Thread by @dsmart

Buckle up buttercups, here comes a Star Citizen thread. I haven't done one of these in awhile.

So, you remember how every year since 2014, during their CitizenCon, anniversary and holiday streams (all take place in Q4), CIG has used all sorts of bullshot presentations to scam gullible backers? Well, it's happened again. And this year it's even more blatant.

To understand what they've done this time around, you have to appreciate the fact that they have insurmountable tech challenges due to the fact that for 7 yrs they've raised almost $200m based pure hype alone.

So, it all started back in 2017 when they fired up the hype machine for planets and that they were totally going to be building fully interactive and massive "procedural cities".

At the 2017 CitizenCon whale milking, they did the first presentation showing off what appeared to be their fully interactive procedural city which was (at the time) coming (it didn't) to 3.0 that year.

@47:49

As they hype reached fever pitch following that spectacle, they even released a dev video show how they did it, what was coming etc.

@ 24:20

Sean Tracy started tempering expectations pretty much right off the bat.

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ps: None of what he post there in Oct 2017 has happened. So there's that.

2017 came and went. No 3.0. No procedural cities. But they did manage to raise over $6m that quarter based on pure hype over that presentation.

Shortly after, they started talking about performance related tech. Nah, we totally didn't see that one coming.

Since that 2017 presentation I had written that there was no way in hell they were going to have a city level at *that* level of visual fidelity without making performance even worse than it already was.

Shortly after, they ramped up the performance tech improvements.

The narrative was that in order to have the procedural cities, they needed to do implement this new tech (which they had been talking about for months prior).

Object Container Streaming & Network Bind Culling were born.

It was all complete nonsense.

I started off by writing a detailed article in Dec 2017 explaining why it was all complete nonsense that wasn't going to achieve the desired results.

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As the weeks turned into months and the schedule kept slipping, in Feb 2018 I wrote yet another article in which I once again explained (based on what they were saying) how it all nonsense, a classic bait & switch etc.

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But the time 3.1 (nerfed & gimped 3.0) rolled around and was a performance disaster, they continued to hype this amazing new tech that was totally coming.

Once again, I covered that.

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As tensions mounted and with the Q4/2018 whale milking period looming, they increased the hype over the incoming tech, how it was going to fix all the things, performance was going to be amazing etc.

Except, as I wrote, it was the usual nonsense.

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Then one day, completely out of the Blue, less than one month from CitizenCon in Oct, they announced that 3.3 which was now slated to have the first of the procedural cities, was going to be split into two.

I laughed so hard because I knew why.

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Then, once again during CitizenCon 2018, they showed the Lorville city

@ 26:55

Two presentations about the same city, one year apart. A city which was supposed to have been released a year earlier.

Once again, they were flying around this city, the performance was abysmal, and my coverage was brutal but fair (I thought).

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That same CitizenCon week, they released a 3.3 build candidate to backers in the test pattern.

It didn't have any of the new planet, moons or procedural city. And the performance was still abysmal. Buy hey, alpha.

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That 3.3 build was in testing for over a month and finally went live on last week.

As expected, the performance gains were not only sporadic, but also largely immaterial. Just as I had had written for over a year.

Still no procedural city btw.

Now for the FUN part.

Almost immediately after releasing 3.3 to live, last week they released 3.3.5 (the other half which they had split off) into the backer test pattern.

It had Lorville. The first "procedural" that's nonsense btw) city which they had been touting since 2017.

Remember how I had written this in my previous article explaining what they were going to release in the end?

Well they released Lorville, the much hyped procedural city.

1) You can't fly inside it like they had shown at two previous presentations

2) They put a no fly zone around it that immediately destroys the player ship

3) The ingress (from space) altitude is 100K meters AGL

And the reason for this? Performance. Just as I had written, not only have they hit the performance wall, but there is no way they can have clients around that city and get decent frame rates.

So they had to cordon it off as a set piece for taking screen shots. LOL!!

And even though you can't even go there, the performance in both 3.3. and 3.3.5 is precisely as I had stated it would remain. Sporadic, immaterial, inconsequential, because the game engine is neither up to the task, nor does anyone in the dev team capable of getting around that.

These two videos give you a thorough tour of Lorville, complete with performance issues, glitches. And only a single player in the vicinity.

Welcome to Lorville. Stay well beyond the no fly zones - or else.

While most of those guys don't bother showing the fps counter or mention their rig (Tactical Advance was running an I7 8086K w/ GTX1080), this one does. Average was about 21 fps. Yeah.

Given how everything about Star Citizen is either flat-outr broken or glitchy, it wasn't long before someone was able to fly into and around the city when the server crashed and was no longer processing client input.

And just like that, we got a solid idea of why they needed the no fly zones in the first place.

WIth a single client flying around in off-line mode, performance is horrid, the set pieces are as repetitive as you could imagine etc.

The procedural emperor had not clothes.

So once again, CIG spent a whole 18 months hyping a piece of tech, a whole year hyping a feature - in two presentations. Then didn't deliver as promised on ANYTHING.

And some backers are livid.

This is why I spend time writing about and cataloging all of this because one day it's all going to be lost in time.

In Oct 2012, two games were promised to be released in Nov 2014. Exactly FOUR years ago this month. And neither one is near completion - $200m later.