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Team Avatar and the future of our prototype

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Cade Windstalker
#1801 - 2013-09-19 18:44:19 UTC  |  Edited by: Cade Windstalker
Arduemont wrote:
Just confirming that the discussion about how long it will take them to make SC earlier is making a lot of deductions that shouldn't really be made.

As a developer myself I can tell you the engine your working with makes a massive difference. I've never worked with Carbon obviously, and I have never worked with Cry 3. But we know that so far CCP haven't developed anything Avatar based with Carbon (anything worth talking about anyway), and Roberts has already achieved infinately more than them in that regards. Also, his 20m budget is 20m so far, for a while his budget was going up by 1m per week. And that is just the kickstarter money. He also has a lot of people investing and just giving him money from other sources. I imagine his currently total budget is much greater than double 20m.


Actually according to their own wiki that is his funding for the game. The article mentions outside investors but that note is conspicuously devoid of sources, especially given that there's a note saying it needs a source.

As for the Cry engine, that says nothing about getting it to do massive space battles without melting peoples' computers or the net-code to make all that work, which is where I would expect most of the problems and bugs to crop up from. Good net-code is notoriously hard to do, and it gets worse the more people you're trying to run in one place at one time.

Arduemont wrote:
As for Eve having 300 employees, and Robets having 200... well that's not true or relevant. CCP has 300 employees, Eve probably has something like 60-80 dedicated employees. The rest will be general admin, or working on other games. Roberts isn't working on any other projects. On top of that, Roberts is developing a new game. No signifcant amount of his employees will be customer support. Software maintainance takes as much or more man hours than developement. Currently Roberts isn't maintaining anything so you can double his developement time just on that.


Actually CCP has approximately 600 employees, Eve Online itself has about 300 people working on it.

As for double his development time, what? That doesn't even make sense unless you mean 80 vs 200 employees, which as I've already pointed out is pretty false.

Also Eve Online has a fair base of volunteers doing menial customer support tasks and Roberts is still going to need to fund non-development positions like customer relations people, people to police the forums, lawyers, ect. Yes, he's going to need a few more people for a full launch but given that the game is doing a staged launch rather than going into hibernation for 2 years he's actually going to need those people earlier than another game company would.

Arduemont wrote:
Basically, Roberts has it easy. A better engine, more employees, more money, no maintainance and a new project that doesn't have old code that needs sifting through. There are more things to take into account but that will do. Trying to compare the amount of time it will take for Roberts by using CCP as an example is futile at best. They are in very differant boats. Best to just look at History as an indicater. Has Roberts dilivered on every promise so far? Yes. Has CCP? No, lol. Will Roberts get it all done when he says he will? Probably. Will CCP deliver on any of their future promises? Probably not, lol.


The one thing I'll give you is no old code to deal with. Every older game is hampered somewhat by this because refactoring old code is time consuming and gives you very little to show for it to the player base unless that refactor shows massive performance gains or lets you do something really cool immediately.

Also, using history as an indicator Roberts hasn't delivered on all of his promises for old games. Freelancer was originally supposed to be on the scale of Eve Online just for a start. His claims just turned out to be too technically ambitious for the time.

You can go around to pretty much every MMO forum and see people making the same "soon(TM)" jokes and complaining about bugs, incomplete features, and all the other basic complaints Eve players have. The grass is always greener until you get there, ect.
Cade Windstalker
#1802 - 2013-09-19 18:55:30 UTC
raven666wings wrote:
Apart from disagreeing completely with this ridiculous analysis on those titles showing your knowledge about them, it seems to me you forgot to include something in your list:


  • EVE Online - Good space game with great sci-fi content and backstory. Gained notoriety over the years for rarely delivering on its promises regarding gameplay development. Engaged in side projects and failed to upgrade its graphic and physics engine and add Directx 11 support, aswell as to improve core gameplay features. Launched a half baked Carbon avatar gameplay engine that melted video cards and offered 0 gameplay features. Its subscription numbers grew over the years, but with the appearance of other quality space mmorpgs delivering what EVE couldn't, its place on top of the food chain seems now more shaken than ever. Stay tuned for the next year to hear the rest of the story.


Pretty much every game listed has those issues.

Every studio has other projects, Eve Online is the only community I've seen get massively upset about it.

This is the full list of games with Direct X 11 support. Note that most MMOs aren't on there. In-fact, amusingly neither Diablo 3 nor SWTOR support Direct X 11 despite having much higher budgets than either Eve Online or Star Citizen. Many games don't bother supporting it because they either don't need it or upgrading to Direct X 11 would cut off a portion of their user base. This is probably especially true of Eve Online which is notorious for having people either running multiple clients or running on older machines.

Yes, we've all established that the WiS launch was not good. On the melting video cards end of things though, Star Citizen's Hangar has higher system requirements than Eve Online does.

Citation needed on that "place in the food chain" bit since Eve's numbers passed 500,000 at the start of the year and it seems to be doing better than ever with the averages for this summer being possibly the highest ever.
Cade Windstalker
#1803 - 2013-09-19 19:00:30 UTC
Shalua Rui wrote:
Cade Windstalker wrote:
Except, you know, the last time they said "lets go this way" the player base said "nope, more in-space stuff or we burn the game down!"

Not this theory again... the outrage was 90% about the NeX store, and the "greed is good" agenda, CCP had back then.

But, yea, the door...


Oh, I'm completely aware that that's an over-simplification of what actually caused the outrage. The problem is that people still believe that WiS was the cause and that it's something to be outraged over, which means CCP are still going to have to contend with those people if they want to release more WiS content.

Ishtanchuk Fazmarai wrote:
By the way, concerning this image:

http://jestertrek.com/eve/blog/2013/eve-future.png

Don't you feel like something is missing?

To be fair, the image is old and just is an instance on how "paralel development" is meant to work. And yet, WiS and avatars weren't in the plans neither "before" nor "after."


Not really, it's a controversial topic so they're unlikely to address it directly until they feel in-space features are on a stable footing and that bringing it up again won't produce a massive backlash. Plus those are large, primary features and that's unlikely to be what future WiS development is going to be. Far more likely it'll have a dedicated team and be going on in the background of everything else.

There were no less than four sessions from the last CSM that were NDA's into a crater so it's not like they're talking opening about everything they're working on. Blink
Varius Xeral
Doomheim
#1804 - 2013-09-19 19:12:06 UTC
Cade Windstalker wrote:
The problem is that people still believe that WiS was the cause and that it's something to be outraged over, which means CCP are still going to have to contend with those people if they want to release more WiS content.

...it's a controversial topic so they're unlikely to address it directly until they feel in-space features are on a stable footing and that bringing it up again won't produce a massive backlash. Plus those are large, primary features and that's unlikely to be what future WiS development is going to be. Far more likely it'll have a dedicated team and be going on in the background of everything else.


Agreed. I am supremely confident that WiS will be a large and focused development that follows a general feeling, at least within CCP, that the existing core gameplay of Eve is developmentally current and on track to stay that way through the focused implementation of WiS...and that trailers or snapshots from games that are at least two years from existing have little to no impact on their plans.




Official Representative of The Nullsec Zealot Cabal
Cade Windstalker
#1805 - 2013-09-19 19:23:02 UTC
Varius Xeral wrote:
Agreed. I am supremely confident that WiS will be a large and focused development that follows a general feeling, at least within CCP, that the existing core gameplay of Eve is developmentally current and on track to stay that way through the focused implementation of WiS...and that trailers or snapshots from games that are at least two years from existing have little to no impact on their plans.


Pretty much this. Though I doubt it's going to be a "large" development. More likely we'll just see one decent sized team assigned to carry it forward with small incremental updates so as not to make it seem like they've lost focus on in-space features.

Otherwise, yeah pretty much this.
Rhes
Brutor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#1806 - 2013-09-19 19:39:46 UTC
Cade Windstalker wrote:
Also Dust 514 is based on the Carbon engine


LOL

EVE is a game about spaceships and there's an enormous amount of work to do on the in-space gameplay before players (or developers) are ready to sacrifice it for a totally new type of gameplay - CCP Rise
raven666wings
Cyber Chaos Crew
#1807 - 2013-09-19 20:32:37 UTC
Rhes wrote:
Cade Windstalker wrote:
Also Dust 514 is based on the Carbon engine


LOL


lol nuff said!!!!
Arduemont
Rotten Legion
#1808 - 2013-09-19 20:35:35 UTC  |  Edited by: Arduemont
Cade Windstalker wrote:

Also Dust 514 is based on the Carbon engine


I stopped reading there, your rant was entirely wasted. Dust514 uses the Unreal 3 engine. Check your facts.

"In the age of information, ignorance is a choice." www.stateofwar.co.nf
Cade Windstalker
#1809 - 2013-09-19 20:55:20 UTC
Arduemont wrote:
I stopped reading there, your rant was entirely wasted. Dust514 uses the Unreal 3 engine. Check your facts.


Woops, you are correct. My bad.

I do suggest you read the rest of it though.
Arduemont
Rotten Legion
#1810 - 2013-09-19 21:06:40 UTC  |  Edited by: Arduemont
Cade Windstalker wrote:

Woops, you are correct. My bad.

I do suggest you read the rest of it though.


As you were suprisingly polite and admitted your wrongs, I went back and read the rest. Being able to admit you are wrong is a quality I have always admired in a person. The wiki that you linked talking about their funds is massively out of date. At that point they had only crowd sourced 6m, when recent blogs etc are quoting their most up-to-date figure as nearing 21m. A lack of evidence for a specific number of other sources of funding is not evidence of a lack of funding. That's quite a backward way of looking at it.

I took the figures on CCP's employees from your previous arguement. The 600 number your saying there is... well.. I don't know where you got it from. The last official figure I can find is that CCP had a total of 350 staff (on all projects) in 2009. I think that's before Incarnageddon.

At the end of all that my point is (take it from a software developer), Roberts has it really realy easy compared to CCP. Comparing their developement speeds just isn't worth it.

"In the age of information, ignorance is a choice." www.stateofwar.co.nf
raven666wings
Cyber Chaos Crew
#1811 - 2013-09-19 21:23:49 UTC  |  Edited by: raven666wings
Cade Windstalker wrote:

Also Dust 514 is based on the Carbon engine, so this proves Carbon actually works and your statement is blatantly false. It has some bugs and the gameplay is not perfect yes, but makes Dust514 itself an awesome test for carbon.


Does Valkyrie run on Carbon too? Oh my, this whole EVE Universe thing might turn out to be better than I thought... I can see the meaningful connection there, everything on Carbon!!! \o/ Now just need Carbon spaceshipz too Twisted
Cade Windstalker
#1812 - 2013-09-19 23:14:48 UTC
Arduemont wrote:
As you were suprisingly polite and admitted your wrongs, I went back and read the rest. Being able to admit you are wrong is a quality I have always admired in a person. The wiki that you linked talking about their funds is massively out of date. At that point they had only crowd sourced 6m, when recent blogs etc are quoting their most up-to-date figure as nearing 21m. A lack of evidence for a specific number of other sources of funding is not evidence of a lack of funding. That's quite a backward way of looking at it.

I took the figures on CCP's employees from your previous arguement. The 600 number your saying there is... well.. I don't know where you got it from. The last official figure I can find is that CCP had a total of 350 staff (on all projects) in 2009. I think that's before Incarnageddon.

At the end of all that my point is (take it from a software developer), Roberts has it really realy easy compared to CCP. Comparing their developement speeds just isn't worth it.


Thanks, I appreciate that you cited a source for that number so I checked my source. The 600 came from the CCP Games Wiki page but the source it cited is from 2008. I went back through the history and that number has been there since 2011 or so which was a bit suspect. I found this article from early 2012 that says 450 employees but doesn't cite a source. Then I found CCP's Linked-In profile which lists 973 employees. Even accounting for old employees that makes the 600 employees figure pretty realistic. Also they currently have 6 different campuses and Rejavick (Eve development) is supposed to be their biggest campus so at least something in the realm of 900 is pretty believable.

Also the video that's heavy cited in the Star Citizen release schedule article has Chris mention that at the 9,5 million mark he was hoping to crowd-fund the entire development and was figuring on 14-15 million for the fully developed game.

Sure, he has some advantages, but he's also shooting for something that's, conceptually, very complicated and going to be hard to pull off. Hence why what their shooting for is an ambiguous "early 2015". Realistically I think it's going to be mid to late 2015 before they've got all the potential gameplay and networking issues worked out.

What I am not saying is that Star Citizen is going to be a bad game, just that development issues are fairly normal in any software development, especially game development, and especially MMOs.

Overall 3-4 Eve expansions is a lot of time. That's about how much time has passed since Incarna and the game has improved a ton in that time and is, in my opinion at least, in better shape than its ever been in and 3-4 expansions is a pretty good amount of time for it to improve further. It's also way to far in the future to be declaring that these games are going to kill Eve.

So, more talk of WiS features we'd like to see! Arrow
Flamespar
WarRavens
#1813 - 2013-09-19 23:52:32 UTC
Meanwhile the 12 month anniversary of this thread is coming up.

Seriously CCP. What else do we need to do to demonstrate that there is huge interest in meaningful avatar gameplay?
Varius Xeral
Doomheim
#1814 - 2013-09-19 23:56:13 UTC  |  Edited by: Varius Xeral
Flamespar wrote:
Meanwhile the 12 month anniversary of this thread is coming up.

Seriously CCP. What else do we need to do to demonstrate that there is huge interest in meaningful avatar gameplay?


Obviously more than one thread with a dozen people circlejerking each other with terrible arguments for a year.

Official Representative of The Nullsec Zealot Cabal
Flamespar
WarRavens
#1815 - 2013-09-19 23:59:58 UTC
Varius Xeral wrote:
Flamespar wrote:
Meanwhile the 12 month anniversary of this thread is coming up.

Seriously CCP. What else do we need to do to demonstrate that there is huge interest in meaningful avatar gameplay?


Obviously more than one thread with a dozen people circlejerking each other with terrible arguments for a year.


And yet the best counterarguments people can come up with is gibberish like yours.
Bagrat Skalski
Koinuun Kotei
#1816 - 2013-09-20 00:04:07 UTC  |  Edited by: Bagrat Skalski
But how much people are actually working on EVE? It's classified or what?

Custom ship skins, character creator style "repaint". Bring it!
Rhes
Brutor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#1817 - 2013-09-20 02:08:24 UTC
Flamespar wrote:
Meanwhile the 12 month anniversary of this thread is coming up.

Seriously CCP. What else do we need to do to demonstrate that there is huge interest in meaningful avatar gameplay?


This one is easy. If you can't live without more space pants or dance parties then cancel your subscription and state why. If there really is "huge interest" CCP will take note of all the people canceling and do something.

This is what real Eve players did after Incarna was released and it was fantastically effective. We got WiS put on the backburner and they have concentrated on spaceships ever since.

CCP is a business that relies on subscribers and it's the only metric that matters. Posting in a thread addressed to a team that doesn't even exist anymore isn't going to sway them.

EVE is a game about spaceships and there's an enormous amount of work to do on the in-space gameplay before players (or developers) are ready to sacrifice it for a totally new type of gameplay - CCP Rise
Varius Xeral
Doomheim
#1818 - 2013-09-20 02:11:16 UTC
Rhes wrote:
Posting in a thread addressed to a team that doesn't even exist anymore isn't going to sway them.


Please, Team Jesus, send me electric sex pants for my space avatar!

Official Representative of The Nullsec Zealot Cabal
raven666wings
Cyber Chaos Crew
#1819 - 2013-09-20 03:15:55 UTC  |  Edited by: raven666wings
Meanwhile on other games' news, Rockstar Games' GTA V featuring RAGE (Rockstar Advanced Graphic Engine) launched and sold 14 million copies in 24 hours, netting 800 million USD Twisted Already the most sucessful and one of the best (if not THE best) games of all time.

http://uk.ign.com/articles/2013/09/18/gta-5-makes-800-million-in-one-day

http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2013/09/18/gta-5-sells-800-million-in-one-day/

http://www.businessinsider.com/gta-v-earns-800-million-in-one-day-2013-9


If only Rockstar let CCP borrow RAGE and make some sick Avatar gameplay out of it...

¸¸.•*¨*•♪♫♪You can say I'm a dreamer ¸¸.•*¨*•¸¸.•*¨*•¸¸.•*¨*•♫♪♫ but I'm not the only one...♪♫♪♫♪¸¸.•*¨*•¸¸.•*¨*•
Flamespar
WarRavens
#1820 - 2013-09-20 05:37:34 UTC
raven666wings wrote:
If only Rockstar let CCP borrow RAGE and make some sick Avatar gameplay out of it...

¸¸.•*¨*•♪♫♪You can say I'm a dreamer ¸¸.•*¨*•¸¸.•*¨*•¸¸.•*¨*•♫♪♫ but I'm not the only one...♪♫♪♫♪¸¸.•*¨*•¸¸.•*¨*•


I wonder if there is any scope for the work of the World of Darkness team to feed back into EVE. I saw some videos where they were showing how they were going about building large urban environments which could be used to build station interiors/and derelicts.

The way they optimize the graphics engine for crowded scenes with lots of avatars could be useful too.