PC Alpha 21 Discussion Overflow

bdubyah said:
"When it's done" and "We don't give dates" means the same thing. You're just hung on something that makes no sense.
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I don’t like those words when someone asks when do you expect x to be released. I still cannot imagine any modern business using “when it’s done” I still haven’t been show an example of a business using them except the john carmack quote from 10 years ago.

I do not like those words.

I would not let people I manage use those words to external customers.

Why people keep questioning me about this is unknown to me.

 
meganoth said:
Uhh? I was assuming you were joking when you said something about me saying something yesterday about the alpha release. If that was serious, please show me a link where I said that.
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yes, i was teasing you, cause saying yes or no to the question they asked woulda been the same.

 
wolfbain5 said:
yes, i was teasing you, cause saying yes or no to the question they asked woulda been the same.
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How so? Answering "no" would pinpoint the release at exactly one day of the year, christmas and is almost surely false. While answering "yes" is almost certainly correct. Which after all was the joke as the answer was true but useless.

 
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Fanatical_Meat said:
Why people keep questioning me about this is unknown to me.
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Once upon a career, I was responsible for the installation of a critical piece of new equipment at the factory. A manager of the entire scheme would come and visit the factory every 2 weeks or so to demand, er, review the status of the big plan from everyone involved. 

"Mel, are you going to complete such-and-such task by the stated date?"

"Yes"

"What's your level of assurance?"

"51.3%""

"What?"

"Well, I could just lie to make you feel better. It'll get done. Relax."

Daggers.

And it was done, two weeks ahead of schedule. And that manager always had his knickers in a twist after exhibiting his authority in those update sessions. Phht. No sense of humor. Never would ask one-on-one for info. Always had to be in a group meeting. That didn't work out so well between us. Leave us alone, we know what we're doing. To have said "Its done when its done" would have been truthful. Just not what Mr I-am-in-control manager could accept. Cue the Hitler video....

He never did get the joke. And he's sill employed there, relieved that I had moved on to do bigger and better things.

 
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Melange said:
Once upon a career, I was responsible for the installation of a critical piece of new equipment at the factory. A manager of the entire scheme would come and visit the factory every 2 weeks or so to demand, er, review the status of the big plan from everyone involved. 

"Mel, are you going to complete such-and-such task by the stated date?"

"Yes"

"What's your level of assurance?"

"51.3%""

"What?"

"Well, I could just lie to make you feel better. It'll get done. Relax."

Daggers.

And it was done, two weeks ahead of schedule. And that manager always had his knickers in a twist after exhibiting his authority in those update sessions. Phht. No sense of humor. Never would ask one-on-one for info. Always had to be in a group meeting. That didn't work out so well between us. Leave us alone, we know what we're doing. To have said "Its done when its done" would have been truthful. Just not what Mr I-am-in-control manager could accept. Cue the Hitler video....

He never did get the joke. And he's sill employed there, relieved that I had moved on to do bigger and better things.
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Good for you!

 
Fanatical_Meat said:
Good for you!
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Aye, thanks. Now dealing with a customer the attitude would be different. Else they wouldn't be a repeat customer. But, once I've bought the game and won't be buying it again because I already have it, the point is moot. Maybe could slip in a bad review, but had no reason to. Honestly, some things that have been said by the game owners didn't quite sit well with me at first (before I bought it). But it looked fun, so I got it on sale anyway. No regrets as far as the fun/frustration factor goes. For me no other game beats it in that regard.

Nobody knows when this thing will be finished (gold status), not even the dev crew. 

In the mean time we adapt and play on. And come here to vent. It's all good.

 
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Fanatical_Meat said:
I don’t like those words when someone asks when do you expect x to be released. I still cannot imagine any modern business using “when it’s done” I still haven’t been show an example of a business using them except the john carmack quote from 10 years ago.
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I'm not sure I understand any subtlety you might be expressing. I can't imagine a modern business that doesn't use this approach in some way for some services, typically when we start talking about teams that deliver services to _internal_ customers.

Perhaps you'll consider these:

(1) "Best effort clauses" are often found in contracts where somebody providing a service cannot be specific, including being specific about a delivery deadline. These contracts are common in many industries. You can read up on those clauses and get numerous examples.

(2) My current employer (Ohio University) has an IT department where "best effort" is all they promise for certain services they offer to departments. Basically, take a number and they'll get to you when they can. The service level agreements state as much.

(3) Internal project teams that work on projects with an iterative approach that focus on features, not deadlines, are quite common. They have internal customers. Easily the majority of project done by my employer's custom application development team are of this type. Sure, they also do project with deadlines, but that's usually when the project is being driven by a business need to hit a certain date. Not all projects have that need.

(4) I've worked in a couple of places where "when it's done" is effectively the working arrangement. For example, I was a contractor at a US West (a "Baby Bell" phone company) that published Yellow Pages. Internal developers to a legacy system were gone and the company wanted to add new features. When could I have the features ready? No idea. I'd never seen the system before. We developed a feature, tested it, released it, and then the sales people started selling ads using the feature. Of course the sales people wanted to start selling ads with the new feature once they knew we were working on it. Management wisely knew to forbid that. Management didn't want to promise something to a customer, make a sale, and then be unable to deliver. We worked that way the entire time, even after I was able to make reasonable estimates. Management never wanted to risk being in a situation where they would make a sale and then be unable to deliver.

I see TFP's approach being consistent with all of those. "When it's done." You can interpret it as being said with arrogance or stubbornness, but I really just think they're using it a a concise expression of their philosophy.

 
the concept is good, the game is good, the code is horrible they made a mistake and should have optimized from the ground up instead of adding more and more without optimizing , if they would have started from the ground up, and then added things in optimizing them before adding more this wouldnt be the memory leak fest that it is today. We still in ALPHA? Jesus the longest running game in ALPHA that I have ever seen and now they wanna take away things that are unnecessary and unbalanced seems like the fun pimps are committing suicide on this game...  I love this game, I only wish TFP would just optimize the game, and leave it as is its already a great game without taking away from it, or adding anything to it. -Just Optimize and give your fans what they want online play nobody wants to play the game like youd have them play they want online play with multiple people, not 7-8 people only.

 
metA said:
the code is horrible they made a mistake and should have optimized from the ground up instead of adding more and more without optimizing , 
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TFP are optimising primarily to get a common code base that will run on much more resource constrained consoles.

But that said, come on, It works perfectly fine on my 5 generation old PC, even with max zombies spawned cranked up. It drops only to a bit irritatingly choppy around T5 POIs. There's plenty of advice threads out there on how to tweak performance from turning off dynamic mesh, to setting processor affinity. 

 
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Pernicious said:
TFP are optimising primarily to get a common code base that will run on much more resource constrained consoles.
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That is the current task, but TFP has been and surely will optimize to give more FPS to weak PCs as well. But the important thing is that optimizations before all features are in are suboptimal. This is why this is usually called "premature optimization" in computer science. 

Pernicious said:
But that said, come on, It works perfectly fine on my 5 generation old PC, even with max zombies spawned cranked up. It drops only to a bit irritatingly choppy around T5 POIs. There's plenty of advice threads out there on how to tweak performance from turning off dynamic mesh, to setting processor affinity. 
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metA said:
the concept is good, the game is good, the code is horrible
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How do you know? Have you read through it? Or are you just guessing from having low FPS?

One big reason for the low FPS is that this is a voxel game. It has unique and unusual challenges. Normal graphics libraries do not have any support for it and though voxels allow unique features like a fully destructible world  the disadvantage is that it needs much more data to move around and calculate.

metA said:
they made a mistake and should have optimized from the ground up instead of adding more and more without optimizing , if they would have started from the ground up, and then added things in optimizing them before adding more this wouldnt be the memory leak fest that it is today. We still in ALPHA? Jesus the longest running game in ALPHA that I have ever seen and now they wanna take away things that are unnecessary and unbalanced seems like the fun pimps are committing suicide on this game...  I love this game, I only wish TFP would just optimize the game, and leave it as is its already a great game without taking away from it, or adding anything to it. -Just Optimize and give your fans what they want online play nobody wants to play the game like youd have them play they want online play with multiple people, not 7-8 people only.
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metA said:
the concept is good, the game is good, the code is horrible they made a mistake and should have optimized from the ground up instead of adding more and more without optimizing , if they would have started from the ground up, and then added things in optimizing them before adding more this wouldnt be the memory leak fest that it is today. We still in ALPHA?
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There was no mistake. Adding features in first and then optimizing afterward is an industry standard because it is most efficient. Your plan would likely double the development time which is funny since you already want to be finished with development. They have been optimizing all along but only with the goal to successfully add the next features they need and keep the game performant enough to be playable for testing. Once they are in final feature lock, all their optimizing efforts will be to improve the playability of the now finished game and then they’ll be able to make decisions for adding more enemies or more players. 
 

metA said:
Jesus the longest running game in ALPHA that I have ever seen and now they wanna take away things that are unnecessary and unbalanced seems like the fun pimps are committing suicide on this game... 
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You say that this game is the longest running game in alpha like it’s a bad thing. The game has been playable for this entire time. What they add or remove from the game always brings some individuals to predict that the game is dead…and yet it gains more popularity with every alpha. 
 

metA said:
  I love this game, I only wish TFP would just optimize the game, and leave it as is its already a great game without taking away from it, or adding anything to it. -Just Optimize and give your fans what they want online play nobody wants to play the game like youd have them play they want online play with multiple people, not 7-8 people only.
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Lol, this was almost word for word one of the jokes on the recent Hitler video. It’s pretty ridiculous to purchase a game that is in active development and expect it to stay the same without adding or removing anything from it. Sorry, but your expectations are way off. If you don’t like the development process which necessarily involves changes by the creative directors of the project, then don’t buy and play a game while it is being developed. Wait until it’s done and set in its final version. 
 

So far and based on evidence, there are a significant number of people willing and happy to play the game the devs would have them play. The new changes for A21 fix a number of issues, add a new dimension to early game survival, and improve and enhance both looting and crafting. We are getting some posts from people who don’t like looting who are unhappy about the changes but people who hate looting are a very small percentage of the players of this game. Their views are not going to stop TFP from enhancing a part of the game that will please the vast majority.
 

Their views WILL inspire modders to patch things up for them to the way they like it which is another planned for and sanctioned feature of the game by the devs. They want the tiny minority of players who hate looting to still be able to play the game the way they want so they’ve designed the game so that it can be easily modded. The same goes for water or pretty much any feature of the game. 

 
metA said:
the concept is good, the game is good, the code is horrible they made a mistake and should have optimized from the ground up instead of adding more and more without optimizing , if they would have started from the ground up, and then added things in optimizing them before adding more this wouldnt be the memory leak fest that it is today. We still in ALPHA? Jesus the longest running game in ALPHA that I have ever seen and now they wanna take away things that are unnecessary and unbalanced seems like the fun pimps are committing suicide on this game...  I love this game, I only wish TFP would just optimize the game, and leave it as is its already a great game without taking away from it, or adding anything to it. -Just Optimize and give your fans what they want online play nobody wants to play the game like youd have them play they want online play with multiple people, not 7-8 people only.
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Hmm smells like a troll, you post this with exactly one post.

There are loads of games still in development with a equal or longer development cycle than 7D2D,  Star Citizen, beyond good and evil two 16years for that one.

None of those games have tried to do what 7D2D does not one.

Not even Unreal Engine 5.1 can do it, a full destructive world with vehicles and a full gravity system for each block.

I have done a ton of research and not even Minecraft does it but it's the closest game to it.

Are there problems yes are they fixing them yes they are.

Each alpha we get new features and benefits and feals like a new game.

Have mistakes been made yes they have but this game is unique and it's sales number reflect that.

Optimizing has happened is happening and will happen in the future.

They have a vision for THEIR game, I don't agree with everything but I trust them enough to give them the benefit of doubt, if you don't agree that's your choice.

 
So, I was clearing a PopNPills for a cylinder and I start getting attacked but Farels. They come through the front door at me one at a time. Then I get a Dire wolf and then yet another Farel. I head to the door once I hear a few lumberjack zombies coming. 

Just when I get to the door, I see this chicken come through and it shot right past me.  I realized latter that it must have been chased in by the zombies. 

But for a second I thought:  Is the chicken going to attack me to? 😂DAAM, what did TheFumPimps do now? 

 
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