Talvieno wrote: ↑Fri Jan 12, 2018 11:10 am
This year will be exciting - the "year of LT", I'm fairly sure. All Josh really needs to do is convert the old-LT gameplay to Lua and then fill in the missing areas from before, and we'll have a game.
I'm excited, too. I agree things are looking better now than ever before.
However... can I be That Guy for a second, and suggest that there's still some new but important work still to be done before "it's a game?"
- Player-centric combat/research/mining/production/missions/fleet-management all working and balanced
- Ship/colony/faction/economic/project AI fully working in one star system
- Dynamic star system generation and connectivity fully working as gameplay
- Ship/colony/faction/economic/project AI fully working across entire dynamic universe with LOD
- All of the above polished and integrated and tuned and balanced for maximum Freelancer 2.0 fun
Being able to import existing LTSL gameplay code will be a huge advantage. It's one of the reasons why I think shipping LT 1.0 in 2018 is a real possibility. (The other reason is the brainpower of the Procedural Reality team.)
But just putting individual pieces together doth not a game make.
There's no substitute for actually connecting all the bits and seeing if the whole thing is fun to play for any length of time.
To my knowledge, this step hasn't happened yet. But it's a vital phase of the game development process, and it's not like anything Josh has done with Limit Theory so far.
So while like you I'm also optimistic, I hope it's helpful to point out that there's still some challenging work ahead... and Perfectionist Josh has not been exiled, he's just hiding.
LT 1.0 in 3Q 2018 would be amazing. I suspect 4Q 2018 is more likely... and that's fine by me.