TL:DR: Ok I get it but, I have legitimate concerns IMO. It's not quite about what they're working on. These questions have been asked in the SC forums, to no avail. No answer from CIG. They aren't hard questions for CIG to answer, but we might have a few problems answering them ourselves. The questions boil down to, "Why is code base modifications required for every ship, planet or moon? " and virtually every other property in the game? Really, I shouldn't be asking another supporter, but CIG doesn't talk so I'm just saying what my concerns are.
Probably nit-picky technical details follow... non IT professionals will probably get lost. I'm just laying out the concerns and why they are concerns.
@Bambooza, I used the same ordering you did, and I'm only expressing clarification of the concerns. If you have an answer, great... I don't for any of this. I am usually an apologist for CIG but lately that has begun to erode.
Just for example, the ships all have a HUD. Few or none of the HUD navigation displays line up exactly with the center of the HUD display. that is true of virtually all of the ships that I fly even infrequently. That is indicative of a problem with either the object model (architecture or lack thereof), or incredibly sloppy programming. Probably both, but the evidence mounts that it is a problem that costs them time, and
our money.
The argument that Cryengine is not capable does not wash with me, even though I do not like Cryengine much. Game engines are almost universally designed for use on a client computer, not the server. The server provides the game engine software, but the program runs on the users computer, not the server. What runs on the server is the services that manages user identity and security, application state, the asset services, and client communications. If you screw that up, the clients will be screwed up. Most games don't use a pre-made game engine, which CIG had the option to do too, but they were in a hurry. The tools they are writing only work for Cryengine, and Lumberyard clients. They do not appear to help with the server components of any other game.
Physics is simply another place where CIG appears to be using in-class software to build the behavior. That is not good OOP, which is why you'd want to use C++ or some other OOP language. If you're not a programmer, go to your company programmers, JAVA or C# guys are fine, and ask them how inheritance works., and how properties can leverage that model. This is programming 1.0 kind of stuff, and I believe CIG is not leveraging it. Have you ever played KSP? DId you know that no ship, ship part, or part of a part, or construct has _ANY_ code in it? That goes for planets, moons and stars in the game, atmosphere or not. It's just a model, defined by things in an XML file.
Feature creep is a big problem with CIG, and that is also costing them our money. Caves just as an example are another kind of construct that should require no code. Users figured out how to build caves in SL (Second Life) using a game designed in 2002 and 3. Sink the ground, and build your cave, or build the cave in a hill. No code required, unless you're building something new and then you use the Object Model so that your code doesn't have to exist in every cave element. You just reference the class in objects you want it in, and set the properties. That's all there is to it. Yes SL is a little bit old to mention here, but has a great example of how to build caves in an MMO that supports as many users as you want to support. they have supported as many as 100K simultaneous users, but regularly support "only" 45K simultaneous users on a typical day. That's 900 times as many users as a single SC instance. 1 shard. Multiple regions. The game Dual Universe which I mention in the next paragraph is able to do this, and has constructed an interesting solution to the player density in a small area question. They figured out how to make the region size and density as dynamic as player movement.
On missteps, I have no argument whatsoever. Their lessons learned are immense(fs.. spelling?). They've learned, that is why I am still a backer of SC and not one of the other games that are going to beat SC to market, with less than
10% of the programmers. CIG no longer leads the pack of 3 +1(Elite Dangerous is the 1. It has its own issues because of being rushed to beat everyone else to market), in any metric except monthly earnings and expences. The market leader is now Dual Universe which is more like Second Life in space than anything else. They have a well constructed object model too. No code required for user constructed items. You inherit thee classes from properties you set, and nobody writes code to do it.
Finally, leaving bugs behind is always a mistake. Always. never move forward if there are known bugs in your code, in fact don't even include that code in the build you're releasing. That is part of the things we have been drilling into programmers since a decade or more before the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was written ("Agile"(tm) is a subset of this, consisting of only 1 acceptable model, where there are at least 12 viable models for different circumstances. Agile(tm) is a good way to mess up a project budget just as surely as a waterfall)
I was sure at one point in 2017, that CIG was going to make an offer for Novaquark, the Dual Universe developer. Novaquark was in fairly hard financial state. There was a lot of synergy between the goals of each company. They didn't, and now Novaquark is growing and progressing toward their earlier go live date faster than SC.
Those are my concerns. That's all they are. If you or anyone who cares to answer any of these concerns, I don't expect it, and I might have some questions. It is NOT an attack on you, it's what I see as a legitimate question from a backer of the game. I hope CIG explains themselves one day, instead of relying on apologists. They chose to make this process open, precisely so we could ask questions and contribute to their success, and by extension our success. I don't see them exactly living up to their end of the bargain.
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