I have to wonder if, with the amount of money they’re going to burn on retrofitting CryEngine for their needs (assuming that they’re successful), it would’ve been cheaper to just buy us and build the tools.
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Well if they get stuck they’ll know exactly who to buy…I mean, turn to for help 
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Unless they’re trying to warp CryEngine into something that it wasn’t intended to be, then their approach will be cheaper. They won’t have to create a new product from scratch, which means specification, design, development, test, debug - and also documentation and training. There is a long list of known quantities that comes with retrofitting CryEngine, and that’s very reassuring for management.
When I worked at DEC, the company had tried several times to build a document package like Microsoft Word. Each time the project burned, fell over and sank into the swamp. It was only when we purchased a guy’s document package (he built it so he could write his thesis paper) and retrofitted it that we had a successful project. Sometimes engineers just get too carried away with interesting technical creations without remembering that they’re supposed to be building a product for end users. Critically, retrofitting a functioning product keeps people’s focus.
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If only the software industry wasn’t overloaded with demand to the point where this could happen. But that’s the way it is right now. Interesting things and new creations are all fine and great, but at the end of the day, if no one uses it, what’s the point? Yeah you might be able to reuse some of the code / you learned something new, but all be damned if we couldn’t be a twenty or so years in the future because of delays like this.
But then again what do I care, I use notepad for my writing most of the time anyways.
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Engine programmers become engine programmers because they want to build game engines. When the M&A guys are doing due diligence and they ask their tech guy “should we buy this” the tech guy is going to say “no, we can build it ourselves” because that’s fun, what he wants to do, and it’s easy to underestimate the work involved in doing something yourself.
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I completely agree, though saying that it’s easy to underestimate the work involved is akin to saying that it’s easy to screw up the work itself. It is easy, but it shouldn’t be for a good engineer. Knowing how long our work will take is part of our job.
And, of course, everyone likes to do whatever it is that they’re good at. M&A guys make deals, so buying something is their preference. That’s dealing, making the business decision now. Having some software engineers do something later on is akin to passing the buck to someone else, and that’s not as satisfying.
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By that logic they should have bought INS, there is plenty of dev to keep a coder happy and it was rumored that INE was considered by CR, yet rejected because it was not mature enough, in other words, too much coding to do.
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Right, my musing was with regard to the fact that they obviously have needed to make significant modifications to CryEngine and whether, in the end, it would have been cheaper to buy us and add the FPS stuff than to buy CryEngine and add the planet stuff.
It was just a musing, I obviously have no insight into what they’re doing with CryEngine but they have an entire engineering team dedicated to it so whatever modifications they are making are going to cost millions of dollars along with whatever it cost for them to purchase the full source to CryEngine.
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Well, everything they are doing can be done cheaper than what they are spending, hearing about the millions they are burning through, makes me think they are paying consulting rates for everything.
I would guess the upgrade of INE would have cost more than the conversion of CryEngine, by their financial standards.
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Didn’t they also collaborate with Kingdom Come Deliverance with CryEngine stuff? I think there was an announcement in that regard, at least about ‘sharing tech’
kingdom come deliverance gave SC a bunch of character attachment and equipment system code and CIG hasnt given any code back yet, other than “lots of exposure” to quote the kingdom come dev. Kinda collaboration.
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ah thanks for clearing that up mattk50 ^^
What the hell is going on with Star Citizen?
Nice article, DS makes an appearance in the comments if you like a side salad with your main.
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CR is running around 20 hours a day, 7 days a week, trying to micro-manage a ~250 headed infant monster and failing?
facepalm
I actually feel sorry for all of the staff at CIG who have to read shit like this from empty-headed people like DS.
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A terrible article from a terrible clickbait website, what’s to expect.
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Wondered what you meant with terrible clickbait site, then realized it was an article on polygon. Makes sense now.
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Here is a new article on SC, CR and RSI, from the escapist, doesn’t look good.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/features/14715-CIG-Employees-Talk-Star-Citizen-and-the-State-of-the-Company
Also CR’s response to the article.
Really, really trashy.
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Must be some degree of truth in it, also CR’s obsession with Smart is evident.