Kuokkanen
Posts: 3545
Joined: 4/2/2004 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Hertston quote:
And who pays? Your customers! I suspect that is the point! Economics; that individual games simply generate more cash at the end of the day taken as a whole Let's say time it takes to create detailed campaign for TUGE is more or less half from what it takes to create campaign with its own game engine. That would mean two times more products to sell with half, or bit more than half, of normal game's price. If time to create new campaign is less than half of time of creation whole new game and it is sold for higher than half the price of new game, then two sold campaigns should have higher income than one sold game. This is just my wild guess; I need someone from Matrix to give estimations of times needed to create game engine and campaign for it. Give examples of Korsun Pocket and Battles in Italy please. quote:
There's a problem there in that not everybody will, and they won't buy anything. These problems are available for SPWAW and Titans of Steel: both of said games are available for free with plenty of content even though chargeable versions are available. quote:
Some people like TAOW but not the SSG engine, and vice versa, there's a lot of personal preference involved. TUGE would cover most or all features of mentioned engines and it's up to scenario/campaign designers to decide what features they want to use. Some features, what are used only on few campaigns, could be sold as part of that campaign and thus save hard disk space of those who don't play said campaigns (also saves bandwidth). quote:
Another problem is that as the engine was improved and refined it would also have to retain compatability with the modules released to date. ... sooner or later it will hamper and restrict development and the base engine will become more and more of a dinosaur. Yeah, one coder of MegaMek game complained just about that: quote:
Apr 13, 2005 Elevation levels are sort of my baby, because I love my choppers and want to have an entire company of Yellow Jackets flying before summer is out. But they're just hell to code. You're talking about literally a hundred points of change in the code because we're breaking assumptions a lot of different people have made and perhaps not documented because it was so obvious at the time. Some examples: LOS (Pain! Pain! Pure pain! Its got all of the fun of trigonometry with fifteen zillion edge cases like what happens when you try to fire between a Yellow Jacket at L6 over a L-2 hole and a hovercraft on D3 water at L1 with a L3 hill with a heavy woods in the middle) Targetting (a lot of code assumes only one target in a hex -- oops, a sufficiently tall building can fit multiple mechs now) Interface (redesign time -- need to be able to show units which are not present on either the floor or surface of a hex, and need to be able to order elevation changes for units which are capable of them, like subs/VTOLs) Cases not sufficiently documented in the rules, but which our players will expect to work right -- artillery strike against a hex with a VTOL in it, for example ("But he's not on the ground! How did he get hit with the arty strike?!") Redo moving code (if you haven't seen it, you're lucky -- its a mess, and large chunks have to get ripped out and recoded, which will cause rippling bugs all over the place) Lets see, what else is there... LOTS. Patrick McKenzie That was written over year and half ago. Now buildings are working properly, bridges work, they can be destroyed, units can get under bridges and helicopters and submarines work as described on rule books (note: MegaMek is under update process to meet rules of Total Warfare). Not bad from bunch of amateurs who use different notations in their source codes and don't get paid their work. But we're talking about paid professional here and some of them have been on business literally for tens of years! (Gary Grigsby ) Even if TUGE comes to point where overhaul is absolutely required, old campaigns and scenarios could still be played on older versions. Or convert said campaigns to new version. Both of these options are available for Steel Panthers scenarios: play them on old game or convert for SPWAW. Unless I'm badly mistaken...
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You know what they say, don't you? About how us MechWarriors are the modern knights, how warfare has become civilized now that we have to abide by conventions and rules of war. Don't believe it. MekWars
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