Steel Beasts Dynamic Terrain Will Come After New Terrain Engine

[Rinix]

There was a time in the not so distant past when it seemed that eSims policy was that the private (military) contracts were the primary focus and the public (PE) license was secondary.....Many people felt that they were made to feel "lucky" to be able to purchase a license. This is with a product costing $125 + $40 regular upgrade fees.......

My, how things have changed: http://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/11302-eta-on-terrain-patch/?page=7#comment-176243

That is not what he said. And I strongly disagree with  your personal interpretation.

http://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/11302-eta-on-terrain-patch/?page=7#comment-176244

Esim has bent over backwards for its non military players.you must be new yo the forums.

The sad part is that I saw this coming. The exact message Ssnake has been sending, for a long time, through mentions of where their income comes from, military contracts getting in the way, etc., is: The military customers come first, the enthusiast market comes second.

[Asid]

Esim has bent over backwards for its non military players.you must be new yo the forums.

I fail to see this  .  I paid FULL price for my license. Paid updates are just that...Paid for a service/product.

One things for sure. You could not have a discussion like this on "some" sites 

[Lumituisku]

It's either language barrier or that I do not follow their forums at all, or that im just really really tired after being servant to my mother, animals and dad for a week...  but I fail to understand full meaning your post Rinix. Could you clarify it to me please.

[Rinix]

It's either language barrier or that I do not follow their forums at all, or that im just really really tired after being servant to my mother, animals and dad for a week...  but I fail to understand full meaning your post Rinix. Could you clarify it to me please.

OK. My point is that for eSim Games, the military customers come first, while us enthusiasts come second. This has been demonstrated by Ssnake in the following ways:

• Putting off release of Steel Beasts Pro PE releases because of military contracts
• Ssnake talking about how little of their revenue comes from the enthusiasts
• Steel Beasts Pro getting features before Steel Beasts Pro PE does

[Rinix]

http://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/11302-eta-on-terrain-patch/?page=7#comment-176248

Patience will pay off.

I'll respond by quoting this again, and by saying that Steel Beasts Pro PE 4.1 had better not turn into Steel Nukem Forever, joining other infamous games like Duke Nukem Forever, Half-Nukem Forever (Half-Life 3), and Star Nukem Forever (Star Citizen):

In his case it didn't end well.

http://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/11302-eta-on-terrain-patch/?page=7#comment-176251

Well if you are paying salaries and putting bread on your table at home then yes that makes sense.

If the paying customers aren't satisfied and the contracts disappear, then there would be a drastically reduced resource base for any development.

However whilst being a member of a "paying customer" I also endorse the view that eSim has provided excellent support to its "mere" (to borrow your tone) private people.

I wouldn't call the general lack of communication about 4.1 "excellent support".

[Rinix]

As if I didn't make it clear enough: http://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/11302-eta-on-terrain-patch/?page=7#comment-176255

Any development that we do is directly or indirectly dependent on profits earned from sales to military customers; most of our work you get from direct development to some army customer, some of it (like the M60, T-72, BMP-2, BRDM, BTR, ...) you get because we can afford to work on it, thanks to profits made from previous military sales.

That being said, while being an important aspect, this is actually of secondary relevance; what really matters is that we have contractual obligations to fulfill, and contractual obligations always have the highest priority. A contract is a contract is a contract, period. (If I promise to the general public that we will deliver a new terrain engine, free of charge, to all customers of the 4.0 version, that actually is a contract too; it's just that there's no deadline tied to it (and no late delivery penalty payment).)

Losing support contracts, and losing an army customer as a contract partner for new customizations would eventually hurt you PE customers worse than a delay of a release by a few months. You will eventually get your update, rest assured about that. I made a promise. I will keep that promise. But you have to understand certain realities. Even if we did not depend on army money to finance our work, we would still depend on armies granting us access to armored combat vehicles. Ask yourself how likely it would be to get that access if we weren't working for them?

Yeah, Ssnake, about promises... Another promise you made was that . It's 4 months later, you've piled on 100,000 lines of code, and you're not visibly any closer to completion.

I'm having a bit of difficulty believing Ssnake's claims about what they can afford to work on. Of the 5 examples he cites, 3

• T-72 (he probably means the T-72A/M1 given what a big deal it was when it finally arrived)
• M60A3 (TTS)
• BMP-2

are or were recently in use with some of his clients (Brazil for the M60A3 (TTS), Finland for the T-72A/M1 and BMP-2, speaking of which, hurry up and get Finland to give you a customization contract for the BMP-2MD). All 3 of them got 3D clickable interiors. I just don't think you would have gone to that effort without customization contracts being involved. The other 2, the BRDM-2 and BTR, did not require much effort. The BTR-60, 70, and 80 have incredibly simple interiors, the BRDM-2 had an incredibly simply interior from its release in 2.640 to its vastly improved, but still not clickable, interior in 4.019, over 5 years later.

And even if you didn't depend on armies to finance your work, there's always museums.

[Lumituisku]

Soo...  i guess what messed me up was the sarcasm spoken here or something becasue I have not expected things to change. Military first. Second hand next. Mostly I was upset about comment "How things have change and all related stuff. Because I thouhg there was something I didnt know.

Anyways...


Finland no longer officially has t72s.  Whether we truly have some of them or not...  I do not know. It is said to be legend or rumor that we still have some as "Reserve"   so better to believe that we do not. Atleast not sufficient amount to make any difference.

As for BMP2 and their modernisation.  Updates that were done to bmp2. As far as I know...  didnt change how origianl vehicle worked. Same levers and buttoms are still used for same purposes according to magazine that I wrote about the update. Just new much more powerful internal equipment were build inside the optics devices and so.
 Also I believe that it serves Finland best to continue training regular bmp2  as these updates were just additions as far as I understood. The way how original vehicle works didnt truly change that much.  or so I understood. Just its cababilities got MAJOR boost. 

[Rinix]

http://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/11302-eta-on-terrain-patch/?page=7#comment-176302
Does inexus live in Bizarro World?

That is ok, but dont go public with promises about new patch next time tho...

I dont see the point in making public announcements about something you cant deliver for like a year... Just publish it once it is ready next time.

-1
You know how to push the wrong buttons mate.

You are not helping with supporting an open and transparent communication between esim and the users... esim with their best intentions giving insights into their work and they go beyond what many companies would do for their customers to provide us with as much information as possible.

If you prefer only to know when a patch or release truly come out it is better if you follow the standard sales pages to see public patch releases when they come out.

[Asid]

Everyone has their own opinion. They are entitled to it.

I am used to eSims failing to deliver on time. I do not think they do it on purpose. It is how the company is.

[Lumituisku]

Game updates...

When you expect it... it seems to be always just coming... and like it would never tryly get out.

And when youre not expecting it...  it knocks on door reminging that you should.


I dont know about dynamic terrain though. I do kinda feel that Esims has for long spoiled a lot of stuff they are working on. That there is little to surprice us. Then again.. on last major updade we got BMP-2 and other nice vehicles that we were not expecting, and other stuff...  so I do dare to hope that there would be atleast small kinder eggs on this dynamic terrain that we are not being told about.

[Rinix]

I think the problem with the delays is from them having difficulty in fixing bugs, because of the code itself. I've written about this earlier in this thread. To that I add some more from dejawolf: "the main problem with SB is that it is a legacy engine built for speed, not expandability. as such, changing what seems like simple things can take years, since you pretty much have to carefully go through and completely rewrite large sections of code that is more than 500 000 lines long, and then make sure that the thousands of things that can break doesn't."

[Asid]

"the main problem with SB is that it is a legacy engine built for speed, not expandability. as such, changing what seems like simple things can take years, since you pretty much have to carefully go through and completely rewrite large sections of code that is more than 500 000 lines long, and then make sure that the thousands of things that can break doesn't."

[Rinix]

http://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/11302-eta-on-terrain-patch/?page=7#comment-176311

I will be the first to acknowledge that I could have been more careful and reserved about the announcements. But there is the problem that I must announce what's in an update at a point where not everything is settled. We announced the new terrain in 2016 in good faith because we had it working. Okay, there were issues with a certain loss of flexibility in map editing that we developers didn't see/didn't take as serious as they were, until the only solution was to cut the new terrain engine and at least release what we had. That was in August 2016.
Next I was pressed to make a statement when the promised feature of the new terrain engine actually WOULD be delivered, and our best estimate at the time was six months. Unfortunately we didn't take into account the changes that were made to infantry pathfinding at the same time which, for efficiency reasons, had to be made in the same code branch as the new terrain. THEN it turns out that the changes there are both good, but also come with a few serious bugs that again we cannot release the software with the high res terrain without creating more damage in other places. OK, so we delay the release again to fix those infantry bugs.
At the same time we're running into problems with an entirely unrelated project that's just eating up a lot of development time, which inevitably takes away from the time needed to fix the PE beta so it's mature for a release. And THEN we overshoot the window of opportunity for a release, at which point a lot of other projects HAVE to be given priority. These non-linear effects are difficult to predict. The only way around that would be to remain extremely vague and non-committal in all public communication, or to release bug-ridden garbage on time. Both options, I think, are not in your interest as mature consumers of our product. You want to be informed in time, you want to know what to expect, you want adherence to deadlines, and you want mature and stable software at a reasonably low price.
There's the adage that in software development, of the three categories "cheap", "good", and "fast" you may only pick two without compromising. Sometimes things just don't work out as planned. I can but ask any reader of this forum to take my predictions with a grain of salt. The future always was, and will always remain to be inherently unknown. Only CPT Hindsight can predict the past (when teaming up with CPT Obvious). We mere mortals have to make do with estimations.

[Rinix]

http://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/11835-sb-4019-vehicle-mounted-troop-issues/#comment-176487

The legacy HE model is somewhat capricious on occasion. We'll replace it with the next major release (after the New Terrain update).

[Asid]

The HE issue has been there for a long time, If not forever. SB is not as accurate or realistic as many think. It is a great simulation when you work within its limitations.