Bad news about the patch
It looks like Gas Powered Games mad a mistake in announcing that the next patch would be released in mid-April. They’ve usually stuck to not announcing any concrete deadlines other than “when it’s ready,” and it looks like their decision to break the protocol in this instance was unwise, because Jmavor has just confirmed on GPGnet that the patch won’t be ready for at least another 2-4 weeks. That’s right, the “mid-April” patch is slipping towards becoming a “mid-May” patch. Let me echo all of my fellow SupCom players’ sentiments by letting out a roar of frustration. Arrgghhhhh. Okay, feeling slightly better now.
Jmavor hinted that the reason the patch is taking so long is that they need to make sure that all of the changes they made are correct. It looks like Grokmoo was right on when he called for decoupling the engine optimizations from the map editor and game balancing. The optimizations are proving to be tricky (with over 800 total items in the patch change list), and I think we all would’ve rather had at least the map editor by now than nothing at all. Jmavor says that all of the engine enhancements they’ve made since launch will be rolled into this patch, so hopefully it’ll be good once it finally comes. With the slipping of date of this patch’s completion, it looks likely that the forthcoming Map Vault and Challenge Ladder will be delayed as well. So don’t look for any of them soon.
Jmavor did offer up some explanation as to why the engine improvements couldn’t be removed from the game balance changes as follows, but still no explanation on why the map editor is so delayed.
It’s pretty simple, because as the game balance gets tweaked it’s based on the new code. If we make changes to things like unit motion code and then things like unit speed are tweaked it wouldn’t make any sense with the old codr. Jence it all has to come at one time. Not to mention the QA time and effort is long enough that making multiple small patches means things take that much longer to get to the public. New code will have new bugs, hence the extended QA on this patch.
April 18th, 2007 at 1:00 pm
If it takes time to get it right then so be it. Pressuring the devs for info when they wouldn’t otherwise release it is what’s causing the issues.
April 18th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Hmm, maybe the map editor is still coming, why the hell would GPGnet advertise the user map vault coming in April for several weeks now? Bugger.
April 18th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
One other thing I’d like to mention is that having relatively large gaps between balance patches is a good thing. What I’ve noticed in mods for TA Spring is that having frequent balance changes is self defeating. You have to give the game time to settle. If you keep changing the game in a knee jerk reaction to what everybody is moaning about you’ll never find satisfying balance. In many cases eventually the players will come up with a gameplay solution that fixes the perceived imbalance.
A good example would be in Total Annihilation. Many players got pissed off with how good the Big Bertha cannon was. It became the game deciding factor on small maps like Gods of War. There wasn’t any official patch forthcoming so they just had to learn to deal with it. People worked out how to maximise the life of their Bertha with nano blocking. Thus they came up with a way of even beating opponents who got their Bertha far earlier than they did. Next they got into the habit of building bombers the second the shells started firing. By the latter days of Total Annihilation competitive play people would construct bombers in every game, just as a contingency. They would have them ready long before their opponent even got the opportunity to start building one. People adapted. If you change the stats too often you’re discounting the ability of the competitive players to rebalance the game themselves. If the balance is in a constant state of flux then nobody ever thinks they can sort a problem themselves. They just moan and wait for the devs to tweak the unit.
Another example is the Pelican. It had a bug that made it harder to hit than intended. Cue mass moaning about how overpowered it was. But most of the latter day players go for level 1 ships instead. Unit for unit they were more powerful and you could build a larger, and harder to bomb economy on the water and outproduce your opponent easily in the long run.
I’d also give GPG some slack. They’re pretty amazing to be making engine optimisations after the game came out. That isn’t going to change reviews. It mightn’t increase sales that much. It’s not common practice. They’re also doing a Direct 10 patch. And they’re not bundling it with an addon pack and make you pay for it. This is pretty damn generous.
April 18th, 2007 at 1:22 pm
Well this is even worse then the usual cases of develperse… );. But it’s gonna be worth the wait at least.
April 18th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
jmavor - patch is NOT delayed as we never announced a release date. We are actively working on finishing / testing it.
April 18th, 2007 at 2:16 pm
It’ll be out soon enough. I do wish the map editor was separate though in case people want to install the map editor but not the upcoming patch (for some reason). Tying it all together means you will probably HAVE to install the patch to get the map editor, but maybe that’s also by design as GPG must feel this patch is a must have, and in order to make this run-on sentence a bit longer I’ll say that this then means that if this patch is so important it should have been in the game at release but we all know how producers push developers to release games that are in some ways incomplete these days so that’s not GPG’s fault really. =)
April 18th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
Luva: I don’t think it’s true to say that the patch was not delayed. For one, someone did announce a release date of mid-April. But even had that not been announced, we know they were shooting to release it by some time around then. Since it’s actually taken a bit longer to do and the release date is pushed back a bit, it’s still delayed. It’s like if I planned to do something by Friday, didn’t tell anyone my plans, and then only ended up finishing it on Sunday, it’s still late.
April 18th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
That wasnt from me, it was from the gpg employee jmavor. Who was it that said the patch was going to be released in mid april ? And his statment didnt say anything about it not being released soon.
April 18th, 2007 at 4:26 pm
One of the GPG-folks on GPGnet chat some weeks ago, it was an estimate of course and this is always a case of “when it’s done” but still…
April 18th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
Sucks. But at least this means they want to get it right, rather than rush it out. The map editor could still be released, it’s not really part of a patch as it is an opional extra. Not everyone is going to want it, so imagine it would have been a seperate download from the patch any way.
April 18th, 2007 at 8:24 pm
I just read Grokmoo post about the map editor…
April 19th, 2007 at 12:47 am
“Who was it that said the patch was going to be released in mid april ?”
Chris Taylor himself said this in some interview. And I swear I’ve heard it from other developers too somewhere.
April 19th, 2007 at 8:49 am
About the map editor; apparently ( http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?p=97408#97408 ) it’ll be tested by a selected few this month first before it is released.
April 19th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
So will it include the multiplayer saves or is that slated for 10 years from now?
April 20th, 2007 at 9:52 am
I wonder what percentage of players would ever actually get around to playing the multiplayer games they saved. The likelihood of actually getting back together with the same folks and wanting to pick back up where you left off as opposed to starting a new game is so incredibly small as to make sure a feature one of the least important things to add to the game.
April 20th, 2007 at 11:29 am
I would use multiplayer saves all the time. It would be really nice to be able to save after someone has been ejected due to a network problem or system crash and reload. All their stuff stays when they lag out, so it doesn’t seem like it would be hard.
April 23rd, 2007 at 4:13 am
Bah. I was hoping that in my one-week absence from SupCom (I live on the Virginia Tech campus and went home after the shootings) I’d come back and see the mid-April patch. :(
April 25th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
Multiplayer saves would be incredible, for the very reason Will (Green) states. If a friend lags/crashes out…save the game and wait for them to come back online. Happened all the time to my buddies and I in TA.
April 25th, 2007 at 7:19 pm
Gryphyn: You wouldn’t even need multiplayer saves for that. You’d need something even easier: allow players to reconnect to games in progress. So if a player disconnects, all of his units stick around rather than exploding. If you’re playing with friends, that would be when you pause the game (or at least, pause attacking him) and wait for him to reconnect to the game.
April 25th, 2007 at 7:52 pm
“Oh crap man I got disconnected pause the game” “sure” *Kills all his economy and expands my own* “WTF MATE?” “I told you, you were playing bad”
April 25th, 2007 at 11:37 pm
Cyde,
Yes, I’d thought of that too, and it would also be a great feature. I think I would still like to have multiplayer saves though, for those times when you’re playing a long cooperative assault game with friends (we play rather slowly as some folks don’t have fast computers) and it gets very late at night.
This makes me think of something else though, an idea I had a while back. Sometimes it is difficult to get all of my friends together at the same time online to start a game…someone is always coming in 30 minutes late. What if games could be left open so that players could join at anytime?
My friends and I discussed how best to accomplish this, here is what we came up with. When a player joins a game late, an average of all the mass/energy value of units in play is given to the new player, to build within a certain radius of his starting point at an extremely accelerated rate. This would allow the new player to “get up to speed” with others very quickly. Optionally, the game could be paused for, say, three minutes to allow the new player to place structures, build units, etc, which would then happen instantaneously once the game is unpaused.
A lot of balance issues would come into play, since you wouldn’t want incoming players in a free-for-all to be too powerful, or underpowered, but I think it would add some fun new modes of play. On very small maps it would almost lead to a deathmatch style of play.
A little bit of modding would allow a player to join as an AI and set up the units as he sees fit, then relinquish control to the AI. This would allow a scripted scenario style of cooperative play. Almost like a dungeon master creating scenarios for the players. Of course, why not just play the game in that situation? Heh.