What I meant by freezing is...no further development of a particular title such as SH4. I don't get why the source code has to be locked up in a vault when there are plenty of people here who would be happy to make some sort of legal arrangement to continue improvements and even not get paid for it. All they need is a binding contract. I'm sure this could be done with minimal effort and suspect nobody has thought about it seriously enough to be realized.

To me, this is the best news I heard in a long while here. And coming from the right person. Thanks a lot for it, Dan!:up:

I've been on the Torsk several years ago (just checked the website). Funny...it was built in Portsmouth, NH which is where I grew up. You can take a tour of the Albacore if you ever go up there.

By the way, I was lucky to get a full tour of the SSBN Ohio back in 94 while visiting family in Seattle. Also got to see the Florida in dry dock while I was there. 9 Stories high from keel to sail and three football fields long.

What? Yet another "boycot Ubi" post?

How about setting an example. I see YOU bought the product. :hmm:


I would never attempt to review a game I've never played.

I like SH4. It has flaws but it's entertaining. Too bad you'll never find that out.

Good luck with your protest\boycott\petition or whatever it is you are doing.

RickC

Thats the one...USS Torsk. Let me know if you can come on up one weekend! Get to see all the goodies found in the game up close and personal:yep:

I edited my reply but would still like to come up again. I'll contact you the first weekend I can make it. Thanks!

Read some more of this thread...you will find there's more to it than first glance reveals.

Thanks

You assume too much.

I've read the thread.

Agreed. Unfortunately, I don't see this improving. Everytime someone says something bad, it's a smart ass remark or a :roll: and the thread dies a slow death instead of actual discussion. Oh, well. I doubt this will change, or at least not for a little while until everyone gets finished gawking over the greatness that is the 1.3 patch.

As for UBI, well, they have a less then sterling reputation in the gaming industry, I wouldn't use them as an example of a good game company. Actually, they are much more like EA nowadays, the poster boys for how not to make a game properly. I'll definatly be speaking with my cash by not purchasing then next SH5, simply as a matter of principle because of all the stunts they've pulled with these few patches they did bother to fund post-development. :nope:

Okay...I guess that makes two of us.

That has already been done... with Ubisoft, and you can thank Neal Stevens for breaking that particular patch of ground.

When Sh2 was officially abandonned by Ubisoft (and it was a troubled child at best) the multiplayer was completely broken. Given that the logic behind the project was that you would be able to play it in adversarial mode with Destroyer Command old Neal stepped up to the plate and convinced Ubisoft to supply him with the source code and to hire a Windows programmer to rip out all of the multiplayer code and replace it with something that worked. To everybody's amazement Ubisoft signed off on this (as long as they did not have to support the resulting product) and voila... a really fine working multiplayer version of both SH2 and DC were born (well... after months of very hard work but several members of this community).

The downside of all of this was that Ubisoft has to have abandonned a project for this to happen. The upside (my personal half full glass) is that I don't believe this to be the case here.

To the point of the binding contract... well, the "patch leak" was possibly done by someone with a binding contract, and we can all see how that worked out. And if you have ever read an NDA from a game company the penalties are pretty scary. But if that is what happened (and I am not saying it is) someone clearly didn't give a rat's patootie for no steenkin' contract (or ethics, trust or integrity.... but that's another discussion). So the question becomes why would Ubisoft trust anyone, contract or not?

JCC

Thanks for the info...that's extremely encouraging to read. Maybe something similar could be proposed when and if enough people get behind it. I think that with any sim that gets this close to being very, very good, a natural enthusiasm to "fix it right" is generated. Maybe it's just a bit too early for that to come together right now.

I also believe this sim deserves it. It's one of those situations where the closer it gets to being finished, the harder it is to let it be as it is.

I have the X-Fi Platinum, but I'm in XP and it works fine. I have Vista installed, only to try out Lost Planet (a joke, far better in XP) and I never use it. All of the drivers suck. There is a 10-15% FPS drop for virtually everything. The one game that uses DX10 sucks in Vista. If you want to play any games on your PC, I can't understand why you would choose Vista.

Honestly? I really hope it doesn't. The project was.... ummm.. trying and pretty much ended up with a lot of people hating each other. As well, it really was putting lipstick on a pig (although it was a pig I rode for a long time). I would also be remiss in the extreme if I did not mention the Team that turned SH2 into Pacific Aces... which actually was an outstanding game. Again, community involvement came to the rescue.

So why do I hope it doesn't come to pass. Because the release of the source code at this point would almost certainly mean the end of this particular franchise, and I, for one feel there is a lot of life left in it. Add to that I sincerely believe Dan and his team are the right ones for the job.

I would just hate to see it turn into falcon4.0.5./AlliedForce/Freefalcon/whateverthehellitis type of mess.

JCC

Oh, I think they've most likely milked the engine being used in SH3 and SH4 to the point where it will not be used in future games, it's beginning to show it's age. I'm sure at some point down the road, they'll release the source code, if the mood so moves them. After that, I'm sure modding can make something a little more polished out of SH4. Or not. Time will tell.

I'm content enough with the 1.3 version, things are working as intended for the most part, so it's not as if we need to hire a programmer and pay him to fix the problems. The core engine is decent enough.

Funny how there can be so much drama over what from the outside seems so simple. I can see what you mean and why. Still, it would be nice to witness a new style of development that removes the bottlenecks that have built up over time with the current approach. It's getting to the point where I feel like saying, "If you can't do it right, don't do it at all." This seems especially applicable to simulations as they are meant to "simulate" something (hopefully with some accuracy).

Nobody is going to complain if Super Mario's mustache is too big.

work
 

I work in the software industry for a 'business to business' product. By comparision to what we do, game software is simply just awful.

For an example, we very rarely ever do a 'patch' to one of our releases. It is almost never required. That's a testament to the quality of the programming and the extensive testing we do. When we do have to do a patch, its almost always to fix just one defect that slipped through.

Also, the manual for SH4 would be a sick joke to us. In general, our goal is to design UI's that are so intuitive that a user never needs to use a manual or go to help in the first place. But then, we'd expect our manuals and online help to be informative and correctly answer the customer's questions fully and completely. (Try even to run SH4 without reading the manual ... We'd run that test in house on the design, and that UI would be given an "F" in our shop and completely redesigned)

The game industry is a bad joke to me. It produces crappy software and basically relies on its customers to test the product. Then they slowly fix it until its just barely to the acceptable level, then they say no more work on that project and work on the next project to sucker money from buyers.

The game industry also relies on free work from its customers to basically produce usable documentation online in forums. And it relies on free work from its customers to produce the final product in the form of 'mods.'

Basically, the whole industry is almost totally a complete con these days. You buy unfinished, untested software where version 1.00 rarely even works, then you are expected to do a lot of free work for the company to finish their product for them.

I'm happy of course that there are these people willing to do this free work, as that's the only thing that makes most games playable these days. But I really wonder if they wouldn't be better off doing their own open-source software projects instead of supporting the game companies.

I almost never buy game software on release these days. I try to wait until the 'final' product is done with the patches and the mods and the online docs. And hopefully by then I can buy the software somewhere at a big discount. That seems to be the only rational response as a customer to an industry that basically seems out to rip me off.

If there are companies that aren't running this business model these days, they tend to be very small independent companies that still rate the satisfaction of their customers as something of importance. There are a few of them still out there. Look for companies that rarely do anything beyond a 1.1 patch, but have lots of happy and satisfied customers.

Oh, gees. Spend four years living in the Falkland Chase Apartment complex at East-West and Silver Spring... while going to law school at American.

Wow. Don't miss that place much. ;)

(No quote included as the tree is getting out of control)

Well, of course the problem is people. Things are always fine in the abstract, but once you get the old human factor involved things go to hell in a handbasket.

The problem, of course, with simulations is that they are so friggin' complex. You have to model a world with total accuracy, model systems, sub systems, people and historical events. Then you have to make all of that work together, you have to make the graphics outstanding, develop an AI that meets with everyone's approval, get about a million things more to work together and they scales it so you don't need a cray to run it.

And I am not kidding about this. People were complaining that the belt buckles on the crew's pants were Marine Corps issue.

THE BELT BUCKLES! WHO EVEN LOOKS AT THE BELT BUCKLES?

Never mind the million and one things that they got spot on... the belt buckles were a deal breaker for some people.

JCC

And of course thats really hard to achieve. because although physics are physics it bends somewhat when it comes down to personal interpretation, one mans chalk is another mans cheese :damn: , you can only ever hope you hit the happy medium, even then its not good enough for some people :roll: