Not playing til the game is completed

[froggyluv]

What I want to know where is notification/alert process for when the game is complete enough to be playable.

Look to the Sky. When the Earth slams into the Sun twill be the 1st sign

 

[Ettenrocal]

Adding more people to a project doesn't make it faster or better, especially in game development. After some point, adding more people will even slow it down.

I imagine Armagan using this book you linked as the excuse for Bannerlord development being so slow Let's hope they will not add too much dev in the late development of Bannerlord.

 

[babelfisch]

I imagine Armagan using this book you linked as the excuse for Bannerlord development being so slow Let's hope they will not add too much dev in the late development of Bannerlord.

No chance, haven't seen Armagan on the forums since quite some time.

By the way, currently I don't even find development too slow (1.56/1.57). If you look at the past ten months it does seem slow indeed but progress over the last weeks was fine in my opinion. Let's hope this trend continues.

 

[babelfisch]

Makes sense but i doubt that speaks to the entirety of every games situation. For instance then there must be another law in which a one man team brings on more developers to help him an that in turn speeds up production as well -is that scenario taken into consideration as well? Im guessing how fine tuned and streamlined each dept of the game effects how well it plays with all the other subsystems and if these are smooth transitions than more man power would only help.

For instance take Arma 3 (my usual example as i followed its design since OFP inception) - they had terrible communication between world/level developers and the AI team -so if you noticed, there are many, many dead zones, that being places the AI simply cant go nor function (including streets roads buildings etc) because that team had little to no communication with the AI team *(who themselves are clueless to many of the AI's erhm nuances). SO in this case - Brooks Law would and did become seen in full effect -they kept adding designers, and the problem got worse and worse until the public outcry finally reached the DEVs and they changed the method of operation.

Now take something like the Prophecy of Pendor mod (ok not a game but just for example) - we needed alot of custom scenes and backstories for all the characters and some other things -since none of this conflicted with hardcoded game mechanics -the more people we had on teams the faster and better production we had at release. Again i know its not a game in its own right -but the point being - as long as things like pathfinding issues etc are fully worked out -they could hire a bazillion scene editors and a few more Q/A testers and we could all have alot more scenes to play in without Brooks Law coming into effect.

Good points, just two things I would add:
Regarding QA, to me it seems like finding issues isn't the problem here. Most bugs are spotted quite fast, it's just that fixing them takes time. So I am not sure if more QA would help much, especially if we consider that they have a few hundred thousands of unpaid beta testers... ;

Regarding scene editors, yes, putting more people on it would probably work. But they still need to learn the tools, read the design documents, get briefed, tested, etc. So it would take some time until we really notice a difference. In the meantime scene variety isn't one of the biggest problems of the game. I want to see more and better mechanics. EA will probably last 6 more months at least and it's entirely possible they can add lots of variety with current team size while the rest of the game gets finished.

 

[Eärendil Ardamírë]

Getting really tired of finding great mods that people have clearly worked hard at and as soon as a new patch comes out half of the ones I use no longer work. I am done having to restart because my game is now screwed up. I give a lot of thanks to the people who created the great mods that made the game much more fun but until Taleworlds gets their act together I am going to sit the game out. They promised a year and they have 2.5 months left. Yeah will see.

Playing a game in EA and complaining about patches breaking mods is just pathetic. It's not possible to patch a game without breaking at least a couple of mods since the developers cannot watch out for every single mod and what they alter and they also shouldn't restrict their work on doing so. Now, don't get me wrong, I am not a huge supporter of Bannerlord, I have never played it yet. That's more due to the fact that I tend to play old games which are mostly already bug fixed and not changing a lot anymore, like Warband, I actually posses no game younger than four years.

However, players and modders of old Warband should already know that such things happen and will still happen over the course of the next years. It was exactly the same thing at Warband, a bunch of updates made it impossible to play specific mods and modders needed to update their work. So I find it personally always funny when I see modders complaining and whining about a patch breaking their mod, game history repeating itself. At the same time pathetic since it's simply what has to be expected when modding an EA game. And for mod players, bad luck for you, but you are at the end of the current digital food chain here (developers -> players of the game -> modders of the game -> players of mods).

On another note, I wonder how many people are aware that Warband was also an unfinished mess upon release, and needed additional updates after release (funded by early sales) to make it into the game we know today...

^ This

TW needs the people who provide good and meaningful feedback. It's quite obvious who they are, mexxico even asks them about their opinion before he implements changes.
What they don't need are people who throw a tantrum because their favourite mods no longer work after an update. They don't understand the concept of early access and nobody should take them seriously because their feedback is worthless.

There is nothing wrong with waiting until the game is released, but that can only happen if TW keeps updating the game...

^ And this

I really wouldn't go crazy modding the game at this point. Every patch is just going to break the mods, and unless the modder stays active - you're boned. It's like this for all games. I mean most of the people playing/modding Skyrim are still using the old 32-bit version I believe.

Patches always break mods, sometimes it's a very simple fix, sometimes not. Modding really should be reserved for a game that's well past the official release - when you're looking to make the "vanilla" game more interesting.

Every single person who is considering getting into modding now - refering to the coders here - has to be clear about the fact that it is very challenging at the moment and can become quite tedious. At the same time you can learn a lot, the learning curve is step, and everything you learn now can still be applied at later stages of the game. So I wouldn't really reserve modding for a game which is past official release. Modding a game at that moment is only simplier, you have a more stable game and in most cases a better documentation and more tutorials to rely on.

Makes sense but i doubt that speaks to the entirety of every games situation. For instance then there must be another law in which a one man team brings on more developers to help him an that in turn speeds up production as well -is that scenario taken into consideration as well? Im guessing how fine tuned and streamlined each dept of the game effects how well it plays with all the other subsystems and if these are smooth transitions than more man power would only help.

For instance take Arma 3 (my usual example as i followed its design since OFP inception) - they had terrible communication between world/level developers and the AI team -so if you noticed, there are many, many dead zones, that being places the AI simply cant go nor function (including streets roads buildings etc) because that team had little to no communication with the AI team *(who themselves are clueless to many of the AI's erhm nuances). SO in this case - Brooks Law would and did become seen in full effect -they kept adding designers, and the problem got worse and worse until the public outcry finally reached the DEVs and they changed the method of operation.

Now take something like the Prophecy of Pendor mod (ok not a game but just for example) - we needed alot of custom scenes and backstories for all the characters and some other things -since none of this conflicted with hardcoded game mechanics -the more people we had on teams the faster and better production we had at release. Again i know its not a game in its own right -but the point being - as long as things like pathfinding issues etc are fully worked out -they could hire a bazillion scene editors and a few more Q/A testers and we could all have alot more scenes to play in without Brooks Law coming into effect.

That law pretty much exists, in economic terms you would speak about marginal profit here. You can imagine it basically like an reverse hyperboly. At the beginning each additional worker adds a lot to your progress but with the growing amount of them it will be less and less. You reach at some point a maximum after which additional workforce is decreasing process since there are sideeffects which influence it negatively (you need more time for coordination and management, departments at development might rely on interdepending parts of the code structure, etc).

The ones for which this is not really counting are the departments which are pretty much independent of the code structure. Those are for example the ones which you mention with the Prophecy of Pendor mod (ignoring the fact that Mod development is a bit easier that Game development, it is still pretty similar): Neither backstories for the characters nor the scene creating are depending a lot on the development of the rest of the module (given that one does not suddenly **** up the module_scene_props.py file ), so more people here affect the production definitely in a positive way. At game developing these are the most times the 2D- and 3D-art departments. Not sure how scening and coding is connected nowadays at Bannerlord but I think you are correct there too.

What I recommend for new modders/mod teams to read are the following two articles. I find them quite informative and well written, one can learn a bit there:
https://www.moddb.com/tutorials/the-modular-release-model
https://www.moddb.com/tutorials/post-mortem

 

[HugoTheFrenchMan]

Every single person who is considering getting into modding now - refering to the coders here - has to be clear about the fact that it is very challenging at the moment and can become quite tedious. At the same time you can learn a lot, the learning curve is step, and everything you learn now can still be applied at later stages of the game. So I wouldn't really reserve modding for a game which is past official release. Modding a game at that moment is only simplier, you have a more stable game and in most cases a better documentation and more tutorials to rely on.

Yep this all mods I work on currently don't have any code due to updates breaking it potentially so basically until a stable enough version is out doing coding is somewhat useless unless you want to stick to an unstable update

 

[Limbojack]

Well, you don't have to update your game so you can still enjoy your mods.

 

[Foohy]

No worries mate, you get used to reinstalling the game every couple of months and uninstalling after another 10 hours of gameplay in which you realize how much of a mess Native still is even after this much EA time.