ORIGINAL: wargameplayer
Look I will stand by the comment I made around a year ago on this thread.
It''s pretty obvious from even a cursory monitoring of the progress reports that there is a mistmatch between the project complexity and the ability of the programmer.
Why?
1) Constant inability to gauge the time required to complete milestones
2) too much time interacting with users here, not enough time spent on development of the game
3) constant missing of deadlines set for yourself BY YOURSELF.
4) inability to understand the need for help finsihing the project and/or an inabilty to work with others.
5) a seeming fear of letting others into the project to help code and develop the game. When I suggested a year ago he bring on talent to help code the game it was classic "uhm more people would just make this go slower". "the code is too complex to be done by more than one person" I've managed enough programmers to see this type of response and know what it means. That kind of resposne set off about 5 different red flags which have all proven to be correct.
People who offer to pre order the game are kidding themselves. A big change is needed to get a half decent product here. If things don't change dramatically either the product that comes out will be horrible or it will plainly never come out.
Sorry if this comment is too much truth for some of the glad handers here that are kidding themselves. But I said this stuff a year ago and it's turned out to delay after delay when the deadlines are selected by the programmer himself.
If you guys really care about the project you will urge Matrix to either get more help to get this thing done, or get the project assigned the resources it needs to be completed. Glad handing and only accentuating the positive is getting this game nowhere.
Impugning my ability is rather rough.
It is certainly true I haven't appreciated the difficulties and time involved in taking a program containing 100,000 lines of undocumented code, designed for a single player on a single computer, and converting it so it can run on multiple computers used by multiple players. When I first looked at the performance of the code (June 2005) it looked ok, though there are thousands of details in the WIF rules that have to be coded correctly and there was no way I could evaluate that without looking at the code in detail - which I hadn't done.
As for hiring more people, help is hard to come by. I can point to several delays being related directly to 'subcontracting' a portion of the work to others and having those portions not arrive in a timely manner (over a year late). Yes, it would be nice to put together a team of 6 professional programmers and develop the product the same way I would a database system for order entry, acccounting, inventroy control, manufacturing machine diagnostics, an expert system for helicopter maintenance, a simulation of human physiology responding to disease and medical treatment, or any of the other dozens of projects I have worked on and/or managed in my programming career. Somehow I do not think the budget allows for this. Projected total product sales just do not support that heavy an expenditure, especially since it would all have to be up-front money, before the revenue stream appears.
As for working with others, the two games I have developed previously were done with another programmer and a 60-40 split of the work. But we started with a blank sheet of paper, which made division of labor easy. It is extremely difficult to neatly partition MWIF, no matter how hard I try. What I have been able to do is split it by mode of play, but even that requires a common foundation of code. Oh, and I have managed up to 16 programmers working simultaneously on 5 different projects.
So, yes, let's go hire 4 or 5 more guys, and then spend 2-3 months getting them up to speed on the existing code base of 260,000 lines of code. And then finish off the project in another 2-3 months. Well, maybe, if those 4 or 5 guys turn out to be good at their jobs and work well with each other. I'm not sure who is paying their salaries for those 6 months.
You seem to view MWIF in the same context as a large commercial programming project, featuring cubicles, meeting rooms, state-of-the-art computer equipment, advanced telecommunications, 3 weeks of vacation, and holidays & weekends off. It's a real nice picture and a nice work environment that I have enjoyed for most of my career, but Matrix Games can't quite afford that.
And let me disabuse you of the idea that I 'fear' working with others. Quite the contrary. Having someone to write A, B, and C would be great. But the time required for them to get up to speed and the amount of time I would have to spend answering their questions would not be insignificant. To start with, they would have to be very skilled programmers and be working on this full time. I just haven't been able to find a lot of people who meet those qualifications who are willing to work unpaid for a year or more.
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I do take major exception to your criticism of the time I spend communicating to forum members. It has resulted in a vast improvement in the design of the final product. By using feedback on even seemingly trivial decisions (e.g., color choices) the product is an order of magnitude superior to what I would have achieved on my own.
I strongly recommend it to any programming project you are involved with. Let the final users see what you are doing and comment on the thousands of decisions that are made by the programmer(s) - before the code is written. Otherwise you will see a lot of unhappy faces on your users when your product is delivered and you will have to go back to your programmers to have them redesign sections of the program from scratch, or apply unwieldly patches to accommodate all the things they hadn't taken into consideration.
Yeah, I use a lot of words - blah, blah, blah. But if you are a programmer, you should try it. If you can't articulate your ideas in written words, it is pretty much hopeless to try to program them. At times it seems that I learn as much by writing as I do by reading. For instance, your 5 points are actually 3 points.
