Rogue: Like Ray says in the thread.. no idea. I had the 5600 in my machine for awhile too, and had no problems. It isn't the fastest card in the universe, but I definitely never saw anything like 4fps. I was running with everything turned up, too. Ray is doing all his current testing with the 5600 in his machine, and the DX9 GKGL driver by default. So.. we would be inclined to think it's something specific to you.

If not, then I'd wait until the new client goes into testing, and give it a shot then and see if it's better. But, for whatever it's worth, I have yet to see any performance problems on the wide variety of Nvidia and ATI hardware that we use at work and home(s).

ctishman:

That "washboard" area you're referring to crosses an angled polygon boundary. I tried bumping it as is and it looked weird (3D normal changes ruin the simple 2D normal effect). I'd either have to build the entire angled surface normal into the map, or split it into two bumpy sections. Anyway, if I get to it, maybe I'll change it. For the moment I'm just doing a "quick and dirty" spruce-up when I have time.

One word: focus.

What on earth does the re-vamping of existing ships' in-game look and feel have to do with the launch of the next release?

As a development team your energies should be focused on coding and testing (and re-testing) the new UI, mission-based logic and currently dis-functional game features. Period.

Get that stuff out to the community so we can use it, abuse it and report back to you on how well (or poorly) it works.

Then, move onto some of the nifty new and revamped ships that we have all seen on these boards... as well as some of the long-sought features such as cap ship acquisition and piloting.

The bottom line is that Guild has paying clients who enjoy playing the VO product as well as supporting the concept of a small dev-team fighting the good fight, but who are tired of hearing about updates right around the corner that never materialize.

I'm doing this stuff in the background, while the rest of the work takes place. We have plenty of focus, thanks. I also would like to get major graphical changes in place in the release version in the short term, so that we don't need to do dramatically large (download-size) patches unnecessarily once we do start marketing.

There is more to this whole redux than just making the UI better. The point is to have a game that can attract and retain more players. Part of that is gameplay, part of that is accessability (user friendly interface), and part of that is graphics that don't immediately make people laugh. Nothing is possibly going to be delayed while "John works on ships". This is a background when-I-have-time effort, as I've said in every post that's described the topic. If I can spend a little time improving ships while Ray is working on the client, and make a substantial graphical difference, then that's time well spent.

I'm sorry you don't agree.

Gosh leadfist, this isn't the place to be disagreeing with ppl!

*replaces ion cores with luxury goods on sacrificial altar*
LONG LIVE THE DEV GODS!!!
*slowly backs away with while prostrating ones self*

I'm currently at work on a game project and I have to agree with incarnate, without graphics that catch your eye it's very unlikely a player will download a game let alone play it for more than the 8 hour trial.

You can have gameplay and a easy to use interface, but the first thing that catches people's eye and brings them in is the graphics of whatever game it is their looking at.

For example, after playing Vendetta for about 4 months I built up some good levels and was doing well, however the look got old, it was unique but got boring after awhile, the Vulture looked like a plastic toy, the ships in general looked cartoonie and I dont mean to insult the devs on this but I think that was a bad style decision early on in pre-production, when the beginning modeling was taking place. Needless to say my boredum drove me away and I stopped playing for about 6 months.

Recently I was checking out the forums and saw that the new mission system was coming soon, the ships were being updated, the raptor looked beatuiful and so did the new capital ship, it got me exicted the see the new direction the devs were taking the game. I re-activated my account and started playing again just last night and I look forward to steedy progress and a much improved vendetta-online in the coming months.

Also on a side note, with any game each person on the development team does do their own side projects, I do some of mine and 1 or 2 of them have been integrated into my current project, I worked outside the current box and made a different look, one that eventually ran very well with the overall product up to this point.

Concluding this short lecture, what the devs are doing is putting the game back on track, in order to make this a successful venture they need to attract at least about 1000-1500 players online at all times and near 5-7000 accounts, updated graphics and changes are what they need right now, and thats exsactly what the devs are doing.

No Kix, look, it's fine for people to disagree. Yes, it frustrates and depresses me sometimes. I'm working my ass off on what I know is the correct route for us to take.. but no one else knows why it's the correct route, and.. I can't expect them to. I understand that people are frustrated by the delays. I'm doing everything I can, and I try to make posts like this to.. show.. something, since we have so little to show for all our time of late.

So, yeah.. I'm gonna go ahead and just.. do what I have to do, and maybe cut back on posting and reading for awhile.

Nah Incarnate posting is not the problem, dont let foolish people get you down, hell remeber how the guys at bungie caught a flame over making halo for the xbox and not the macintosh. They did it because it would be the right thing for the company. I think thats what your doing now.

I'm just pokin your eye Inc.
I agree that the ships need to look pretty because I like pretty ships.
And the correct answer is that more ppl will join the game but I just like pretty ships.

Having the attributes of good graphics, a friendly UI and quality gameplay are most welcome in my book. I have been gaming for long enough to have a nuanced appreciation for all three, especially when they are well-integrated. I hope that Guild takes VO to that point in the near future.

What I did not effectively communicate in the previous post is that there is a perception in the community that for new features there is a cycle of release, figure out what is broken, re-release, then nothing... and then onto the next feature. This has happened with cap ships to a lesser extent (due to their dependency on UI functionality to be released a future date) and to the advanced Hive AI/in-game presence to a greater extent.

When I bring up the topic of focus, I am writing in the context of seeing, from a user perspective, features half-way released and then dropped for four or more months with the occassional "it's coming" news release. And while I know that in development work there can be many interdependencies, releasing a bunch of half-complete features to a paying community can last for a limited period of time before the newness wears off and the holes in the product become glaringly apparent.

As far as refreshing the look and feel of the existing ships on the side, that is going to take more work that what was presented in the image referenced above. The bar that Luis Zardo has set with the recently released models (TPG Raptor, etc.) is far beyond the level that any minor tweaking to the existing birds can reach. Mr. Zardo should be given a crack at re-doing some of the original models, frankly.

I am all for Guild putting its best foot forward when the marketing starts, but let's at least get some more complete features released out to the existing user community for serious, real-world testing.

As you say, the demands of interdependencies sometimes place requirements on our release schedule that are not desirable, and can even be difficult to forsee. I won't go into that further, as I've extensively explained our current source-tree / client-release predicament in other threads.

As for your opinion about the art assets, well, I don't disagree with you. Luis's stuff is clearly to a higher standard than our very-dated ships from the late 90s. The topic of replacing them is one that I've brought up on here several times (starting with the replacing of the EC-88, etc). However, it is infeasable to replace all of our existing ships with drop-in versions over the next 6 months.

Since I am left with using our existing assets, at least for a little while, I find it worthwhile to improve them a bit here and there if I can. I think the redone versions actually don't look that bad.. certainly nowhere up to par with the new ships, but they don't "stick out" nearly as much, and that's the point.

Lastly, there seems to be a great lack of understanding of the time requirements for a given art asset. Luis is a great artist, and he's producing some fantastic work. But, he's very new to 3D Studio Max (he models in another program), and he is still adjusting to making meshes for our particular game engine, as well as the requirements of normal, specularity and illumination mapping, etc. Most of the interactions between him and me, since he's started doing work for us, have been a kind of "training" in the process of building assets for our game.

It takes me several days (or longer) to "fix" a ship he sends me, and clean it up for use in the game. And that's not counting the creation of collision meshes, LOD meshes, game object positioning and other things required to make it actually usable in-game. All things he will eventually know how to do, not yet.

I made these originally for a discussion with Luis about normal mapping and the benefits of smoothing groups..

His ship, as sent to me:

http://www.incarnate.net/shot1.jpg

His ship, after I spend a few hours on it:

http://www.incarnate.net/shot2.jpg

(paste into one browser and flip back/forward to make the differences more obvious).

..and those are relatively minor changes (compared to other things I regularly have to do), but changes that would make a major difference in the way the ship looks in-game. So, yes, between 10-20 hours to clean up/redo a ship and make it fit for game-rendering, maybe twice that to put it in functionally the game.

It takes me a whopping hour to take one of our existing ships and just spruce it up a little, start to finish. No, it isn't on the same level as the stuff he's making.. and once he gets used to working with our game engine and shaders, I'm sure it'll be a much easier process. But, right now and as always, I'm making the best use of the art assets and time and other resources I have available.. while also trying to work towards a future with generally improved assets.

Ultimately, however, this discussion seems to boil down to a lack of confidence in me.. or us (Guild) as a whole, and the wisdom of my decisions. And I'm sorry to hear that. No amount of explanation of this sort is going to restore that confidence, so.. like I said before, I guess I'll just focus on getting stuff done, and hopefully the results will speak for themselves in the long run.

It's really easy to second-guess somebody, based on limited available information. It's easy to be a "back seat game-developer" in this process. I do understand that people are frustrated with the lack of perceived progress, and that this discussion is a symptom of that fact. But, there isn't anything I can do about it other than what I'm already doing, and I'm quite confident in the choices I've made. So, I guess we'll all have to wait and see if my decisions bear fruit. Hopefully people will wait and see a little longer, frustrating as that may be. We are not Blizzard, after all, we are four guys in a room, and we're doing our best. And believe it or not, for the most part.. we're a pretty smart bunch and actually know what we're doing. Hopefully at some point people will believe that again.

It is very important that you don't generalize everyone. If I was so disappointed, I would not have come back at all. In fact, I never meant to leave.

Some may not appreciate the work involved in getting this all together, or the importance of the "Wow!" factor when it comes to presentation. Others do. I'm not saying to make it "us" and "them", but some people would rank thier priorities different if they were the developers. There is nothing wrong with that, but you are doing fine as you are. Keep doing it and ignore anyone who can't give a logical reason why aspect b is more important than aspect a.

One thing ship-related I would deem important to have at "Vendetta 2.0" launch is a true cockpit perspective. That is, seeing some kind of glassy effect and a few strips of metal. Only something that gives an immersive/claustraphobic feel to the player, as if they were in a real cockpit looking at a projected HUD.

Yes, I have seen the not-as-cute-as-you-think tape-on-the-monitor picture a thosand times, but the simple fact remains that it's an often requested feature and alot of would-be players will be turned off by the lacking thereof. It's one of those cosmetic "Wow" factor effects that augments the nice looking ship. This feature should, however, have a turn-off switch for our vets and die hards who can't have thier screen cluttered with such nonsense.

i actually like it without that wow factor mecha. I really never got into that type of look.

The graphical tweaks are nice.

I have to admit, though, when I first started playing this game a few months back, I didn't look at the ships and think "Hmm, they look a bit low quality/old fashioned" etc. My initial thoughts were that the bus looked crap, but it's meant to, and that the Wraith looked a bit toy-like, but that was it. I had no problem with anything else, so first impressions of the ships can't be that bad.

And as for the cockpit, if people want it, fine, but it's the first thing I switch off (if I can) when I play games like this - you need every bit of visibility you can get in combat.

While graphics have never been a major factor for me (not even in graphic-intensive games, such as this), I must say that after trying EVE Online (and having been bitterly disappointed with everything but the graphics), what I'd most like to see touched up in VO is not the ships, but the stations, and, to some lesser extent, the environmental graphics.

While I assume the bulky, box-style graphics of the stations is actually a in-game part of space-station design in 4432, it does lend an old, second-hand feeling to the surroundings and environment (which might, perhaps, be the purpose of their design?). And while ships just swoop by in the occasional furball, stations is something I interact with daily, and often slowly enough to actually study them.

And I think of the beautiful constructs in Homeworld 2, and the gargantuan sky-bases in EVE, and think that it would indeed be a wonderful thing to dock with something like that, instead of something that looks like someone had gone into the shantytowns back home in the Cape and (and excuse the tasteless imagery) bought (or stolen, as is often the case here) a number of shacks, stringed them together, strapped a generator and interstellar flight engine to the back, and sent them into space. Don't get me wrong: they are cool, and seem very suitable for deep space and emergency construction, but they can never impress me the way space stations in EVE can.

The same goes for the backgrounds and environment. While they, just like the stations, are detailed, occasionally beautiful, and absolutely enough for me to feel immersed in the game, I still unconsciously compare them to the solar flares and bright skies in Homeworld, and the starlit vistas in EVE.

So, if any time should be spent on improving the graphics, personally I'd prefer if that time was spent on station design and environment. And while I really do hope that some of the old. ill-matched collections of tubes, rotating wheels, boxes and docking bays remain, especially in deep space, it would be nice if the capital systems could sport some really impressive, enormous, and above all, differently designed constructs. And also (though I must admit I don't remember enough of high-school astrophysics to know if this is realistic or not), it would be wonderful to sometimes, at least when close to the system center, do battle against backdrops similar to Homeworld, with bright, sun-lit skies, dust clouds thick enough to hide in, and multicoloured nebulaes.

No replacing the ships!

well, as long as you keep a hog.

hog, hornet, centurion and vulture are neat looking and deserve visual saving, centaur, wraith and atlas are kinda....heh...jetsons the movie-esque

the bus actually is a pretty good starting off ship, it looks just right for a free ship.

As far as eventually replacing the old ships... I would say that would be fine... it's just that... some of those ships have great character that should be preserved in the new version.

I also disagree with spence when he says that the taur is just "bleh." I also disagree than the Hornet is cool looking... IT'S A GIANT TRIANGLE!!! A cool triangle... but a triangle nonetheless.

I really would like to keep the ec class of ships just for nostalgia's sake...

I think we should keep all ships. It adds variety. But I'm all-go for enhancing the texture of some of them (the Vult needing it badly).

I like the EC. I routinely use one when I just need to change to a nearby station.

The existing ships should absolutely be replaced (over time, of course). I really like the gameplay here, but I very nearly did not subscribe because of the cruddy ship models. If it's not a big strain on downloads or whatever then who cares if the old ones are kept, but this is a pretty big deal.

I don't want to make comparisons with WoW, so let's pick...er...Neverwinter Nights, because that's an older game I still play a lot of. Let's say in NWN you could only play one of 5 different character types and the models for them were blocky and derivative. I probably wouldn't want to play it very much. Intellectually I know it has nothing to do with the gameplay, but I still want to have a character that looks like something I want to play.

I still play Nethack a lot (actually some Larn port for the Palm) and I still have a great time playing that game, and I still dig MUDs as well. This illustrates my point. When you're presenting models in a way that suggests the player is taking on that identity, you need to either be totally abstract like a MUD or a Nethack, or you need to have some level of visual cool factor. It doesn't need to be photorealistic, but come on, I want to fly a ship that makes me feel like I'm in the future.

Now, all that said, I accept that the Guild team is prioritizing their time appropriately, and recognize all the issues, and I am content to wait for their plans to come to fruition.

Because the source tree has diverged from what we've currently got, we can't really do anything except wait. Things will improve, and rapidly, once they get the UI nailed down, and that's something I'm looking forward to.

Just keep pluggin' away at the game, I'll still be here when it's released.

:)

Hang in there John, not all subscribers feel as was voiced earlier. I guess maybe I am simply more patient - but I also understand the development cycle (been doing it for years). Your frustration is clearly evident, and that is pretty neat in itself - shows your concern for our interaction. It will be there, no worries.

I also think you should not read in a "lack of confidence" from that post - just a "gimme, gimme" from a back-seater (you already nailed that yourself).

You, Andy, Ray, and Michael (and now Luis) are doing an awesome job. I appreciate the time and effort you all put into the game, and the openness with which you interract with us.

Hummm, maybe it's about time for another pizza party... :)