Was the original MOO3 concept better?

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by 13Matt13


Youll excuse me if i question your objectivity.

You'll excuse me if I don't care. Luckily, neither of us reports to the other.

For the love of God in Heaven, get your facts straight. Stormhound was teh one that came and made the post about layoffs. You really have a problem with knowing whom you are talking about, dont you?

It was a ****ing typo, dude. I type 110 wpm. I don't usually bother to edit.

Are you always this easily bent out of shape, or is this some special issue for you?

BTW, while you can't hold someone responsible for what gets done after they're gone, you can hold them responsible for what happened before that point. Which seems to be the crux of the issue. Now if Hasbro (at the time) made a specific commitment of resources and a schedule allowance, in terms more businesslike than "build the greatest game ever" than Hasbro (or whoever did the hosing when reality finally set in) can take the majority of the blame for changing conditions.

I work with clients who are unrealistic about budgets and goals, and I have learned the hard way that the more vague and undefined the client or senior managers (I do a lot of subcontract stuff too) are, the more likely they are to try to screw me down the road. So I force definition, and don't start the real work until the client has, one way or another, agreed to concrete goals, design intentions, budget, and resources. If I don't do those things, and the project blows up because the client finally gets a sense of realism I never enforced from the beginning, it's my responsibility, because even if the client didn't have a clue, I did.

[Grumbold]

Can we please, please lock this thread and move on. While no single posting may have crossed the line into unacceptable abuse the whole thread has just deteriorated into a meaningless flame war. Lets shut it down, gain a bit of perspective and move on.

[TCO]

Originally posted by 13Matt13


No, the Navy took care of that for me quite well. Whats YOUR excuse? Or is getting drunk and flaming people anonymously the only thrill you have in life?

No, I like interesting discussion and learning something. Just not getting it from you.

[TCO]

Originally posted by 13Matt13


Youll excuse me if i question your objectivity.



For the love of God in Heaven, get your facts straight. Stormhound was teh one that came and made the post about layoffs. You really have a problem with knowing whom you are talking about, dont you?



I never said either way, but i did say that you cant hold a man responsible for what goes wrong with a project, after it is out of HIS hands, and HIS design is cut all to Hell.



Here:

And here:

Basically, when you started speaking for him and explaining what he was doing and why. Although, one has to wonder how you can speak to anothers motives.

I hate people who cut and paste like this. Especially when it is not even about the argument, but about the evil way of argumentation (ad hominem and flames and such).

[AminMaalouf]

Originally posted by 13Matt13


Thats a double-edged sword.

I mean we would agree that uncreative people brought nothing on its four legs even if they could hack together all existing cool feature from any game of the world.

But sometimes it would be graceful if the "true genius" had not to bother about features which are already made by an other true genius.

It seems to me, Admiral PJ has a reasonable and realistic approach, - and although I do not like the practice in MMORPG of monthly or yearly fees -, the idea to conceptualize open products with regulary upgrades and enhanchments pleases me somehow. I think hereby at Ultima Online (other exemples might be better, though that is the one which just came in my mind).

[AminMaalouf]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat

The problem is those tool sets can only take you a fairly short distance in game coding compared with commercial software coding.

Would you mind to explain what you mean with "short distance in game coding"?

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by AminMaalouf


Would you mind to explain what you mean with "short distance in game coding"?

Game development is much more performance constrained than typical commercial software. The stuff I develop is fairly high-intensity for the commercial side (data acquisition, real time sound and video and electronic documument embedding into a common database), but I have the luxury of having that occur on multiple boxes, and of specifying high-end PC's and midlevel servers for that work. So I can distribute program load across different computers, and afford to go with standardized tools like .NET because the performance hit is minor compared with the benefits of versioning, code maintainability, ease of localization for different languages, etc.

Game developers don't have those luxuries - you have to make the game work on a single box, and you can't get away with requiring the user to upgrade or dedicate a box solely to running your game. You also have the additional load from multiple AI's, whatever type of graphic treatment you give your game world (nobody wants a game that looks like Solitaire or MS word), keeping active track of lots of objects outside the player's immediate view, and you have to make things respond fast enough on whatever you've decided the "typical" user's comp will be. If somebody has an old lower-end comp, and can barely play the game, he won't be expecting great performance (stability would be nice). But the average gamer with a fairly current comp doesn't want to wait for minutes between turns.

With the performance constraints imposed by everything the game does, developers can't go to things like "Rapid Application Development" languages like Delphi. .NET framework has too many performance hits. Languages like Java would give you the ability to run on Linux with more or less the same codebase, but Java performance for serious games is laughable.

Standard class libraries for C++ (and there's a billion tools out there you can buy) often have fat in them since they're intended to be general purpose tools.

In the end, with most game development you have a mixture of "code it from scratch" and some use of low-level third party tools like MFC. The more performance driven the game (like FPS games), the less reliance you have on even the low level tools like MFC, and the more effort you have on basic engine development to run the game.

[krait23]

I think Grumbold made the only valuable comment in the last.. uhh.... 20 or so posts in this thread

Lata
Krait

[Cola]

Will all of you STFU

This is stupid, one side is saying that the game sucks because the designer leafed the the game. and the other {for god knows why}is saying that the game sucks because the designer who design the game in the first place, would have made the game suck more if he was still designing It........... will you all please STFU.

[CharlesBHoff]

My first computer was than Timex 1000 (ZX-80) with 16 kilobytes of memony which I make programs in basic. I have to find short cut in one program as it would need 24k of memony to run. I fround you didnot need to have different RAND fundion to make different type of dice roll with DM , you can make one gerneral one with variable in place of the data it need to run right.

[Vince278]

Originally posted by krait23
I think Grumbold made the only valuable comment in the last.. uhh.... 20 or so posts in this thread
Lata
Krait

I tend to agree. Looks like we need a moderator here.

[13Matt13]

Supposedly, we have one.

[Vince278]

I know. I was just trying to be subtly sarcastic.

[Sarxis]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat


From a gamer's perspective, I'd rather have given the money I spent on MoO3 to a charity.

From a software developer and software company owner's perspective (which is what I primarily do for a living), given the choice of two bad situations, I'll take the one that is less bad.

Terminating an overbudget, out of control project, and absorbing all of the costs, plus getting bad press for failing to produce anything on an already PR-hyped project is far worse than getting to market in some form, and recovering some of my costs and being able to at least attempt damage control from the PR aspect.

Yes, the economists would say to ship what you have and cut your losses. But games like this do put a bad taste in gamer's mouths. And MoO3 sure didn't help Infogrames already tainted image. Oh, I mean Atari's image.

I can't blame these big publishers pushing shoddy, half-baked games out the door- we keep buying them.

Is there no end to the cycle??

[Vince278]

Believe me I for one will remember when it comes time to buy something else from them. Names changes won't make a difference, I'm not as dumb as they think we are. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice shame on me.