71–80 of 85 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I looked him up I'm guessing you haven't played a little series called Wing Commander?
That's true for most of the world's population.
I'd expect most people commenting on games could at least name some of the major 90s studios. Origin was kind of a big deal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can test it on earth! Take a glass, fill it with water. Put something in it that floats, keep it away from the sides. Rotate the glass.
Thank you for your suggested experiment, though the set ups are different in one crucial regard. The water molecules interact with the glass, each other, and the floating object. The vessel's occupant (as mentioned in my earlier post) is in the vessel's interior which has no atmosphere (vacuum).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who will suffer are backers who supported this project.
There is no scenario where Crowd Funding backers profit. I don't know why people who Crowd Fund act like they are owed anything. Funding a business via Crowd Funding is in most scenarios the dumbest economic decision you can make. Comparable to throwing money out the window in terms of ROI.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The drama basically arises from where common people are a good source of funds but actually terrible investors, giving personal money by impulse, usually without being equipped with the industry insight to evaluate the risks, or fully accepting there are risks because they are too emotionally invested in the product.
Maybe so, but it's probably important not to enact regulations preventing people from doing this. Otherwise we'll lose all the things that Kickstarter et al. helped create. Anyone who's loved the game Undertale will tell you that was a fine use of their funds. But games like that wouldn't be possible without unsophisticated investors throwing their money at it in small quantities.
Ortwin: We have noticed the speculations created by a posting on the website of UK’s Company House with respect to Coutt’s security for our UK Tax Rebate advance, and we would like to provide you with the following insight to help prevent some of the misinformation we have seen.
Our UK companies are entitled to a Government Game tax credit rebate which we earn every month on the Squadron 42 development. These rebates are payable by the UK Government in the fall of the next following year when we file our tax returns. Foundry 42 and its parent company Cloud Imperium Games UK Ltd. have elected to partner with Coutts, a highly regarded, very selective, and specialized UK banking institution, to obtain a regular advance against this rebate, which will allow us to avoid converting unnecessarily other currencies into GBP. We obviously incur a significant part of our expenditures in GBP while our collections are mostly in USD and EUR. Given today's low interest rates versus the ongoing and uncertain currency fluctuations, this is simply a smart money management move, which we implemented upon recommendation of our financial advisors.
The collateral granted in connection with this discounting loan is absolutely standard and pertains to our UK operation only, which develops Squadron 42. As a careful review of the security will show and contrary to some irresponsible and misleading reports, the collateral specifically excludes “Star Citizen.” The UK Government rebate entitlement, which is audited and certified by our outside auditors on a quarterly basis, is the prime collateral. Per standard procedure in banking, our UK companies of course stand behind the loan and guarantee repayment which, however, given the reliability of the discounted asset (a UK Government payment) is a formality and nothing else. This security does not affect our UK companies’ ownership and control of their assets. Obviously, the UK Government will not default on its rebate obligations which will be used for repayment, and even then the UK companies have ample assets to repay the loan, even in such an eventuality which is of course unthinkable.
This should clarify the matter. Thank you.Earlier quoted context omitted.
My suspension of disbelief is destroyed every time I see missiles without proximity detonators.
The entire game design and physics of SC is built around "World War 2, BUT IN SPACE". I mean damn, they even have actual cockpit windows with no appreciable polarization (note the freighter pilot blinded by a simple laser scanner in the second video). That said, missiles with proximity detonation only make sense if they're actually built to be fragmentation weapons, not pure explosive-based, due to explosion shockwav…
CIG have just released a statement regarding this ( https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/for... ). Pasted below for those who can't or won't visit the previous link: Ortwin: We have noticed the speculations created by a posting on the website of UK’s Company House with respect to Coutt’s security for our UK Tax Rebate advance, and we would like to provide you with the following insight to help pre…
https://i.redd.it/3yddemsdku5z.jpg
"We have noticed the speculations created by a posting on the website of UK’s Company House with respect to Coutt’s security for our UK Tax Rebate advance, and we would like to provide you with the following insight to help prevent some of the misinformation we have seen.
Our UK companies are entitled to a Government Game tax credit rebate which we earn every month on the Squadron 42 development. These rebates are payable by the UK Government in the fall of the next following year when we file our tax returns. Foundry 42 and its parent company Cloud Imperium Games UK Ltd. have elected to partner with Coutts, a highly regarded, very selective, and specialized UK banking institution, to obtain a regular advance against this rebate, which will allow us to avoid converting unnecessarily other currencies into GBP. We obviously incur a significant part of our expenditures in GBP while our collections are mostly in USD and EUR. Given today's low interest rates versus the ongoing and uncertain currency fluctuations, this is simply a smart money management move, which we implemented upon recommendation of our financial advisors.
The collateral granted in connection with this discounting loan is absolutely standard and pertains to our UK operation only, which develops Squadron 42. As a careful review of the security will show and contrary to some irresponsible and misleading reports, the collateral specifically excludes “Star Citizen.” The UK Government rebate entitlement, which is audited and certified by our outside auditors on a quarterly basis, is the prime collateral. Per standard procedure in banking, our UK companies of course stand behind the loan and guarantee repayment which, however, given the reliability of the discounted asset (a UK Government payment) is a formality and nothing else. This security does not affect our UK companies’ ownership and control of their assets. Obviously, the UK Government will not default on its rebate obligations which will be used for repayment, and even then the UK companies have ample assets to repay the loan, even in such an eventuality which is of course unthinkable.
This should clarify the matter. Thank you. "
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Minor correction, the communication with the community is funded by "community subscribers" separate from the game development crowdfunding.
Thanks. I didn't knew they funded it separately. I still think some part of developers working time going on it. And due to how their marketing works they likely had to adjust usual development pipeline. In most of "normal" games there can be untextured models, unfinished animations until very end while on Star Citizen they try to show eye-candy updates all the time. So I guess this would likely drive development cos…
I don't know about untextured models and unfinished animations driving up costs. At one point they showed a demo with early draft facial animations and got slammed for it (The Morrow Tour), and since then they've been hesitant to show things that aren't near finished. Stuff's getting to that level of visual polish either way, I think this is more likely to impact whether they publish early drafts of visual features, rather than having an impact on their actual development process.
Not that we don't see progress on stuff though. The procedural planets have been repeatedly featured in videos since back since the first teaser (Pupil to Planet) when it had a single material covering the entire planet. More recent demos are much more detailed and have shown what's slated for release in alpha 3.0, including the Levski landing area.
Other things like animations do get shown in untextured demo levels, and I remember recently seeing one with a person putting a box on a shelf and clipped his arm through a solid object. So they're not total perfectionists, but they're not 100% open about in-progress features either. If you show something too early and it changes significantly before release, somebody's bound to get upset about it.
Who could've guessed? The game designer suddenly gets $150m and rather than iterating, he goes for the dream. I looked him up and he apparently has produced AAA games before so what's the deal here? Shooting for the moon on the first go in any software development processes is a recipe for disaster.
