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Mike Wood -> (11/23/2001 12:29:00 AM)
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Hello...
Catdaddies apparent distress over the progress of the game and decision to avoid this site saddens me. It is for he and you, our gentle end users, which we labour.
At this point, Keith, Gary and I are programming as quickly as possible. The project is an ambitious one and we have included features never before attempted in a game on this scale. The basic game is completed and we are debugging and adding a few more features from our wish list. That list was developed by our development team and included everything that Gary, Joel, Keith, David, Rich and myself had ever wanted to see in a game of this type. It also included everything we had wanted, but failed to find in other games, such as Pacific War or Pacific Tide. That wish list has been extended by desires expressed here, in this forum. Some of your ideas have made it into Uncommon Valor. Others will have to wait for War in the Pacific. This is because some of our clientele have become a bit impatient and want to play a new game, right now. I can understand that impatience, as there are few games like Uncommon Valor on the market, from which one might choose.
We have also added several new artists to the project and new art has been added; we have recoded some of the executable to include this new and improved art. Not part of the original design, we have added and are adding a significant amount of animation for your viewing pleasure. These animation sequences hit and burning ships and aircraft hit by anti-aircraft artillery, flak bursts and exploding land based targets. Each takes 81 to 222 frames of art. Our artists are also working many long hours.
We have also been working with the sound routines to insure as much compatibility as possible with as many computers as possible. We are using advanced sound routines that allow panning in stereo and have increased the number of sounds available by the hundreds. David, our sound effects and Foley man, has put many hours in creating and editing these sounds.
It is our intention to provide you with an exceptional gaming experience with a minimum of bugs and untoward features and with a maximum of smooth, user gaming ease in an exciting war game that is visually appealing and filled with ambience. It takes time for we mere mortals to attempt such a divine endeavour.
In direct response to Catdaddies issues, I might make the following comments. My reply is not made to invalidate his concerns, but to help explain our situation, so that you might better understand our position.
I, too, am a programmer. Programming a large project, such as this one, is the process of creating something new from nothing and, because of this, software development travels at the speed of software development. If our estimates as to completion of a game are not always accurate, we share that with the entirety of the gaming industry. Joel Billings told me, the other day, that out of the 90+ games over which he supervised development, while at SSI, none were ever completed in the allotted time.
With regards to our going "belly up", before finishing the game, we are currently fully funded, in no small part due to the Mega Campaigns, for which I thank our devoted end users.
We are a corporation and, therefore a part of corporate America. I feel our business model is solid and will see us through the lean times. Other, larger war game companies, such as SSI and Talonsoft have not been able to survive these times, because it is very difficult to run a company that primarily produces war games, a rather small, niche market.
We have worked for less than one year on this project and in spite of the improvements we decided to make to the game, midway through development, I expect to finish the game in mid January, after 12 months of work. Building a new game in one year is not an unusually long development period.
In conclusion, I would pray that Catdaddy and others, who might be anxious to start playing, might be patient a bit longer. Having expended three years of my life on Steel Panthers: World at War, I am confident that spending another year on Uncommon Valor: Battle for the South Pacific will yield another camp of happy gamers.
Your Servant...
Michael Wood
Lead Programmer,
Matrix Games
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quote:
Originally posted by catdaddy:
Being a programmer I can't believe for as long as this project has been in development you haven't finished yet. But then as I recall all the posts of Matrix adding this game and that game to their list of games in "DEVELOPMENT" I feel you people are not very professional. As a matter of fact I doubt very seriously if this game will ever be released. My quess is that you will go belly up before that happens. If you had been working for coporate America on this project you would have been FIRED long ago. Perhaps that is why you and your staff are in the game business, because you couldn't hack it anywhere else. I no longer will visit your site or waste my time in waiting for you to release something that should have been released by Christmas of 2001. After all you have been advertising this for quite some time. You have continually bumped the release date each time you have failed to meet what you "HOPED" to be the date. I have no intrest in your company anymore. No wonder this part of the wargaming hobby refuses to grow.
[ November 22, 2001: Message edited by: Mike Wood ]
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![]("wink.gif")
Sorry, I couldn't resist. I work in IT and it continually amazes me that statements like "We hope" or "We'll try" become dates written in stone. But, I am eagerly awaiting this one, along w/the megacampaigns, and the Napoleonic games, and...
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I have a feeling anyway, that the audience these titles cater too, will do the same. ![]("smile.gif")
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Of course the behemoth did have about 600 lines of code once it was done. ![]("rolleyes.gif")
Nathanael
