Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: Prophet on August 24, 2005, 03:10:30 am
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I was staring the forums and then it struck me... Those hosted campaigns and mod projects have been there for as long as I can remember... (Since VWBB retired)
But has there really been any major releases other than TBP?
I think TVWP relased something ages ago...? And that demo thingy from Blakcwater was nice, but small. Anything else? Has there been anything large that you can really call a release?
TBP has done quite a good job giving out packages that have worked well and have brought more people under the shining lights of B5.
But what is wrong with the other projects? Sure, its cool to have a polished and perfect, not to mention huge, pakcage to give out. But while the "team" is "working" on their grand product, their loyal worshipper have nothing to do but wait...
SCP is producing new builds, and modding forums contain juicy suprises. But other than those (and TBP) the community seems to be in a kind of a stasis.
What is happening behind the closed doors?
Are the projects become too big to do anything else than just "be"...
Who will be the next one to break the spell and give the community a real event?
Or have I missed something?
This was not meant as offense towards those people who work on those projects. I'm not claiming they are lazy. And I sure as hell know how that people have personal lives... So dont dare to give me any of that ****.
"It's done when it's done".
My main concern here is that so many big high profile projects give that answer, and none have been finished.
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Inferno have made one major release, and the second one should be done by the end of the year.
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Blackwater Ops looks like their getting closer to their Big Release...and i don't mean the kind that i just made in the Lavatory...:p
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The FSPort has put out a few releases. So has Lightning Marshall. NTV released a demo.
For the most part though, you're right. Most of the hosted projects are far too ambitious to be completed in a year. Many of them have been ongoing for several years.
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BD and I had a chat about feature-creep in Blackwater Ops not too long ago.
{BlackDove} http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,34171.msg710700.html#msg710700 I smell feature-creep. Looks good, mind you, but BWO's never getting released at this rate.
{BlackDove} Oh BWO's getting released quite soonish
{BlackDove} Actually if it all went up and died right now, with the files I have, I could have it done myself with some extra help.
{BlueFlames} Soonish must be pretty relative, when the campaign's four years past its first release date.
{BlackDove} I wasn't with the staff four years ago so I can't comment on that heh.
{BlueFlames} I don't think it's going to be a matter of people abandoning it; I think it's a matter of you (meaning the current BWO team) continually adding more and more to the campaign.
{BlackDove} Ehhhhh no.
{BlackDove} This is all of the stuff we didn't have because Bobbau was inactive.
{BlackDove} Just patching it to the SCP level now.
{BlackDove} In the process of releasing a few more images.
{BlueFlames} Initially the voice pack was going to be a post-release add-on. Now that's a won't-release-without feature. It was going to be a retail campaign (since it started pre-SCP), and now all of the MODs need to be updated for the SCP.
{BlackDove} It was never a post-release add-on
{BlackDove} IceFire got confused.
{BlackDove} Because he released Derelict unfinished.
{BlackDove} And with the progress of the SCP, do you really think it could've just been ignored?
{BlackDove} That was rhetorical by the way.
{BlueFlames} I think the campaign upgrades could be left as an update.
{BlueFlames} The campaign's already four YEARS late. Now's not the time to be adding features.
{BlackDove} Since the campaign is four years late, all the better to be doing it now.
{BlackDove} After all, people should've realised that it's not to be expected four years ago and that it was an unrealistic date.
{BlackDove} Four years ago SCP didn't exist.
{Judd-MGT} anyone have any idea why a fresh install of XP wouldn't be able to run HL2?
{BlueFlames} Four years ago, it was a bunch of missions. Getting that done in twelve to eighteen months isn't unrealistic, with a diligent team.
{BlueFlames} Now you're adding and adding, and not thinking realistically about how much further back the release date is going to be pushed.
{BlueFlames} Sure, SCP upgrades look nice, but I'd rather have the finished campaign on my hard drive right now than wait for it to look prettier.
{BlackDove} Ah that may be true for everyone waiting.
{BlackDove} Truth is, nobody on the staff cares when it's going to be released. Four years down the line, the product has to be quality before anything else.
{BlackDove} Official motto of the release date is "When it's done"
{BlackDove} For good reason too.
{BlueFlames} Bah. What good is a game or campaign that never gets released? It could be the greatest campaign in the world, but who's going to give a ****, if nobody gets to play it?
{-- [SK-lead]Deathsong has quit (Quit: This computer has gone to sleep)
{BlackDove} Sometime down the line.........
{BlackDove} As I said, it will definatly get played one way or the other.
{BlueFlames} Well, that's just so many words until you've released something more substantial than a screenshot and a many-year-old demo.
I found the bit about Icefire getting confused about the campaign he started particularly humorous.
It's particularly relevant to note, though, that in the case of BWO and likely others, the development teams' priorities have shifted from actually releasing the campaign/MOD/project to making sure that campaign/MOD/project is as shiny and fully-featured as possible. It's a nice intent to want to take advantage of all resources available for a project, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. How close have these major projects come to release, before the development team decided to take several months to a year, just to update the included MODs for the SCP? How many man-hours have been thrown to the wayside by development teams scrapping content so that it could be 'updated'? I think a whole lot of campaigns would benefit more from being released, then updated, than from being continually updated and never released.
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Originally posted by Prophet
"It's done when it's done".[/I]
My main concern here is that so many big high profile projects give that answer, and none have been finished.
That's because we don't get paid (and I'm open to offers) :D
So other stuff takes priority; I have job interviews and stuff to prepare for, for example, plus need to keep doing other work to keep my coding up to scratch. So already you've only got a few hours in the day to work.
And then I don't work every day on, say, LS. So it'd take a long time anyways, assuming you don't get bored doing it and detour. Which is how I ended up making CoW, incidentally.
I think I have, personally, at least managed to sort out my previous feature creep issues :D Reci was bit of a nightmare in that regard; at one point every mod was done, but all 3 FREDers were busy or just away.... so I ended up working on stuff for a sequel and Icefires' abortive Paradigm Shift campaign, and then ended up redoing the Reci storyline and mods because I was doing stuff for that which was of a far better quality than the existing Reci stuff.
Vicious circle.
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Originally posted by aldo_14
That's because we don't get paid (and I'm open to offers) :D
So other stuff takes priority; I have job interviews and stuff to prepare for, for example, plus need to keep doing other work to keep my coding up to scratch. So already you've only got a few hours in the day to work.
So you were the first one...
Originally posted by aldo_14
And I sure as hell know how that people have personal lives... So dont dare to give me any of that ****.
Every person who has been in this community more than a month knows that. Myself included.
Every person who has produced/producing something for this community knows that. Myself included.
To me, it is painful to see this cold fact in these forums. Please do not bring this up here because it is not the point in this discussion and everyone should automaticly take it in to account when talking thinking about this...
Ok?
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eh?
Painful as it may be, it needs to be reinforced sometimes IMO. Especially given that this is now quite an old community, and a lot of people - like me - willl have moved through formal education and into proper work.
It might not be a nice answer, but that's the truth; it's why projects can't work to set release dates. modding work is personal time, and personal time is very fluid in what it's used for and how much you can spare. There's no real common reason, I'd wager, for "done when it's done" beyond the consequences of personal stuff.
Especially the biggies, who are trying to work to a near-professional standard (which is another reason for projects being very quiet). I know I try to, although at the same time I've scaled back my ambitions to be - I hope - a little more achievable.
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Your point is recived and understood, very deeply. But it isn't the point I had in mind when I started this thread. BlueFlames post displays that point point far elegantly than I ever could. Its about release policy and wether or not big projects can be over-ambitious.
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The community isn't in stasis if you take your eye off the skyscrapers and look down towards the ground. ;)
There are lots of "small" projects running around that are doing quite nicely. 'Sides, towers rarely crumble from the bottom up and all that. :)
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There are a couple of small campaigns/chapters I've been testing that seemed pretty much finalized, but haven't been released yet.
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Gah, remind me never to have a conversation with you again.
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Don't speak in an open channel if you don't want someone to log it. ;P
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I seem to recall MindGames getting in the highlights with "We're half done. Yay!"
Can't remember how long ago that was.
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No.
Originally posted by BlueFlames
Don't speak in an open channel if you don't want someone to log it. ;P
Yeah, because that's the problem.
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Originally posted by Roanoke
I seem to recall MindGames getting in the highlights with "We're half done. Yay!"
We did have screenshots too though :D
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Well, the classic answer to feature creep is to ignore anything that doesn't break your missions.
@High Max: You do not want them to do that.
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@High Max: You do not want them to do that.
Derelict did fine with voices released seperately. Placeholder sounds would have been nice, but even without, the campaign is still quite good. I'm not sure you're in the greatest position to be telling High Max, myself, or anyone else waiting for a campaign-in-development what we want. We know what we want a hair better than a third-party might.
[The next bit I wrote, thinking of nobody in particular, then realized it might look like I'm still addressing ngtm1r. Just to clear up confusion, I'm back on the general subject of feature-creeping campaign developers.]
I think that the real answer to feature creep is to come up with a fixed list of features before development even begins, and then don't add anything, no matter how trivial, to that list until after the initial release. The point here is, none of the most-hyped-about projects have had a policy like that, and their release dates keep getting shoved back because of it. If your philosophy is one of, "Oooo... Shine-maps and glow-points are supported now? We gotta add that!" you'll never make it to the initial release.
The SCP is feature-creeping by design, since it's an on-going upgrade project with semi-regular public releases. You can't plan around having your MODs support every SCP feature, since by the time you're done adding support for one release's new spiffiness, another release will come around with more stuff you'll want to support. Professional game developers that use third-party engines have the same issues to cope with. As they're building the game and tweaking the engine, new games will constantly be getting released, and they can either take the time to add the feature to the engine they're using, scrap the work done so far and start anew on the new engine, or continue work on the game, leaving the new features for their next project.
Think of it like a game, where you keep changing engines in mid-development. What do you have? Duke Nukem Forever. That will be released, "when it's done," as well, and I think everyone stopped caring round-about four or five years ago, realizing that it will never be done. If you're going to follow DNF's design philosophy, I'd ask that you follow their media policy too, and put a gag-order on yourself until "it's done" too. I don't want to hear about it, if you don't plan on finishing your initial release. Seriously, close your public development forum(s); stop posting screenshots; stop promising demos; stop giving out phony release dates; stop saying, "Soon! We swear... Really! ...but when it's done..." Just stop.
It's getting to be like an old joke now. I went on a two-year hiatus, expecting Machina Terra and Blackwater Ops (to name just a couple) to be finished or very nearly finished, knowing how real life matters tend to get in the way of development around here. Instead, I come back to find that all of the projects I had been watching have scrapped a great deal of work, since missions with only retail SEXPs are apparently out-of-fashion now, and every single new ship and weapon had to be upgraded to use every single graphical effect I could name and a few I can't.
That was a huge, HUGE disappointment. I hear you screaming, "We're making a PROFESSIONAL-quality product here, so quit whining!" Excuse me? In just over two years, a professional team would be pressing CDs for the game that they built from a blank page of code up. A professional team would have something to their product that the developers around here don't seem to have... Namely, THE PRODUCT!
I've been tossing around the Duke Nukem Forever example enough, so let me throw another one out there...
Dark Horizons: Lore (http://www.garagegames.com/pg/product/view.php?id=29)
I know there's at least a couple of Lore players in the FS2 community here, and they can tell you it's a pretty sweet game for the price. Inquisitor and his team built Lore using the Torque (Tribes 2 engine), with few, if any major upgrades to the graphics-side of the engine. Now, if I had to choose between retail FS2 and Tribes 2 on basis of graphics alone, I'd probably side with retail FS2, just to give you an idea of the graphical punch the Torque engine has. Inquisitor and his team used Torque with little to no major upgrades, and started selling it. You know... Selling... As in, people will pay for the game, despite its dated graphics engine. I've played around with the game a bit, and can say that it's pretty fun. If you will, it's worthy of being called a good game. Are there shiny maps and glowing points on every model? Nope. Does it have crazy-awesome looking 3D shockwaves emitted by dying units and large weapons? Nope. Do people still pay for it and feel that the game is a product of professional quality? Hell yes, they do. I'm quite sure esd will be happy to pop on here and box your ears if you disagree.
You don't need to play the game of 1001-prerelease upgrades to have a professional-quality campaign. All you need is a good writer/designer, some experienced FRED-users, and some time. Prior to my hiatus, many project teams had everything but the time. Now, they seem to have a little more time, but they're managing it poorly, picking up a lot more work than they can handle. I understand that real life gets in the way, but volunteering yourself and your team for more work on your project, when the lot of you are already in a time-pinch is your own fault.
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I agree.
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I always thought DH:L looked quite nice, actually. Models and maps seem good.
I'd point out a professional team can usually develop a far more complex product in less that 2 years simply because they get paid to work 9 or more hours a day on stuff. And there's also usually, say, more than one artist (for example). And they outsource some work like cgi.
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Whatever helps you sleep at night, Aldo. You're also not having to build your engine from the ground up, deal with publishing companies, bug-hunt anything more complex than a scripting error, or build your own in-house development tools. Correct me, if I'm wrong, but for Casualties of War, you didn't look at the FS2 and FRED2 source, clear the pages, and rebuild it, did you?
Your argument ignores the fact that FS2 is already a completed game, to which you are adding content. Granted, a full-sized campaign is a lot of content, but with the available tools, and the size of the development teams working on the major projects on HLP, they're still taking an unreasonably long time to complete.
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Originally posted by BlueFlames
Whatever helps you sleep at night, Aldo. You're also not having to build your engine from the ground up, deal with publishing companies, bug-hunt anything more complex than a scripting error, or build your own in-house development tools. Correct me, if I'm wrong, but for Casualties of War, you didn't look at the FS2 and FRED2 source, clear the pages, and rebuild it, did you?
Your argument ignores the fact that FS2 is already a completed game, to which you are adding content. Granted, a full-sized campaign is a lot of content, but with the available tools, and the size of the development teams working on the major projects on HLP, they're still taking an unreasonably long time to complete.
Well, you try modelling about 9 average-poly models, mapping them with high quality, hig res maps, building high-poly render models and rigging the character ones - whilst learning how to do it from scratch of course, animating bugger knows how many small cutscenes, briefs, tech stuff and soforth, writing a storyline (which at present has something like a 20 pages - excluding scripts) - working at a rate about 2-4 hours a day. On a very good day.
I'm sure you'll recognise that the content takes time, too. Sure, if someone was paying me 16-30k a year to do it, I'd have this finished in a quarter of the time. But no-one is. You don't like it? Fine. I don't give a ****. You come here, and do what I - what every person in Ls and beyond - am trying to do, then you can talk about what is unreasonably long. Don't give me any comparisons with professional development - you know full well what professional stands for, and why people do it.
CoW was a piece of cake. It was practice. That's why it was finished.
Pay me money, and I'll do LS double quick. Otherwise, haud yer wheesht.
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Originally posted by Roanoke
I seem to recall MindGames getting in the highlights with "We're half done. Yay!"
Can't remember how long ago that was.
Originally posted by karajorma
We did have screenshots too though :D
how long ago was that ? :)
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I'd suggest releasing your own campaign done entirely out of your own free time before trying to point fingers at anyone.
Because everyone working on projects such as these do not get paid, its done entirely for their own fun or entertainment for the most part. If a person doesn't feel like working on it that day, they won't. I personally have things better to do than sit in front of the computer in my 4 hours of free time a day working on a project.
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I'd suggest releasing your own campaign done entirely out of your own free time before trying to point fingers at anyone.
Second Front (http://home.comcast.net/~blueflames/SF1site). Have I earned my right to gripe yet, or are you going to rewrite the rules just for little, ol' me?
Well, you try modelling about 9 average-poly models, mapping them with high quality, hig res maps, building high-poly render models and rigging the character ones - whilst learning how to do it from scratch of course, animating bugger knows how many small cutscenes, briefs, tech stuff and soforth, writing a storyline (which at present has something like a 20 pages - excluding scripts) - working at a rate about 2-4 hours a day. On a very good day.
That's kind of the entire point of my previous posts in this thread. The developers in this community are piling way too much stuff onto their projects to ever expect them to be finished. They then compound their time-crunch problems by piling even more work on top of that as new SCP features get added to the mix.
Having made a campaign and several standalone missions, I don't understand why developers do that to themselves. As an audience member, I can understand that stuff takes time, but cannot tolerate it when the development community whines about having too little time, followed right up by, "We're scrapping old content to make way for newer, shinier things!" If you want to make nine new ship models with high-res maps from the beginning, fine, but don't come back to your design document later, and say that you need to scrap the ships because they don't have enough polies and there aren't enough pixels in the texture map. That's where it stops being an issue of not having time to commit to the project and starts becoming an issue of ridiculously bad time management.
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Originally posted by BlueFlames
Derelict did fine with voices released seperately. Placeholder sounds would have been nice, but even without, the campaign is still quite good. I'm not sure you're in the greatest position to be telling High Max, myself, or anyone else waiting for a campaign-in-development what we want. We know what we want a hair better than a third-party might.
No, no, you misunderstand me. You don't want them to release, because THEY ARE NOT DONE YET.
They hired people to test the last batch of missions just recently, if you'd been paying attention. I'm one of them. And the missions need testing and revision.
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I can definitely see what Blueflames is talking about here. I fell into that trap to some degree myself when building my campaign, PI. My project was originally going to be very small, like four or five missions, but my plans became larger as I got more ideas - 7 missions, then 12 missions and finally 16 missions with more new ships and mods - and the project dragged on for years, by which point the community, which was never big in the first place, had become much smaller.
I actually didn't spend a lot of time adding in the SCP features though, as I wasn't using that many mods in the first place (the only thing I spent some effort on was replacing the default nebulas with Lightspeed's ones). I don't know if any of you have found yourselves doing this, but what actually consumed a lot more time for me was that since I was gaining experience as a mission designer while I was making the thing, the later missions were of significantly higher quality than the earlier ones, so I ended up completely rewriting the first few missions, even though they were still very good. It takes an enormous amount of time to fully playtest and debug one of these things (easily 50+ test runs) and it was a doubly stupid idea in my case since that was about the time that I was starting to get busy with the ISTS competition and other things in real life.
That being said, my project was far less ambitious than some of the stuff here and I would easily have had the whole thing fully polished and ready for release at the beginning of this year (after working on it on and off for four years or so; makes me wonder how long it would take to finish these really big projects) if I hadn't lost a ton of work due to a hard drive failure at the very end. At this point, it's hard to have the enthusiasm to pick up the pieces and redo everything. I suppose I could just throw out the stuff I have into the public domain in case anyone can use any parts of it, but I doubt I'll do anything more with it.
I haven't done any mission designing at all for quite some time, but if I get back into it, I will be sticking to standalone missions. I think we need to have more people working on those rather than full blown campaigns, as they take much less time to produce. I have a few that cover events that occur during the main campaign, but the thing is that they all run off my PI mods (and use the hundreds of gameplay tweaks incorporated in those), so I doubt I'll actually release them separately.
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Originally posted by BlueFlames
Having made a campaign and several standalone missions, I don't understand why developers do that to themselves. As an audience member, I can understand that stuff takes time, but cannot tolerate it when the development community whines about having too little time, followed right up by, "We're scrapping old content to make way for newer, shinier things!" If you want to make nine new ship models with high-res maps from the beginning, fine, but don't come back to your design document later, and say that you need to scrap the ships because they don't have enough polies and there aren't enough pixels in the texture map. That's where it stops being an issue of not having time to commit to the project and starts becoming an issue of ridiculously bad time management.
He ain't subtle, but speaks sense...
Everyone who spends his/hers time doing something for the community earns my respect and appreciation...
Sure, state of the art models, comm anis, briefing anis, interface art and such are cool. But are they more important than getting your story, your campaing out to them who you have been making it: To the community?
One of my wild examples: A good burger is a damn good burger even if it's not served on a golden platter by half naked beach babe...
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He ain't subtle, but speaks sense...
heh, my thoughts exactly.
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If you want to see the hosted campaigns finished how about signing up for them instead of going off and doing your own thing?
I've been complaining that MG needs a modeller badly for about 2 years now and it's never gotten me anywhere. That's been the major hold up for me. I'd FRED the rest of MG in about 6 months if I had the models done.
The problem with the community is that everyone has their own personal little project that they prefer to work on instead of helping out the hosted projects. That's why everything is taking so long. MG has FREDders sitting around doing very little sometimes precisely because we lack the mods we need to finish the story. MG has had a few redesigns but the simple fact is that it's mostly cause we've been waiting so damn long to get the models done.
Sometimes it isn't feature creep that's the problem. It's getting the original features we wanted right from conception into the game.
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Hm...FOW is mostly done, all it's left to do is FRED several more mission (~15).
But since I'm the only working team member (out of 3 - the other 2 are mostly giving me feedback) and I have MANY other things to work on besides my campaign it's going slowly... :(
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Originally posted by BlueFlames
Second Front (http://home.comcast.net/~blueflames/SF1site). Have I earned my right to gripe yet, or are you going to rewrite the rules just for little, ol' me?
That's kind of the entire point of my previous posts in this thread. The developers in this community are piling way too much stuff onto their projects to ever expect them to be finished. They then compound their time-crunch problems by piling even more work on top of that as new SCP features get added to the mix.
Having made a campaign and several standalone missions, I don't understand why developers do that to themselves. As an audience member, I can understand that stuff takes time, but cannot tolerate it when the development community whines about having too little time, followed right up by, "We're scrapping old content to make way for newer, shinier things!" If you want to make nine new ship models with high-res maps from the beginning, fine, but don't come back to your design document later, and say that you need to scrap the ships because they don't have enough polies and there aren't enough pixels in the texture map. That's where it stops being an issue of not having time to commit to the project and starts becoming an issue of ridiculously bad time management.
Funnily enough, that's exactly what I'm doing. I've not changed the required content list, nor reworked any of the existing content, since writing the devdocs in August 04.
It takes a good month or so for me to build a ship. It's that simple. I'd note that Second Front doesn't AFAIK have any new models, for example, and once you get into the stage of new content it's a different kettle of fish.
But don't throw this 'unreasonable' claim out. There's nothing reasonable about spending a good 1,2,3 or more years of your life working on something you'll give away for free - it's done purely out of the goodness of our hearts. And for people to ***** about how we're letting them down?
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Originally posted by karajorma
If you want to see the hosted campaigns finished how about signing up for them instead of going off and doing your own thing?
That's really the main problem. While I see that more and more people joining big campaigns to get them done is an issue, I honestly feel that some of the major ones would be somewhat restrictive (especially to FREDers) in terms of style and ideas.
The big thing is that lots of people want to see their ideas and stories put into FS2, and joining a big campaign just simply won't allow it to happen. However, with some of the lesser-known camps (i.e. Mercenaries, GTI, Pathways), designers often set guidelines, and then allow their FREDers to do a mission however they feel like. For example, when I FRED a mission for Pathways, I pretty much have reign on dialogue/story ideas so long as I stick to what Cobra and Ransom have said before.
The same goes for GTI: I set out the plot, mission details, and then allow FreespaceGundam to play around with the mission as much as he wants, so long as it A) gets the original point across and B) doesn't change the story drastically. Because of this, I often find FG's missions to be extremely enjoyable and deep simply because I let him use his own style and ideas when it comes to FRED.
I do see your point, however. People who start (or attempt to start) campaigns that are simply overambitious or grandiose and require a decent staff are the main problem. Honestly, people should just start basic: get some ideas for FRED, and, using either pure FS2/FSO or with some released mods, FRED a campaign with their own storyline. No new CBAnims/effects/mods of their own, just FRED, a story, and a campaign.
No 40-50 mission campaign either: just something basic to give them a rep and a test drive for building campaigns (there are exceptions to this, though; Blaise Russel, as we already know as a God with the ability to FRED 20 missions in his sleep and Ransom who simply catches onto FRED and does amazing things).
Usually a released campaign can give a designer a good rep among the community, and then that may lead to requests from various projects to have him enroll in their campaigns. Thus, one person starts a small project, impresses some people, one person joins big campaign, big campaign speeds up.
But don't throw this 'unreasonable' claim out. There's nothing reasonable about spending a good 1,2,3 or more years of your life working on something you'll give away for free - it's done purely out of the goodness of our hearts. And for people to ***** about how we're letting them down?
Amen. I know that as a (minor campaign and thus slow-working) developer, it takes a lot out of a person to formulate story ideas, manage teams, delegate tasks, and work out the bugs in campaigns. Having to deal with PR and people saying 'Is this dead?' or 'OMGOMGOMGHURRYUP!!!!1' I can imagine is just unbearable.
Seriously, people. If you want a quality product, don't edge the staff on. Give them reminders at the right times (i.e. when an update thread is posted) that you're still a fan and are waiting patiently, but don't spam their forums with "WE WANT UPDATES! POST SCREENIES OR I'LL SPAM YER FORUM WITH USELESS FANB0Y CRAP!" A project will be done when it's done and it feels that it has been fully worked-out to completion and their satisfaction. If the developers are happy, the people should be happy too. If they say they're moving along, spamming the forum doesn't make them go any faster. A lot of developers have been nice with dealing with these posts (Port Team with ST:R and Sesquipedalian with Scroll especially; I'll give credits to kara for being egged on for finishing SoR as well :) ), but just because they're nice about it doesn't make it alright to do.
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Originally posted by aldo_14
And for people to ***** about how we're letting them down?
[19:47] CaptJosh> Blueflames, if I had to judge you entirel based on your posting in that thread, I'd have to say that you're quite an ass.
[19:48] CaptJosh> It's possible to raise concerns without being a jerk about it. There's this thing called tact...
[19:48] BlueFlames> My apologies. I figure after something's been hyped for four to five years, the development team should have a release to show for it.
[19:49] Judd-MGT> agreed..
[19:49] Judd-MGT> and there are many campaigns that have been continually hyped... :)
[19:49] BlueFlames> I also have a big gripe with the "we don't care when we release" mentality that has swept over the FS2 development community.
[19:50] * CaptJosh shrugs.
[19:50] CaptJosh> I'm used to this. Ever hear of Ambrosia Software?
[19:50] BlueFlames> They need a kick in the jaw, and I'm giving it to them. They've had my tact to hide behind for ages, and I'm done with it.
[19:51] CaptJosh> Everything they do has no release dates. They release a game "what it's done."
[19:51] Judd-MGT> Ambrosia released games Josh..
[19:51] CaptJosh> er, "when it's done."
[19:51] Judd-MGT> We are talkig about people who haven't released anything.. other than press releases.. persay
[19:51] BlueFlames> Yeah, that just gives them an open license to never finish.
[19:51] CaptJosh> ASW has been at it a lot longer than these guys, and they do this professionally.
[19:52] CaptJosh> i.e., they get paid for this.
[19:52] Judd-MGT> but Ambrosia releases games..
[19:52] Judd-MGT> And they get paid becuase they release games.. :)
[19:52] BlueFlames> ASW? I'm not sure who exactly they are, but if someone's paying them and they aren't making releases, then the someone signing the checks in wasting a lot of money.
[19:52] CaptJosh> You're asking rank amateurs to behave like a professional game developing company.
[19:53] CaptJosh> Ambrosia Software. http://www.ambrosiasw.com
[19:53] Judd-MGT> He is asking Rank Amateurs to do in 5 years what used to happen in 6months..
[19:53] BlueFlames> Hey, they're the ones saying they're going to make a "professional-quality" product, so I'm holding them to a professional standard. They can't tell me they didn't ask for it.
[19:53] Judd-MGT> :)
[19:54] CaptJosh> By their standards "professional" means it has all the bells and whistles. You and I know that's not how the real world works, but these guys haven't quite figured that out.
[19:54] Judd-MGT> yep.. and because they haven't figured it out.. BF is calling them to task.. ;)
[19:54] BlueFlames> Well, I'm giving them a lesson. They can manage their time, or put up with people griping.
[19:55] CaptJosh> Maybe your post will help light a fire under them, or maybe they'll just all say "**** you" and you'll get nothing.
[19:55] BlueFlames> Let 'em say "**** you." I care about that about as much as they care about releasing a final campaign.
[19:56] CaptJosh> You don't care, do you? Because if they release something in short order, you've won. And if they shut down because of *******s like you, you've been proven right.
[19:58] BlueFlames> I'm not trying to shut anybody down. I'm trying to bring it to their attention that they're taking too damn long, and there's easy ways to prevent that.
[19:58] CaptJosh> There are better ways to do that then being a damn troll.
[19:59] BlackDove> So good we have YOU to educate us on how things should be done. We'd be lost otherwise.
[20:00] BlueFlames> Hey, when you release something, you're welcome to say, "I told you so." So far, you've not got anything to show for five years of work, BD.
Yeah. I've got nothing to show for it. Deary me. I'm so embarrassed.
Let me go hide in the corner somewhere.
I love people who think that I'm supposed to justify something that doesn't concern them.
You're not going to be getting the satisfaction of an "I told you so", because I'm not obligated to you in any way.
Go back to waiting and keep quiet. Kids like you make me want to cease any development or association with this community.
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Originally posted by TrashMan
Hm...FOW is mostly done, all it's left to do is FRED several more mission (~15).
But since I'm the only working team member (out of 3 - the other 2 are mostly giving me feedback) and I have MANY other things to work on besides my campaign it's going slowly... :(
Which FOW are you talking about? :confused:
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I think FS2's open ended story is one of the main reasons that there are so many campaign projects, as everyone has their own idea of how a post-FS2 plot should proceed. The storyline is the starting point and basic framework of any FS2 campaign, so a lot of potential new staff for existing campaigns just decide to start their own projects and do it their own way.
I never joined any campaign projects mainly for this reason. I had a pretty clear idea of how I wanted the storyline to go on, down to a lot of small details, and wanted to be in full control of the missions that I was building simply for fun; if I worked under someone else, there would always be disagreements. The project head cannot give total freedom to the designers or it wouldn't be much of a campaign. I also had my own mission style (as everyone does) that nobody else could quite replicate, so I never considered getting any help with the design of my own campaign either.
By the way, what's the deal with Ambrosia software? I used to play their stuff all the time about 12 years ago. Maelstrom on my mac was SO cool back then. :nod:
But don't throw this 'unreasonable' claim out. There's nothing reasonable about spending a good 1,2,3 or more years of your life working on something you'll give away for free - it's done purely out of the goodness of our hearts. And for people to ***** about how we're letting them down?
Now this I find very strange. Goodness of our hearts? I always worked on my campaign simply because I overall found it to be a lot of fun, both the mission design part as well as building and playing out the continuation of the FS2 story the way I wanted it. It's silly to think that you're doing the community a service and people should be grateful for it, especially when the community is so small in the first place. If you don't think it's reasonable, then why are you doing it at all? You should make missions if you enjoy doing it and for no other reason than that.
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Originally posted by nuclear1
The big thing is that lots of people want to see their ideas and stories put into FS2, and joining a big campaign just simply won't allow it to happen.
Depends on the campaign to be honest. There are a few places in MG where we're all open to suggestions for missions. If I trust a FREDder I'm more than happy to hand out a mission after saying "You've seen how the campaign works. I need a mission to show that side x is gaining the upper hand".
Sure we've got the plotline largely set out but it's not hard to slot in extra missions and tweak the others so that they don't look like filler depending on the campaign.
I doubt many campaigns are so rigidly set in stone that they wouldn't take suggestions from new members of the team.
Originally posted by nuclear1
I'll give credits to kara for being egged on for finishing SoR as well
Glad to see someone noticed :D
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Originally posted by CP5670
Now this I find very strange. Goodness of our hearts? I always worked on my campaign simply because I overall found it to be a lot of fun, both the mission design part as well as building and playing out the continuation of the FS2 story the way I wanted it. It's silly to think that you're doing the community a service and people should be grateful for it, especially when the community is so small in the first place. If you don't think it's reasonable, then why are you doing it at all? You should make missions if you enjoy doing it and for no other reason than that.
Exterior perspective. I start things out of interest, but usually the bulk of work ends up being done as I don't want to let any of the people either a) waiting or b) working with me down. That's why it took me so long to formally cancel Reci (even though I'd realised it was going nowhere a long time beforehand).
But ultimately the point is that, what 'we' do is as much for other peoples benefit as our own. And IMO it's unreasonable to ***** about how long that takes or otherwise, because it's not like we're getting anything tangible in return from the waiting people.
If people are so unhappy waiting 1 year or 2 or whatever on me and the people I'm working with trying to make something that's fun, and that's ****ing good, then I'm not sure why I bother. There's like some implicit assumption that when a campaign is delayed it's because the staff are ****ing up requirements; that it's better to release something you consider half-arsed and incomplete than have people waiting another 6 months or so. That, I guess, would be like professional development.
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Originally posted by aldo_14
If people are so unhappy waiting 1 year or 2 or whatever on me and the people I'm working with trying to make something that's fun, and that's ****ing good, then I'm not sure why I bother. There's like some implicit assumption that when a campaign is delayed it's because the staff are ****ing up requirements; that it's better to release something you consider half-arsed and incomplete than have people waiting another 6 months or so. That, I guess, would be like professional development.
Releasing something that is not complete is not what this is about! That is unreasonable, and not what people want.
It's about keeping the work in reasonable size so that it does not take 5 years to complete it.
And do not go assuming this is somekind of attack against the people who work on these projects. Take a look at my first post on this thread. BlueFlames has presented us some issues that are worth noting. But he has done it with such zeal that some people got offended.
I am sorry I started this thread that has turned in to a discussion about time and money. And that some people find it offensive.
Now, please stop lashing out at each other and take a moment to examine the questions that have been raised here.
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The trust the people making projects to judge what is and what is not 'complete'. That's all I ask.
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Originally posted by Prophet
It's about keeping the work in reasonable size so that it does not take 5 years to complete it.
Again, it's not your place to judge nor analyse that.
If any campaign needs your opinion, they'll promote you to staff member.
The topic is off limits to you.
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Exterior perspective. I start things out of interest, but usually the bulk of work ends up being done as I don't want to let any of the people either a) waiting or b) working with me down. That's why it took me so long to formally cancel Reci (even though I'd realised it was going nowhere a long time beforehand).
So you only find it fun at the beginning and then spend years on it just to not let down some people in an internet community? That makes no sense; you're implying that the project has become a chore rather than a pastime. I would have cancelled it the moment I got bored with it rather than letting it come to that.
Also, if you are that worried about getting people's hopes up, the best thing is to not hype the campaign so much in the first place. Some of these mega projects we have here tend to do that and they are the main culprits of this over-ambitious planning. Nobody had heard of my campaign at all until it was a bit under half finished.
But ultimately the point is that, what 'we' do is as much for other peoples benefit as our own. And IMO it's unreasonable to ***** about how long that takes or otherwise, because it's not like we're getting anything tangible in return from the waiting people.
The fact that the finished products are released to the public is kind of a moot point (if you have completed a campaign, you might as well release it). I like to make missions mainly so that I can play them out myself, as everything is exactly the way I want it, which I won't find in any missions made by others. I really can't imagine how anyone could motivate themselves to make FS2 campaigns if the main purpose was to release them to the community. This community in particular is quite tiny compared to other games and you can't really expect more than 60 or 70 people at best to play your campaign.
If people are so unhappy waiting 1 year or 2 or whatever on me and the people I'm working with trying to make something that's fun, and that's ****ing good, then I'm not sure why I bother. There's like some implicit assumption that when a campaign is delayed it's because the staff are ****ing up requirements; that it's better to release something you consider half-arsed and incomplete than have people waiting another 6 months or so. That, I guess, would be like professional development.
Well, BlueFlames is being harsh, but his main point still stands. I guess someone had to say it. You can make perfectly good, highly polished campaigns in a reasonable amount of time by simply not having super ambitious goals with the quantity of missions and extras like new ships. I'm not saying you are doing that, but we have several projects here that are. I sort of got it wrong myself and have learned my lesson, although I wasn't quite as bad as many other campaigns.
I honestly doubt these huge projects will ever reach completion; the staff will eventually just give up and move on to other things. I have been in this community for six years and have seen this happen to overly big campaigns far too many times. Even if they are completed, it won't be before much of their potential audience has left the community for other games.
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Originally posted by BlackDove
Again, it's not your place to judge nor analyse that.
If any campaign needs your opinion, they'll promote you to staff member.
The topic is off limits to you.
Can those who are the main audience say something then?
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Originally posted by Janos
Can those who are the main audience say something then?
You can say something, but not criticize a campaign for taking its time when it comes to keeping up with the times and making the best possible story and presentation possible to keep the main audience happy.
Seriously, if BWO is anything like I know it will be, then we're all in for a helluva play. Same goes for ST:R. And Scroll. And TAP. And... well, you get the point. Give these people just a little more time--when they say "it's done", it's done. I don't think the BWO people are going to degrade themselves or give its fans some half-baked campaign since the 'fans' keep pressuring them to release it.
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From what i cna see, mods like BWO have as much content as the original FS2 and had to do a partial restart of development halfway through in order to make up for SCP features.
Rome wasn't built in a day.
Anywyas, on the voices thing, i for one would not want BWO to be released wihtout it, i wouldnt play it, voices are that important to me. That is why i still havent played derelict, but may soon...
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Originally posted by BlackDove
Again, it's not your place to judge nor analyse that.
I most certainly am not judging nor am I analyzing.
Originally posted by BlackDove
If any campaign needs your opinion, they'll promote you to staff member.
I have to part of some project in order to present my opinion?
Originally posted by BlackDove
The topic is off limits to you.
And who are you to decide that?
Originally posted by aldo_14
The trust the people making projects to judge what is and what is not 'complete'. That's all I ask.
Originally posted by nuclear1
give its fans some half-baked campaign since the 'fans' keep pressuring them to release it.
Have I missed something? Who has pressured someone to release "half-baked campaign"?
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You can say something, but not criticize a campaign for taking its time when it comes to keeping up with the times and making the best possible story and presentation possible to keep the main audience happy.
Seriously, if BWO is anything like I know it will be, then we're all in for a helluva play. Same goes for ST:R. And Scroll. And TAP. And... well, you get the point. Give these people just a little more time--when they say "it's done", it's done. I don't think the BWO people are going to degrade themselves or give its fans some half-baked campaign since the 'fans' keep pressuring them to release it.
That's assuming we will still be around in this community when all of those are finished, which I doubt.
I have no idea where people are getting this idea that a campaign has to be gigantic or else it's "half baked" and not professional. There were actually quite a few good smallish campaigns for FS1 (maybe since in those days hardly anybody knew much about making pofs and mods in general), but I haven't seen many of those for FS2.
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Originally posted by CP5670
That's assuming we will still be around in this community when all of those are finished, which I doubt.
People have been predicting the death of the FS2 community for the last 3-4 years. Had we thought like that I doubt any of the hosted projects would even still be running now.
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The predictions have been true to some extent, if you consider the number of people there used to be (in the VBB days, for example) compared to how many there are now. There are quite a few people registered here, but a lot of them are no longer that interested in FS2 and come here to talk about other things. The community won't die but it will get smaller. Anyway, my point is that investing years into a huge mega-project just for presenting it to an audience is silly when it's this small, especially as aldo's remarks imply that some designers are not actually having fun with their projects and are just working on them for the prospect of a public release.
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Actually the predictions were a load of bollocks. The number of people active in the community and playing the game is pretty much roughly the same as what it was 3 years ago when the predictions were made.
You only need to look at the reg dates for this thread to see that there are lots of people here who registered after the community was supposed to be dying.
The SCP and TBP attracted quite a few new members. Sure there are less people than in the golden age but that happens to every single game. I don't see the numbers dwindling in the last couple of years. They've pretty much hit a stable plateau and may actually climb if TC's like Starfox and BSG bring us new members.
I get your point about not developing unless you're enjoying it (or at least are very close to release) but when people predict the death of the community I always call them on it cause I haven't seen signs of it happening yet.
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Originally posted by CP5670
Anyway, my point is that investing years into a huge mega-project just for presenting it to an audience is silly when it's this small, especially as aldo's remarks imply that some designers are not actually having fun with their projects and are just working on them for the prospect of a public release.
Not silly. Infact it's very commendable if you like the challenge and enjoy doing it. What is silly is that you prolonge the release because you wait for the briefing anis some guy promised to make two months ago. Or the release is delayed because of enermous hype about awesome new mods that you really don't enjoy doing anymore. But force yourself to work on because you advertized them so much...
I dont see this community dying anywhere in the near future. But the fact is that releasing stuff really breathes new life in it. Just releasing Derelict again with voices would make me equally happy as releasing BWO. Even if it doesn't have new cool eyecandy and tons of awesome new mods, but because the story is great and the missions are fun to play!
Ofcourse seeing those mods and all that stuff is neat. And ofcourse it is up to the project staff to decide what they will do. But its also up to them to decide what they will not do.
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(prophet): I mis-read your title... I thought it said June2005 so I thought it was going to be about a late release ;) ..
(to the complainers):
So I get sucked into reading this enite thread and guess what? I say stop being a hater. Campaigns progress as they can based on skill, talent, and time available.
Whiney people with no vision or appreciation of the work put into them IMHO have no credit to speak the garbage I've seen posted here.
The Ironic thing is I have practically no skills and my projects are now reaching the 2-3 year mark, yet I can understand both sides of the Issue (yay, about to celebrate my FOURTH birthday here!). I also get newbs from time to time in my thread asking "Is it done yet?" or "Why is it not done?". When asked if they woud like to help move any of the developments along usually I get the old, "I can't help, no skills" or people with the level of commitment your average streetwalker posesses (ie none).
There is nothing wrong with asking for a status update in a NICE way, but making yourself a Troll is rude, disrespectful, and really not needed in any community.
I bet the majority of people here would agree that WE do what we do for OUR OWN enjoyment, and not for some community-wide praise or recognition.
If you don't have hordes of people knocking on your door to help your project then it's a good bet they are not intersted in the subject, and when it ever gets finished are probably NOT going to play it anyway! So catering to that audience is foolish in the firstplace.
BD may have gone to far that your opinion isn't wanted/needed, BUT seriously... He's part of BWO so your getting the info straight from the source. What the (blank) more do you want?
You either accept that info or you don't, but you sure as hell are not gonna debate it. That has nothing to do with opinion, that's called facts.
How you feel about BWO is your business, but debating one person's feelings of the inner workings or management of something they are not even a part of with a member of that team who's telling you like it is, is both fruitless and arrogant.
and THAT is an opinion (mine)
Star Dragon
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@ Getter Robo G
This isn't about BWO but about large projects in general. Thought I mentioned BWO in my last post, it was meant to be as an example toghether with Derelict. I should have chosen some other campaign than that. Too late now.
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My last coment on this, but if you noticed (Prophet) I seperated who I was talking to/about. If you lumped yourself in that group, that's a personal choice.
It wasn't meant to target any specific individual, though there is one here who's only been here a year longer than me that DOES come to mind and should know better.
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Originally posted by Getter Robo G
The Ironic thing is I have practically no skills and my projects are now reaching the 2-3 year mark, yet I can understand both sides of the Issue (yay, about to celebrate my FOURTH birthday here!). I also get newbs from time to time in my thread asking "Is it done yet?" or "Why is it not done?". When asked if they woud like to help move any of the developments along usually I get the old, "I can't help, no skills" or people with the level of commitment your average streetwalker posesses (ie none).
Dude, you're reg. date is like, a year ago!!! What yer lying for ??!!
:p
I think some of you guys forget how hard it is to learn decent modding skills. Hell, I've been here for 2/3 years, having started not knowing the difference between a pof. or a pcx; and I still struggle to make the sort of stuff people like Aldo were making when he was still fairly new.
And that doesn't even touch on coding, fredding or general art.
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You forgot WHO I am (Star Dragon) first registered Feb/March 2002!
(why do you think I keep practically the same sig and added the line "I am the one and ONLY Star Dragon)
Don't believe me do a member search for my info and ask the mods...
(nm in case you too lazy to look):
Old info
http://dynamic.gamespy.com/~freespace/forums/member.php?s=&action=getinfo&userid=622
current
http://dynamic.gamespy.com/~freespace/forums/member.php?s=&action=getinfo&userid=2035
so do a little math and you'll figure out I've been here a little over 3 1/2 years and have 2216 posts not including this one ;)
I take accusations of LYING or resource hijacking VERY seriously so just don't go there... I had a problem on my end and they couldn't figure it out so I chalked it up to being hacked and re-registered under the Japanese name for Star Dragon (Getter Robo G). I lost my old post count and registration date... And that is your HLP history lesson for the day.
Now back to our sponsors...
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Originally posted by Roanoke
Hell, I've been here for 2/3 years, having started not knowing the difference between a pof. or a pcx
Dude, you're reg. date is like, a year ago!!! What yer lying for ??!!
:p
Yes, I know Roanoke used to be Mag 1, I'm just pointing out the irony of what he said
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Actually the predictions were a load of bollocks. The number of people active in the community and playing the game is pretty much roughly the same as what it was 3 years ago when the predictions were made.
You only need to look at the reg dates for this thread to see that there are lots of people here who registered after the community was supposed to be dying.
The SCP and TBP attracted quite a few new members. Sure there are less people than in the golden age but that happens to every single game. I don't see the numbers dwindling in the last couple of years. They've pretty much hit a stable plateau and may actually climb if TC's like Starfox and BSG bring us new members.
I get your point about not developing unless you're enjoying it (or at least are very close to release) but when people predict the death of the community I always call them on it cause I haven't seen signs of it happening yet.
Actually in those days (or a bit longer ago, maybe 4 years) there were almost two distinct FS communities of rougly equal size, the multiplayer group, some of who used to post in the squadwar forum, and everyone else who posted on all the other forums. It's certainly not that anywhere near that size anymore. There are new members registering but let's face it, only a small number of those are here to stay for a long time, just like with any other forum.
I think we will probably have a hardcore group of 60 or so people who are actually interested in FS here at all times (not necessarily all the same people as there are now), which is more than enough for the community to stay alive, but is not much of an audience for gaining fame, which is the only other reason I can think of for making these campaigns if it has ceased to be fun.
Anyway, I've made my point. I'm really looking forward to playing these big campaigns if and when they do come out.
Not silly. Infact it's very commendable if you like the challenge and enjoy doing it. What is silly is that you prolonge the release because you wait for the briefing anis some guy promised to make two months ago. Or the release is delayed because of enermous hype about awesome new mods that you really don't enjoy doing anymore. But force yourself to work on because you advertized them so much...
okay...that's essentially what I have been saying. :wtf: :D
I bet the majority of people here would agree that WE do what we do for OUR OWN enjoyment, and not for some community-wide praise or recognition.
Yes, I think most of the designers are like that. I certainly had fun with my attempt, although the fun factor did go down for me towards the end when the thing was going on for years. I'm mainly responding to aldo's stuff about how the campaign designers are doing everyone else a service and all that, as that isn't a sensible mindset to have when the community is so small.
You forgot WHO I am (Star Dragon) first registered Feb/March 2002!
(why do you think I keep practically the same sig and added the line "I am the one and ONLY Star Dragon)
Actually I knew a Star Dragon on PXO many years ago. A bit eccentric but a nice guy, a retired army veteran or something. So there is at least one more SD out there. :D
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Originally posted by Prophet
Have I missed something? Who has pressured someone to release "half-baked campaign"?
If you're criticising, say, MT or BWO for taking their time deciding on what is the appropriate level and quality of content, that's exactly what you're doing.
Originally posted by Roanoke
I think some of you guys forget how hard it is to learn decent modding skills. Hell, I've been here for 2/3 years, having started not knowing the difference between a pof. or a pcx; and I still struggle to make the sort of stuff people like Aldo were making when he was still fairly new.
And that doesn't even touch on coding, fredding or general art.
I dunno; you obviously don't remember the first thing I posted here :D
Anything is hard, really, if you want to be good. And the better is is, usually the more time it'll take.
Originally posted by CP5670
Yes, I think most of the designers are like that. I certainly had fun with my attempt, although the fun factor did go down for me towards the end when the thing was going on for years. I'm mainly responding to aldo's stuff about how the campaign designers are doing everyone else a service and all that, as that isn't a sensible mindset to have when the community is so small.
Hey, I'm not saying people should regard mod tems as mother teresa or even be glad they decide to start stuff, just recognise that part of the whole attraction of this is giving other people soemthing to play with, and asking that people have a bit of patience & trust in our judgement, because even if we **** up or miss planned dates, or whatever, it's not costing the ordinary forumite anything.
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Originally posted by CP5670
Actually in those days (or a bit longer ago, maybe 4 years) there were almost two distinct FS communities of rougly equal size, the multiplayer group, some of who used to post in the squadwar forum, and everyone else who posted on all the other forums. It's certainly not that anywhere near that size anymore. There are new members registering but let's face it, only a small number of those are here to stay for a long time, just like with any other forum.
In the golden age there were more people obviously but since the VBB closed I haven't really seen any huge decline in the number of people here.
Besides like I said before campaigns like BSG and TBP can bring us a lot of new blood.
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Originally posted by Prophet
I most certainly am not judging nor am I analyzing.
Don't contradict me on the obvious.
I have to part of some project in order to present my opinion?
You need to be part of a project to present your opinion on SAID PROJECT ONLY.
Do you see me giving educational lessons to aldo about his Lost Souls?
And who are you to decide that?
I am someone who has been with the community for 7 years. I am someone who was responsible for a squad reaching and maintaining first place (http://web.comhem.se/~u72302126/clear.jpg) in a league in Squad Wars. I am someone who is affiliated with the group and people that has its name in the "Special Thanks To" (http://web.comhem.se/~u72302126/specialthanksto.jpg) in FreeSpace2. I am someone who is working on one of the projects you use "as an example" to make your retarded point.
The question isn't who I am. Who the hell are YOU?
Go. Away.
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Yeah CP that was me. (what's this eccentric business though?) I "retired" from the Army after my 3 year tour (1988-1991) ;)
I think I flew like just a few months (once I got into modding I basicly gave up PXO and began my obsession with finding meshes all over the internet, especially of anime and OLD tv shows.) But I do remember there was a good crowd back then so it was always a good experience even though I REALLY sucked (and was lagging with my 56k connection and PII400, which I continually thumbed my nose at retail "limits" for battle of endor stuff.).
I'd fly the new FS2net but my comp won't let me :(
I don't mind though, I got PLENTY to keep me occupied.
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I think it might have been someone else, since the one I remember had a cable connection (and a very different writing style :D). I was on a lousy 56k back then, so I joined his hosted games quite often.
Maybe I ran into more than one SD but can't remember now. It all seems so long ago.
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Nope then it wasn't me I couldn't host a tea party then. Strange though PXO registered me then so I thought my name was unique (or could you have two of same name ?)... I got DSL in 2003 and cable in like 2004
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Now that I think of it, the guy I'm talking about was actually StarDragon, with no space. Close enough. :D I believe he was relatively old, in his 50s or so.
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Originally posted by BlackDove
I am someone who has been with the community for 7 years. I am someone who was responsible for a squad reaching and maintaining first place (http://web.comhem.se/~u72302126/clear.jpg) in a league in Squad Wars. I am someone who is affiliated with the group and people that has its name in the "Special Thanks To" (http://web.comhem.se/~u72302126/specialthanksto.jpg) in FreeSpace2. I am someone who is working on one of the projects you use "as an example" to make your retarded point.
The question isn't who I am. Who the hell are YOU?
Go. Away.
Your package is indeed impressive, sir, but I remind you that this is not a urinal.
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I seriously burst out laughing when I read that. :lol:
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Originally posted by Getter Robo G
You forgot WHO I am (Star Dragon) first registered Feb/March 2002!
(why do you think I keep practically the same sig and added the line "I am the one and ONLY Star Dragon)
Don't believe me do a member search for my info and ask the mods...
(nm in case you too lazy to look):
I take accusations of LYING or resource hijacking VERY seriously so just don't go there... I had a problem on my end and they couldn't figure it out so I chalked it up to being hacked and re-registered under the Japanese name for Star Dragon (Getter Robo G). I lost my old post count and registration date... And that is your HLP history lesson for the day.
Uh, sorry dude, I was joking. Ofcourse I remember you as your old tag. Maybe I should have included more smileys. No offence intended. :)
I was only on VBB for a couple of months but I miss not having the developers around. I always thought that was really cool.
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Originally posted by Blaise Russel
Your package is indeed impressive, sir, but I remind you that this is not a urinal.
Some people need to be pissed on just the same.
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Even so, sir, I would take it as a personal favour if you stopped waving it about and put it away.
You're frightening the children, sir. And people are trying to eat.
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I was trying to eat too, then he came and soiled on my plate.
So I had to take it out and lay down the law. Children need to know not to mess.
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tsk, tsk...
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It should be a sign of the size of the community that only one member so far has resorted to waving the e-penis.
Although then again, it could be a sign of the maturity of the community. Hmm...
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Some people need to be pissed on just the same.
And you claim your attitude is so different than mine. Pfft.
I'll also note that being a part of a winning squad doesn't automatically make you great management material. In fact, throwing you gameplay resumé around, like it means anything in regards to your development management ability, kind of says that you don't have any relevant experience, so you need a crutch.
And, keep in mind, that when you ask who the hell we are, we're your audience. When we're the one's you're supposedly designing the project for, it's bad form to turn around and say, "That may be true for everyone waiting[, but the] truth is, nobody on the staff cares when it's going to be released."
(By the way, BD, when I quote a chat log, as I did earlier in the thread, I make a point not to truncate at a point that omits part of the conversation. I'm still waiting for that vaunted explanation you promised a couple lines down after your cut.)
To clarify, I'm not asking for a half-baked campaign from anybody. I'm asking for campaigns that follow their original design plans, so that they might get released some time before 2050. I can wait a couple years for a campaign, and tolerate delays due to real-life occurances. I can understand when a campaign is held up because the staff lacks somebody with a particular skill set. My complaint isn't with such issues of circumstance. My complaint arises from poor management of a project. When an add-on becomes a mandatory feature for release, and new technologies suddenly must implimented, just because they're there, the delays become nonsensical. So many 'professional' projects in the gaming industry have fallen prey to this kind of feature creep, that I really hate to see it happening to the community projects here, hence my hateful fervor against such silliness.
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Yeah, going into the details of me managing a squad is really the way to discredit me. Truly because of that aspect, I must know nothing about development.
Wow. Staggering stuff. What's next? Are we going to be generalizing which country and race is stupid?
Also, I cut that part because it wasn't relevant to your catastrophic line of thought. Feel free to quote it. I explained everything to you. If you didn't get that my explanation was "It's none of your damn buisness", that'd be your fault.
And keep in mind, when I say "who the hell you are to judge something that isn't your buisness", I actually mean "Go away and come back when you grow up".
I wasn't aware these things needed to be spelled out.
As far as "e-penis'" go, it was meant to illustrate the point that I know what I'm talking about in contrast to someone who has been here for only a few months. However, they also represent my work (because that WAS work, like it or not) in and with the community in one way or another.
It is also a fact, that many of you cannot display your achievments here, but then again, that's not my problem.
Also BF, I never asked you to be my audience or to not be my audience. I asked you not to act like an imbecile. There is a difference. Audience or not, it does not excuse you from acting like a moron.
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This thread is heading for lockage.
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You resort to name-calling, BD, and I need to grow up, eh? Intriguing.
On the note about the audience, nobody gets to choose their audience. Hollywood doesn't choose who goes to the movies; Broadway doesn't choose who partakes in stage routines; Valve doesn't choose who plays Half Life 2; campaign developers typically don't choose who plays their campaigns, and specifically, you don't have much say over who does or doesn't take interest in BWO's development.
Your so-called explanations aren't explanations at all, and that's another huge problem. You make declarations, such as, 'You want this upgrade and that upgrade,' but you don't say why, and don't even consider the possibility that you're wrong. If the voicepack and SCP upgrades are going to tack on another six to twelve months of development time, I would rather see them done as an add-on. Other members of the BWO audience, that you so casually cast aside, seem to agree, judging from this thread.
"It's none of your damn business," again, is a declaration, not an explanation. You say I'm not privy to any information whatsoever about development decisions because I'm "not involved" in the project, but when the project is being hyped as the next best thing to sex, you've involved your audience. We don't need to know the day-to-day stuff, like what mission bug a FREDer needs to debug next, granted, but when you make a development decision that could come with another twelve month delay, your audience deserves to know why that decision is so important. If a significant chunk of your audience disagrees with the decision, it's generally a sign that you should take note and take some time out to reconsider. If Valve says that the next patch for Half Life 2 will change it into a third-person RTS game, people will disagree, and Valve will probably reverse the decision. You wouldn't regard them as maintaining a professional standard if they brushed off their detractors, so why do you simultaneously regard yourself as working at a professional level while engaging in such unprofessional behavior?
I'm not going to grovel at your feet for making a campaign, no matter how many times you tell me to shut up and get back in line. You're the so-called professional, so maybe you need to learn to take the bad feedback with the good.
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If you don't like it, what are you going to do? Not download? Whine on the forums about it? Because all your unhappiness... doesn't affect the developers in the slightest. There's no sales to worry about, after all.
There is doing professional quality content, and working like professionals. The latter is just stupid.... pros only explain what they do when it's needed for PR and the eventual sales. Hell, I'd bet the only reason titles are announced prior to release is to get that publicity bandwagon on the road, and sometimes when the have still to attract publishers. (the main reason for announcing campaigns is really to get staff)
Although... how many developers actually make their development docs public? How many say 'we're thinking off adding this, but we can't make our minds up'?
Isn't the one thing that annoys people more than anything else, when a developer releases something half-baked, buggy and behind the curve ("patch it in later!"), just to get the money-men off their backs? And these are the people whose livelihoods depends on it, too.
EDIT; worth noting. Half Life, one of the most succesfull games in history, was postponed for about 8 months or so because the developers decided it needed more work.
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Originally posted by BlueFlames
You resort to name-calling, BD, and I need to grow up, eh? Intriguing.
On the note about the audience, nobody gets to choose their audience. Hollywood doesn't choose who goes to the movies; Broadway doesn't choose who partakes in stage routines; Valve doesn't choose who plays Half Life 2; campaign developers typically don't choose who plays their campaigns, and specifically, you don't have much say over who does or doesn't take interest in BWO's development.
Your so-called explanations aren't explanations at all, and that's another huge problem. You make declarations, such as, 'You want this upgrade and that upgrade,' but you don't say why, and don't even consider the possibility that you're wrong. If the voicepack and SCP upgrades are going to tack on another six to twelve months of development time, I would rather see them done as an add-on. Other members of the BWO audience, that you so casually cast aside, seem to agree, judging from this thread.
"It's none of your damn business," again, is a declaration, not an explanation. You say I'm not privy to any information whatsoever about development decisions because I'm "not involved" in the project, but when the project is being hyped as the next best thing to sex, you've involved your audience. We don't need to know the day-to-day stuff, like what mission bug a FREDer needs to debug next, granted, but when you make a development decision that could come with another twelve month delay, your audience deserves to know why that decision is so important. If a significant chunk of your audience disagrees with the decision, it's generally a sign that you should take note and take some time out to reconsider. If Valve says that the next patch for Half Life 2 will change it into a third-person RTS game, people will disagree, and Valve will probably reverse the decision. You wouldn't regard them as maintaining a professional standard if they brushed off their detractors, so why do you simultaneously regard yourself as working at a professional level while engaging in such unprofessional behavior?
I'm not going to grovel at your feet for making a campaign, no matter how many times you tell me to shut up and get back in line. You're the so-called professional, so maybe you need to learn to take the bad feedback with the good.
Stupid is as stupid does. Name calling isn't my purpose of insulting you. It is the best and quickest way to describe your behaviour on this particular matter.
No matter how many paragraphs you write, you will only get the "declarations" which you should treat as explanations.
None of your buisness. No matter how much you try to provoke a response on the subject of "why" - which you are clueless to - you will not obtain it. There isn't any feedback for you to give, unless on specifically released material.
Other than that, it's none of your buisness. Development doesn't concern you. Bye.
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[color=66ff00]I think a few of you guys need to ignore this thread and go take a breather.
Aldo's pretty much covered everything in a sane manner with his posts. I'd also like to reinforce the fact that this is a community of volinteers, if you want to see a campaign sooner then I'd advise you to start paying or start contributing.
As someone who sees all of the internal forums I can quite comfortably tell you all that the people working on these projects are attempting to make the very best of Freespace that they can. They don't have to share the end result with you, they do so out of kindness.
Think about that.
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They don't have to share the end result with you, they do so out of kindness.
Part of the problem is that they aren't sharing it, if they never become willing to call it finished. That's why I'm ranting about feature-creep. If the project's destined to never be completed, it's just a website and a forum with a whole lot of hype and status bars that move backwards, if at all.
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[color=66ff00]You're being awfully adamant about something you have no control over. I'd go do something more constructive with my time were I you.
Whether or not any campaign gets finished is utterly out of your hands, you may as well rant about man not having set up a base on the moon by now. You're being negatively critical and overly repetitive and it's not going to win you any friends or speed things up at all.
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Originally posted by BlackDove
I know what I'm talking about in contrast to someone who has been here for only a few months.
I do hope you are not talking about me. You do remember that there is life outside the forums? I, nor anyone else, was not born on the day they registered.
For myself, I'm a VWBB survivor. And have not been around because I simply lost my connection and lacked any proper access to the net...
And I think this thread should be locked. It has become a two guys pissing duel and either side refuses to see the others point of view, nor do they even try to understand it. Hence, this "discussion" isn't going anywhere...
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Originally posted by BlueFlames
Part of the problem is that they aren't sharing it, if they never become willing to call it finished. That's why I'm ranting about feature-creep. If the project's destined to never be completed, it's just a website and a forum with a whole lot of hype and status bars that move backwards, if at all.
Don't confuse feature creep with wanting to get the best result, though. Things do change, work sometimes turns out to be worse than hoped, etc. Adding stuff for the sake of it is daft, I recognise that - but I would bet the likes of BWO and MT aren't doing that, just taking advantage of new opportunities. Bear in mind these 2 in particular were started before the SCP - there's probably stuff intended but dropped for them that can now be added. And if the developers feel that those features/content add something worthwhile, then I won't complain - because I trust their judgement, and it's their decision to make, not mine.
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I think the contention is that you don't need straight-off voice acting or a dozen shiny new cutscenes or never-seen-before fleets for all three races PLUS NEW ALIEN SPECIES or fifty missions with branching storyline and four different SOC loops or a completely new interface or an RTS mode or whatever in order to produce the best result, to create something of a "professional standard." After all, isn't the central, key, core appeal of a project its content and story?
(More generally:) Of course, I dislike this implication that a project needs to be huge and unwieldy in order to be considered "good" or "professional." If a big project has to have a lifetime measured in years to be half-decent, where does that leave projects that only took months, because the project lead had the sense not to write FS3?
If the problem is that the developer doesn't have enough time to implement this huge f*ck-off idea because he's only part-time, surely then the answer is not to take five years trying to get it in but instead not to do the huge f*ck-off idea in the first place? Surely what is needed is not patience but rather a sense of perspective? We're not big Hollywood studios, so perhaps it is inadvisable to try and release big blockbuster movies, no?
You know, if there were fewer "big projects" and more "small campaigns" the universe'd be a better place. :P
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I think we need both.
There's nothing wrong with having big projects that take years as long as there are people doing small projects that take months too. The problem is that everyone wants to do their own project and very few people are willing to work together in small groups and make the small less than a year projects.
I don't think anyone is saying that a project needs to be big to be good or professional. But if a project was designed to be big then releasing it when it's small is going to make it half-baked and poor.
I definately don't think there should be less "big" campaigns and as someone who sometimes stands on the shoulders of giants with his own campaigns (e.g SaH being based on Inferno) I can't see why you'd be calling for less of them either.
What we really need is not less big campaigns but fewer small campaigns (e.g one person doing a campaign they'll never finish). What I like to see is people doing exactly what you did in SaH and using what's out there instead of starting a huge project of their own that will never get finished.
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But if a project was designed to be big then releasing it when it's small is going to make it half-baked and poor.
True. But some features are extraneous and can be disposed with. The biggest offenders are, obviously, voicework and cutscenes; things of that ilk. Nobody *needs* voices or movies, smaller campaigns did and do well enough without them, and it's not as if leaving them out temporarily will render the campaign meaningless and incomprehensible. Ultimately, they'll be packaged as optional downloads anyway.
More fundamental things likes ship models and missions can't be cut so easily, but in this case the only cure is not to aim too high in the first place. I once had an idea for SAH where the EA happened across a new jump node and discovered a Terran colony in the system beyond which set off from Earth 'round about these times and had developed its own unique (and primitive) spacefaring fleet. There was some hoohah about rebellion and Ancient technology and a mandatory Shivan appearance, and it wasn't very good, but the important thing is that I didn't go through with it because another Terran fleet would be beyond my skills, even if I used my reputation of SAH to team up with somebody with modeling skills.
The point? Oh, right, well, the point is not to write cheques you can't cash. I suppose, though, that it's a matter of perspective and furthermore the example is not applicable to people with, you know, actual pof-making ability and stuff. Even so, everything is still second to the story, and if you've overstretched yourself you've overstretched yourself. Something can be cut out.
Thing is, if a small campaign can get along fine without any mods at all, then to a certain extent the same principle applies to any big campaign, unless said campaign is all style and no substance, aha. Eh? Eh?
I definately don't think there should be less "big" campaigns and as someone who sometimes stands on the shoulders of giants with his own campaigns (e.g SaH being based on Inferno) I can't see why you'd be calling for less of them either.
Also true. I wasn't entirely serious with that statement, but then again, I wasn't completely joking, either.
Thinking more philosophically: what if every project ran on a schedule of five years? What if every project offered to finish the FS saga in a explosive climactic rush of explosions, supra-juggernaughts and galaxy-sized space battles? What if every project promised full voiceacting and more cinematics than FS1 and 2 combined? What if this horrendous strawman was reality?
We'd be buggered, wouldn't we? Nothing would get done. No campaigns, no individual models, no backgrounds or weapons, because everybody would be saving them for the big projects, and because the big projects are waiting for big releases, there's nothing to enjoy.
Now, what if everyone did small releases? What if people didn't faff around trying to beat Volition at their own game, but instead spent their time making and releasing models and missions and campaigns and such? It's not even as if it precludes a big overarching plan, so long as it's just that and not an attempt to emulate the big publishers. Someone could produce a fighter, individually, and then a bomber, individually, and a cruiser, and a freighter, until he ends up with a complete ship list that just so happens to share a common style and could, feasibly, be a "new race" or faction or whatever, to be used by the original maker or by others. It'd be harder to accomplish the same thing with missions, as hard-hitting stories don't work so well spread out evenly over several months or whatever, but... lots of releases, all round!
What a terrific, unrealistic, open-development-esque communist idyll!
It's blatantly one-sided, I know, but it illustrates something, and that is I think it'd be better to err in favour of lots of releases than in favour of none at all. A big project ties up resources in the hope of awesomeness tomorrow, whereas small projects can be finished and enjoyed today. If forced to choose between the death of big ideas and the death of productivity, I'd know which way I'd flow.
(And I am coming down heavily on big projects, and it's unfair, and it's not really accurate at all, and in truth I don't really believe this, but I am interested in advocating a particular design ethos even if I am exaggerating the situation greatly. So, disclaimer: I do not wish to freight this or any other post with imperatives, and if it wasn't so sappy, I'd say 'big projects are A-OK', but it is, so I won't.)
Returning back from the detour, I could make the point that projects like Inferno and FSPort, which I have used and abused in the process of making my own campaigns, avoid the trap of big projects by using multiple releases to prevent stagnation. Technically, The Babylon Project is the worst offender of being too big for its team, being an on-going project, but because it releases and develops continuously, people remain interested and they provide feedback, which inspires the team to keep producing, and so on, so forth.
(Maybe I just dream of a situation where people produce things that can be used and enjoyed; filling gaps in current Terran/Vasudan/Shivan fleet lists and small, potent campaigns that can be played right now instead of another GTVA Colossus or an epic tale set a thousand years after Capella and due to be released on the same date.)
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Often, content constrains story; the story I want to do with LS can't be done with the existing FS2 models, backgrounds, etc.
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Blaise Russel: Couldn't have said it better myself. :yes:
I think we need both.
There's nothing wrong with having big projects that take years as long as there are people doing small projects that take months too. The problem is that everyone wants to do their own project and very few people are willing to work together in small groups and make the small less than a year projects.
I don't think anyone is saying that a project needs to be big to be good or professional. But if a project was designed to be big then releasing it when it's small is going to make it half-baked and poor.
I definately don't think there should be less "big" campaigns and as someone who sometimes stands on the shoulders of giants with his own campaigns (e.g SaH being based on Inferno) I can't see why you'd be calling for less of them either.
What we really need is not less big campaigns but fewer small campaigns (e.g one person doing a campaign they'll never finish). What I like to see is people doing exactly what you did in SaH and using what's out there instead of starting a huge project of their own that will never get finished.
As was stated before, this situation is pretty much unavoidable due to the nature of FS2's story and the amount of time it takes to make even one fully polished mission. I know I would never devote so much time and effort to making missions that aren't exactly as I want them and follow a story different than what I have in mind, which is what joining an existing project would ask of me, since I am after all doing it for fun. I'm sure many other people feel the same way, especially people who have been around the community for a while and have experience in mission design and the details of the FS universe. This isn't going to change anytime soon, unless of course a project head advertises that they are paying their staff. :D
The sorry part of this whole affair is that a few people won't even consider that there might be a problem here, preferring to flat out deny its existence and get way pissed at anyone who brings it up.
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Originally posted by Blaise Russel
True. But some features are extraneous and can be disposed with. The biggest offenders are, obviously, voicework and cutscenes; things of that ilk. Nobody *needs* voices or movies, smaller campaigns did and do well enough without them, and it's not as if leaving them out temporarily will render the campaign meaningless and incomprehensible. Ultimately, they'll be packaged as optional downloads anyway.
Boy have you chosen the wrong person to argue that with. Quite frankly I've been having nightmares until recently about how to tell the MG story without cutscenes. Now that we have in-game cutscenes it might be possible to avoid a full rendered one but a year ago it was a case of introduce the Starborn in cutscenes or don't bother with the project at all.
The simple fact is that like the narrator in a story the Starborn are there for the player not the character he controls. As the development of the mod proceeded it became obvious that the only way to introduce them was to step outside of the game engine with a cutscene or to simply hand the players a big readme and tell them to read it before starting the game. Anything else would have left the player wondering "Who are these guys?" and completely spoiling the story.
Originally posted by Blaise Russel
More fundamental things likes ship models and missions can't be cut so easily, but in this case the only cure is not to aim too high in the first place.
There's a difference between not aiming high and not telling your story at all because it will require determination to finish. From the moment I read Geezer's plot for MG I knew I wanted in. I knew it would take a long time to complete but I figured that there was no way that I was going to let the story not get told.
MG mostly uses mods released to the community because we knew how hard it would be to make a new fleet but there are a small number of mods we can't do without. Without a modeller on board I knew that it would be hard but again it was either a case of finding one, learning how to do it myself or simply giving up on the whole plotline. I certainly wasn't going to do the latter.
Originally posted by Blaise Russel
The point? Oh, right, well, the point is not to write cheques you can't cash.
But surely this whole thread is about people writing cheques they can cash as long as it's on a long term repayment policy :D
Originally posted by Blaise Russel
Thing is, if a small campaign can get along fine without any mods at all, then to a certain extent the same principle applies to any big campaign, unless said campaign is all style and no substance, aha. Eh? Eh?
Again it depends on the campaign you want to make. Sometimes you do need a mod to tell a story. Sometimes you need lots.
Originally posted by Blaise Russel
It's blatantly one-sided, I know, but it illustrates something, and that is I think it'd be better to err in favour of lots of releases than in favour of none at all. A big project ties up resources in the hope of awesomeness tomorrow, whereas small projects can be finished and enjoyed today. If forced to choose between the death of big ideas and the death of productivity, I'd know which way I'd flow.
I don't believe we have to choose. There's room for both.
Originally posted by Blaise Russel
Returning back from the detour, I could make the point that projects like Inferno and FSPort, which I have used and abused in the process of making my own campaigns, avoid the trap of big projects by using multiple releases to prevent stagnation. Technically, The Babylon Project is the worst offender of being too big for its team, being an on-going project, but because it releases and develops continuously, people remain interested and they provide feedback, which inspires the team to keep producing, and so on, so forth.
Some stories have that option. Some don't though. MG has a nice breakpoint that allows us to split the campaign into a chapter 1 demo and the main story. After the breakpoint there is no good point at which to end the story. It would be like ending a movie halfway through and saying "come back next year for the ending". (And I'm not even talking about somthing like the end of Empire Strikes Back. I mean there is literally no place suitable that wouldn't feel like we just decided to cut and run)
Originally posted by Blaise Russel
(Maybe I just dream of a situation where people produce things that can be used and enjoyed; filling gaps in current Terran/Vasudan/Shivan fleet lists and small, potent campaigns that can be played right now instead of another GTVA Colossus or an epic tale set a thousand years after Capella and due to be released on the same date.)
In many ways I agree with you. What we need to take steps on is not the big campaigns but the little ones that go nowhere. I know it's hard to distinguish those at the inception from things like your own campaigns and Sync/Transcend which do deliver but the community is wasting many times more effort on 1 or 2 man projects that never see the light of day. At least when something like Reci or OTT gets cancelled some of the hard work is used by other campaigns. When the small fry die it's all wasted.
Originally posted by CP5670
As was stated before, this situation is pretty much unavoidable due to the nature of FS2's story and the amount of time it takes to make even one fully polished mission. I know I would never devote so much time and effort to making missions that aren't exactly as I want them and follow a story different than what I have in mind, which is what joining an existing project would ask of me, since I am after all doing it for fun.
Have you not heard the basic hypocrisy in your statement? "I can do whatever I like as long as I enjoy it. I'm not going to tell anyone elses story cause I don't want to. You, you and you. Shorten your stories so that they aren't what you want to do but can be released more quickly, chop chop!"
I'll be damned if anyone is going to tell me that he can do whatever he wants for five years but if I do I should think of the community. If I enjoy spending years working on a "big" campaign who gives you the right to lord it over me and say you should do it this way but I'm not going do it someone elses way?
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Have you not heard the basic hypocrisy in your statement? "I can do whatever I like as long as I enjoy it. I'm not going to tell anyone elses story cause I don't want to. You, you and you. Shorten your stories so that they aren't what you want to do but can be released more quickly, chop chop!"
I'll be damned if anyone is going to tell me that he can do whatever he wants for five years but if I do I should think of the community. If I enjoy spending years working on a "big" campaign who gives you the right to lord it over me and say you should do it this way but I'm not going do it someone elses way?
I like how you are equating a very general suggestion on time management with the specific story requirements of a campaign project. I'm always open to any suggestions for my own work, certainly something as general and vague as this one, but are you trying to tell me that there is a campaign out there that will allow me to just do whatever I want with the story? Let me sign up! :D There are simply no campaigns like that; without a fairly restrictive back-story for mission designers that ties events together, what you will end up with is not a campaign but a collection of good standalone missions.
Also, you're free to ignore any advice in this thread and spend your entire life with your campaign, if that's what suits you. I for one won't be complaining. There is no such freedom when working on someone else's campaign unless you happen to have the same story vision (which is less likely with FS2 than most other games); going against the main plot means effectively leaving the project.
And show me where I said you should you think of the community. I've been saying over and over again that this is precisely what you should not do. It's clear from the earlier posts in this thread that not everyone is enjoying the projects after having them drag on for years (and who can blame them?) and are doing it just because they think the community will appreciate it. No wonder they are blowing their tops when the slightest hint of criticism comes up. (okay, forget about BF's attitude, but Prophet's original post brought some relevant issues to light)
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Originally posted by High Max
Yeah, it is pathetic.:sigh: I do like the fact that BWO is adding FS Open features to it, but the voices can wait. WHY NOT JUST MAKE A VOICE PATCH after the campaign is released? Some people are just too damn picky.
Well, in all fairness I have to say that Derelict got release without voices. And the voices are still not released. The work can very easily end up unfinished if your... "suggestion" is heeded.
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Originally posted by High Max
Yeah, it is pathetic.:sigh: I do like the fact that BWO is adding FS Open features to it, but the voices can wait. WHY NOT JUST MAKE A VOICE PATCH after the campaign is released? Some people are just too damn picky. I'm not that damn picky about voices, just the quality of the missions and ships and story. Plus the files are too large and I have dial-up. I could download from the college and put it on my flash drive though. The main thing that I find hilarious about the whole thing considering BWO is the fact that Inferno has many more ships, weapons, and extra stuff compared to BWO, yet Inferno looks to be released before BWO. What the hell? That is messed up. No one cares about having voices right in this moment. Why not just make a patch? Because the BWO team is afraid that if they don't add them right when the campaign is released, then it won't be as popular and you won't get many downloads? Wrong. Truth is, if you release voices and with such a large file size, you will actually get less downloads because all the 56kers can't download such a massive file. So you would actually be losing downloads if the voices and campaign are in one huge file. Though my two top campaigns that I'm waiting for are Inferno and BWO, I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that Inferno WILL be released before BWO (by Christmas if everthing goes as planned), at the rate things are going with BWO.:eek: It gets extremely old having to wait an astronomical amount of time for a project that should've been released years ago:shaking:
Also, why doesn't someone just remove that Babel Effect page on Volition Watch that says "coming in November of 2001"? Keeping it there is pointless, wastes server space, and deceives n00bs into thinking that the campaign is still being worked on when infact Babel Effect is dead.
... and people wonder why I insult them.
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And I honestly missed voices in Derelict. I'd hate to see something as story-centric as BWO get released without voice, if just because I want the full experience the first time I play it.
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Originally posted by CP5670
I like how you are equating a very general suggestion on time management with the specific story requirements of a campaign project. I'm always open to any suggestions for my own work, certainly something as general and vague as this one, but are you trying to tell me that there is a campaign out there that will allow me to just do whatever I want with the story? Let me sign up! :D There are simply no campaigns like that; without a fairly restrictive back-story for mission designers that ties events together, what you will end up with is not a campaign but a collection of good standalone missions.
I'm not talking about time management and if you're being honest neither were you. You've already mentioned in this thread that you're talking about campaigns taking too long because of more than simply bad time management. e.g
Well, BlueFlames is being harsh, but his main point still stands. I guess someone had to say it. You can make perfectly good, highly polished campaigns in a reasonable amount of time by simply not having super ambitious goals with the quantity of missions and extras like new ships. I'm not saying you are doing that, but we have several projects here that are. I sort of got it wrong myself and have learned my lesson, although I wasn't quite as bad as many other campaigns.
How is that a comment about time management? That's a dig at all the hosted campaigns you think are trying to do too much. Well sorry but it's not your choice how we decide to spend our time and it's pretty arrogant of you to tell us how we should spend our time when you're not willing to join a hosted campaign and have someone tell you what to do yourself.
Originally posted by CP5670
Also, you're free to ignore any advice in this thread and spend your entire life with your campaign, if that's what suits you. I for one won't be complaining. .
Post already quoted proving that you are.
Originally posted by CP5670
And show me where I said you should you think of the community. I've been saying over and over again that this is precisely what you should not do. It's clear from the earlier posts in this thread that not everyone is enjoying the projects after having them drag on for years (and who can blame them?) and are doing it just because they think the community will appreciate it. No wonder they are blowing their tops when the slightest hint of criticism comes up. (okay, forget about BF's attitude, but Prophet's original post brought some relevant issues to light)
Well if you're doing it out of a desire to just pass on advice that's fine. I'll even thank you for that one. Don't happen to agree with your advice but that's another matter.
I'm not working on MG primarily for the adoration of the community. I work on campaigns cause I enjoy it. It's my choice to work on the campaign and it's my choice to decide what level of completion is good enough. That's been pretty much the view of every single person who is currently hosting a project and I'm sure it was also your view when you had one of your own.
People are blowing their tops not because of criticism of their campaigns but because it is pretty arrogant for someone outside of the team to tell them what they should cut out to meet some arbitrary deadline. Pretty much all of the people with "big" campaigns are saying "It's my campaign. It's my choice. I'll take advice but I won't take someone not connected to my team telling me. No cutscenes, No voice acting. Move faster"
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Originally posted by karajorma
I'm not working on MG primarily for the adoration of the community. I work on campaigns cause I enjoy it. It's my choice to work on the campaign and it's my choice to decide what level of completion is good enough. That's been pretty much the view of every single person who is currently hosting a project and I'm sure it was also your view when you had one of your own.
Quote in red is about to be siggified. I don't know about a lot of other people, but if I'm going to make a campaign, I'm going to do it because I enjoy FREDing and telling stories. I don't do it to be immortalized in the FS community or to do some good for my rep (trust me, no amount of campaigns can fix that right now).
The only real reason that I don't do voiceacting in Rogue or GTI is that I simply can't find any female voiceactors. I've got several female characters at critical parts in the story, and if I can't do full VA'ing, then I won't do it at all.
Originally ranted by High Max
*snip*
That was totally uncalled for. Let BWO do its job at making a top-quality campaign, and if it doesn't deliver (which I highly doubt it won't), then criticize away. Honestly, how many single campaigns have been in development for as long as BWO? It's not as if every single campaign in development has taken as long as BWO, and with a number of already-available campaigns up for download, you should have plenty to tide you over until BWO comes out. Go back and play some of CE's other projects and then look at why they're taking so much time on BWO. Derelict and Warzone were top-quality campaigns, with each of them getting better and better. Let BWO take their time. They'll do their job, and they'll do it right.
My complaint arises from poor management of a project. When an add-on becomes a mandatory feature for release, and new technologies suddenly must implimented, just because they're there, the delays become nonsensical.
Am I correct in assuming that you have only released your solo project Second Front? Are you involved with any other campaigns that operate as a team? If not, I don't really think that you have much room to argue this. Managing a project is much more difficult than you could imagine. There are some who make it look easy (such as Sesqui when I did work for Scroll; I learned a lot of project-leading skills from his examples), but it really is difficult. Trying to lead a group of FREDers is hard enough in terms of getting them to complete their missions within a reasonable timeframe, but also managing modellers and others just adds to it.
I know CE's standard of campaign building and management, and I'll leave the BWO team to live up to that standard.
The simple fact is that like the narrator in a story the Starborn are there for the player not the character he controls. As the development of the mod proceeded it became obvious that the only way to introduce them was to step outside of the game engine with a cutscene or to simply hand the players a big readme and tell them to read it before starting the game. Anything else would have left the player wondering "Who are these guys?" and completely spoiling the story.
I can hopefully expand using this quote. Just like kara needs cutscenes to tell MindGames' story, I have my own needs to tell Rogue or GTI's story. These happen to take the form of the music, and I thank Singh muy mucho for all the painstaking work that he's done to give GTI the music that it needs to help tell the story. It might sound confusing at first, but, IMO, the music can add to the atmosphere wonderfully, so long as it's the right track at the right time. Wagnerian motifs (like John Williams' style) can be used to add to the story in a way that is simply powerful; Middle-Eastern drums and vocals heralding a Vasudan fleet, or dark and mysterious tunes playing with the GTI...
My point is that every team has its own needs. If BWO feels that voice-acting will add to its character-heavy campaign and give it soul, then let them have voice-acting.
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I must agree with Blaise Russel on his POW..
I myself am working on a one-man-campaign currently (as on some others) and it is going slowly, but at leat I release 90% of the stuff I do to the public.
At least if my campaign fails people (community) will have something out of it...
The Archangel and Whitehall are for instance central from my 3rd Chapter (if it ever get's done that is) but I released them anyway.. Why not? let the pople have fun! :D
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Originally posted by Prophet
Well, in all fairness I have to say that Derelict got release without voices. And the voices are still not released. The work can very easily end up unfinished if your... "suggestion" is heeded.
The original release of Derelict didn't include voices, but I'm not sure whether or not it was ever the intention to fully voiceact it at the time of its release. There is an unfinished voiceacting pack for a few of the missions available. Blaise's Derelict re-release was made with the full intention of being voiceacted, and I know that the voiceacting is almost complete and should be released relatively soon; I finished up my own part (Tau Sigma Station) a month or two ago. I would personally like BWO to be released without voices initially, as their lack doesn't really bother me, but it's ultimately the team's choice as to what they want in their finished product.
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Are you saying that the community got nothing when Reci and OTT were cancelled?
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Boy have you chosen the wrong person to argue that with. Quite frankly I've been having nightmares until recently about how to tell the MG story without cutscenes. Now that we have in-game cutscenes it might be possible to avoid a full rendered one but a year ago it was a case of introduce the Starborn in cutscenes or don't bother with the project at all.
My own inclination would have leaned towards not bothering. If there's no way to implement something because the first choice is too ambitious and second choices ('anonymous' command briefings like Derelict's quotes, SAH's history essays and FSPort's Ancient transcriptions, in-game cutscene-missions at pre-SCP, Technological-Superiority levels) don't do it justice, I personally would not bother, it's not that critical anyway. Which is somewhat unambitious and overly flexible, but it'd be a strange world if we were all alike, eh?
Of course, I have the (dis)advantage of not wanting to create fantastical storylines that push envelopes and involve entirely new concepts or races or ships or whatever. My interest is in filling in gaps in the current FS mythos, so to a certain extent I already have all the mods I could ever want; they were all included in the game. Mods tend to hang off my stories, instead of my stories hanging on mods. My interest doesn't lend me to having project-critical mods, which is probably why I can be so blasé about dismissing elements that are too much bother for me to implement. So yeah, valid point, man.
I don't believe we have to choose. There's room for both.
Oh, of course there is, of course, and the question is academic. But I still would prefer more intensive, productive smaller projects than bigger, more ambitious, slower goliaths.
In many ways I agree with you. What we need to take steps on is not the big campaigns but the little ones that go nowhere. I know it's hard to distinguish those at the inception from things like your own campaigns and Sync/Transcend which do deliver but the community is wasting many times more effort on 1 or 2 man projects that never see the light of day. At least when something like Reci or OTT gets cancelled some of the hard work is used by other campaigns. When the small fry die it's all wasted.
I disagree somewhat. Firstly, missions are wasted no matter the size of the project. While models and music and such can survive intact and live again in another campaign, if a project reaches core-content-production stage and then keels over, that's FREDtime wasted right there.
Secondly, I'd argue that 'small' projects that never make it are more 'big' than 'small'. They're not as big as the very big ones, but it seems to me that a campaign that is too ambitious for its maker automatically becomes 'too big'. Then again, 'big' is relative. Is a thirty, forty mission campaign big for me? What about a new fighter model? A whole fleet list? A music track? How about two? And for someone else? What about a team of people? A team of people that aren't overstretched? Hmm...
Regardless, I'd still like to see more small projects... I mean, sort of taking the model scene and expanding it, so people are releasing single missions and mini-campaigns and less mod-dependant projects and things. But this is more an extension of my own design philosophy.
My point is that every team has its own needs. If BWO feels that voice-acting will add to its character-heavy campaign and give it soul, then let them have voice-acting.
There's no "letting" them have anything; it's not in anyone's power to tell anyone what to do, be it abandon projects that some random member has decided is "too big", whatever that means, and has too many "extraneous features" or to force people to help established projects simply because they have a forum and a badge and got here first. This is important, although it doesn't need to be emphasised because if anyone tries it, they'll accomplish sod all.
Though it would be a cool HLP-Movie-spinoff-thing for Communists to take over the Administration and force the listed projects into hiding.
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Reci was frankly a ****ed up project. I managed it poorly, and I accept that - and have learned from it. It's why I try discourage newcomers wanting to make stupidly huge uber-campaigns....
But at the same time, I trust the judgement of the people behind the big campaigns - MT, TVW, MG, BWO, etc - to make these decisions. I think it's worth noting that IIRC the main reason OTT - and the Descent campaign prior - was cancelled was a lack of FREDers, not overrunning on features.
(hopefully, FRED academy is preventing that from happening again ;) )
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I'm doing my damnest to make sure that people who want to learn to FRED can do so as easily as possible. Hopefully that will result in less cancelled projects due to a lack of FREDders rather than all of the people who went through the academy rushing off to do their own campaigns. Either way at least the FREDders have more of an appreciation of what to do with FRED and what people like in a mission. :)
Originally posted by Blaise Russel
I disagree somewhat. Firstly, missions are wasted no matter the size of the project. While models and music and such can survive intact and live again in another campaign, if a project reaches core-content-production stage and then keels over, that's FREDtime wasted right there.
The problem with the kind of campaign I'm on about is that they're the kind started by someone who's just learned FRED and decides to go off and make their own campaign. Occasionally they do a good job but quite often they don't and get bored or get a better idea and abandon the project halfway through.
I made that mistake myself with TMA and although it isn't abandoned (I plan to rewrite it) all my early work has been. So that's 6 months worth of work and around 20 FREDded missions not precisely down the drain (TMA was were I learned to FRED) but with no disernable end product.
The FA was in part designed to prevent that. FREDders learn in a way that gives the community viable missions while avoiding newbish mistakes (Which is what really killed TMA. The campaign is technically quite good but the plotline isn't something I'm too proud of :D )
The big campaigns on the other hands avoid that pretty much. With lots of people they can avoid newbish mistakes and even if they do fail they contain stuff like mods and effects which can be salvaged. When TMA v1 was abandoned all that was salvaged was my increased knowledge of FRED (A prize I hold dear but no one else can grab a joystick and play it :D ). The problem with newbie campaigns is that they are almost 100% unsalvagable. (And that is especially sad for me as Gordian's Knot Part II from TMA is probably the best mission I ever FREDded).
Originally posted by Blaise Russel
Secondly, I'd argue that 'small' projects that never make it are more 'big' than 'small'. They're not as big as the very big ones, but it seems to me that a campaign that is too ambitious for its maker automatically becomes 'too big'. Then again, 'big' is relative. Is a thirty, forty mission campaign big for me? What about a new fighter model? A whole fleet list? A music track? How about two? And for someone else? What about a team of people? A team of people that aren't overstretched? Hmm...
I was refering to big in the terms used on this thread. I.e lots of effects and new models etc. It's possible for any campaign of any size to be too much for the designer.
Originally posted by Blaise Russel
Regardless, I'd still like to see more small projects... I mean, sort of taking the model scene and expanding it, so people are releasing single missions and mini-campaigns and less mod-dependant projects and things. But this is more an extension of my own design philosophy.
I wouldn't complain about having more single missions and mini-campaigns. I think the FRED contest was a step in the right direction there. Not something I'll be doing much of cause quite frankly I don't like FREDding unless I've included at least 5 events so labyrithine that I've pulled hair out over them but I'm sure that most FREDders prefer to work in a way less condusive to male-pattern baldness. So I can't see why there shouldn't be more of that. :)
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No and No.
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Originally posted by StratComm
And I honestly missed voices in Derelict. I'd hate to see something as story-centric as BWO get released without voice, if just because I want the full experience the first time I play it.
Precisely. What some people fail to realize is that releasing things like Voice Patches AFTER the fact ruins immersion. Take the Raider Wars Voice Acting. After playing it the first time around w/o Voices, I knew everything that would happen or be said. So, when the end product came around (RW 2.0), I ended up somewhat bored with the new material. "Blah blah blah Raiders, blah blah blah Heard it all before Blah..." I ended up skipping a bunch of it, and it had a FAR lesser impact on me than if it had been in the initial release.\
If the hosted projects want to take their time to make the Campaigns spiffy, who the **** are you people to tell them "Your taking too long?" They do this out of their own spare time and love for the community. Ever hear of "don't look a Gift horse in the mouth?" Really. None of you have a clue what is needed, how long what part of the modding takes, or how much time is available.
Leave them alone. Trust them to make a good campaign, and not overdo anything. Good work takes time, moreso when said time is limited by Real Life constraints. And remember, they don't have to do this stuff. I, for one, though, am glad they are.
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I'm not talking about time management and if you're being honest neither were you. You've already mentioned in this thread that you're talking about campaigns taking too long because of more than simply bad time management. e.g
How is that a comment about time management? That's a dig at all the hosted campaigns you think are trying to do too much. Well sorry but it's not your choice how we decide to spend our time and it's pretty arrogant of you to tell us how we should spend our time when you're not willing to join a hosted campaign and have someone tell you what to do yourself.
um, how isn't it a comment about time management? I was mainly responding to the remarks about a lack of free time and professional quality requiring a lot of time, pointing out that a professional standard can still be achieved on a smaller scale as long as you plan well (and we have already seen it with some things that have already been released). If you are managing to see that as a snide against larger projects and think that I'm somehow dictating how you have to spend your time, well, that's your problem.
I am mainly saying all these things because over the years I have seen so many overambitious campaigns go under (some well known, but also many that weren't, and from well established veterans too), far more than ones that were eventually finished, and it appears that some current projects may be following the same path. I can't imagine the staff of those defunct projects were any happier about the whole affair in the end than their potential audience was.
And I honestly can't see how anything I have said can be construed as "arrogant," unless you're one of those self-important people that just can't stand the thought of someone offering advice. In any case, you seem to have completely missed my intent here. Do whatever you like. I won't say anything more about it. There is already some very good stuff available, so the rest of us will have something even if the massive projects are never finished.
Post already quoted proving that you are.
Yeah, tell me about proofs. :D How is that a complaint? I am just throwing up some suggestions based on my own experience with my and other campaigns. Turns out it wasn't such a smart idea, but I am hardly complaining.
Well if you're doing it out of a desire to just pass on advice that's fine. I'll even thank you for that one. Don't happen to agree with your advice but that's another matter.
I'm not working on MG primarily for the adoration of the community. I work on campaigns cause I enjoy it. It's my choice to work on the campaign and it's my choice to decide what level of completion is good enough. That's been pretty much the view of every single person who is currently hosting a project and I'm sure it was also your view when you had one of your own.
That's great, and you're right, I did have fun for the most part (until I lost everything, anyway). But there are apparently people who don't see it that way; just look at the comments on the first page. I know that many other game communities have modders just looking for fame, and perhaps it's justified there, but it makes less sense around here.
By the way, Derelict was fine without the voices. Sure, it would have been better with them, but that was hardly reason enough for me to not play it. I can read messages fast enough. :D The original release did have some bugs though.
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Originally posted by karajorma
The problem with newbie campaigns is that they are almost 100% unsalvagable. (And that is especially sad for me as Gordian's Knot Part II from TMA is probably the best mission I ever FREDded).
Nah. Release them as "outtakes" once the original campaign has been either finished or abandoned. :)
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Maybe somebody should go and form a group of people to finish unfinished campaigns, or at least bugfix them enough to be playable and maybe add on some kind of cheesy ending.
Assuming I ever get fs2_open working again, I wouldn't mind testing. :)
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Originally posted by CP5670
um, how isn't it a comment about time management? I was mainly responding to the remarks about a lack of free time and professional quality requiring a lot of time, pointing out that a professional standard can still be achieved on a smaller scale as long as you plan well (and we have already seen it with some things that have already been released). If you are managing to see that as a snide against larger projects and think that I'm somehow dictating how you have to spend your time, well, that's your problem.
That statement pretty much appears to say that many of the hosted projects are too big in your view. If that's not what you're saying then fine but it's what people you have agreed with were saying so you shouldn't be surprised if people see you as claiming that.
Originally posted by CP5670
And I honestly can't see how anything I have said can be construed as "arrogant," unless you're one of those self-important people that just can't stand the thought of someone offering advice.
The tone of several of the people on the hosted campaigns are too big has been pretty arrogant. When you agree with them you get lumped in with them. It's a whole lying down with dogs thing.
If you're not telling me that I'm wasting my time and should do what you want like other people on this thread have said then fair enough.
Originally posted by Goober5000
Nah. Release them as "outtakes" once the original campaign has been either finished or abandoned. :)
That's pretty much the plan but that can only happen after I release v2 or it will give too much away. And not many people do release outtakes (which is a pity).
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That statement pretty much appears to say that many of the hosted projects are too big in your view. If that's not what you're saying then fine but it's what people you have agreed with were saying so you shouldn't be surprised if people see you as claiming that.
I do indeed think some of the hosted projects are too big and it could end up hurting them in the long run, but that is simply my opinion and you won't find me ranting at people to cut down on them so that I can play the finished products faster. It's worth bringing to the attention of project staff though because excessively big planning and "feature creep" can occur without the designers even realizing it and it has caused cancellations many, many times before. If the staff already knows all that and is fine with it anyway or thinks it's not an issue, then that's the end of the matter. Cool?
The tone of several of the people on the hosted campaigns are too big has been pretty arrogant. When you agree with them you get lumped in with them. It's a whole lying down with dogs thing.
If you're not telling me that I'm wasting my time and should do what you want like other people on this thread have said then fair enough.
You seem to be reading BlueFlames' posts and mixing them up with mine. We're not the same person with a double identity. :D As I said, I don't agree with his demanding attitude, but his points about feature creep leading to perpetual delays make sense. Whether or not that's a problem is up to the project staff.
And no, there is no such thing as "lying down with dogs" around here. You have been here long enough to know that any fights here don't have teams and proceed in a free for all fashion once they go on for a while. :D
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If you say you agree with Blueflames comments and don't point out where you disagree you've shouldn't be surprised if people take you the wrong way. :) There are better ways to get your point across than hitching your wagon to someone who you know is ranting his way through the forum in the most tactless manner he can think of :D
You've also been making the assumption that none of us were aware of the danger of feature creep just cause we were disagreeing with BlueFlames or saying that we had no intention of cutting voice acting after all so I don't think either of us can claim the moral high ground on this one :D
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There are campaigns that aim too high and get burned as a result.
The DOTA campaign I worked on with Free Terrna was one of those - with all "cool" stuff planned - custom mainhall, loading screens, music, a new race and tons of ships and everything. And naturally it was too much.
Personally ship making has never been a problem for me, but there was too much of the other stuff and the team just dissolved.
I learned a lesson from that ans my Chapter 1 is set in FS2 period with only 4 new ships and nothing else.
Chapter 3 is supposed to be the salvaging of the DOTA project but with massice redising. I threw out everything that wasn't really necessaray (music, backgrounds, new race, etc..) and once I start it, it may actually get finished:D
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Originally posted by Goober5000
Nah. Release them as "outtakes" once the original campaign has been either finished or abandoned. :)
Pilots, officers, whatever:
We may have crushed the [rebellion/insurgence/a new race], but their leader hasn't been found and we cannot be sure if he/she is dead or not. The [Shivan/Ancient/A new race] threat has been halted... for now, but we can never be sure. The leader of the [conspiracy] developed [shocking new technology] which has not yet been found. It is possible we have just bought us some time, but rest assureed that whatever we sacrifices was not in vein, because now we have [a way to Earth/new technology/philosophy/lol] and will use it to [overcome difficulties/unite ourselves/find a way back to Earth/wtf]. Also, note the [cliffhanger ending/overambitious goals for the sequel/models/Shivans].
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Originally posted by Janos
Pilots, officers, whatever:
We may have crushed the [rebellion/insurgence/a new race], but their leader hasn't been found and we cannot be sure if he/she is dead or not. The [Shivan/Ancient/A new race] threat has been halted... for now, but we can never be sure. The leader of the [conspiracy] developed [shocking new technology] which has not yet been found. It is possible we have just bought us some time, but rest assureed that whatever we sacrifices was not in vein, because now we have [a way to Earth/new technology/philosophy/lol] and will use it to [overcome difficulties/unite ourselves/find a way back to Earth/wtf]. Also, note the [cliffhanger ending/overambitious goals for the sequel/models/Shivans].
Hehe, so true. :lol: It reminds me of a line from a website that featured all of these absolutely terrible ideas for HL2 mods; in the realm of FS2 campaigns, your average story is, "It has been x years since Capella went supernova. Go!" :p
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Or TNG:
PLOT SUMMARY:
The Enterprise arrives at a (Planet/ship/space station). (Picard/RIker/Worf/Deanna/The Entire Bridge Crew) procede to (the Holodeck/Transporter pad). However, the (Holodeck malfunctions/Transporter malfunctions/Klingons attack/Romulans attack/aliens sneak onboard/Politician they are meeting is an idiotic jackass). As a result, (Picard/Riker/Worf/Deanna/The Entire Bridge Crew/The whole damn ship) is put into mortal danger. Fortunately, (Data) saves them.
Voyager:
The Borg attack.
Seven of Nine walks around in a disco ball catsuit, trying hard to look like she's not simply serving as eye candy. (This is referred to as "internal conflict")
Janeway finds a way to kill the Borg.
RUN CREDITS.
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I prefer Bond movies myself:
Bond meets girl.
Bond sleeps with girl.
Bond finds bad guy.
Bond watches in stupid awe as bad guy's superhuman sidekick who is possibly more badass than the actual bad guy does some random amazing trick that really could be deadly.
Girl goes bad. Bond finds good girl.
Bond kills bad girl.
Bond kills bad guy's superhuman cohort.
Bond kills bad guy.
Bond sleeps with good girl.
CREDITS.
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Seems I now have to defend myself.
BWO isn't done. It was supposed to be done ages ago but it wasn't. I'm sorry. But lets get some things straight here.
Derelict was never my campaign, I tested it, but it was Kellan and Agatheron's work. They planned to do voice overs and then they only did a few missions a build a mammoth campaign. With BWO we wanted to be a bit smaller and concentrate. Unfortunately, for the first year and a half Kellan and I kept getting bigger and people like Dark and Bobboau were offering new MODs that weren't even possible when we started the campaign (this is pre SCP by the way).
Then we got word from DaveB that FS2 source was coming so we sort of planned to be planning for the long term. Let me tell you that building a campaign of the length and detail we have takes ages to do and it was made harder by the fact that so many of the original team left. Of the original team, I'm the only one still in semi-existance (although its BlackDove and Ace now that are leading the charge). For a while, it was me, and a few people who wandered back in and out. It could have been done but things changed, people left, I started (and then finished) university, and so on and so forth.
The voice package has gone between being part of the release to being part of a later addon to being part of the release again and back again and again. What it is now is a team decision. I'm not confused so much as the situation has changed repeatedly over the last 4 years.
Why I am defending myself over something that I (and others) do in my spare time is something else. These big projects take ages to do.
MT, BWO, TBP, Inferno, OTT, and countless others have either released or gone the way of the dodo. They are huge projects, with many people involved, sometimes not always working on it for months at a time, and then finally somehow getting finished.
BD has pointed out. We're now at a stage with BWO development where if everything died tommorow...we could release and it'd be pretty good and it'd work. We're upgrading our work a bit and finishing off some stuff we always planned to do.
The plan is now 2 years old and we've stuck to it since it initially spiraled out of control. When you finally DO get it...it'll be like the next expansion in the FS series. Thats what we wanted to do...thats the sort of quality we're hoping to achieve. For better or worse.
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Perhaps I should add my two cents to the discussion since the original poster used TBP as an example.
Now, what's different in TBP compared to most of the other projects hosted here? It's the fact that most projects are set in the freespace universe and are not total conversions. Of those hosted projects that are total conversions, their history does not predate as far as to year 1999 and are younger than TBP. Now that you are comparing TBP to the majority of hosted projects, which are campaign projects; has TBP really released that many missions and campaigns after all? There's old Earth-Minbari War, a whopping 5 missions long campaign. Not really comparable to most of the hosted projects. Then there is the new Raider Wars campaign, even with 16 missions it's still on the shorter end of the campaigns that the hosted projects are developing.
During TBP development, the hardest part has always been missions, especially full campaigns. Campaigns just take immeasurable time, patience and resources to be completed, especially if you add cb animations, voice acting and maybe even cutscenes since that's possible these days. Yes, TBP has done quite a lot of content, but not so much missions as it might first look like. Few of you actually know that there was a time after release of R2, when TBP was quite a dead project. One thread less in the old TBP VWBB internal and there might never have been R3 or Raider Wars. We have lost so many of our staff along the years, that it is very much a miracle that TBP managed to survive through the hard time between R2 and R3.
But in any case, the point in my post is the fact that there is not as much official missions to play as it has been made to sound. As far as I am concerned, Raider Wars is the first real TBP campaign, rest are just stand-alone missions. And for making Raider Wars true, you all should thank IPAndrews as the amount of work he did on the project is astounding.
Now TBP is also on the very same line as all other campaign projects; we need to get Earth Alliance Civil War completed. The amount of work is nowhere small and there is always the fear of the campaign being never completed in the air. It is troubful that the talented resources of the community is already reserved so we are as hard pressed to achieve any concrete results as any other project. Luckily there is the FRED Academy training up potential fredders, for which there will be need. However, having too big of a development team is not very wise either, a small and solid active team can accomplish things better than a bigger loose bunch.
Anyways, I don't see what the ruckus is really about. Everyone here have their own visions, some people have made those visions into real projects. If those people actually manage to get their project into good start, its up to them how to organize their own show. If you want to make a positive impact on development speed and efficiency, learn the skills a project needs and join up. Talking and acting are two completely different things.
Learn, act and help your favorite project. Don't get involved with more than one project (unless the job is relatively small) as you need to share your little time with all projects, effectively making you less useful. Get your job done in one project and then move on to another, of course there's no point joining up to projects you are not interested in. But some of you have mentioned certain projects by name, you know what to do other than just keep talking.
As for taking projects up to their own "professional quality" promises, even you yourself know that it is nearly impossible for us to reach the truly professional quality. Now, there are different kinds of quality, not all professional gaming companies can hold up to the industry's principles and actually develop a quality game. But it's the same for us, while it is extremely hard for any modding project to reach that quality, they can still reach very high unprofessional quality. Sometimes high unprofessional quality can surpass low professional quality, but very rarely it can surpass high professional quality. Projects should get their act together and not make promises they cannot fulfill, they don't need to market their "game" after all. The community will learn of the project's accomplishments even without any marketing ploys. But the fans following those projects should also use their own common sense and acknowledge the fact that the guys developing these projects are the same as you, just fans themselves.
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I would like to take this time to merely point out something that I think has gone largely unnoticed. Check my signature block, there's a link to my site with my campaign on it. I have produced four chapters, the shortest one consisting of ten missions, and all totaled being well over fifty. I'm just about finished the fifth chapter which actually consists of three smaller campaigns, two of them are already done. I have received help only from Trashman, who has provided me with some superior quality ships and weapons. You want to talk about hard work, try producing all that I have and only getting a polite nod or two from the HLP community as a reward. Now I know that chapters 2&3 aren't on the site, but they're down for repairs that were pointed out to me by an HLP member that is oddly fanatical about my campaign. They may not be perfect, but I'm doing my best.
The point is, the super stupid huge campaigns don't always deliver and in many cases have collapsed under their weight. Look to the little guys who get the job done with the resources they have on hand and the hard work and dedication that some of the big boys seem to lack. The meek shall inherit the earth
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Maybe. But only because I'm quietly fanatical about it.