Re: Where to be notified about code release, and any fan-based projects to bring LT-like games to life using code?
Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2018 3:13 pm
Ditto!
Well, you can have a dead project and a healthy project manager planning his future after having learnt from his experience.
I'd like to also put this in perspective.BFett wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 11:36 amIn essence technical feature creep was what killed LT. Modding was not supposed to be in LT, and in the end, this is what I think prevented the game from releasing. I'm not a programmer though so I could be wrong there. I just think that if Josh had worked on getting gameplay worked out, just as he had while he was doing work on the prototype, LT would have released at least a year ago.
Normally I'm content to let people have their own opinions, but the community here is not the reason that Josh failed to make LT. First, it was a project that even AAA studios don't dare to attempt, and the only one that did (Freelancer) almost failed, even with a large team with plenty of experience. It's sad that LT failed, but really not that much of a surprise. It would have gone this way regardless of whether or not the community said helpful or unhelpful things. The people here do not control him. You can say most anything you want about Josh, but insulting other people here is not something we do on this forum.ExpressZero wrote: ↑Thu Nov 29, 2018 12:14 pmI agree with all of this, Zanteogo. People kissing his ass for YEARS, reassuring him this behavior was exceptable is exactly why it failed the way it did. [...] But, his ass-kissing crew, hoping to be buddies with him and get sneak peeks or demo's to play/test, continued to reassure him things were fine.
It was not.He should have never taken on a project of this magnitude if mental stability was EVER an issue in the past
May I remind you that your original post on this forum expressed the opposite of this sentiment. Hindsight is 20/20.and he damn for sure should have thrown in the towel and offer partial refunds when it first start affecting him the way it did. Instead he went silent.... For months? No... Nowhere would that be exceptable!
I'm going to take the opportunity to point out (as someone always does) that Kickstarter is not a vending site such as Steam or GOG. It is a system where people donate money to a cause: helping someone reach a goal. If the goal is reached, the people get bonuses as a thank-you. If you use Kickstarter purely for rewards, you are not using it as was intended, and if you're upset by the results, that's on you. One should not sue a company that manufactures kitchen knives when they cut their arm open trying to juggle them.This wasn't a gift to the world he was working on. It was a paid for promise. And forget the basecode release in its current state.... Why hasn't the kickstarter Alpha release been made public to us all? Why are those few lucky people still the only ones allowed to have ANY access to this? However limited it was, it was still in a "playable state". One would think after years of delays and broken deadlines and promises, he could at least happily allow that as a download.
Re: People kissing his ass for yearsExpressZero wrote: ↑Thu Nov 29, 2018 12:14 pm...yadda yadda yadda.....ass-kissing community...Josh is mentally unstable...etc...
One minor point about this: the reason a script language really is much less work for developing the game logic, is because high-level languages provide more facility than low-level ones.
Damocles wrote: ↑Thu Nov 29, 2018 5:14 pmThe game could have also just defined its content using a custom data-description language, xmls, json or whatever.
Where the content is described by data, but not necessarily by describing processing logic (wich can be kept in C that uses the data).
Developing the logic is not that much less work just because its done in a scripting language. The logic still need to be thought out.
Damocles wrote: ↑Thu Nov 29, 2018 5:14 pmAlso the performance optimization discussion was kind of odd: Trying to have 10.000 ships run at the same time? Whats the point in that?
There are no space-games that have that many ai ships run at the same time .. because its adds nothing to the gameplay.
The player can handle maybe a few dozen ships in active combat. The rest would be just backdrop, wich could be a simple animation for all it matters.
Putting so much effort into letting 10.000 ships run at the same time was an optimization exercise with no real feedback to determine the performance in the actual game later.
Damocles wrote: ↑Thu Nov 29, 2018 5:14 pmWhat would have potentially tanked performance is much more likely the simulation of the world economy and ai decisions, not an unrealistic amount of dynamic 3D objects with a simple combat ai.
And designing that part (economy and ai decisions) was being pushed back for the sake of first optimizing the LUA-C implementation. But even if the scripting engine runs perfect, developing the gameplay logic of the world is not an afterthought that can be quickly raced to the finish line.
- Its likely the biggest hurdle to take -
Not because of performance problems, but because its effect on gameplay was never tested in a running implementation.
Gameplay and balancing are not straight forward procedures that can be optimized like spacial partitioning, physics or pushing drawcalls.
Its takes lots of prototypes, gameplay test sessions, tuning and reiterations to make it a system that is fun and stable in procedural gameworld (without resorting to cheap hacks).
The high level economy and ai-decisions are also something where the prototypes could have been developed in parallel and independent of the game engine, even in another language. Once it looks promising, it can be ported over to the gameengine -> already indicating what parts of this simulation really need to run performant (pushing it to raw C), and what parts dont.
Wait, people still have to buy compilers? I thought all the big ones had free ones by now.Flatfingers wrote: ↑Fri Nov 30, 2018 11:10 amI agree with Ringu's response, but one other note is that if you don't implement a scripting language for most of the gameplay logic, and stick to a compiled language like C, you may require most modders to have to go buy a compiler.
It's been a while since I shopped for a C compiler. If there's a freeware compiler today that's compatible with whatever Josh was using (GCC?), then yep, this concern fades away.0111narwhalz wrote: ↑Fri Nov 30, 2018 6:46 pmWait, people still have to buy compilers? I thought all the big ones had free ones by now.Flatfingers wrote: ↑Fri Nov 30, 2018 11:10 amI agree with Ringu's response, but one other note is that if you don't implement a scripting language for most of the gameplay logic, and stick to a compiled language like C, you may require most modders to have to go buy a compiler.