Closing the thread would only serve to add fuel to the argument of unfair censorship.
Everyone is welcome to discuss this topic in a open, meaningful and mature way.
No Single Player offline Mode then?
- Thread starter Brandon31
- Start date
- Status
Closing the thread would only serve to add fuel to the argument of unfair censorship.
Everyone is welcome to discuss this topic in a open, meaningful and mature way.
Good one
I was thinking the same this morning. Wouldn't that be the next step to cool down the crowd or rather heat up the situation?
There does not need to be a separate codebase. We talk about data here, not how the game behaved. I would be very astonished if the basic offline would be different. Quite the contrary. It's only about the parts that make up the "cloud". These parts are mostly static.
(Skipped anything about secondary codebase concerning gameplay).
What I really want is difference between Solo Player and MP / OP. As Base for Offline. This does not mean the code should be changed. Not at all. It is a separate instance from the game, that is only "for me". If the game design/architecture is not too catastrophic then the difference has to be how data is handled. The game itself may not see that there is a different data "cloud".
Would you say it's people pointing out
* how desperate FD were for kickstarter funds, and how much offline backers contributed to getting the project funded at all
* how recently they lied about offline being available, and how long this went on, for years
* how wrong the idea that this is somehow "not DRM" is, and how undeliverable that promise is
* how unsuitable a persistent always-on connection is for people who can just "play solo", only they can't, actually, chum
* how feeble the justification for using the cloud seems to be, standing tall over such classic lines as EAs "oh no, simcity 5 couldn't possibly let you buy power from a neighboring city without the power of the cloud™" or major nelson's "they can't just flip a switch"
which of those would you say rattles you the most? Is it more a gestalt of all those and so much more?
Yeah what a very nice answer. Do that and be sure the nightmare will start.
This thread is a good thing .. it let people give their feedback, emotions and all.
Beside that you are not obligated to follow it as you are not impacted and dont care about some who are loosing their habillity to play .. there are many other thread where you can go and express your hate.
Demand money back and report to Kickstarter for "false claims"
The offline single player mode was announced and corroberated in the FAQs - and additionally corroberated by a message to me from a certain "Michael" at the beginning after telling him, I do not support online/multiplayer games...
1) I suggest all of us demand their money back.
2) I have reported this project to Kickstarter for making "false claims" - I encourage all of my fellow backers to do so, too!
I feel most disappointed! :-(
Greetings from Austria,
Franz
The offline single player mode was announced and corroberated in the FAQs - and additionally corroberated by a message to me from a certain "Michael" at the beginning after telling him, I do not support online/multiplayer games...
1) I suggest all of us demand their money back.
2) I have reported this project to Kickstarter for making "false claims" - I encourage all of my fellow backers to do so, too!
I feel most disappointed! :-(
Greetings from Austria,
Franz
I'm convinced that a lot of this havoc is down to people having knee-jerk reactions and throwing their toys out of their pram as opposed to all of them suddenly losing their stable internet connection.
Hahaha, good one. What comes to mind first are double standards...
Good one
I was thinking the same this morning. Wouldn't that be the next step to cool down the crowd or rather heat up the situation?
I know you jest, but I would actually pledge to a kickstarter for offline.. or a kickstarter to remake FE2 or FFE in "HD".
Yep, wouldn't have anything to do with being aggravated by people with no vested interest taking cheap shots at them, right? >________________>
We gotses good internets, doesn't make us better people. In some cases it looks like it makes us worse.
Smiles at that. If only it could happen, could it ?
Of course. An Amazon AWS server is merely a virtual Linux box.
However, what's running on the AWS instance is not the whole story. Those server processes will be talking to a single back-end database server, which is probably held within Frontier itself. Databases need fast, near-line storage.
Also connected to this would be the economic and event engine processes etc.
Now, for the demonstration they'd not need the whole caboodle, merely a large enough sub-set of the database to run the demos and no for the dynamic sub-systems.
All very easy to run on a Linux server in the corner.
The key part Frontier are worried about others getting their hands on isn't all this infrastructure it's the data in the database. It holds the information about the special places required for future missions etc. The stuff which will allow the on-line world to be fun, at least in the first few months. Some Easter eggs may be there for people to find years hence. This is a problem for them. It would take time and effort (beyond building a single-player version of the backend) to create a new database with different information within it for the off-line version. It would also be rather too big to download in a useful timeframe.
Nothing is as simple as it first seems.
To me it is clear that I want to have a refund. I bought the game because Frontier stated there would be an offline SP.
Best regrads
phila
Best regrads
phila
i can only speculate, but based on my own experience during large software development projects, sometimes things just come up! (i'm not trying to sugar coat). i'll try to give an example.
you know how with some websites (Facebook and Google+ are good examples) the site appears to "auto refresh", meaning new content keeps coming into the page even when you're not actually interacting with it, you're not clicking or whatnot? this is done using a persistent connection between the browser and the site/servers. this is not "normal HTTP" traffic as HTTP traffic does not maintain any kind of state.
so if you want to make a website that auto refreshes content for your users, you have to use a technology or protocol on top of regular HTTP. there are many different options to do this, some more complicated than others. the barrier to entry for some of them is much higher than others. so at some point, the software architect has to make a choice of which one to use, based on information they have at the time. so they make a choice, and go with it.
the code is written, tests are done, QA is completed, and everyone is happy. yay!
down the road however, lets say a new feature is added, unfortunately this feature is more 'expensive' on the wire than you had previously anticipated. suddenly the protocol that sits on top of HTTP that was 100% totally fine before, may not be fine anymore. suddenly instead of using a periodic XMLHTTP long polling request just won't cut the mustard anymore. you have to reevaluate the situation, realising that you might (for example) have to use persistent TCP websockets instead of sitting on top of HTTP.
so in order to carry on and keep giving your customers the performance that you promised them, you have to rip out your long polling code and start using websockets. this could be a significant amount of work. you didn't want to use websockets to begin with, but "various things have come up" that are effectively forcing your hand.
now you have to add another month of dev work, plus 2 weeks of QA to your project timeline (slowing down other things) so you can refactor your network code to use websockets. this has happened to a project that i was writing backend Go code on very recently. the type of hyper-fast speedy interactivity we needed a particular site to have was just not performing well enough using long polling, so we had to rethink and go with websockets. it sucked as i really liked the longpolling code that i'd done.
the site was slightly delayed, the client wasnt happy, but after explaining our thought processes, the pros and cons of each approach, a happy medium point was arrived at.
my feeling is that this is exactly what happened with ED offline mode. i suspect that during the initial phases of development, quite a lot more of the core game mechanics was being performed on the client side. but as development progressed, as more features were added, it became clear that having these processes performed on the client side was just not optimal. or perhaps they were not as easily scalable on user's PC's as they would be if they were performed at the server side.
i suspect they tried to work around these issues, trying different methods of solving the problem(s), but ultimately (and again this is conjecture on my part based only on my experience of large software systems) the hard decision was made to move these items into the server side.
its a decision that noone likes, neither FD, nor many of the initial backers who really really wanted offline mode. FD's devs are obviously extremely good at their game (no pun intended), i mean look at it! if it was possible from either a staffing, financial or project-scope perspective to keep offline mode, they would have. i am convinced of this. but, for reasons that are obviously opaque to us (internal development decisions are generally not made public), the hard decision was made and [poorly] communicated to us as backers.
it's sad, i for one will miss the offline mode (though not as much as many others it seems). but this is NOT a decision that FD made lightly. and this is almost certainly NOT something that they knew of many months or even years ago as some have suggested.
complex things come up when developing complex software. sometimes very hard decisions have to be made. sometimes "all of the things" simply cannot be quantified from the beginning of a project. its only when thousands of players start interacting with your system(s) that you can "grok" how things may pan out. this is why we are all part of a BETA. to help test. to help FD quantify. in-house QA testers can only give so much data.
Last edited:
Yep, indeed. Even this would be fine for me. Better late as never. If they have said this, i don't think we would have this thread here and peoples would keep calm. Development needs their time and even if they need a bit longer to get a feature it would be okay and understandable. But completly chancel this feature is a no go and a fraud.
And for the software developer part. A software developer should have a list of high priority targets they have to meet. Here the list of features promised from the Kickstarter. And the offline game mode is one of it.
Its not okay, if a software devleoper don't fullfill the primary targets of the software and deliver it on this base. I personally would see such a project as failed.
>While Im here writing does anyone fancy a Kickstarter campaign to raise a few quid for a purely offline version of Elite Dangerous? - No promises tho (-:
Uhh, if it is from Frontier Developments then no. Donno, if they would even develop a offline version from it then or use the money otherwise.
>If you know how costly this is, why didn't Frontier know and ditch the offline idea from the start?
Possible, because they would have failed the kickstarter then?
>Indeed I would have closed it a long time ago and wielded the ban stick without mercy.
Good decision. Betraying the pledger by cancel a main feature, then closing the thread where they complain against it and ban everybody who do so.
strikes me as sheer laziness in that they couldnt be bothered to create an ai controlled economy etc
i hate multiplayer. i bought this game thinking it would have singleplayer offline based on what the devs had previously stated.
if i cannot connect to the servers to play my solo game on launch day or therafter i will ask for an immediate refund.
i hate multiplayer. i bought this game thinking it would have singleplayer offline based on what the devs had previously stated.
if i cannot connect to the servers to play my solo game on launch day or therafter i will ask for an immediate refund.
I don't get the whole thing with the timeline.
Imagine the following:
*knock knock*
MB: Yes?
Dev: Hi Michael, we got a problem.
MB: One more ...
Dev: Yes, we just discovered, that we put too many features onto the server side.
MB: That means?
Dev: We basically cant offer an offline mode.
So Michael, you really want to tell us, that you noticed the offline mode wasn't doable just right now?
What's the job of a producer? Please enlight me.
Imagine the following:
*knock knock*
MB: Yes?
Dev: Hi Michael, we got a problem.
MB: One more ...
Dev: Yes, we just discovered, that we put too many features onto the server side.
MB: That means?
Dev: We basically cant offer an offline mode.
So Michael, you really want to tell us, that you noticed the offline mode wasn't doable just right now?
What's the job of a producer? Please enlight me.
- Status