I think sim market is very small, and then companies decide to invest in other genres ( sports and fps ) which give instant action to the player and instant incomes to them.

Heck in its fullest potential DW could offer massively multiplayer-multi platform-multi sides with optional multi stations game encompassing near full spectrum naval warfare that is air to surface, air to underwater, surface to surface, surface to underwater, underwater warfare(sub vs sub).

The only thing lacking would be air-to-air warfare and land warfare.

What we need is more playable platforms(planes, helos, subs, ships), that's all at the minimum.

I think World of Warcraft is selling well otherwise why the hell they keep on churning out newer additions to the series?

I mean I really have no idea why it sells well but if world of Warcraft could sell well I really couldn't think why a massively multiplayer improved DW couldn't.

Everytime I sink something in DW I feel a point or two smarter. That's how rewarding it is. :D

I do not quite agree with the view that more platforms are needed for the sake of multiplayer. In my opinion, and perhaps I am wrong, the multiplayer aspect of DW has been grossly overestimated. It seems that only a small fraction of all players are playing multiplayer at all.

In my opinion, naval sims have only limited potential in multiplayer. Don't get my wrong, a fight against a human opponent is certainly fun. But there are some inherent limitations to the MP expierience. The first is scale. Most good SP scenarios take hours to complete and time compression is almost always needed. Naval combat is large and slow (compared to aircombat for example), and therfore is difficult to get right in multiplayer. I for one do not have time to spend 5 hours in realtime on a hunt for a sub. Then multiplayer removes much of the uncertanity of the hunt. At the beginning you know exactly what you will be facing (at least human controlled). This is already a major hinderance for the subs. A subs biggest advantage is to remain undedected, which in a MP session is impossible by definition. The sub may remain unlocalized, but its presence will always be known. There is some other stuff, but I don't want to go in too much detail. MP fights are certainly fun and good mission design can help over many problems, but in my opinion there are just some things in the very essence of modern naval combat that work against good multiplayer.

I would certainly love to see more platforms in the form of a DW addon. But for the reasons stated above I would also not mind if a future subsim would only have one playable.

I still need to get off my duff and do my Chinese campaign.:oops:

Sonalysts already lost the train. :nope:
Those that wanted an opfor pack already have it and they use it in multiplayer games.

The market may be small, it doesn't mean its not worthy of attention.
If everybody reasoned this way, we would only have harry potter novels in bookstores, briteny spears cd in music stores and adventure films in cinemas. :roll:
Even if the market is niche, it still is profitable.

May I say ? :rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl:
Multiplayer-multistation is what saved Dangerous Waters from completely going under the radar.
You know that the italian subsim community that was never that big to begin with, already has around 30 people learning the intricacies and enjoying multiplayer games ? And this is on a regular basis. And more and more are joining.
Damn, in the last year I tought more people manual tma than I would have been possibile.
We schedule not only weekly missions (not deathmatch type missions) but also long campaigns. We even play against the french naval community of mille-sabords from time to time.
The life and blood of the simulation is multiplayer, and Sonalysts even though they may have botched everything else in the game, at least were smart enough to give us multistation. A feature which to my knowledge is absent from all the "simulation" games on the market.
So excuse me but DW is well alive and kicking ass in multiplayer, even moreso with "special mods".

That might be the impression when observing DW players on various forums. It is natural that people that hang out on internet forums also have a closer relation to multiplayer. But there must be hundreds or thousands of people that never visit a forum that play the sim in singleplayer (at least I hope so).

For successful games sales numbers are counted in 100'000s or millions. For DW I hope that sales were at least in the 10'000s. If only the people that participate in communities are the majority of DW player, then I can realy understand why Sonalysts had to abandon this market.

You got it all wrong here MBot.
A game to be succesful must bring a profit.
So it depends on how much money you spent on development and how much you sold at retail. A game can sell millions and still not bring a profit. You know why ? Because it cost ten million $ to develop.
SCS has to adjust their expectations to the market they are selling to. Spend 1 million $ (a hypothetical figure) for DW when it will sell in the low tens of thousands is just pure stupidity. Thats why you see a lot of recycled resources in DW (from SC and previous SCS naval games)
Now if you sell for the general gaming market, my dear friend you can kiss goodbye to every single bit of "simulation candy" we have in the game. But in the end the game could possibily sell in the millions. Would you be satisfied then ? :hmm:

The days where development of a simulation take years, cost several million dollars and bring syou (the hardcore gamer) and full package is way past us. The last dinosour of that era was Falcon 4. And we are not going back.

I agree with what you say. Still I think that my point stays that the majority of players are singleplayers stands. Unless DW was programmed in Sonalysts freetime, there is no way the couple of hundred people in the various communities could sustain the development costs.

The multiplayer communities tend to overestimate their importance, that is a phenomenon I often observed. Il-2 Sturmovik is a good example. Multiplayer is often considered as the backbone of the sim, I myselfe play it for years MP exclusively. In the better days, you could see 1000 people in the Hyperlobby at a given time. Yet, as the developer himselfe stated, only about 5-10% of all buyers ever touched multiplayer in the sim at all, not to mention play it regularly.



Btw, the days of Falcon 4.0 like sims are comming back :) It's called Dynamic Combat Simulator by Eagle Dynamics.

I wish it were so. I'm still waiting on Black Shark btw. :damn:

Hummm yes but that was already long ago (An eternity in terms of videogames market :) ) and it would be worth trying again.

Many new platforms can be added with existing knowledge, and as far as interfaces go, all of them can be revised and reworked also. I have done it myself with the new scope/binoculars for the Kilo, and as long as modifying the looks of current interfaces goes, it is possible.

Where we would need special tools is for:

A) Adding towed arrays to a diesel submarine, since there is no control for that in the Kilo

B) Adding more VLS for units like an Oscar, Ohio or similars.

If only we could get permission from DW to further mod the game adding playable platforms now they have abandoned its development, that would be already great.

For example, you could add a "Late Cold War" mode with following replacements:

- Victor III for the Akula
-Tango for the Kilo
-Sturgeon for the Seawolf
-Knox for the OHPerry

....plus a nice campaign. None of that would require special tools or editors.

Why don't we talk with Neal and see how we best could make an official petition to DW to allow us limited modification of the game, adding playables?

We can't lose anything, and circumstances have changed a lot in the last years. It could even help keeping the DW sales alive.:up:

The most important thing hasn't changed ... DW being just a spin-off product of the still sold and maintained commercial version for the USN (and others) using the NavalSimEngine. Unless this situation changes I wont get my hopes up, but I would still be willing to sign a petition (or help in other ways). I just wouldn't really hold my breath because (at least as far as I remember) all the pertinent reasons are still there (even after this "long" a time) and thus the resulting descision most likely wont have changed.
Yes and no ... You can (legally) add new non-playable platforms which is "easy enough". You can even modify the interfaces to some extend (as you have done with the scope). But there is and has always been a clear line in regard to new playable platforms and to be frank, to truly get a new platform instead of just a different 3D modell and some changed parameters while using the same old interfaces (which is kinda useless in my eyes) we would need a bit more than what we have in terms of tools and more importantly (at least for me) permission from SCS.

No sorry I explained it wrong then. I meant if we got permission to add new platforms (And not a commercial expansion) then we could do such a mod easily, even if we can't add some units for obvious interface limitations (TA in diesels and such). I never meant to add those units without agreement from SA, it was just an example of what could be done even without their tools.

Yes, but if we get permission to add platforms without having full access to the code itself, then that wouldn't be a problem, right? :hmm:

I mean, there are out there mods that add playable platforms and yet they haven't had access to the real game code -the part SA is interested in protecting-.

I think that not allowing to add platforms was in the first time a way of protecting the commercial success of an eventual expansion, not security concerns about their code.

Besides, if we get permission to add for example only retrospective units, like Cold War ones from the 80s, that would again be no competition for a modern day naval program :hmm:

What I'm seeking is a personal agreement between SA and a few, chosen and named modders to be able to add a few, chosen and specific platforms, not a general permission from SA to anyone who bought their game to do whatever they like. I'm sure we could put together a team of serious people here for that.

I think the idea of DW as an MMO is a bit of a rush because DW is nowhere near the full-spectrum that you'd need to pull it off (imagine a WoW with only one or two character classes), and because the MP architecture just isn't there. But I do think full spectrum massive MP is exactly what's needed....

You'd need a different MP architecture than what we have now. But if that architecture were to be built, then the short answer to the time issue is that you would simply log out when you didn't have time anymore (and the platform would revert to AI control). But I don't want to keep this limited to the MMO concept (which is always online and in realtime); you could still have a more conventional full-spectrum setup with dozens of players, but with the server only up at designated times (like weekends) when a threshold number of players were available for a scheduled session.

DW as an MMO wouldn't have this problem. There would just be too many people, too many potential battles for you to know who/what your opponent is. The information you're likely to have is the Order of Battle--for the enemy's entire naval (air? land?) forces, plus intelligence gathered by your platforms/players as the simulation runs. Again, it needs to be emphasized that DW is incapable of anything like this without a radically different MP engine; the old "lobby" that you log into that a scenario is loaded from will have to be replaced with an interface that runs simultaneously with the simulation instead of simply before it.