Author Topic: Update on Progress  (Read 252706 times)

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Offline Tikigod

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Re: Update on Progress
« Reply #345 on: October 16, 2019, 07:24:45 PM »
Am kind of curious as to what kind of development milestone Steve has in mind for what would constitute ready for some kind of public availability on the C# side of things as they're progressing.

Given the nature of Aurora as a labour of love for personal enjoyment with the open distribution more of a nice gesture, I can't imagine it would be anything that would really be 'feature complete' as I'd imagine Steve's wish list of things to add, change or overhaul is a constantly shifting thing and Aurora will never really be 'done' until he no longer has a personal interest in the whole thing, so that milestone is pretty much a no.

And considering the various bugs, weird workings and in the case of one or two technologies completely non-functioning elements present in the current public VB release, I am not sure stability is altogether a milestone objective either (Although based on the game reports shared and their duration, core stability seems pretty decent already). A C# build with only 40% of the tech tree functional in the sense they actually apply bonuses or technology and with some non-optimal AI decision making, would still from a user stand point probably be a quality of life step up from the current public VB build given the changes made in the fundamentals in the C# revision.
« Last Edit: October 16, 2019, 07:29:53 PM by Tikigod »
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Offline Steve Walmsley (OP)

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Re: Update on Progress
« Reply #346 on: October 17, 2019, 03:43:45 AM »
C# is already more-or-less where VB6 is in terms of functionality. There are some minor blank areas on windows that need to be filled in and I still haven't done Diplomacy, but C# also has more functionality than VB6 in other areas.

The main thing driving the release date (besides Diplomacy) is testing. Once I stop finding significant bugs it will be ready for release. I was in Santorini all last week and I am busy this weekend too, so its been a while since I have done any coding. Should be back to normal after this weekend (assuming I can avoid Roguetech).
 
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Offline Garfunkel

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Re: Update on Progress
« Reply #347 on: October 17, 2019, 12:27:17 PM »
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Santorini

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Offline Froggiest1982

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Re: Update on Progress
« Reply #348 on: October 17, 2019, 05:17:43 PM »
Quote
Santorini

I am dying of envy, enjoying as I am the fabulous Yorkshire autumn.

Imagine he is not only in Santorini but he can also play Aurora C# and you don't. Life sucks!

:-)

Offline Jarhead0331

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Re: Update on Progress
« Reply #349 on: October 18, 2019, 04:41:33 AM »
What is this Roguetech? Are you talking about the mod for Battletech? If so, is it really THAT good?
 

Offline Arwyn

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Re: Update on Progress
« Reply #350 on: October 18, 2019, 09:53:04 AM »
What is this Roguetech? Are you talking about the mod for Battletech? If so, is it really THAT good?

It is. Almost video game crack. Battletech was already a good game, and Roguetech dials it up to 11. Much more challenging, but also adds a ton of stuff to the game from the historical lore. It advances the tech tree to around the Word of Blake Jihad era. Tons of new tech. It also opens the map up to have actually possession mechanics, so you can pick a faction to serve and flip system control to them through your campaigning.

Its a bit finicky to get setup, but its worth it. :)
 

Offline Tikigod

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Re: Update on Progress
« Reply #351 on: October 18, 2019, 01:35:46 PM »
What is this Roguetech? Are you talking about the mod for Battletech? If so, is it really THAT good?

RogueTech takes the BattleTech core game and pretty much turns it into BattleTech.

Much of the games core rules are either replaced entirely with ones more appropriate for BattleTech or tuned to remove 'gamey' open to abuse tactics all too common in the vanilla game.

A lot of the existing weapons along with newly introduced ones are redesigned to fill particular niche roles, so there is actually a strong drive to design your lances to work as a unit against the enemy, where as in the vanilla game you could very much just pure blind firepower all your mechs and stomp your way through anything.

The MechLab scope is expanded massively to the point where all the various sub-components of each mech are now exposed and open to customisation.

The galaxy map is opened up entirely to give you the full scope, with a online persistent system ownership state that the mod keeps updated as you play along with everyone else playing RogueTech (Plus a pretty cool live control map you can find here)

Enemy and friendly unit AI are quite improved... still not great, but improved enough so that alongside the increase in typical enemy strength that actually pulling a victory in anything above 1.5 skulls without some casualties with a non-advanced tech lance actually feels like an accomplishment. (Just for the love of Bob, disable nukes when installing RogueTech. They're stupidly unbalanced and broken at the moment and will constantly throw unmanageable same spawn turn suicide mission losses that you couldn't possibly counter).

MechWarrior traits have been significantly tweaked so your pilots background actually now matters, and finding the right pilot for the right mech can make all the difference in a battle. It's not just about how you spend XP on their skill tree anymore. Traits do matter.
The popular stereotype of the researcher is that of a skeptic and a pessimist.  Nothing could be further from the truth! Scientists must be optimists at heart, in order to block out the incessant chorus of those who say "It cannot be done. "

- Academician Prokhor Zakharov, University Commencement
 

Offline Tikigod

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Re: Update on Progress
« Reply #352 on: October 19, 2019, 05:40:32 AM »
C# is already more-or-less where VB6 is in terms of functionality. There are some minor blank areas on windows that need to be filled in and I still haven't done Diplomacy, but C# also has more functionality than VB6 in other areas.

The main thing driving the release date (besides Diplomacy) is testing. Once I stop finding significant bugs it will be ready for release. I was in Santorini all last week and I am busy this weekend too, so its been a while since I have done any coding. Should be back to normal after this weekend (assuming I can avoid Roguetech).

I honestly can't remember the last time I even used diplomacy with the VB6 branch of the game. lol

But sounds like it's all coming together quite nicely.
The popular stereotype of the researcher is that of a skeptic and a pessimist.  Nothing could be further from the truth! Scientists must be optimists at heart, in order to block out the incessant chorus of those who say "It cannot be done. "

- Academician Prokhor Zakharov, University Commencement
 

Offline Steve Walmsley (OP)

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Re: Update on Progress
« Reply #353 on: October 19, 2019, 11:29:59 AM »
Quote
Santorini

I am dying of envy, enjoying as I am the fabulous Yorkshire autumn.

It was rather nice :)
 

Offline Steve Walmsley (OP)

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Re: Update on Progress
« Reply #354 on: October 19, 2019, 11:41:04 AM »
My wife and I were at the Motorhome show at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham today (UK, not Alabama :) ) and we've ordered our first Motorhome (RV). It will arrive at the end of March 2020. Given my free time is likely to be severely curtailed at that point (weather permitting), that gives me something of a hard deadline for the initial C# release.

So while I don't normally commit to release dates, one way or another I will have something released before the end of March 2020. With any luck it will be a little sooner than that, assuming nothing major comes along to interfere, but that is now my target date.

This doesn't mean that C# Aurora development will cease at that point, but it is likely to be even slower than normal in the summer months.

Offline Bremen

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Re: Update on Progress
« Reply #355 on: October 19, 2019, 01:02:33 PM »
Time for a song! It's been a long road, getting from there to here. It's been a long time, but my time is finally near.

More seriously, best news I've seen today (and that includes CK3 getting announced!)
 
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Offline Panpiper

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Re: Update on Progress
« Reply #356 on: October 19, 2019, 08:13:31 PM »
What is this Roguetech? Are you talking about the mod for Battletech? If so, is it really THAT good?

Every few months, I brush off Battletech and look at the state of the Roguetech mod, reinstall everything and play it, Roguetech, not Battletech. I have no interest in playing Battletech. Roguetech on the other hand I keep coming back to. Yes. Roguetech is that good. It's what Battletech 'should' be.
 

Offline Tikigod

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Re: Update on Progress
« Reply #357 on: October 21, 2019, 06:47:01 PM »
What is this Roguetech? Are you talking about the mod for Battletech? If so, is it really THAT good?

Every few months, I brush off Battletech and look at the state of the Roguetech mod, reinstall everything and play it, Roguetech, not Battletech. I have no interest in playing Battletech. Roguetech on the other hand I keep coming back to. Yes. Roguetech is that good. It's what Battletech 'should' be.

You see the recent announcement for the next BattleTech paid DLC? Adding a whole 5 new mechs to the base game! Whilst RogueTech alongside using the Community Asset Bundle adds more than 1,600 mechs into the game (if you include variants), and hundreds of different vehicles including aerial craft.

I kind of feel sorry for Harebrained, they clearly didn't want mod support with BattleTech and even outright said that officially they view the game as not being supportive of modding. Yet modders tackled all the early headaches getting around the limitations of trying to load so many additional assets into the game without hitting load/save bugs or the game constantly running out of memory due to Unity limitations, injecting new behaviour and so forth and pretty much killed off most of the appeal for the official paid DLC roadmap.

Edit: Just for giggles. For when you feel the urge to constantly just run up to anything and melt them very quickly.
The popular stereotype of the researcher is that of a skeptic and a pessimist.  Nothing could be further from the truth! Scientists must be optimists at heart, in order to block out the incessant chorus of those who say "It cannot be done. "

- Academician Prokhor Zakharov, University Commencement
 

Offline vorpal+5

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Re: Update on Progress
« Reply #358 on: October 21, 2019, 10:28:14 PM »
I think they promised Workshop support with the 3rd DLC? Or did I dream?

Back to the progress update, as the talented developer he is, Steve knows he would be wise to release the first 'open beta' of AC# some 2 months before he goes on the road... Because from past experience, I know that there is approximately 0% chance that a game developer manages to find 100% of the bug of his game. We the players will find new ones!

 

Offline Tikigod

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Re: Update on Progress
« Reply #359 on: October 22, 2019, 10:48:19 AM »
I think they promised Workshop support with the 3rd DLC? Or did I dream?

Back to the progress update, as the talented developer he is, Steve knows he would be wise to release the first 'open beta' of AC# some 2 months before he goes on the road... Because from past experience, I know that there is approximately 0% chance that a game developer manages to find 100% of the bug of his game. We the players will find new ones!

The way modders have had to go about injecting things into the game, adding any meaningful official mod support through something like the Steam workshop would pretty much require a massive rewrite of the core game and how they're using Unity.... certainly not impossible but given their official stance is that they don't support modding in their game at all, it's really not going to happen.


On the topic of guesstimates on the most appropriate lead up time for C# distribution, even if Steve were to just focus on wrapping up the known major issues over the next week or two, decide diplomacy can wait for getting feedback on the rest of the core of the game and  release now, he'd likely still have new bug reports and fringe case issues coming in this time next year on that exact same build, so trying to assign any kind of meaningful lead-up time for "When is the best time to release to get reports back on additional issues" before his mentioned downtime is like trying to predict the length of a piece of string needed for a task before you know what the task is nor the quality of the string itself.

There really isn't a ideal appropriate lead-up time before March, it all really depends how Steve wants to approach things, how much time he'd want to spend investigating submit issues and how much he'd like to just carry on with his existing plans and then loop back around for fringe case issues later.

In one scenario it would make all the sense in the world for Steve to intentionally not release anything openly until March, throw it out and then step away from it all for a few weeks to allow the reports, discussion of shared experiences of the same issue (or not) and potential community solutions/workarounds to happen, then once back at some point go through the range of reported issues, weed out the ones that will resolve themselves naturally once already planned work is completed, or issues that aren't actually what the person reporting says they are. Then assign the rest into severity categories, amend existing development focus accordingly and then shut out additional input on issues until the next significant release milestone and repeat the process all over again... Release. -> Step back. -> Weed out. -> Assign issues. -> Adjust schedule. -> Develop. <--> Repeat loop.

From a personal interest standpoint I'd hate to see that happen as I am busting at the bit to dive into the C# build and poke around, and the idea of there being nothing tangible for another half a year almost would really be a huge shame  but I can understand if Steve were to take such a approach, especially with how Aurora development is being handled and the ever shifting real life demands.

Really only Steve knows what kind of lead up (or no lead up at all) would work best around known real life plans given how he wants to approach the project, hence my original question trying to ascertain what Steve had in mind in terms of what would qualify as an open feedback viable state for C#.

From the answer given, it seems in terms of the state of the project itself, C# Aurora could pretty much be released today and it would perform decently against the current VB release (if not already better) for most users outside of Diplomacy (The severity of Diplomacy being missing I guess is a question of personal opinion lol) and begin getting feedback by this evening. But that increase in forum noise may not be appropriate for the decided approach, especially with known issues likely being reported over and over again even if Steve were to include disclaimer links everywhere in large font to a list of known issue alongside the release.... perhaps only releasing when there is a more assured real life period of downtime and being able to remove himself for a period of time after the release is seen as important with whatever way Steve would prefer to approach things.

Or maybe there are a thousand other factors that are influencing when the most appropriate time to push anything public out is, I wouldn't at all be surprised if Steve hasn't already picked out a series of long term forum posters or individuals he knows in real life and even has some closed group feedback collection going on, and if that's the case then the net gain from any kind of public release suddenly becomes massively depreciated, would certainly make sense for him to have gone down that route as that approach does significantly improve the quality of feedback and ability to respond to it directly for situations like how Aurora is being developed.
« Last Edit: October 22, 2019, 11:17:49 AM by Tikigod »
The popular stereotype of the researcher is that of a skeptic and a pessimist.  Nothing could be further from the truth! Scientists must be optimists at heart, in order to block out the incessant chorus of those who say "It cannot be done. "

- Academician Prokhor Zakharov, University Commencement