An innocent bystander
neilm86
Join Date: 2009-04-16 Member: 67198Members
Join Date: 2009-04-16 Member: 67198Members
<div class="IPBDescription">Progression</div>As you are very aware by my post count, I am very much a voyeur (and financial contributer) of the NS2 development.
I have followed this project since day 1 as an avid player of NS1.
I have been very patient and have thouroughly enjoyed watching this project grow, however, with every update my mouth waters with desire as opposed to belief.
I believe it is time we were delivered a solid core of what is NS2 - a massive project undertaken by a skilled and ambitious few.
A perfectt alpha release is a polished bare bones game which deliveres performance and stability which promises rigidity throughout NS2's lifetime and allowing elements to the game to be added with confidence.
I am beginning to see a pattern of focus onto the game features as opposed to the technical durability of the game and I am growing impatient.
I am pining for the next release, the changelist is monumental. I know this through religious vigil via the 'Progress' page.
I just hope, the developers will not dissapoint on the performance front which may be the make and break of future purchases of this product.
I am fully aware of the game being in ALPHA stage, however, if ambition procedes durability, we may all be in for a dissapointment.
The other issue is, for every day this project moves on, it becomes more and more obsolete.
Come on UWE lets see what you've got!!
I have followed this project since day 1 as an avid player of NS1.
I have been very patient and have thouroughly enjoyed watching this project grow, however, with every update my mouth waters with desire as opposed to belief.
I believe it is time we were delivered a solid core of what is NS2 - a massive project undertaken by a skilled and ambitious few.
A perfectt alpha release is a polished bare bones game which deliveres performance and stability which promises rigidity throughout NS2's lifetime and allowing elements to the game to be added with confidence.
I am beginning to see a pattern of focus onto the game features as opposed to the technical durability of the game and I am growing impatient.
I am pining for the next release, the changelist is monumental. I know this through religious vigil via the 'Progress' page.
I just hope, the developers will not dissapoint on the performance front which may be the make and break of future purchases of this product.
I am fully aware of the game being in ALPHA stage, however, if ambition procedes durability, we may all be in for a dissapointment.
The other issue is, for every day this project moves on, it becomes more and more obsolete.
Come on UWE lets see what you've got!!
Comments
I hope that the successful launch of the pre-order purchases have not erroneously added to the development schedule for the game by providing (too much) additional funding.
while performance is engine-hard-coded.
i'm guessing Charlie does the LUA thing while Max handles the technicals of the engine..
so the "gamelayer" is pretty much independent of the "enginelayer".
Bingo. Stalling game development to wait for the engine, when both are worked on by separate teams, is not logical.
The reverse: 'Guys, stop improving the engine, not enough features have been added yet to warrant a good engine!'
The more one side moves ahead of the other, the better the overall product when the other side reaches a satisfactory state. Imagine, the engine is polished enough to run on a 7800, but the gamelayer team hadn't spent the spare time working on balance!
Now the words sound fine, but something about the tone made me worried that cash flow is going to be the determining factor in release full stop, so if a reasonable amount of pre-orders keep coming in the game will continue to be developed. This can be good, but it can also be bad as OP pointed out the longer you wait the more obsolete your engine becomes.
From the point of view of NS2 it doesn't matter so much about the engine (gameplay yay!) but from the point of view of UWE as a company, the reception, licensing and use as a mod platform of spark is obviously completely dependant on the spark engine being desirable and having good documentation to back it up.
I'm sure it'll be fine, but occasionally I worry for UWE.
We aren't in any serious danger of the engine becoming obsolete. For a lot of reasons, the graphical quality of games is kind of stabilizing right now.
PS3 and XBOX360 reaching their hardware limits and many PC games are simply ports from those two platforms? PC games moving more in the direction of casual players and web-browser stuffs? Phones and other mobile thingies are becoming a much larger platform and they simply lack the juice for fancy stuff at this point?
Genuinely curious about this. :)
And as a comment to this thread: Most of Blizzard's and Valve's games have old (although incrementally updated) game engines but they are still good looking due to a good art direction, not to mention that the games are excellent.
I suppose the only real problem would be if/when they were to push NS2 for consoles, if they have to compete it against the next Carl of Duty on the basis of fancy explosions and whatever, I'm not sure how well the whole "intelligent multiplayer" genre sells for consoles.
Genuinely curious about this. :)
And as a comment to this thread: Most of Blizzard's and Valve's games have old (although incrementally updated) game engines but they are still good looking due to a good art direction, not to mention that the games are excellent.
I suppose the only real problem would be if/when they were to push NS2 for consoles, if they have to compete it against the next Carl of Duty on the basis of fancy explosions and whatever, I'm not sure how well the whole "intelligent multiplayer" genre sells for consoles.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Those are big reasons. The console hardware limitation is a big one. The huge explosion of indie/mobile studios is a part of it -- there's been a big movement to focus more on gameplay and less on insanely polished assets.
As an aside, the mobile gaming market still has huge untapped potential. There are an insane number of games, but very, very few of them have really managed to incorporate GOOD mobile gameplay, using the limitations of a mobile device rather than fighting them.
This.
<3
Every patch consumes work time to prepare and distribute, work time that could be spent on developing the game. Releasing patches only when neccesary would be more efficient.
<b>Every patch consumes work time to prepare and distribute</b>, work time that could be spent on developing the game. Releasing patches only when neccesary would be more efficient.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
About that: Does anybody know what it takes to push a patch out through steam? I assume UWE has got some nightly build setup already in place for internal testing, how much work does it take to package those binarys and hand them to steam for distribution?
while performance is engine-hard-coded.
i'm guessing Charlie does the LUA thing while Max handles the technicals of the engine..
so the "gamelayer" is pretty much independent of the "enginelayer".<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The cryengines do this, using lua + c, and I think they did in fact have a number of "enginelayer" issues related to lua stuff, with calling functions and memory and vectors and such.
I'm guessing it all has to be compiled and locked up, which depending on how big they are can take an hour or so. Plus the upload time. So, I would guess a few hours.
I imagine also there's some lag (maybe a day?) where Valve inspects it to make sure it won't fork bomb Steam or something.
What you guys want is the BETA, where you test the final stage of the game and servers and fine tune everything just to not release a big bug called NS2.
So, now we are about to get the next alpha release, a lot of thing worked out, a lot added, and still many others to fix.
Of course there will be issues, and from this new problems that we all are going to report a new long, long list of fixes will be written. Then start over. This process will continue until all the major problems are solved and is stable enough to call it beta. In this point you'll see various beta releases, and a lot more players. Hopefully this stage will come near the end of this year or the first months of the next, but we can't say exactly because all depends on the stability and playability of the next alpha release.
Finally, the game is not getting old, it just take longer than expected. If you know a little about the game industry you know that there is nothing new on the horizon until 2 or 3 more years. The only new thing right now is the 3D that some games are going to try, but is still under development and the market for it is really small, for now.
The Cryengine 3 is the 2 with fixes and better performance and graphics. Nothing new, just a few additions and fixes, and it works for 3 systems. So, the latest engine that you'll see is nothing else that the same thing with optimizations. Yes, I know, the lights are better, but the core is the same. So, Spark is not getting old, and will include features that no other engine have.
I think they've talked about some of the features they want. A loose set of features doesn't doesn't equal core gameplay. We have very little idea how all the features are going to get bound together into a functional game.
It's easy to say you want magical rings, orcs, dwarves, elves, wizards, little pipe smoking guys, dark lords and great destinies in one book. Another thing is creating it without making it look like a totally cliched and shallow thing that was glued together from 15 books just to have everything in it.