Important Current Dev Responses(General)

Discussion in 'Starbound FAQs, Q&A, and General Help' started by Seria-Myouna, Sep 17, 2013.

  1. Seria-Myouna

    Seria-Myouna The Last Moderator IRC Operator

    [​IMG]Mollygos(9/17/13)

    Right! Sorry about that delay. Lemme get to answering these questions.
    Starbound has been in development since 2011. It was officially announced in early 2012, with the intention of releasing it that summer. Being the large, ambitious project that it is, it quickly became apparent that that just...wasn't gonna happen. Given that Starbound is our first project as a company, it was easy to continue to be optimistic about our deadlines and say that we could still safely get the game out by the end of 2012, or Q1 2013. Oops!

    When Q1 2013 came around and the game still wasn't in quite the state we wanted it to be in, we got pretty stressed out. The whole team had been working their butts off for over a year and lots of them were living off of savings, which they were starting to run out of. Other people were in a position where they were going to have to take a full-time job, severely limiting their time to work on Starbound. That would have been preeeetty disastrous.

    People had been asking us to open up pre-orders for a long time. The idea that we might not make it to full release by the end of 2013 seemed ludicrous, and we really needed the funds to keep our team afloat. So, we decided to open up pre-orders with the promise that the full game would be out this year, confident that that was the case so long as the team could keep working full time.

    Thing is, developing Starbound is weird. It's a huge project with a lot of elements to it, and almost all of the elements are there now, which means that a lot of the development process is problem solving. It's reeaally difficult to predict how long things are going to take. We're not where we wanted to be by late 2013, but I think we're very close to the stage where we'd be comfortable releasing a beta.
    That's completely true, though. All of the pre-order money is going toward developing Starbound. I'm actually not sure what you're getting at here. :O

    I'm not saying you think this, but there seems to be this strange idea that there's some sort of magical development machine that you stick funds into and code comes out. What "supporting development" means is allowing us to fund the team's continued work on the game. Which is exaaaactly what's happened.

    If not for pre-orders being as successful as they have been, I honestly have no idea what we'd be doing right now. We're really thankful, and we've tried to repay you guys by being more communicative, but clearly there's something we're not getting quite right there.
    I mean, on the one hand, it's a bit mind-boggling to me when people say we don't communicate with fans. We update people on our progress every day, we're constantly in IRC, we answer questions over e-mail, etc. We can't answer questions we don't have the answer to, though.

    There's been no paranoia/internal mandate saying "DON'T ANSWER QUESTIONS", but obviously we've already had some trouble with giving release estimates we couldn't make. We don't want to answer questions when the answers to those questions aren't clear or may change.

    As for one of the most recent concerns-- whether or not full release will be in 2013 or not-- the answer is no, it won't. We've said as much in a lot of places, but the team's been sort of scattered about lately and it's been disorienting. It's my fault really for not keeping the main site completely up to date (our About page is especially bad), which is something I plan to work on today.

    However, you guys will be able to play the game this year. We are releasing the beta this year.
    I'm also planning on updating the Roadmap this week. Y'know how I was talking about how developing Starbound is difficult/weird because it's a lot of problem-solving, balancing and implementing rather than tangible "okay, we put these assets in the game today" or "we put this many lines of code in today"? That's kind of what makes it difficult to update the Roadmap with accurate percentages.

    We thought it was a really cool idea when we made it, and we were really excited to use it, but I guess we got a bit lazy on that front, honestly. We've just got a ton on our plates and we're doing the best we can to work with it.

    However, like I said, I'm planning to update it this week.

    We're also very conscious of the fact that the pre-order changed everything, and that we are certainly obligated to make sure our supporters know what's going on. Pre-orders have helped us develop the game faster. They've allowed the team to actually survive the rest of development instead of coding from cardboard boxes.
    People are entitled to know what's going on, which is why we've tried keeping people in the loop. But, again, there are questions we can't answer because we just don't have answers, so all we can really do is keep developing and keep telling you exactly what we've accomplished each day.

    The i49 demo was something we were kind of terrified about, to be honest, because we had to disable lots of things that weren't finished or polished in order to make the game playable, and even then we still had bugs and crashes. In fact, we had to fix a really server-crashing scary bug in the 10 minutes leading up to Yogscast's playthrough, and then we all sort of sat there nervously staring up at the screen, hoping nothing disastrous would happen. And...it didn't! So we were really happy about that.

    But the point I'm trying to illustrate is that for as good as a lot of people think the game looked at i49, and as much as they want us to release that code to the public, it's just not quite there yet. It's playable for sure, but so many precautions had to be taken in order to show off a small amount of gameplay that it just wouldn't be an accurate reflection of what we want the game, or the beta, to be.

    I really pushed for us to show off the game at i49 despite these issues because I knew that for one, overall, it'd be good publicity, and two, the response from fans would help to motivate us a whole lot during these last months of 2013.
    I believe I answered all of these concerns above, but if I didn't, let me know.
    As far as what month beta will be released, I just can't say yet. We'll figure it out and then we'll tell you.

    [​IMG]Bartwe(9/17/13)

    Sadly the roadmap isn't as simple as it looks. Making a game isn't about completing todo lists. Items aren't all 1 day in size. Stuff simply doesn't translate into simple progress bars going upwards at a stable rate. Plans change, features get changed, priorities reordered.
    Every change is a step towards release. And we have clearly said that the beta will arrive this year. beyond that programming is always more work than you imagine.


    [​IMG]OmnipotentEntity(8/30/13)
    This is simply what I understand beta release to require. I might be missing part of the picture and I might simply be mistaken, so please do not take this as gospel.

    Quite a bit. We need to gear up tier 2 and tier 3 story quests, flesh out quests in general, party mechanics. Lots of stuff. The roadmap has much of this information already. We want the universe to feel "lived in" much more than it currently does. I mean, some things that seem simple still need adding, like, "configurable keys." Or even, "gui for more options." Just a million little things to actually bring the game to a shippable level of polish, and turn it from a bunch of systems into an actual game that you can have fun playing.

    Not really. It's always been a pretty long drudge.

    Crash stability isn't really what I am worried about. I'm more worried about world generation stability. I don't want to have situations where we invalidate save files more often than absolutely necessary. Not having a public release gives us the freedom to invalidate save files on a whim if it will make the game better. And we do so very regularly.

    I'm worried about data/time loss. There's nothing more frustrating than losing progress because of a crash bug. I don't really care if the game crashes if you can pick up right where you left off, but if you lose progression, that's really horrible, and it's caused me to ragequit otherwise wonderful games.

    Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

    Here are a few good examples:

    Starting off with the new action bar mechanics. I honestly expected it to be an afternoon project. Instead, it took me like an entire freaking week to hammer out and touched 4 different layers of code (/client, /core, /game, /frontend), and it went through 5 different iterations. And caused me to create 12x12 matrices to figure out proper behavior.

    Other things that took me far longer than expected. I rewrote much of the Gui code a few months back. Now we're using what amounts to a primitive toolkit, complete with arbitrary encapsulation, extensibility, etc. It operates like a subset of Qt, and it's completely data driven. That took me nearly a month. But it was required for things like scroll areas and such that the old Gui simply was simply not powerful enough to handle.

    It took me a day or two to begin porting our 7 or 8 separate implementations of a progress bar over to the one progress bar implementation to rule the world, one that you can actually put in JSON and configure (modders rejoice). Now we only have like 5 or 6 separate implementations, which I'm going to pare down as I touch nearby code.

    I mean that's just Gui stuff. There's a lot of little things. Sometimes things that look to be finished wind up having problems. For instance, the action bar changes I mentioned wound up breaking the matter manipulator, because (and this took me hours and hours of agonizing debugging to uncover) the item was being double initialized and it was trying to read the location of the wrong hand. Making the beam start from the center of the player rather than from the end of the hand. This is a bug that was always there, but it was only exposed by the action bar changes.

    Because love them or hate them, Yogscast has fans that don't know Starbound. It was very good exposure for us. I mean, we already have days worth of live stream footage of devs just playing around in the game showing off things like procedural world generation.

    Our feature list hasn't really gotten much bigger.

    Anything crash that causes time investment loss.

    We're not waiting on feature completion as far as I'm aware. I'm pretty sure we're just going to get the first 3 tiers going.

    If it works for them, great. I don't think it will work for us though. There's really two things that will keep a person playing this game, and keep excitement up about it. The ability to build worlds, and the ability to play story. Currently, we only have the first, and that's hampered by the aforementioned constant invalidation of save files because of serialization differences.

    The i49/Yogcast demo had a game breaking bug in it that was discovered 5 minutes before we started the demo. It only shows up using certain build options, but those are the build options we're going to have to use for the beta. It has to do with strong authentication being turned off, and then a user leaving a multiplayer session.

    In Linux it works fine, because I wrote the code and tested it on Linux while flying to i49, because I needed to bypass mandatory authentication to work without internet on the plane.*

    In Windows it crashes the server, corrupts the world file, and kicks everyone off without saving their character file.

    Needless to say, if you felt a ball of extreme stress just to the left of Molly off camera during the stream, that was me. Also bart was incredibly stressed too.

    Additionally, there's some sort of memory leak or resource leak in the Windows build of the server, because the resource usage just goes up and up, it was fine for an hour, but much more and I was getting really nervous.

    Finally, tier 1 is only partially finished, we're using a boss that's probably not even going to be the tier 1 boss. There's no side quests, nothing outside of the main tutorial line of quests. We don't have serialization stability. Party mechanics are only accessible via chat commands, as are much of everything else. The state the game is in is kinda cool to kick around in for about an hour. But it really isn't ready to be released to the general public.

    I try. I really do.

    As far as I'm aware.

    Latest murmurings I've heard are 3 for beta. Once we get everything situated the way we want it with regards to world generations, etc. And then we'll release tiers as we complete them? Not really sure what the plan is there.

    It's rather difficult to just find the time to do the update every day, to be honest. I mean, you can ask for more. I'm not going to say you're ungrateful for asking or anything, but please just a bit of perspective, we're already doing daily updates, which is far above and beyond nearly every other video game development firm that I'm aware of.

    We've been kinda letting some things float because we've been running on crazy push mode for quite a while now. I'm terribly sorry. I haven't forgotten about the Q&A thread, or the trailer, or the roadmap, or the lore. It's just been pushed as "not as important as beta release." I'm sure you can agree.

    A few. One example that comes to mind is the flavor text for the matter manipulator, which was suggested by a redditor. "Manipulates anything that matters." I don't know of a master list of these things though.
    Yeah, this is important. Healing items are actually rather new in the grand scheme of things. Being a problem that is both easy to solve and self-contained, we let it sit for a long while as low hanging fruit. As a result we haven't fixed some of the usability problems with them yet.
    The unreleased version requires mandatory internet on DRM that's authenticated against a remote server to prevent leaks.

    The code I wrote is to allow us to turn that off. Which is a major requirement for beta.
     
  2. Serenity

    Serenity The Waste of Time

    Thank you for making this, I honestly feared all the responsibility I had foolishly put on my self lol.
     
    Axe Garian, Jonesy, onerb2 and 4 others like this.
  3. Regal Kain

    Regal Kain Space Kumquat


    Arrrggggg cuteness overloooooad e_e where can I find more Chibi work of Avatar? :: Sets off on a Google quest.::
     
  4. Delimar

    Delimar Star Wrangler

    Well, this post answered nearly every question people had. Well done in putting this together. :up:
     
    pankakeman and Serenity like this.
  5. Serenity

    Serenity The Waste of Time

    There is some new stuff after trolls showed up.
     
    Hippolv likes this.
  6. Katzeus

    Katzeus Chucklefisherman Chucklefish

  7. greenman

    greenman Spaceman Spiff

    DBeslan, Gunslinger and Serenity like this.
  8. Katzeus

    Katzeus Chucklefisherman Chucklefish

    It works for me, oh well so much for trying to be helpful :cry:
     
    RodrigoKiller and pankakeman like this.
  9. greenman

    greenman Spaceman Spiff

    Yea? I get a chucklefish page, but the is the message:
    Official Chucklefish Forums! - Error
    The requested search could not be found.
    That is weird man. Thanks anyway
     
  10. Gunslinger

    Gunslinger Existential Complex

    Thanks for the thread. I had no idea!
     
  11. DiscontentWithTheSystem

    DiscontentWithTheSystem Big Damn Hero

    This answered a lot of questions. 2013 beta? That could be a great Birthday/Christmas present :DD
     
  12. Seria-Myouna

    Seria-Myouna The Last Moderator IRC Operator

    That's the plan.
    • Spread Information
    • Educate Masses
    • ???
    • Profit
     
  13. Still I can't see why making quests from tier 1-3 is an essential part of the beta.
    Am I missing something?
     
    Axe Garian likes this.
  14. greenman

    greenman Spaceman Spiff

    Dig deeper ;)
     
  15. DiscontentWithTheSystem

    DiscontentWithTheSystem Big Damn Hero

    Does that make you an information gnome?
     
    RodrigoKiller likes this.
  16. Seria-Myouna

    Seria-Myouna The Last Moderator IRC Operator

    Maybe
     
  17. Delimar

    Delimar Star Wrangler


    A beta using 3 tiers would definitely show the curve of the average player. I imagine balancing out how long it takes to reach each tier is on their minds.
     
  18. Using tiers yes, using actual quest not so much.
    I don't know whether the quests are going to be the exact same quests from the full game or not but if they are then I think that's pointless.
    We will be spoiled with the story and quests making it not that much fun later when the game finally releases.
     
    Axe Garian likes this.
  19. Seria-Myouna

    Seria-Myouna The Last Moderator IRC Operator

    It's possible that they may be using the quests as a controlled method of progression between the various tiers, and forcing the player to adequately prepare themselves for higher-tier content by quest-restricting certain tech items and craftable things such as higher level machines and such.
     
  20. greenman

    greenman Spaceman Spiff

    That's a fair concern. Playing the beta instead of waiting for the full release will definitely change your first impression of the game. The beta release is for development testing, and it's not a finished product. You could think of it as a spoiler in that way. If your concern is that too much storyline is revealed in the beta, then you might consider holding off until a full release.
     

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