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Originally Posted by maerean_m
Silent Hunter is a very lucky game. It's a game created by grown-ups for other grown-ups to play it. All of them which are fanatic about simulations and submarine simulation. So because of this grown-up thing, there can be an unofficial dialog (here on subsim) about the good and the bad of the game. And as players can see, the dev team has listened to the problems and fixed them as knew best using the available resources (time, money, people). The satisfaction rate about SH4 has increased steadily with each patch. I think that is very obvious.
It is only the satisfaction of the players that motivate the devs (and the money they spent on the game that motivates the Ubi bosses). And everyone can see that we already have a 3rd patch that makes the SH4 experience even better.
Time is now to enjoy the game. Otherwise, you've wasted your money (I think is silly to buy a game, wait until patch no 3, and not play it at all. It's like not enjoying life until you're 30, just because you're not all the way smart and experienced).
As for the idea that Ubi should make the source code public, I completely disagree. The devs are the owners of the source code and this ownership is the only thing that gives them the right to come back to make a new patch or start a new game (SH5). Plus, you can imagine the complexity of the code of a game like SH4, which took in a total of almost 4 years to develop (including SH3, SH4 being based on it). It's almost as complex as the software that runs the Boeing planes. It takes a game professional to be able to handle that amount of code, of that complexity. Although the players understand all the inner workings of the simulation of the sub, I think they don't understand what it takes to make that simulation happen on their screen. "A genius is someone who makes it look easy".
Everybody should do what they do best: the devs create the game, the players play it. Being able to mod a game doesn't imply the ability to create a game. There is a subtle but important difference. Plus, the devs use completely different tools than moders do.
A great deal of effort has been put into SH to make it modable. SH is not modable by chance. So have fun with the game, mod it the way you want, but it's not fair to ask for the code. The ownership of the code is the only thing that pays for the salaries of the devs. Working on SH4 is what pays for their kids going to school.
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I hear what you're saying. I also see you're located in Romania...are you part of the dev team? Just curious.
As to what you wrote, I wasn't lobbying for the source code to go public but rather for a new approach to address the development cycle problems that appears with just about every new title. If a game sells like hotcakes, further work on it is much more likely and patches more prolific. But for the niche market of simulations, the profit margin of development and subsequent support is very narrow...yet the sims and the hardware they run on continue to grow in complexity.
A lot of companies have abandoned simulations altogether because of this. There has to be a solution that breaks out the bottleneck and restores the equilibrium. Making the game highly modable is one. Identifying programmers who are customers, willing and capable of addressing bugs in the source code is another. If the company cannot afford to pay the original developers to continue and somebody is out here who is perfectly willing to do it for the love of the game, why not try that?
This is new territory and until both sides get some experience under their belt, of course there will be some stumbling and groping until the quirks are worked out. Maybe the source code could be written in modules so only parts of it were released to the chosen few. If there's something a module being worked on references in a module they don't have, perhaps there could be a company developer acting as a liason to supply them with the answer they need to do whatever needs to be done to the module they have. This would retain security and help prevent source code leaks I would think. At least over time, credibility could be established between the company and those who are willing to do the work, post-release.
The alternative to not trying to find a better way is to eventually reach the point where the company feels they cannot do sims anymore...then the whole thing just stops. I don't think anyone wants that to happen. The landscape is changing and we must change with it or become obsolete.