Gas clouds / nebula effects in Rebirth?

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Deeparth
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Post by Deeparth » Thu, 30. May 13, 09:42

A wise game developer once said,"The goal shouldn't be to make your game realistic, rather it should be to make it believable."

numerialized

Re:

Post by numerialized » Sat, 1. Aug 20, 08:07

CBJ wrote:
Thu, 16. May 13, 12:05
greypanther wrote:Is it really asking too much for the option; for choice?
Actually yes, it may be. I've explained this before, but I'll do it again with this particular context in mind.

Every time there is a discussion about a particular feature, you have three camps. There's the "I want this" camp, the "I want that" camp, and then you have the people who think they have a magic solution that will make everyone happy, the "make it optional" camp. The trouble is that it's not the magic solution those people think it is.

Creating a game that is fun and enjoyable is about making game design decisions, not dithering about it and ending up leaving the player to decide. While some players have strong opinions about a feature, most will just go with the default setting, and if you have dithered and not designed your game firmly around a core set of solid design decisions, then everyone's experience will be almost certainly be the poorer for it. Of course there are exceptions, particular features such as graphics settings, where giving people options doesn't detract from the game's core design, but for something fundamental like the cockpit it is almost always better to make a decision and accept that it won't please everyone than to dither and give people two different options, neither of which can be fully followed through because you have to take into account the possibility that people may choose the other option.

And that brings me to the second point, which is that making something optional costs more than making a design choice even in the case where one of the options is simply not having that feature. Why? Well, because not only do you have to develop the feature (or in the worst case two different versions of the feature) but you also have to set up the option (additional menus, translations, etc.), and then you have to test the whole game with both options. The more things you make optional, the more different combinations you have to test; up to twice as many combinations, in fact, for each thing you make optional.

It gets even worse if the option is as fundamental as something like the cockpit. Even if the cockpit were just eye-candy, you'd have to make sure that all aspects of the game worked and performed correctly with both a full-screen view of space and a partial view. But of course in this case the cockpit isn't just eye-candy, it's an integral part of the game, with the parts of the UI built into it. Making that optional would require the game to function with two separate interface paradigms, significantly increasing the cost for design, development and testing.

Why should you care about making things optional being an expensive way of doing things? Well, cost and time are pretty much the same thing in development tems, both of which are finite, so those resources would, by definition, be prevented from being used on other game features. Worse still, for any given player, at least some of those resources would be wasted, because they would be spent on an option that they wouldn't be using; in fact in practice for most players, all the effort put into the non-default option would be wasted. In essence you are shooting yourself in the foot somewhat by suggesting that a feature you want should be made optional; you are asking for the available resources to be spent on a feature you don't want, only for you to then switch it off, instead of on features you do want!

And this of course brings us back to the first point, which is that it is almost always better to make design decisions than to try to please everyone by making everything optional.
Sorry to sidetrack this with X in general but this perspective is what I want to address and there was a link to here.

I disagree. It does solve it. Yes it takes away your resources and we are grateful that you listen when we talk about this. But you are making a fine chocolate cake, label it a sandbox, then are putting raisins in it... Then argue that you won't have resources for the topping if you make a second chocolate cake without raisins.
Even with the topping, some of us do not want to eat raisins. Yes we mod and I am not talking about things we can personalize with mods(like xenon are OP/Weak or trader can't find this), but a lot of things are beyond us, not to mention that our intention is playing a game.

This here is one of my raisins. https://i.imgur.com/8Lm82HJ.png I had been waiting for 8 minutes for it to dock while it circled around my ship. It is a single top grade ship to land on a single bay with no obstructions or on going movement. I can not tell you how annoying it is to wait only because you didn't want to interpolate or even teleport this thing in and instead have a you-amusing animation. I do not know if you people are actually watching this either while managing your empire... But it renders carriers completely useless at any fast paced, combat oriented gameplay. Not to mention, it was 1000x better 10 years ago(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFnpVDGr1YM).

Therefore, in essence, not having such a punishing friendly fire "feature" or docking/undocking procedure "feature" are actually quite a boon to many. Yes, CBJ, optional works because you are leaving us a big variety of raisins. Some are swallowed, some are removed by modding, some are asked to be made optional-some just so we can disable it; and some are looked at at reacted with "wtf" and abandoned for a while or permanently; usually because of "camps of others" here.
(They live and socialize in here you know... And they want you to become like them. And if you do not, your opinion becomes null and void.)

Alan Phipps
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Re: Gas clouds / nebula effects in Rebirth?

Post by Alan Phipps » Sun, 2. Aug 20, 11:57

@ numerialized: Seven years on from the discussion you quote and for a game no longer in development, I doubt that your post will have much impact.
A dog has a master; a cat has domestic staff.

numerialized

Re: Gas clouds / nebula effects in Rebirth?

Post by numerialized » Mon, 3. Aug 20, 13:24

Alan Phipps wrote:
Sun, 2. Aug 20, 11:57
@ numerialized: Seven years on from the discussion you quote and for a game no longer in development, I doubt that your post will have much impact.
Yea, I'm aware that it is old. It was meant for CBJ, since he referred to his post here in a recent X4 topic; in a general X series context.

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