Oh boy, another excuse to link a halfway relevant xkcd! 
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Bit of a shout out from Derek Smart:
This isn’t something you just tack on several years down the road. Don’t take my word for it, read some of these legacy articles (1, 2) if you think that a “multiplayer game” is the same as a “massively multiplayer game”. Heck, go ask the guys working on Dual Universe or Battlespace Infinity if they left the massive multiplayer part for last.
Full article:
While I tend to agree with DS’s analysis of situations, I wish he’d refrain from artificially inflating some arguments.
The particular case in this article is the check that couldn’t be cashed. Not because it bounced, but because the bank the recipient used requires a code the issuing bank doesn’t utilize.
There are plenty of real points to make without making such arguments.
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With post refund hindsight, the one thing I also forgot to ask for was ‘Can I have my dreams back please’.
They kept those.
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Chris Roberts and Wife enlist the help of venue security guard and leg it out the back with
the Citcon2017 door takings. But chaos quickly ensues during the getaway! - CCTV video
It is feasible, no doubt about that. The question is what they’re going to achieve in the time they have left before they run out of steam. No way people are going to wait another 10 years before they pull out from this project ( although I’m sure a minority wouldn’t mind waiting that long for their dream game ). Two years ago, nobody was speaking about SC having any difficulity. Today, there’s already quite a bit of controversy about it. Imagine how it’ll look like in two years.
The other side of the coin is the difference between the dream-selling speeches given during these conferences, and what they actually implement / plan to implement in reality. Take two recent examples from the latest Citizencon:
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Dream sold: it’s a real planet at full scale. Reality: 1/5 scale with orbital outpost floating at 10-15 Km in the sky - we’re pretty far from a real scale planet here, and more in the lands of No Man’s Sky, which also had toy-ish planets. I’m not judging that negatively, btw. In fact, it makes a lot of sense, technically. The problem is that you don’t get to claim to be the first ones to do real-scale planets, when 1) it’s false, and 2) there’s other people doing it for real ( hint: us, for example ).
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Dream sold: the city is populated by billions of NPCs, each with their own schedule / agenda and you can fly / go anywhere. Reality: only going to generate interiors and NPCs around points of interests / landing / mission zones. IIRC the devs even admitted they had no clue yet on how to handle players around the city and how to prevent them from landing anywhere, which they don’t want to for obvious design reasons.
I have no doubts that they’re eventually going to release something. Whether that something will be the best game of the century or a let down I cannot say. All I can say is that due to selling all these dreams for all these years, there might be a gap between the very very high expectations of their fans and what they’ll deliver. But time will tell.
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This is the main issue I would have. I like my planets full scale and distances realistic. So what is stopping them from going to full scale? Is it a technical limitation or is it just a design decision?
The fact that you have reached realistic scales proves it is at least possible.
Probably both. They wanted high-quality planets with distinct features. I might be wrong, but last time they talked about planets they were still touching up regions after the procgen pass to add the level of detail and variability they want. Having a smaller planet probably makes that easier as they don’t need to create as much bespoke modeling and texturing, and there’s less planet to check, which means they can make more of them.
It’s a reasonable design decision, but it’s unfortunately at odds with what they’ve been promising.
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They’ve switched their engine to Lumberyard, which itself is a fork of Cryengine. Their physics grid probably ends up in trouble past certain sizes / distances. That’s the most probable explanation.
As for running out of steam, nobody knows when that’s going to happen, and I’m not a soothsayer, but here’s some interesting facts for year 2017:
- They’ve got 470+ developers ( not counting contractors )
- GlassDoor employee reviews tell us they’re paying comfortable salaries with benefits - that means at least industry average - probably a bit higher, but for the sake of the argument I’ll just assume industry average.
- That means the median salary would be around $60K for their UK studio and $75K for their US ones, roughly split 50/50%
- Obviously that’s a median salary: entry-level artists or QA testers get paid a lot less, but senior developers / engineers get paid more.
- That’s around $32M this year in salaries only
- Add to that all the extra costs: office rent, motion-capture, extra benefits, contractors, software/hardware, executives salaries, and you can probably add a few other millions, reaching $40M of expenses for this year.
And now the interesting part: despite all their sales, they’ve “only” got $21M of revenue for 2017 until end of october. If you extrapolate that to the end of the year, they’re definitely losing millions of dollars per year; I’d say between $5M and $10M for this year. Question is: they’ve raised a lot in the past years and obviously they had less employees, so how long can they sustain that ? How much cash do they have left in the bank ? $15M, $30M, $50M+ ? It’s anybody’s guess and it means the dream can go on for many more years, possibly. Or collapse next year. Who knows.
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I see… Well… fingers crossed they will at least reach a playable game in time. If only for the lasting boost it will give to the genre.
And even a game with non-realistic sized planets with that level of detail will be enjoyable.
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There are way too many people working on that project. That’s the thing that’s kinda baffling me.
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Why didn’t he just swallow the pride and came to you ?
I remember reading about his comment on Inovae engine and that “he aims to do something else”.
I say bulls… on that. Since from that time onwards they added exactly the things they lacked and you had in spades.
Oh well he will do it eventually 
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Could be. However I would expect the physics engine component to suffer much much much earlier, even at a 1/5 scale planet. A diameter of ~2.500 km would still be too much at least if they used the engine and the static coordinate system as it was meant to be.
Which they didnt do as far as it seems since they told they moved on to floating origin approach where you have to think differently about scaled physics and some other stuff anyway. Maybe you’re right if they use a rawer floating origin or lets say segmented approach (I wouldnt call it floating origin then anymore) in a custom partially double coordinate system where they don’t reset the coordinates that often like you would do in a completely floating point based engine. They were definitely fighting with floating point precision at the point of their first planet generation iteration at least, the stuttering in some of the videos was a clear indication. But my thought was that this was not physics related but more general due to overall (re-)position problems in combination with FO. But at least that seems to have become better, the later builts run notable smother. But I am pretty sure there still are floating point restrictions around the implementation, the design of speeds (slower speed for battles and static warp drive in a certain direction) seems to be a workaround for network or float problems (or an indication for instancing?), with FO and some techniques speed handling could have been much more flexible (at least to handle the floating point limitation)?
My impression of planetary scales is maybe more in the direction that the sizes are a design choice but also (even more?) for performance reason of their planet generation as a combination of procedural and artist-driven custom surface generation. In the videos they seem to use a relative low number of terrain patches. Eventually there is a reason for that and they don’t want or cant traverse too much into finer sized patches. Despite the float limitation that still might be here and there in their reimplementation maybe also the number of detail they put onto the surface comes with a price.
We don’t know, I think it really depends on how much of the engine was customized, the (noise/custom-based planet generation) and if/how floating origin was applied.
I am fine with the design choice if they keep going the route to put more gameplay elements in like the city shown in the demo and than for example available in ED, until the budget ends…
Thanks for the example calculation, it seems pretty valid to me. I did a similar rougher one a few weeks ago, and came to ~30M USD, but with 330 developers, not checking todays number. IMHO the budget restriction is a good thing. They will have to come out of the comfort zone somewhen. The SC story will end somewhen probably not too far away, I don’t think next year but somewhen. Good or bad, but it definitely ends. And as positive sideeffect hopefully that ugly DS face will disappear in non-relevance again.
I think 3.0 will be interesting too see in terms of release date and, if available, also as an indication of the implementation strategy chosen discussed above.
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He probably wanted to choose an engine with strong recognition and appeal to maximize his marketing. With an obscure engine such as ours, a lot of people who have expressed doubts IMO.
Also, our engine has never been “mature” and robust enough to be instantly used in a massive commercial product; even to this day we’re lacking proper tools and support/documentation. Of course, retrospectively it would have made a ton of sense considering they had to do massive changes to the engine anyways, but remember in the original KS, they weren’t even going to do planets, right ? They didn’t know in advance that the scope would increase so much.
And once the project was advertised as based off Cryengine, it’s very very difficult to turn back.
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Pretty much that.
It could be also that he would not like to share the direction of a development… but who knows what could have been arranged by you two.
Perhaps in future once IB is finished and your engine bit more mature.
But i feel like it was a bit of missed opportunity from his side.
At one point in time the whole SC project started to remind me this oddly familiar hodgepodge of ideas that used to float on old Infinity forum.
Minus - engine
Plus - money
why are the staff and community members so bothered by cig not asking for your engine that you feel that you need to vent on the forums? and going by some post it would seem that you guys at inovae positioned your selves for cig to buy/use your engine but got ignored and now your a little salty over it.
the last time i see that very same thing happen was derek smart offering to help cig out and they said no and we all know how that man child deals with being told no.
BTW lets say the inovae engine was the best solution for cig so what they didnt want it so screw them and let them get on with it as it makes no odds to you as you have the engine and not them.
regarding there PG tech well they procedural generate the base moon/planet then proceduraly distribute hand crafted assets and useing there tools (they demo the tools last year i think) they paint on trees rocks etc then they go over the whole thing adding hero zones and then having an artist go over the moon/planet adding there touches to it. thats the rough explination from memory on how they use the pg tech.
now wheres my flame resistant clothes
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The only saltyness I see is coming from you.
I don’t see devs or community members being ‘bothered’, just having a chat about engines, which seems pretty well grounded in technical discussion.
Sure there are a few members of this community who are overly anti-RSI and make the hideous error of linking to DS. Personally I find that embarrassing. However, they are a minority. Most of the active members of this community simply don’t get involved in the SC conversations, or when they do, it’s logical and analytical.
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… sorry ? I said the exact opposite. Please read again. I said it wouldn’t have made sense for CR to try using our engine at Kickstarter time, and that after scope increase it was too late to change anyways. At no point did I suggest it would have been doable/feasible for them to license/acquire ours, so I fail to see how we could even be “salty” about it in the first place…
Kind of. They hand-craft tiled elevation layer heightmaps, and they hand-craft a series of masks ( like drawing with a brush in photoshop ) over the planet that indicates for each layer what the weight is. It’s a pretty smart trade-off between real PG and hand-crafting if you ask me. Although it has its own set of drawbacks ( one of them being, since it’s not real PG, you can notice some repetition patterns on the planets when you look at them from space ). As for benefits, you can use real Earth-like terrain with erosion, although it all comes from static textures, but it definitely looks a lot better than our mountains.
For points of interests, yeah, they use Cryengine’s / LY’s editor ( probably with a bunch of modifications ) to place assets. We’re pretty much doing the same, except we use 3ds max instead ( simply because we don’t have a functional scene editor yet ).
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how am i being salty lol i ask a question to one of the devs and now you came in like a knight in shining armour defending inovaes honour,
I actually pushed for SC to develop their own engine from scratch because I knew their engine wouldn’t cut it no matter how many times they tried to repackage it. 5 years later with a project in disarray and ever changing directions (no doubt due to engine limitations struggling to get more than 12~16 people on at any given time), and with only a few systems of the 100 advertised, CR crashed and burned long before ever getting off the ground. CR reached for the stars and the cash without a real strategy to achieve what he actually advertised.
Anyway, I hope CR never approaches you because you are the real deal and attaching yourself to CR will only ruin I-Novae, IMO.