Tired of Hollow Excuses and Apologies

[Nighthaunt]

I don't know, but if I was starting the Sots 2 project right now the first thing I would have checked is which engines out there I can use, how much they cost and try to estimate how long it would take with each engine. This isn't something anyone can answer on the spot, this is something that in professional software development company spends weeks researching and planning before they embark on a 2 years project of their flag product that will make or break the company.

All of this is however, irrelevant. The exact details of which engine or how long are not needed in order to look at the bigger picture here. We know the degree of what free or licensable game engines today offer, we can see the technical requirements of the game, and broadly speaking there isn't a huge gap there. Building a complete engine from scratch by a small company is a questionable move at best.

To be fair I would imagine Kerberos already looked into that - I was trying to establish if this was speculation or if you had done a study. This would seem to be pure speculation without evidence - Technical requirements does not match the coding requirements. I have never come across a FPS which deals with as many possible combinations of ship sections (cruiser/dread/lv), weapons (small, medium,large, extra large turrets and fixed) and the accuracy to target and destroy individual components (blow off enemy turrets) - that level of complexity, across 6 different races each with their own travel method - would seem in excess of the FPS engines abilities I've played that let you go across a free movement environment.

[Devlin]

Not entirely true, I can still get my hands on WIndows XP easy. It's just a bus ride and about 80 bucks in cash. They are OEM, not retail.

I think gamers need to unite instead of biting and baiting each other on these forums.

(cut for brevity) ...

Like the WWF used to say and still say, If the Buying Stops.....No more sore buttholes!

Haha this was an epic post. You receive +10 Internets points

Having said that, you DO have options as a gamer. Don't trust release dates anymore. Just wait until the reviews pour in and then decide if you want to buy something. It just takes a little patience, and will save you lots of money. I do the same thing with movies now. I don't bother watching movies that are panned, and yet bad movies keep getting made! So somebody is out there supporting the bad movies, just like people are still supporting bad games.

Barring some kind of aforementioned meteor strike on a certain developer's studio, I don't think SotS II will end up being a bad game. I think it will turn out to be an awesome game. And no, what they did with this release wasn't cool. I wonder if you can summon up a little sympathy in your heart for folks that think dishonesty is the only way they can scrounge up the cash to bring their lovechild into the world.

[Buddahcjcc]

You dont know crap so shut up. your negativity in every damn thread here is starting to piss me off.

P.S the worst game they support right now is Supreme ruler 2020 + Cold War

Nice personal attack buddy, I was actually going by a post I saw earlier in this thread I do believe, here, ill look for it so you can rage against him too...

Ill "shut up" when
A.) I get my refund
or
B.) I get banned (but considering I actually try to pay attention to forum rules hopefully wont happen)
or
C.) They make it so I can play and enjoy the game.

[Nighthaunt]

In another thread you have now decided you may *keep* the game. Its nice to see that the game has won you over already to changing from REFUND NOW to I MAY keep it.

Perhaps in that case you can understand people getting a wee bit frustrated with constantly negative posts - Constructive ones people are fine with but messages of doom, doom, doom, do get a bit wearing after 5 days.

[airpirate]

Nice personal attack buddy, I was actually going by a post I saw earlier in this thread I do believe, here, ill look for it so you can rage against him too...

He's attacking you because you've been posting large amounts of negative stuff without being really very constructive, even your sig attacks SOTS2. You're also new, haven't bought any Paradox games and with the post he quoted seemed like you were judging Paradox as whole for the terrible release of one game. To be honest I agree with Sunfighter, lighten up a bit.

[Buddahcjcc]

In another thread you have now decided you may *keep* the game. Its nice to see that the game has won you over already to changing from REFUND NOW to I MAY keep it.

Perhaps in that case you can understand people getting a wee bit frustrated with constantly negative posts - Constructive ones people are fine with but messages of doom, doom, doom, do get a bit wearing after 5 days.

Its interesting to see how people in this forum think people CANT CHANGE

To be honest I agree with Sunfighter, lighten up a bit.

HUGE surprise btw

seemed like you were judging Paradox as whole for the terrible release of one game.

Yeah... IM gonna be the ONLY PERSON doing that.
Right... lol I love being the worst person in the internet here

My sig attacks SOTS2... My sig attacks the ppl qqing about the ppl asking for refunds because they were sold a lemon. Im not gonna be one of those that pretend what it says in my sig isnt true, cause I dont like lying to myself.

I see... truth hurts.

[Nighthaunt]

Its interesting to see how people in this forum think people CANT CHANGE

HUGE surprise btw

No - I suspected that once people gave the game a chance many people would change - I'm actually pleased to see you have given the game the chance it needed to win you round

[Buddahcjcc]

Largely opinion, but I would have to disagree.
EU:3 is quite good, although late game is rather silly. I do recommend going through the amazing modding community.
EU: Rome, I enjoy the era, the game however I play in spurts and spasms with months in between, mainly because the scope is too small, but the timeline fairly large. Not enough content to keep me in the game and immersed.
Victoria: Rev, a great game, STEEP learning ccurve, and micromanagement hell with the bigger nations such as Russia and the UK.
Hearts of Iron III, I'm till 'meh' on it. I can play a game of it and enjoy though at least.

I joined in with EU3, so I have a fair understanding of the launch history with the games.

I really was going along with something I saw someone else say about those picks. But given Im the end all be all of internet evil, I guess I deserve to be ripped apart for saying it.

No - I suspected that once people gave the game a chance many people would change - I'm actually pleased to see you have given the game the chance it needed to win you round

As Ive said elsewhere, IM TRYING. I play Hiver and not being able to redesign my gates hurts. Not being able to see where my gates are is another one.

As for me being negative, think about this, be objective (or try to anyways) do you REALLY think I have NOTHING to be upset about over this? Hell, Im even TRYING to calm other ppl down on the "theyre not giving us refunds" thing cause they didnt say "no" they said "next week"

IM TRYING to give over to not being as "doom an gloom" as I was as Im TRYING to get less angry about this whole thing. Trolling me for every thing I say doesnt help with that

[safferli]

Everybody please take a deep breath, relax, and be nice to each other. Get up, away from the computer, fetch yourself a nice cup of tea, and then re-read your reply before you hit the "post reply" button!

[amirabiri]

To be fair I would imagine Kerberos already looked into that - I was trying to establish if this was speculation or if you had done a study. This would seem to be pure speculation without evidence - Technical requirements does not match the coding requirements.

Of course it's only speculation but I don't need to do a study in order to make a broad comment on the bigger picture. Kerberos might have had a very good reason to build an engine from scratch, but I find it very hard to see what it was. If anyone has any knowledge on this subject I would be happy to hear.

I don't know what you mean by technical requirements vs coding requirements. I'm getting the impression that you are not able to or not willing to try and understand what I'm saying, which is a broad assertion.

I have never come across a FPS which deals with as many possible combinations of ship sections (cruiser/dread/lv), weapons (small, medium,large, extra large turrets and fixed) and the accuracy to target and destroy individual components (blow off enemy turrets) - that level of complexity, across 6 different races each with their own travel method - would seem in excess of the FPS engines abilities I've played that let you go across a free movement environment.

What you are saying here tells me that you have very little knowledge of what I'm speaking about and that you (again) did not understand what I'm saying. What you perceive as an FPS in abstract terms isn't fundamentally different to the 3D battles in Sots. Different ship sections are not different to an FPS character holding a different gun, it's just several different meshes grouped together. The actual skill required is in the graphics, not the coding (i.e building the different ship sections in such a way that they can always be put together and still look nice).

To achieve individual hits you analyse the ship component before hand, either manually (artist who built the component defines locations) or automatically (write a tool that "compiles" the component as part of the build process). The end result in either case is the same - different locations around the centre of the ship correspond to different ship systems. This can be represented as meshes or primitives, either way something that can participate in collision detection. The data structure to hold this connection is a simple map. When a hit occurs it will have a location relative to the centre of the ship and correspond to one of these predefined components. This is something basic that the physics simulation provides. With that coordinate relative to the ship centre you look up the ship system in the above date structure.

All of this can be built around the what a basic engine would provide, and an FPS engine. What happens when a hit is scored and how you process that is irrelevant. The engine just wants to have objects, render them, move them, perform physics simulation, and then hand over control to your game logic which may result in some objects remove/added/modified or your internal data structures changed. It doesn't care.

The number of components, races and so on is completely irrelevant, that is a question of game content - art and design. Adding another 10 races to the game would have added relatively little coding to game logic and no code to the graphics engine. The different travel methods affect mostly the strategic game logic, they have almost no effect on the battles other than slightly different physics properties of ships.


I'm going to "speculate" again and say that you don't like what I have to say but you have very little knowledge in this area and you don't really understand what I'm talking about. I suggest you take a deep breath and simply say what really is on your mind rather than trying to dig deep into technical details in something you don't really understand.

[Nighthaunt]

As Ive said elsewhere, IM TRYING. I play Hiver and not being able to redesign my gates hurts. Not being able to see where my gates are is another one.

Don't worry about designing gates atm - for Key systems you will naturally upgrade them to Gate stations - for other systems, just forget about it for the moment

As to which systems you have gates in - when you click an uncolonised system the pop up display should automatically switch to fleet view where on the right it shows the Gate ship deployed. Not as convienient I agree and something Kerberos are looking into along with the pathing Hope that helps

[leggosboy]

Of course it's only speculation but I don't need to do a study in order to make a broad comment on the bigger picture. Kerberos might have had a very good reason to build an engine from scratch, but I find it very hard to see what it was. If anyone has any knowledge on this subject I would be happy to hear.

I would assume it would be because either there was not an existing engine that met their needs or the licensing was too prohibitive/expensive. Another possible and likely reason would be wanting to have the engine in house for other projects or even to license out to others for their projects. All of these are common practices.

[amirabiri]

I would assume it would be because either there was not an existing engine that met their needs or the licensing was too prohibitive/expensive. Another possible and likely reason would be wanting to have the engine in house for other projects or even to license out to others for their projects. All of these are common practices.

Well the first reason you mentioned is what we debated here in length and I find hard to believe. The second reason I can understand but looks foolish to me - small company with little resources reinventing the wheel? Who are they going to sell the engine to? For a start, it doesn't support DX9, which other engines do...

I find it more plausible that it was a bad decision due to the usual reasons - bad decision making process / no planning / lack of understanding by the people at the top coupled with pushing by the techies who were eager to build an engine, or alternatively the CEO thinking it's cool to let his team build an engine not understanding or not willing to thoroughly check the costs of building your engine engine vs. licensing another.

[Nighthaunt]

What you are saying here tells me that you have very little knowledge of what I'm speaking about and that you (again) did not understand what I'm saying. What you perceive as an FPS in abstract terms isn't fundamentally different to the 3D battles in Sots. Different ship sections are not different to an FPS character holding a different gun, it's just several different meshes grouped together. The actual skill required is in the graphics, not the coding (i.e building the different ship sections in such a way that they can always be put together and still look nice).

Admittedly I have very little, or more acurately no knowledge of coding, or creating a strategy game. I'm just surprised if its that simple why all, or indeed any of the Total War series, or any other, don't use a FPS engine as well if the advantages are so apparent. But on the bright side, if all strategy developers aren't using it, there's the making of a lot of money as a consultant for those who do understand coding and game design.

[leggosboy]

Well the first reason you mentioned is what we debated here in length and I find hard to believe. The second reason I can understand but looks foolish to me - small company with little resources reinventing the wheel? Who are they going to sell the engine to? For a start, it doesn't support DX9, which other engines do...

I find it more plausible that it was a bad decision due to the usual reasons - bad decision making process / no planning / lack of understanding by the people at the top coupled with pushing by the techies who were eager to build an engine, or alternatively the CEO thinking it's cool to let his team build an engine not understanding or not willing to thoroughly check the costs of building your engine engine vs. licensing another.

Small companies make their own engines and I would find it unusual for anyone making an engine in 2011 to go DX9 due to its current lifecycle.

While the CEO clearly made bad decisions (otherwise we would not have gotten this flaming bag of poop instead of a working game), I am not sure it is fair to say this is one of those bad decisions without knowing information that none of us (with possible exception of some of the mods) are privy to.

[amirabiri]

Admittedly I have very little, or more acurately no knowledge of coding, or creating a strategy game. I'm just surprised if its that simple why all, or indeed any of the Total War series, or any other, don't use a FPS engine as well if the advantages are so apparent. But on the bright side, if all strategy developers aren't using it, there's the making of a lot of money as a consultant for those who do understand coding and game design.

There is no money in consulting the simple things that I'm saying, because software professionals already know these things.

The game engine required for the Total War series is very different to an FPS. The Total War engine dealt with a huge number of objects in a huge scene. In the recent versions it's even more complicated because they have tried to break the "army of clones" pattern so that means each solder is now made of different parts (much like ships in sots, but on a huge scale). In addition the Total War engine had to be able to deal with zooming out and taking a bird eye view of the scene, i.e rendering many of these objects but at lower details, or zooming into the action, and that can happen within a split of a second. That meant the camera culling, the LOD and the mesh / material caching had to be very streamlined and they would have needed different data structures to hold the game objects than an FPS would. These characteristics set it apart from the average FPS. Also the Total war series started many years ago, when the availability of engines, free or licensable wasn't like what it is today. And by now they have the know-how in house of how to do what they are doing and they take incremental steps.

[Buddahcjcc]

Small companies make their own engines and I would find it unusual for anyone making an engine in 2011 to go DX9 due to its current lifecycle.

While the CEO clearly made bad decisions (otherwise we would not have gotten this flaming bag of poop instead of a working game), I am not sure it is fair to say this is one of those bad decisions without knowing information that none of us (with possible exception of some of the mods) are privy to.

gotta say... lol
flaming bag of poo

[amirabiri]

Small companies make their own engines and I would find it unusual for anyone making an engine in 2011 to go DX9 due to its current lifecycle.

While the CEO clearly made bad decisions (otherwise we would not have gotten this flaming bag of poop instead of a working game), I am not sure it is fair to say this is one of those bad decisions without knowing information that none of us (with possible exception of some of the mods) are privy to.

Fair enough I might have gone too far with the speculation, we don't really know.

For the record I wasn't saying that that engines built today would support DX9 (actually I said the opposite) but that if they used an existing engine that has been around for a while it would have likely supported DX9.

RE small companies making their own engines I don't completely agree, it's too broad a statement. The kind of engine we are seeing here is quite complex to build from scratch and is a big undertaking. I doubt many small companies, specially with relatively little resources, would opt to do that. If you are referring to other scenarios of simpler engines, or their own game engines based on existing 3D graphics engines then I can understand that but is that what happened here?

[Archonsod]

Microsoft took a big leap between DX9 and DX10 and a lot of it is tightly coupled to the design of the operating system.

They didn't really, it was more trimming out the bloat that DX9 (and which one, a, b or c? :P) suffered from. Of course, most of that bloat was due to backwards compatibility - worth remembering DX hadn't had a real overhaul since Windows 95.
It's a non-issue though. Most new games this year are also using DX10 as a baseline. It's only really the cross-platform releases that retain DX9, and that's simply because the current console generation is limited to DX9 (and even then, when they can be bothered to do proper ports it's turning up in DX10, it's getting to the point you can almost spot the shoddy ports by their DX9 support ...).

Also Mars 2 is based off the original Mars engine, so it's not like Kerberos built their own engine from the ground up for this - they upgraded the engine they built from the ground up for their previous release. I wouldn't speculate on the why; quite frankly there's as many downsides to licensing an engine as there is to building your own, not least of which is the cost.

[Lor Dric]

This thread is actually getting interesting