I've heard a few people say it, and I myself think that 1.3 is just a revved up 1.2.3... It's not nearly as awesome as the videos/screenshots we've been seeing for the past 2 1/2 years. It's somewhat... disappointing...
I know it's a beta still but damn, after 2 1/2 years, this is it? A team of like 30 people, developing a mod for 2 1/2 years, and this is it? And really, not even everything is new. All the new version has is a few new characters, a buddy system, SSJ3, and a bunch of new eye-candy. Oh, and swooping is rendered completely useless now. Now we must constantly spam our directional keys in order to fight. That's really all I've seen that's different from 1.2.3... The rest is the same...
There is no God, we are all alone...
Edit: This isn't intended as a rant. I'm still grateful to the dev team for developing the mod. I'm merely expressing my views and opinions.
You have a good point, and it's a good point indeed. I'm actually quite surprised we didn't receive more post than this saying how incomplete 1.3 is; I expected to reply to a lot more "This game sucks ass!!?!?! wtf, omfg, bbq!!!" threads, rather than actual suggestion and bug submission threads (not saying this thread is 'that' type of thread, since it's not).
Lets start from the top... We don't have a team of 30 people; the core of the ESF team is actually extremely small. Lets just look at the animations for a second. Across the 30 something models we have in ESF now, the
majority of them need custom animations. Take a second and download Half-Life Model Viewer (if you don't already have it) and open up the frieza4.mdl model for example. Just go to ref_powerup_charge for example. Note how detailed it is; even the mouth moves (if you go through all of the animations, you'll notice a lot of small details; the mouth moving in and out, sometimes chest expanding, etc etc...). Go to the same animation goku. Different? yes. Go to the SAME animation on SSJ goku. Different? Go to the -same- animation on SSJ2 goku, once again different.. And for kicks, check it out on SSJ3 goku. In this case, we have, and for the most part, always had one animator which is our beloved Darktooth. This is just reflecting that we don't have this 'huge' team to beast away our work; it's normally the work of an individual or two.
Going to the team size aspect...
Programmers:
HarSens - General Programmer
Pcjoe - General Programmer (or seems like fx ***** programmer, haha)
Ian - Buddy Programmer (Not entirely sure if he's on the team still; he's had a lot of RL work issues to keep up with, and I don't think he still has the time to work with us)
(DragonDude defected over to the minions after only being on the team for a few months, and did like 3 things for us regardless...)
Character Modelers:
GodGundam
Mastasurf
Enix
Skinners:
Mastasurf
Kama
Davidskiwan
Animators:
Darktooth
Mappers:
IM KOnG KoNg
Cold Steel
DJ Ready
Zero
Sound:
Freedom
and others (don't be offended if I left you out team -_-)... I think in the ways of models, skins, maps, etc, we have quite a bit of material. Nearly all of the characters are complete, and a lot of the animations are complete as well. So, that leaves the code front...
First, I'm going to be honest with you; the speed at which the code has been going at
was not ideal for the past couple years. On my part, due to the fact that I entered college and would much rather prefer socializing with friends over sitting in my room and programming is quite a kicker. I'm only 19 years old and do like spending my time doing other things ^_^; Also since I'm on co-op right now programming full time, coming home to
more programming is quite a challenge as well.
Even so, they're just excuses, and I really can't give you a hard set reason why the progress is so lacking. A lot of stuff has been implemented, but for the most part, it's smaller things you won't find on your first or second play through.
As SA_Gohan says...
SA_Gohan said:
...but without advanced melee and the FX system I'm not really to surprised. IMO those were going to be the main things to set it apart from 1.2. and since their not done its not really fair to judge its gameplay features.
So, as you probably know, besides the generalized stuff I do, my 'main' projects are the fx script and melee systems. In regards to the fx script system, it's so close, but the GUI isn't done. It's just a lot of freakin work. If I honestly knew it would have taken this much, I completely wouldn't have started it. It's too late to turn back now though, and the core code is literally finished... So, just have to keep on rolling with it. At this point the source for the fx script is spread across 40 someodd files totaling 569KB. To put it into context, the rest of the client code (written by valve and the esf team) totals a little less than 2MB, which spans across more than 150 files... The main point isn't "oh, look how much code I wrote!! weee!!", but rather to show that I have been working extremely hard on it, and it's
almost there. Without an intuitive graphical user interface though, the entire system would be useless since our artists wouldn't be able to use it. As far as I know, our artists don't like editing raw XML to generate scripted events and particle systems
So, Melee system? It hasn't been touched; we've been through at least 20 different melee system write ups and just a few weeks ago we
finally decided on something we're happy with. Ridiculous that it took us that long? Yeah, but what can you do -_- I don't think it's going to be too hard to implement though, so with some luck, you should see some progress with that soon after I finish up the fx script.
So, where does this leave us now.. Yes, open beta... Like I've said before, it's our attempt to interact with the community some more, and actually let you guys impact the direction ESF is going in. Not only that, but I personally hoped it would show you guys that, yeah, progress over the past couple years kind of sucked, but we're back and ****in' serious about getting stuff done. It would be retarded if we decided to do bi-weekly releases and have them nearly identical every time. My personal hope is that you guys make some suggestions on the forums on how something should be handled (for example, in relations to swooping), and in the next inteam go like - wholy ****, they actually implemented the changes I suggested less than 2 weeks ago
. And the same thing with the bug submissions... Hopefully over the next couple months you guys will see that we're serious about wrapping up ESF development, and you'll put the lack of development before hand behind you.
I guess that's it... My apologies for typos/grammar mistakes. I just woke up, so bare with it -_-