There's several things I'd like to say here, and I think I can pretty confidently say that there isn't anyone on the team who would disagree with what I'm going to say. I'll try to be about as lengthy and honest about this as I can.
First off, a little history. Willhelm, you said "spent two years on it". I'm not sure if that was just a throwaway number you chose, but actually it's really far off the mark. Hell, the release of 1.0 is over 2 years ago now, having been released on September 2nd of 2010. The mod began on June 7th, 2006. Right now we're sitting on over 6 years of development history.
Things like corona frigates being hitable by proton topedos appears to have been entirely overlooked,
It hasn't been overlooked at all, it's something that's out of our control. I've done what I can to mitigate the issue but the basic fact is that the game just doesn't like the profile of the Corona, and we have never found a way to figure out exactly what's happening when this issue occurs. We're not working within our own system, and we don't have access to all of the tools and information needed for this kind of thing. Everything we do is still based within Petroglyph's game and engine, and a massive amount of it is hardcoded, which means not only do we not have the means to edit that bit of it (which is probably 90% of the important stuff), buit we also don't have the ability to even see it. Maybe this issue is soluble, I don't know, but there is a lot of work we have to do, and very few people to spread it between, so different stuff gets prioritized differently. As a mod, while we'll always strive to do the best we can, there's a certain amount of variance we have to accept just from a pragmatic standpoint. When we released 2.0, we did it knowing damn well there were probably still major bugs we hadn't been able to catch simply because of how small of a sample size we had while testing, and the only way to get the information we needed on what was actually doing what was to put it out to a larger audience. I'm sure the beta testers can attest to this. I'm confident that the Grodin Tierce crash bug, for example, had been reported before release, however it was just as a generic "game crashed at week x" without anyone being able to know exactly how or why until we got it out to more people, though it was still one of those testers who tracked it down in the end.
I like similes, so here's one: A lot of the issues we work on as a mod, and that modders in general work on in games like EaW are kind of like being sent into a house with broken plumbing and being told to fix it by rearranging the furniture.
im also bothered as to how things like balance how also been scarily overlooked as well... i supposes this could all be part of human mistakes but i then would question what you were doing in the however long beta testing period :/
What balance issues are you talking about, exactly? Balancing definitely wasn't "overlooked". Do you have any actual examples?
death clones are not there and it just gives the game this unfinished feeling that i do not like. I believe i understand why you haven't made death clones but i cant help wishing that youd just made them from the beginning... i also feel like simply changing how the death clones are to something easier to animate, would make it not painful, but they would still look good would work (i have alot of ideas Tongue)
i also have rudimentary animating skills with adobe flash and would help with death clones although i would need help getting into it :/
Last thing first here: Thanks for the offer, but Flash animation is absolutely nothing like 3D mesh animation in Max, excepting that there are frames involved.
That being said, there are several big reasons why we don't have death clones. The first one is they are hard to do well, and would be extremely time consuming. Every time a model is changed, or the skin gets redone, they'd have to be redone. You might say at this point "well you're just being lazy," but I'd call bullshit on that. This is another point where the differences between modding and professional game design come in. We are doing this for free. While I have no problem with this on the surface, we do it because it's fun, what it also means is the time we have to devote to it has to be worked around the rest of our lives. We're making these mods, but we're also students with families, friends, and other jobs and hobbies to fit in. Only two of us only intend to go into game design, myself not being one of those two, so we can't even call this vocational training. There's only so much that's feasible.
The major point where this comes in, though, is we have individual people on the team doing what entire departments would be doing in professional game design. We talk about "the team," but other than myself I'm not sure how familiar people are with it. At any given time, the active team is basically a core 5 people, and not to diminish the contributions of the rest of the team, but I think everyone would agree that the majority of the work is usually done by myself.
For the death clones in particular, there's no way to "make them simpler." We did want to do them for 2.0. Kalo even started several of them, however he had some computer trouble (3ds Max and Photoshop stopped working entirely), which means we were essentially SOL on that front.
Here's what would have to have happened for us to do proper death clones for 2.0: I would have to learn animation, then I would have had to start making the death clones for every single unit that needed it starting in about mid June, and then do that in addition to the rest of the work I had to do. The result would have been pushing the release of 2.0 well into next year (probably just shift everything to its corresponding date in 2013). Now, is that worth it?
The other thing there is, quite frankly, I don't want to learn how to animate. I have absofuckinglutely no interest in doing it. I've already learned how to model, how to code, how to skin, how to rig and a ton of other skills that are entirely useless otherwise, just to make this mod. I honestly can't afford to spend the time it would take to learn another entirely different skillset like that, especially when the older copies of 3DS Max which you have to use in order to export for EaW have glitchy viewports because they're 32 bit programs on a 64 bit OS. There's a lot I'm willing to do to make these mods as good as they can be, but I don't think that year of delay and the personal investment to learn that skill would really amount to much. Death clones wouldn't add to the experience enough to be worth that investment, and the extra year of waiting would mean an extra year of building anticipations and hype which would eventually be met with disappointment. It's true of any game or movie or whatnot. Delay it more for something that trivial and the end result isn't worth the difference in expectations. Death clones are the kind of thing that become more feasible when you've been frontloaded with premade material, which we are not, or are able to devote more resources to it, which we can't.
The basic fact is that we're moving on because we want to. We've learned a lot while making ICW, but we've spent 6 years making this mod, and there does come a point where it's just time to move on. Is there more we could do? Sure, but
that's always going to be true, especially in a game Modification. You have to draw the line somewhere, and there are some inherent limitations in EaW that mean the returns on future work will diminish as we go. More simply put, I strongly dislike Empire at War at this point. This was my first project and on the whole I'd say I'm happy with what's come of it, both the mod itself and the experience I've had making it. It's been completely frustrating at times, and there's been time where we've all wanted to and have just given up and quit, but I've had the opportunity to do some amazing things that I never imagined I'd be doing, and I've met and worked with some great people because of it. I wouldn't trade it for anything, but I'm not going to prolong it past its time either. If I'm going to mod, I'm going to do it because I enjoy it. Burning myself out on it just for things like death clones won't help anyone.
When we were discussing Ascendancy, we knew there'd be people who'd basically take the idea that we were cutting off ICW before its time in favour of the new project. While various versions of Ascendancy have been played around with for years, and it's something we're all excited to be starting on, the end of ICW hasn't been influenced in any way because of it. We've been planning for the end of ICW since before 1.0 came out, deciding what we did and didn't want to do, or could and couldn't do. I'd love to have all the free time in the world and be able to learn how to animate to add the little rouches like death clones to ICW and whatnot, but I don't, and it's a lot of work to become self taught in those areas that I don't have the time to put in. I think what we can do with Ascendancy in that timeframe will be a lot better than the results of just working on the death clones for the same period, and it's something ICW will benefit from as well; ICW already has benefitted from it in the form of the Mon Cal cruiser models in 2.0, for example.
Topic: Mod "completion" (Read 5106 times)