swalkSay hello to my little friend.Join Date: 2011-01-20Member: 78384Members, Squad Five Blue
<!--quoteo(post=1841082:date=Apr 15 2011, 08:09 PM:name=Pr0n)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Pr0n @ Apr 15 2011, 08:09 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1841082"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Let's count how many potential patches there can be if UWE continues a 2/month patch release schedule.
~13 Patches til October 31st
~17 Patches til Jan 1st 2012
Considering the amount of progress from Alpha through 20ish patches (b149-b171) over 8 months, draw your own conclusions.
Let's just say I'm not holding my breath, but it's not absolute impossible; just damn improbable.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
You might also want to consider that they hired a few new people, and previously they uploaded patches much more often then now. UWE already said that they got a good feeling about 1.0 this year, don't be such a downie =)
Somehow, we have not experienced the mythical man month. Every time we've had a new programmer help us, they've gotten up to speed very quickly. I'm not sure why this is, but it is definitely the case.
We will not be rushing v1.0 or releasing it before it's done (unlike with our earlier releases that we wanted to get feedback on earlier, and also were having financial concerns), and we're ramping up now to get everything in and polished up this year.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Mythical man month was book about IBM project with around 1000 engineers. I don't think UWE is anywhere near that. :P
<!--quoteo(post=1841083:date=Apr 15 2011, 02:15 PM:name=player)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (player @ Apr 15 2011, 02:15 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1841083"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I like how you're assuming linear progression.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I assume nothing, I look at facts. Facts like "Fall 2009", "Playable Alpha", "Beta Release," and of course the total number of patches since release, the total amount of time that took, and the total number of additional patches they would be releasing if they stuck to their 2 patch/month schedule.
Impossible before 2012? No. Improbable? Definitely. I'm not going to hold my breath. They patch it a few times and the game starts to get playable...they patch it a few more times and the game *completely* falls apart. Rinse repeat for 8 months. That's the history of patching for NS2.
They've added another programmer recently, so hopefully development improves; we can only hope.
Do I want NS2 before 2012? Of course, and if I saw that the development advancement looked liked they were making sweet ass progress I would comment to that effect.
<!--quoteo(post=1841121:date=Apr 15 2011, 09:34 PM:name=Pr0n)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Pr0n @ Apr 15 2011, 09:34 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1841121"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I assume nothing, I look at facts. Facts like "Fall 2009", "Playable Alpha", "Beta Release," and of course the total number of patches since release, the total amount of time that took, and the total number of additional patches they would be releasing if they stuck to their 2 patch/month schedule.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The NUMBER of patches they'd need to release says absolutely nothing about the amount of progress that would be made in the span of those patches. Unless you're extrapolating previously observed results into future patches. Patches do not indicate progression, so you HAVE to assume progression in order to accurately gauge whether or not these "X amount of patches" are a reasonable or impossible amount that you can see them finishing the game in.
So yes, you are "looking at facts," but you're also making assumptions.
NUMBER of patches matters; of course it's not the SOLE determining factor.
There is no way in hell that NS2 can go to 1.0 in only ONE patch from where it is now. Fact. Two? Again, Fact. Three? Fact.
There definitely are minimums - just no maximums.
A handful of patches CANNOT POSSIBLY fix everything wrong with the game, add in all the new content, and also optimize the game; oh, and also fix the new problems that the new patches have introduced.
Unless, of course, you're playing a different NS2 than I am - if so, I want your version.
<!--quoteo(post=1841121:date=Apr 16 2011, 01:34 AM:name=Pr0n)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Pr0n @ Apr 16 2011, 01:34 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1841121"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->They patch it a few times and the game starts to get playable...they patch it a few more times and the game *completely* falls apart. Rinse repeat for 8 months. That's the history of patching for NS2.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> There have been very few patches where the game has "completely fallen apart", but the few occasions where patches have caused some major issues usually have either come about as a result of a patch taking much longer then anticipated to put out, meaning that a lot of content, features, and changes had gone in, which naturally leads to more bugs as a result, or has been due to a major re factoring of the engine code. Patch 171 is an example of that last one. We knew that the scope of changes that were made was going to break a lot of stuff, but we are quickly sorting through all the issues and getting the game back in working order.
There have been several points in development of this project where we had to bite the bullet and make some big changes to the engine (physics, removing flash and reworking most of the UI to work in Lua, to name a few), and while its all been for the better, those changes did cause us to have to stop and fix a lot of stuff. However this last major re factoring should be it for this project, and development should be proceeding much more smoothly from here on.
ScardyBobScardyBobJoin Date: 2009-11-25Member: 69528Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Shadow
edited April 2011
<!--quoteo(post=1841121:date=Apr 15 2011, 06:34 PM:name=Pr0n)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Pr0n @ Apr 15 2011, 06:34 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1841121"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I assume nothing, I look at facts. Facts like "Fall 2009", "Playable Alpha", "Beta Release," and of course the total number of patches since release, the total amount of time that took, and the total number of additional patches they would be releasing if they stuck to their 2 patch/month schedule.
Impossible before 2012? No. Improbable? Definitely. I'm not going to hold my breath. They patch it a few times and the game starts to get playable...they patch it a few more times and the game *completely* falls apart. Rinse repeat for 8 months. That's the history of patching for NS2.
They've added another programmer recently, so hopefully development improves; we can only hope.
Do I want NS2 before 2012? Of course, and if I saw that the development advancement looked liked they were making sweet ass progress I would comment to that effect.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I'm less concerned about whether they'll release NS2 before 2012 than what they'll release with v1.0. I have no doubt they could release a more or less 'full' NS2 that is both fun and playable by Halloween, but they may have to leave out numerous things they we're planning to do to get it done by then. For example, I doubt they'd release NS2 without the Onos, but what about one with a 24 max player rather than 32? Or they don't do much more work on the map editor or server browser, etc. That's not the end of the world, but while we might have a game called NS2 released this year, we still might have to wait 2-3 years to get all of the bells and whistles we expected when we pre-ordered the game.
Personally, while I excited about NS2, I'm really most interested in the custom maps/mods people will create with the spark engine. I can totally see UWE skimping on the mod-friendly aspects of the spark engine to get out v1.0 faster, meaning that we'd still have a few years before any significant spark mods exist.
For those asking about uwe's cash problems im pretty sure they're more than sorted for cash now lol, didn't they get about 1 mil from investors?. And im sure i saw somewhere that they've sold over 200,000 copies of ns2 already, even if EVERYONE paid $19.99 for the game (which a lot didn't, and no one from now on can), that's still a total of 3,998,000 MINIMUM.
Putting their total income so far up to a total of nearly 5 mil absolute bare minimum (unless the sales figures are completely wrong), If they are right though cash isn't a problem for uwe anymore, just finding more decent programmers seems to be :>
<!--quoteo(post=1862698:date=Jul 23 2011, 01:56 PM:name=rushmonkey)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (rushmonkey @ Jul 23 2011, 01:56 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1862698"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->For those asking about uwe's cash problems im pretty sure they're more than sorted for cash now lol, didn't they get about 1 mil from investors?. And im sure i saw somewhere that they've sold over 200,000 copies of ns2 already, even if EVERYONE paid $19.99 for the game (which a lot didn't, and no one from now on can), that's still a total of 3,998,000 MINIMUM.
Putting their total income so far up to a total of nearly 5 mil absolute bare minimum (unless the sales figures are completely wrong), If they are right though cash isn't a problem for uwe anymore, just finding more decent programmers seems to be :><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> Pretty sure you got extra digit there, 20 000 was broken at some point, no idea how beta increased it though.
info found <a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/index.php?showtopic=113471&view=findpost&p=1846651" target="_blank">here</a>. Maximum nubmer of beta slots is 10,000. Since there are still some availible I'd guess that they alltogether sold about 25,000 - 27,000 copies.
hmmm maybe i was mistaken about the 200,000 number then, or the other poster i saw it from was mistaken too. But still, even the number of members on this forum suggests that actual pre-orders should be slightly higher than 25k total, why would you sign up to a forum like this if you don't own the game? :s
<!--quoteo(post=1862738:date=Jul 23 2011, 10:02 AM:name=wulf 21)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (wulf 21 @ Jul 23 2011, 10:02 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1862738"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->well, feature freeze isn't going to happen at least until all the counterparts of what was in NS1 are in NS2 as well. (shift, shade, onos, exosuit)<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Which honestly I prefer, games get kinda stale after a while IMO(I only last about an hour or 2 before getting bored and have owned the game now about 4 days lol). The update yesterday was a big bug fix, so hopefully once they get the server lag and pathing under control from this update they can focus on such things.
<!--quoteo(post=1862741:date=Jul 23 2011, 04:10 PM:name=MaGicBush)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (MaGicBush @ Jul 23 2011, 04:10 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1862741"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->games get kinda stale after a while IMO(I only last about an hour or 2 before getting bored and have owned the game now about 4 days lol)<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Yeah the game does get a bit boring after a while but that's mainly because there's only one map being played at the moment and the other two aren't much fun anyway, hopefully the devs/community will sort that out soon, we can't be expected to play the same map all the time...
<!--quoteo(post=1862698:date=Jul 23 2011, 11:56 AM:name=rushmonkey)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (rushmonkey @ Jul 23 2011, 11:56 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1862698"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->For those asking about uwe's cash problems im pretty sure they're more than sorted for cash now lol, didn't they get about 1 mil from investors?. And im sure i saw somewhere that they've sold over 200,000 copies of ns2 already, even if EVERYONE paid $19.99 for the game (which a lot didn't, and no one from now on can), that's still a total of 3,998,000 MINIMUM.
Putting their total income so far up to a total of nearly 5 mil absolute bare minimum (unless the sales figures are completely wrong), If they are right though cash isn't a problem for uwe anymore, just finding more decent programmers seems to be :><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> Haha. I wish these numbers were right. If they were, the game would be done by now, because we would have been able to hire a lot more employees a while ago. Nope, investor funding that we got some time back was far less then 1 mil and the current copies of Ns2 pre-orders is still under 30K.
But, finding good programmers is indeed difficult, especially when you can't afford to pay them a lot. We've been very lucky with the caliber of the amazing and dedicated programmers we currently have working here.
We don't know what's going on behind the scenes. If I remember correctly, mineshaft is ready for release and I can imagine that EXO and onos are also nearly finished. But before they release that they want to increase the performance, or so.
It might happen that they release the finished game this year but if they don't nobody will hold that against them.
As I said before: better release the game "when it's done" then release a halfway finished mess because the deadline says so.
You are right, but If you have to pay 9 people with (lets say) 1500$ gross per month + the hardware, the office rent, company taxes, exterenal companies and may be a janitor and a cleaning lady. and that for over 3 years now....
With that in mind $700'000 is not that many either.
(btw. I am still waiting for a "donate" button for NS" or UWE)
If you want to donate why not purchase another copy of NS2? You can always give the game code to a friend. <a href="http://www.naturalselection2.com/buy" target="_blank">http://www.naturalselection2.com/buy</a>
<!--quoteo(post=1840554:date=Apr 11 2011, 06:27 PM:name=Squeal_Like_A_Pig)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Squeal_Like_A_Pig @ Apr 11 2011, 06:27 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1840554"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->We are making every effort to have the game done this year. We have hired and are still hiring more programming help, and that should speed up development considerably. Trust me, we are as anxious to get this game done as you all are.
--Cory<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
no way, I'm super duper wooper anxious, if you guys are that anxious how could u get any work done!
I think UWE is doing a great job so far, just remember guys while this is an indy game for the most part, alot of other games take upwards of 5 years of dev.
<!--quoteo(post=1841065:date=Apr 15 2011, 08:28 AM:name=Harimau)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Harimau @ Apr 15 2011, 08:28 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1841065"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Why that specific date? Is it your birthday?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Comments
~13 Patches til October 31st
~17 Patches til Jan 1st 2012
Considering the amount of progress from Alpha through 20ish patches (b149-b171) over 8 months, draw your own conclusions.
Let's just say I'm not holding my breath, but it's not absolute impossible; just damn improbable.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
You might also want to consider that they hired a few new people, and previously they uploaded patches much more often then now. UWE already said that they got a good feeling about 1.0 this year, don't be such a downie =)
Somehow, we have not experienced the mythical man month. Every time we've had a new programmer help us, they've gotten up to speed very quickly. I'm not sure why this is, but it is definitely the case.
We will not be rushing v1.0 or releasing it before it's done (unlike with our earlier releases that we wanted to get feedback on earlier, and also were having financial concerns), and we're ramping up now to get everything in and polished up this year.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Mythical man month was book about IBM project with around 1000 engineers. I don't think UWE is anywhere near that. :P
I assume nothing, I look at facts. Facts like "Fall 2009", "Playable Alpha", "Beta Release," and of course the total number of patches since release, the total amount of time that took, and the total number of additional patches they would be releasing if they stuck to their 2 patch/month schedule.
Impossible before 2012? No. Improbable? Definitely. I'm not going to hold my breath. They patch it a few times and the game starts to get playable...they patch it a few more times and the game *completely* falls apart. Rinse repeat for 8 months. That's the history of patching for NS2.
They've added another programmer recently, so hopefully development improves; we can only hope.
Do I want NS2 before 2012? Of course, and if I saw that the development advancement looked liked they were making sweet ass progress I would comment to that effect.
The NUMBER of patches they'd need to release says absolutely nothing about the amount of progress that would be made in the span of those patches. Unless you're extrapolating previously observed results into future patches. Patches do not indicate progression, so you HAVE to assume progression in order to accurately gauge whether or not these "X amount of patches" are a reasonable or impossible amount that you can see them finishing the game in.
So yes, you are "looking at facts," but you're also making assumptions.
There is no way in hell that NS2 can go to 1.0 in only ONE patch from where it is now. Fact. Two? Again, Fact. Three? Fact.
There definitely are minimums - just no maximums.
A handful of patches CANNOT POSSIBLY fix everything wrong with the game, add in all the new content, and also optimize the game; oh, and also fix the new problems that the new patches have introduced.
Unless, of course, you're playing a different NS2 than I am - if so, I want your version.
There have been very few patches where the game has "completely fallen apart", but the few occasions where patches have caused some major issues usually have either come about as a result of a patch taking much longer then anticipated to put out, meaning that a lot of content, features, and changes had gone in, which naturally leads to more bugs as a result, or has been due to a major re factoring of the engine code. Patch 171 is an example of that last one. We knew that the scope of changes that were made was going to break a lot of stuff, but we are quickly sorting through all the issues and getting the game back in working order.
There have been several points in development of this project where we had to bite the bullet and make some big changes to the engine (physics, removing flash and reworking most of the UI to work in Lua, to name a few), and while its all been for the better, those changes did cause us to have to stop and fix a lot of stuff. However this last major re factoring should be it for this project, and development should be proceeding much more smoothly from here on.
--Cory
Impossible before 2012? No. Improbable? Definitely. I'm not going to hold my breath. They patch it a few times and the game starts to get playable...they patch it a few more times and the game *completely* falls apart. Rinse repeat for 8 months. That's the history of patching for NS2.
They've added another programmer recently, so hopefully development improves; we can only hope.
Do I want NS2 before 2012? Of course, and if I saw that the development advancement looked liked they were making sweet ass progress I would comment to that effect.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I'm less concerned about whether they'll release NS2 before 2012 than what they'll release with v1.0. I have no doubt they could release a more or less 'full' NS2 that is both fun and playable by Halloween, but they may have to leave out numerous things they we're planning to do to get it done by then. For example, I doubt they'd release NS2 without the Onos, but what about one with a 24 max player rather than 32? Or they don't do much more work on the map editor or server browser, etc. That's not the end of the world, but while we might have a game called NS2 released this year, we still might have to wait 2-3 years to get all of the bells and whistles we expected when we pre-ordered the game.
Personally, while I excited about NS2, I'm really most interested in the custom maps/mods people will create with the spark engine. I can totally see UWE skimping on the mod-friendly aspects of the spark engine to get out v1.0 faster, meaning that we'd still have a few years before any significant spark mods exist.
And im sure i saw somewhere that they've sold over 200,000 copies of ns2 already, even if EVERYONE paid $19.99 for the game (which a lot didn't, and no one from now on can), that's still a total of 3,998,000 MINIMUM.
Putting their total income so far up to a total of nearly 5 mil absolute bare minimum (unless the sales figures are completely wrong), If they are right though cash isn't a problem for uwe anymore, just finding more decent programmers seems to be :>
And im sure i saw somewhere that they've sold over 200,000 copies of ns2 already, even if EVERYONE paid $19.99 for the game (which a lot didn't, and no one from now on can), that's still a total of 3,998,000 MINIMUM.
Putting their total income so far up to a total of nearly 5 mil absolute bare minimum (unless the sales figures are completely wrong), If they are right though cash isn't a problem for uwe anymore, just finding more decent programmers seems to be :><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Pretty sure you got extra digit there, 20 000 was broken at some point, no idea how beta increased it though.
Which honestly I prefer, games get kinda stale after a while IMO(I only last about an hour or 2 before getting bored and have owned the game now about 4 days lol). The update yesterday was a big bug fix, so hopefully once they get the server lag and pathing under control from this update they can focus on such things.
Yeah the game does get a bit boring after a while but that's mainly because there's only one map being played at the moment and the other two aren't much fun anyway, hopefully the devs/community will sort that out soon, we can't be expected to play the same map all the time...
And im sure i saw somewhere that they've sold over 200,000 copies of ns2 already, even if EVERYONE paid $19.99 for the game (which a lot didn't, and no one from now on can), that's still a total of 3,998,000 MINIMUM.
Putting their total income so far up to a total of nearly 5 mil absolute bare minimum (unless the sales figures are completely wrong), If they are right though cash isn't a problem for uwe anymore, just finding more decent programmers seems to be :><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Haha. I wish these numbers were right. If they were, the game would be done by now, because we would have been able to hire a lot more employees a while ago. Nope, investor funding that we got some time back was far less then 1 mil and the current copies of Ns2 pre-orders is still under 30K.
But, finding good programmers is indeed difficult, especially when you can't afford to pay them a lot. We've been very lucky with the caliber of the amazing and dedicated programmers we currently have working here.
--Cory
But before they release that they want to increase the performance, or so.
It might happen that they release the finished game this year but if they don't nobody will hold that against them.
As I said before: better release the game "when it's done" then release a halfway finished mess because the deadline says so.
With that in mind $700'000 is not that many either.
(btw. I am still waiting for a "donate" button for NS" or UWE)
<a href="http://www.naturalselection2.com/buy" target="_blank">http://www.naturalselection2.com/buy</a>
--Cory<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
no way, I'm super duper wooper anxious, if you guys are that anxious how could u get any work done!
3,288 posts and you ask this. FOR SHAME!