how far along is ns2? (not looking for release date just an update)
JesusUncuT
Join Date: 2005-03-05 Member: 43367Members
Join Date: 2005-03-05 Member: 43367Members
ive roamed around a few threads looking for this info but to no avail. any chance we can get a rough idea how far along the game actualy is? rough idea on what youve completed and any other info?
im getting anxious to play it but also wanna know what all has been finished... maybe not thuroughly tested but finished to at least testing point. i would be grateful for any information along these lines... thanks a bunch and cant wait for it to come out... heh pre ordered it the week pre orders were avail :P
im getting anxious to play it but also wanna know what all has been finished... maybe not thuroughly tested but finished to at least testing point. i would be grateful for any information along these lines... thanks a bunch and cant wait for it to come out... heh pre ordered it the week pre orders were avail :P
Comments
By the way is the game going to be on steam? :)
According to <a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/news/2010/02" target="_blank">this</a>:
" For those of you who don't know, Steamworks is the core technology of Steam, like the friends list, server browser and voice chat. We've integrated Steamworks into Natural Selection 2 because it saves us the effort of implementing these things ourselves, and gets the game into your hands faster."
It has all the steam amenities, so i'm assuming it'll be available for purchase/download through steam as well
Surprisingly, these things are very seperate from eachother. As I understand it, anyone can use Steamworks in their games but deals have to be worked out about how the game will be sold through the Steam store. Currently, I don't believe they worked out such a deal with Valve yet.
It seems unlikely that the major gameplay aspects like DI and technogrid are yet to be implimented at least not well enough and UWE doesnt seem to be willing to release less tech-wise game so we have many boring weeks/months ahead of us.
If you are the waiting type then you have no problem just be back in Fall 2011.
See you then.
The alpha is soon, we've seen it in action and they've released Spark, things are happening and we'll probably see it this year.
as far as release dates going ive noticed a trend with companies such as blizzard refusing to put out release dates on upcoming games like starcraft 2 and diablo 3... this is kind of a gift and a curse.... allows the manufacturing and coding of such games to meet their potential without being rushed but also when they announce the games 2 years before the game comes out it gets very frustrating to not get any detail on where they are at.... i mean even them saying ok weve completed initial work on maping or character design as it gets done gives the public at least a rough feel on when to start getting ready for it without rushing the producers. but leaving us in the dark with a majority of the work just gets me and people like me pissed off that we have to wait another year for something that pre orders became avail so early...
yes their need for funding is understandable and i wouldve still preordered it but it bugs me to come here and have to search for long periods of time to come up with little to no info on where they are at... a locked thread with list of whats been worked on completed and still to come would be much appreciated... but i fear that request may fall on deaf ears or just wishful thinking...
either way i cant wait for it to come out i just want to play it lol
again thanks for the info
The game has already been confirmed to be including Steamworks. so I wouldn't worry too much on that front. Besides, you can get Steam to launch virtually any game or program you have installed; in the event that the preorders don't immediately show up in Steam as soon as you install, just add the game manually and you'll be fine.
Also, I would say they are pretty far along considering that they put the game up for pre-order and that the engine is in a "playable" state. The ladder being a monumental step in the development process, especially when you consider that a small team put together the entire engine virtually from scratch. I think Max spearheaded a majority of the work, too, if he didn't do it entirely (believe the NS2 engine was built on top of his own custom built engine). It's important to understand that writing a game engine is an incredibly time consuming process, even for a large development team. Most companies, even with big titles, just license something like Unreal or Source to shave off a few years of development time.
All in all, it's like they've laid the foundation and structure to a house. All that's left is decoration, atmosphere.
To be fair, in videogame development, in terms of man-hours content creation dwarfs technology development in nearly all cases. My impression is that engine and tools development is typically run by a small team and takes a long time because it takes numerous iterations to even develop an idea of the features you need for your game. And a lot of the time savings that comes from licensing 3rd party tools is that you get to start producing the content immediately with mature tools, as opposed to being limited for a long time until the feature set of in house tools is bigger. Bioware's account of the Mass Effect development is very insightful, if you're curious about that kind of stuff, and a lot of game "postmortems" (you can find a lot on Gamasutra) talk extensively about the relationship between the tools and the content in game development.
You can also look at the composition of UWE for clues. For a long time Max was the only one working on the engine and tools. On the content side you have Charlie with the game development, at least a couple mappers, some nebulous quantity of animators and riggers and a couple artists at least.
Anyway, Max still deserves props because of the insane amount of work he's put into the NS2 engine. I have only wee skill in programming, but I couldn't even imagine producing that quantity of code and still remaining sane at the end of it. I was reading about the lifetime achievement award they're giving John Carmack; the article mentioned how people like Sid Meyer and Will Wright got their awards previously, and my impression was while they did produce undoubtedly classic games, without people like Max or Carmack we'd still be playing boardgames.
Max is sane?
;)
This is purely assumption but this is what i think:
Max just does his best to find libraries out there to handle a good chunk of the heavy lifting. Stuff like physics (Nvidia), scripting (hello LUA). And then there's direct x which can also help you handle controller and keyboard/mouse input... Probably voice-chat (although there may be a separate library for that), and sound if you want it to.
Max's job is to read through thousands of pages (actually just skims through) of documentation to find out how to make it all work together :P
O ya he also has to make and fix the map maker.
Wait... they hired other programmers lol.
Back on topic, I typically ignore FocusedWolf's post as they make me uncontrollably facepalm, but as a programmer no less having dabbled in OpenGL and DirextX I no longer have enough palms nor faces to react to the above post.
Suffice to say Focused, the engine IS the "libraries", you need one before you can start calling into things like physics (unless Spark using Havoc that I am not aware of) and netcode and input, output, it's your gaming equivalent of an operating system.
Maybe my amateur work doesn't reflect in the professional world, but as someone whose done both assets and engine design I'd have to firmly agree with the camp that states designing an engine is THE most involved part of the creation process because it is, as another member said, the foundation upon which everything is laid.
For that, and for nearly single-handedly designing it, I give Max some mad props.
im getting anxious to play it but also wanna know what all has been finished... maybe not thuroughly tested but finished to at least testing point. i would be grateful for any information along these lines... thanks a bunch and cant wait for it to come out... heh pre ordered it the week pre orders were avail :P<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
somewhere between started and completed