RE: Patching Philosophies

RE: Patching Philosophies (Full Version)

All Forums >> [Current Games From Matrix.] >> [American Civil War] >> Forge of Freedom: The American Civil War 1861-1865

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Gray_Lensman -> RE: Patching Philosophies (4/21/2007 7:58:39 PM)
LarryP... Nice to know there are other "ancients" on board, LOL, I started out on a TRS-80 in 1978, myself. Before that I probably had accumulated over 100 board wargames, mostly Avalon Hill and SPI, but with little kids running around, boardgames were an exercise in frustration. I might possibly have you beat in computer game accumulation, however, although, I could not begin to get an accurate count since I have thrown/given away most of the MSDOS based games. Bugs have been around since programming began of course, but it seems to me over the years, that a shift in attitude has slowly affected the publishers handling of them. Some publishers more than others, of course. I grew increasingly frustrated with the huge retail publishers, because there were too many examples of programs pushed out the door, just in time for Christmas sales for example, that my game purchases slowed to a crawl. When I discovered that a lot of the good wargaming designers had moved to online publishing, I felt that this might be a good thing, since less money would be going to publishing and more to the designers/programmers, and this would result in better products (less buggy before publication), or the cost would come down, or both. To my disappointment, neither has occurred. I will generally give Matrix much higher marks than most publishers in their efforts to keeping their associated developers plugging away at bugs, but I only wish they would playtest much more thorougly before offering a product for sale to the public. With less publishing costs associated with online publication, and yet the finished product costing the same as a Retail product, I would expect some of the additional profit(s) to be directed to ensuring a more finished final product.

Yogi the Great -> RE: Patching Philosophies (4/21/2007 8:43:51 PM)
[sm=00000116.gif]This is starting to sound like the over the hill club! As may be obvious by my signature, I go back to Avalon Hill Gettysburg (before hexes even). Spent quite a few years after that collecting each AH game as it came out. Sad part was I didn't really have anyone to play them with, but could always play solitare and/or just look over the game and map. Also added in SPI, Victory games and a few others like Gray_Lensman. Yeah setting up a game became a real problem. Plus the fun of finding your two year old had picked up your counters for you and even chewed on a few of them adding to the challenge. So while I too admire the progress of computer games, I still long for computer games that would match some of the old board games. Just like the past, I do most of my gaming solitare, so AI is a big issue, and one that is often neglected. Back on topic, I appreciate what the designers have to go through. I fully understand that it is not possible to catch all bugs. My main gripe is when I buy a game and it is obvious to see poor design, poor game mechanics and/or just a really bad game. I don't care to throw money away on a bad product. When I spend $50, I don't expect to be part of the beta testing team, I expect a good product. As to Forge of Freedom and Matrix, the fact that I'm on the forum says I appreciate their product and efforts. We can of course always hope to continue improving. I'm not as concerned about "play balance" as I am about a reasonable simulation. If you are given the same situation as the historical it is likely that the winning side will win again. The challenge is to do better then history. The fun of the game is in the recreation of history, not just in who wins.

Gil R. -> RE: Patching Philosophies (4/21/2007 10:14:31 PM)
Yogi, The game we released was absolutely, positively, NOT a beta version. Other than two critical bugs that were never came up in beta-testing and were fixed within a week of release -- a very low number, compared to other games -- FOF at release was a perfectly playable game, as is shown by the large number of people who have been playing non-stop since release. So I strongly differ what that characterization. As for the current patch and the process of having it publicly tested, the reason it is so large, and the reason it is taking so long, is that we've been listening to customer feedback and putting in numerous improvements that enhance the game, but are not necessary -- i.e., bonus features, features that give you more than your $50 worth. And there are so many, in fact, that we cannot properly test them internally, which is why we're having public testing. So it's a very good thing that we have such a large patch, and that we're soliciting input on it before it's officially released -- not a reason to be unhappy. As for the game balance issue, yours is just one philosophy -- some people want the exact opposite from a Civil War game. With this new patch, everyone will be happy: those who want more balanced games, and those who want the historical disparities between both sides to be reflected.

Gray_Lensman -> RE: Patching Philosophies (4/21/2007 11:10:10 PM)
In the late 90's, it was common for me to spend between $100 to $200 a month on games, since then, with the proliferation of incomplete, buggy products, I have tapered down to less than $300 a year. It's not because I have less time or money to give to computer gaming, quite the contrary, I just prefer not to purchase software that ends as shelfware, while waiting for bugs to be removed or new features to be added. User forums help guide my purchasing direction, although occasionally I allow myself to be overexcited and purchase some products too soon due to the subject they are going to be covering, FOF and the civil war is a good example. I will admit the v1.94 beta is allowing me to experiment with the game somewhat, but my immersion level is not what it could be, since I know that some day?, week?, month?, whenever, perhaps the actual comprehensive patch will be released. As a side comment, I thought I might edit the .pdf manual to incorporate some of the changes up to the v1.94 beta release... Then I found out that is not even possible due to your use of proprietary fonts within the .pdf file itself. Why issue a manual to a game that is going to have all these new changes, and then use a font format that prevents editing those changes within the manual? Can we expect a timely update to the manual (incorporating all the new improvements) also?

Yogi the Great -> RE: Patching Philosophies (4/22/2007 3:06:05 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Gil R. Yogi, The game we released was absolutely, positively, NOT a beta version. ------------------- So I strongly differ what that characterization. Sorry Gil if that didn't come through clear enough in my post. I was not referring to FOF being a Beta version, I meant to be making a general statement about computer gaming and some of the other games I have purchased. As I put in my post I have a positive image of FOF and Matrix.[:)]

Gil R. -> RE: Patching Philosophies (4/22/2007 5:48:30 AM)
Sorry to misread. Since FOF's price is $50 I assumed that was a statement about that game in particular.

ericbabe -> RE: Patching Philosophies (4/23/2007 5:08:41 PM)
The current build of the game has some AI issues that some may regard as "game breakers" and we'd like to address these things before making an official release. There should be a new public beta up before too long, though we would like to fix the most critical issues before we release that. FOF, on the hardest settings, is a fairly complicated game; tweaking the heuristic side of the AI takes a lot of work -- the AI component has hundreds of little rules it looks at. Adding or modifying one little rule might make it perform better 70% of the time, but doing something bizarre and suicidal 5% of the time. People who critique the AI usually do so in very general terms "make it think about concentrating its forces" or "have it outflank only when circumstances are good for outflanking" but trying to express these behaviors in terms of a list of heuristics is much more difficult. My advice on viruses is to uninstall Java 1.4!

LarryP -> RE: Patching Philosophies (4/23/2007 5:33:23 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: ericbabe The current build of the game as some AI issues that some may regard as "game breakers" and we'd like to address these things before making an official release. There should be a new public beta up before too long, though we would like to fix the most critical issues before we release that. FOF, on the hardest settings, is a fairly complicated game; tweaking the heuristic side of the AI takes a lot of work -- the AI component has hundreds of little rules it looks at. Adding or modifying one little rule might make it perform better 70% of the time, but doing something bizarre and suicidal 5% of the time. People who critique the AI usually do so in very general terms "make it think about concentrating its forces" or "have it outflank only when circumstances are good for outflanking" but trying to express these behaviors in terms of a list of heuristics is much more difficult. My advice on viruses is to uninstall Java 1.4! From the programming point of view, making changes to the AI to "think this way or that way" deals with a lot of underlying decision making. I can see the coding loops and trees in my head and it makes it spin. It certainly is not simple. There are so many values that have to be checked and the threading of those decisions can end up disasterous! Like you said, 5% of the time maybe, but that's the 5% that players will find. I just removed Java 1.4.2. Is that what caused your virus problem last week? [&:]

ericbabe -> RE: Patching Philosophies (4/23/2007 9:02:13 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: LarryP I just removed Java 1.4.2. Is that what caused your virus problem last week? [&:] Yes, there's a vulnerability in Java 1.4 and earlier that allows malicious websites to install a Trojan when you hit the "close window" button on what seems to be a standard pop-up advertisement. Here's a Wikipedia article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vundo_trojan

General Quarters -> RE: Patching Philosophies (4/24/2007 5:20:34 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: ericbabe quote: ORIGINAL: LarryP I just removed Java 1.4.2. Is that what caused your virus problem last week? [&:] Yes, there's a vulnerability in Java 1.4 and earlier that allows malicious websites to install a Trojan when you hit the "close window" button on what seems to be a standard pop-up advertisement. Here's a Wikipedia article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vundo_trojan If you click the "x" exit button in the upper right corner of the pop-up, does that avoid the virtus?

ericbabe -> RE: Patching Philosophies (4/24/2007 6:48:21 PM)
That's what I clicked! Another article I read recommends that if you see this you should (1) disconnect from the internet, (2) shut down all your internet connections with the task manager, (3) reboot for good measure. After I clicked on the red X it opened a little Window that said it was installing the program it was "advertising" -- I freaked out and opened the task manager and started shutting down every process, then after about 15 seconds of this I realized it would just be faster to shut off the power to my machine. Apparently in that short time enough of it got into my machine. My big mistake was not disconnecting from the internet before I rebooted -- when I got back on and ran "Ad Aware" and some other virus checkers there were four new big pieces of spyware on my machine (I usually do a sweep every day, so these were all new). From things I've read, one of the nasty things this piece of spyware does is to download and install other bits of spyware!

ChuckK -> RE: Patching Philosophies (4/25/2007 12:39:34 AM)
quote: Yogi wrote: As may be obvious by my signature, I go back to Avalon Hill Gettysburg (before hexes even). Spent quite a few years after that collecting each AH game as it came out. Sad part was I didn't really have anyone to play them with, but could always play solitaire and/or just look over the game and map. Yup, though for me it was signing up with SPI and waiting for each magazine with it's featured game to arrive in the mail box every other month. My family thought I was nuts siting in the basement pushing little cardboard squares and around and rolling dice all by myself. [8D]

Yogi the Great -> RE: Patching Philosophies (4/25/2007 6:55:03 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: ChuckK Yup, though for me it was signing up with SPI and waiting for each magazine with it's featured game to arrive in the mail box every other month. My family thought I was nuts siting in the basement pushing little cardboard squares and around and rolling dice all by myself. [8D] Sounds familiar. I got the SPI magazine/games for about a year and also the AH General Magazine for quite a few years. My family thought I was nuts too. All these years later I'm still pushing (electronically) those counters around all by myself. I think they were probably right. [&:]

Drex -> RE: Patching Philosophies (4/25/2007 8:39:15 PM)
I was doing the same thing myself. I think the last game I got was the Siege fo Constantinople.

Kriegsspieler -> RE: Patching Philosophies (4/26/2007 2:20:16 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Yogi the Great quote: ORIGINAL: ChuckK Yup, though for me it was signing up with SPI and waiting for each magazine with it's featured game to arrive in the mail box every other month. My family thought I was nuts siting in the basement pushing little cardboard squares and around and rolling dice all by myself. [8D] Sounds familiar. I got the SPI magazine/games for about a year and also the AH General Magazine for quite a few years. My family thought I was nuts too. All these years later I'm still pushing (electronically) those counters around all by myself. I think they were probably right. [&:] Man, I can relate. I began by playing Tactics II when I was a kid and it's been all downhill from there. [8\|] And as to patching -- I've been a beta tester for various of Paradox's games, and so I can speak a little from both inside and outside. What I want to know about a game in the current computer age is two things: 1) is the basic concept behind it a good one, does it provide an interesting situation, and so forth? 2) Is it backed by people who are committed to making it work well and improving on it? I don't really care that a game isn't perfect on release. All I care about while I am learning how to play the game is that the people producing it are responsive to their audience and are committed to making it better. On both counts, I'm happy with FOF. I'm as impatient as hell waiting for the next patch, but such is the way of these things . . . . [:'(]

ChuckK -> RE: Patching Philosophies (4/26/2007 2:41:35 AM)
quote: 2) Is it backed by people who are committed to making it work well and improving on it? I don't really care that a game isn't perfect on release. All I care about while I am learning how to play the game is that the people producing it are responsive to their audience and are committed to making it better. Bullseye, Kriegsspiler! [sm=sterb011.gif]

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