Star Citizen's feature creep... and other signs of a software project doomed for disaster?

It seems that Star Citizen is suffering from severe "feature creep" (where features keep getting added long after work has started on a project), as they are doing things like:

• Modifying the game engine to be double-precision (64-bit) for much larger game 'maps'.
• Trying to add orbital mechanics (i.e. actually moving planets & moons).
• Trying to add procedural generation of planets.

I first found about this here (skip the first big post, but read the rest of the page).

Apart from this sounding to me like a severe case of "Elite Dangerous envy", feature creep is a classic way for a software project to go way over-budget in time & money, with the end result being a horrible mess, or even simply running out of money before it is ever completed.  Feature creep (and changing project goals) happens to many government IT projects that have tens or hundreds of millions of pounds to spend, and is why so many government IT projects end-up being a disaster.  So having masses of money is not (on it's own) a good predictor of success (or failure).

And as someone pointed out, this also sounds suspiciously like what happened to a certain well-funded game about chewing bubble gum & kicking ass (i.e. Duke Nukem Forever).

Early signs do not seem good, as someone reports that they "have [yet] to produce ... properly working core functionality - even the hangar is a buggy mess".

Also, my impression of Star Citizen is that they're a big brand new team who have mostly never worked together before.  This is not a good way to start a massive project, as demonstrated by Daikatana:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana#Development
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana#Development_hell

In fact Daikatana may have more similarities to Star Citizen than Duke Nukem Forever:

• Massive hype before the project had even started, mostly coming from one famous name.
• Massive project for a newly formed team (which also kept adding more people).
• Even Daikatana's changing of game engine mid-project isn't so far off, as Star Citizen's engine has been heavily modified to be double-precision (not an easy undertaking).
• Missed deadline(s).
• The release of an (IMHO) underwhelming early 'demo'.
• Daikatana was even funded to Star Citizen levels, to the tune of $44 million.

Having said all that, I do hope Star Citizen is (at least moderately) successful, otherwise the whole space game genre might be tarnished & disappear for another decade or two (why would publishers take the risk when another First Person Military Shooter is bound to sell well?).  But if S.C. is successful, then we are bound to see many more space games (even if most of them will be uninspired crap).

(Up front admission: Although I am a space game fan, Star Citizen has never excited me, but I did back Elite Dangerous, and I am crossing my fingers for Infinity Battlescape.)

UPDATE:
At least one Star Citizen backer is (IMHO rightly) getting nervous, as H1itman_Actual says:

The 6 month delay of the dog fighting module along with ambiguous release dates have test a lot of us backers.

If this date doesn't hold I'm really loosing faith.

I'm an original backer. But CR release dates the past 6 months have been broken. He should have never of told backers "2 weeks from now" "1 month from now" " 1 or 2 weeks after PAX"

that kind of leading backer on creates scepticism.

Android just became crap with official update (SD cards are disabled)

I can't believe this, but the latest update to Android KitKit (v4.4.2) prevents all 3rd-party apps from writing to the SD card!  This is not a joke:
community.sprint.com/baw/message/750451

I mean, WTF.  Google has removed one of the most heavily used features of an OS (writing data to external media).  And they explicitly prevent manufacturers from restoring this feature!  There is NO good reason for doing this, not in the name of "security" or any other short-sighted reason.  I know Google thinks SD cards are unnecessary (see Google Nexus stuff) but that's no reason to prevent other companies from offering such stuff.  The SD card slot has now become TOTALLY USELESS.  Android is now less functional than Windows Phone (in one important respect anyway).

Are they trying to drive people to Android phones that don't use the Google ecosystem, and thus don't have to put up with their ridiculous restrictions?  Cos I'm sure as hell not going to buy a phone with a limited amount of storage capacity.


It was bad enough when Google removed the ability of third-party apps to toggle Flight mode (it's really handy having an app put my phone into Flight mode overnight, so I don't get rudely awakened & also to save power).

UPDATE:
I am told that apps can still write to their own pre-defined 'sandbox' folders on the SD card.  If that's the case then it's not nearly so bad (and in fact is close to what I've been wanting Android to do for ages, albeit a bit more draconian than I'd have liked).

UPDATE:

But this will still mean I can't use OI File Manager - a really really good free file manager, and instead will have to use whatever crap is built into the phone.  That sucks.  Why the hell can't Google just add a (maybe new) Write-To-Whole-SD-Card-DANGEROUS permission?

Android's permissions system is great... but also terrible

Android's permissions system is pretty good (compared to the competition).  But it still suffers from several serious annoyances:

1. Permissions are all or nothing - the user either grants access to all the permissions at installation time, or he can't install the app.
   
2. Permissions are too coarse, such that if an app needs access to one particular function/ability (let's call them "sub-permissions" for simplicity), it will usually need to ask for a load of other sub-permissions that it doesn't actually need.  On it's own this wouldn't have been too bad, but...
   
3. Permissions often contain several sub-permissions that aren't related to each other in a useful way, at least from the user's perspective, when he is worried about privacy (or possibly security).  e.g. To tell whether the user is making/receiving a call or not (so it can pause itself), an app also gains access to who the user is calling, the caller's own phone number, and other personal information.

I would like to see developer being able to mark some permissions as optional, so that savy users could choose to disable them if they wanted.  For example, say that My Backup's internet permission was marked as optional - then if I didn't want to use the cloud (nor risk the NSA remote-controlling it) I could simply disable internet access.

Or instead marking them as optional, the developer could mark some permissions as ask first, such that they default to disabled but upon first use the user would be automatically asked if they allow the app access to that permission.  This has the benefit that the user will understand WHY a permission is needed, and so they can make a more informed decision about whether to allow it.

Or Google could take try to please everyone, by effectively implementing both options... but keep it simple for users, by having "optional" permissions default to behaving like "ask first".  That way users would not have this important security option hidden from them, but savy users could change it if they want.  You view this "optional" behaviour as "don't ask me about permission choices".


As far as fixing coarse permissions (esp. when grouping unrelated sub-permissions), it might be too much to ask that Google totally revamp Android's permissions, but there are a few obviously bad mistakes that they ought to fix:

• Checking whether the user is making/receiving a call should not require access to tons of other personal info.  Thus music players & games & other apps could pause for calls, without getting access to lots of unnecessary stuff.
  
• Being able to store data on the SD card should NOT require giving an app access to the whole SD card.  It would be far better if every app has a pre-defined (but maybe user configurable) folder, and could only be given permission to write to that folder.
  
• But once you've created an app-specific folder for writing, why not limited read-access to that folder too?  Then you don't need to give an app read-access to the whole SD card either.  Given that private data may be stored on the SD card, this seems like a big security win.

NSA must love My Backup

My Backup (Pro) is by far the best backup app for Android phones (at least if you aren't rooted).  But I have a love/hate relationship with it, because of it's Internet permission & the fact that it can be remote-controlled (from Rerware's website).  Snowden's recent NSA revelations make this all the more worrying.

Given the NSA has hacked Google's secure cloud, it seems very likely the NSA can also read everything that My Backup stores in the Rerware's dinky cloud, and perhaps even remote-control My Backup (since it's designed to be remote-controlled by you).

I'd like to see a version which doesn't ask for internet permissions (and has no cloud backup options), so I can be sure it's impossible for it to send my data to the NSA. So far Rerware has denied my requests for such a version. But if enough people ask them, they will surely see there is demand for it, and so provide one I hope.

This would be much easier for Rerware, if Google allowed developers to mark certain permissions (such as internet) as optional.  Then I'd be able to disable it's internet permission (and stop worrying).

The end of smartphones with physical keyboards?

This is really depressing:
http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/15/5104704/i-come-not-to-praise-qwerty-but-to-bury-it

I know the UK hasn't seen any keyboarded phones since the Sony Xperia Pro, but I thought the USA was still getting them, and so still held out hope the UK would get another one eventually.  Apparently not :(

Blogger editing sucks on Android

Google get a D-- for their effort with Blogger on mobiles:

The web version is totally unusable on mobile web browsers (due to how touch seems to be interpreted), when editing.

The Android app is a lot better, but as soon as you try to edit a post that I editied on the web version, then I find it filled with tons of HTML mark-up tag crap, rending it unusable.

And of course it's not really possible to send any feedback to Google, so they'll likely remain oblivious to these issues.  Something to add to a future "Google sucks" post....

Android sucks... at App management (and will get much worse!)

Android has no way of rolling-back to a previous (known good) version of an App, if an update makes it much worse. Google were probably thinking this would put more pressure on an App developer to fix it quickly, but the sad fact is this often doesn't happen, and sometimes this is because the developer thinks these bad changes are actually improvements!

You are probably thinking that Android has lots of app-backup Apps. Yes it does, but it seems pretty sure that Google will prevent these apps from working in the not-too-distant-future (with a new version of Android) in the name of preventing piracy - something which is a major issue for Android developers (compared to Apple's walled garden). At that point I may actually start to dislike Android, and wish for a (non-Microsoft) alternative...

I haven't been using Android for that long (say 1.5 years), but I've already seen many of my favourite apps made far worse by "improvements", and then never fixed:

* Simple Task Manager. Used to be the best task manager by a mile, as all it did things wonderfully different to all the (really crappy) task managers on Android. Then he updated it for ICS, and at the same time made it behave like all those other (crappy) task managers. Plus he removed some useful features, and made it buggy (it get's stuck trying to refresh the list - how crap is that?). And despite my emails, the author doesn't seem to care. The only thing still going for it is the lack of internet & other dodgy permissions inexplicably present on most other task managers.

* Adobe Reader. This WAS fantastic, as it was much faster at rendering PDF files than any other PDF reader. Then Adobe made a big update, adding loads of new features... but going by comments (I haven't dared to update), they made it take forever to start-up (due to all the new features bloating it), added lots of new bugs (some still not fixed), and made it far slower at rendering web pages. In short, they ruined it, and apart from fixing the few worst bugs they seem to think it is "mission accomplished".

* (ADDED LATER) Astro File Manager. It was really good & popular, then they completely redid the interface (most likely for tabletes & ICS) & added some major new features, seemingly with much testing as the old features are now extremely buggy, and it takes far longer to start. And they don't seem able to fix these issues, at least not anytime soon (weeks so far). Lots of people have been dumping it for other apps that actually work.

* Memento. THE best database app on Android (by a mile), but after being updated for ICS it wastes a lot of screen space (at least on Gingerbread) without any obviously good reason. This app gets updated so infrequently, that I went back to the old version.


And even after you intentionally install an older version of an App, the Google Market Google Play app will keep telling me there is a new (but rubbish) version of the App available. And there is no way to stop it. How crap is that?