Next T3D 1.1 release?

#41 @Everyone - thank you for the feedback. You are being heard. The good/bad news is that we already understand your concerns and we've been working towards short and long term solutions.

@EB - no offense taken. I've tried to be very careful about what I've promised the community and as the guys here will tell you, promises made are hugely important to me. I promised TGB fixes by the end of April and we delivered. We promised better docs for Torque 3D ( We've delivered 40% on this promise and slowed down a bit to fix bugs, but we have started 2 contracts to make up for that ). We made a commitment to converge and we are currently in development on that promise ( we have roughly three developers working on it now ). I promised to make usability and quality a focus; we put a usability and quality assurance lab to deliver on that promise. We will do roughly one usability test a month. The focus sprints are also aimed at meeting this goal. In regards to Jugg, it didn't fully reach the goal of converging, but it did actually help set the stage for this next round.

We are also very sensitive to managing expectation. That means not over-extending our promises just to make sales. I don't think you will find a recent example of us doing that.

@Mark - In many cases we are dropping legacy pieces in order to move forward more efficiently. But we are doing more carefully than what I'm hearing you suggest.

@S2P - I agree things are moving slower than they should. We are working on corrections, but I believe we are moving in the right direction.

#42 So I generally like and agree with Matt's response. Except for one item.
The whole, this is a high tech industry and so we dont know how long things will take and so we just work until we think its ready.

I believe that giving timelimes for things (ie ballpark timelines) can work IF if you go to bite size pieces.

I've been in the game industry for 20 years and avoiding dates and setting deadlines has killed many projects whereby the publisher finally has enough of the "we dont know how long, maybe a couple months" and they kill the project after awhile 'cause everything revolves around dates and no one wants to hear "well maybe next month" cant do marketing, cant get boxes on shelves if you dont know when. and most of that(marketing, buying shelf space, etc) has to get started long before you have actually finished the product. so if you cant say when your eventually in deep trouble and you run the risk of getting the project canned.

high tech or not setting up a roadmap and general timeline for features to happen is not asking too much, and in fact not doing that gets you into bigger trouble then setting it and missing it from time to time.

sure its a PR/Marketing problem to set a date and miss it, so dont, set a timeline instead, but if you course correct so that you do start estimating better, and adjusting your process so you can hit them you move towards a smoother/faster/more efficient process.

where if you just do the "we dont know so whenever" you can go down the wrong path and the result is super long release cycles, feature bloat, lack of agility, etc.

So maybe exact dates does not work for your process, but how about, we are going to work on this stuff this month, next month is blah blah blah, the following month is a new super cool feature, etc (especially if you were on a monthly release cycle for example).

so its not exact, your not pinned down to an exact date, but it gives a general idea to us as to what your working on and whats coming up (always subject to change so remember to update it) and it helps you develop your faster release cycle. You may find you can only get one big feature in for a month or maybe three, you adjust accordingly so that if your goal was 1 release per month you build in time for design, implementation, test, docs.

You have to be able at some level to have an idea how long things will take, admittedly its hard to hit some date at some time, but being able to guage what you can do in say 1 month is extremely important to understanding what you can do and when, which feeds itself into marketing, user expectations, etc.

if a month doesnt work then pick the next increment, maybe per quarter.

the way we always met our dates was to underpromise and over deliver, if we were not sure something was going to get done we wouldnt even mention it until it was done, we would only commit to what we were completely sure was going to make it. Its trial and error but you get it figured out.

Sounds like you guys are heading in the right direction and I cant wait to see what you do with T3d (yeah I know the other engines are important too but T3D is the one that interests me).

Alright enough preaching to the choir lol :)

#43 Don't get me wrong...we do have an internal schedule and deadlines and release windows.

However, it has been proven time and time again that there is no amount of caveats and messaging that we can do to keep our current customer base from crucifying us if we slip an estimate or have to delay or cut a feature.

We have over 9 years of experience to back us up...just take a look at the vehemence in this very thread about broken "promises" over features that had to be cut because they didn't work out as planned. In the very first Torque 3D Development Blog Brett posted this in bold:

Shine some light on our development process by exposing feature targets early, even if they end up being cut for the final release.

Yet, here we are more than a year and a half later and people are still upset about things we had to cut. Our current customer base has proven time and time again over the course of a decade that it is better for us to not say anything.

There absolutely are developers in our community who understand the reality of high risk software development and would treat any information we share with them in the proper way but they are in the minority.

Not sharing our long range project schedules definitely isn't ideal but our sales figures clearly show that it is the lesser of two evils.

#44 I get more the impression that it is not what WAS cut, but what is still missing or busted.

It is also discouraging the way some features(and functionality) were truly hyped up BIG, then silently they were dropped.

But most of all is the features one expects from ANY modern game engine that are missing or have never truly worked correctly, this is what seems to upset your customer base the most.

#45 @Caylo - Hyping up something big that isn't high confidence for completion isn't a practice I will support. I can't promise it won't happen by accident with big apologies from me, but I'm sensitive to expectations. We have several things that fall under that category that we are working on right now that I won't discuss until it's closer to being done for that very reason.

Heh, reminds me of the ending for Sopranos. It got hyped up so big that no ending could have lived up to anyone's expectations.

Caylo, feel free to post a list of what is missing or still busted from your perspective. That would be a great list for me to compare to our current project plan. If you already have posted this somewhere, feel free to point me to it. I'd obviously like to handle as many of those as possible ( not promising that I can until I see your list ).

I think we are working on a lot of topics you may be referring to in the last paragraph. If you want to give me a break down of your perspective again, I'd be willing to listen. Chances are that many of them are on our mind as well.

#46 Caylo, I couldn't agree with you more.

We should have known they would pull some strategic move like a management change to snake out of giving us what they hyped. There would be no other excuse to see the community take such a punch to the face and expect us to understand.

..and IMO, it's a terrible excuse.

(I edited this sentence out, if you want to know what it said, plz email me)

//--------------
I have a comment for this;
"There absolutely are developers in our community who understand the reality of high risk software development and would treat any information we share with them in the proper way but they are in the minority."
- sharing information and hyping features are 2 different things.


Edit#2: I'm having deja-vu, in TGEA style.

#47 Im not going to compose any more lists of bugs and shortcomings, just so they can be promptly forgotten about.

Near a year ago i was all over the forums of the T3D beta tests, and frankly much of my opinionations, suggestions and bug reports were completely ignored by the DEV team (some of the bugs are still plaguing T3D right now), and inflamed my fellow Torque users who must have been part of that faithful GG fan club cult of greasy kids who are IN LOVE with the idea of making computer games but give it up as soon as it becomes clear real work is involved (this is a great % of your customers and 'who cares how crappy your products are?' because this % is never going to delve deep enough to find the bugs or even complain about them because they do not know the difference), to the point that i was receiving email flames and 'yo momma' insults, and just stopped trying.

My real only point with this type of banter is to be sure it is on record that this type of customer treatment from GG is indeed a continuing growing pattern of behavior over the last few years.

But now, once more we are assured the rusty old problems from the past are well known by the powers that be, and steps are in motion to rectify such issues. So its back to the waiting game, with many words said and assurances made.

I will wait and see, with hope. But as it is my product loyalty is very very low, exponentially shrinking as the weeks and weeks of words with no actions drag on.

#48 @Caylo - Thanks for your feedback; it's valuable to me. I appreciate the challenge of improving your experience. I've gone through your past posts and I notice a lot of negativity. I'm pretty sure that if I can improve your experience to be more positive, we will improve the experience for many people who aren't as vocal as you.

While you say that your "product loyalty" is very low, I also find that you are a very active participant and have a lot of passion for this community. Heck, you've got over a 1000 posts. If you find the time to point me at bugs you don't think have been resolved, I'll personally upate this thread with each bug's current status so that you will have some sense of what's been fixed, what hasn't, and what we can't reproduce.

#49 Lot of negativity? Im highly critical, and very opinionated(and often not 100% correct) but Asperger syndrome prevents me from truly having any emotional attachments negative or positive to the things i am critical and opinionated about. But thanks for noticing a general trend in expressed attitude.

I am just returning home and settling in after a very successful 9 month business trip, and have just short of 2 weeks experience with the T3D 1.1b1 build. Imagine my disgust at finding T3D1.1b1 just as useless as Torque 3D 2009 Beta 3, what is the last version of T3D I had worked with. To be clear i am using undeserved verbiage, glazing the fact that there are many features of T3D 1.1b1 what are good and sound working as expected or better and a few that i am truly impressed with. But it is all the little quirks, the inconstant functionality, non intuitive design decisions and tired old bugs that burn at me. It is very difficult to be productive with a product that requires vast amounts of personal time just to make it generally usable, and when some quirky 'known and reported' bug pops up productivity is put on hold as a workaround or fix is researched. I know and understand such issues of complaint are unavoidable, but what IS avoidable is the amount of time it is taking to get TRUE bug fixes once the problem is reported.

I am not going to spent allot of time compiling a list of bugs, and testing them for guaranteed methods to reproduce them, not for T3D1.1b1. Once the next version is out in the wild, I will be sure to post my findings.

I am impressed by the fact you (Eric Preisz) are checking and replying on the forums long after your office hours commitment have been fulfilled. Equally impressed by your carefully worded reply to my complaints, and genuine attempts to find a solution. Your a crafty one, perhaps GarageGames is not as doomed as it seemed.

#50

Quote:perhaps GarageGames is not as doomed as it seemed.

I wouldn't have moved my family across the country if I thought it was ;)

#51 Lets hope you have some Aces up your sleeve Eric. Some of those cards need to be seen, and with a good hand. The community will back you up 100%.

#52 Once again, what about the Mac version of T3D.

Mac users are still locked in 1.0.1 version, without Advanced lighting and with features that worked in TGE 1.52 and not in T3D 1.0.1 (glowing objects).

But T3D 1.0.1 is easier and faster/safer to use than TGE. So I want to continue to use it for my customers.

A few weeks ago, Matt Fairfax told that you were hiring a new mac developer (after Alex Scarborough departure). Where are you about that ?

Who is he ? What is his experience ? Is he onboard actually ? What is the expectations to have for the mac version with T3D 1.1 coming to Windows ?

Did the near completion of openGL 3.0 implementation in Mac OS X 10.6.3/4 is useful ? is efficient ? Did you evaluate it ?

So, what are you doing actually to make T3D for Mac on par with T3D on Windows ? What do you plan to do in the near futur ?

Hope to have some answers from you.
Hope to have

#53

Quote:So, what are you doing actually to make T3D for Mac on par with T3D on Windows ? What do you plan to do in the near future ?

It takes Apple to fix their damn buggy drivers and GLSL compiler, which currently make it impossible to implement shader model 3.0 games properly.

Now that Valve got on board with Steam, I hope Apple will have a big incentive to make drivers which can support high-end GPU features without causing crashing the kernel. Why do you think there's no HL EP2 or L4D for Mac yet?

#54 Of course Manoel, and that's why I asked if TorquePowered evaluated the openGL stack/drivers in mac OS X 10.6.3/4 that seems to be better (slower but with more functionality, near full support of openGL 3, which doesn't mean bug free, so the need to evaluate it).

#55 We aren't hiring a new Mac developer but we have entered into a contract with a team in Australia to update Torque 3D 1.1 to as close to feature parity as Apple's drivers will allow.

This is going to lag a bit behind the Windows release because it isn't efficient or cost effective to have those guys trying to hit a moving target so there will be slow going until the Windows side of things reaches complete stability.

#56 Not to rehash what have been already mentioned in this thread, but just needed to mention that we have delayed our own development cycle since last year in anticipation of the 1.1 release, which has neither a solid public release timeline nor a final list of the features and fixes that will go into it.

It's really discouraging for us to stay in this state of purgatory, unsure of when we'll get the final build to work upon. And many of us who started with TGE, TGEA and recently T3D feel like GG's focus got scattered towards the other engines instead of focusing on their flagship one.

#57 "... Our current customer base has proven time and time again over the course of a decade that it is better for us to not say anything."

Ouch that is actually pretty sad. If anything I have learned over the years its better to keep the community involved and informed (even if limited) and to be cautious of what you say or promise as opposed to shutting out the community and stone walling them.

Keeping your users in the dark limits your feedback and creates threads just like this one.

Don't let the vocal minority decide how you will interact with your community.

Your basically saying all that you have learned is to not say anything, not promise anything and keep your users in the dark and you defend it by saying look at the sales.

well my comment would be how come your sales aren't higher? why are they only where they are at now? That's how you should look at it.

so what if a few jerks crucify you for not following through, get over it(think vocal minority). Its likely that most of us, many who probably never post anything, appreciate the effort and respect the difficulty, but not saying anything is not the solution.

but if the level of sales you have achieved is your measure of success and proof that not having to promise anything is working then I guess there is no point in trying to help/convince you that there is always an opportunity to do better. There is an opportunity cost for the choices you have made.

and so its back to the original question, we have been waiting a long time for a solid release build of T3D, many of us have already paid our money and yet we are still struggling with a broken beta version.

Personally I've had to revert back to my build of TGEA, which still has some issues but has caused less problems then trying to use T3D.

You got my money over a year ago last month. Thats right 04/22/2009 is when I purchased T3D. its now almost June 2010.

You have had my money for over a year and have yet to deliver and yet you insist that its better to not say anything and you just ship it whenever? seriously? you honestly think that is the best approach?

so ok, dont tell me what features your going to put in, dont promise me anything, but at least let me know if you have some idea on a ship time frame. How long will you keep my money without delivering the goods?
1 year? 2 years? more?

you see what I mean right? Its not unreasonable to be upset and concerned that this is not going well. and with no feedback from your guys our minds and tempers run wild. which I still suggest is worse then blowing a promise from time to time(and take your crucifying in stride) at least if you nailed the rest of them then a slip is ok.

i know, damned if you do, damned if you don't, I just don't agree that you picked the lessor of two evils.

#58 Bon la, je suis oblige de réagir, désole en français
(mon anglais est déplorable)

@The martien : je trouve que vous y allé un peut fort la. Je suis moi aussi dans le cas Lethal Concept et j’attends comme tout le monde une version stable du T3D V1.1. Lors de l’achat du produit on était prévenus que le moteur n’était pas encore complet et je trouve que Garage Games a vraiment fait du chemin avec le T3D. Alors accordez encore le bénéfice du doute à Eric.

Ça fait un bon moment que je suis GG. Et j’ai récemment commencé à porter mon projet sur le T3D et je peux vous dire que le résultat est vraiment très concluant et va même au delà de mes espoirs. Bien sur qu’il reste des trucs à faire pour qu’il soit complet mais sa tient déjà bien la route dans sa version béta.

D’ailleurs un moteur sa s’adapte aussi à son projet donc on ne peut pas demander à GG des fonctionnalités pour tel ou tel truc.

Pour ma part j’attends la version finale 1.1 pour sortir mon projet. Je suis persuadé que nous aurons un produit vraiment complet.

#59 Cyril's post translated:

------------------------------------------------------------------
Well there, I am forced to react, sorry in French
(My English is deplorable)

@ The Martian: I think you went to the one may very. I am also in the case Lethal Concept and waiting like everyone else a stable version of T3D V1.1. When buying the product we were warned that the engine was not yet complete and I think that Garage Games has really come a long way with the T3D. Then again give the benefit of the doubt to Eric.

It's been a while since I'm GG. And I recently started wearing my project on the T3D and I can tell you that the outcome is very successful and even goes beyond my expectations. Of course there are still things to do to make it complete but it already holds the road well in its beta version.

Besides its engine also adapts its plan so we can not ask GG functionality for a particular thing.

For my part I expect the final version 1.1 out my project. I am confident that we will have a truly complete product.

#60 @The Martin -

Quote:Ouch that is actually pretty sad. If anything I have learned over the years its better to keep the community involved and informed (even if limited) and to be cautious of what you say or promise as opposed to shutting out the community and stone walling them.

I'm with you Martin. Matt's worked here for a long time and I think he has some shell shock from the years of the vocal minority you are referencing. I'm hopeful that with better messaging and some policing help from the non-vocal majority we can feel more comfortable share more information. Internally, we discussed a R&D warning icon and a bordered table around information that we want to share that is subject to change. I think we can play a role with your help to be more informative.

On the sales topic. I do have to focus on sales as part of my job, but my opinion is similar to that how I look at my personal career. Do what you love, work as hard and smart as possible, and forget the money as a driving factor. Chances are it will take care of itself over time ( It's as timeless as the battle of good and evil; and I think money is evil ). While sales is important to me, building great products, great communities, and great experiences is on the forefront of my mind.

Sales ensures that I have enough to cover payrolls and future investments.

Also, if you don't mind. What is the feature that made you bounce back to TGEA? I'll be happy to update you on the status of the issue.