The Future of TT from GG!

[Cannon-Dale J]

Joe - You mention business models, fine. But any business model hangs off a product. It lives & dies on the product. I am in Engineering, so this PC stuff is a bit alien to me, but I live products day in day out. You are asking us to play the IA game. I did this last time & I have tried again & I won't be again until the product itself works. You can level the effort thing on me etc, but from my perspective we have fed back the major issues & there have been no improvements on these.

If you get the game working I would be one of your uber Euro TT legends to market your product with. atm I can't as the lag is so bad the game is un-playable. The lag needs to be addressed by a master server, which you say & said was going to happen. You also say that a master server (with regards to our TT) is no problem, no cost...

So, in a nutshell. You want us to play the IA game. It has many issues which I could live with if it was playable due to the lag. With the lag in TBM one can't shoot (slight problem) & in TS one can't get the scrum (slight problem).

What do you expect me to do?

I am with original TT until the IA product is at least somewhere near...

You are trying to put the cart before the horse. You want a justification for resource. Sometimes you need to have the foresight & just go for it, but you are losing us...

[Mighty Mouse]

^ The driver of the IA game is clearly not TT. As joe stated, there are other games which are driving the IA cart. People liked Legion enough right of the bat that GG is devoting bulk of resources to that game and not TT. No biggie. I can wait until they get around to it. If not, I'll move onto another game.

It's not the end of the world if the developers don't recoup all of the clientele. They just need to cater to the majority, which at current status is Legion, which was a pretty cool game btw.

[Cannon-Dale J]

^ I realise that, but me being simple think the process would be. TT game is sorted so make it sexy & incorporate some of the developed mods. Somewhere in that process the game got buggered up & TT is mostly about the playability (am I wrong?).

Have you tried to play the new IA game MM?

I tried the Legions Game (Doom type thing) sucks my will to live & makes me dizzy (no ty). Different games add diversity & TT is pretty cool/ different. Appealed/s to us eh.

I'm same as you. No skin off my nose whatever, adding my 1c. If the new game worked I 'might' give it a go, if it doesn't I won't. I am a simple thing as you know.

I am actually more worried about Joe applying himself & getting this working, that would be a major dliiemma, asking the wife for some pocket money to but a NEW TT game....

[Mighty Mouse]

I tried the new game. It worked on my PC and besides the few morons who think their mastery of the game entitles them to GOD status, it was OK. It was definitely missing something I grant you that.

You are not purchasing the right to play on IA. You pay to unlock more stuff, no? Unless they changed it since I last visited. Seems to me if you don't like to complicate things, stick with the basic tank and basic mod.

I've tried Legion and TT on IA. I haven't tried any other game. No time to.

TBH, the servers they had for TT when it was in its heyday for me was pretty unplayable without the runarounds that Roo et al provided. SO I don't see the lag/playability being resolved in my/your favor any time soon by GG.

[Cannon-Dale J]

^ Looks like i'm gonna be kicking your a.ss with twice your ping for a while to come then eh

[Reagent X]

@Joe, thanks a lot for the responses.

Perhaps some of our programmers could respond to the issue of what could we do if we were to get the code for TT. Can we do what we want to do without getting access to the innards of the Torque Game Engine?

[joemaruschak]

If you get the game working I would be one of your uber Euro TT legends to market your product with. atm I can't as the lag is so bad the game is un-playable. The lag needs to be addressed by a master server, which you say & said was going to happen. You also say that a master server (with regards to our TT) is no problem, no cost..

to clear up some confusion.. the master server is not the same as a dedicated server. The master server is literally a game connection thing. It connects servers and clients. They all report in to one server (the master) and this just sorts out the IPs of all servers and clients. It is simple and does not do much.

dedicated servers are instances of the game that run on dedicated boxes, ideally located in data warehouses on the internet backbone. The master server has nothing to do with Lag.. dedicated servers do. We could throw up a server and it would help, but part of the issue with dedicated servers is the cost associated with it and the management of those servers. We are working on it, and with several games, this is a slow process as our Ops team builds out the infrastructure to support and manage this in a cost effective manner.

Dedicated servers are a problem, and they do cost, and the management of the deployment of new builds/updates, etc, has a cost to it.

So, in a nutshell. You want us to play the IA game. It has many issues which I could live with if it was playable due to the lag. With the lag in TBM one can't shoot (slight problem) & in TS one can't get the scrum (slight problem).

You don't have to play the game. Legions will get dedicated servers on ia.com first, followed by whatever game is getting the most play, and how many dedicated servers we spin up is dependent on the player base. From my perspective, you can not play and it is not going to hurt us. We have plenty going on. Not having dedicated servers for TT on ia.com in the next few months is not going to kill GG. If this means no one is playing the ia.com version, then this means no one is playing it. No one playing just means we shift resources to game people are playing..

I don't want or not want.. I am saying that if YOU want to see US devote resources to ThinkTanks, you need to go to where we are presently putting our resources and make your presence known. If this is too much of a pain, you don't need to do it.

You are trying to put the cart before the horse. You want a justification for resource. Sometimes you need to have the foresight & just go for it, but you are losing us...

not at all. I was asked about the standalone, and I answered.. we will not be doing in update for it in the near future. Updates to TT, for the near term, will be on ia.com. Resources will be assigned to projects as they generate 'heat' on the site. If TT gets heat, it will get resources. If it does not, it won't.

If you want to have a say in the updates, and you want them to take a high priority for us, you need to make it so it is a high priority creating a demand for it.. and this demand will be created by actually playing on the site.. it will be visible to us. As for justification of resources, right now, the player base on ia.com does not constitute a large enough audience to justify upping it's priority status, and honestly, the base here, while it has been stable for a while, is not incredibly large. We may lose you.. it would be a bummer, but it is not going to end the world.

I am not trying to be dismissive here, but the argument that everyone is trying to make is that GG is missing out on a huge business opportunity. It may be the case that we are missing an opportunity, but I find the assertion that it is huge to be an overstatement. How huge? Bigger than other opportunities we have?

I come here to let you guys know what is going on. We are doing what we are doing. You can be a part of it, but you don't have to be. Boycotting ia.com is not going to 'wake us up' or substantially change our approach.

But any business model hangs off a product. It lives & dies on the product

yes.. but in this case, the 'product' we are building is the distribution channel. We are seeding it with some of our own games, but the opportunity here is not an individual game, but the channel which delivers them. It is not where it needs to be yet, but that is not going to stop us from trying to create it. From a metaphorical perspective, it is like a TV show on a cable channel. We are trying to make a 'channel'.. the failure of one show does not mean the end of the channel. Happens all the time.. if the audience does not come, then we move on to the next until we hit something where an audience is.

[joemaruschak]

@ReagentX,

it depends on what you want to do whether or not you will need access to the source. I would suspect yes. ThinkTanks is a variant of Torque, and much of what we did was in code, and not in script. I would also suspect that you would want to move more into code, as opening up the source to all will have an adverse affect on how much 'crap' script gets injected into the game, opens up cheats, etc..

so what is it you guys are wanting to do?

Joe

[44]

If you want to have a say in the updates, and you want them to take a high priority for us, you need to make it so it is a high priority creating a demand for it.. and this demand will be created by actually playing on the site....

I am not trying to be dismissive here, but the argument that everyone is trying to make is that GG is missing out on a huge business opportunity. It may be the case that we are missing an opportunity, but I find the assertion that it is huge to be an overstatement. How huge? Bigger than other opportunities we have?

@Joe -- Are there enough standalone players here -- if a substantial percentage went over to IA -- to drive a shift in TT's level of priority?

[dash]

I agree with joe here. There is no huge business opportunity with TT in its current model. Release a new version and say he sells
1000 copies at $20 a pop. $20k. That is nothing when you're paying a project manager, 4 developers, a designer, rent, overhead ... Sounds like 2 weeks of operating costs to me, if that.

We need to come up with a dual licensing model that allows continued proprietary development from a code fork point and open source development under a bsd license. With a BSD license Garage Games could continue on their way , peek in on our version and borrow from it but not be then burdened with a GPL type requirement to release more code because of doing so. Then we have to raise enough money to make releasing it worthwhile to Garage Games. I really suck at discussing/negotiating money so I'll leave that to someone else.

I think IA is a good direction and just needs some polish.

I'll host a dedicated server for IA thinktanks in my rack if I can get the code for doing so. I'm in a multi-homed datacenter with tier 1 connectivity so I think it can help the cause. I can do this for free for a very long time( I already have ). Email me about that Joe.