[Discussion] Tired of hearing "soon"? Thoughts on the Q&A

[schema]

I'm not against opening up the code. But it has to be done in an ordered fashion. The first people with access will be people I absolutely trust.

And I'm planning to do it in stages. The thing is, that organization of coding with multiple people is very time consuming. I don't want people to get into parts that have a shaky core: For example if someone was to make an amazing feature but it's build on a foundation that has to be changed for optimization. I don't want them to have to redo the whole feature. It just wastes time. So I want to release part by part of things I know are solid enough to be extended.

As a side-note: optimization is a very big buzz word in the gaming industry, often thrown around at will. Promoters often like to use that word when something is not working the way it should. but optimization is not something you can actually do efficiently at later stages. Most of of the core work that took so long is actually optimization. But, because there are atm limited features it won't make a big difference visually. The difference is, that planned features are already accounted for in terms of basic optimization in starmade (there can be deviations of course). And of course there are still ways to do it more efficiently, but what I want to avoid is having to change a system because there is something seriously wrong in the core. Just doing features without caring about the core will end up making the game limited. If the game is already slow with the features that are in, all the planned features will just add to that performance cost.
As that issue is often ignored and optimization is just promised when the game reaches beta or release state, I was in the past often disappointed by those games not actually having much optimization at all compared to their alpha states.
My point is basically: optimization has to happen now or never!

 

[gravypod]

I'd just like to take my time to pitch into the argument that has developed over the past few posts.

I, as many other players, have been playing starmade from some time now. From what I remember it is coming up to my one year mark over the next few months and with that information I can easily, and confidently, say that the stability of starmade has been steadily degrading over time. Many of the bugs that I and members of my server have reported have been fixed; however running a server and keeping it online has gotten exponentially harder which is my main problem with starmade: there is a problem. Starmade is at a point at which it's community can grow and the game may be revitalized in the eyes of the old players or the game can continue to die off. With updates, fixed, and new content sparse it is hard to continue to love and play starmade. The only solution I see to fixing this problem is hiring more people to help with fixing bugs.

I would like to start off and address the naysayers of the community first. Adding programmers does not mean the game will die, the exact opposite is true. One of the worlds biggest game development and distribution companies, Valve, has ~330 employees. From where I stand, Steam is a very functional distribution platform and the source engine is still one of the leading engines in the gaming world. The fact of the matter is: getting help to do something improves your ability to do it.

Starmade is at a volatile state, no one can deny this. The game is on the verge of dying off, hosting large servers is a task only able to be performed by few, and most of the players are drifting away. It is to the point at which the game needs more help.

I have asked schema if he wanted any help and many times I have seen similar responses to "I don't want people messing up my code". The fact is, things like that don't happen within the industry. Each project has standards that are followed as if they were biblical. Nothing would be "messed up".

In my mind, I see nothing wrong with reaching out to community members and requesting help.

 

[gravypod]

My point is basically: optimization has to happen now or never!

Then you should grab YourKit and some coffee. Trust me, it will help.

 

[therimmer96]

I think we may have come across wrong in our posts. Please don't see us as people against schema or starmade, we love the idea of the game, and want to see it grow. But we don't see that happening at the moment, and that worries us. Please don't hate us for this. We love the prospect of this game, we want to see it go the same way minecraft went, so we are offering our opinions

 

[schema]

gravypod I use YourKit on a daily bases. What i mean is not how to find bottlenecks of performance, but their implications. There is a difference of having to change a small thing to make it faster, and to have to basically change the whole code because it's fundamentally flawed

About stability, I don't know exactly what to say. Something like a server with 30 people being on was impossible in the past. An example is the mushroom fleet server where they were able to do complex minigames while the server was filled up during the charity stream. This would have been so many server crashes in the past. And I'm in no way implying with that it's perfect. And also the scale has changed. When things get more scalable, player will do bigger things. I purposely made the balance in a way where there is not much implication, while of course there are natural limits.

 

[schema]

As for the "starmade is dying" thing, I can only give insight from my situation on that. The main hype that hit the game was because of a video of yogscast. I didn't plan this, nor was it under my control, but of course I'm very thankful of the exposure. It's hard to say if the game was ever "alive", as I just followed my ultimate goal of making a fun game, no matter how much hype/flag there is.

The thing is that I refuse to sell something based on just promises, and I know that it's hard to keep the hype up based on that premise. One thing to consider is, though, that all the hype the game ever got was based on actual things in the game. And I had the same system of getting the core right all the time. My philosophy is not to consider players as naive consumers. My goal is to make a fun game, and even if it takes more time in the long run, I believe that this is what the gaming industry should be about.

 

[marcus87]

Keep all the time you need and make an more awesome game. I dont see it dying I dont even know how they come to that conlusion?

 

[Mariux]

I know I'm not alone in this, and I think it needs to be addressed. The community for this game is actively shrinking, or maybe just stagnant. To put a few numbers to this. Space Engineers had a peak number of players around 7,000 people around the time of this post. I doubt Starmade has been so lucky. The SE subreddit has about 6000 readers while the SM subreddit has half that amount. I know during the Q&A that the devs did not feel a need to compete with SE, but this is a naive notion. Your customers clearly don't see it that way. They see these two games as very similar, and if one doesn't offer the right experience it is trivial to jump ship. If the end goal is to make a good game that will get played, then having your customers taken away by a similar game is bad.

It is lazy to think that a game will get played just because it has a good premise. The game needs to be developed, it needs to meet the standards of the community, and it needs to be done in a timely manner . So far SM has not done these things. Doors still 'degroup', severs get corrupted, weapons fail to damage blocks, ships randomly teleport, the game is unbalanced, and all the anticipated features have all gone the way of a George RR Martin novel being "on the way". The game has been in alpha for more than two years. two years and the game is sort of working. If you think that the majority of people care about the difficulties that come with bug fixing and engine development then maybe game design is clearly not for you. Customers expect a game that works, this is the bare minimum of standards. It is the flashy bits that draw people in and keep them playing. So far the two things that SM has working for it are an open PvP universe, and the capacity to build mega ships.

This brings me to some general thoughts on the most recent Q&A. There was absolutely zero constructive criticism. How did the mushroom fleet guys get by without showing any sort of concern!? All i heard was "that's interesting" or "I agree with that". What a complete waste of time. We know what features are planned, and when we asked when they were coming we got a very loud "I DON'T KNOW". If there are zero deadlines, that are then met, all we have are empty promises. Another confusing bit is that the game in in alpha, but the devs don't really treat it that way. There is a great big concern about stuff being backwards compatible. Why? If this is alpha why do you care? Let stuff break, fix it and make it better. Truthfully I don't think this game is in alpha based on the way the devs treat it. It seems that the word alpha is only used as a convenient excuse for when something breaks or isn't finished.

I hope when you read this you do not mistake it for a malicious attack. I wish only convey my frustration with the progress being made, and I am merely concerned about the future of the game. I believe this game has the potential to be the best space builder out there, but it has yet to prove it. What is more, with SE releasing updates weekly It is getting hard to justify playing SM.

Times are bad when the devs joke about the frequency of updates "Soon(TM)"

Although you have a point, I think you're a little too harsh. Schema spends the whole week developing a game that's supposed to be fun, not just adding performance-risky features that would harm the game later on and he would get away with it, like KSW did (I'm not a hater of them, in fact I even have legit SE, but it's a different thing). As for the ''dying'', it's just because that not all Yogsfans actually stayed with the game, some left in a week, some in a month, but some stayed. In fact, that's how I found Starmade! Also, most of the people (but not all!) who left SM early, were just impatient and immature audience that went on another prey that YogsCast would drop them. About the estimates, you probably don't realise how hard it is to make them. I intensionally planned to finish my Titan-class ship in a month, but it took me three.

Next thing I wanted to mention is that Space Engineers and Starmade are incomparable. Yes, both are voxel-based and set in space, but that's where similarities end. Starmade focuses on sci-fi, scalability and procedural generation (universe, planets, etc.), while Space Engineers is more about graphics, realism and more realism. I don't think that it's very nice for you to talk in the name of the whole community.

Yes, this game is in alpha for a long time, but the reason why it is, is that only Schema works on the code (of course, there's Kupu doing textures, which is very nice) and any additional people would require extra money to pay them, which would be taken from the game's budget. Considering that Starmade is so cheap and there's not such a big player base, Schema gets massively underpaid, and taking even more money for salaries, Schema would be left with nothing.

To sum it up, I'd like to thank Schema for working very hard on such a cool and fun game, always listening to the community, and obviously doing it all for more then just money. He's litterally the best and most dedicated dev I've seen.

P.S. Neon, making an excuse for a post being rude in the end, doesn't make the post less rude.

 

[Tomino_sama]

We mean for the actual coding, something schema has kept personal for too long.

INB4 Everything Requires "Coding" if you want to get technical

sooo..... There are a lot of volunteers. Everybody just does it. I salute them all!

 

[Tomino_sama]

It is Schema's baby and we respect how much work he is doing, but the community dying due to the lack of completion. Which is a real shame, because this game has so much potential. He just needs some help to get things running. I'm not talking about the website, forget that. Just the game itself. The bugs just need to be squashed so we can enjoy it. Which can obviously not be done at the same time as addition of new content. So, why not allow the community to help squash them?

We just want to help make this game live up to it's potential.

We had 100 new members in the last 3 days. That just on the Whitelist. Where are you getting your figures from? We see no problems with the game classed as "Zero Day". Most issues people have with Starmade are relating to client hardware or network performance.

also - there are Official Testers, so we can help them squash the bugs now, by *reporting bugs* :D

The point of the OP was that the community is slowly bleeding away most of its playerbase because of the state of the current game, which is a symptom of a game in early alpha. The community has grown far too big for just one person to be working on the game, as it makes it impossible for that single person to be able to create enough stable content fast enough to keep most of the fans of the game fed.

While I liked some of what you had to say Deadlis. you Contradict yourself. How can the Community be shrinking but also too large for one man at this point. from the same paragraph.

Where are your references to support this Decline? I see like 3-4 of the same names "Naysaying" in amongst some passive submissive sugar coating.

It is easy to say all these buzzwords, but without any real data to back them up it's like me saying the Pope is Chinese and you lot rolling your eyes when it is clearly unsubstantiated Speculation at best.

This is Alpha as everyone forgets. We are the testers. This game is Community Driven. Stale Community = Stale Game. That is independent of the Game itself.

If you can't enjoy Starmade right now, I am most certainly surprised

 

[therimmer96]

You guys seem to be seeing the people who see problems as evil hate throwers. please dont. we feel passionately for this game, and feel that it can do well, but we don't feel that it is happening, and that things can change to make starmade even better. if we simply didn't offer our opinions because it is not one that everyone shares, nothing would happen about the issues we see, and schema wouldn't know about these. that is all we are doing. and don't feel we don't help with bug reports. gravypod Deadlis x2006charger and myself frequently send error reports, logs and other problems we have to AndyP so that these issues get fixed. Please dont see us as hostile forces throwing around hate. we love this game, and want it to grow. all we are doing is offering our suggestions to do this.

 

[Winterhome]

When you're messing with adding new, fancy and flashy features, I feel that adding extra devs is fine.

But when you're changing the core of the game itself, you need to stick with the developers who were there from the beginning, since you need *everyone* to know all of its ins and outs. Otherwise, someone would write a line of code that breaks something somewhere else, slowing down progress by requiring an otherwise nonexistant bug to be fixed.

I think it'd be best if it stayed as a one-man programming project until it's stable and functional enough to support a modding community. Then just pull the most ethical and reasonable coders from the modding community in as potential members of the Schine team. :P

 

[Cybertooth]

But when you're changing the core of the game itself, you need to stick with the developers who were there from the beginning, since you need *everyone* to know all of its ins and outs.

I think it'd be best if it stayed as a one-man programming project until it's stable and functional enough to support a modding community. Then just pull the most ethical and reasonable coders from the modding community in as potential members of the Schine team. :p

Thats actually the best post we've had for a while.
Maybe just ask the modder(s) in question if they would mind their mods being implemented into the vanillia game. But yes, good plan

 

[Firestorm29]

I think I agree with Azereiah here.

I can recall some of the hard times trying to play Planetside 1 when they kept on moving people around. Resulted in tons of band-aids which caused many, many memory leaks since there was little documentation on how the source code worked and tools to modify the geometry of the game was lost.

 

[Websterandy42]

When you're messing with adding new, fancy and flashy features, I feel that adding extra devs is fine.

But when you're changing the core of the game itself, you need to stick with the developers who were there from the beginning, since you need *everyone* to know all of its ins and outs. Otherwise, someone would write a line of code that breaks something somewhere else, slowing down progress by requiring an otherwise nonexistant bug to be fixed.

I think it'd be best if it stayed as a one-man programming project until it's stable and functional enough to support a modding community. Then just pull the most ethical and reasonable coders from the modding community in as potential members of the Schine team. :p

Honestly though, thank you for understanding coding and having the ability to apply basic logic to that understanding. Adding programming devs would slow down the project considerably. They would have to learn how the entire engine works and Schema would need to micromanage everything they do until the engine was done because even minor changes would greatly effect everything.

The best thing I can think of is:

• Schema continues work on the game like he has been
• People will mod when the game reaches a certain amount of stability and a modding API gets released
  
• These mods could be available as plugins that are registered, controlled, and updated through the launcher
• Getting on a server with certain plugins would automatically download and apply them client side
• If a plugin becomes universally used, schema could incorporate it into the base game with permission from the maker

 

[gravypod]

I feel that there is a large discrepancy and lack of knowledge on code collaboration. Many of the concerns people seem to have are just misplaced. As a friend to owners of some large projects, open and closed sourced, I have heard of the benefits of teams of coders time and time again. It might take a developer some time to get acclimated, but each dev brings something to the table. One might have experience in one field that the rest of the devs have not dabbled in. In the real world, there is no one-man-team that works efficiently. From the changes made over the time I have played the game, I can tell schema has a large knowledge for the workings of OpenGL; however this is a very specific field of study and hiring people to fill the gaps of schema's knowledge would greatly benefit the game.

I would also like to say that the fear of one programmer making a change will destroy the whole project has no basis in fact. When a code base organically grows by work from a team of developers a code base becomes refined, tested, and well documented. For example, one of my friends from the minecraft community, ElgarL, took over development of many plugins such as GroupManager and Towny. It took some time, but with his help and commits from many other people within the community both plugins became extremely stable. There is no reason that something similar could not happen with starmade. With a dev team of capable programmers, the game's general stability would improve drastically.

 

[Firestorm29]

gravypod I think part of the concern is how much faster it would be to allow schema to finish the work on what needs to be finished at this point vs bringing others in to help finish. While the remaining work can be broken down, considering how much is left with many of the new features, it might take longer to train new peeps. It seems like most the work is done to the point to suggest the latter.

 

[gravypod]

gravypod I think part of the concern is how much faster it would be to allow schema to finish the work on what needs to be finished at this point vs bringing others in to help finish. While the remaining work can be broken down, considering how much is left with many of the new features, it might take longer to train new peeps. It seems like most the work is done to the point to suggest the latter.

It would be much faster to get help than to do it alone.

 

[Cybertooth]

You entirly missed his point there, hes saying that theres no point getting people to help with what schema is currently working on, because it will probably take longer to get help up to speed than it will to finish it.

 

[marcus87]

I have no experience with computing but I know one thing. Starmade is schema´s, it is his to decide if he wants to hire people. I think he knows as much about the possible benefit of additional coders as you do.

But I think he knows way more about his current affairs. Which means he is in a much better position to decide what he has to do. And even if he simply wants to do it alone, this would still be his decision. You can be happy about that or not, it wont change anything.