Engine Update IS the worst tha happened to APB

[Resine 144]

To be honest, engine update is what doomed APB, for couple of years now, there are bugs, issues, imbalances of various kinds, thousands of community ideas, propositions, expectations that are not fulfilled because of "team being busy working on the update", while the players pool diminishes each and every day.

Say, you deliver it, the game will feel smoother and I will get few extra FPS, it doesn't look that much better than RTW looked like and the core of game mechanics won't change for years to come, since you will be busy fixing thousands of issues after the patch.

Looking from times perspective, I would rather have current engine that is patched to community carefully filtered demands and expectations, with fluid patches that take care of bugs, issues, complaints and bring balance across the board, and some day switch to new Engine, rather than play this shit that hasn't seen major patch in AGES, while we wait for miraculous engine update for years to come.

[iRawwwN 284]

negative, the worst thing for apb was old G1 (techmech and tiggs etc) deciding to take a quick cash boost and have it go to consoles first :^)

Edited June 20, 2020 by iRawwwN

[iMiss 49]

You realize the fixes you want are fixes that make more sense logistically by doing them after the Upgrade considering the absolute fragile hodgepodge of outdated custom code that this game was built on? yaknow, the whole... measure twice, cut once sort of rule that says you shouldn't be wasteful?

[TheMessiah 430]

25 minutes ago, Resine said:

engine update is what doomed APB

making the game for consoles was the thing not the engine upgrade

Quote

negative, the worst thing for apb was old G1 (techmech and tiggs etc) deciding to take a quick cash boost and have it go to consoles first :^)

exactly

Edited June 20, 2020 by TheMessiah

[TheJellyGoo 343]

7 minutes ago, iMiss said:

You realize the fixes you want are fixes that make more sense logistically by doing them after the Upgrade considering the absolute fragile hodgepodge of outdated custom code that this game was built on? yaknow, the whole... measure twice, cut once sort of rule that says you shouldn't be wasteful?

That's how it is sold in theory. In reality it's not viable to have a game run on zero progression for half a decade because you can't revitalize a corpse.

There was a clear miscalculation, at least I hope so, in the scale of the task which will ultimately lead to more loss than gain.

Would have been far more viable to have an active 5 year plan with regular updates. Could have still decided on the way whether or not an expansion was an option.

[iRawwwN 284]

7 minutes ago, TheJellyGoo said:

That's how it is sold in theory. In reality it's not viable to have a game run on zero progression for half a decade because you can't revitalize a corpse.

There was a clear miscalculation, at least I hope so, in the scale of the task which will ultimately lead to more loss than gain.

Would have been far more viable to have an active 5 year plan with regular updates. Could have still decided on the way whether or not an expansion was an option.

IMO, the game needed these new contacts as soon as LO took over, even if it took a month or two from the engine upgrade.

 

(i mean game needed these contacts yeaaaaaars ago but whatever)

Edited June 20, 2020 by iRawwwN

[vsb 6174]

1 hour ago, Resine said:

Looking from times perspective, I would rather have current engine that is patched to community carefully filtered demands and expectations, with fluid patches that take care of bugs, issues, complaints and bring balance across the board, and some day switch to new Engine, rather than play this shit that hasn't seen major patch in AGES, while we wait for miraculous engine update for years to come.

but a large portion of bugs/issues are related to the current spaghetti code, “new” content will be limited to shoehorning existing mechanics into slightly different roles, and every additional patch lowers game performance just a little bit more

 

if we were to just barge ahead without the engine upgrade i suspect most updates would either be A) extremely narrow in scope like slightly tweaked existing clothing or more and more redundant modifications and reskins, or B) awful half-assed stuff like riot, which still took at least a year of dev time despite being stitched together (very poorly) from existing mechanics 

 

all while the game plays worse and worse, plus as the months go by a majority of players will move on to rtx or better gpus and won’t be able to play the current 32 bit version at all

 

 

Edited June 20, 2020 by 404
edit

[NotZombieBiscuit 3146]

You're going to get downvoted for being right.

 

People won't listen. But hey, at least you'll get to say 'I told you so' after it all.

[MrChan 337]

Even if they'd balanced the game perfectly (good luck getting all players or even a majority to agree on what a state of perfect balance in APB is, btw), it probably wouldn't be much better off for player numbers than it is now without frequent content updates. And major content without doing the EU is not viable because anytime anything was added to the game the performance deteriorated. I used to run this game on a Core 2 Duo.

 

As Jelly says, they completely miscalculated the scale of the task. They'd have actually been better off developing a completely new game from scratch and not carrying a single asset or line of code over from what we have now.

[Sayori 311]

There are like 20 people testing, not that many bugs reported and LO is still struggling(I don't blame them).  Guess what is going to happen when thousand players get access and start reporting.

Not the mention the performance is not that amazing considering the hardware people use in the tests.

 

The best part? Nobody is going to buy and save APB this time because there's no IP attached to it, it's just the source code.

[CookiePuss 5382]

4 hours ago, Sayori said:

There are like 20 people testing, not that many bugs reported

How many bugs have been reported?

I ask because you have no idea how many.

[Acornie 490]

Yeah, just screw those people with current gen Nvidia cards, amirite

[Sayori 311]

3 hours ago, CookiePuss said:

How many bugs have been reported?

I ask because you have no idea how many.

No, I have no idea how many but I know 20 people who do this part-time, unpaid and not professional  are not able to finish this at decent completion level .  So yes, I really doubt most bugs have been discovered, it's most likely just on the surface. Will see soon ™ anyway

[CookiePuss 5382]

6 hours ago, Sayori said:

No, I have no idea how many but I know 20 people who do this part-time, unpaid and not professional  are not able to finish this at decent completion level .  So yes, I really doubt most bugs have been discovered, it's most likely just on the surface. Will see soon ™ anyway

There are pages and pages of bugs identified just by SPCT, and then LO has their own QA.

 

Finding a bug doesn't = fixing a bug.

Find a bug and it goes on a list, that list is then organized by importance and given a spot in line waiting to be fixed.

 

SPCT has been finding bugs much faster than they can be fixed, that is how testing goes. What I mean is, finding the bugs is the easy part... fixing them can be difficult and time consuming.

 

I feel bad for whomever has to read through the thousands of bugs "discovered" by players once public testing is open. Hopefully they have a macro  for "we already knew that please tell people to stop reporting it".

 

 

 

Edited June 21, 2020 by CookiePuss

[PepeHands 50]

No.

The execution of the update is what doomed this game. The whole idea with teaming up with DS for this and that. And pointing fingers later...because there was always some external force meddling with poor RP and G1

[RespectThis 121]

The engine update has very little to do with the decrease in player population imo. Its how the game has aged in terms of weapon balancing, added content, and terrible interaction with the community from the moderators. Its poor and lack luster. Irawn also makes a great point about how the console version was released before any sort of forward motion on PC. Pretty crazy to focus on console when your ENTIRE player base is on PC.  

Edited June 21, 2020 by RespectThis

[PingOVER9000 189]

11 hours ago, CookiePuss said:

How many bugs have been reported?

I ask because you have no idea how many.

 

I have nothing against LO, adjust things perfecty or so close, it's not a easy task, for making an analogy also "God has needed for making the earth  7 days", beatiful things yes,  but not perfect :3

 

Just I guess everybody would like to know it's a realease date, for then really start to add contenets... 2 years for arriving to the beta, one may arrive to think it will need other 2 years for the update and start to add  contenents we were waiting since the old G1 ( such as balancing weapon, New contacts, Clan wars ... new maps.. etc etc )

 

I mean... Sometimes I like to see a cake at the shop window, but I would like to know when I may entry in for eating it XD... (also very approximately)

Edited June 21, 2020 by PingOVER9000
very approximately..

[DeadPixels 253]

7 hours ago, RespectThis said:

The engine update has very little to do with the decrease in player population imo. Its how the game has aged in terms of weapon balancing, added content, and terrible interaction with the community from the moderators. Its poor and lack luster. Irawn also makes a great point about how the console version was released before any sort of forward motion on PC. Pretty crazy to focus on console when your ENTIRE player base is on PC.  

What are you talking about, engine upgrade has a lot to do with how the game is right now. The company decided to put everything on hold and focus only on the new engine. Bugs were piling up and never got fixed, a lot of things like matchmaking never got addressed, nothing new was added (except for some weapons so the money was flowing). Sure APB was never perfect, but before we actually got some updates, then it stopped completely...

[Sayori 311]

16 hours ago, CookiePuss said:

There are pages and pages of bugs identified just by SPCT, and then LO has their own QA.

 

Finding a bug doesn't = fixing a bug.

Find a bug and it goes on a list, that list is then organized by importance and given a spot in line waiting to be fixed.

 

SPCT has been finding bugs much faster than they can be fixed, that is how testing goes. What I mean is, finding the bugs is the easy part... fixing them can be difficult and time consuming.

 

I feel bad for whomever has to read through the thousands of bugs "discovered" by players once public testing is open. Hopefully they have a macro  for "we already knew that please tell people to stop reporting it".

 

 

 

Sure, they have QA... probably like two people and of course there's you...who test for a bit on the weekend and still have reported a lot of things. So just imagine all of us getting access and start discovering new bugs....

You are kinda proving my point though, there's already bottleneck at LO's side because there's not enough work force. 

Thank you for explaining how software development and bug management works. Totally haven't been involved in such things  /s

 

18 hours ago, Acornie said:

Yeah, just screw those people with current gen Nvidia cards, amirite

I know, right? I crash too so it's like I'd like this to be fixed too? Actually don't need UE to fix this problem. Just so you know, it's not entirely nvidia's fault.

https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis565/LECTURES/Lecture2 New.pdf

http://homepages.math.uic.edu/~jan/mcs572/mcs572notes/lec28.html

 

Edited June 22, 2020 by Sayori

[Lign 361]

I’m more concerned of LO developing and then releasing that piece of fart named RIOT instead of working on tiny QoL changes or balancing the live build. Everytime someone makes a suggestion that will improve live version and can be done on the current engine Matt responded: ‘good idea but we’re busy with the new engine’. And then they’re releasing this mess

Edited June 22, 2020 by Lign

[Fortune Runner 796]

On 6/20/2020 at 10:59 AM, Resine said:

To be honest, engine update is what doomed APB, for couple of years now, there are bugs, issues, imbalances of various kinds, thousands of community ideas, propositions, expectations that are not fulfilled because of "team being busy working on the update", while the players pool diminishes each and every day.

Say, you deliver it, the game will feel smoother and I will get few extra FPS, it doesn't look that much better than RTW looked like and the core of game mechanics won't change for years to come, since you will be busy fixing thousands of issues after the patch.

Looking from times perspective, I would rather have current engine that is patched to community carefully filtered demands and expectations, with fluid patches that take care of bugs, issues, complaints and bring balance across the board, and some day switch to new Engine, rather than play this shit that hasn't seen major patch in AGES, while we wait for miraculous engine update for years to come.

The engine upgrade is needed to fix bugs and problems with APB including matchmaking , phasing and threat changes to be fixed that can not be done otherwise

G1 did an incomplete engine for the consoles full of problems

RTW to begin with left a mess as well

 

The current engine can not do phasing from what Little Orbit has mentioned in the past , and its not exactly a secret how bad this engine is either since its ten years old and beyond a fossil.

How do you patch a engine that never worked right without breaking even more things? its not a secret that APB suffers from that as well.

 

Also its not like you changing your clothes ; you do not just  "switch" to a new engine , because if it was that easy then there would be no need for SPCT to do bug testing

And thank you SPCT for the hard and annoying work. I do not see you get thanked often even though you all try hard to help fix APB's bugs so much

 

Most of the  problems you would like to see fixed just simply can not be done without a new engine to run APB

When G1 chose to not do the engine upgrade and did a cash grab instead , a lot of people left from being burned that badly.

[RespectThis 121]

5 hours ago, DeadPixels said:

What are you talking about, engine upgrade has a lot to do with how the game is right now. The company decided to put everything on hold and focus only on the new engine. Bugs were piling up and never got fixed, a lot of things like matchmaking never got addressed, nothing new was added (except for some weapons so the money was flowing). Sure APB was never perfect, but before we actually got some updates, then it stopped completely...

Im talking about APB as a whole. Even "right now" i don't think its the reason for a majority of people quitting. Bugs will always be an issue even with 3.5. Matchmaking is pretty low on the priorities imo. Biggest issues with matchmaking is all the dethreaters going down to the bronze district. What new do you want added? New weapons, vehicles, and clothes are the best things they can add. Apart from that its just events really. But realistically how long will people play modes like snowball fight or the BR mode (blanking on the name). Probably not very long considering how fast those districts emptied out in the past. 
 

Anyway, i honestly don't find the engine upgrade to be the biggest of issues. I doubt a majority of people are quitting over the engine upgrade. There is a laundry list of things before that. Such as weapon balancing and how stale the weapon choices are meta wise currently. The switching of anti cheats and cheaters in general. Alot of dethreaters. Or people have lost interest in the game. To name a few.

Edited June 22, 2020 by RespectThis

[CookiePuss 5382]

1 hour ago, Sayori said:

~snip~

Im not sure how you misunderstood so completely, but you do you.

[DeadPixels 253]

19 hours ago, RespectThis said:

Matchmaking is pretty low on the priorities imo. Biggest issues with matchmaking is all the dethreaters going down to the bronze district. 

And why do players dethreate? Gold threat is to easy to achieve. The gap between high gold and low gold players is way too big! Matchmaking puts high premade group against random low gold and silver groups. Of course better team always easily wins and goes on a win streak of 20... So yeah i do believe with a proper matchmaking dethreaters wouldn't exist

[RespectThis 121]

1 hour ago, DeadPixels said:

And why do players dethreate? Gold threat is to easy to achieve. The gap between high gold and low gold players is way too big! Matchmaking puts high premade group against random low gold and silver groups. Of course better team always easily wins and goes on a win streak of 20... So yeah i do believe with a proper matchmaking dethreaters wouldn't exist

A variety of reasons. Because of "gold cheaters" is one of them. Dethreating to go to bronze district is no excuse for not wanting to verse better and more coordinated players. Only way to get better is to verse better players anyway. Even with a reworked system i guarantee you people will still dethreat.  Going against low gold and silver groups only really happens often when the games population is low like it currently is. Even in a group of 2-3 its hard to find opposition for me and my buddies. There still seems to be a hidden threat system behind the bronze, silver, gold. At the end of the day you have to take the training wheels off at some point. Can't just hide in bronze forever.