How much work of squad is showed in updates

[Stargate525]

Like you i have over 25 years IT/Telecom construction expierence, except from consumer home jobs, i never had one big job that ever made the deadline.

Only jobs i made in time, where installing some basic consumer equipment, and then even though where hard to keep up the schedule, and more as often ofc one of the 5 jobs a day had to run into problems, where i was getting home late again..

sheesh... remind me never to hire you. People do actually hit deadlines. My uncle has run a thriving engineering business and has yet to deliver late or above budget. Its definitely possible.

[Frostiken]

A quote from the PC Gamer interview comments:

It seems Squad is so focused on attracting new players that they forget to add mid-game and end-game content. Or, rather, the content that they did decide to add just gets cancelled because it wouldn't be useful for little Billy who is looking into buying the game. When people complain about these actions, Squad falls back to their argument that modders should fill in those gaps. At this point the devs are just attempting to make a base for modders to add features for them. I invested in KSP with the belief that it would be developed into a complete game, seems I was wrong.

That's basically what's happened. Mid and endgame content has basically been totally canceled. They don't seem to really care at all about their current players whatsoever at this point. I was vaguely optimistic when Harvester said that the tech tree was 'for newbies' and that experienced players should power through it in an afternoon by design, but this really makes a lot of sense - they just want easy cash with a bombastic feature that appeals to new players. The total abandonment of mid and endgame content really is just 'take the money and run' design. You got their cash, what do you care that there's nothing to do in the game except go to places just because they're there? What's that? You explored every inch of our featureless worlds nearly a year ago? We don't care, deal with it.

[r4pt0r]

just uninstall please. or get some patience. things will come eventually: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Planned_features of special mention is the text just above the list

"The entries on the list are not a commitment, and the developer team is not under any obligation to implement them all. These features may be pushed back or implemented on another way then suggested here."

Edited December 27, 2013 by r4pt0r

[jwenting]

Then think of the NZ line in amsterdam, startingdate of the constructions was aroun 1996, planned completion date 2009, prosponed to at least 2015.

Initional costs 1.5 Miljard euro, current costs 9.5 Miljard euro, and still more money is needed for the project..

Deadlines... yea sure!..

OP clearly has never worked a day in his live in any production enviroment, or construction related.

Like you i have over 25 years IT/Telecom construction expierence, except from consumer home jobs, i never had one big job that ever made the deadline.

Only jobs i made in time, where installing some basic consumer equipment, and then even though where hard to keep up the schedule, and more as often ofc one of the 5 jobs a day had to run into problems, where i was getting home late again..

I've worked for going on 20 years in IT. MOST jobs meet deadlines. Some (and in some companies many) of them, the staff have to work overtime, drive themselves to the edge of a burnout and sometimes over to get it done, but they get it done.

The main exceptions are jobs for government agencies where the customer constantly changes requirements during development, his own people on the team are not dedicated except to their perfectly safe union salaries which means they can and do go home on the clock of their 32 hour work weeks if not before, never dreaming of doing overtime, and the management structure is so bloated and inefficient that there's no way to get any work done whatsoever. One such project I worked on there were 5 people doing actual work, 20+ doing nothing but writing reports and filling out forms for the managers, and 50+ managers doing nothing but talking to each other about how great things were going, until things came crashing down and they started talking about whom to blame for the failure.

That's why government jobs are almost always under spec, over budget, and way past the deadline.

[Stargate525]

just uninstall please. or get some patience. things will come eventually: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Planned_features of special mention is the text just above the list

"The entries on the list are not a commitment, and the developer team is not under any obligation to implement them all. These features may be pushed back or implemented on another way then suggested here."

So basically you're telling us to trust the devs (who, as far as I know, don't have a single previous game between them), but to be willing to accept that everything they've said could be completely hollow BS?

How is that a way to run a company? How is that a way to run PR? We do a major service for the devs in that we provide word of mouth advertising. That spreads like wildfire among the internet. If they continue to back off and cancel these 'not-promises,' they will run into a sticky situation when no one believes what they put out about anything. I don't think you can sell games like that. Especially alphas, especially from a new company.

[r4pt0r]

if they've made money they are obviously doing well enough. if they make a bad game they will fail. let them make their game for the free market. sales will tell the tale

[Stargate525]

if they've made money they are obviously doing well enough. if they make a bad game they will fail. let them make their game for the free market. sales will tell the tale

Counterpoint: EA. Full stop.

Just because it makes money does not mean it's good, nor does it mean what you're doing is right.

[Clockwork_werewolf]

Counterpoint: EA. Full stop.

Actually advertising and biased reviews (the sites get more hits if they are linked from the game) mean that EA can sell a bad game well. I stumbled across KSP on steam and even then didn't buy it out right I only bought it on a whim in a steam sale. I am so glad I did. KSP's sales are 90-100% due to the quality of the game. EA's games are 50-100% due to the pre hype and advertising.

I can agree with that statement. We are less patient because we have already mastered things like orbital mechanics and base building, etc. The last feature that experienced players got was docking, back in 0.18. Five updates (at 3 months per update) without a fun feature can kind of make any player a little peeved. The nail in the coffin is the fact that the Devs confirmed that the most wanted endgame feature has been canned, and that the foreseeable future of the game will be devoted to new players. That's pretty discouraging.

Now this is at least a statement I can understand and respect even if I disagree with it. Though I would say I

mastered things like orbital mechanics and base building

way before update 0.22 let alone 0.23. This is not a long time if you have been playing for a year or two but it means I still have reached the same knowledge point even if the time since then has only been 4-5 months not 10.

I would say it's not a simple as them leaving all the late game ideas to be made by mods. Every update (such as science) adds options and new parts for the modders to make. Yes they could have made them before but apart from interstellar I have never seen a science mod. Also Interstellar mod is very different form the sort of game I want to play, it's far too sci Fictions than Science Fiction.

My final point is what would it take to keep people happy each update? How long would it take you to get to a new planet or 10? If 10 did last you the 2-3 months till the next update how many new ones would need to be added then? They could add procedural planets yes but their personal opinion not to is one I respect. Since they have said they will not be adding them a modder knows they can make a mod for it without being made redundant in 3 months. If they added a whole new mechanic like life support (TAC or Ironcross) How long would that last? How many BIG updates can they do while ignoring small tweaks, bug removal UI changes to handle the updates before the game is huge takes 10 mins to load and crashes half the time BUT has all the features the community wants? While also having features the other half the community doesn't want.

[Frostiken]

OP clearly has never worked a day in his live in any production enviroment, or construction related.

I work overhauling aircraft. All our aircraft overhauls are planned out years in advance, we're given a very specific timeframe to get things done, and we have specific goals to meet on a daily or weekly basis to get things done on-time. Money is a lot more flexible, but if someone starts slacking off, we don't have the luxury of going 'oh just one more week, srsly lol'. If we're looking to miss a deadline, we bust hours in overtime and weekends.

I honestly doubt Squad is putting more than ten hours of effort into this game a week. There is NOT 3 months of work evident anywhere in the last four updates.

KSP's sales are 90-100% due to the quality of the game. EA's games are 50-100% due to the pre hype and advertising.

What a bunch of bull. You think Call of Duty's hype is totally artificial and that everyone actually hates the game? The game is clogged with people who love it and tell everyone how awesome the game is, exactly the same as KSP. KSP is 90-100% driven by word-of-mouth hype. Players own personal anecdotes about if the game is good are not are no different from personal anecdotes from a game reviewer if the game is good or not. Squad promised us a list of features and hinted at a general direction the game was going. Squad spun us the same load of hype and garbage you accuse EA of manipulating.

Now that the team is abandoning goals, chronically under-delivering, and completely shifting gears on a monthly basis, they're just freewheeling and burning time and money. They've burned *so* much time and money that now they have to shift goals to dumb-down the game and spit in the eye of all their original players by introducing 'features' that 'aren't for us', because they need more money to pay their salaries so they can spend another three years burning time and money, and MAYBE at the end of those three years, we can finally get another planet. But I honestly doubt that. I don't believe anything the team says anymore and I don't expect them to deliver on a single promise in a satisfactory fashion.

This is Mechwarrior Online all over again. And the same fanboys are here. "JUST TRUST THE DEVS LOL". "YOU'RE SO ENTITLED". "YOU CAN'T DO BETTER". "HAVE PATIENCE THEY KNOW WHAT THEY'RE DOING". Everything they've accomplished in the last year shows that they don't know what they're doing and they've totally lost discipline and direction. The disgusting amounts of naivete coming from the sycophants doesn't help. I've been down this road so many times that I actually can't think of a single game I've seen that was ever in a situation like this that was turned around and saved from itself. Unless the devs do a complete 180 and return to their roots, literally the only thing that is going to make this game worth playing is the army of completely unpaid volunteers in the Addons forum who are sacrificing themselves to fix a badly designed, unfinished, broken, shallow game.

I would almost rather they quit development altogether. Every single update (that gives us very little) is full of undocumented changes that completely break half the mods. The modded game is so much better than the vanilla game that I think we've almost gotten to the point where the devs' updates are actually doing more damage than they are improving it. Every single update we run the risk of a critical mod-maker losing interest in his work and completely losing all of his progress until someone manages to take it over. Was the science archive screen and their RAPIER engine worth breaking B9 (which already had the engine), Kethane, RemoteTech, and a slew of minor plugins? I say that it wasn't.

I seriously think Harvester's comment about forgetting shovels was the most insulting thing they've done. Resourcing was scrapped because he thinks we're too stupid to understand the concepts at work. Real classy.

Edited December 27, 2013 by Frostiken

[Sirrobert]

I work overhauling aircraft. All our aircraft overhauls are planned out years in advance, we're given a very specific timeframe to get things done, and we have specific goals to meet on a daily or weekly basis to get things done on-time. Money is a lot more flexible, but if someone starts slacking off, we don't have the luxury of going 'oh just one more week, srsly lol'. If we're looking to miss a deadline, we bust hours in overtime and weekends.

I honestly doubt Squad is putting more than ten hours of effort into this game a week. There is NOT 3 months of work evident anywhere in the last four updates.

Well, than you are not a game developer. That means you don't know how to develop games. That means you don't have a god damn clue how long it takes

[Kokanee]

Squad IMHO needs to focus on developing more content for people who already play the game. Some ideas;

- Another star system to visit;

- Bring back resources;

- Asteroid belts (for harvesting);

- Another parts category (habitats) for building bases and outposts etc;

- Adjustable difficulty, a la incorporating life support etc into the main game, then having the ability to simply check/uncheck a box to enable/disable when starting a new game... like pretty much every other game out there like this.

[Frostiken]

Well, than you are not a game developer. That means you don't know how to develop games. That means you don't have a god damn clue how long it takes

Or I don't care because excuses seem easier to make than results for the fanboys around here.

Let's compare results to the modders, should we? Because FAR alone makes the devs look like they have no idea what they're doing.

I'm through with excuses. We've been hearing whining excuses about how hard development is for a B-rated indy game running on a licensed engine for years now. Harvester made a post about 'development asymptotes' which was nothing more than a stream of excuses for their terrible progress. There is no way, no way whatsoever, that this team is putting anything more than a couple hours of their free time into development.

Maybe if there was any evidence that they were actually busting their butts to get content out in a reasonable timeframe we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

Edited December 27, 2013 by Frostiken

[r4pt0r]

Squad IMHO needs to focus on developing more content for people who already play the game. Some ideas;

- Another star system to visit;

- Bring back resources;

- Asteroid belts (for harvesting);

- Another parts category (habitats) for building bases and outposts etc;

- Adjustable difficulty, a la incorporating life support etc into the main game, then having the ability to simply check/uncheck a box to enable/disable when starting a new game... like pretty much every other game out there like this.

literally everything here is on the "do not suggest" list in the suggestions forum. probably because they want to do it their way. and their way is working quite well. the advanced mod community holds over the veterans so squad can actually finish the base game for the millions who dont even know what ksp is yet.

[Frostiken]

literally everything here is on the "do not suggest" list in the suggestions forum. probably because they want to do it their way. and their way is working quite well. the advanced mod community holds over the veterans so squad can actually finish the base game for the millions who dont even know what ksp is yet.

In other words, they got our money, we can sit and spin.

I regret ever telling people to buy this game.

[r4pt0r]

In other words, they got our money, we can sit and spin.

I regret ever telling people to buy this game.

jesus someone seems butthurt. check this from the xmas devnote tuesday "Season’s greetings, everyone. There will be no devnotes happening until we’re all back in the new year." they get a vacation for all the work on .23 they did. well deserved imo. and as far as "we can sit and spin" they so far have delivered a working game with a functioning universe. i see no problem so far.

[marach]

Or I don't care because excuses seem easier to make than results for the fanboys around here.

Let's compare results to the modders, should we? Because FAR alone makes the devs look like they have no idea what they're doing.

FAR =~5k lines of code

KSP = probably a couple of orders of magnitude more (thats 500k lines to you)...

Finding bugs in FAR still takes hours now think how long just adding the energy pool fix took? How about adding the code for the Science library? The Rapier? The redone particle effects? How about the tweakables? Or the redone part interface?

Now consider testing all the edge cases... etc..

[r4pt0r]

FAR =~5k lines of code

KSP = probably a couple of orders of magnitude more (thats 500k lines to you)...

Finding bugs in FAR still takes hours now think how long just adding the energy pool fix took? How about adding the code for the Science library? The Rapier? The redone particle effects? How about the tweakables? Or the redone part interface?

Now consider testing all the edge cases... etc..

Frosty just wont get it, nor does he think squads making the game HE wants.

[JumpsterG]

I don't want to feed any fires, but I would like to summarize the grey area between the black and white sides of this discussion. I tend towards regarding Squad as a pretty good developer overall, but as you can see by my TL/DR, there's nothing to say you can't complain if you don't like their development style's consequences.

Development IS slow - Squad's team is small and personal. An art guy, a handful of coders, and a handful of QA's. They wont grow in any large way in the foreseeable future. This means we get the 3-month cycles we currently have (arguably a long time). On the flipside, this is a fairly efficient team size and structure, which shows in the relatively bug-free releases. As teams grow in size, they become disjointed and do not work as efficiently, so there is an upside to the slower, smaller team. They also happen to be VERY deliberate in their design process, so they add very few new features to the game at a time.

They ARE focusing on Early-game (for now) - It is true that it would benefit Squad to attract new players, and a progression-based career mode helps. Keep in mind though, that career mode was a planned feature from the start. They didn't decide out-of-the-blue to implement it because they wanted to drive new sales. They needed to work on this feature sometime, and for it to be all it can be, it requires a large commitment of time and effort. Simply, they can't work on much else until it is finished. (Again, slow, small team development). They've said numerous times that their features wishlist is gigantic, and that they want to do as much as they can. Harvester has also said that resource mining in it's previous form is not happening, but that it may turn up again in a better way when they come back to focus on wider features again.

Lack of deadlines - They don't know what they'll be working on 3 or more updates down the line, or how long those updates will take, or when to expect it all to be done. They work in cycles, wherein they decide what is going to be added to the game in each cycle as it comes. It's very haphazard. The tradeoff is that Squad is more flexible and does not need to adhere to a list of "Must haves", instead focusing on what they feel is the best thing to work on at that time. This mostly is a benefit for things that don't work out (Resources), since they're not locked into using a feature that can't be done elegantly.

TL/DR

-Small, slow team makes less-buggy releases, slower. Not much to be done...

-Career mode needs to be done sometime. Now seems good...

-Roadmaps? Where we're going, we don't need roadmaps...

[Themohawkninja]

The only long term goals that Squad seems to have set for now is the career mode (if not how science works as well, but I don't see it changing much now that the spamming exploit got nerfed). Most things that Squad seems to be implementing are just that update, like with the various new parts, docking electricity, etc.

[boxman]

I can agree with that statement. We are less patient because we have already mastered things like orbital mechanics and base building, etc. The last feature that experienced players got was docking, back in 0.18. Five updates (at 3 months per update) without a fun feature can kind of make any player a little peeved. The nail in the coffin is the fact that the Devs confirmed that the most wanted endgame feature has been canned, and that the foreseeable future of the game will be devoted to new players. That's pretty discouraging.

Exactly! And the sad part is that what they have announced for the future is mostly dumbed down career features that is meant to get new/more casual players to buy the game.

I have nothing against making the game easier for new players as long as they also add something for us long time players.

Some people might find resources boring, but other people like me would find that it adds so much playability to the game. What squad could have done is make the features optional so that every player can customize the difficulty and settings of the career mode. That way they could make "everyone" happy.

[Clockwork_werewolf]

What a bunch of bull. You think Call of Duty's hype is totally artificial and that everyone actually hates the game? The game is clogged with people who love it and tell everyone how awesome the game is, exactly the same as KSP. KSP is 90-100% driven by word-of-mouth hype. Players own personal anecdotes about if the game is good are not are no different from personal anecdotes from a game reviewer if the game is good or not. Squad promised us a list of features and hinted at a general direction the game was going. Squad spun us the same load of hype and garbage you accuse EA of manipulating.

To quote a new site http://news.softpedia.com/news/Call-of-Duty-Ghosts-Metacritc-User-Review-Score-Bombed-by-Angry-Fans-397930.shtml

PS3 users are also quite upset with Ghosts, leaving a user review average of 2.0 out of 10. The official average is 76 out of 100, resulting in quite a difference between what actual reviewers say and what users believe.

Xbox 360 owners follow, with a user review score average of 2.1 out of 10. Here the official review average is 74 out of 100, meaning reviewers have noticed a drop in quality.

The few PS4 owners out there are also unhappy with the game, giving it an average user score of 2.8 out of 10, while the official review average is a much higher 78 out of 100.

Wii U users are a bit happier with the game, only giving it an average score of 3.2 out of 10. On this platform no official review has been recorded by Metacritic, so it's unclear just what actual magazines and websites think about the game.

A game as big as Call of Duty with this much this much hype can still keep 1000 obsessional players on-line even if this is only 0.01% of the people who bought the game.

I was very clear in saying that I had heard NOTHING about Kerbal space program. I had not heard about it from friends, I had not seen posters, I had not seen TV adverts, I had not seen You Tube Adverts, I had not seen magazine adverts. I have seen Call of duty adverts in all of these places (except from my friends, they don't play it).

I work overhauling aircraft. All our aircraft overhauls are planned out years in advance, we're given a very specific timeframe to get things done, and we have specific goals to meet on a daily or weekly basis to get things done on-time. Money is a lot more flexible, but if someone starts slacking off, we don't have the luxury of going 'oh just one more week, srsly lol'. If we're looking to miss a deadline, we bust hours in overtime and weekends.

Great, Lovely. But they are not overhauling a game. They are not recreating a game that already exists. There is no manual for the finished game that they can look at and see what is missing from their version back in time. You do not have to make parts that have never existed in the entire universe before. I did computer science at university, it I was writing for a company making a data base then I could well predict the time it would take, I would give costs and schedules and be on time. Making a game is NOT the same its more like paint a picture.

In the 1480s Leonardo received two very important commissions and commenced another work which was also of ground-breaking importance in terms of composition. Two of the three were never finished, and the third took so long that it was subject to lengthy negotiations over completion and payment.

Leonardo da Vinci is regarded as one of the best painters in the world and yet he did not do things on time.

I would like to make it clear that I would like Squad to work faster, I would like them to add more content and I might even say that they could work 20% faster if pushed but I'm pretty sure we would get more of this

Am I a fanboy who thinks they are perfect? Well I don't think so but do I think they are about 7/10 and that's good enough for me and the small amount of money I paid.

[Stargate525]

Squad is not DaVinci. And good or not, he was a notoriously atrocious *illegitimate son* when it came to payment and delivery. He refused to turn over the mona lisa to the guy who commissioned it, never completed jobs he'd taken payment on... if he lived in today's society he would have been sued into oblivion for fraud and breach of contract.

He's probably not the best comparison you can make to tell us to trust the devs.

[Luckless]

FAR =~5k lines of code

KSP = probably a couple of orders of magnitude more (thats 500k lines to you)...

Finding bugs in FAR still takes hours now think how long just adding the energy pool fix took? How about adding the code for the Science library? The Rapier? The redone particle effects? How about the tweakables? Or the redone part interface?

Now consider testing all the edge cases... etc..

Lines of code is also a horrible metric. I've spent two weeks coding and debugging ten lines of code for a flight controller, and then turned around and spent thirty minutes this morning and produced I think 500 lines of code with Qt designer for a GUI front end on another project.

I have tested hundreds of titles from dozens of developers, and it is very hard to judge from the outside whether or not 'real progress' is being made. I've been on projects that made more progress on the surface in two weeks than other projects did in a month. They added more graphics, more levels, more features, etc, and then got bogged down later in development due to bug fixes and edge cases.

So in times like this the best thing to do is to sit back, don't panic, and offer helpful feedback and discussion.

Edited December 27, 2013 by Luckless

[Kilmeister]

I skimmed through the vitriol. And I have said in all of these threads the exact same thing. People who think 3 years is a long time for a full release have no clue how long it actually takes to develop a game. All you normally see are games that are in "Beta" which are essentially ready to go after a number of years. And as far as complexity of writing code. It can be a lot more difficult than you realize to accomplish even simple sounding tasks sometimes. For example, the science archives screen. I recently finished an app that I figure was about the same level of complexity. I just did a code analysis and it was 1500 lines of code to complete that. Edit: Yes I know it is a horrible metric, but it's about the only one that most people understand.

and to throw the cliche that always applies...

A. You can have your software quickly.

B. You can have your software cheap.

C. You can have your software good.

Pick 2.

And since we're only paying a measly $20 for the game I'd say squad is going with B and C.

Edited December 27, 2013 by Kilmeister
I know

[Clockwork_werewolf]

if he lived in today's society he would have been sued into oblivion for fraud and breach of contract.

That's NOT A GOOD THING!

And since we're only paying a measly $20 for the game I'd say squad is going with B and C.

I think it was £15 here but yea