It's interesting to compare the development time between Starbound and Terraria

It hasn't been invalidated, not for many people. I was asking that the dismissive attitude be dropped, not the valid argument. I'm oh so happy that you are happy but your thoughts are no more or less valuable than the informed opinions of others.

Bringing up the very odd definition of "beta" that has been used here seems to get a lot of ire so I won't delve into that, beyond stating that this isn't a "so there" or "end of disucussion" kind of topic. You aren't "right" just because you say you are.
Try to remember that owning a subjective opinion doesn't automatically remove the validity of arguments that you don't agree with.

For the record, I didn't sign on for an EA or even a beta, I pre-ordered a game that was slated to be done quite a while ago. However, things HAVE changed and beating a dead horse isn't going to help anyone. I'm as tired of hearing the "thick and fast" quote as the next guy, but the only difference I hear between that old chestnut and the patent fanboy response is how quickly (or slowly) either dismissive attitude seems to get a thread locked.
It's tiresome.

 

I'm curious then...

How long was Terraria in development? Anyone know?

I have a feeling it was for a few years.

 

The original plan, as layed out by CF was, they develop and make unstable updates to test the latest features. Then when the first round of testing was cracked, this stuff would, after polishing a bit, move to a stable update. Considerably less broken than the unstable version.

I dont think theyve followed this plan for some time now. Instead they changed it to Nightly builds. You want the latest stuff, then you get nightly builds. Even more broken then previously Unstable builds. And the stable builds? They're gone completely. So you either play on very broken builds, that defaults to admin mode, or you dont play with updates.
The last stable update i can find in the news section was april 25th. No more news on either stable or unstable updates after that.

And it had some relevant optimization updates, but content wise Stable is atleast 3 months behind nightly. And id wager even more as only features that were (more or less) complete and done made it to the unstable-stable branch.

Now this is not about my own personal expectations, but simply about how things were said they were going to be done and how it painted a certain expectation. One that currently isnt being lived up to. So i find the criticism valid.

 

To stay on topic according to Wikipedia Terraria was in development for 5 months before release.

Keep in mind that the game was very simple and was updated with content after "release", so technically the game was still being developed.
Terraria then offered less than Starbound offers right now.

After a year of adding content and patching it was announced that the game is complete and won't be updated anymore. It was then ported by another company to consoles...and the sh*tstorm began because of whales ("exclusive" content consoles would only get). Players felt cheated consoles were getting more content and raged so much they basically forced RE-LOGIC to update the game more, so a big update was planned which took more or less a year to develop I believe.

Since then the game is being still updated with content with a 1.3 patch to be still released. The 1.3 was teased at the beginning of this year and no news till today.

 

No.

Their ORIGINAL plan was for there to be no stable build, and for everything to be as stable as the the unstable, MAYBE. The giant disclaimer warnings about the progenitor phase are really about the same as the warnings for the nightlies, rather than unstable, tbh.

Then people whined and bitched about buggy updates, mods getting broken, character/ship/planet wipes, poorly balanced updates. . . and they fixed wipes to not happen anymore, and slowed down updates and started doing internal QA on them. Then people bitched about how slow updates were and how hey, we're playing Early Access, we should be doing bug testing and QA, why are you delaying updates for that? And so unstable got launched, etc. etc. right up to now with nightlies.

If they had followed their original plan, you're right--stable would be getting updated. However, it wouldn't be called stable, and would be only slightly more stable than the nightlies, if at all.

 

@krylo Thanks for the historical perspective. I've also been one of the complainers recently, but knowing where they're coming from does help me understand the problems they're dealing with where updates are concerned.

 

We don't really know. It'd be as if this whole time someone didn't know about starbound until "1.0" then found out about it. "Wow, it's like this game was finished in no time at all!"

 

Is the original plan still in effect? Yes, the nightlies as they are is a pretty good match for the description for phase 1, but the whole process seems to have morphed so much and so many times since the three stage beta was announced. If so, perhaps that means that the next update of the stable branch marks the start of phase 2... pure speculation though, of course.

 

Spent 300 hours on Terraria since day 1.

IMHO, the became decent at version 1.2...

 

I don't know. especially since the original plan is from before they had a beta out but on the other hand if they change it there might be yet another backlash.

According to wikipedia it was in development for 4 months till it was released on Steam. It gets quoted a lot in certain places.... a whole lot..

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraria

 

What I meant was that the dev wasn't as open with keeping everyone in the loop. So it coulda been 4 months, but it doesn't really matter because it was traditionally released. Even if it was 5 years, we weren't following it the entire time before release so it virtually felt like it took no time at all whether it did or not.

 

I agree. I know since it was a traditional release it could have been announced that it was developing 4 months before release or even the 4 months could have been after the game engine was developed and they decided what the content for the game would be.

 

Terraria has far more effective procedural generation than Starbound does.

 

What do you mean?

 

Dungeons in Starbound are all more or less the same, in fact last build I played dungeons did not have any procedural generation to them. So once you had seen a few Avian temples or apex labs you had seen them all. Whereas in terraria dungeons (the various types including pyramid etc) are all procedurally generated leading to each one being unique.

Starbound was marketed as have procedurally generated everything, including armor and weapons and when that is implemented I would agree, but until then it is certainly no more complex than Terraria.

 

I'm pretty sure all the dungeons and labs are prefabs...hence the recent updates showcasing specific ones you can come across.

 

If I recall correctly the pyramids in terraria were big stone triangles with a chest in the middle and nothing else, kind of cool the first time you see one but eh...then there was the dungeon and the jungle temple/dungeon, I think that's pretty much it. Imho starbound already has much more interesting and varied setpiece structures than terraria, it's just that the innards haven't been fleshed out.

CF has said that the underground is having a lot added to it, that's where most of the cool stuff was in terraria and also is a noticeably empty part of the planets in starbound at present. I get the feeling that the much of what you mentioned will be forthcoming, aside from procedural weapons... I'm not so sure about that.

 

They are. Which also throws the argument that Starbound took this long to develop because it is so procedurally intense right out the window.

 

So what do you think the reason is?

 

no man... LUA is only for the mods

Starbound is actually coded in C++, which is more multi-platform friendly, more complex and allows for a far higher degree of control in the specifics, which also means there is far more room for errors. C# is a simpler language akin to Java, very high level and much easier to work with as long as you're ok with losing control over some (sometimes important) aspects

Terraria was written in the XNA development environment for C# I'm fairly sure.