Friday Update, February 24, 2012

[GraveyardJimmy]

Originally Posted by speculum jockey

So the people who are working on the tanks, work for free? They don't need to occupy a space in the office? They don't need to use an office computer?

This has obviously been on the cards for some time (since before release)- look at the controls section (vehicle controls). Would it be better to have the coding and models for this and then suddenly sack developer team members and throw away all the labour that had taken place for a long time? If this is the case there are two options:

1) release the vehicle part of the game, get more customer, more revenue and able to develop a better flight sim.

2) Drop everything, dont make back the cost of developing vehicles and then try to focus on flight sim but with reduced funds for development.

1 sounds like a winner for both those who are and aren't interested in the ground stuff

Edit: Also, especially with regard to the sequel, fighting in dogfights or ground attack above fields with dynamic action happening on is going to be far more interesting and realistic than watching battles that will have required huge amounts of scripting from mission designers.

[badaboom]

Tank You!!! No Really,Tanks a lot!!!!

[csThor]

The reactions to this and the previous two updates shows how utterly difficult decent PR can be if it's being treated as secondary - as is obvious with the belated appointment of BlackSix and the rather limited amount of information he seems to get.

The problem as I see it is that Luthier has not much to show in the way of screenshots or videos which touch the core of what most people think ails the game (performance, FM, systemic bugs etc). You can't really show a video or make screenshots to document fixes or updates since most of these things can only be experienced in-game and are highly dependent on what kind of hardware the player has. And since he has nothing in that sector to show - and since he is not inclined to let the audience take a peek at the details by making them public or talking about them - Luthier does show something that he can. Only that it's not what a good number of people want to know about (myself included). I can understand the idea to "show something for the sake of showing" because otherwise he'd be accused of not providing enough information, but I am personally not sure rolling out this "feature" at this particular time was a wise move. Stuff like this most of us see as additional feature to be worked on and introduced when the rest is up to specs ... only that it's the rest that we want to see fixed and know about.