ORIGINAL: **budd**
your dedication and effort to make your product the best it can be is to be applauded. I think when CO2 is in a playable state to your liking you should think about a alpha release to sell to those willing to invest money and time in the product, its would seem that if that was done some of this post release work would be cut down and there seems to be plenty of players with very helpful feedback. I don't say this lightly and it is a difficult idea to get behind in general but your proven track record of support and dedication to your product is unmatched. This is from someone who was critical of the battle academy pre-release, so i'm feeling a little hypocritical at the moment. I'm just a CO fanboy and i want to see where this is going. Thanks again.
Note: this is my personal opinion, Dave's may differ. I think I'll be including this line to every next post I make here from now on.
I am personally not too keen on early access programs, in general, and much less in the context of this project. If we look at what we've been doing, most of the changes we have made can fall within these categories:
[*] Fixing engine or application bugs: these include addressing crashes, infinite loops, unreasonably inefficient code, errors in computations - preventing some outcomes of actions done by the player or the AI to happen - or antics like the one with folder settings affecting the behaviour of ScenMaker.
[*] Refining the models of processes in the engine (under the hood new features): these include increasing fidelity of both how the AI perceives the situation, verifying that anti-armour and anti-personnel fires are correctly and historically modeled (note I say "modelled" not implemented), tracking separatedly AWOL and POW, and generally increasing realism and reactivity.
[*] Apparent new features: like the Supply lines visualization, increasing the gamut of SOP's the player can select (i.e. the Defend In-Situ after Attack thing), making the MapMaker, ScenMaker and EstabEditor more functional, etc.
[*] Introducing new models in the engine: like the massive overhaul Dave did on how supply distribution AI reacts to battlefield conditions.
The first ones are the only absolute and total priorities to be addressed ASAP, and the others are mostly dependent on the good will of the developing team (and how much they care about their project).
Given our commitment to ensure that players can upgrade their purchased or personally developed content - estabs, maps, scenarios - as we keep iterating on the engine - starting with version 4 of the engine, which is the one we refer to as "CO1" - I wonder what's the point of an "early access" program at all. There's content there to be played for ages, I reckon.
And I think that we should cater better for content development, maybe by creating an open - but structured - system of incentives and rewards that allows us to "outsource" most of the content development to the community. This might cause content and engine to go slightly out of sync - as is perhaps the case with the Eastern Front scenarios made by Chris (CaptHillrat) who has indeed overtaken the engine in term of features.
Does this - for instance that the engine cannot simulate in a natural way certain aspects of the historical event portrayed in an scenario - detract from the value of such content? I reckon it's not the case: the engine, as it is, enables Chris' scenarios to be much better renditions of the Eastern Front - and other campaigns - than anything I have ever played (V4V, WAW, TOAW at the finer time and space granularity, Panzer Campaigns, you name it). That's the benchmark we have to compare our work with, not the perfect pie in the sky we haven't yet built a ladder high enough to reach (and whose taste and shape can be different from what we imagine).
Having this content developing community in place, would motivate development both in a material and intellectual way. This would involve Panther moving towards the same model Paradox uses with their games (i.e. EU 1, EU 2, EU 3 and EU 4 are basically all the same game, based on related technological foundations) and patching policy. With the proviso of empowering the "modding" community to a degree which I reckon nobody has done so far. This totally sounds like bullsh*t buzzwords to me, but we need to work much harder in the "community engagement" department. We're taking steps to do so - it's just slow because it's not like we're sitting on top of a pile of resources precisely.
There's an alternative, of course. Which is to admit that Command Ops is just not a sustainable project, which has succeeded technologically but failed economically. And here I'm talking about the revenue it's generating being enough to cover a decent salary for Dave (I'm not alone in doing what I do for Command Ops for free, backing this project "in specie") we just need to accept it and move to other endeavors. A bit like Charles Chaplin in
Limelight, perhaps it's time to wake up and realize we don't have a public big enough to justify the effort.
What do you reckon guys? Is it
Limelight or (controversial) new development and business models?
