I think you are missing the point. You trash a whole bunch of people's projects in the course of your posts and then complain in the next sentence about how nobody wants to work with you. Come on, you can't put those two things together? Improve your attitude and people will be more willing to collaborate.

Attitude is very important, to developers and to gamers. It's tough to see people who have bad attitudes expect better results.

FYI I work with other people on shipped commercial projects all the time and never have a problem since I'm always the first to kill my darlings.

And no, I'm not trashing people's projects: I am saying they all ended up as vaporware. That's the truth.

It doesn't matter if they started off with the best of intentions, because in the end they all failed to deliver because ambitions were too high. So what good are community projects like these if they at best fail to deliver (like Jet Thunder, DotD) and at worst scam people through paid-access forums (Fighter Ops)?

Come on. If a project runs on and on for 5-6 years without even an alpha release, then it's not going to happen any time soon. And even if it does, it faces the problem of looking obsolete and poor against the competition so it ends up like Duke Nukem where engines are swapped out, content and code has to be scratched and redone and features are added in the meantime etc. So it gets perpetually delayed as the bar keeps getting raised and when and if it ever ships, it's going to be broken and unsuccessful.

What I want to see is a proper project plan where milestones and deadlines are planned ahead, a design document that describes how the game plays and what features are and are not in, and a funding plan, be it publisher money or preorders with alpha build access. And it has to have someone in charge acting as a producer that can manage things so the project isn't killed over in-fighting between team members or losing a key member. Without this organisation, it's not going to be any more credible than the projects I listed.

For the sake of perspective, consider that DCS runs on about 15 years of legacy codebase and experience. FSX/Flight has 30 years of legacy development. X-Plane about 20 or so? Even Strike Fighters has over 10 years and only began to be "complete" some 3-4 years after release. So if you develop your sim from scratch today, that's the kind of timeline you're looking at before you can reach that level of production values/fidelity.

Again, this isn't a case of bad attitude on my part. If you go look at the state of indie projects, you'll find 90% of them never make it to beta, much less release, for all the above reasons.

It is no time for "true sim" now. All developers look at our money only and keep attention for arcade or simply games. Unfortunately only the big game companies can give us usually good and playable game.
The open projects have too poor background - examples: undeveloped DotD, SurfaceWarfareSuperMod still not developed, GR2Editor for SH5 is developed by one person only...

At this moment only "World of Battleships" can be good target for us. Developers still change the idea of this game (latest news tell us about shooting torpedoes by destroyers and transport ships) - maybe in the future we'll spot submarines at this - unfortunately arcade game...

Other idea is access to open source of game - this forum join many moders with some brillant ideas. But no open codes for horizon included old project like Battlestations:Midway, SH3 or Enigma:Rising Tide...

Ok I think you would make a great Führer for this project. Now we only have to find some people who would want to work under your iron heel... :salute:

Personally, i don't think we'll see any more submarine sims (not sure if this upcoming flash based game qualifies or not), and i also see a decline in "big name modding" on subsim in terms of "super mods".

I don't think many have thought about it, but a lot of the big name supermods are made by the same generation of modders on subsim. The scene that developed on SH3 might have been unique. Since then, there has been a steady decline in participation by much of this older generation , and not as many new modders are picking up the baton and moving forward.

Five years from now, half the people on subsim will still be playing SH3 on some screwed up aspect ratio, with no real headway going forward on the other titles that are more current to the technolgoy of the machines these games are being ran on. If people were smart and got together, they'd make a concerted and organized effort to move to SH4 or 5, but the likelyhood of that is remote. There's a lot of loyalty in the community to platforms (be it SH3, 4, or 5), and a lot of "Brand loyalty" to whatever brand name mod of your choosing.

Unless a fire is lit under some asses, and people stop expecting this small cadre of people to make everything for them, i think eventually, things will sort of fizzle out. People need to stop relying on the same old names to provide for them. Eventually, all these same old names will get bored, and move on to other hobbies, taking whatever knowledge they have out the door with them.

I agree. If a group of people got together, they could make SH4 and SH5 as good as any supermod for SH3. Take SH5 and add GWX. Wouldnt that be great. But yes. I see people complaining, I have done my share of complaining too, but why cant SH4 and 5 be as great as SH3? It isnt as if its a lost cause, I just think that people have their mind set that SH3 is the best and there will never be anything better. I say, stop thinking like that. Supermods are slowly being developed for SH3? A pretty old game. Mods exist for SH4 and 5. But has anybody sat down and tried to do a supermod for 4 and 5?

I hope TDW (and many others!) won't need their heart pills when they read this...

It's not as if Ubi has made their games uber-modder friendly, man, he has been even working with damned disassembler to make stuff work, and then patching the exe file... :/\\!!

Here's a better idea:

You find me the funding, and I'll hire you a bunch of competent people to do the job fulltime. That's the only way large, ambitious projects like coding hardcore sims from scratch can be done.

Don't believe me? How many AAA-level indie/community sims not based on a commercially available base have released so far?

And yes, you really do need a führer to manage big projects and make the tough decisions if you want it to succeed. That's kind of a no-brainer.

ftfy

Wake up, sailor! Read forum before spamming!
TMO or OM for SH4 and OH2 or MMM for SH5.
:03:

And RFB and GFO and FOTRS. :sunny:

Ok pal, we're all friends here. :timeout: :D I stand corrected. I dont spend much time in the 4 and 5 forums. I dont own the games, my machine isnt powerful enough. I hope i dont make anybody mad enough to need heart pills. I forgot who posted that, but, I sorry! Im just expressing the opinions i have. I have no experience with programming other than a crash course on Flash Programming i had a couple years ago and never stuck with. :arrgh!: Too complicated for me. All the people who dont have any experience with programming are the ones who complain. Flash Programming was hard for me. 3D game programming is probably evil torture. If you arent a programmer, you shouldnt complain because you havent tried. I have complained in the past, but the past is past. I will complain less because I kinda have an idea how hard it is. If you make an effort and get an actual product, you're farther along than me. An effort is about how far I got a couple years ago with Flash.

I'd say the people who don't have any experience programming are the ones saying how easy it is and how the modders can not only fix all that which the professional devs were too incompetent to get right and even create new AAA-level U-boat hardcore sim from scratch.

Anyway, my point is a lot of the people who post on forums vastly underestimate just how much work goes into a modern sim. All of the current products have evolved over the course of more than a decade. In the case of MSFS that is 30 years of evolution. It is unrealistic to assume people working in their spare time can develop a product with the same production quality, scope and fidelity over 2-3 years, which is the window you have before your assets and tech become obsolete. I just can't see why this should be such a controversial opinion on this board.

So yes I agree with Ducimus that we aren't going to see anymore subsims (at least not indie ones) unless people lower expectations of complexity and fidelity to the point where they might accept SFP1-type game with submarines that can be done by a smaller team working fulltime.

In college I was a CIS major because i didn't have the mathmatics to be a CS major. At the time, designing/making games was my dream. I believe that is the standard lament of an IT puke this day and age. I took several programming courses. Visual basic to start, then Java, and then to C++ doing win32 console apps, SDI with Doc/View, and other business related things like ODBC. Hell, i took the advanced programming course twice, just for fun. And then I fell into my current job because i couldn't find an entry level programming job, and all those skills (assuming I ever really had them), went away from disuse. I remember logic, but not so much the syntax. These days after 12 years in my current field, I would not put ANY OF THAT on my resume. It's a dead issue.

Anyway, my point is, when I took on making a supermod for SH4, I gained a newfound appreciation for just how much work goes into these games. On top of doing my normal job that paid money, i was doing my "modding job" that didn't pay any money. The two combined, i was sitting in a computer chair for anywhere between 16 to 18 hours a day. That is painful, and there just wasn't enough time in the day to do everything i wanted to do. Through all that, the thing is, your never REALLY editing the game. All your editing is configuration and resource files, and often enough trying to illicit a behavior the game was never coded for through said resource files.

As an aside, I will never bust my ass like i was doing, ever again. It just takes too much out of your personal life.

I took COBAL 68, RPG II, and Basic in college but, never could get hired into a entry level job, so all knowledge went away over time. I do remember how hard it was writing the programs, and debugging them, till they did what you wanted them to do. Believe me, it takes alot of patience to set for hours going over pages and pages of code to find one little error. That is why I never complain about how long a mod is taking to develop.

GW BASIC and QBASIC, here. Debugging programs was a massive hassle back in the old days before all of the nice, spiffy compilers and debuggers we have nowadays, not to mention how mundane OLE is compared to back then when it was all new and spiffy. I wanted to program computers when I joined the army, but the "needs of the service" had me fix radio scramblers, instead. All my programming savvy rotted over time. I can stumble through XML with mixed results and ActionScript is an alien mess to me.

Where did you join the army? Which country do you live in? Just wondering, I have great respect for anyone who wears a uniform so their fellow citizens can sleep safely at night.


Again, i have little to no programming experience. I dont see myself ever doing that. I see myself flying an A-10C over some battlefield in the near future, not programming the weapon systems. :cool:

I took QBASIC and TurboPascal classes in highschool but I never had the talent for it. Then when I was in the navy I was a combat systems operator and stared at radar search plots all day and spent my spare time learning 3d modelling instead. To this day the only programming I've ever been good at is ISO G-code for CNC multiaxis machines :)

Hell, I'd be happy if someone simply updated the DOS version of Aces of the Deep; sharpen the graphics/resolution up a bit, add new textures to the pre-existing screens, include new/updated sound files for voices, engines, etc. and you're set. Gameplay-wise, there is very little (personally) that I would change. Hmmm does anyone know how moddable a DOS game is....:hmmm: