Thanks for checking in guys, keep working on it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dano
I just have this mental image of several people actually foaming at the mouth  |
So true, i couldn't suppress an initial outburst of laughter when i saw the update.
In all honesty though, what more is there to say if it's still under development? "Hey guys, we're still working on the sound and it's going well" is what we're being told. Some will be happy about it, some will simply go "meh, i'll play title X for a few more weeks until it's done" and some will demand to know more.
I just don't know what a regular weekly update would cover at this point. The updates we had in the past (during development) were keeping people calm because we hadn't yet seen the sim so everything seemed new. Now that we have seen it, an in-depth update would have to contain more technical things and to be honest, i don't know how useful that would be to the average forum poster:
"Today we adjusted our sounds so that at high speeds the propeller sound overcomes the engine sound, this is done by shifting the waveforms up a bit and adding a 5% change in the pitch of the sound".
Is this useful to someone who's not a professional sound editor? More importantly, would it quench the thirst of those who shout the loudest or would it just result in the same old "what is this technical jargon? give me a video preview and tell me when it's ready man", followed by charts from the e-expert brigade about how things really go on in real life?
Be honest guys, i think we all know the answer here: there is a certain group whose appetite grows exponentially with every scrap of information they're fed, some just want information but for some others no amount of it will ever be enough.
Let's face it, the pool of easy to understand and not overly technical oriented things to post as updates is exhausted, until something is finished and displayed in its final working state there's not much to say. Unless people are proficient in the tools and programming languages these guys use, there is nothing of benefit to post except a "we're working on feature X" or an announcement when it's ready.
The notion that the average poster here would somehow benefit from in-depth technical information is proven absurd by their own behaviour: a substantial percentage is seemingly unable to read the manual or find answers and workarounds to issues that have been answered multiple times since April and plastered all over the relevant sections, often in sticky threads no less.
In other words and forgive my being a bit blunt here, if someone who's had the game for 5 months can't find out how to customize or delete an info window and hasn't read the manual yet (the ever reappearing questions about camera control, enabling/disabling mouse cursor and so on), that person doesn't deserve more in-depth technical updates because he's learning-averse anyway
Ok, i'm being a bit harsh, so let's rephrase: it wouldn't do him any good to know how the sound engineer or the FM programmer does what he needs to do when he doesn't have the tiniest bit of patience to read readily available information on how to improve his gameplay experience, it's like building a reversed pyramid.
The only other thing that could be talked about is a road map and ETA dates. Well, we've already got a road map and if it changed all the time it wouldn't be much of a road map, so i guess it still applies. As for ETAs, people have trouble understanding the initial E and think that estimated equals definite, at which point if the date slips they go all tar and pitchforks again, so why bother making estimates that will be taken as commitments and used to generate further unrest down the road?
Long story short, the only useful thing that's left to be said until tangible results are reached and a preview is shown, is something to the tune of "we are working on feature X, it's going well/takes a bit longer than expected/is ahead of schedule".
Well, that's exactly what we got here and it pretty much covers what i need to know:
a) are they are working on something? yes
b) what is it? the sounds
c) how is it progressing? well