T2D update?

#21 This is slightly off topic, but...

I am amazed. I have worked at established companies, and lastly at a start-up. It is inevitable that customers want a "preview" or "early" product. Some of them run off and treat it as a finished deal, others understand. What almost always happens is that the customers have a brief flash of "Hurry and fix this, I NEED it". Then they realize they really have no control of the schedule and they run off to do what ever it is they can. They complain, and then back off when they find work arounds.

T2d is completely different. Here is a product in EA, and the users aren't (mostly) yelling for fixes. They are yelling for *More*, months after they got it. This product is slick beyond belief for an EA. From an EA perspective, when customers are excited about updates because of enhancement rather than fixes something good is happening.

Now, I think three months is riding the edge of how long the excitement can last, and I'm sure GG is aware of this. Luckily, I've only had it for about 2 weeks, so I won't have to suffer as long as you guys ;).

2 weeks with this version and I have a prototype, with a ton of code that won't change in the final, and my initial estimate of 6 month development looks way too long. For $100, they could stop development now and I'd still have gotten a steal of a deal. And this from a guy who quit his job to work on a game because of the potential he saw in T2d (and a very generous/supportive wife). (and yes, this is why you won't see any previews of my game till closer to the end. Too much risk was taken to work on this.)

#22 Even with T2D in its pressent state, games are being created with it. I'm as eager as anyone to see the functionality for the type of games i hope to create come into being. But for the meantime, why not try a smaller, simpler project that T2D can handle. Just keep yourself entertained with it. I haven't seen such a huge number of games created with T2D come out yet to make me think we've already explored and exhausted its current abilities.

Along those lines, would anyone be interested in colaborative projects via this forum? Someone come up with an idea, a simple one, and then anyone interested could contibute art, code, etc. It may sound obvious, but i'm not seeing much of this going on between us T2Der's.

#23 This is slightly off topic, but...

I am amazed. I have worked at established companies, and lastly at a start-up. It is inevitable that customers want a "preview" or "early" product. Some of them run off and treat it as a finished deal, others understand. What almost always happens is that the customers have a brief flash of "Hurry and fix this, I NEED it". Then they realize they really have no control of the schedule and they run off to do what ever it is they can. They complain, and then back off when they find work arounds.

T2d is completely different. Here is a product in EA, and the users aren't (mostly) yelling for fixes. They are yelling for *More*, months after they got it. This product is slick beyond belief for an EA. From an EA perspective, when customers are excited about updates because of enhancement rather than fixes something good is happening.

Now, I think three months is riding the edge of how long the excitement can last, and I'm sure GG is aware of this. Luckily, I've only had it for about 2 weeks, so I won't have to suffer as long as you guys ;).

2 weeks with this version and I have a prototype, with a ton of code that won't change in the final, and my initial estimate of 6 month development looks way too long. For $100, they could stop development now and I'd still have gotten a steal of a deal. And this from a guy who quit his job to work on a game because of the potential he saw in T2d (and a very generous/supportive wife). (and yes, this is why you won't see any previews of my game till closer to the end. Too much risk was taken to work on this.)

#24 @Melv, Well much as I would like a minute by minute account of what your doing I am sure you have much to do.. :)
It has been awhile since your last .plan and everyone is excited, so if you get the chance it would be an awesome read.. if not I am sure we will all understand.. the main thing I am interested in knowing is what will be changed that will break backwards compatibility.. if its just maps then I wont spend loads of time making maps.. and so on.. :)

other then that I would like to say thanks for making my hobby grow.. :) I am learning this much easier then Torque 3d :)

#25

Quote:Everyone at GG are working very hard (you try 16-20 hour days)

Done that. Not a good habbit. People start to make stupid mistakes after the first crunch week. After the 2nd week of 14h+ most people have a hard time reading code - which doesn't actually help the project.

Quote:over the last two months I've been fighting-time between my day job, my family, T2D development and some nasty sickness (back-ache and fatigue). Just let me put this into context; I spend 15-30 hours a week on T2D on-top of my 40 hour/week at work and what's left is given to my family

Honestly, that's not good. No payment is worth that. If t2d means that you've to take so much stress, don't do it. Or take your time.

We#re not complaining that you guys arn't working fast or hard enough. We're complaining about the fact that there haven't been updates lately. Small steps are ok for us (well, I'm mainly speaking for myself here).

Quote:I'm going to try to put together a good plan with plenty of 'meat' in it including lots of nice pictures though so please watch-out for that.

Only speaking for myself, but an update with some bug fixes would IMHO be better than yet-another-feature-list.
Just a version fixing the most critical bugs, and some more documentation. Or the RPC example we all have been waiting for.

Just give us something to chew on. Showing us pictures of food (=lists of planned features) only makes us feel more hungry.

#26 In-fact, like it or not, Tik Games proved that with very little modification, you can releases games even with the v1.0.0 release so we were hoping others would follow suit.

Cool!
Which game did they release based on T2D?

#27 @Hokuto, read www.garagegames.com/news/8206

#28 Gold Fever

#29 IIRC, the only real problem that I saw with Cloudburst was the "taskbar overlays fullscreen" deal. Enough people were seeing this problem to make it a definite high priority on my list to be fixed. (I tried Clark's TT window code fix that he posted somewhere on here, but it didn't seem to help.)

The problems with the DX translation layer I don't really consider show stoppers, as the T2D code is still a WIP. (In fact, I wish I had disabled the Direct X option under the config menu before releasing CB. ^_^)

The rest was just me not understanding at the time how the engine worked (the bin trashing) and a slight bug in physics integration which was found fairly quickly, and a fix posted on the boards.

There's the tile-boundary-collision bug, but fixing that is not going to be easy and so I sympathize with Melv and understand why he's taking it slow on this.

It's obvious that Melv is keeping a changelog, seeing that he's included it in the last release. Maybe if Melv posted this on occasion and just let folks see what is being worked on, it will alleviate people's concerns?

#30

Quote:It's obvious that Melv is keeping a changelog, seeing that he's included it in the last release. Maybe if Melv posted this on occasion and just let folks see what is being worked on, it will alleviate people's concerns?

That's almost the same thing I asked months ago. Not more speedy releases or more features, just simply information. I understand how it can fall through the cracks, though. But it would provide the insight we're all seeking.

Edit: clarified a bit.

#31 OH.. that's funny..
I played the demo a few days ago...
didn't know it had been done with T2D
eh eh

cool!

#32 Gold rush is pretty tight although I wish they made the explosion bigger if you let the timer run out. ;)

Melv and GG team glad your busting ass to improve an already awesome product. I've enjoyed the EA release and have learned a ton.

#33 Our first T2D game is currently about one month away from shipping. It is code-complete (just finishing graphic/sound assets now), virtually bug-free, stretches the feature-set in several directions and has only small modifications to the engine code for performance (i.e. they were originally in script). The engine is certainly stable enough and feature-rich enough to do almost any game I can think of short of something with advanced networked gameplay. I've personally enjoyed working with it immensely, the code is clean and well designed overall and I've almost never had to fight with any code to get it to do what I wanted/expected.

All I'd ask for is a little more consistency in community participation (and an occasional reply to emails would be nice, actually). Using statements like "sooner than you think", "1.1 is getting pretty darn close", "Coming: next few weeks" are all fine general estimates provided there's some context and consistent/fairly frequent refinements to those statements.

As a developer seeking to release commercially, I'd kick myself if I decided to go with what I have right now and then have the next version come out in a day or two that fixed bugs I worked around or had performance/feature improvements that I've been looking forward to. Just some perspective would help this immensely.

Please either commit to more timely progress updates or open up source control with stable drops so EA's can stay on top of things. Look to OSS development for great examples of the benefits; much less/no in-the-dark feeling by the community, early eyeballs on the features, suggestions for fixes/improvements, and the more bleeding-edge EA's can then handle some of the communication load to the community on fixes/coming features (e.g. the people unable/unwilling to use the source control drops).


All said and done, considering the price I'm getting my money's worth so far - and I can't imagine anyone can say otherwise - so I really can't legitimately complain. I can't say the value isn't there in terms of what these products enable people to do.

#34 Re: development updates, have you guys read the recent .plans? I'm not totally sure what more you want. You should've seen that we've been working on a great new editor, physics updates and general SDK simplifications, more networking support, and of course general bug fixes and internal clean-ups. I'm doing another .plan on T2D in the next couple days, that'll help summarize things too. Do you want me to post a trimmed version of the T2D changelog or something? I can post the remaining to-do list for the 1.1 update, if people think that'd be helpful.

We've tried doing stuff like this a little before, and have been burnt a little by argumentative feedback and/or discussions that somehow devolve into personal insults being slung around. If everyone feels that kind of junk won't happen, then I'd be glad to do, say, monthly status updates going into what we've done and what's coming next.

#35 Could you post a link to the most recent .plan file? I was just curious where I should be checking.

#36 Josh, I think you guys need to post stuff like the changelog/todo list and then disable comments. :)

It doesn't matter which way you go, people are always going to bitch about something. That's just the human way.

I think what people are reacting to is that when you guys do post a list of features/bugfixes, people give you crap about not working on their personal favorites. So you've clammed up on the whole thing, thinking it's just better to release it at all at once. But in a way, that silence is worse.

I see this happen with a lot of development teams. They release a product/game, then get shitslammed in response, so they hunker down, work on their list and let people scratch their heads and wonder. The problem is that it makes people act even worse, as they start to get all freaky thinking that so-in-so bug or feature will be in there, and when it isn't, they go ballistic.

I truly do not envy your position on this. ^_^ I wish I could say either method would go painlessly.

#37 Josh and Melv,
I understand the whole concept of being burnt by feedback in the past. Although it hurts sometimes, doesn't it make more sense to get a little negative feedback then to spend a lot of development time on something that people won't like?

I don't care how many projects people work on, the fact is that no matter what you do, there will be a great deal of people who either will not be happy or not like the dircection you are going.

Personally, I'd be more then happy to just know what is going on. Although there has been a few plans on the subject, not everyone making these plans are in the employee blog list nor are they people I may know by name. Since a lot of people don't read day to day comunity plans, things get lost in the shuffle.

I can only read so many " this is the great thing that I am working on now that will never see the light of day" posts. We have a T2D section, why not use it?

I'm hoping that the new TDN features will do a better job seperating the products from each other but I guess I'll have to wait and see.

Thats just my two cents.

#38 I think .plans are too disparate, scattered around and can often be irrelevent, since people are working on many things. Perhaps a moderator-only forum for each product with release information would help a lot. Alternatively a near-daily news sub-section per product, perhaps in the new TDN.

Frequent well-disclaimed timeframes would also be valuable. In a perfect world you wouldn't have the oft ill-worded, ungrateful/arrogant replies and flames but they're almost inevitable regardless of what you do (or not do..) For the mature, serious developers and hobbyists in your audience it would be of immeasurable help to be able to have some kind of consistently updated idea of what's in the pipeline with a reasonable estimated delivery. Barring that, access to a frequently updated codebase/source control like the core TGE/TSE products.

Barring either of those, I'd personally prefer no mentions of timeframe ever, with no exceptions. No "Sooner than you think", or "in the next few weeks" or "still on schedule". Peppering those types of updates around in between long silences is maddening.


To your suggestions, if you publicized the upcoming-release to-do list and updated it timely as you add/complete/drop things from it, that would be fantastic! But best to put it someplace that can be easily found and returned to without getting cluttered with comments, or get pushed down because of new posts/plan messages.

#39 I think Melv and Josh are already doing things right with T2D at this point. They let us know which core modules are going to have breaking changes (in the case of the next version, all of them ;) ) and they give us a good idea of what features are going to be in the new version. They don't itemize every single little change. I would rather them keep doing things the way they are doing now.

If you give them too much overhead with needless documentation they will get a lot less done. In addition it puts stress on Melv and Josh that they don't need. They are doing an awesome job, on a project that is really hard to get just right. So stop complaining, you will get your free updates when they are completed, and not a minute sooner!

#40 Alright, thanks for all the feedback guys. We'll give the monthly status update thing a shot. I'll kick it off with a .plan here soon, and will follow-up soon after that with the first official T2D status update thread here in the forums.

We'll do our part, and for your part, please do keep your eye on the community page and .plans. :) People are doing lots of cool T2D stuff, and lots of times they post about it in detail in .plans, since that's a more personal way to get the word out about your projects. The T2D dev team does this as well, so if you want to get the scoop on T2D, keeping your eye out over there is a good idea.

Note: to keep the official T2D status update thread from being incredibly long-winded, I'll probably just trim responses to one a day or so. If you want to spin off a discussion on a topic we mention in the update thread, that's cool. I think it'll be best to keep the main thread short and sweet though.

That said then, I think we've all come to a good understanding here. Excellent! I'm looking forward to doing the updates... I know all of us on the team would prefer to talk about what we're doing more, if it pans out to be a valuable investment of time and helps people. With that, I think we can consider this issued closed for the time being.