Big Letter from the Chairman - Server Meshing and the Persistent Universe

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/18696-Letter-From-The-Chairman

This was one of the better letters packaging information about the status of the game's critical systems for reaching true MMO capabilities.

We'll see how far CIG's goals get them this time :P

This game is truly the most Sisyphean of all development cycles.

I read up to the quote from groundhogs day an immediately died of irony poisoning.

Cycles implies recursion, this is a rat king of development at this point.

. . . it is a privilege to be challenged artistically and supported financially in this manner. . ."

Yeah, no kidding. Having a bunch of saps keep paying you to put out an aspirational roadmap every few months is good work if you can get it.

@therealturk: Ten thousand struggling Etsy/Patreon/etc. artists just read this and died of laughter and/or depression.

Then, with Alpha 3.15: Deadly Consequences

Yeah, give the alpha a wrestling pay-per-view name.

I understand that people that are fully invested in the promise of this game and what it represents are willing to look at one part of this "plan" and get excited.

But... Jesus fucking Christ.

Oh my god I expected that chart to be like "we are adding XYZ mission or ABC feature" but it seems literally to be fully in the weeds engine goals? Who the fuck cares whether the entities are loaded in the client server side online jpeg pipeline or whether the navmesh sync will be attuned with the geo-poly triangle system.

Who is that for? If the fans of this thing are in so deep that a chart like that is exciting... Wowee. This thing hasn't been something I am really interested in playing (even though I bought it for 30 USD a decade ago) but this one still shook me.

I am really worried that this game is going to come out so far in the future that Mark Hamil will have died of old age and it will forever be his last credited appearance.

Come for the technical descriptions, stay for the assertion that Covid is done and working from home is for suckers!

Maybe I'm not the target audience here -- I have to imagine a release like this is largely meant to preach to the already converted and keep them on the hook -- but nothing here does anything to convince me that this would be a fun game to play. It's perhaps telling that this whole release is packed full of material details of the software and the organization but says absolutely nothing about the game. Your persistent entity system only matters if it's in the service of creating a new and better experience for your players, and "leave a thing on a planet and come back to it later" just isn't that compelling.

I'll admit that I funded this for around $100 near the end of the original Kickstarter, with the understanding that this may never come out and I may have essentially thrown that money into a fire.

In hindsight, this was the right perspective to take.

It does seem to operate more than a little like a pump and dump scheme. Right down to the pictures of their new office they have up on their site:

OK, so actually one of those pictures is from the movie Boiler Room, but somehow I could totally see Chris Roberts standing up and shouting "Reco!" every time a new Patreon subscriber comes in.

I have no skin in Star Citizen, but watching a few streamers recently it looks really cool it does seem to be delivering what they promised.

Given the footage of the game I've seen recently, it's for people who want the game to move with a relatively smooth framerate, where things load in a reasonable time and you don't fall through the underside of a planet forever.