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DanW

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Posts posted by DanW

  1. Posted

    i know how long it can take to make a new aircraft model and i believe that it can be very expensive if the one making it does so for business and even more so if we talk about cockpits but to say that a model for SF2 would cost more as for SF1 is insane , the work is still the same !!!!

    and most of the aircraft in SF2 are from SF1 just with a smal update here and there

     

    Why do you think it is insane?

    • Larger textures require more detail
    • More polygons take more time
    • Specular mapping
    • Bump mapping
    • More detail in avionics
    • 10 - 14 years from SF1 to F-14: Do you really think labor rates don't go up in a decade?

     

    If the development costs go up and the labor rates go up, yet the sales and the prices of the games stay the same (remember these are budget games), common sense would dictate that you are making less money. It's really not that hard to grasp, I hope.

     

    And another thing, you are only focusing on artwork since that is all you know. Exp 2 added the mission editor which took a long, long time to make - and almost put him under. F-14 took a long, long time to make with all kinds of new features - naval ops, terrain engine - which again, almost put him under. And the terrain engine needs a lot more time to be optimized and complete. It's just not very mature. But, you either lose your business or make compromises. This is the last thing I'll say.

    • Like 7

  6. Posted

    And Dan, we all knew that's what's being worked on now, that wasn't the question. That's concrete, even if release dates or exact details aren't. The point is...and then? Once the mobile game and Exp 3 are done, with the DLC sprinkled around, where is he going?

     

    The answer is I don't know. I have no idea. Things change. I would assume that he keeps on chugging along like he has been. What chugging along means, I don't know. There's still lots of planes to do.

     

    Is the open nature of it going to be scaled back farther and farther, with the DLC turning into "TW released mods" as the only option?

     

    The game is very open as far as I can tell. None of the DLC that has been released (sans editors and stuff that involves coding) isn't anything that can't be done by the community. New planes and new skins can be created. And exactly just how much has been 'locked' and the stuff that has been 'locked', how much of that is for sale in DLC? I think the answer is none.

     

    Modders don't want to work on something for a year or more, release it, and 2 weeks later have a patch come out that not only breaks the mod but means it will NEVER work again because such-and-such has been cut off. If that's what's going to happen, say it now so the modders don't spin their wheels for nothing.

     

    That's just the risk you take when you mod a game. As a former modder that's put a ton of personal time into games that were crap back then and aren't even played today, I sympathize with anyone that works that hard on something that may or may not be used. But at the same time, I know that games aren't made exclusively just for modding, they are meant to be played. You choose to mod because you can and you want to. SF was mod friendly from the start and advertised as a mod friendly game and I disagree with anyone that thinks the game is no longer moddable.

  7. Posted

    10k gets you, at best, a new player plane and cockpit. The hardcore features will cost an insane amount of money and dev time. Sorry, but that's just the way it is. The mission editor alone came close to shutting everything down. It's just hard for the average person to understand how s**tty it is to make flight simulators. Even budget ones like this.

     

    As I've said before, which no one seems to listen, the stuff being worked on is:

     

    SF for droid/win8/iOS (no, it's not linux code)

    Exp 3 at some point

    More DLCs

     

    I'm not sure of the order except that DLC are mixed in with Droid Fighters.

    And he's still patching the game.

  12. Posted

    Dan

    We just wish we had more info and where things are going. We have supported the sim and each other for so long that its natural for us to want some info.

     

    He's kinda of already laid out the road map for this year. Exp3 at some point... a port for Win8/android/iOS is being worked on. That's all I know of now. I mean, you can't say too much because when things change people get bent out of shape. What was the Falklands game that was supposed to come out few years ago? Jet Thunder? What ever happened to those poor guys? Fighter Ops? Personally, I doubt he'll ever stop making PC games... I mean, that's why we are all here right? But it takes real cash to do this, so you gotta find new sources of funding.

     

    I don't know what any patches are fixes are coming out. I think the series has removed some moddability because of people stealing our work and also because of all the tech support posts about x/y/z not working due to a modded install. For each thread he has to read and answer the more time/money that takes, so in some cases, things may have gotten hard coded to make life easier. It's just the way it is. Case in point, the missiles. No matter what he does some guy is gonna complain over and over that is was changed/sucks/not real/etc.

     

    I don't what the future holds. It's been 10+ years and he's still chugging along where others have failed. Is it the most pretty, realistic, bug free game? Nope, but I'd say F-14 looks a tad bit better than SFP1. But in the end, it's still a 20 dollar game. Nothing more, nothing less. I've painted everything from F-22s to the Wright Flyer.

     

    I know everyone thinks they can do better, and make smarter business decisions, but try and cut the guy some slack. It's hard staying afloat with next to zero money every month. If it costs too much, then more than likely it costs too much. It's not an excuse, it's a reasonable explanation of the reality of the current flight sim economic universe when you don't have a publisher and aren't on Steam.

     

    This is still a good site and great community. I hope it's still here 10 years from now.

     

    And last, FC is good people for inviting us to fly and simulator and pizza/beer.

    • Like 7

  25. Posted

    The terrain engine is changing anyway, so there probably won't be any more updates to the existing terrain engine anyway. I have no idea how things will be handled in the new engine, but everything will be .lod based with shaders. There will be no square tiles or .tod objects and trees will probably be placed in max just like every terrain object. I imagine there will be DLC terrain and things of that nature on the Thirdwire DLC store.

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