how does ED compare to SC ?

[Viking]

Being a designer is about coming up with good ideas and concepts [...]

Yes it is sort of necessary to be able to draw a little bit to do the job, but it isn't vital to be brilliant at it, conveying the idea is the vital bit. And that's coming from someone who spent four years at art college, who can actually draw. It's nice to be able to draw, but that alone will not make you a good designer.

Some professional designers can't draw very well. Here's an early concept idea from the CIG designer who designed the new Mustang:



Personally, I don't like the finished design either:



Honestly, I think some of the ship designs from CIG shouldn't have left the drawing board.

OTOH others are very nice, like the Retaliator:



... and the Gladiator:

 

[Chock]

I'm personally holding out for: Britain's Got the Strictly Spaceship Designers on Ice Factor

 

[Jezzah]

That's really all the show should have said; that the group withdrew. They did not have to wash the laundry unless they wanted to create the controversy.

Pettiness in the worst way. I am disappointed.

Thats the thing that gripped me above everything else about this. Apparently the "Pretty face" of CIG Sandi Gardiner talked them down from withdrawing completely and to hand in notice about it all after the concept stage was over.

The team put in what they had only for it to be shot down in the way it was - which was in the manner of pure crass saturday night reality TV.

Just rubbish. Shoulda read the teams own statement in their slot and moved on to the next item and leave it at that.

 

[Toumal]

Here's the thing though: There's so much focus on individual ships, and very little discussion about gameplay details. This is a very dangerous trend. You don't play a ship, you play the game. The ship is part of the game, and it's good to spend time and effort in making them unique and appealing to many people but IMHO SC is taking this too far, and neglecting other things.

How does ED compare to SC? I'd say less hype, more.. well.. game. After the past few SC shows I'm inclined to say FD should not even bother looking at what RSI is doing, they should bury themselves into making their own game awesome. If the docking alpha turns out as awesome as the latest sneak peek hinted at... holy crap. You're on the right track, please don't mess this up, FD

 

[Jezzah]

How does ED compare to SC? I'd say less hype, more.. well.. game. After the past few SC shows I'm inclined to say FD should not even bother looking at what RSI is doing, they should bury themselves into making their own game awesome. If the docking alpha turns out as awesome as the latest sneak peek hinted at... holy crap. You're on the right track, please don't mess this up, FD

+1 to that. FD are on course for a great game right now doing it their way quietly and competently with plenty of time for the media fuss and marketing when actually have a game to fuss and market over.

 

[Dejay]

I don't disagree with the inclusion of modding early on in the game. I do disagree with the "satirical" talent show and their conduct. They should do it far less seriously and more as a fun and friendly thing, not that competitive or critical.

But generally it's great to see this kind of crazy stuff directly from the developers, stuff that isn't made up by the marketing department of a publisher. They are not a publicly listed business so they don't have any publishers or shareholders breathing down their necks telling them what to do and be less childish. That's kind of great. They only have to please their audience and backers. If I wasn't so opposed to the connected room design of SC I probably would be a fanboy.
And game designers SHOULD get more of a "star" status like film directors. They just shouldn't take themselves too seriously.


The recent video about their developer summit also showed how chaotic the development still must be and how much growing pains they probably have. Chris Roberts seemed to have mixed together a couple of existing and new studios, and each stretch goal changes the planning and adds new acquisition of employees. Some of the comments in the summit video are downright hilarious and there must be immense waste of time and money throughout the development teams, simply because it's a team that had to grow rapidly, doesn't know each other, isn't familiar with the tools or the concepts of a space sim game. And if you hire a lot of people in a hurry, you'll get quite a mixed bag of talent too. Also the larger the team the larger the management overhead. And money can't compensate all that in terms of the quality of the finished product. Damn now I almost feel sorry for Chris Roberts for getting so much funding hehe.

 

[ZeeWolf]

Here's the thing though: There's so much focus on individual ships, and very little discussion about gameplay details. This is a very dangerous trend. You don't play a ship, you play the game. The ship is part of the game, and it's good to spend time and effort in making them unique and appealing to many people but IMHO SC is taking this too far, and neglecting other things.

How does ED compare to SC? I'd say less hype, more.. well.. game. After the past few SC shows I'm inclined to say FD should not even bother looking at what RSI is doing, they should bury themselves into making their own game awesome. If the docking alpha turns out as awesome as the latest sneak peek hinted at... holy crap. You're on the right track, please don't mess this up, FD

What? Haven't you heard?

Pretty ships = Good game.

I for one can't drive down the M25 unless it is full of pretty cars.

 

[Jezzah]

But generally it's great to see this kind of crazy stuff directly from the developers.

See this is where i think ED is shining a lot hotter than SC. I say hotter rather than Brighter you'll notice to give an impression of effect!

The way FD have the DDF and the archives just shows the community interaction and community input on all aspects of the game. Sure many of us are not DDF members but the DDF members can see our ideas and put them to FD in those channels as im sure happens quite a lot.

The great starship thing is a pretty meager attempt at community inclusion and a stage show for the game or at least it tries to be. Ultimately we backers of SC will play Chris Roberts vision of that game, so he has a lot at stake i guess. Over here at ED we play a shared vision of ED which ultimately we can blame ourselves for

 

[Neo-ST]

Here's the thing though: There's so much focus on individual ships, and very little discussion about gameplay details. This is a very dangerous trend. You don't play a ship, you play the game. The ship is part of the game, and it's good to spend time and effort in making them unique and appealing to many people but IMHO SC is taking this too far, and neglecting other things.

How does ED compare to SC? I'd say less hype, more.. well.. game. After the past few SC shows I'm inclined to say FD should not even bother looking at what RSI is doing, they should bury themselves into making their own game awesome. If the docking alpha turns out as awesome as the latest sneak peek hinted at... holy crap. You're on the right track, please don't mess this up, FD

They won't mess it up, hard work behind the curtains and delivery of quality product without much fuss is their strongest marketing

 

[Slythe]

Nope, it's not just you who thinks that....
<snip>
....It's nice to be able to draw, but that alone will not make you a good designer.

I'd give you some rep for that post, but their system won't let me rep you again.

 

[Viking]

The recent video about their developer summit also showed how chaotic the development still must be and how much growing pains they probably have. Chris Roberts seemed to have mixed together a couple of existing and new studios, and each stretch goal changes the planning and adds new acquisition of employees.

You know this is not true. You're grasping for straws to slander CIG. No need for that, we all support ED also here.

Some of the comments in the summit video are downright hilarious and there must be immense waste of time and money throughout the development teams, simply because it's a team that had to grow rapidly, doesn't know each other, isn't familiar with the tools or the concepts of a space sim game.

Which you know nothing about. Many of these guys have know each other for decades, some have worked with each other many times through the last decades too.

And if you hire a lot of people in a hurry, you'll get quite a mixed bag of talent too. Also the larger the team the larger the management overhead. And money can't compensate all that in terms of the quality of the finished product. Damn now I almost feel sorry for Chris Roberts for getting so much funding hehe.

Dont feel sorry for him. He knows what he's doing. And don't hold it against him that his company is young and doesn't have all the developers from start, as ED had. Star Citizen is coming along nicely, despite its hard start in the market and the headstart ED has.

 

[Chock]

The recent video about their developer summit also showed how chaotic the development still must be and how much growing pains they probably have. Chris Roberts seemed to have mixed together a couple of existing and new studios, and each stretch goal changes the planning and adds new acquisition of employees. Some of the comments in the summit video are downright hilarious and there must be immense waste of time and money throughout the development teams, simply because it's a team that had to grow rapidly, doesn't know each other, isn't familiar with the tools or the concepts of a space sim game. And if you hire a lot of people in a hurry, you'll get quite a mixed bag of talent too. Also the larger the team the larger the management overhead. And money can't compensate all that in terms of the quality of the finished product. Damn now I almost feel sorry for Chris Roberts for getting so much funding hehe.

You should be aware that this is not the first time Chris Roberts has handled an undertaking with a large budget. Don't forget that he directed the Wing Commander movie, which had a budget of about thirty million Bucks, and was a producer on a few other films, including Lord of War, which had a budget of over 40 million Bucks, so he's no stranger to wrangling big production crews of people who may or may not have worked together before. I know the Wing Commander movie got a bit of a panning, but I actually think it's not a bad film myself, and regardless of the opinions of critics, it did get done, got released and although it only pulled in about twelve million at the box office, which technically makes it a flop, it probably has now pulled itself out of that hole with TV and DVD sales royalties.

 

[Dalkeith]

I've been watching those shows and I find them interesting.

I tell you what - If they can't pull the game off I reckon they'll get a job producing content for Dave.

They don't half produce a ton of marketing

 

[ZeeWolf]

I've been watching those shows and I find them interesting.

I tell you what - If they can't pull the game off I reckon they'll get a job producing content for Dave.

They don't half produce a ton of marketing

Good idea, lets use "Dave" as the codeword for "that game" from now on.

I for one look forward to seeing how Dave pans out and hope that Dave can deliver everything Dave has promised.

 

[Dejay]

You know this is not true. You're grasping for straws to slander CIG. No need for that, we all support ED also here.

All right, I confess, I'm trolling SC a bit, but it's so much fun lol

What I meant is the wingman's hangar ep55 video. It's has some insight into the planning and management process. They flew in all the developer leads into one location to have one week of meetings (The horror! The costs!). It's just fun to hear them talking about things like:

"How to make the spaceships of the people work well across the network and be smooth"... "See you would just send position and rotation updates accross and interpolate between them".

I mean there is nothing wrong with that it's just cute to see that they are still talking about such basic things 1 year after start and there are like 20 studio leads in the room

http://youtu.be/yavfOREH8sA?t=8m48s
Don't get me wrong it's very impressive, but if you read between the lines you can see how much much energy must be going into communicating, managing, planning between a lot of different studios.
I'm sure they will succeed but I think a single existing studio on one location probably has at least 2 or 3 times the productivity. At least for the gameplay, content itself is easier to churn out. But I enjoy poking fun at them

"Each studio at this point has clear ownership of ... certain parts of the game"

"A week long planning session to make sure everybody knows exactly what we're doing, and it's... clear to everybody... since we have... I mean... a lot of different studios working on this" "Everybody on the same page, who the owners are, what we're marching towards" etc etc.
"We made a huge dent... definitely feel a lot better about... the next year".
"Yeah the next year... we got a lot of work to do..."

Hehehe. It's just something different if you can slough over to your coder and ask him to change the algorithm for some part of the procedural generation, than having to coordinate the handcrafted modelling of this stuff.
Like I said, it might not be fair to knock them, but all this will leave a mark in how unified the gameplay will be and the overall effectivity.


Studios that I know of:
CIG Los Angeles
CIG Austin
Foundry 42 in Manchester
Behaviour Interactive in Montreal
Massive Black in San Francisco (Some spaceship design?)
Turbulent in Montreal (Web?)
CryTek for their engine technology

You should be aware that this is not the first time Chris Roberts has handled an undertaking with a large budget. Don't forget that he directed the Wing Commander movie, which had a budget of about thirty million Bucks, and was a producer on a few other films, including Lord of War, which had a budget of over 40 million Bucks, so he's no stranger to wrangling big production crews of people who may or may not have worked together before.

Yeah but I think even if a movie can have more work put into it, it is easier to plan. You can map out the whole movie first in a script and then in a story board. The process of creating a movie doesn't change as radically as in game development. The process of planning a game is radically more difficult.

 

[Viking]

They flew in all the developer leads into one location to have one week of meetings (The horror! The costs!). [...]

Don't get me wrong it's very impressive, but if you read between the lines you can see how much much energy must be going into communicating, managing, planning between a lot of different studios.
I'm sure they will succeed but I think a single existing studio on one location probably has at least 2 or 3 times the productivity.

Well, Chris Roberts chose the model of separate studios, working on different parts of the game, because it is more efficient. He has experience from this earlier, when he owned Origin, and later Digital Anvil. So it's not something he's invented for this project. And he's been open about this since the start. I've known about this model since October 2012, so it's nothing new.

The bottom line is you should wait and see if this model is efficient or not, until you judge how good or bad it is.

Frontier is fortunate to have an established studio and a game platform that's mature. CIG had none of that when they started. CR made the prototype himself, with help from a guy who worked with Crytek.

About gathering developers for a week to discuss coordination is not a money-waste, it's both necessary and productive. They said themselves they got many new ideas and solved many issues. And the project has enough funds to carry cost of this developer week, and more.

Edit: And when it comes to the network issues they discuss openly - Don't you think Frontier also have network issues? It's natural to discuss these things and tune it to fit the players' real Internet speed. In a nutshell: you don't want to push so much data back and forth between server and client that you get lags. Both CIG and Frontier has many of the same issues here, I'd guess.

 

[Andrew Sayers]

I for one look forward to seeing how Dave pans out and hope that Dave can deliver everything Dave has promised.

What's this about Mr. Braben?

 

[blibbka]

You mean the Anvil Aerospace Albatross from Team Catapult?

Brrr.. the whole faux-Showbiz format of this video makes me cringe. Sorry, nothing more perceptive to add than that. Please FD don't go down this route.

 

[Krollin]

Greetings Commanders,

I think comparing SC and ED is like comparing an apple to an orange; yes they are both fruit but that is where the similarities end.

CIG and FDEV have taken different models to produce their products:

FDEV is a fully functioning business so already have fixed overheads and commitments, granted they no doubt needed additional resource to deal with ED but generally are set-up and ready to go.

CIG are a new organisation, granted they are bringing in experienced people (most of whom they have worked with previously). Outsourcing work to design studios is a great idea, it reduces your long term overheads (instead of hiring staff and firing them when its all done *cough* like CCP).

CIG are also generating more revenue through selling ships, ship varients and other things - FDEV are not going down this road, but instead selling shares etc to generate large.

I've backed both and will be looking at both closely, whichever delivers a game closer to my likes then that's the one I will be off playing.

The market has space for all games (EVE, ED and SC). Lets just relax and enjoy the revival of this genre

Kro

 

[Toumal]

Edit: And when it comes to the network issues they discuss openly - Don't you think Frontier also have network issues? It's natural to discuss these things and tune it to fit the players' real Internet speed. In a nutshell: you don't want to push so much data back and forth between server and client that you get lags. Both CIG and Frontier has many of the same issues here, I'd guess.

ED already has basically working netcode. What he was pointing out was that the SC guys were discussing the very basic principles of netcode as if it was something really amazing that they just came up with. That's kinda the same vibe I was getting, and it was a bit off-putting to be honest.

BTW I seriously doubt that they'll use the default crysis netcode. If they do, they'll be limited to 32 players (64 if you tweak it and don't have lots of stuff going on). But for all we know they may still just be playing around with the built in stuff and trying to make it work for SC.