Powerplay Discussion Thread

[xyphic]

Yep. The background simulation has been in better condition (before 1.2), missions have long standing issues (hunt bounty hunters, hunt propagandists, the assassination counter offer, to name a few). Everyone waits for 1.3, but apart from last weeks Newsletter and AMA no word yet. Today's dev update will be about crime. The speed has dropped significantly since 1.2 (which was 7 weeks ago). If that means more testing and higher quality rollouts, I am all happy. But if it means that everyone works on Mac and XBox, I am not.

The reason that patches drop off over time is due to increasing cost of maintenance over time. When 1.2 released, that was effectively a snapshot of the main development stream. For the next few weeks, bugfixes would be modifying code that isn't too far away from that release so can be applied to both the 1.2 stream and the main development stream for little cost in developer time. But as Frontier start bringing new features into the development stream, the two codebases start to diverge and a couple of things happen. First, code gets refactored (in a nutshell: rewritten). This has the side effect that certain bugs are removed; this can't just be ported straight into 1.2, because it would require the rest of that change. So to fix that bug in 1.2 would require a second implementation of the fix, one that would only apply to 1.2 and would effectively be thrown away when 1.3 is released. Second, bugs will get fixed in the main development stream. But because the underlying code base is fluid, that fix may be different in 1.2 and again would require extra developer time to port to 1.2.

As a developer you have two choices. You can divert effort away from your next release to do throwaway work maintaining an old release that'll be obsolete soon, or you concentrate your efforts on getting that next release out sooner. Frontier choose the latter approach unless the bug is a real game-breaker. It's a sensible approach. Also worth bearing in mind that the teams working on the Mac and Xbox ports are likely to be mostly separate to the ones doing the work on the PC version, so diverting resource away from those would be inefficient as they'd have to learn all about the game logic rather than just the engine.

 

[TunaMage]

CMDR Thrust from Bradford has been playing 1.3 for about a week now. He reckons the new Alliance factions rock!

 

[Beardless]

I'd guess mid-May, once the Mac/PC beta is sorted. Early June for 1.3 public rollout, probably. Hard to say as it is going to contain a lot of things to test. Public rollout might take longer, with several "1.30x" patches.

Need to get the game world ready for the extra 154 Mac players they will get.

 

[CMDR MAIN SEQUENCE]

Quoted from the Q&A:
"There are some bug fixes to Wings in Powerplay coming, and we are continuing to look at all issues."

Ah. The way I interpret that is that there are fixes coming to the Wings mechanism, rather than to the whole known issues list. But I agree with you, some of the known issues have been there for a while now, as well as other bugs that are not even on the list even though FD know about them.

 

[Beardless]

The reason that patches drop off over time is due to increasing cost of maintenance over time. When 1.2 released, that was effectively a snapshot of the main development stream. For the next few weeks, bugfixes would be modifying code that isn't too far away from that release so can be applied to both the 1.2 stream and the main development stream for little cost in developer time. But as Frontier start bringing new features into the development stream, the two codebases start to diverge and a couple of things happen. First, code gets refactored (in a nutshell: rewritten). This has the side effect that certain bugs are removed; this can't just be ported straight into 1.2, because it would require the rest of that change. So to fix that bug in 1.2 would require a second implementation of the fix, one that would only apply to 1.2 and would effectively be thrown away when 1.3 is released. Second, bugs will get fixed in the main development stream. But because the underlying code base is fluid, that fix may be different in 1.2 and again would require extra developer time to port to 1.2.

As a developer you have two choices. You can divert effort away from your next release to do throwaway work maintaining an old release that'll be obsolete soon, or you concentrate your efforts on getting that next release out sooner. Frontier choose the latter approach unless the bug is a real game-breaker. It's a sensible approach. Also worth bearing in mind that the teams working on the Mac and Xbox ports are likely to be mostly separate to the ones doing the work on the PC version, so diverting resource away from those would be inefficient as they'd have to learn all about the game logic rather than just the engine.

I dont think they will be mostly separate, I believe I read a FDev quote somewhere? because they want all the xbox/mac/pc players to "integrate" and be on same servers the process is more mixed than me imagine

 

[Tinman]

They have said no date but only that the window for release is may. They also said there woulod be a beta on it as well so figure maybe a week after the release of beta barring any bugs. If you can believe what they say because they are always so trustworthy

When it comes to dates they are indeed very trustworthy. Every time they have given a release date they have hit that date without exception. Unless you count the original estimated release of March 2014 from the Kickstarter, but since that was given before production even started I don't think that's fair too do.

Yep. The background simulation has been in better condition (before 1.2), missions have long standing issues (hunt bounty hunters, hunt propagandists, the assassination counter offer, to name a few). Everyone waits for 1.3, but apart from last weeks Newsletter and AMA no word yet. Today's dev update will be about crime. The speed has dropped significantly since 1.2 (which was 7 weeks ago). If that means more testing and higher quality rollouts, I am all happy. But if it means that everyone works on Mac and XBox, I am not.

Has the speed "dropped significatly", really?

Let's put this in a wider context shall we?

--------

Alpha 1 - 12th Dec 2013
Alpha 2 - 5th Feb 2014 (roughly 2 months later)
Alpha 3 - 14 March 2014 (roughly 1.5 months later)
Alpha 4 - 15th May 2014 (roughly 2 months later)

Premium Beta 1 - 30th May 2014 (roughly 2 weeks later BUT this was more or less just a polished Alpha 4)

Premium Beta 2 - 24th June 2014 (roughly 1.5 months later compared to Alpha 4)

Beta 1 - 30th July 2014 (roughly 1 months later)
Beta 2 - 30th Sep 2014 (roughly 2 months later)
Beta 3 - 28th Oct 2014 (roughly 1 months later, crunchtime for release)

First release 1.0 - 16th Dec 2014 (roughly 1.5 months later)
1.1 - 10th Feb 2015 (roughly 1 month later)
1.2 - 10th March 2015 (1 month later)

-------

Looking at this we can see that major builds normally come every 1-2 months. 1.1 was IMO very much a polishing pass. Probably a lot of things that didn't quite make it for initial release and therefore "easy" to bundle together and get out there pretty quickly. 1.2 was the first real post-launch-update IMO, which would mean that it was 2 months after the first release.

1.3 will most likely be released 2 weeks from now, maybe three, which still means that it will come roughly 2 months after 1.2, so how have they slowed down?

 

[Cmdr Kurnek]

Powerplay: balance between neutral 'merc' players and their power pledged counterparts.

in short, will balance between the two choices come from the merc's ability to fight for both sides in any given situation?

Eg:

A player supports one power, gets benefits from said power but cannot fight on both sides of a community goal involving that power as they can't fight against their allies without hurting their rep with that power. This could possibly even be extended to major powers, so an imperial aligned player couldnt fight against an imperial faction unless there was an actual civil war, though that might not be supported by everyone. this would limit their income, but provide other advantages such as discounts, support from friendly NPCs etc.

A player who chooses no allegiance could fight on both sides of any war as a mercenary and thus earn more (which fits a merc's life outlook rather well), but at the cost of other, power based advantages.


Anyone this this is/should be how the new features are balanced? I personally don't see how FD would be served by alienating any part of their playerbase, and this would allow for more freedom of choice for players, which they seem by and large to be in favour of...


Thoughts?

 

[xyphic]

I dont think they will be mostly separate, I believe I read a FDev quote somewhere? because they want all the xbox/mac/pc players to "integrate" and be on same servers the process is more mixed than me imagine

Game logic and engine will be (mostly) separate. The work involved in porting to a new platform is mainly related to the engine, and how it interfaces to the underlying hardware. There are some areas where that gets a little murky (e.g. the graphical aspects such as shaders). But things like missions will be entirely game logic and will be agnostic of the platform. The Xbox port will be done by a team who have significant experience of that platform, likely from the team who worked on Screamride. They'll be intimately familiar with the Xbox hardware, and will be tasked with porting the engine to the new platform. Those developers working on the game logic wouldn't be the right choice to do the port in the same way as those doing the port would have a lot to do to get familiar with the game logic and jump in bugfixing.

Integration of Xbox, Mac and PC on the same servers should be relatively straightforward. What the engine delivers to the game logic (and vice versa) will be the same on all platforms. The engine will contain libraries to take that and package it up into the format the server expects (probably JSON or XML). The libraries may differ between platforms, but again not something a game logic programmer needs to care about. The big challenge I expect will be in the P2P networking side of things, which I suspect is one of the murkier areas. But again that'll be down to people who know about networking and *should* present data to the game logic in an agnostic manner.

TL;DR: Game logic and engine programming are different disciplines and require different skillsets. Stopping work on Xbox porting wouldn't speed up work on game logic bugfixing.

 

[DjordjeDtW]

Very well. For a next months we will know all about 1.3 update. I have been distanced from game and forum by few weeks. I try to pickup some strains for understanding what is happening now here about 1.3. Is he released or not. When, where. Total confusion.

Tnx ppls.

 

[Thirstybadger]

Wooh, Thanks for this Tinman it is most awesome to see it all laid out like this, I was starting to believe the negative hype.

BE GONE FOUL BEASTS! Let them get on with this incredible work rate

Sad thing is I am too impatient. Hurry up Frontier

 

[nicomak]

The average has always been around 1.2/1.3 months (depending on how you consider PB1 since it was, as Tinman put it, a "polished Alpha 4"). Actually, it was longer in alpha i would say.
We're at 51 days since 1.2, the maximum so far has been 63. There's no garantee this one won't take longer. But it will take a few more updates than that to know if it really slowed down or not.


From Alpha(A) 1 to 1.2, through Premium Beta(PB), Standard Beta(B)and Gamma(G).
A4 & PB1 are mostly the same thing, that's why A4 was so short.

 

[Nelina]

When he comes live?

Isnt that obvious ?
As soon as you have no time for elite, 1.3 will go live

 

[Kyokushin]

When he comes live?

Answer i short and precize

 

[Tinman]

The average has always been around 1.2/1.3 months (depending on how you consider PB1 since it was, as Tinman put it, a "polished Alpha 4").
We're at 51 days since 1.2, the maximum so far has been 63. There's no garantee this one won't take longer. But it will take a few more updates than that to know if it really slowed down or not.

Indeed, and even then it's hard to say for sure because build X isn't equal to build Y.

 

[CMDR MAIN SEQUENCE]

Very well. For a next months we will know all about 1.3 update. I have been distanced from game and forum by few weeks. I try to pickup some strains for understanding what is happening now here about 1.3.

If you don't have much free time then just use either the email newsletters or the FD Twitter feed. That way you will only get accurate info* and dates from FD themselves.

*Disclaimer: I am not suggesting that anything you read on this forum is rumours or inaccurate *cough*

 

[Zephyriel]

Tinman > If we put things in an even wider context, there is also the mac beta release, which has to count for something. It's not like they haven't released anything after 1.2.

 

[Beardless]

TL;DR: Game logic and engine programming are different disciplines and require different skillsets. Stopping work on Xbox porting wouldn't speed up work on game logic bugfixing.

Thanks for your info ;-)
I struggle to see how creating an update/bug fix for PC, xbox and mac platforms simultaneously will be no slower than creating the update/bug fix for pc version, as you have stated as they don't work together. it's three times the work

I cant help but imagine, I think, that if FD had not took on Mac and Xbox this early we would be well into Powerplay by now as it must be easier and faster to program/bug fix on one platform instead of trying to do all three at once?

 

[Cmdr Trav ElEr]

The average has always been around 1.2/1.3 months (depending on how you consider PB1 since it was, as Tinman put it, a "polished Alpha 4"). Actually, it was more i would say.
We're at 51 days since 1.2, the maximum so far has been 63. There's no garantee this one won't take longer. But it will take a few more updates than that to know if it really slowed down or not.

View attachment 32666
From Alpha(A) 1 to 1.2, through Premium Beta(PB), Standard Beta(B)and Gamma(G).
A4 & PB1 are mostly the same thing, that's why A4 was so short.

are you planning on counting the MacOS update that just made it to beta as one or not?

 

[Beardless]

The OP is talking about a game update not platform realease

 

[Tinman]

Tinman > If we put things in an even wider context, there is also the mac beta release, which has to count for something. It's not like they haven't released anything after 1.2.

Yes, but my response was to the claim that the ports have slowed down the PC builds which there is no evidence for at this time. That's why I only mentioned them specifically.