Couple questions about development timelines and milestones

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graphicboy
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Couple questions about development timelines and milestones

Post by graphicboy » Sat, 15. Mar 14, 01:35

Not sure how much you're willing to spell out, but it doesn't hurt to ask. I'm intentionally going with terse questions to leave the door open as wide as possible.

- ETA and topic of the next patch?

- Best guess at topics for the next few patches?

- Approximate time needed to resolve all known medium/high/critical bugs?

While I realize a high level answer was provided for this, there is always a difference between the company line, and reality. If your development methodologies are remotely similar to my own, you have a pretty good idea what the next year looks like, and what your actual focus is in the near term now that you've been living it for a bit now and can provide more realistic estimates for what you're up against.

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Post by ragod » Sat, 15. Mar 14, 05:18

Well you never get a response from Egosoft so I will try my best to help ya

-They are supposed to be moving to 1/month patches. If you look at when the last patch came out, you can extrapolate roughly a month out from that.

-Bug fixes and maybe 1 or 2 quality of life upgrades. One they mentioned is working on redoing the retarded highway minigame. No ETA on when that will be done though

-General consensus among the fans of the game would be somewhere between 3-6 months. But for myself I would guess closer to a year or two.

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YorrickVander
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Post by YorrickVander » Sat, 15. Mar 14, 06:16

We're 5 months om from launch now, and still even the basic functions in game don't work properly :( With 1 month between testing to new patch, 6 months from now maybe it'll work the way we expected it to last november.
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Post by BigBANGtheory » Sat, 15. Mar 14, 10:10

Personally I do not believe the necessary features will ever be patched into XR, I think you'll end up paying for them in either an expansion or DLC.

The next 6months will be bug fixes and game tweaks essentially.

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Santi
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Post by Santi » Sat, 15. Mar 14, 12:23

- We are close to having a bug free plot, "food mission", "no fuel issue when you get your ships back" and "escorting the ship pathing problem" the only sticky points left. Then script the whole lot for the missions instead of the open system currently in place. You can sit in space doing nothing and missions will complete. Huge battles where nobody fires at anybody and battles that you have 4 to 1 superiority and you made a strategically retreat and so on.

- Trading and Mining pretty much are done too and just need some polishing and a few more tweaks. Boarding is done too but needs to be balanced in some way. Missions works well, but seems to be some issue with certain types of missions not being available quite often.

- Stations and Empire building needs a lot of work, not only there is a lot of bugs still remaining but critical parts like Managers and Architects don't work as they should, denoting problems with AI that have a domino effect on the rest of the game. It really needs more features as well.

- Performance and UI need work, but that should be a constant over the life of the game.

The good thing is the open Beta patch testing, that already been a huge boost and allowed Egosoft to focus on what the Community think are the priorities.

5 to 7 Months from now looks pretty good to me for a very solid game.
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Post by stickocide » Sun, 16. Mar 14, 17:21

I really wish I could share your optimism.

I imagine by one year after release - so in another 8 months or so - we'll have more or less what we started with, but with fewer bugs. The features I imagine we'll gain in that time will be cheap carbon-copies of Never Enter Stations Again, various fleet command mods, and possibly some others. Trading, and ship and manager AI, will probably remain as useless as they are currently. I don't expect we'll get an autopilot or *proper* command suite, like in the older games. I shouldn't think there will be any more mission content or anything like that. Hopefully the highway rejig that Linolafett hinted at - going faster when you *avoid* ships - will be implemented relatively soon. Perhaps they'll finally implement small ships, but I doubt they'll bother before they get some proper ship commands in. Even then these features are peanuts compared with what's missing.

The big thing that will make a difference is if they get workshop support up and running sooner rather than later, and manage to coax some modders back. But even then, it'll likely only be on the level mods on the current Nexus are, and with current tools being as they are, I don't imagine they can fix all that much. With all the other space sims on the horizon, the community may dwindle further despite game improvements. I guess we'll see.

We're never likely to have a Skyrim Mod Workshop level of modding, and Egosoft are terribly slow at implementing changes to the core parts of the game. Where things will be a year from now, or two or three, depends on how much money Egosoft managed to get in their cash-grab. Not sure whether I hope that was a lot or relatively little.

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Post by RedEclipse » Sun, 16. Mar 14, 19:05

I posted a similar thread but clumsyly put it on the beta forum one week ago.
I just didn't knew where to post. I didn't want to post here "because of trolland" and somehow posting it in a part of the forum "exclusive" to some of us was not rigth too.

It got deleted. That was logic but...

The "problem" is people in the beta forum tell many bugs but nobody replies. A simple "adressed" would do (that's how I work with project owners), I wouldn't have these questions.

Anyhow... I know they work. I'd like to know "where" they work too. The "feature list" they gave is an intention list. But I would like to know the real list.

I didn't asked that. I asked if we could expect a patch in a week or in a month. Without any further comments maybe it got overlooked or though as "dumb spam", but hey, how would they express this ? I don't know the rigth way. ES got pretty secret these days (not yet to compare with the rest of the industry I know but I knew them more "talkative"). The problem is they only talk to say "no", or "formal/not fomal warning", or patch list is... I'm of the kind of "would want to help but don't know how". I'm curious because I like the game. They never talk to my kind.

I feel "nervousness" tbh. Or maybe I've got ideas.

Sorry for all the french giberrish/engrish. Just drank lot of white wine tonigth with my old dad, looking at the sunset, talking about the future :) :) :)

PS - Muscadet, not bad but too young :/ Headaches allready.
Last edited by RedEclipse on Sun, 16. Mar 14, 19:31, edited 5 times in total.
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Post by birdtable » Sun, 16. Mar 14, 19:12

:) :) :) hic :) :) :)

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RedEclipse
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Post by RedEclipse » Sun, 16. Mar 14, 19:27

birdtable wrote::) :) :) hic :) :) :)
Not even close. just "chaud du casque" :) :) :)
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Post by exogenesis » Sun, 16. Mar 14, 23:10

[quote="RedEclipse"]...
The "problem" is people in the beta forum tell many bugs but nobody replies. A simple "adressed" would do (that's how I work with project owners), I wouldn't have these questions.

Anyhow... I know they work. I'd like to know "where" they work too. The "feature list" they gave is an intention list. But I would like to know the real list.
... Hic [/quote]

tbh I feel similar after posting a few bugs there a while back,
sort of made me feel - is this even being read ?
Anything at all would be good, so you know it was worth any effort,
I certainly didn't feel like beta-testing any further with zero feedback.

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Post by narn » Mon, 17. Mar 14, 00:29

When writing any code the best idea is to always remove the bugs before adding new features. I think that is pretty wise of them. However the time it has taken to remove the bugs is starting to be an issue. When they do add new features they should also really try to change some of the major aspects of game play that many people find poorly done. If they do that they may still have a good chance of pulling themselves out of this rut.

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YorrickVander
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Post by YorrickVander » Mon, 17. Mar 14, 00:34

What we hit in the beta forum is the two tier wall : there is a second beta forum that is non-public and we never see whats there. Those that can are NDA restricted. Since the game was released 5 months ago I have no idea what is going through the minds responsible for NDA on a broken game being fixed. Sanity is I guess a relative thing :P
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Santi
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Post by Santi » Mon, 17. Mar 14, 01:17

YorrickVander wrote:What we hit in the beta forum is the two tier wall : there is a second beta forum that is non-public and we never see whats there. Those that can are NDA restricted. Since the game was released 5 months ago I have no idea what is going through the minds responsible for NDA on a broken game being fixed. Sanity is I guess a relative thing :P
I made a half arsed effort to bring the whole of testing to Level 3 here:

http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php? ... t=#4338024

I think Egosoft is making a mistake here, it is fine if Level 5 keep doing the professional testing and reporting, but discussion of Rebirth with the developers should be open to everybody. We already have some "features" that look more like a tool for testing than a gameplay element. Lack of interaction between level 5 and the main forum is appalling too, except one or two people there is nil communication whatsoever.
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YorrickVander
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Post by YorrickVander » Mon, 17. Mar 14, 09:56

An obvious solution (obvious to me at least) would be to make the 'real' beta forum a read only access for public beta testers. At least we'd know whats actually being looked at and what we are wasting time on testing if already being/been fixed internally.
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BigBANGtheory
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Post by BigBANGtheory » Mon, 17. Mar 14, 09:57

Kotaku wrote an interesting article a while back which tackled this head on:

http://kotaku.com/5928663/gamings-bigge ... ts-to-talk

It doesn't matter how big or small a developer is (though I do acknowledge it isn't always easy), this is a simple case of do or don't. With respect to DevNet Lvl5, I doubt they even had the opportunity to steer things differently and for the most part play a functional role.

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Post by ragod » Mon, 17. Mar 14, 10:06

BigBANGtheory wrote:Kotaku wrote an interesting article a while back which tackled this head on:

http://kotaku.com/5928663/gamings-bigge ... ts-to-talk

It doesn't matter how big or small a developer is (though I do acknowledge it isn't always easy), this is a simple case of do or don't. With respect to DevNet Lvl5, I doubt they even had the opportunity to steer things differently and for the most part play a functional role.
good article, thats why I like Kickstarter devs so much, they are a lot more open generally with their customers.

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