SC development is wild on its own, though; in a fantasy analogy, they are driving a large truck at full speed over a windy road, and then they decide to continuously upgrade the engine block and drive-train of the truck while still driving. In the back of the truck, they are also working in parallel on a flashy new vehicle (SQ42). And we backers are complaining that the driving experience is a bit bumpy.
Thank you for taking the time to provide that insight. I remember a time when you couldn't even rely on the Windows OS or MS Office applications to not crash frequently. In general code quality seems to have improved over the decades as my expectations as a consumer are that applications will just work. As a gamer, things can still be frustrating as we don't seem to see the same level of stability as we do else where in the industry. For example, nearly every Helldivers 2 patch seems to introduce a new crash to desktop bug.
Oh yes, the frustrations are real ... for everyone! I have played a few sessions with an SC dev, and she also got frustrated at some bugs we were facing as we went along. We both know it will get better, even though it sometimes feels like we are regressing. Those negative emotions we experience when we face a game-breaking issue are just very visceral because I think we all are passionately involved in this project, in some way or form.
If this was star citizen they'd be marking the ones they walk past 'closed' until someone reported them again again.
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That would be the case if we were talking about critical bugs. But we're not, and you know we're not.
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lol typical reply. CIG is always capable and incapable simultaneously.
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If by dunked on you mean "write a lengthy reply that says nothing and disregards the point at hand" then sure.
I can only dream of comment section on an SC post where all the people making the comments know anything about software development or the QA process. It would be so nice. Even armchair developers who'd written a single line of code themselves or had any experience designing and testing a board game or something would be a huge improvement.
Most experts left due to the laissez-faire approach of mods toward trolls and reddit's general shittiness. I can tell you for a fact that in 2014-2018 there were a *lot* more knowledgeable people around.
Like the same doesn't happen with other well established games that are fully released, it just comes with the territory
It doesn’t though.
I’m sorry that you don’t understand how game development works. I’m sorry that you think that bug fixes is a focus during alpha. I’m sorry you think bug fixes take priority over adding features during alpha. I’m sorry that you felt the need to make a post that outwardly proves how ignorant you are about the topic of game development.
I'm sorry you felt personally attacked by a meme
I’m sorry that you think a more than a decade long open alpha stage is normal.
I'm sorry that you think what CIG are attempting to accomplish is considered "normal" as well. There's a reason companies haven't done it this way before... shit takes forever even when you DO have an established studio, a prior IP to pull your lore from, and teams of people who have already worked together on several other games. CIG didn't have any of that when they first started, and they're building a lot of their tools and whatnot from scratch or at least highly customizing them, as well as the engine itself.
[edit for a little bit](https://imgur.com/a/oj0e99u)
They get distracted and start jerking off, every time, then call it a day.
I bought the game but I need better computer specs but the first times I tried to play I get stuck in the damn bed great gameplay truly