The future of Fleet Operations

posted on November 17th, 2014, 8:41 pm

You don't need more then 8 months to show us something where people get this from what you want us to wait 1year per info you fucking mad lol and i know they do it for free would people stop saying that they started a mod people are going to ask about it and not for 99% of people to say they do it for free we ALL KNOW THIS

Part of what is taking so long is that there is a whole new engine under development. For reference, it usually takes professional game developers a couple years to make one while working on it full time. OpenMW is an engine replacement for Morrowind that has been under development for several years and is just now getting to the point where it is almost kind-of playable. The ezEngine (and by extension FO NX) is going to take a long long time, not just to be playable, but to have anything at all. Even professional games that are reusing an existing engine tend to spend a year or two in development before a public announcement is made and even then spend another year or two before release. If you wish to see how the engine is coming along, check out their site here. The FO devs are most likely spending this time to create new art assets and conceptualize the NX gameplay.

Where we get this is that many of us are modders and understand exactly how much time it takes to develop a project of this size due to personal experience and having followed dozens of mods and games through their development. If you think you can do this work faster than them, I highly recommend you join the team.

posted on November 17th, 2014, 8:42 pm

Funny when people go mad out you when you wanna get some feed back about the next version of fleetops and all people can say no 2years+ waiting you need wait for wait 5years then we can talk lol

you know would not be so bad waiting if we got news or some info on the next version but guess not how it works here and ONLY here.

posted on November 17th, 2014, 8:44 pm

I wait for the next post for some one to bitch back out me for asking what's going on having this no feed back or info on the next version is kiling the game

[Atlantis]

posted on November 17th, 2014, 8:51 pm

Last edited by Atlantis on November 17th, 2014, 8:55 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Stop bitching yourself then.

How is it killing the game? People like you come and go all the time, but the devs will carry on making the game, even if only for themselves. So don't overestimate yourself; you make no impact.

Tell you what, why don't you just play the current version of the game, be thankful for what you've already got, eh? Or try some of the amazing mods currently out there for it.

posted on November 17th, 2014, 8:52 pm

I wait for the next post for some one to bitch back out me for asking what's going on having this no feed back or info on the next version is kiling the game

The problem isn't that you asked, the problem is your horrible attitude about it. I understand that you want to have some news, we all do, but you need to chill out.

posted on November 17th, 2014, 8:57 pm

o come on we been waiting going on 3 years on what's going on how much they done what need to be done what they done they tell us nothing and you all know it guess that's just the way the roll

posted on November 17th, 2014, 9:00 pm

But i do think they make a very good game.

They just give you no info or what been done/what need to be done on new versions or better yet some kind of time farm when they hoping it might be done and this date dose not need to be right but they will have some idea on this.

posted on November 17th, 2014, 9:08 pm

To be honest, the most communicative devs I've seen are the ones that never release anything. If you check out ModDB you'll see hundreds of mods that have extensive and frequent details about what's been done but they've been abandoned for six or seven years and never saw a release. Meanwhile, there are plenty of mods there that have half a dozen full releases and twice as many patches, but the only news posts are "New Release for Download" and "New Patch Available" repeated over and over.

posted on November 17th, 2014, 9:31 pm

and then there A3 that't keep you up to date tells you what going on

posted on November 17th, 2014, 9:54 pm

You really desperately want to have an update on what is going on behind the scenes?

I can't talk for the FO team, I can only talk for the ezEngine team, but here goes:

Just a few days ago one of use has analyzed the performance of our data structures (containers, similarly to the C++ STL) and has made significant performance improvements by optimizing cases in which objects can be copied bitwise, instead of requiring full copy construction. He also optimized cases in which a memory resize is necessary. After that he battled with the GCC and Clang compilers to make his fixes also work for Android and MacOS platforms.

Another guy is working on rendering infrastructure, such that we can efficiently cull and render 3D geometry. This is a huge task and except for a few rotating spheres there is currently nothing to see (because as a test case such simple things are usually sufficient, often even much better than anything too complex) . The FO team does not use our renderer, though (they use another, mature, middleware), so this actually does not imply anything on their side. But that won't stop you from assuming stuff, I guess.

Another guy is currently looking into highly efficient stream processing, meaning working on large arrays of data that can be optimized with SSE or on the GPU. Such systems can be used for particle systems or animation updates. He was also looking into random number generators.

Two of us are pretty busy working on editor infrastructure. While one guy is busy with building back-end data-structures that fully support undo/redo functionality and mergability of the stored scene files (a specially designed JSON file format), I am currently working on the front-end, e.g. the GUI infrastructure, document and project management, plugin loading and rendering from another process. In fact I took a break from working on this, just to give you an update, which might mean that I won't have time for this today anymore. I can manage to get 2 - 4 hours of time for this on most days, after work, between family and now kids, but only because I haven't played any game myself for the last ~9 months, watch nearly no TV, nearly don't go to out (more difficult with newborn kids anyway) and so on. Just to put things a little bit into perspective.
It's similar for most people that work on free stuff like mods for so long.

All of this is very important infrastructure work, that requires a lot of experience and time to get right. Trust me, from our side, there is nothing we could show you (well, maybe those rotating spheres...). On the ezEngine side the vast amount of work that we do will not be visible to you, once you get to play the game.

On the FO side, as far as I know, there is a lot of place-holder graphics going on (probably rotating spheres...). Those are easy and quick to replace once a project gets closer to the final vision, but until then there is really no point in wasting one's time on that. So if they would show you a screenshot now, you would say "WTF, so many years and you only got THIS?? lol". Because unless you are very experienced in these things, there is just no way to realistically judge how much work went into something and how much work is still left. That is probably one reason for them not to show anything, because there will be negative reactions from people that expect shiny graphics, explosions and so on, while the developers are actually focusing on getting things run deterministically across a network.

From what I hear the FO team is making good progress. I can personally tell you, that the ez team is making good progress as well. But we are still in the very early stages. Just recently someone from DICE twittered that the "new Battlefield engine" (Frostbite) had its 10 year anniversary. That's an engine that was used for the first time in Battlefield 3 about 2 years ago IIRC. So 8 years of full time development by a large and experienced team. Now we are not aiming as high as Frostbite, but this might give you an idea of just how much work ANY engine is.

Anyway, that's all that I'll contribute to this particular discussion, I still have to figure out how to use shared memory to communicate with another process, which is actually what I wanted to achieve today.

posted on November 17th, 2014, 10:28 pm

Thanks Jan, you of course did not have to make such a nice detailed description of the EZ team's hard work

To contribute very briefly to the NX side of things (at least the biggest parts):

The team recently completed work on repair queues and waypoint usage, including quite a lot of work on pathing. Physics (push/pull system) was completed some time ago and is working quite nicely. Also the network infrastructure is working, though as the game gets more complex, it will need more work. Altogether this means we have placeholder ships, via a placeholder render, moving around the map, using physics, and able to use nice waypoints to get to repair facilities (or other destinations) - and have multiple people from different computers control these.

Optec is currently working on pathing and also wants to work on the architecture for weapons soon. Doca is working on implementing construction, including worker bees, which involves setting up how hardpoint work (which ties back into weapons). I'm working on voiceovers. Once NX becomes more self-contained, I'll shift time over to work on testing/breaking features. Zeich is working on modeling and texturing our new ships.

We are all very pleased with the speed of development. We have made great progress and have hit, what we consider our milestones, on time.

Our internal videos, although they look 'great' to us, will look like crap to you. They are all placeholders, designed to show just that something works and that the architecture is sound. We have no good-looking art assets in game, even if we are working on good looking assets for later. Integration comes near the end of development. We're not a modification anymore, where we have a ready made game with physics, fancy render, etc, all built up and just requiring plug and play. We've said it time and time again, but art integration isn't what we focus our attention on first - even while we were working on A2-FO, we integrated art only late in development.

posted on November 17th, 2014, 10:37 pm

there is nothing we could show you (well, maybe those rotating spheres...).

put green blinkies on them and call them borg spheres. job done.

you would say "WTF, so many years and you only got THIS?? lol".

some would say that even if the finished product was released.

That's an engine that was used for the first time in Battlefield 3 about 2 years ago IIRC.

it's incredibly been over 3 years, i was amazed that bf4 was over a year old already. it doesn't feel like these games are that old. bf3 especially still feels up to date.

also frostbite launched in 2008 with bad company. bf3 was the first game with frostbite 2. I'm not sure whether the tweet meant the 10th anniversary of development on frostbite as a whole or just on frostbite 2.

posted on November 17th, 2014, 10:50 pm

Anyway, that's all that I'll contribute to this particular discussion, I still have to figure out how to use shared memory to communicate with another process, which is actually what I wanted to achieve today.

Good luck! And it sounds like having kids is a recent thing, so congratulations on being a parent!

Our internal videos, although they look 'great' to us, will look like crap to you. They are all placeholders, designed to show just that something works and that the architecture is sound. We have no good-looking art assets in game, even if we are working on good looking assets for later. Integration comes near the end of development. We're not a modification anymore, where we have a ready made game with physics, fancy render, etc, all built up and just requiring plug and play. We've said it time and time again, but art integration isn't what we focus our attention on first - even while we were working on A2-FO, we integrated art only late in development.

From what I've seen, that's pretty much the way most professional developers do it, with the pretty art added at the tail end of development. It's just more efficient to make the models and textures after you have the gameplay down.

posted on November 17th, 2014, 11:11 pm

O wow an update a last something we can read and see what's been done and what's getting worked on a lot of detailed description from Jan and Dominus_Noctis a kind of detailed description the like we have not seeing here in a post before lets hope we get updates like this more.


On the Fleet Operations side it be nice to see what your time farms or as you put it milestones are so we can see how development in coming along. One last thing it be nice if you can tell us of some new features that will be in the next version of Fleet Operations not all but as you was working on 4.0 for the good part of 2 years and im sure a some of what was going to be in 4.0 will be in this NX in some why im sure you could tell us something or even low im not hoping on this what you hoping some of the new features will be that be nice to.

I hope the Project Progress gets update to or if you can think of a new way to show us in more detail what been done or getting done.

Star Mighty Master

posted on November 17th, 2014, 11:13 pm

O and i must say thanks for taking sometime to do the post and Jan sound like you need a day off