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Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

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Author Topic: I'm sorry, but this is getting ridiculous.  (Read 18898 times)

Dri

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Re: I'm sorry, but this is getting ridiculous.
« Reply #30 on: October 15, 2014, 08:43:49 PM »

Did you read what it says on the "Buy" page? Because that pretty much sums it up.

I bought the game years ago. You'd think it'd be done by now.
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kazi

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Re: I'm sorry, but this is getting ridiculous.
« Reply #31 on: October 15, 2014, 09:12:42 PM »

Did you read what it says on the "Buy" page? Because that pretty much sums it up.

I bought the game years ago. You'd think it'd be done by now.

Hah, that made me laugh.

In the time that this game has been under development (well since I bought this game, really...), I've finished my last two years of university, worked three different full-time research jobs, published a paper, and made it halfway through grad school.

During the same time period, SS has only added ship systems, combat readiness/logistics, and hyperspace.

I think Dri does have a very valid point.
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Alex

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Re: I'm sorry, but this is getting ridiculous.
« Reply #32 on: October 15, 2014, 09:35:28 PM »

In the time that this game has been under development (well since I bought this game, really...), I've finished my last two years of university, worked three different full-time research jobs, published a paper, and made it halfway through grad school.

I think this just underscores how big an undertaking making a wide-scope game is! I mean, it's a fair point, but looking back, I can't imagine having done anything all that much faster.

(Also, technically, there's the economy and a bunch of other stuff that's in the upcoming release - that's certainly been "added", even if it's not exactly out yet :))
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kazi

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Re: I'm sorry, but this is getting ridiculous.
« Reply #33 on: October 15, 2014, 10:27:04 PM »

In the time that this game has been under development (well since I bought this game, really...), I've finished my last two years of university, worked three different full-time research jobs, published a paper, and made it halfway through grad school.

I think this just underscores how big an undertaking making a wide-scope game is! I mean, it's a fair point, but looking back, I can't imagine having done anything all that much faster.

(Also, technically, there's the economy and a bunch of other stuff that's in the upcoming release - that's certainly been "added", even if it's not exactly out yet :))

It's true, and with all of the planned features Starsector will be a deceptively large scale game. And my very limited experience with coding tells me that it's almost even slower going than the field I work in ;). Regardless, every update so far has been polished and all-around excellent, so you're obviously doing something very right over on your end.

Granted, I can think of a few ways to speed up development process, such as farming out playtesting/bug hunting to small groups of players in sort of a 'closed beta' approach right before each update, encourage the community to (attempt to) generate some types of art assets (if it seems like that is becoming a bottleneck), or even going as far as incorporating high quality, vanilla-friendly mods like ShaderLib or Blackrock Driveyards to add gigantic chunks of content (I saw that KSP included another mod the other day, so there's obviously precedent for that). Of course, it's your game to manage how you wish, but it seems like there are faster ways of doing certain things.

I feel like a few of these threads come up before every update. It's not like any of us would die or something if updates came at 1 year intervals, but it might help the more uh, anxious players (like Dri) if you mentioned a "fuzzy deadline" every now and then. Nothing concrete that you had to stick to, but just a rough estimate of when things might happen (like +/- a month or so). The way updates are currently managed (no signs of life aside from the occasional blog post, and then BAM!... surprise update out of nowhere) could probably be improved. You might even avoid these kinds of threads that way haha....  ;)
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Debido

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Re: I'm sorry, but this is getting ridiculous.
« Reply #34 on: October 15, 2014, 10:57:21 PM »

@Kazi: Though I see what you mean about adding content from mod content creators to speed up delivery...and shaderlib...and BRDY content...but that's all been discussed and discounted repeatedly, and there are very valid reasons for those, which I'm not going to rehash.

Though if you were going to add mod faction content, I would lean away from BRDY because the art style is too different from David's, and probably lean towards SHI and EXI as they require the least amount of effort on the part of David to bring them into alignment with the art style of vanilla. That is just is in unique non-kitbash content though.

Polished kitbash factions such as II which could probably be integrated fairly well and require little work by David, and seeing as the base sprites that were transformed were already David's work in terms of copyright it might be easier in terms of transfer?

Either way it ends with David and Alex having to update and maintain code/content while the fundamentals of Starsector's campaign is being developed, we don't even have a procedural sector yet!

Also quite a lot of modder scripts are dependent on LazyLib, so as soon as any mod is 'put' into the game as vanilla content, LazyLib then also must be owned or maintained by Alex as well.

At best we might hope for certain mods to be highlighted or endorsed in some way by Alex in a blog post or twitter feed. Or some sort of showcase thread.
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Dark.Revenant

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Re: I'm sorry, but this is getting ridiculous.
« Reply #35 on: October 15, 2014, 11:05:01 PM »

The only valid reason to bring on modders for development is for closed-doors testing.  However, the logistics of this are problematic and frankly the game isn't big enough yet to need that kind of effort.  Only in the case where there is too much content for Alex to personally examine in a reasonable time-frame would such a thing be necessary.
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kazi

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Re: I'm sorry, but this is getting ridiculous.
« Reply #36 on: October 15, 2014, 11:47:04 PM »

You're both somewhat off topic. My point was that there are several different ways that Alex could be doing things faster (if he wanted to).

At the current rate of development, I am willing to bet this game will be "done" late 2016/early 2017. If I'm wrong, I owe you (and Alex) a beer. ;)
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Tartiflette

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Re: I'm sorry, but this is getting ridiculous.
« Reply #37 on: October 16, 2014, 12:57:12 AM »

I saw that KSP included another mod the other day, so there's obviously precedent for that
They did, and it took a month to a team of 3 to clean up and bring the mod in line with the rest of the game. Basically they had to redo it from scratch keeping only the mod as a guide line. Still faster than starting ex nihilo, but it is a time consuming procedure. You may notice they took "inspiration" from multiple mods but preferred to redo them themselves. The main reason isn't the cost to buy it (if anything, it would cost less) but the time and resources needed to check it, balance it, and the possible compatibility problems generated. Better start fresh. (I exaggerate a bit, but you get the idea)

In the case of SS (and omitting the fact that most modders would certainly refuse to cede their mod and be unable to work on it ever again, except under the form of a mod for the mod!), integration means a huge delay for the following update, plus more content mean more balancing, more data entry for each update and overall a slower development pace. All that for content already available in the form of mods.

But I completely agree on one point: more communication would be very appreciable! Maybe just a tweet per week, nothing that take much time but gives at least sign of life... The blogs are great but they obviously take a day or so create, smaller chunk of info more often would be great. The lack of regular updates reminds me the dreaded "silence treatment" from Egosoft during X-Rebirth development, and we saw what came out of this.
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Okim

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Re: I'm sorry, but this is getting ridiculous.
« Reply #38 on: October 16, 2014, 02:28:57 AM »

Just divide this update into what it brings and give each new feature (faction relations, events, intel screen, markets, new fleet generation system, combat improvements, API rehaul for all this and much more stuff to make modding easie and etc.) the usual Starsector 2 month period of development time and you`ll get these 10 month. Actually it seems that current pace is a bit faster with all those calculations.

The thing is that each of these features are interconnected with one another and releasing them one-by-one is pointless as they wont be working at full potential.

Now imagine what will happen after this update. It brings quite a huge chunk of the game features with it leaving outposts and player property things for the future as well as officers and some other improvements. Guess that these would be much easier/faster to add with all the relations/events/economy system already present and being digested by the community.

SteelRonin

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Re: I'm sorry, but this is getting ridiculous.
« Reply #39 on: October 16, 2014, 03:10:51 AM »

While slightly off topic, i felt that this is a Point I wanted to make.

I havent posted here. In a LONG time. over a year.

But this, this is exactly what brings me back. and Alex I hope you realize this: The community that is here is an absolute Godsend.
the quality and quantity of mods that are made, the dedication to updating those and the adult well worded arguments that lead to well thought out conclusion is RARE thing on the internet. I feel you should make more use of it, Involve all these people with great skills, get the people interested to Playtest. dont leave all these Rescources unused.

PS. I need to find my game Key again xD   
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bills6693

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Re: I'm sorry, but this is getting ridiculous.
« Reply #40 on: October 16, 2014, 07:32:03 AM »

Personally I worry that all this polishing, bug testing, and balance work that comes before each release is adding a lot of time to development. If each release has 1-2 months of bug testing, polish etc, thats adding years to development.

Personally I'd prefer all the core systems got put in - all of them - and then all the units, assets etc got added, and finally the game went through a polish phase for the final release. That polish/bug quashing phase would be long, but overall could it save a long time off development?
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ValkyriaL

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Re: I'm sorry, but this is getting ridiculous.
« Reply #41 on: October 16, 2014, 08:31:01 AM »

It would take the same amount of time, but instead, we would have a broken, non playable game with countless bugs for a year atleast.

as it is now, Starsector is perfectly playable, in its alpha stage, and i would almost pay you money to find a bug that renders this game unplayable.
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xenoargh

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Re: I'm sorry, but this is getting ridiculous.
« Reply #42 on: October 16, 2014, 09:42:35 AM »

No complaints from me.  This part was going to take major time, period; it's completely understandable why it's been so long. 

Yes, I'd like to see macro-operations in the UI for this update (i.e., being able to do fleet commands and basically taking the game to the 4X point that I feel a lot of players are expecting in the final title) but frankly, this is going to add a terrific amount of depth and bring the game to a very-near par with games like Escape Velocity... and modders can push it that final mile with reasonable ease (for example, it's possible to write a fleet-command UI right now).

Is that worth another 3-5 months to develop the UI for that?  Not really. 

I do think that the team ought to reconsider going for Greenlight when this development stage is polished up, personally. 

Once mods are making full use of the new hooks, I suspect that there's going to be some really great content for players to enjoy whilst Alex gets through that next leg, and a fresh wave of capital might be helpful at that point, just to make sure Alex isn't reduced to eating too much ramen at the end while paying David et al to get their end of things done :)
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ahrenjb

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Re: I'm sorry, but this is getting ridiculous.
« Reply #43 on: October 16, 2014, 11:18:51 AM »

To put things in perspective, the development time for another of my favorite free-roam space games (EV:Nova) was about four years. Two of those as part time, then two more as full time with a development team. The scale of the game was enormous, and it had multiple complex, well fleshed out story lines. In fact, the strength of that game was its setting and campaign. Starsector is similar in that it's space based and open universe, but being a sandbox type game rather than a primarily story driven game, the feature set and universe need to be much, much more fleshed out for it to live up to its potential.

Point being, a game of this type is an ambitious project. Even for a small team of developers. You have to have a massive amount of content to keep players interested in playing, and an advanced and deep feature-set to take advantage of all that content. Conversely, you need a deep and complex feature set to keep the game interesting, and a massive amount of content to take advantage of those features. While the current galaxy isn't particularly large, it's clear that the intended scale of the game is huge. What Alex is trying to create is a rich, complex, living universe deep in character and history that immerses the player and provides many ways to play. I appreciate his attention to detail and quality oriented development. It has made for a game that, while currently somewhat sparse (though improving with each update), is very pleasant and engaging to play. On the other hand, the protracted update time is an easy to understand source of frustration for many players. At this point in the project, when the critical functionalities that will define the game are being developed, it makes sense though. It takes time to create and tweak these things. Once the framework is in place though, I would like to see a change of pace.

From there, it will be content and balancing. These updates can be small, frequent, and they are often no less enjoyable to a player than large feature based updates. The modding community adds extensive content, but that's a bonus and can't really be considered an attribute of the game.

I look forward to and eagerly await the next update, I check the website every week or so to see if it has come out, but it's certainly started to become a little discouraging recently. I don't even want to start messing with mods because I know they'll all be obsolete as soon as its out.
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c plus one

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Re: I'm sorry, but this is getting ridiculous.
« Reply #44 on: October 16, 2014, 03:56:53 PM »

Unlike in the thread title, I would not use the word 'ridiculous' but I will admit I'm not content to sugar-coat my feelings on the slow pace of development here. The lengthy delay since the last batch of official new content is unfortunate. I won't pretend that it's been a perfectly happy exercise in patience. At no point am i angry about this, though; just surprised and unhappy.

My reaction is mainly tempered by the fact that gaming is not a major part of my life. Nor am i personally juggling a dozen separate games around in an effort to deal with boredom or ADD or whztever; i dont have the time. Still, it's super-noticeable to me that there have been zero updates during the entire time to date that 2014's been on the calendar. ::) That's not the sort of thing to be easily swept under the proverbial rug.

OTOH, I fully understand the cause of the delay and it generally sounds reasonable. One doesn't have to be a hardcore member of the veteran's club to acknowledge that this has been and still is an uphill battle for the dev team; trying to make their creative vision into a playable reality. I respect their invested effort.

Starsector is about as far from "shovelware" as a game can possibly get. Im not terribly good at it but it's been a very interesting ride all the way. My great hope is that after no more new gameplay features are needing to be created, the dev pace will hopefully speed up. I assume that by that point, dev time will revolve much more around additional re-balancing and tweaking the whole, which should be a much less time-intensive and heartburn-inducing phase of work.

After a few more delays such as the one we're currently subjected to, I think it's reasonable to expect that things are going to speed up. I will continue to keep an eye on Starfarer during this extended process. Best wishes to the dev team; you'll get 'over the hump' and it'll all be worthwhile.
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