fix the beams and quit screwing with feature additions

[AtraUnam]

Why do bugs take so long to fix? because finding the cause of bugs is hard and it takes a lot of testing to verify that a bug is actually caused by what you think is causing it.

 

[hunterRAE]

This thread disappoints me to no end. I must explain myself for my frustration here, but it has been stated in one form or another on this thread, but I wish to take my own spin.

First, lets just lay down an understanding of who is making this game, Schine. I do not remember the number of staff under Schine currently, but lets just say for simplicity sake there is 15. These individuals have families, full-time jobs and other commitments other than taking care of their own needs like eating and sleeping, trust me, I should know, I am human. :p Though in all seriousness, if you have only 15 workers and expect to create a flawless, functioning program that would compete with companies that have a rather limitless budget and a legion of testers they can hire for the extent of the game production and then some with 24/7 commitment, then you must believe that these people are machines, which people are like this for durations, but most people having to do that would either collapse at work, die of exhaustion or go mad. This can be only solved in 3 ways I see it. The first is Schine gets backing from a large company/ they buy out Schine, which is a touchy thing and a lot of the times kills the innovation of a company untouched by corporations, which you can probably figure a few good examples from today. The second would be for us, the community to submit bits and pieces of code for individual programs, and Schine would would tie together everything, which is not efficient at all, but on paper it could work, we would just have to weed out the "code monkeys". Third, we must pay for a subscription so that they would get a more steady income so they may dedicate more to the work and maybe hire more people, though many would not like this, and maybe kick people from staying, because today that kind of game has died down and eventually went to the "standard" sale of games.

Second, lets look at resources, such as time and money. As a part time team, they have very limited time. If they had a dedicated job of making this game for the foreseeable future, then maybe progress could be made of the path of a update every month. Bare in mind, companies that produce games like Destiny or EVE or Halo or some other sci-fi game have dedicated teams that work for them as a career and work full time every week and have a good 300 programmers just for that one game over a year. Schine is again comprised of about 15 people. This is like comparing a toddlers ability to a grown man, it is not comparable because of capability. They are so good that they were able to do something that most 100 to 200 man teams could do in a decade, which you guys should give credit to, because they are doing more than you are right now, which is practically being a complete snob saying they are not doing enough. So lets continue with this, lets look at money. Currently they go with a somewhat free product model, which is saying that they are getting paid just a bit better than a unpaid intern for something that most people would be doing full time for a minimum of $55,000 a year. Like I said, they have full time jobs that require them to dedicate to something that does not bring in the income, which sadly is this game. Like in engineering, everything is a task of resources, because without resources, people cannot live their life and have to move to a more "green pasture". I know this, because I did my own engineering project for an advanced course that we would have to have a functioning product and market to engineers, which to say did not go well because we did not get any funding and I had to fork over my own money in the end to get anything to get done. Unless you are willing to give up a monthly check to them to fund this game so they could work on this for a living, you should be happy with the results of very to little resources.

Third, lets take a look at the negative comparisons that have been from us. Most of us have compared this game to minecraft and to other voxel based games along with space simulators like Sta Citizen and EVE, which none of these games are like this game. To an extent, StarMade has taken influence from other games in concept form, but nothing to copying or making a duplicate, because if they did, they would have been done along time ago. This game is reaching barriers that have never been touched before in a game, and only have been imitated in other situations, such as an unlimited ship building experience that is only limited by player input. If it was so easy to make a infinite universe and make it fully destructible and customizable, everyone and their dog would be doing this and you would not be here supporting this game. In this though, their is unforeseen issues that require working through, because how would someone know how someone would exploit a system or how a weapon system might be useless to some. I saw on here somewhere, don't know who said it but it does not matter, that No Man's Sky is doing more than StarMade, which in truth it looks it will do a lot, but it is not to the extent of what it looks like will be the end result of StarMade. You cannot create your own ship in NMS or claim your own planet, and those procedurally generated creatures and planets are going to be fleshed out soon within StarMade game, so they in my opinion have not done something ground breaking, so insulting this game is uncalled for.

Finally, lets see what the community as a whole is doing. For the most part, we are actively helping with suggesting new features, but I see little to no posts on issues or possible fixes by the community to these issues. I may be a amateur programmer and studying Software Engineering at a university, but I know for a fact that you cannot fix an issue if you do not know the issue exists. Trust me, if you coded anything over 10,000 lines of code in Java, you could easily get lost in finding issues. You could look over the same block of code for a day a not see anything unless you run that block several times in multiple situations, which is why so many bugs can go for so long until the community would bring it to attention. Even if you know what the problem is and even where it is located in the code, it is sometimes difficult to fix because of the intertwined nature of object oriented programming. So, please discuss this more in the suggestions, join the tester team, do something
other than complaining about a company that barely has enough people to constantly updated on a close to every other month basis. I agree that it is infuriating that something that to most seems so obvious to fix, but it takes time which Schine between their full time jobs and their own lives, it might be hard to muster the time.

I hope you understand why to some who have been on this thread might have some issues with the negative sentiment for something that can be helped by the community. I too wish for a great bit more to the game than currently, but I understand that greatness comes with time, it cannot be fixed under a day of work. I hope your negative feelings were sated by the recent release, and if not, hopefully in the future it will be sated.

 

[Winterhome]

I see little to no posts on issues or possible fixes by the community to these issues

They're there, they just get buried extremely quickly.

The simple fact of the matter is that the community in general is not made up of computer scientists and such. Any technical explanations of issues in programming terms tend to go over peoples' heads very quickly, and suggestions on how to fix a given problem widely go ignored because the threads fall off the front page in under a day.

 

[hunterRAE]

They're there, they just get buried extremely quickly.

The simple fact of the matter is that the community in general is not made up of computer scientists and such. Any technical explanations of issues in programming terms tend to go over peoples' heads very quickly, and suggestions on how to fix a given problem widely go ignored because the threads fall off the front page in under a day.

True, but a great thing I have done when I program is to just pretend that I have no knowledge of the program at hand, pretending it is not my own and try to break it as much as possible and record what led up to it, such as I deleted a bunch of systems and opened the weapon system tab and it crashed (true story that happened once, but it was most likely just high load on the server). Testers purposely try to find workarounds to find every way something can go wrong, and believe it or not, this is somewhat a simple process to do, just do as much random stuff as possible. For most, the programming lingo gets overlooked easily, but if it is translated into a simple, "I did this, this and this happened", Schine can start piecing together where at least the error is occurring and fix it. I hope that the posts about bugs and fixes take more notice or maybe Schine could make a "bug fix" forum so that it is more visible for those who care, because it is quite apparent that people quite care about bug issues.

 

[Megacrafter127]

Schine could make a "bug fix" forum so that it is more visible for those who care, because it is quite apparent that people quite care about bug issues.

So a publicly available bugtracker is not enough?

 

[kiraen]

Front page news: New bug tracker, not even two weeks old.
Of course, that isn't actually a forum. You'd have to go somewhere else for that.

I still haven't gotten my lunch, tho.

 

[hunterRAE]

So a publicly available bugtracker is not enough?

Bug tracker for many like me would be fine, but maybe for the people who do not see the obvious bug tracker site, maybe a forum would prevent good bug tracking discussions from disappearing due the mass number of suggestions.

 

[Megacrafter127]

but maybe for the people who do not see the obvious bug tracker site

Or just link it in the site's forum list(and probably also navigator).

 

[hunterRAE]

Or just link it in the site's forum list(and probably also navigator).

That seems doable for someone to do, I like that idea. :D

 

[BDLS]

I too wish for a great bit more to the game than currently, but I understand that greatness comes with time, it cannot be fixed under a day of work.

Nor the 10-12 or whatever years the Schine engine has been in development for
:^)

 

[Lecic]

Nor the 10-12 or whatever years the Schine engine has been in development for
:^)

The engine may be 10+ years old, but that doesn't mean the game is. The engine is just a framework for the game that has nothing to do with, say, a bug with how beam power is calculated.

 

[jayman38]

The general StarMade player population requested more frequent updates than less and the dev team has complied. A request to send out less frequent updates is simply not in line with the general community's wishes. Most players want more frequent updates, if only to be reassured that the game is, in fact, being actively worked on.

 

[Deepy]

Quoting party !

I believe schema gave some solid reasoning behind this. As this is alpha development, he cannot afford to spend time fixing bugs that will appear again in a new patch. We have already seen this happen. It is more complicated than eradicating issues once and for all. Game breaking bugs are the exception. With that, it should be noted that every weapons combo was looked over by the testers and there should be fixes coming in the next patch. I believe these fixes are already in the dev build.
Indeed, as said before, fixing take time. But if you build and fix things properly, fixing new bug will be easier. Fixing a huge programm with everything bugging en coeur is far more difficult than fixing a bug created with the addition of a handful of functions. Plus, you mention a "time" thing. Believe me, if things are too buggy, the fastest option is to rewrite your code. It also consumes a lot of time, also, I'd like to say that time is not an issue, i'm quite patient, and if it needs 10 years to release even a single simple release (we fixed a grammar error, hurrah \o/), I'll wait.

Don't complain unless you are willing to do something about it.

If Schine is going to slowly for you, keep in mind that this game is available for free. Free games do not support people. Most of Schine therefore has to be part time volunteers. I doubt they can afford to pay legions of professional coders like many of the games that get hotfixes in days or hours, I doubt they can afford to pay the few they have.
Time is not a problem, most of the software I use on my computer are released less than once a 3-years. Plus it's only free (although you can pay for it) as in you do not pay. The code is "closed" source, and it is not allowed to see what's inside. "Beyond that, you are not allowed to copy, reverse engineer or de-compile StarMade without permission."
If you say that the large community is evidence of a released game, I would say you are quite wrong. Look at Minecraft, the game that inspired most of these voxel based games. It was popular pre-release. And if you think that went better, and faster, than this does, keep in mind that this is still in alpha, and minecraft has been a game you must pay for for most of it's history.
Minecraft have long been criticized for the same reasons some of us are criticizing Star-Made.
What you should be asking is how a game filled with "quarter baked" features made by mostly unpaid volunteers has grown to have such a large community. Even those of us who have paid for the game have only spent, say, $12 or whatever it is now. If the community thinks that an alpha game is being developed too slowly, maybe that community should pay for the ability to develop it at the speed it thinks it should be going at.
When someone pays the game, he's morally and financially powering a game. Everyone who paid should be considered as part of the dev-team :p The interesting thing is : someone who paid the game should be "rewarded" by the dev team, and actually the dev team listen to recommendations, features request, and such. What our minority is saying is that too many of "you" asks for a sped up development and more features, plus bug fixing. As you said Schine cannot afford such a wide frontline. As a consequence, their development process is bugged.
Would I prefer that the game be developed faster? Of course. But considering the resources its developers have it is going quite fast enough.
I personnally want the game to be playable and perfectly polished until I buy it. But such a way to think is not constructive, since if everyone does so, the game will have near to 0 support and will die. That's why I'm asking for a "proof" that my money will potentially be spend in "useful" time. If the dev team does not want to do so, it's their own right, but they've to know I'll not put a penny to see things becoming better. I'll just wait, in my wise patience, that things change (or not).

Shockingly, an alpha game that has until recently only had 1 person doing code has a lot of issues.
Having more people to work on it might actually result in a more buggy and messy game. Some people have really... Exotic coding habits, and reading their code is painful. Just imagine someone joins the team, write down some "core" functionnality, and leaves the team. Schema will die trying to fix bugs that are linked to the messy code.

To conclude, most of you seem to have misinterpreted "our" message : we do not want Schine to do awesome stuff, right now, nor we want them to speed up. It's the total opposite, "we" are wondering if slowing down, doing things slowly but well, might not be a better thing.


Edit : Aarg, my post is full of awful grammar and/or spelling errors, I'll try to fix it later, sorry !

 

[Valiant70]

Seriously. Stop releasing new features like an kid with ADHD on speed and focus on core functions. There's not anything even attached to my slave computer and the power draw burns out a 1m battery in less than three ticks. If I see another feature drop before beams get properly fixed (their initial power draw for the damage/accuracy of the weapon was lackluster as well) I will continue to think on Schine as the amatuer operation it keeps looking like. No Man's Sky is coming with a stronger look and gameplay because they committed to a design goal and saw it through while you dithered. Get on the ball.

Also, boarding flies in the face of a million things that were already in the game. A faction module can be burned out by the torch as easily as anything else, did the trolling possibilities not occur to you or did you just say "screw it they can deal."

If you want to improve combat, there are other existing features you could just finish instead of pasting on new ones like a child with a macaroni box and a paper plate. The support tools need some serious love. Give me slave systems for support tools so I can build a fleet support that can recharge the shields of all allies with a damage pulse slaving a shield recharge beam.

3d printing?!?!?! MAKE THE GAME WORK PROPERLY BEFORE YOU TRY TO SELL ME MERCH.

I threw you some dough because I like your concept. Commit to the concept and solidify what it has rather than crowd sourcing the design process. I'd like to see this game leave alpha before 2020.

You don't need more new features. Just finish the ones you've already started and wandered away from like goldfish distracted by a mirror.

This is why so many games don't have an open alpha. Go away until the game reaches beta, then return and be welcome.

 

[Ithirahad]

It's the total opposite, "we" are wondering if slowing down, doing things slowly but well, might not be a better thing.

Yeah, I almost agree... almost. Problem is, last time the updates were slowed down we got the equivalent of a bunch of these same sorts of updates mashed together every six months or so... If anything the current development schedule is probably best. The problem lies somewhere in Schine's development process, I think.

 

[Groovrider]

Just out of curiosity, how many people here have answered the recruitment drive for testers?

 

[0Samuel0]

Quoting party !





To conclude, most of you seem to have misinterpreted "our" message : we do not want Schine to do awesome stuff, right now, nor we want them to speed up. It's the total opposite, "we" are wondering if slowing down, doing things slowly but well, might not be a better thing.


Edit : Aarg, my post is full of awful grammar and/or spelling errors, I'll try to fix it later, sorry !

Why are you putting your responses inside the quotes.
Why would you do that... what could you possibly hope to gain.

Maybe I should be saying something about the content... but the formatting, it bothers me too much.

Please fix it.

EDIT
Actually, one key point you made is that Schine should be listening to the people who bought the game. And if you look through this thread, look at who is satisfied, or at least not entirely hostile towards the way Schine is doing things now. You will notice a trend.

 

[Criss]

Yeah, I almost agree... almost. Problem is, last time the updates were slowed down we got the equivalent of a bunch of these same sorts of updates mashed together every six months or so... If anything the current development schedule is probably best. The problem lies somewhere in Schine's development process, I think.

It's really not even that. It's time and resources. Schine is just small. Although there are things being worked on that would have been put off for months had the new people not been brought in.

 

[BDLS]

Hardly any of the old players stick with this game, because of long periods of unplayability/massive bugs. If Schine is ok with that, and the newer community spouting "it's alpha, retards" is fine with it, well, that's cool.

Stuff like a single player crippling a top 3 population server by planet mining that has been going on forever is just getting old. Why should people keep playing and bugtesting? Like how can you release a game update, and you ask for money & support for when there are hundreds of recorded bugs still out there? How small of a scale is the testing done on? An isanth? How about the big ships players actually field? Lets look at beams. A year since they've been released and they still don't record their hits properly. Rails? Enjoy using something with more than five turrets.

What happened to mines? Shitcanned.

literal stockholm syndrome

it's amusing how people can't criticize the direction the game has been going for the past year+ without being jumped by the Schine Defense Force. "Just stop playing it's not for you." Is that acceptable? It's not that I don't like the new features, they're great and I like where they're going. But it doesn't mean a damn thing if they don't even function properly.

F A U N A T I M E B O Y S

rip on biddles, literally the new Mou now

edit: Fauna feature update before shipyards? That is quite amusing. Spawning in ships through BPs is the most annoying facet of the game right now.

 

[Criss]

because of long periods of unplayability/massive bugs

This is a bit exaggerated. While it is certainly a problem to have things like planet mining slow down a server, it can be avoided if the server admins take steps to prevent it from happening. Is it entirely the admins responsibility? No. Schine does owe players optimization updates. But that comes after most major features are in. There really is no way around that. The devs would be wasting time fixing the same bugs with each update if they focused on fixing them each update. There are literally 3 of them. It's tough.

Like how can you release a game update, and you ask for money & support for when there are hundreds of recorded bugs still out there?

Again, if there were more to the dev team there would be less of an issue with bugs.

How small of a scale is the testing done on

There was recently a call for more testers to get involved. That is because very often testers will become inactive. Don't blame Schine when bugs go unreported. Get involved if you want to see bugs getting squashed!

What happened to mines? Shitcanned.

Totally not shitcanned! Implementing new weapons is easy as per the big weapons update months ago. But do we need a new weapon? Not really. We need shipyards. We need NPC's. We need better faction systems. More planetary content. Fauna. More space exploration. These are major elements of the game, but they aren't really in the game at all yet. I think it's imperative to get them in first before we think of a new weapon. Mines were a bit tricky to figure out iirc. I think the concept is finalized though.