vjek said: That was specifically in response to the community question as to whether or not you could use pledge rewards being available to map timelines. They said no. Otherwise, you could say pre-alpha might last another 11 months and 29 days, I guess? Or what do you think it means, Kalok?
I'm not going to say what I think it means, because at this point it just seems like you're trying to pick a fight and I'm not going to play into that.
zewtastic said:Ranarius said:It seems like people could be worried that if they pledge to pre-alpha then the very next day Alpha starts they'll feel like they wasted money. So to me the question meant something more like "are we really going to get a year more of pre-alpha access or should I just wait for alpha to start?"
To which the answer was basically "we can't say, but the pre-alpha access is a Thank You for pledging."
Quite accurate.
When I initially pledged if I had known PA would go on for years with no apparent ending point, I probably would have pledged at a higher tier to get access to PA. I in no way expected it to last as long as it has. But I also did not realize they would stop hiring and keep the team tiny when I pledged. I thought they were going to build a team large enough to complete an MMO in a realisitic time-frame.
If they said tomorrow PA is gonna last at least 2 more years, some might up their Tier subscriptions I'm sure.
If they said tomorrow that PA is going to last 2 more years there would be a near total drop off in interest in the game.
Sadly thats probably uncomfortably close to being accurate, but they could never admit such a thing.
lotuss79 said:
If they said tomorrow that PA is going to last 2 more years there would be a near total drop off in interest in the game.
Sadly thats probably uncomfortably close to being accurate, but they could never admit such a thing.
I'm not sure why you think that? People didn't lose interest years ago when we were told alpha and beta would be in 2017 but here we are. I don't think the drop off would be as bad as you think.
disposalist said:So we found a hard-coded quest with a bug in it in a pre-alpha build and lose our poop? Maybe take a break.
People are on edge these days. One bug in a PA video and the conversation took a nose dive into how the game is badly coded and the database is broken... how the game is dead and will never come out. For a second I thought I was reading the YouTube comments.
There are many possible simple reasons for this bug outside of an assumption that the developers decied to ignore basic OOP fundamentals and have spent the last 7 years writing spaghetti code. People should chill out.
philo said:lotuss79 said:
If they said tomorrow that PA is going to last 2 more years there would be a near total drop off in interest in the game.
Sadly thats probably uncomfortably close to being accurate, but they could never admit such a thing.
I'm not sure why you think that? People didn't lose interest years ago when we were told alpha and beta would be in 2017 but here we are. I don't think the drop off would be as bad as you think.
I think this precisely because we were told in 2017 that alpha was going to happen and then 3 years pass. Im not sure how many of these missed timeframes people will put up with.
Project Faerthale was being touted as being basically finished last May, and here we are in October and the videos still feature grey boxed environments and instruction on the forums to “take a break” if you don’t like it.
I hope you’re right though. It just nothing from the past 4 years or so give me any assurance.
lotuss79 said:Project Faerthale was being touted as being basically finished last May, and here we are in October and the videos still feature grey boxed environments and instruction on the forums to “take a break” if you don’t like it.
The zone in the PA5 shakeout video with the grey boxing was Thronefast, and it wasn't part of Project Faerthale. I think using Thronefast for the recent videos was a mistake because so many people aren't connecting the dots and think that Thronefast and that grey boxing is the best they have to offer right now.
zewtastic said:When I initially pledged if I had known PA would go on for years with no apparent ending point, I probably would have pledged at a higher tier to get access to PA. I in no way expected it to last as long as it has. But I also did not realize they would stop hiring and keep the team tiny when I pledged. I thought they were going to build a team large enough to complete an MMO in a realisitic time-frame.
Bingo.
snocap said:lotuss79 said:Project Faerthale was being touted as being basically finished last May, and here we are in October and the videos still feature grey boxed environments and instruction on the forums to “take a break” if you don’t like it.
The zone in the PA5 shakeout video with the grey boxing was Thronefast, and it wasn't part of Project Faerthale. I think using Thronefast for the recent videos was a mistake because so many people aren't connecting the dots and think that Thronefast and that grey boxing is the best they have to offer right now.
Absolutely fair enough. I check in from time to time and don’t follow closely enough to have noticed that. (used to follow more closely)
Im still hoping after 6 years to at least see something like a visually/systemically finished product at this point, but have been left disappointed.
Thank you for pointing that out to me though.
lotuss79: Im still hoping after 6 years to at least see something like a visually/systemically finished product at this point, but have been left disappointed.
I guess this is a reflection on how you view things. Personally I am very optomistic. After 6 years of waiting it is exciting to see Faerthale coming together and looking lush and inviting. I have the imagination to see that Thronefast will be as beautiful as the parts we have seen in Faerthale. I see a game harking back to EQ and I love what I see. Personally I am far from disappointed.
lotuss79: If they said tomorrow that PA is going to last 2 more years there would be a near total drop off in interest in the game.
Yet after 6 years, here we are, passionate and argumentative about a game most of us are craving. Back to the question at hand though. Its a bug. Its a small bug.
disposalist: So we found a hard-coded quest with a bug in it in a pre-alpha build and lose our poop? Maybe take a break.
Exactly!
Huh. Imagine that. Hardcoding WAS a mistake. (yes, I know the link says june, it's actually october 14th, 2020)
"
By the end of 2018 we began work on Project Faerthale, which was to incorporate all of Pantheon’s systems into a playable version of the game. It was an ambitious project for our scrappy few, but it was the next logical step. And we went for it. All of 2019 and much of 2020 was used for Project Faerthale.
During that time it became more and more clear that we had to get out of the old client we were using. We needed to move from hardcoded, inflexible implementations to more robust and scalable solutions. Otherwise, we would have needed to come back and redo the work again later – something that our small team could not afford to do.
We realized that should we continue with the then-current implementation practices, we wouldn’t be able to ship the game. We were backing ourselves in a corner with hardcoding. Any changes had to be done by programming. All quests, all encounters, everything was hardcoded into the client. Designers couldn’t do implementation themselves, they needed a programmer to put it into the game for them. Not to mention the size of the code was enormous. Any new programmers coming in would have a hard time making sense of things or even knowing where to begin. Things had to change.
So we stopped hardcoding.
"
vjek said:Huh. Imagine that. Hardcoding WAS a mistake. (yes, I know the link says june, it's actually october 14th, 2020)
"
By the end of 2018 we began work on Project Faerthale, which was to incorporate all of Pantheon’s systems into a playable version of the game. It was an ambitious project for our scrappy few, but it was the next logical step. And we went for it. All of 2019 and much of 2020 was used for Project Faerthale.
During that time it became more and more clear that we had to get out of the old client we were using. We needed to move from hardcoded, inflexible implementations to more robust and scalable solutions. Otherwise, we would have needed to come back and redo the work again later – something that our small team could not afford to do.
We realized that should we continue with the then-current implementation practices, we wouldn’t be able to ship the game. We were backing ourselves in a corner with hardcoding. Any changes had to be done by programming. All quests, all encounters, everything was hardcoded into the client. Designers couldn’t do implementation themselves, they needed a programmer to put it into the game for them. Not to mention the size of the code was enormous. Any new programmers coming in would have a hard time making sense of things or even knowing where to begin. Things had to change.
So we stopped hardcoding.
"
Yep, slightly more then "just a bug in pre-alpha, relax everyone".
(What # complete overhaul of the game are we at now?)
But at least they finally communicated honestly. Props for that.
Now just got to hope the new partners they are looking for don't change this from a Spiritual Successor to EverQuest into a Spiritual Successor to Elder Scrolls Online. Visually its almost there already.
Sorry for the continued pessimism!
zewtastic said:Producer's letter, thy vindication be mine.
Not really... He stated during PF they rewrote entire systems and removed the hardcoded nature of the game, and that we are now looking at a strong object oriented client that can handle scalable content and asset pipelines. When he spoke of hardcoded content, it was in the past tense.
Your claims are that everything current is still hardcoded.
You are not vindicated, infact you are proven wrong.
arazons said:zewtastic said:Producer's letter, thy vindication be mine.
Not really... He stated during PF they rewrote entire systems and removed the hardcoded nature of the game, and that we are now looking at a strong object oriented client that can handle scalable content and asset pipelines. When he spoke of hardcoded content, it was in the past tense.
Your claims are that everything current is still hardcoded.
You are not vindicated, infact you are proven wrong.
Smug mode...
Something hard-coded was left in. Or perhaps they just quickly knocked up a hard-coded quest rather than hooked it into the object-oriented system. Hard-coding is often more expedient - any coder has done it a ton of times, maybe it wasn't even a mistake, but is simply not that important and is due to be re-written.
Mountain out of a molehill. Tinfoil hats on.
