Quote:
Originally Posted by magicstix
That's a very important point. Usually what I see sinking hobbyist projects like these is focusing on the wrong things too early. Yes, it's good and cool to have a super accurate acoustics model that makes former sub sailors think they're at sea, but if you spend all your time on that early and burn out, where's the rest of the game?
The best thing to do is focus on the fundamentals early on. Get your entity system done, get your network communications done, get a game going before adding the flash and bling. Don't worry about the ocean modeling until you have a sonar display, use 20 log R propagation and get dots stacking on your simulated broadband waterfall first. Playability beats pretty any day.
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All I was doing is making sure my goal was possible. I'd hate to get something playable without an acoustics model and then realize I was going to need to model all the acoustics myself because the libraries out there weren't fast enough. I simply do not know enough math or physics for that, and it would permanently stall release unless somebody else stepped in and did it for me (unlikely, but it's open source so it could happen). I'd hate to get to that point after a few months of work or more. It's much better to assess all risks up front, especially the ones that have the potential to prevent the project from becoming what I want it to.
Like I said in the original post, we're using Unreal Engine so it already has an entity-component system and the networking code is written for me. I just need to use some preprocessor macros before variables and the engine takes care of the rest.
I've properly finished a few hobby projects before, so I totally understand what you're trying to convey, but benchmarking USML made sense for me. I don't want to make something that isn't as good as what's already available, because then nobody would have any reason to play it.
Unfortunately my graphics card died on me today so I'll need to take a break from the project for however long it takes to get it RMA'd. Maybe a week or two. The unreal engine editor doesn't run on integrated graphics.