So I understand that making an MMO is hard. I also understand that there are only a few people working as volunteers in their free time on the project.

Still - it's a little dejecting that it's going to be years of development. It's great that we can play even now, but it would be wonderful if the progress could be accelerated.

Could it be that instead of gaining funding to expand features you just gain funding to accelerate the process? Feature creep can really run a game development process into the extreme.

From what I heard in the recent NameSake radio there are enough features. What kind of funding would you need to finish that in a year?

I don't mean to dash your hopes here, but there is no amount of money (unless you start talking in the millions of dollars to get a large staff of dedicated coders) that is going to get a complete MMO created inside of a single year. Even from the point this MMO is already at.

I thought the interview was pretty informative really. I didn't hear anything about them taking longer to make the game because of any particular item. From the way they talked, there is a lot left to do (obviously) and they talked about different things they would be able to do with more or less money in relatively the same amount of time. So really it just comes down to how much do you want for a good game.

Thinking as a coder, I would say that there is no way to speed up the creation of a quality product beyond a certain point without losing quality control. Then at that point - if you can add man hours and technology, you could add more content within the same time frame. I believe that is all they were talking about. Does that make sense?

Although - I'm sure one of the devs or content guys could clarify mucho betto than myself. I'm just a dood.

Gray_Scale wrote:

You may get the Steam game by years end, the alpha that is. Just speculating, of course I could be wrong. I heard the "years" also and was like "Damn." I just want to see some live stream stuff, I don't need to play anything.

I think that this is something we could ask more specifics on during the next interview!

During the broadcast, we have live chat setup on the radio website for incoming questions. I will see about other ways for people to submit questions that cannot be there for the live broadcast.

I can't make any assumptions or suggestions without talking to the VO team, so let me do some talking and I will get back with you guys. I know that just the time I have spent talking with them, they are more than willing to talk with the community and enjoy doing so. It is just a matter of getting the time set aside to do it, and fitting in the questions into a few hours, while still just having a good time.

Take care,
Mandrake

Haplo wrote:
Yeah I thought as much. I'm not a coder and don't really understand the process, but I'm always amazed at the differences in funding needed for projects.

Intuitively it seems like some items on a work stream will need to happen sequentially, and some can happen in parallel. Having more resources may or may not change the time needed to accomplish sequential tasks, but will almost always change the time needed for parallel tasks. If a clever project manager can organize a team into as many parallel tasks as possible, if more money were available to fund that development, and if no new features were added to the project requiring more funding, then I'd assume the time required to complete the project would reduce.

Maybe I'm living in a pipe dream! A lot of work is needed from where they are now, but actually a lot of work has already been done. Most of the tough decisions have been made, so there's a lot of stuff that's just implementation. They don't need to create any new tech or convert what they've done to any new engine. They could fill in the expected features and then world-build, which could both be parallel tasks. Then quality assurance and bug smashing, which could go on for another year (but open to backers!)

Mandrake wrote:
Nice, thanks.

Gray_Scale wrote:
Yeah it does seem that way, but that is something else that maybe could be asked about during the next Q&A? (hint hint)

There is no way for them to know what kind of tech they will have to create between now and release to be able to actually release. So I think we should get a definition of 'tech'. Perhaps we could get some more 'englishy' stuffs?

I've done a lot of debugging and minor coding over the years, some of it within game environments, and I know how difficult it can be to try to translate what is actually happening, into something that makes any kind of basic sense.

Obviously, they've already built a custom server and Unity engine. They're not going to switch away from that. They have already rebuilt the character generator once (twice?) and are now on the last leg to getting that 'tech' married into the system.

You could consider the chargen (character generator) like a module of a building set (engine), and this is a module they've been getting right, while prepping the whole to be able to accept it. One of how many thousands of modules to get right, and make them all work together?

So in the end, the reason why projections are better stated in the longer term to (hopefully) finish early rather than late, is because there will always be new tech you end up needing to get or create for something you can't foresee until you get to that stage. It seems disappointing or whatever now, but how disappointed and more aggravated would you be as time ticked by and they kept turning whatever too early of a date they set for themselves, to farther and farther back?

I think that more than anything - there is no way for them to know how much money they are going to generate, and how much manpower they are going to get. I would venture to say they are going on the idea that they get a decent amount and get to keep the few people they have and that's it. If they get a *huge* amount and can hire on several more people? I bet the date gets moved up. Just have to see

And... there's my trademark long-windedness. Oh well.

I don't particularly mind if it stays in alpha for a decade if it is playable. To be honest, I would have been happy to still be playing the closed beta of City of Heroes. If this becomes nearly as good as that, I intend to set up a recurring subscription and just pretend it's launched. ^_^

Sadly I know this will take a very long time and I'm sure every little penny I add to that donation will help in someway to reach all those different goals, but it will be difficult and not very much...unless I like won the lottery or something and I'd probably dump a million or two on the group here so that the funding it done, but then I'd do the same for City of Titans as both of these games are very promising. Valiance more-so due to us having access to the pre-alpha already.