Seriously, doesn't AMD test their installers?
The Adrenaline installer is worse than whatever AMD did to the Radeon installer when they first bought out ATI. The last two times I've installed I was wondering if I had to sacrifice a live chicken to the AMD gods to get things to work.

I agree theyarecomingforyou about the case not being strong. The only problem being that this is a court action in the US, and as we have seen by cases like SCO vs IBM, these things can get drawn out for years. The SCO case going on 15 years now.
The one bit of hope is that CIG is getting sued in California, instead of Texas. Which I find a bit surprising as CIG's original office is in Texas and the Texas court is more likely to draw this out. California is more likely to actually take a look at the documents as presented.

Too bad this isn't Canada. Our courts, though imperfect, would throw this case out with prejudice. The original filing is exploratory, meaning they are trying to find proof of breach of contract, instead of having proof. This is highly frowned on in Canada. Then they purposely misrepresented the contract, which even if they had provided some proof, is grounds for complete dismissal.

We only know pieces of information about Crytek's financials and current owned IP, but what we do know is in 2013 Crytek was unable to make payroll multiple times for 1 to 2 months. This lead to many lead devs quitting their jobs. Some of these people started the Frankfurt RSI Studio. In 2013 CIG and Crytek renegotiated their deal. According to ex-Crytek employees it was Crytek that approached CIG to buy a normal GLA for for the price reduced by the amount CIG had already paid. This allegedly allowed Crytek to start paying their employees again.
In 2015 Crytek was having troubles making payroll again. Amazon bought a license to CryEngine 3 for an undisclosed amount. According to at least 4 anonymous employees the deal was for full rights to the CryEngine 3 for $50 to $70 million. Crytek was using the CryEngine 4 at this time.
Reports continued into and through 2016 of employees not being paid for up to 6 months. At the end of 2016 one of the disgruntled accountants said Crytek was $23 million in debt. This was after selling 3 studios, multiple franchise IPs and trying to sell, or close down 3 more. They were trying to go down to 2 offices. Not surprisingly, during these periods of non-payment many more senior developers left the company.

My take, I don't think Crytek is worried about not licensing their engine anymore, I think the financial hardships and lack of skilled developers has long since kept new companies from considering CryEngine.

Try re-reading it. This means you can pay to not only get better gear, but also be paired with people you can slaughter with your new gear.
It quite literally is pay to win.

chickenboo wrote on Oct 18, 2017, 10:45:
The thing that irks me about this, is that this is once again simply common sense. It's already obvious that junior players are going to see the pros running around with their (a la TF2) iPod earbuds and hats for their hats and Santa Claus beards and want them too, and head off to the store. Activision is simply codifying this into a patent so they can get the jump on other devs/publishers in the industry.

It's just so sad watching the industry go this way.

Actually 2.x was branched from master about 15 months ago when 2.4 was released. While the features from 2.5 and 2.6 would have been merged to master, some fixes would have been too time consuming to merge to the old branch they have been releasing from.
We are getting over a year's worth of work. Also, they already have some 3.1 items done. Can't wait for 3.0 and hopefully 3.1 will make it out before the end of the year.

What is the name of the song in this trailer?

Am I the only one that originally read this as Need for Speed Paycheck, and thought at least EA is being honest about their lack of care of games. Yes, I can see it says payback.

Windows 10 Anniversary showed either Microsoft has completely incompetent QA, or no QA at all anymore! How can there be a change that breaks tens to hundreds of millions of devices. Including a majority of Webcam still on the market and they don't find the problem until after release?

This pure stupidity of "supporting" offline gaming in this way goes to show that no one at Microsoft has any brains at all anymore. Of course we already knew that when they didn't scrap the modern joke of an API.

"Battery life also tends to be on the high side."
Ha ha, ha ha, ha ha ha ha. LOL! ROFL!
On my Wii, that I barely used, I was constantly replacing the batteries. So much so that I got rechargeable batteries that I was constantly charging and changing half way through a gaming session. This combined with another person talking about always having to have the tablet of the WiiU plugged in makes me think this will be as much of a disaster in design.

Then I see all the people with the handhelds with massive external batteries to try make it so they can just play while they are in transit.

Fortunately I was able to sell off my Wii at a reasonable price, but for what was supposed to be a cheap console, I payed more for it than my PS3 and I was a fairly early adopter of the PS3.

The planets are first procedurally generated using seed information. Then an artist goes in and can paint on biomes on the macro to normal level. They can also place down objects. These objects could be fully hand crafted landing zones, or just trees, rocks and people.

Chris wants no planets, or moons that are just procedurally generated. He wants at least some artist sculpting, even if it is a barren rock moon.

Star Network 1.0 is scheduled for Alpha 3.0. At minimum this will allow them to use 16 cores per instance rather than the 4 that are currently used. Item 2.0 will fully come online with this greatly reducing network traffic. I would be surprised if partial dynamic instancing wasn't part of this as it is a major part of the networking code rewrite. I wouldn't be surprised if they start out with up to 100 people per instance and major areas as their own instances that you can fly into that instance.

As for when 4.0, that will be late 2017. Chris said the are going for a release every 2-3 months.
3.0 - December 2016
3.1 - February-March 2017
3.2 - April-June 2017
3.3 - June-September 2017
4.0 - August-December 2017

Some of those releases are more ambitious than others, but also over 100 people will be freed up one Squadron 42 is released. Judging on their history of being able to deliver, I think we will most likely see 4.0 in late October 2017. Probably showing it off incomplete at GamesCon. Then showing off some exotic new biome at CitizenCon.

First off, I think this article is a fair representation. Yes, the first part sounds a little one sided, but as you read the rest of the article, you understand why.

Where you stand with the information in the article depends on your point of view. I look at it where we need people that are going to push the boundaries. Plus they are releasing so much information about how they solved the problem, other games can take all that research and use it. Others may think, no they should be keeping the research to themselves, or go with established solutions.

As for Derek being semi-right... He said that combined first person and third person wasn't possible, or would be crappy. He said that multiple people getting on a ship, then landing somewhere else with no loading screens was impossible with current technology. He said that the full scope of the game can't be made for less than $150 million, well he might be right, but they are at $124 million. He seems to suffer from, if I can't do it, nobody can. Also, last I checked, CIG is still working on the game, and according to Derek they should be completely out of money now.

Do people have legitimate concerns about the game? Yes, but I've read some of Derek's ranting and ravings and he even admits to posting stuff to try to piss people off.

I was going to ask how do they know if you are spoofing GPS, then it came to me that their tracking is so horrible, they can just detect if you ever go in a straight line without popping all over the place.

Considering they say they are still on schedule to deliver Squadron 42 this year, I think we should probably see a new graphics engine soon. They have talked about it being designed for DirectX 12 and Vulcan. It will be backward compatible with DirectX 11 and will run faster than the current engine on that API.

I think you were probably meaning game engine, but they have been working on replacing the rendering engine for quite some time now.

Unfortunately most people's performance problems have to do with the network code and how CryEngine handles objects.

The above is being dealt with in a multi-prong approach. Item System 2.0 allows more customization, better interactions and the ability to glob items together. Like being able to say move ship to here, instead of basically individually moving the thousands of objects that individually are part of, or in the spaceship.

They are also working on only sending information on what you can see.
Right now, you can look at network traffic and know there are 20 people on a ship and everything they have equipped. You don't even have to be able to see the ship.

Multi-theading the servers. Right now they only really support 4 cores. They have 16 core servers that they run 4 instances on right now. Currently they support 24 players per server. This will give them 96, without any other optimization.

One of the major fixes for this will be the dynamic server transitions. CryEngine only updates what is close to a user. This works fairly well when everyone is close together, like in most FPS games, but sucks when people spread out, like in Star Citizen. The plan was always to have transitions between servers, but they are now taking it a step further where a server will service a whole solar system when there are very few people there, but if a whole bunch of people come and are at one space station, a server will be spun up just to handle what is happening at that station.

Just wondering if we'll see the imminent "we're switching to a new graphics engine" announcement at some point.

I bought Rock Band 4 digitally. Found that my old guitars don't work that great for it, so I was looking at buying 1 new one. The only way for me to do it back then was to buy Rock Band 4 again with a guitar. I already had Rock Band 4, I just wanted a guitar!
I see they are finally selling the instruments by themselves, but with the new partnership and people saying how the original RB4 instruments felt really cheap, I'm holding out for the new instruments.

TBH I still have yet to see an answer to my similar question directed at Star Citizen, other than it will be like Wing Commander, whatever that means.

There is the single player story to Star Citizen called Squadron 42, which you will be a pilot fighting the Vanduul as part of Squadron 42 in the military. The Vanduul have been taking star systems from the UEE for a long time, and it is time to fight back.

Star Citizen takes place after the events of the story of Squadron 42. It is more just a sandbox game. You can be a bounty hunter, a pirate, a cargo hauler, a miner, information runner, or other possibilities. There is no real story, but there is a back end simulator that will keep track of everything and generate missions based on what is happening. Also CIG can seed that back end system with some short stories. We have seen the start of this with the Covalex Shipping Hub.

Yup, they haven't released anything in the last 2 years. All we can do is go in our hanger, look at our ships and dogfight single player ships.

They didn't release the planetside module in August of last year. Okay, rather dull, but they still did.

They definitely did not deliver the Baby Persistent Universe in December that showed they could do what Derek Smart said they couldn't. Being able to start on a station in first person, get in a ship with some friends, or stowaways, in a Constellation Andromeda having one person fly and other people in the turrets.

And there is nothing to do except fly around and shoot other ships. There is no Covalex Shipping Hub mission that shows the starting of the mission system.

Of course you can't get any weapons and shoot each other in first person. Especially not on Security Outpost Kareah.

No way to go fix your ship either at Cry-Astro Service.

Okay, so maybe the number of ships hasn't increased in 2 years. I think we maybe had 8 at that time. This is the list now:
-300i
-315P
-325A
-350R
-Aurora ES
-Aurora MR
-Aurora CL
-Aurora LN
-Aurora LX
-Avenger Stalker
-Avenger Titan
-Avenger Warlock
-Constellation Andromeda
-Cutlass Black
-F7A Hornet
-F7C Hornet
-F7C-S Hornet Ghost
-F7C-R Hornet Tracker
-F7C-M Super Hornet
-Freelancer
-Gladiator
-Gladius
-M50
-Mustang Alpha
-Mustang Beta
-Mustang Gamma
-Mustang Delta
-Mustang Omega
-P-52 Merlin
-Retaliator
-Sabre
-Vanduul Glaive
-Vanduul Scythe
-Vanguard Warden

Of course we haven't seen any planetside technology that is supposed to be coming probably by the end of June, that was originally scheduled for post launch, but we are getting it earlier because of the increased funds.

Considering that the US Government supplies money, guns, equipment and performs the majority of terrorist attacks in the world. It shouldn't be that hard for them to find the terrorists.
Of course in their view terrorism is fine, unless is it performed against their country.
Honestly the War on Terror is a joke because the only way to win it is for the US to wipe itself out!

Win 7, 8GB RAM, Core i5 @ 3.5 GHz, GTX670

*Points at the GTX670*
There is the problem. nVidia cards and drivers are buggy beyond belief.

In my experience it has been very difficult to get things to run properly using basic DirectX feature. AMD aren't the best cards, but for the basic stuff they tend to just work.

My friends who professionally write games have the same experience. They tell me they program the game, then spend at least a month trying to get it to not crash and run smoothly on nVidia cards.

Intel graphics they like because they have the most stable drivers, but the low performance they don't like.

Of course Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 isn't the most stable thing in the world, but I can usually play for a while without it crashing. Alpha 2.1 I experience the performance problem they mentioned pretty quickly. For me it seems to happen when trying to fly the Freelancer.

CPU emulation isn't the biggest problem for emulating most platforms. It is the GPU that is usually the biggest problems. Yes, Xbox and Xbone both use x86 compatible CPUs, but the Xbox used an nVidia GPU and the XBone uses an AMD.

The limited backwards compatibility of Xbox games on 360 was achieved by rewriting some of the shaders. nVidia threatened to sue Microsoft, but didn't because Microsoft didn't try to emulate the nVidia chip.