Elite Dangerous
-
If you think Braben codes in “machine code” (whatever the hell that means), you’re deluded. He’s very likely using a prebuilt engine in a standard language like C or C++. Sure, he may be a better programmer than Roberts (though I personally wouldn’t be able to say that, considering Roberts also built a lot of games back in the day), but at this stage NEITHER has much input on the game’s code, they’re designers.
Regardless of all the ridiculous claims I’m seeing here, I’ll be curious to see what happens. I just hope people don’t turn this into another turf war over what’s the “best” space sim, because obviously the reaction to seeing more than one space sim released every five years should be to rip each other apart because we have diversity now.
-
I’m deluded am i? Assembly language (look it up) is what Elite was written in, maybe i didn’t use the correct term, such is life. It’s DB’s speciality. While i don’t doubt the modern version of Elite will be written in C++ or similar, i’ll guarantee his knowledge of programming is superior to that of Chris Roberts. I also firmly believe ED will be made on time which i doubt SC will be. Chris is always late, think he was born late. I just hope both products live up to what we all hope they will be.
-
Why does game design have something to do with programming skills?
Besides, all of us who do hooking have assembly knowledge, but that has nothing to do with programming skills in higher programming languages.
I also doubt that much of those are required if you use a commercial engine like they do for SC. Most likely you are getting support from the company anyway.
-
Basically what Schmack said. There’s little logical correlation between low level programming skills and high level programming skills, and even fewer between programming at all and game design.
You can be an awesome leet coder, but a fairly terrible game designer. Case in point: one of the best programmers in the entire industry, John Carmack. He’s so good he’d run in circles around Braben a few dozen times with both hands tied behind his back while under the influence of a full bottle of vodka, yet he can’t seem to design a game worth the engine that’s running under it.
But hey, I’m sure Roberts doesn’t give two shits about the irrational dislike some people seem to have for him. I personally think you should criticize his methods, his concepts or his arguments, not his person. That’s useless.
-
w0dk4 wrote:
Why are you arguing ED vs SC? Who cares?I am looking forward to playing both of them!
We’re all looking forward to playing both of them, but we haven’t had any fun around here since Nova got banned again, so quit stalling, man up, grab some mud and start throwing you damn pacifist!
-
I think nether of the 2 games will be made in time.
Aaaanyways…As per usual this thread is getting away from it’s original purpose, so let us take aside the ED/SC comparison and focus on Elite: Dangerous here only.
So, since we all love starships talk about them for example…
-
Frontier Developments, the game company founded by industry veteran David Braben, has announced an initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange’s AIM market valuing the company at almost £40 million.
Read on. Frontier developments floats
It’s interesting to see this development so soon after the news of double fine adventures realisation that the $3.3million they raised (after only asking for $400k) on kickstarter wasn’t going to be even half of what they need to finish the project.
I suspect most of us have quietly wondered just how these games were going to be big with such little funding available to them, especially star citizen which is claiming to be a certain AAA with only $20million as their estimated final funding goal. If elite is tearing through funds so fast, you have to wonder how SC is doing, or rather, if they can actually produce a game which is AAA with such little funding.
Let’s hope this mini revolution in the pc gaming scene that kickstarter seems to have brought about doesn’t fizzle out through a string of flops and failures.
-
The difference is that DFA/Broken Age is growing fairly close to a AAA on a 3.3M budget, whereas SC’s 14M budget (as of now) is much closer to the average AAA title’s budget.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/35932496
“A recent study by entertainment analyst group M2 Research pegged the average cost of developing a game for this generation of consoles at between $18 million and $28 million.”Keep in mind that SC’s also using CryEngine 3 instead of building their own (though I don’t doubt they’re grafting a lot of stuff to it, it wasn’t really designed for space). That’s going to remove a big part of the cost that many AAA games have as in-house engines are very expensive.
-
Seems to be a pretty accurate assessment of the situation, this altered gamer article has a good breakdown of what percentage of the overall budget is attributed to each area of production, and like you say there are ways which they can reduce the overall spend due to the way those costs are incurred.
Maybe things are shaping up pretty well then, they continue to rake in the funding at a hell of a rate in any case.
