Current Project Status

Which race do you like most? What do you like - what you don't like? Discuss it here.
1 ... 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80 ... 91
posted on January 25th, 2015, 8:00 am
The only thing they really had to update were some balance issues. Numbers. Their ambitions and ideas just kept getting more complex and a tiny balance patch that should have taken a day or two took months then years.

4.0 was not going to be a patch. It was to be a complete overhaul, rebuilding the mod from the ground up, just like 3.0 did for 2.0.

i always knew this was a project by some excellent modders in their spare time which always baffled me as to why they always wanted to make updates harder for themselves.

Ultimately, they made the mod for themselves. We're just along for the ride.

Instead they throw 3 years of the up coming patch away and refuse to release what they have done for the community to modify or play with and go ahead with something way beyond their means i seriously doubt this will ever see the light of day.

The 4.0 loader is available for modders. It is incomplete and not all features work as expected, but they did release it due to popular request.

The ezengine team is another bad idea. It makes the fleet ops project that much more fragile, why pick an incomplete engine. If they suddenly cant continue the project is dead.

Their available choices for engines were incredibly limited. They needed one that was designed for RTS gameplay (or was close enough to work, like an RTT engine), and supported the proper physics for a space setting, and either supported mods or was open source. Their options were basically Armada, Homeworld, or ezEngine. The Armada engine simply isn't viable on modern hardware or current versions of Windows and frankly it's a bear to work with. 9,323 files are used for the few dozen ships and stations in the game and each weapon has literally hundreds of damage exceptions listed. I don't know much about the Homeworld engine, but it is also starting to suffer from similar compatibility issues with things like invisible ships and camera bugs. Sooner or later, a virtual machine running older versions of Windows will be needed to run them. The FO devs have a direct line to the ezEngine devs and it doesn't need hacks to run. It's a bit of a gamble, sure, but they couldn't stick with the Armada engine forever.
posted on January 26th, 2015, 4:50 am
4.0 was not going to be a patch. It was to be a complete overhaul, rebuilding the mod from the ground up, just like 3.0 did for 2.0.


Exactly my point, everything was overly ambitious. Instead of correcting balance problems to make the game playable for everyone it was always made complicated and took ages to accomplish until it was too much and after failing in that task they start something even more ambitious without leaving a balanced game which in turn got more or less every regular fleet ops player to quit until a new balanced release and now the community is dead. There no telling if any will actually come back when or IF this new game is ever released. The real star trek generation is getting older. Everyone i used to play with on tunngle left because they got tired of the balance issues.

i always knew this was a project by some excellent modders in their spare time which always baffled me as to why they always wanted to make updates harder for themselves.

Ultimately, they made the mod for themselves. We're just along for the ride.


Did they? That age old argument works for mod sites but it doesn't really work at fleet ops it never has otherwise it would be on a mod site. I certainly hope that wasn't the selling point when they negotiated with the ezengine team to work with them on the engine. Well its just for us to play anyone is is irrelevant screw the opinion of the ones who will play it and get your engine known. Yeah that argument doesn't fly anymore. People that code game engines want to make money weather through direct funding from people buying the games that use it or through getting the engine well enough known to make other developers use it on their games and gain a % of royalty's.
posted on January 26th, 2015, 6:39 am
eraldo20 wrote:Exactly my point, everything was overly ambitious. Instead of correcting balance problems to make the game playable for everyone it was always made complicated and took ages to accomplish until it was too much and after failing in that task they start something even more ambitious without leaving a balanced game which in turn got more or less every regular fleet ops player to quit until a new balanced release and now the community is dead.

The same thing happened during the gap from 2.0 to 3.0 and that turned out great. The FO community was more active than ever with v3 and drew a lot more attention from the rest of the A2 community.

eraldo20 wrote:Did they? That age old argument works for mod sites but it doesn't really work at fleet ops it never has otherwise it would be on a mod site.

They never made a public release until 2.0. 1.0 was a private A1 mod. Also, Tamriel Rebuilt has a dedicated site, but they don't let public opinion dictate how the mod turns out. They very much make it for themselves.

eraldo20 wrote:People that code game engines want to make money weather through direct funding from people buying the games that use it or through getting the engine well enough known to make other developers use it on their games and gain a % of royalty's.

EZ is open source, meaning that the developers are not making and will not make any money off of it. If you use the engine, all you're required to give them is credit. You can grab a copy of rev561 off of their site if you want.
posted on January 27th, 2015, 3:57 am
cabal wrote:I don't know much about the Homeworld engine, but it is also starting to suffer from similar compatibility issues with things like invisible ships and camera bugs.


Just as an aside, Homeworld Remastered is on pre-order on Steam and will have extensive mod support.
posted on January 27th, 2015, 10:07 pm
Fleet Operations is and will always be all free. This will carry on to Fleet Operations NX as well.

It's relatively quiet from our side, but that's actually a good sign. We are making good progress with the coding :) We are grateful for your ongoing support!
posted on January 28th, 2015, 6:22 pm
Glad to hear it Optec! Thank you for your continued hard work!
posted on February 16th, 2015, 10:20 pm
I have a few questions about NX first of all just nice job on all the work you guys behind the scenes have accomplished.

- So will the NX version have A.I players ? the reason I ask is because I mainly play against the A.I
- Will the dominion be fixed ? they are kinda overpowered at the moment 0.0
- And finally, could we have some sort of update to how the NX is going ? or how close you are to completion
posted on February 17th, 2015, 2:19 pm
Yes. There will be AI players.

We'll do extensive balancing before release. Since we have much more finer control over game play mechanics i am sure we'll have it easier to balance each race. And since we can improve some problematic mechanics which were unfixable in STA-Fleet Operations, there will be some game play changes, too.

Nah, i have no dates of any kind for you. When there is something to show, we'll do so. :) Currently game play mechanics have priority over fancy graphics. So our development version is not so nice to look at visually right now - but it will be :)
posted on February 19th, 2015, 5:43 pm
How similar NX will be to the current FO? I mean modding-wise? Can you tell how difficult will be to port mods for example? Do we have to completely rewrite the ODFs and rework the model hardpoints or would we need only some minor adjustments? I know it's a bit early to ask questions like that, but I hope you can give me at least a rough estimate.
posted on February 19th, 2015, 6:09 pm
While NX definition files will be similar in the way you work with them in Armada, ODFs will not be compatible. A complete rewrite will be necessary.
We'll use a different model format when NX is complete. However SOD file loading will be part of NX. In the current development version we actually only use Armada SOD files.
posted on February 19th, 2015, 7:23 pm
To add to that, we should note that modding NX will be a lot easier than Armada II. Although we might not have automated tooling available for some time for the general public, we won't have such complicated trees of files like you see for replaceweapons etc in A2-FO.

You can expect a very simplified version without these work arounds. For instance, a single definition file for a vessel, its ranks, physics, and its weapons. For even the simplest ship in A2-FO currently, that would take 8 files.
posted on February 19th, 2015, 8:29 pm
That would be a dream come true... So I can keep working on my SODs and await for NX with the coding :lol:
posted on February 20th, 2015, 12:29 am
DOCa Cola wrote:While NX definition files will be similar in the way you work with them in Armada, ODFs will not be compatible.

I hope the file extension is .NDF, NX Definition File. The similarity to .ODF is nice and you kind of already called them that.

The compressing of ships into a smaller number of files sounds fantastic. Part of the problem with modding is that eventually you wonder what to name a new file that you haven't already used.
posted on May 22nd, 2015, 9:10 am
Update.....? :-\
posted on May 22nd, 2015, 9:12 am
Our current project status? Actually we are in the middle of coding right now... :)
1 ... 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80 ... 91
Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests

cron