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07-09-12, 03:34 AM | #11 | |
Seasoned Skipper
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: The Icy North
Posts: 690
Downloads: 189
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Quote:
And no, I'm not trashing people's projects: I am saying they all ended up as vaporware. That's the truth. It doesn't matter if they started off with the best of intentions, because in the end they all failed to deliver because ambitions were too high. So what good are community projects like these if they at best fail to deliver (like Jet Thunder, DotD) and at worst scam people through paid-access forums (Fighter Ops)? Come on. If a project runs on and on for 5-6 years without even an alpha release, then it's not going to happen any time soon. And even if it does, it faces the problem of looking obsolete and poor against the competition so it ends up like Duke Nukem where engines are swapped out, content and code has to be scratched and redone and features are added in the meantime etc. So it gets perpetually delayed as the bar keeps getting raised and when and if it ever ships, it's going to be broken and unsuccessful. What I want to see is a proper project plan where milestones and deadlines are planned ahead, a design document that describes how the game plays and what features are and are not in, and a funding plan, be it publisher money or preorders with alpha build access. And it has to have someone in charge acting as a producer that can manage things so the project isn't killed over in-fighting between team members or losing a key member. Without this organisation, it's not going to be any more credible than the projects I listed. For the sake of perspective, consider that DCS runs on about 15 years of legacy codebase and experience. FSX/Flight has 30 years of legacy development. X-Plane about 20 or so? Even Strike Fighters has over 10 years and only began to be "complete" some 3-4 years after release. So if you develop your sim from scratch today, that's the kind of timeline you're looking at before you can reach that level of production values/fidelity. Again, this isn't a case of bad attitude on my part. If you go look at the state of indie projects, you'll find 90% of them never make it to beta, much less release, for all the above reasons. Last edited by Julhelm; 07-09-12 at 09:46 AM. |
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