World map, game ticker features coming to GPGNet
On March 19, GPGNet is going to get two new features, a world map and a game ticker. Unfortunately, I don’t know much more about the game ticker, because so far I’ve only seen it in banner ads on GPGNet, but I’m guessing that it’ll be a screen that shows results of games as they conclude, not unlike the game ticker at ESPN.com. The world map feature we’ve already heard a lot about. Using a real map of the world it will show all games in progress based on the location of the players, using an interface not unlike Google Earth.
One wonders what the point of these features is, however. Why does the real life geographical location of players matter for anything more than potential ping times? What is the point of the game ticker? I don’t particularly care other games have ended, and if I do, I’d rather watch the replay than just read a short message about who won and lost. I kind of wish that Gas Powered Games was focusing on improvements to the game itself: you know, fixing bugs, releasing new units and maps, that kind of thing. These announced features seem more like fluff improvements to the GPGNet interface when they should really be focusing on improving gameplay.
March 17th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
I think it’s sort of taboo for them to change the abilities of things. I think with post-release patches, you can only change the stats that most people won’t see. “Oh, we bumped up the mass cost on the Aurora.” Or something.
“Taboo” sounds kind of strange for it, but it sounds almost right, right?
March 17th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
I agree. Theese things seems really odd to focus on.
Many other things are possible to improve. Id like to see a thread with other ideas of how to further improve the game.
One thing id like, that’s also kind of a detail on the side. But that i guess might be fast to do. Is to be able to watch replays gratis with some program. (Not buying the game). Would be great for me, since im not buying the game until i have a new pc, but like very much watching the replays (which i can view slow downed a bit). I heard something about the new c&c offering smth like this. I realize this is not a very important “update” for most ppl though. But what is?, id like to hear some more ideas regarding what the dev. team could do to improve this wonderful game.
March 18th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
I suspect the engineers, balance team and GPGnet folks all work in seperate teams and that they each have their own priorities (if you look at some dev posts from squidbot or Scathis on the forums, there are still a lot of things planned).
The world map+game ticker were already showcased in limited form during the last weeks of the beta so it’s a no-brainer this was on its way. Hopefully it’s just a teaser for more useful things to come (like a conquerable galactic map).
April 3rd, 2007 at 10:20 am
The world map and ticker should have been very easy to implement, though – less than one person-day of work. I don’t mind.
April 3rd, 2007 at 11:18 am
Let me just register a comment that, as a software developer myself, I highly doubt that the world map featured could be coded up in 8 hours. I’d have to ask a GPG employee how long it took, but I’m guessing it was significantly longer than that. Testing alone would be at least a week. There’s so many edge and boundary conditions with this kind of thing. I mean, it’s looking up locations by IP lookup. There’s so many contingencies to address. Don’t underestimate how hard it is to code something up. The world map is a completely new, substantial feature, and as a general rule, those take a lot longer than 8 hours to complete.