2011 Release - Oh look flying pig

[morf]

Originally Posted by Raymac

I guess its possible that SOE will only release 2 games in Jan. 2011 and call it a year, but I'm thinking they will be working really hard to get PS:N released before the end of the year.

It may push into Jan. 2012, but I just have a feeling the game is closer to completion than most of you seem to believe. Call me naive and idealistic, but I'm still hopeful that we will be seeing beta sometime this summer.

I disagree. When smed uttered the words "new engine" what I heard was "back to the drawing board." Whatever they developed in-house, it's not going to support unrealscript, which in my estimation means every line of code has to be re-written.

[basti]

Originally Posted by morf

I disagree. When smed uttered the words "new engine" what I heard was "back to the drawing board." Whatever they developed in-house, it's not going to support unrealscript, which in my estimation means every line of code has to be re-written.

Unrealwhat?

[Raymac]

Originally Posted by morf

I disagree. When smed uttered the words "new engine" what I heard was "back to the drawing board." Whatever they developed in-house, it's not going to support unrealscript, which in my estimation means every line of code has to be re-written.

I don't think it means back to the drawing board. It sounds a little foolish to me to completely throw away years of work (and they have been working on PS:N for a long time now) just to implement a new engine and totally start over at the last minute.

SOE isn't above silliness, but we have to remember that since the cancellation of The Agency, SOE is putting alot of eggs into Planetside's basket. Smed seems to personally want PS:N to succeed, and obviously the company needs PS:N to succeed.

I still have faith that PS:N will be released "later this year" and it will be glorious.

[Mightymouser]

Developing a new 'in house engine'; could mean anything from a total re-write to changing some wrapper code and calling it set. It'd be hard to predict exactly what kind of delays that will actually mean.

I would expect that SOE would try to get this out no later than Q1 2012 though, if for no other reason than to show their parent company they're worth keeping around...

This is truely speculation upon speculations at this point though

[Mightymouser]

Originally Posted by basti

Unrealwhat?

The language used by the Unreal engine (which is what it's speculated PS:N was being written with). If they're doing an entire rewrite of their own engine, they could certainly match it to run whatever calls they wanted; I'm sure they could make it run Unrealscript if they decided they needed to...

[Logit]

Originally Posted by Mightymouser

Developing a new 'in house engine'; could mean anything from a total re-write to changing some wrapper code and calling it set. It'd be hard to predict exactly what kind of delays that will actually mean.

I would expect that SOE would try to get this out no later than Q1 2012 though, if for no other reason than to show their parent company they're worth keeping around...

This is truely speculation upon speculations at this point though

I think the games, and inevitably all of their deaths have proven time and time again that SoE isn't worth keeping around.

SWG and Planetside at the forefront of that list..2 Gold mines that withered away and soon will die completely.

[Raymac]

Originally Posted by Logit

I think the games, and inevitably all of their deaths have proven time and time again that SoE isn't worth keeping around.

SWG and Planetside at the forefront of that list..2 Gold mines that withered away and soon will die completely.

Haters gonna hate.

I know there is alot of resentment towards SOE out there, and I totally understand it. It's not easy to keep your biases in check in a situation like this, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

If you can't get past "PS:N will fail because SOE sucks" then it's pointless even discussing anything with that as the foundation.

As MightyMouser said, this is speculation upon speculation at this point, so it's a little premature to get too worked up. I'm as excited as anyone about this game, so I'd love some more information sooner rather than later, but the sky isn't falling.

[morf]

Originally Posted by Mightymouser

If they're doing an entire rewrite of their own engine, they could certainly match it to run whatever calls they wanted; I'm sure they could make it run Unrealscript if they decided they needed to...

To us grown-ups in the real world this is called plagiarism.

[Nephilimuk]

what was MAG written in? quite sure it was something propriety and it has been confirmed that the netcode is written which is very important.

Not being a fanboi just saying..... in before the rage

[Mightymouser]

Originally Posted by morf

To us grown-ups in the real world this is called plagiarism.

No it's not. Stealing the code is plagiarism; making the APIs compatible is called implementing an interface.

But please, try harder at the condescension; it's always refreshing to be addressed as though I was a 5 year old.

[Logit]

Originally Posted by Raymac

Haters gonna hate.

I know there is alot of resentment towards SOE out there, and I totally understand it. It's not easy to keep your biases in check in a situation like this, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

If you can't get past "PS:N will fail because SOE sucks" then it's pointless even discussing anything with that as the foundation.

As MightyMouser said, this is speculation upon speculation at this point, so it's a little premature to get too worked up. I'm as excited as anyone about this game, so I'd love some more information sooner rather than later, but the sky isn't falling.

I think SOE sucking might as well be fact at this point. What have they done to prove otherwise?

I LOVED SWG, I LOVED Planetside, hell I was even a pretty big fan of EQ2.

Are these games old? Yes. Did they have enough support after release to maintain a healthy, and thus, more lucrative player base? Nope.

I won't be one of those people saying I'm not going to buy the game because SOE has done a terrible job with most of it's products. They have great ideas for games, and when they release they are pretty awesome. But I'll remain skeptical on PSN's upkeep the entire time I play it.

[Raymac]

Originally Posted by Logit

I won't be one of those people saying I'm not going to buy the game because SOE has done a terrible job with most of it's products. They have great ideas for games, and when they release they are pretty awesome. But I'll remain skeptical on PSN's upkeep the entire time I play it.

A healthy dose of skepticism is a very good thing. I'm just saying, lets get a website up before we start worrying about Patch 1.0 for goodness sake.

[The Desert Fox]

We need a list of who is on what side. the lines are blurry!

[morf]

Originally Posted by Mightymouser

No it's not. Stealing the code is plagiarism; making the APIs compatible is called implementing an interface.

But please, try harder at the condescension; it's always refreshing to be addressed as though I was a 5 year old.

I'm sorry my previous post assumed you actually had the first clue wtf you were talking about. If you did, you would know that api and syntax have precisely dick to do with it.

The fact of the matter is that any code SOE wrote would inevitably have extended the base classes that make up the unreal engine. So for example, let's say they wanted to change a player's run speed from the unreal default. The developer would have to create a sub class of the unreal player base class and set the groundspeed attribute to a different value. This is an extremely simplified example but the point is that this subclass means absolutely nothing without the base, which is proprietary unreal code. In practice, there would be hundreds of subclasses, each with dozens of attributes, all of them extending the base classes in the engine. You can't take the unreal base classes with you, or it's plagiarism, and the subclasses mean nothing without them. You can't tell the engine "give me a player with a groundspeed of 100" if it doesn't know what a player, or a groundspeed is.

So in addition to re-writing all of the subclasses that describe each object, they have to rewrite all of the base classes that they inherit. Hopefully a good amount of these already exist in whatever engine they developed.

And I know what you're going to say: "Morf! You're speculating! It might not have been Unreal! -I anticipate your argument and substitute reality:

It really doesn't matter because any way you cut it, you're looking at object-oriented programming. This means everything I just said about the base classes applies, regardless of which 3rd party engine they were using. For all intensive purposes, the base classes ARE the engine. The only speculating I am doing is assuming that "we're moving to an in-house engine" means "we were previously using a 3rd party engine."

P.S. You'll win more arguments when you start talking out of the top half of your anatomy.

[Mightymouser]

The entire point of Object-Orientated design is to allow for the modification or replacement of one module without impacting the code that touches it. That's literally the design's fundamental purpose.

In this case, the module to be replaced would be those 'base classes'; and as long as the replacement classes had the appropriate members available (i.e. The proper API) a child class written for one engine could be directed to another engine with relatively little modifications to the code (or if they are named the same, no modifications to the code, just changes in the included header files).

The code written within the propitiatory engine's classes is no-doubt copyright protected; however you would have a hard time making a case that the function prototypes cannot be reused. Thus a new engine can be written with a complementary API, which the children classes can derive from the same way they did from the original engine. Code that directly touches the base engine can be used with the new one the same way, as long as the function prototypes are the same.