CBJ, what is your job at Egosoft?

[Norsk]

Are you a coder or customer support or something else? You seem to be the main voice on the forums for Egosoft so I was wonder what your actual job is?

"Show me your skills please!" and don't give me a "?"

[Nosfuratu79]

Just a Forum mod bro.. i am guessing some guys are probably in house or work out of there home ...

Not all mods are full time Paid jobs unless you work in-house most the time isn't paid for and they just monitor the forum when they have the time to logg in for the day or a few hours.

I was inhouse Mod/Csr tech support for blizzard ent, Long time ago .. same job description.
same routine, same drama , same issues.

we also had a few guys that we nominated to work on our forums that where from out source.

and thats the way the cookie crumbles
Nos

[BlackRain]

I am pretty sure CBJ works for Egosoft but correct me if I am wrong.

[Mauzi!]

Funny that he wouldn't answer this himself, but... well, transparency isn't intended by Egosoft these days anyways.

As per Bernd's words, CBJ is said to be the head of the UK office. His Egosoft tag implies that he's on the payroll of Egosoft and no volunteer or the like, and to my knowledge he's head of the forum/website and DevNet plus possibly more.

Would indeed be nice to get a list of "Who is who" and the respective responsibilities for each Egosoft representant, at least for the ones who are publicly visible.

[Sibilantae]

Aren't Europeans generally asleep at this time?

I recall reading a post months ago about CBJ doing serialization, but I could be remembering wrongly.

[Norsk]

I was just curious because if he is a coder I think he should pass off the forums to someone less crucial lol and get to work

[wwdragon]

Funny that he wouldn't answer this himself, but... well, transparency isn't intended by Egosoft these days anyways.

Bad kitty. That's not true!
forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=352790
Is all about transparency and communication.

[omfgjohnnyisback]

Well, he's definitely involved in coding since there are plenty of dev comments in game files referencing him. Just wingrep or something.

EDIT: Well, check out the game's credits video - first person listed there on the programming team is Chris Burtt-Jones. *SPOILERZ*

[Norsk]

Well, he's definitely involved in coding since there are plenty of dev comments in game files referencing him. Just wingrep or something.

EDIT: Well, check out the game's credits video - first person listed there on the programming team is Chris Burtt-Jones. *SPOILERZ*

CBJ pass off the forums to bernd or better yet an artist and spend more time coding lol

[Mauzi!]

Funny that he wouldn't answer this himself, but... well, transparency isn't intended by Egosoft these days anyways.

Bad kitty. That's not true!
forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=352790
Is all about transparency and communication.

Thank you for calling me that, it has charme !

The "communication" you refer to isn't containing anything new though since we already knew that they were working on the bugfixing. Just elaborating existing information doesn't coun't as "transparency and communication".

Instead, leaving us in the dark about the plans for this "successful" game, both before release and still ongoing while not addressing the "consolism", the lies about "XR having the depth that X fans expect", etc. even after taking time to write something official for yet another time, makes it yet another obvious attempt to appeal to the masses without comitting to anything.

Which is not what us customers need or want at this time, we already had enough lull in the past and I am getting tired of it continuing like that. It just doesn't help to try to calm down people with repetitive non-information without getting to the very core of the problem.

[Mauzi!]

CBJ pass off the forums to bernd or better yet an artist and spend more time coding lol

If at all, one might rather ask for Bernd to pass on the public information work to someone who actually cares for customer relations and not only monetary success, while lieing, hiding cruical information and performing one evasive manouver after another.

Bernd on the other hand might join politics or intelligence service instead, those have high demand for his skills these days while there's no repercussions ever to be expected. Sounds perfect for him, I say.

[Norsk]

CBJ pass off the forums to bernd or better yet an artist and spend more time coding lol

If at all, one might rather ask for Bernd to pass on the public information work to someone who actually cares for customer relations and not only monetary success, while lieing, hiding cruical information and performing one evasive manouver after another.

Bernd on the other hand might join politics or intelligence service instead, those have high demand for his skills these days while there's no repercussions ever to be expected. Sounds perfect for him, I say.

Lol how much do you think Bernd and Egosoft made?


looking at steam, which had about 15k players at its peak so rounding up I'd estimate 20k people bought that game, at 50$ a game that is only 1 million dollars, in terms of scale EA makes 3.4 BILLION a year(wikipedia 2011). since this is Egosoft's only game it is their only revenue stream. consider they are hiring 20 employee's plus other expenses I'd give Egosoft 2 maybe 3 years of cash to float on.

They could have easily pumped out games for X3 to make money but they decided to make a new game, which was a giant financial risk for them. So I'd say they care more about their customers then money. If you want to see a game developer who actually only cares about money try a EA game lol

[Mauzi!]

They could have easily pumped out games for X3 to make money but they decided to make a new game, which was a giant financial risk for them.

Financial risk ? Trying to make a console port with the money and work of their PC gamer fanbase isn't quite that. Not only did they fail in only finding out way too late that this would never work (that wasn't exactly unexpected, eh?), but also it was a slap in the face for their existing customers who pretty much got abused.

Calling fail-decisions a giant financial risk surely is how managers got away all the time. But looking at who their paying customers are and how crappy the old consoles are this project was doomed already before it started. That's not what you can call "risk".

The only good thing of all this - and in my view actual risk-taking - is the seemingly decent new game engine, which is useless without a proper game built with it though. You wouldn't need that many years of wasting scarce funds to build the promised X game though, if not for their console excursion.

Now add the lies they intentionally spread about their products to make those PC gamers buy the turd... not going into the details on that again here.

[omfgjohnnyisback]

We're still to see how good this new engine really is.

Cause it looks like pretty large chunks of game code are written in Lua and some fancy XML-based scripting language, which does not even seem to be compiled at all, hence the overhead must be -huge- I imagine, with all the useless XML parsing happening all the time in background.

Lua is a very simple programming language, but it is still the fastest of all dynamic languages out there with LuaJIT. However, performance-wise it should still be quite slower than standard compiled code.

So if overhead of Lua and that XML-based monster is high, no wonder performance is, was and probably will be their main concern. If so, X Rebirth is not made for 'the computers of the future', but rather it depends on them to be playable.

BUT, if it all ends up being fine, the game may as well be extremely modding-friendly and live a long and happy life.

[GrimTuna]

Cause it looks like pretty large chunks of game code are written in Lua and some fancy XML-based scripting language, which does not even seem to be compiled at all, hence the overhead must be -huge- I imagine, with all the useless XML parsing happening all the time in background.

I don't think you know what you're talking about. The xml is just a way to represent structured script data. It is likely just parsed once, on game start, creating whatever internal object representations they need for later processing.

[Mauzi!]

It is likely just parsed once, on game start, creating whatever internal object representations they need for later processing.

I'd go with this as well, anything else would get is 1% of the existing framerates. Not that it would get much worse by that, but still...

[omfgjohnnyisback]

I don't think you know what you're talking about. The xml is just a way to represent structured script data. It is likely just parsed once, on game start, creating whatever internal object representations they need for later processing.

I don't think you know what you're talking about. Grab xperf from the Windows Performance Toolkit, profile it and check out how much time various threads spend parsing XML -during- normal game play.

Don't you think "structured script data" brings unnecessary parsing overhead, is hardly readable? For what added benefit? Isn't there a better way to store game data?

[omfgjohnnyisback]

I'd go with this as well, anything else would get is 1% of the existing framerates. Not that it would get much worse by that, but still...

Sure, this is hardly worth worrying about unless it becomes a bottleneck. I'm only speculating. But hey we already have a game with only gimmicky simulations that requires 4 GB of RAM.

[builder680]

He made a comment not too long ago about his job involving working with savegames. Something to the effect of "My job is saving the universe every day."

[omfgjohnnyisback]

He made a comment not too long ago about his job involving working with savegames. Something to the effect of "My job is saving the universe every day."

Hey, CBJ, how about using zlib when saving those humongous blobs and speeding saves/loads by cutting on unnecessary I/O?