I’d love to apply for testing. Any idea how I’d go about asking to be allowed such?
Having had gaming for a hobby for 20+ years and having literally played over a thousand games, I feel confident in being able to provide valuable feedback to the devs.
Depends if the devs think they need any more playtesters. Early on Crate would ask individuals if they were interested in becoming a playtester, but the last couple of times they’ve put a thread on the forum asking people to apply. Whether they’ll do anything like that for FF remains to be seen.
We need more info on FF. Acreal’s been dropping titbits of info on the discord, but we need MOAR! You’ve been waxing lyrical about the new RTS so how about a bit more on FF now please?
And heres your answer Medea…
Zantai killed all the settlers and they have to do more recruiting so there’s toons availible for us to kill off when they ship
Uhh yeah, so about that… really just, you expect everything to take longer than you expect but then it actually takes even longer than that.
Some of it though is we’ve had to totally re-write certain systems because 3rd party solutions we tried to use for stuff like path-finding worked 99.5% of the time but then it turned out, that 0.5% where it failed was unfixable and we needed to find another option.
Then there’s just dumb stuff like, despite multiple adjustments, the stupid deer respawn / behavior system never quite works as expected cuz reasons…
Were the creators of those middlewares not interested / able to fix their stuff? Have you considered to branch out and sell not-buggy middleware yourself?
Yeah, they’re either not interested or unable because, in this case, we’re also using Unity and they can’t change some of the fundamental ways Unity works unless they buy the source, which is probably not financially feasible for them. We actually switched to the Unity pathing after they improved it a lot in an update… but it still had it’s own issues and we had to write some work-arounds.
The thing is, these pathing solutions probably work fine for most games and it is probably very low priority for the creators to address an issue affecting only a very small subset of games. We’re doing all sorts of stuff that is probably outside of what’s in most games - randomly generated maps, lots of units moving at once, buildings that change the nav mesh over time, having to find long pathing solutions around walls or bodies of water…
Creating middleware sounds like an absolute nightmare. We’d need to have a dedicated engineering team working with various companies to resolve all the unique problems they experience because of whatever they’re doing in their game. The potential profit off middleware is probably miniscule compared to what we can make off a hit game. God bless the people who do it lol…
I see I did not think this through to the end. I just imagined you created an equally powerful, but flawless solution, by which you could take the middleware market by storm… Of course you have just focussed on those features you actually need.
This is obviously to late to change and probably a redundant question but have you tried to look into other engines before for how they work for an rts?