The Crystal Ball 2

[335th_GRAthos]

Originally Posted by fruitbat

Its like children in the back seat of a car, are we nearly there yet, are we?

Oh yes it is!

They made us being addicted to this game, even when it was not properly finished when it first came out.

I can hardly imagine how it will be the day CoD will fully functional, again 4-6hrs daily in front of the monitor

~S~

[kendo65]

Originally Posted by fruitbat

Its like children in the back seat of a car, are we nearly there yet, are we?

Sorry Fruitbat, but i really think that was a bit uncalled for. It also was the point at which (another) thread started its descent into the familiar 'You're a whiner' - 'No I'm not' argument.

Personally I thought the op's question was fine - after all we're all wondering essentially the same thing. The problem may be that there is no easy answer for it.

But, once again, can the usual crowd who are so quick to throw out the 'whiner' accusations maybe take a step back and think a little bit more. It's obvious the question is of no interest to them. It's equally obvious that it is of interest to the OP. It's also the case that there wasn't anything negative or attacking in the OP, so why the over-reaction?

[fruitbat]

Originally Posted by kendo65

Sorry Fruitbat, but i really think that was a bit uncalled for. It also was the point at which (another) thread started its descent into the familiar 'You're a whiner' - 'No I'm not' argument.

Personally I thought the op's question was fine - after all we're all wondering essentially the same thing. The problem may be that there is no easy answer for it.

But, once again, can the usual crowd who are so quick to throw out the 'whiner' accusations maybe take a step back and think a little bit more. It's obvious the question is of no interest to them. It's equally obvious that it is of interest to the OP. It's also the case that there wasn't anything negative or attacking in the OP, so why the over-reaction?

Well it was a throw away comment on my lunch break. If i'd of thought it was going to have caused such a stink i wouldn't of posted, so there you have it. PotNoodles, my apologies.

That said i don't really see what is going to have changed since B6 posted this last friday,

Dear friends,

Yes, we know it's ridiculous. No one is more upset at the situation than us, believe me. You have lives outside flight sims. You have jobs, you have homes. For us, Cliffs of Dover is our life. When we can't get it right, it hurts us. When we are in the constant state of "almost ready", when we break promises week after week, it affects us very deeply.

Unfortunately, even though it looked like we had something releasable this morning, by lunchtime we felt we should work on it more. What we almost released would have been a "DX10 alpha". All the FM changes are there, lots of other great things, FPS and stability improvements, etc.

However, the things that are the current "known issues" are:
· No dynamic low-caliber hit decals showing on aircraft;
· Detached aircraft chunks losing their texture and becoming pitch-black;
· Little particle "dust" that comes out of weapon hits looking like untextured squares;
· Gunsights always white in color;
· No waypoint lines rendered in map or FMB;
· Pilot and Plane models not rendering textures in Options - Pilot and Options - Plane respectively;
· DX9 support not ready for public consumption.

We just felt that this was one known issue too many. The decision was very hard to make. Many team members are unhappy with it, especially those responsible for the parts of the patch that are fully tested and working such as the FM.

I believe however that, rather than presenting ourselves as a team that releases half-finished patches with lots of graphic issues, we should work very hard on building the reputation for making things right, the first time, however long it takes.

We’ll keep providing regular reports.

All i see we can do is wait for the 'regular reports'.

[ACE-OF-ACES]

Originally Posted by PotNoodles

but does the above statement mean the patch could be months away or even years?

Trust me.. if I had access to a crystal ball to predict the future like that I would not be wasting my crystal ball gazing time looking at the future outcome of a game!

Originally Posted by PotNoodles

I don't mind the wait if that's what we are told and that's what gets the game fixed, but to say: "However long it takes" could actually mean a very very long time.

Yup!

Originally Posted by PotNoodles

I like honesty and I am pleased we have been told about the problems they are having..

LOL.. There is always a 'but'!

Originally Posted by PotNoodles

However, I feel what's missing in this statement is how major these bugs actually are.

Your not a programer are you?

Allow me to make an analogy here..

What your asking them to do is tell us now, how lost their car keys are before they found their car keys

Problem is you don't know how lost your car keys are until you find your car keys

For example..

CASE 1) I lost my car keys once and I went looking for them.. I found them 5 min later upstairs on my desk, at which point I realized I left them there yesterday when I was getting my thumb drive out of my pocket.

CASE 2) I lost my car keys once and I went looking for them.. I found them 6 months later on the ground outside once the snow melted, at which point I realized I must have dropped them when getting out of the car in the snow.

The last thing we want the programer to do is spend 'time' donig a write up AFTER he finds his keys telling us, in great detail, about all the places he looked for his keys before he found his keys!

What we do want the programer to do is move onto the next bug as soon as he finds his keys

SAVVY?

[mazex]

Well, being a programmer myself they sound like the type of problems that take an hour to fix when you finally find that weird parameter that needs to be set to X creating object Y for configuration Z... Finding it can take from 10 minutes if you find that thread in some dev forum or weeks of trial and error / re-engineering...

/mazex

[ATAG_Doc]

Posted by the redundant man of redundancy.

[mxmadman]

I don't know how much the severity of the current list of bugs really matters. 1C has displayed their incompetence many times, and if history tells us anything it is that once these bugs are resolved, they will just be replaced by a new crop.

[David Hayward]

Originally Posted by mxmadman

I don't know how much the severity of the current list of bugs really matters. 1C has displayed their incompetence many times, and if history tells us anything it is that once these bugs are resolved, they will just be replaced by a new crop.

That is true for any complicated software. As you make changes you introduce bugs. You often also add new bugs when you fix old bugs. All of which is great for job security...

[Jaws2002]

Originally Posted by David Hayward

That is true for any complicated software. As you make changes you introduce bugs. You often also add new bugs when you fix old bugs. All of which is great for job security...

They should have known this by now. Instead of fixing the bugs in the new engine they had, they scraped it a d built a new one, with a fresh set of bugs.

[Stublerone]

I think, that at least the posting of the last few weeks really were honest and that they were also thinking to solve the issues in a short time. And it also is honest, that they are even more unhappy about the situation , than we are. So, the last weeks have this honest behaviour as a positive result.

Concerning your mad words about past program skills: It is not okay to evaluate that, as a sim is always something different and in my opinion not as easy as programming a casual game like bf3. All they did is a new evolution stage of their engine and than copy and paste bf:bad company 2 with some new weapons, maps, interfaces and a slightly different system. It is a n1 game, but in its heart it is nothing new. They haven't solved hitbox problems now for decades and if you have a closer look, it simply offer no deeply programmed feature. Some libraries, some physx effects (which are very wrong in important cases) and newest directx effects and they are done for the gaming part. Building ne scenarios perhaps took most of the time. There is no revolution, although I see a talented multiplayer developer in dice!

Think about cod black ops: They ran into time issues for their introduction. So they simply got the multiplayer frome dice (different graphics style between single and multiplayer). I just shoot in the dark with the following, but they just took several weeks to setup the whole multiplayer for cod. But it is poor for cod, that this happened.

You can see, that it is easy to produce ego shooter over ego shooter and just change appearance, story and some features, but it is not easy to program completely new games with such a small studio in an acceptable time frame. U see this in every sim, which tries to do something completely new or in a new detail level.

So, to compare the grade of detail behind the scenes of a sim and a casual game is not possible. They have different priorities!