Redemption - keep it in the game!

[Haste]

The Council Battleship was possibly a bad example. When I talk about model-, shiparch, powercore, ship package "assets" (and whatever I'm forgetting) of "clone" ships causing overhead, I am usually referring to things like the Marlin. Discovery unfortunately has a lot of "baggage" like that lying around that is easy to forget (FLStat doesn't show them without flicking on "Show blank items", for example).

I still believe it is best to discourage players from buying, for many billions of credits, what is essentially an unplayable ship. Especially if there's no guarantee that that ship will stick around or will ever even be playable.

It's easy to say "Just maintain it bro" until you're the guy who has to change the animations of the Insurgency Battlecruiser so its post-rework Battlecruiser Heavy doesn't shoot straight through the infamous Spinning Balls, then has to completely rehardpoint it - including model changes, that require cleanup aftwards, and need to also be applied to LODs that may have very funky geometry. Oh, and after that you have to adjust its hitbox and split the model into parts. This tends to break smoothing, requiring resmoothing of (large) parts of the model. Then you have to go and make damage models and fuses. And then you have to balance the collisiongroup stats, the fuse thresholds, and then the stats of the ship.

..I think people should be catching my drift by now. There was, perhaps, a time when maintaining an "unplayable asset" or two meant copy-pasting a file and swapping some texture names out. That doesn't really always apply anymore. I would expect Battleships to eventually - possibly - have similar, if not more, complexity to (reworked) Battlecruisers. That'd mean all of what I said above would have to be done for a ship like the Council Battleship.

I also forgot to mention wireframing (not an easy task for high-polycount, LODless ships, like most of Discovery's caps), and probably a few other things.

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[Chronicron]

do you really not have enough people who would be passionately dedicated to this sort of work? and if so, ever thought about the "why"?

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[Haste]

do you really not have enough people who would be passionately dedicated to this sort of work? and if so, ever thought about the "why"?

I think the issue is more that this is not something you just throw up an app for and get multiple promising applicants. The things I described require:

• 3dsmax, and a half-decent understanding of how some of it works.
  
• As an extension of the above, an understanding of how the MaxLancer plugin works.
  
• Quite a good grasp of how the game works in a technical sense. Placing crosshairs for components that are attached to the very back of a very long ship, for example, is not the same as putting one dead center in the ship for regular use. So to do this well you have to be pretty intimately familiar with game mechanics / how to balance things in general.
  
• The ability to not lose all hope when you see the 16th seam in a Discovery model from 2007 you have to close to have even the tiniest bit of hope that you might be able to do a boolean op on a portion of the model.
  

People who have loads of experience modding Freelancer, have a good understanding of the finnicky mechanics of PvP in the game, and perhaps most importantly have something resembling modeling skills (I won't pretend that what I'm working with are "modeling skills", but it's something related to it I guess) are not in high supply. Ones with a good chunk of free time are even rarer. And then, of course, they might instead prefer working on their own mod.

I'm also going to say that the rework we're only just now finishing up is something that Discovery never had the tools for. So I can't really judge if things were very different once upon a time, as when Discovery had a larger playerbase (and thus more people to draw devs from) standards for models were infinitely smaller than they have to be for what we're doing now.

Plus we could do a better job managing "applications" and making it clear who or what we're looking for. But I have yet to see anyone ever apply for the above.

Edit: Basically, as a TL;DR, years ago I could have set up and balanced 20 ships with the amount of effort required to do one BC properly. So that makes content bloat a bit of an issue, yes. I don't mind working on things that players actually use. I mind doing the exact same amount of work for someone to maybe one day possibly SRP a single instance of a ship, though.

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[Chenzo-]

I’m pretty sure 98% or more if the playerbase(myself included) has zero understanding of most of what Haste said. What we can all appreciate is probably ‘it’s a lot of work, many hours a time which may not even work the first time around, may need several attempts of many hours to get right for a ship not many will fly or want to fly if it’s not a novelty anymore”

My previous point was about the INRP validity of the ship existing and being maintained bar the single SRP ship. If the council still have the INRP capability & resource to make them, that would probably grant its place on the everlasting list of ships needing said work to be done.

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[Couden]

What's the point of removing content and ships as well? there are a few ships that have unique, but not SRP Status (LLBC, Redemption, old Core snubs, old Marduk and old nom gb iirc) and yet to delete ships that costs a lot.

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