Playing after end of project lifecycle

wstephenson

wstephenson
Riverside said:
Relevant video is relevant. No idea on costs, you could be right I guess :)
Click to expand...

Nope, unfortunately not. As well as the gameservers that the client connects to, there is a whole layer cake of heavyweight database servers making up the galaxy, as well as the turn/stun servers allowing said 'cheap' p2p moment to moment gameplay eating up bandwidth. So it's not by any means almost free to run.
 

Riverside

Riverside
wstephenson said:
Nope, unfortunately not. As well as the gameservers that the client connects to, there is a whole layer cake of heavyweight database servers making up the galaxy, as well as the turn/stun servers allowing said 'cheap' p2p moment to moment gameplay eating up bandwidth. So it's not by any means almost free to run.
Click to expand...

Are you saying I'm wrong because I don't know either the costs or Frontiers product viability cut-off point? Do you know either of these things?

The video gives the impression that it is not simple, beyond that we are all guessing.
 

wstephenson

wstephenson
Koen said:
No: the galaxy is not in the servers, it is generated procedurally on your own computer.

The servers are needed to keep track of first discoveries, to do the matchmaking, push GalNet stories, etc...
Click to expand...

And actual star catalogue data, hand crafted systems like the Old Worlds, the original small bubble, the faction capitals, powerplay, economy, mission, faction reputation states, thargoid activity, guardian sites, permits, players' system scan results and engineers. All of which make up the galaxy, so please excuse me calling them the galaxy servers (so do FD); only NPCs, ephemeral state such as asteroids and the PG physical galaxy all this hangs off of are done client side. Hence data migrations on version updates take hours, and it costs a bob or two to run.
 

wstephenson

wstephenson
Riverside said:
Are you saying I'm wrong because I don't know either the costs or Frontiers product viability cut-off point? Do you know either of these things?

The video gives the impression that it is not simple, beyond that we are all guessing.
Click to expand...

Sorry, I meant to reply to the preceding post.

I work with AWS, enough to know that FDs footprint there is not cheap, which is the point I was trying to make.
 

lenna

lenna
rootsrat said:
It was at Lavecon 2015. I cannot remember the exact question, but it referred to the future of Elite and future expansions. Michael Brookes replied along the lines of "Don't worry, Elite is scheduled as a 10 year project, so there is plenty of new things to come". That is not a direct quote, but the words "10 years" were said in the context of the plan for the game development.
Click to expand...
The context of the question and wording of the response would be critical to understanding the intended meaning. My personal guess would be that MB was not referring to an actual project plan as a such but more the business plan for ED as a product, with confusion arising from the accidental conflation of the two concepts. It would not be the first time such a thing has happened.
 

VR_Yata_PL

VR_Yata_PL
Rock Hunter said:
After Beyond they’re talking of more paid for content, so I’m hoping for a continuing evolution. I’d happily pay for future, what shall we call them...games, versions, iterations? Building from what we have now to what will be in the future. If VR has become the norm in most gaming in the next five years (let’s say) then the future of Elite made and coded implicitly for future VR along with other advances is extremely exciting to me.

A real life in space could be so much closer.
Click to expand...

I would hepilly pay for content which was agreed between lets say 10 community represantative and Frontier Devs. Right now they have only own future vision without communication with a player. We have impact on some minor changes like quantity of syntesis materials but this honestlly not what we want to decide.
 

Stigbob

Stigbob
Yata_PL said:
I would hepilly pay for content which was agreed between lets say 10 community represantative and Frontier Devs. Right now they have only own future vision without communication with a player. We have impact on some minor changes like quantity of syntesis materials but this honestlly not what we want to decide.
Click to expand...

A lot of the community ideas are really really terrible, FDEV should do their own thing.
 

lenna

lenna
Yata_PL said:
I would hepilly pay for content which was agreed between lets say 10 community represantative and Frontier Devs. Right now they have only own future vision without communication with a player. We have impact on some minor changes like quantity of syntesis materials but this honestlly not what we want to decide.
Click to expand...
Tough - the community are purely consumers, the idea that the community should decide how any given game should be developed is ludicrous in the extreme. Despite the entitlement delusion of some in the gaming community in general what we pay to the developers is a drop in the ocean compared to what it costs to actually develop any given product.

The IP (Intellectual Property) rests with the developers it is *their* product and they will decide when it is appropriate to reveal information about the future of their product and what information is appropriate to be released. It is fair and reasonable for developers to consider suggestions but people in general are deluded if they think any given developer should always engage with the community in regards to every single suggestion or even in regards to any specific one under discussion by the community.

It is up to the developers whether they choose to engage in specific discussions but my advice would be for them to avoid getting involved with the public debates - passively monitor them perhaps, but don't respond. They should also consider all perspectives of those involved.
 
Last edited:

MottiKhan

MottiKhan
The projected lifecycle is and has always been 8 years from release. FD has said this every year in their financial reports. The most recent report was for the time period ending in May 2018. Once again, 8 years.

This 10 year thing might be a nice wish, but that's not what FD themselves have said and are saying.

That being said, the game could go on past its projected lifecycle if it continues to bring in cash. It only makes sense.
 

MottiKhan

MottiKhan
Chris Simon said:
The official statement on the end of the life cycle is that the community will be given the source code so we can run our private servers, or alternatively, the game will be recoded to offline Solo only.
Click to expand...

I seem to remember that being said.

Of course, I've also heard it all before from a different company. A game that needed Steam to run and update that would be recoded as a standalone after the end of its life. This so people who bought it could still play it.

So you can guess what happened. Yep, they kept their promise as expected and ported it over to GOG.
 

Odan Brota

Odan Brota
I'd still pay good money for an offline, solo-only game. I want to mod the snot out of it, and would love to just have the whole galaxy running on my system.

And it'd be easier to convince the wife to let me buy a 32 core threadripper chip and 128gb of ram if I actually had a use for such a system. "Muh space game!" always works.
 

Sylveria

Sylveria
As I've pointed out a few times previously- the only real reason an "offline" mode wasn't possible was because of the BGS core (single shared galaxy) and that seed changes wouldn't have been reflected properly (syncing) if people were using offline clients. (which is ultimately why everyone plays "online-connected", even when in Solo) Had the "single shared galaxy" and BGS not been central to the function of this game, it would have been entirely possible to release it as an offline game. Personally I would not at all have minded if they had given each customer this choice.

Arguably "DRM" could be linked to this, too- although I think the former was the most definitive reason for having an online-only component. The latter was just icing on the cake.

Having said that, I truly believe it's possible for Frontier to change each client to seed it's own "BGS" by replacing the core code once they've decided to shut the servers down. Wouldn't be all that difficult to redirect BGS change requests and basically the client machine becomes the BGS server.
 

VR_Yata_PL

VR_Yata_PL
rlsg said:
Tough - the community are purely consumers, the idea that the community should decide how any given game should be developed is ludicrous in the extreme. Despite the entitlement delusion of some in the gaming community in general what we pay to the developers is a drop in the ocean compared to what it costs to actually develop any given product.

.
Click to expand...

Just look at Eve Online , this project exists munch longer than ED, like ~15 years already. They have Council of Stellar Management group choosen in democracy way among community to cooperate with devs and suggest what content they want next, what issues/mechanics need to be fixed/applied in first way and so on. It's more less 10 players which represent the bigest corporations existed in game. Devs are cooperating with them and really listen their suggestions.

https://forums.eveonline.com/c/council-of-stellar-management
 
Last edited:

lenna

lenna
Yata_PL said:
Just look at Eve Online , this project exists much longer than ED. They have Council of Stellar Management group choosen in democracy way among community to cooperate with devs and suggest what next content they want, what issues need to be fixed in first way and so on. It's more less 10 players which represent the bigest corporation existed in game. Devs cooperating with them and really listen their suggestions.

https://forums.eveonline.com/c/council-of-stellar-management
Click to expand...
Regardless, ED is not EvE and FD obviously have a general long term plan for their product and they know the direction the product is meant to go - EvE is hardly what I would call a good example of a product IMO. It might be successful amongst certain groups of players but that is not the same thing.
 

VR Golgot

VR Golgot
Kyokushin said:
Will be planned some 'offline/local/network/client-server' version after the Elite project will hit the end?
Click to expand...

Pre-launch they said this:


2014-11-18 David Braben Q&A in FD forum

We have no intention of taking the servers down, but I understand what you are getting at. We plan to archive the game from time to time (ie matching client and servers and game world state), and would release such an archive if the servers were to come down
Click to expand...



2014-11-19 David Braben in FD Newsletter #50

We do not plan to shut the servers down, but understand it is a reasonable question. We are at the beginning of the game not the end and are focused on creating a game that we hope will be played for many years in the future. We do plan to take regular archives of the game and the servers, to preserve the game for the future.

Could the server code be released publicly some day when the servers are shut down? Yes. This is something we would do if for whatever reason we cannot keep the game going.
Click to expand...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom