Hey, Nova: Firefly part 1 is nearly finished. There's just uh.. some stuff to do...

I haven't played all the way through Arpia 2 but it seems that it is great work all around. However, I don't know if the relatively quick release of a TC-sized plug-in is a challenge that the TC makers need to get off their duffs and get things moving. I think it isn't the workload that is the primary cause of TC-death (well, TC's that have a chance and aren't "I want to make a TC put I can't program or write? Help plz? kthx!"). I think it's an enthusiasm thing; presumably when people were working on Aripia 2 there was constant progress on things likes graphics, writing, and the galaxy in general. Every new achievement resulted in a more playable and professional experience, and so project drive might slow down for a bit when things like "real" work get in the way, but not halt.

With a TC it's a different story. If you follow the TC guide that is occasionally linked to by the boards, you'll be working on small things like governments and weapons before you even get to things like graphics and ships and missions. That can really take the wind out of your sails, having to do all the fiddly-bits before you see real progress. With a quasi-TC like Arpia 2, even though the workload is roughly the same, because you are working within stock Nova the progress becomes visible much earlier on. If you don't follow the TC guide then you start out with exciting graphics and explosions and so on added to game early on, but a lot of work near the end getting it to all work together. Once you've removed the data files completely, all sorts of things will need to be addressed before you can start to see real progress: interfaces and sounds and all sorts of things that the Nova files gave that are taken for granted.

So there are two bottleneck in TC making: either a glut of what amounts to "busy work" at the beginning, or a smattering of it throughout the making of the plug. I'm not saying that this work doesn't exist for quasi-TCs (because it surely does, and there is the additional work of making your new product mesh well with the stock scenario in terms of gameplay and plot), but because the plug-in is at every stage playable or nearly playable, it is a lot easier to maintain enthusiasm for the project than for one where a playable pre-alpha might be months away.

That being said, I'm not giving up on the TCs in progress. Many of them have reached the point of no return, where so much work has been put into them that it is inconceivable that they will not be released. A lot of the projects are hush-hush, but I've seen evidence that quite a few TCs are all well on their way to being enjoyable, complete releases in the near future (not as many as I'd like, but still). But Arpia 2 should not dishearten those that have worked just as long (or longer) without the same result, or even encourage those who think they can pull together a TC in a short amount of time.

@pipeline, on Dec 27 2006, 01:58 AM, said in ARPIA2 finally finished!:

Aftermath and Sephil Saga need to update their logs more often. And here's me saying it.

ahem

Well, there's a reason for that I can't reveal. UE R&D apparently elected not to say even this much.

@liquid_doom, on Dec 29 2006, 07:58 AM, said in ARPIA2 finally finished!:

With a TC it's a different story. If you follow the TC guide that is occasionally linked to by the boards, you'll be working on small things like governments and weapons before you even get to things like graphics and ships and missions. That can really take the wind out of your sails, having to do all the fiddly-bits before you see real progress.

Is this the typical approach that's taken here? When I started work on Override, I always made sure that there was something I could play, right from the beginning of the project. The fifth system created was the one with Pax station, so I could go there and watch UE and Voinian ships blow each other up. Of course, they didn't look like Voinians and UE ships at this point - they looked like (EV Classic) Rebels and Confeds respectively.

And it was a similar story through the rest of the project. For example, the main UE plotline missions were written before most of the galaxy existed (as you can kind of see if you look at the system numbers of the systs that get VisBitted during them).

I think it's important to give yourself as the developer something to play with within the game from as early on as possible. Partly to break up the monotony, but also so that the balance process starts as early as possible. That is, once you've added, for example, a frontier system where two enemies fight each other, you can relax for a bit and hang out there, watching them fight each other. Are the battles going the way you want them to? Do ships from the two sides match up as you planned them to? How easy/dangerous is it for the player to get involved, and how strong a ship do you need to avoid dying just in the crossfire? And then you can tweak the syst resource - or the dudes, the ships or weapons - and go back again. It's very nice to be able to do 'work', mid-project, which just involves watching things shoot each other.

I agree with the "make something playable" aspect. Colosseum has been playable since the end of the very first work session I have put on it. Since the TC will be revolving around combat, gameplay, and difficulty, it was extremely important in my opinion that I be able to balance as I go, as every weapon needed to work a certain way, especially the more unique ones like the Ionization Field or the Burst Laser. The progress on CTC may be slow, but I'm able to test everything straight after creation, so not is it only more interesting to the developers, it also will save alot of tweaking work later on.

I was always irritated when people would work on a TC and make things such as all the weapons first, but nothing else, so there'd be no way to see if they'd work as intended until a long time later.

I just worry that I'm going to write this big long story, my cohorts are going to make all the game engine features beefy, and then we won't have anyone to do graphics (as we will need some 25+ new ships and all new weapons). I think even beyond laziness...the uncertainty of a TC's future can be quite daunting and add to that feeling that it isn't worth trying.

I think that if your TC is t3h awesome and you've finished everything except for graphics, you might be able to find someone to do graphics.

GSN: Master of the run-on sentence.

Graphics themselves are not that big a problem. Even I have learned to make tolerable ship designs and other filler graphics (pac = rubbish at art-type things). What are difficult are really really good graphics - if a project has to wait for Nova-standard work it may be waiting a while.

But this is a beauty of a TC: it doesn't (in a certain sense) have to match up to Nova, since you remove all of Nova. Yes, the player still notices the difference from memory but, if he can be hooked into the story, then as long as there isn't a direct juxtaposition between stunning Nova graphics and more pedestrian TC ones, I don't think that quality matters all that much.

Better graphics are always nice but a complete and released piece of work with okay-to-good graphics throughout is much better than an unreleased one which has some amazing graphics (but never gathered enough of them for release).

@liquid_doom, on Dec 29 2006, 06:58 PM, said in ARPIA2 finally finished!:

With a TC it's a different story.

Nova was an Override TC, and we finished that in 4 years. 5, with testing. Everyone here will have had 5 years in March. Make your point.

@pipeline, on Dec 29 2006, 06:42 PM, said in ARPIA2 finally finished!:

Nova was an Override TC, and we finished that in 4 years. 5, with testing. Everyone here will have had 5 years in March. Make your point.

Actually, I started last spring, so I haven't even hit a year.

Only 4 years and about 4 months to go...

@razzle-storm, on Dec 29 2006, 07:01 AM, said in ARPIA2 finally finished!:

Hey, Nova: Firefly part 1 is nearly finished. There's just uh.. some stuff to do...

Yeah, we're at that part of story-writing when most of it's done, but the remainder is too important to get wrong. Hence, slowness.

Insane.

Pipeline, Pace and co. with ARPIA2 throw down the project gauntlet, and of all people, who picks it up?

Nick Cartwright.

shakes head in vague disbelief

Utterly fantastic - now, who wants to bet that Age of the Council, even at this barely days old, almost pre-planning stage, will be finished and out the door, before anyone else, as the only major scenario released after ARPIA2?

Heh, I'd love to be proven wrong.

pipeline said:

Nova was an Override TC, and we finished that in 4 years. 5, with testing. Everyone here will have had 5 years in March. Make your point.

Ouch. My point was that I didn't see Arpia 2's release as "throwing down the guantlet" because Arpia 2 is a very different type of plug.

It's fair that people want to send out a wake-up call to the community, but frankly I'd rather have a few good TCs later than a bunch of rushed ones now: surely you don't think an Override TC should inform the release deadlines of Nova TCs, different beasts entirely (Okay, it's a little more complicated than that, but I resist the tacit assertion that if the board isn't full of beta-testing TC's come March, then we're somehow lazier or less talented than the Override developers before us).

We used most of the development intensive features of Nova's engine. Hell, we requested those features.

@mista_b, on Dec 30 2006, 02:56 AM, said in ARPIA2 finally finished!:

Insane.

Pipeline, Pace and co. with ARPIA2 throw down the project gauntlet, and of all people, who picks it up?

Nick Cartwright.

shakes head in vague disbelief

Utterly fantastic - now, who wants to bet that Age of the Council, even at this barely days old, almost pre-planning stage, will be finished and out the door, before anyone else, as the only major scenario released after ARPIA2?

Heh, I'd love to be proven wrong.

Unfortunately, pac's got the best track record...by far.

@liquid_doom, on Dec 30 2006, 03:32 AM, said in ARPIA2 finally finished!:

but frankly I'd rather have a few good TCs later than a bunch of rushed ones now

The problem is that we don't have forever. Look at the records.

EV: Five years after it was released, it had good plugins galore, a number of TCs, and an established community. It had reached an amazing peak. It's probable that most people have probably never been able to play everything that that was developed for it, and not because of system requirements.

EVO: Five years after it was developed, it had good plugins, one or two small TCs, and an established community. It never hit it off like EV did, but then, EV's golden age was still going, to an extent, and the latter years were filled with EVN progress -- technically, as EVN was an EVO TC originally, it could be considered EVO's crowning project.

EVN: It has been almost five years since it was developed. We have...a few plugins, and a bunch of TCs that haven't been made. ARPIA 2 is possibly the only really good expansion project out. Where are the Claviuses and the Pales and the Empires? Where are all of the expansion projects and TCs? They don't exist...yet.

In five years, anyone developing for EVN's had more than enough time, even considering the amount of work, just because they also have a proportionately greater number of people. "Frozen Heart" was made by one guy. How long would you have us wait? EVN's showing its age already. Will the Macintosh as we know it still be around when these TCs come out?

- Bob

This post has been edited by Consul Bob : 30 December 2006 - 02:20 PM

My biggest development-inhibitor, all real-life things considered, is exactly what Consul Bob just said:

Quote

How long would you have us wait? EVN's showing its age already. Will the Macintosh as we know it still be around when these TCs come out?

Mabey not the Macintosh per se, but something that I can run. I'm quite possibly the only developer here still using OS9 on a regular basis as my sole development platform. On top of that I've got a considerable real life to deal with- how many members of ATMOS, Pipeline, had mortgages, car payments, wives and kids in thier four year development of Nova? I can't remember the last time I had more than one or two continuous hours to work on KFL. And having a development team wasn't much help when those sparse one or two hour stretches were spent foruming and keeping tabs and trying to motivate people (dispite the work that certain notable members invested in it, for which I am eternally grateful, dispite the fact that they are not parts of KFL now).

Mine, like most of the other TCs, may or may not ever be released and frankly haing Pipeline or anyone else 'throw a gauntlet' down at me or the development community in general will not in any way somehow override (no pun intended) my first-and-foremost commitments to real life.

@consul-bob, on Dec 30 2006, 02:18 PM, said in ARPIA2 finally finished!:

EVN's showing its age already. Will the Macintosh as we know it still be around when these TCs come out?

- Bob

Well, we can always hope that Ambrosia makes an EV4 engine that's backwards compatable.

@mispeled, on Dec 30 2006, 07:52 PM, said in ARPIA2 finally finished!:

Well, we can always hope that Ambrosia makes an EV4 engine that's backwards compatable.

There won't be an engine without a scenario which sells it - and that scenario can only come from developers like those here. That was the pattern for both Nova and Override: developers (working with the previous version) who went to Ambrosia, and got their scenario picked up. Ambrosia are 'just' the co-ordinators: independent teams have made the scenarios and Matt Burch the engine.

In other words, it's a flourishing developer scene producing strong scenarios that is a prerequisite for a new version of the engine (and not the other way round).

@pac, on Dec 29 2006, 06:09 AM, said in ARPIA2 finally finished!:

Is this the typical approach that's taken here? When I started work on Override, I always made sure that there was something I could play, right from the beginning of the project. The fifth system created was the one with Pax station, so I could go there and watch UE and Voinian ships blow each other up. Of course, they didn't look like Voinians and UE ships at this point - they looked like (EV Classic) Rebels and Confeds respectively.

It is indeed the typical approach, but I think yours is a much better practice, and the only one I would ever consider using — an examination of the number of major plug-ins that have been released for EV Nova suggests that perhaps the typical approach needs to be re-evaluated.