I hope so, but I really doubt that. They aren't probably making progress on anything worthwhile to mention.
The fact that not even a ballpark of a release date has been hinted is what is driving people mad. Lots of us paid money for a game with X features, the devs seem to be adding Y+Z features on top of that delaying the release of game with X that people originally wanted. Before anyone says 'before 2014' is a ballpark release date, no it is not. Month and week is a ballpark-sized estimate, saying it's this year is a continent-sized release estimate. How about paying for a car and they tell you 'it will come out some time this year'. Yeah. That feeling. It's late and looking at daily updates doesn't really help as much as I thought it would when they announced it. Most of us just want a good game to play since there wasn't any good stuff released recently.
Except that most people haven't paid that sort of price. It's more like paying for a new shirt, and being told that the printing isn't done yet, it'll be out within a year. To top it off, you already have a whole wardrobe full of shirts. Starbound has code for virtually everything, as near as I can tell. Physics code has to be variable, since Gravity is variable Elasticity is variable Acceleration is variable Viscosity is variable (water vs air vs oil) There's enough items that it would probably take several hours to list them all, and every single item will need unique code specific to its function (even if families like bows might have similar code), and every scrap of code has to integrate seamlessly and flawlessly with every other bit of code. Enemies are procedurally generated, too, so I would hate to think of the intricacy of the code that powers them, given that not only does each enemy have to respond to variable input and circumstances, but every enemy also has to deal with it in a unique way. Due to the fact that enemies are so variable, I would almost imagine that the code they've written for them is akin to coding a system that produces its own code. That's like saying, "We don't know what type of machine we're going to need, so we'll have to build a machine that can build its own machines". That's beyond 3d printing, if you ask me -- 3d printing can't print complex circuitry and metals. In summary, the AI engine is probably a work of fine art, and I would think very difficult to debug (since there are so many possible situations to check) Each individual world, once generated, looks like it will be in the same ballpark of complexity as any Terraria world, with the potential to be much more complex. GUI has to handle every single item, party interfacing, vitals, maps, and who knows what else. The data it uses has to be extractable from anything and everything (Including that weird AI system) Honestly, I could go on, but if people haven't stopped reading by now then they surely will if I keep going on. My point is, with how flexible Chucklefish have shown it all to be, I'm amazed that we have a release date for this year. That's less than four months. The sheer volume of things they have to do is mindboggling, and I think they rightly deserve every penny they've gotten. I also think it will be well worth the wait. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- tl;dr: They're coding something that is honestly mindboggling to contemplate. I know this, and you know this -- or else you wouldn't be as frustrated that it isn't out yet. It's not a supply of insulin or drinking water, so you can hold out. It'll be worth it! Sorry for the ramble, it bothers me when people get upset about the lack of release date, a little.
Can someone give this person a freakin medal please? Thank you for spelling it out for the impatient naggers!
It would be great if they gave them the troll fruit names in game. bannanaba, kurt, kern, blubbery ?, ?, churris, kwi other possibles... plampkeen, aspergers, pah an old meme but fun none the less. He he he
I've a question for you, not joking or anything, serious question. You're right about the coding and how hard is to implement that in a complete game but if it's really this difficult why they dont use all their time to work on code instead of adding new thing, like the music instrument?
In all honesty from many of their videos and updates this stuff seems to be pretty much done. I would have expected a beta by now and from what ive seen there could be a beta. Not entirely sure why they haven't pushed one out yet for those who paid for the early access. I too understand how hard it is to make a game but we've passed the point of beta to be honest and I don't have faith that it'll come out this year. It may but i no longer fully believe that it will.
Having recently taken up the challenge of learning to code a really basic platforming engine in flash - I do mean really basic, mind you - I learned something about coding. It's like a tangled web. You have a hundred things, and every one ties into the other 99. So, you have this big pile of things to code, and they all rely on each other... Where do you start? Which do you do first? For instance... You have two monsters -- monster X and monster Y. You need them to spawn together, or something. You can't finish monster X's code without monster Y, but you can't finish monster Y without monster X. Not to say everything's like this, but so much of it's interdependent that it's easy to get lost in what you have to do, and many, many things have to go "unfinished" until you have the end pieces. I know. It's like you've just made a shoelace. You can't call it "done" until you've got the plastic aglet on the end, but you can't make the plastic aglet until you've made the shoelace (and worked out what size it should be) That's my thought, anyway. So much depends on everything else, that the dev team has to walk away from many vital features until they have other bits and pieces done to finish up with. This is all mostly conjecture, but I like to think it's reasonable conjecture! >.=.>
The ones we have paid have the right to have beta and the others things preordered but not the right to decide how they code and how they do their work.
I hope there is Grain, So we can find BEER recipe, that will definitely be one of human recipes >_< Cent wait to find one of those!
The first boss will probably lay down the ground work for later bosses, you have to remember these things.
