On the issue of game engine changes. I'm reminded of this game called
Duke Nukem Forever. This is not to say changing an engine shouldn't be done but has DNF showed anything if handled poorly it can leave a developer bankrupt with an incomplete game.
I'd just like to point out that DNF suffered far more from overhyping and absurd expectations than it did from the engine changes. Guys that played earler Duke games somehow seemed to forget that it was all over the top violence and immature obscene humor.
The game delivers that in spades.
The level design suffered greatly, but that's more the fault of "this is how it's done" (can you think of another shooter that doesn't corridor you these days?), the humor is pretty much just as forced as it always was, and there's strippers.
It's the same old Duke, most of the reviewers were just either Too Grown Up To Laugh, or hadn't been gaming when the first DN3D title hit and thus weren't privy to the jokes. DNF was precisely what it said on the tin, it was Duke being obscene and blowing up pigcops, same as always. The two-weapon thing was patched out pretty quick because it was fucking moronic, it looked pretty for what it was, and it ran fairly smoothly.
In the end, it was poisoned by people expecting AMAZING and getting... just another DN3D with gimped level design.
I think "better performing" and "optimized" are the key here. If Schine can get the game optimized and performing well, the language and engine used are irrelevant to me.
Personally, I would like to see them step back and do a performance pass before adding any more content to the game. I would have been willing to wait a long time for things like transporters, dark grey blocks and cargo if they could keep our servers from crashing when someone tries to mine a planet or collides with another ship.
It's a game developer mantra to "optimize last," and that's great for keeping up developers' momentum and enthusiasm for their unfinished product, but I think that the situation is a little different with Starmade. There is a large community that has been actively playing, and paying for, this game as though it were a finished product. Maybe it's time Schine started thinking about it the same way.
The community isn't that far removed from the community surrounding Minecraft, and we had to wait... well, it
still has performance issues, and it's been 1.0 for a couple years.
We're not paying for a full product--those that did purchase it that is, since there's still the option to play it completely free--we're essentially paying them for the privilege to stress test their software. As a result, we're along for the ride as the game grows, but we're also gonna have to deal with performance and stability issues because that's just how it goes in testing. And it's not really an enthusiasm thing either--the reason why the mantra is to optimize last, is because each new feature added can (and often will) wreck that optimization all over again. So our options are... have a steady influx of new features until they're all in place, then optimization, bugfixing, and balancing... or one new feature release, four months of fixing, another feature release, four more months of fixing (for the
same problems), etc etc ad infinitum.
I mean it could be worse. Freelance testing ten years ago gave you no promise as to whether or not a game would even avoid throwing your system into a BSOD... I have some stories, youngins, I have some stories... :P
