Shannon V. OKeets
Posts: 22095
Joined: 5/19/2005
From: Honolulu, Hawaii
Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: hakon
@michel : yes, I'm the same Hakon as in the Yahoo forums. I do lurk in this forum too, and post when I have anything relevant to add. In fact, I think it was on this forum that the term Super Balbo was coined the first time, several years back.
On topic: Like most of the posters here, I really want this game to succeed. But I think that a big danger with this kind of game, with such large scope and such limited budget, is that it will be rushed to the market before it's really ready, to make som short term profits. (Like Paradox recently did with Hearts of Iron 3). I work in a software company myself, and I'm afraid that it's just now that the development is entering it's most critical stage, the stage where first class game companies such as Blizzard put in that extra effort to make the product truely polished before releasing it, while other companies, like Paradox, tend to start rushing an unfinished product to the market, resulting in the permanent loss of customers.
Steve is bound to start feeling the fatigue now, more than ever before. While developing new functionality at the very least is pretty fun, the QA phase is a lot tougher on the motivation, especially for comples programs like this, where everything is affected by everything, pretty much. Now, even if Steve can control the number of unintended consequences of most bugfixes performed, it is really quite hard to avoid unintended results entirely. And few things are more frustrating than having ot fix bugs in your bugfixes.....
And on top of this, there is the AIO, for which Steve's ambition level seems to have been pretty high. Now, i will be extremely impressed if he can finish even a decent AI in only a few months. Most likely, I would guess that the AI needs at least about half a year of game testing and tuning before it's even remotely challenging to the average player. Of course, this means that a "finished product" would likely be a year or more in the future
On the other hand, I think that it's possible that we are now approaching the point where some players can find some amount of fun in the game, or at the very least will be willing to pay in advance to get a sneek peek at the game. I know that I will. The only game that I've preordered in this fashion from Stardock, is GalCiv2- Dark Avatar, but I did assume that this wa s a general policy. Hopefully, revenue from presales could keep Steve's motivation for and ability to actually finish the product. Many of the players are grown ups for who it really isn't an issue to pay $100 - $200 up front even if the game is not quite finished yet.
Cheers
Hakon
Straight debugging is difficult. I do do that some days, and even for several days in a row, but I have taken to inserting 'breaks' where I work on the Players Manual, Training Videos, context sensitive Help messages, and the like. Then there are the omnipresent tasks of staying organized: task lists, spreadsheets, status reports, desktop tidyness (real and virtual), program listings. But debugging has been my main focus for the last 6 weeks. As long as things get fixed and/or work better, the positive feedback creates a positive feedback loop. When the compiler goes off into space, the hardwares glitches, and/or the operating system goes kerflooie, ..., well then it is important to prevent a negative feedback loop from spiralling into doom and gloom.
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They have completed the first half of the new hospital next door (Shriners) and moved everyone out of the half of the old hospital that they had been working out of, and into the spanking new half. So the past few days they have been tearing down the remaining old structure, with 3 large backhoes crashing and banging, large trucks pulling up in a continuous line and being filled with steel beams, brioken concrete, and other rubble. From the 19th floor, I don't get that much noise, though the backing-up beeps can be annoying when they seem to be having some sort of bizzarre go around in a circle backwards race.
But meanwhile they are doing repair work on the condiminium I live in: 35 stories, 240 apartments, and 35 years old. What they have been doing is having crews hang off the side of the building looking for spalling (steel reinforced concrete cracks and flakes off due to the high level of salt water in the air). The fix for this is to drill into the concrete exposing the entire area and then patch it with new ~concrete. At times they have to cut the steel rebar using a high-pitched drill. Well, they have gotten around to my area of the building recently and yesterday they were drilling into the concrete a couple of floors above my apartment, which causes the entire building to shake.
Yesterday was also the quarterly window washing day, so those guys were hanging off the other side of my apartment banging on the windows with their suction pads while playing loud music.
At one point in the morning it was so noisy here I could barely hear the ambulance sirens as they went by in the street below.
If you have any image of working at home being like Thoreau on Waldon Pond, I must disabuse you of such a fantasy.
_____________________________
Steve
Perfection is an elusive goal.
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What about an open beta, available to all that pre-order? - 
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