Official Soldat Forums
Official Content => Soldat Developer Log => Topic started by: Falcon` on June 22, 2017, 02:33:22 pm
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Hello guys,
reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated. Currently we're working on a new main menu, Steam storefront, updating the graphics to the previously outlined standard, and a couple of other features. There may or may not be changes to the weapon system, bonus kits, and game structure - too early to tell. Recently there has been quite a bit of drama and a lot of uncertainty regarding the game's direction, and I hope to clear up the situation.
While ideas have been always floating around and no one was ever unresponsive for a long period of time, the constant pace of development ceased around February-April. A lack of motivation and personal conflicts were likely the biggest contributors. Our new map editor project fell through, and everyone was for the most part idle. This long stretch of inactivity is ultimately my fault, as I failed to step up as a leader. Instead I was content to let things slide for the time.
Although helloer worked very hard, he was never very cooperative, much preferring to do his own thing. We had our conflicts, and in the end my lack of leadership made him shut me out completely. He kept working silently, but eventually quit in frustration, as you can see from his farewell post. The timing was a bit unfortunate - I had recently returned to work on the game proactively, putting a lot of hours a week into setting up the foundations of our new GUI. The lack of communication was our eventual downfall, and I admit that I should've left personal matters aside in my role as the project leader.
A build-up of negative feelings likely made helloer leave in such a dramatic fashion, but in the end I think that was a sort of a wake-up call for the rest of us. From now on I'll take bigger care to keep everyone updated and assume a more proactive role in our goal to re-vitalize the game we all love.
During his time helloer implemented in mostly finished state a new c_vars system, the .smap format, worked to refactor the code (with a bit of help from other devs), and ported the game to Linux & MacOS. We thank him for his great contributions and wish him good luck in future projects.
At the moment and for the foreseeable future I am free to put a lot of work into the game weekly, which should allow us to catch up to speed quickly. As mentioned previously, our current priorities are getting Soldat's Steam page finalized so that it may be displayed publicly, finishing the new GUI, and remaking more maps to the new standard. After the Steam store page is published, we will start to advertise the game to our best capacity. So chin up, we're going to need your help spreading news and enthusiasm about Soldat!
More updates to follow soon.
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HOPE
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I'm hopeful again :)
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So we should have a couple of devlogs this summer, right? Hopefully everythings works as planned.
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Still alive <3
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From now on I'll take bigger care to keep everyone updated and assume a more proactive role in our goal to re-vitalize the game we all love.
A bit late for that, Such basic things like keeping people around by posting even basic posts is something that should be made from the beginning.
And most important you still have no clue how to advertise it properly. Because you seriously dont get first rule of making anything: making it is just a half of work, rest 50% is advertising. Without it you have product known only to few people.
You live in some weird world where you think that just by putting game to steam make it popular, just like that?
That "drama" that Helloer made was sadly the truth and you cant cover it with just one post that sound like nothing happen. Obvious things are obvious.
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From now on I'll take bigger care to keep everyone updated and assume a more proactive role in our goal to re-vitalize the game we all love.
And most important you still have no clue how to advertise it properly. Because you seriously dont get first rule of making anything: making it is just a half of work, rest 50% is advertising. Without it you have product known only to few people.
You live in some weird world where you think that just by putting game to steam make it popular, just like that?
After the Steam store page is published, we will start to advertise the game to our best capacity.
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So we should have a couple of devlogs this summer, right? Hopefully everythings works as planned.
Yeah
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Work hard! [fist]
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Work hard!
earn little
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From now on I'll take bigger care to keep everyone updated and assume a more proactive role in our goal to re-vitalize the game we all love.
And most important you still have no clue how to advertise it properly. Because you seriously dont get first rule of making anything: making it is just a half of work, rest 50% is advertising. Without it you have product known only to few people.
You live in some weird world where you think that just by putting game to steam make it popular, just like that?
After the Steam store page is published, we will start to advertise the game to our best capacity.
So your plan is to publish it on Steam that MAGICALLY advertise it self...
we will start to advertise the game to our best capacity.
You see, problem with all people who worked on Soldat for past years, are lack of details. "We do something" "we will advertise it to our best", "We will check that"... etc etc
No specific plan at all.
And you threat every aspect of game as some hidden/mysterious thing like it Soldat was AA game...
No proper official long term plan,
No proper devlogs for past months,
No proper topic about future changes(gathering opinions/ideas),
No one really know who do what,
As Falcon him self admitted: there is lack of proper leadership and activeness.
There is lack of everything.
And because of that chaos with developing and relations with MM, you cant even get proper PR system with donations that would go to advertising or help with developing.
Soldat is still threated as summer project of few friends that do it because they are bored. If you will not threat it as a game, it will never be a proper game.
Free work on it or not, it doesnt matter, if you accepted to help, do what you need to, or say you dont have time and find someone else for that. Soldat is not only project that is made for free by random people working in their spare time, hell, most of smaller games and apps are made like that, dont feel special just because of that.
If you lack proper help in developing, there are lots of places where you can request even free help from all types of people to help starting from programming ending in graphic.
And if you think that one post of Falcon that show up randomly will fix everyone mood ,cover mess that is behind the scene, and make people come back to game, keep dreaming.
Too late, too little was made to fix that.
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You misunderstood, us publishing the game's steam store page does not mean releasing the game, it's just the store page with media and information about the game and a coming soon text. What are we supposed to advertise otherwise, soldat.pl? :D
Release the store page
->
Advertise
->
Release the game
As for official plans and public roadmaps - we don't publish those because it's essentially a promise to the community that these things will get done. We cannot be sure that they do get done, and even if we use all the disclaimers in the world it will still have felt like a lie if something is not delivered. Following progress we will post progress updates, rest assured.
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There may or may not be changes to the weapon system, bonus kits, and game structure - too early to tell.
It's pretty important to have gameplay to be functional, wm and nade/med spawns need to be fixed.
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rest assured.
(https://i.giphy.com/e05GB2c86qgOk.gif)
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Steam is the solution
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Only steam is not enough, you need to spread it on famous sites, social networks and need luck.
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YupYup, a facebook page might just add few players every week.
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YupYup, a facebook page might just add few players every week.
There is an existing Soldat facebook page and it's quite popular actually.
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Every time I open soldatforums I get nervous because there might be the final message saying the development has stopped for good... Thank you for giving me back some hope :3 <3
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Every time I open soldatforums I get nervous because there might be the final message saying the development has stopped for good... Thank you for giving me back some hope :3 <3
That won't happen as the only person who could say that for sure is MM and he wouldn't.
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Soldat is still threated as summer project of few friends that do it because they are bored. If you will not threat it as a game, it will never be a proper game.
Free work on it or not, it doesnt matter, if you accepted to help, do what you need to, or say you dont have time and find someone else for that. Soldat is not only project that is made for free by random people working in their spare time, hell, most of smaller games and apps are made like that, dont feel special just because of that.
That's so well said, Akinaro.
@Falcon, dudes, it's clear that you cannot handle it. But at least stop whining around about the others who have contributed to this game.
And about giving back some hope? That's not funny. Not at all.
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YupYup, a facebook page might just add few players every week.
There is an existing Soldat facebook page and it's quite popular actually.
Regarding Facebook page, is there any chance to get a spot to shine(or at least putting a link for group) for our little 50-member Knife Only Group of players?
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Any news?
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Any news?
+ is there any way we can help you devs with realization of things you mentioned in the devlog update? Why can't we speed this process up just with gather people who has some free time and would like to help? Just write here what are you working on at this moment
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Well people are free to join the dev team and finish what helloer didn't. The issue is that people aren't that motivated.
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Well people are free to join the dev team and finish what helloer didn't. The issue is that people aren't that motivated.
I dont really understand anything about coding or designing but i can happily help with the weapon mode or Qol updates and i can find at least 2 more old school playesr to help just let me know
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From now on I'll take bigger care to keep everyone updated
[...]
More updates to follow soon.
So we should have a couple of devlogs this summer, right? Hopefully everythings works as planned.
Yeah
2 1/2 months of silence again. Not sure what I should think of that.
Being overly positive I guess there has been progress since you said: "At the moment and for the foreseeable future I am free to put a lot of work into the game weekly, which should allow us to catch up to speed quickly."
If that's true I'm not sure why you then would not create (tiny) posts of that progress to at least get some praises of your work.
Looks like the other scenario is the more realistic one: Lost motivation, no time, Soldat dead, bibabo...
And about giving back some hope? That's not funny. Not at all.
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Soldat dead, bibabo...
Its only dead once:
- everyone loses interest in the game (as in people stop posting in these threads nagging for updates)
- people stop playing it (various pubs are always full)
- community dies (everyones on discord nowadays)
- all the developers leave forever (there's still shoozza and falcon and some others, they're just not committing actively)
if you want an example of a dead project, look at qmail (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qmail). no updates since late 90s and very few people using it
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- community dies (everyones on discord nowadays)
This is partly incorrect. If we're talking about active members who play the game on a daily basis, take part in the leagues and different events, provide feedback/soldat-related convos, and contribute to the community in many ways such as by being a playoff streamer or posting post-match summaries, most of them are still in irc. Unfortunately, the competitive scene and the lively general play has stuck in irc and that's where the Soldat hype flows. Discord consists of roughly 70 people(?), most of whom are objectively retired. Discord may just currently have the bigger amount of users in total, but it's more or less idle comparing to what's happening in irc. mIRC is outdated as fuck, but the simplest option we had 15 years ago to make a chat room was IRC. This dinosaur of a system existed since before some of us were born, probably, but we chose it because it was the only chat room we knew. There was one tiny feature, however, that laid the foundations of how we built our little Soldat community going forward. It started out in IRC but Discord would take it to new heights, i completely agree. There are some of you who have been using discord for about six months and i know, technical issues aside, it is so much better than team speak and irc. It also works when you join the network you are connected 24/7 even when your machine is turned off. So you never miss message from any channel, and that's a good alternative for BNC. I personally used IRC for maybe 17 years and i'm skeptic about discord but after couple of days i know i'll get use it because it's probably much better than IRC. I'm pretty sure most of the players think the same; However:
The problem is that the bigger part of competitve scene won't switch to discord until there's gather implementation within it. Probably the only one thing that keeps players using IRC is a gather system. Many are still gonna be using IRC for years to come i think, but it will be nice to have another program to use in conjunction. You could probably use the Discord api to write a program that passes the messages between both programs. I don't know how does that work, i do know though that helloer started some irc implementation within Discord. Perhaps someone can finish what he started. That would be a huge step towards progress if competitive scene moves to Discord. And if we have these things in there i don't think it would be a big deal to make them switch to Discord. And then the whole Discord community would start growing fast because high level/pro players are the lifeblood of games nowadays. The mass majority of people will follow the pro players/streamers to whichever game they go, regardless of if that game caters to them or not. People follow the hype.
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- community dies (everyones on discord nowadays)
This is partly incorrect.
The problem is that the bigger part of competitve scene won't switch to discord until there's gather implementation within it. Probably the only one thing that keeps players using IRC is a gather system. Many are still gonna be using IRC for years to come i think, but it will be nice to have another program to use in conjunction. You could probably use the Discord api to write a program that passes the messages between both programs. I don't know how does that work, i do know though that helloer started some gather implementation in Discord. Perhaps someone can finish what he started. That would be a huge step towards progress if competitive scene moves to Discord. And if we have these things in there i don't think it would be a big deal to make them switch to Discord. And then the whole Discord community would start growing fast because high level/pro players are the lifeblood of games nowadays. The mass majority of people will follow the pro players/streamers to whichever game they go, regardless of if that game caters to them or not. People follow the hype.
Hi.
There's currently a gather bot in the works @ discord.
check my screenshots
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Yeeeaah great news. DutchFlame, when can we expect an official opening of soldat gather on discord? Is this going to be finshed soon?
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Yeeeaah great news. DutchFlame, when can we expect an official opening of soldat gather on discord? Is this going to be finshed soon?
Hi Mayhem,
The second I have information I will inform you about it here.
XvayS is working on it in his spare time.
Stay put..
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update regarding discord's gather development:
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Seeing posts like this make me feel some type of way for not picking up computer science in high school. Do you have an ETA of when the beta for 1.8 will be released for testing? Pretty ecstatic to try it out.
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Seeing posts like this make me feel some type of way for not picking up computer science in high school. Do you have an ETA of when the beta for 1.8 will be released for testing? Pretty ecstatic to try it out.
ETA is: it's done when it's done.
I suggest you sticking up into Discord channel time to time, some admins/devs/whateverwhoisinlead can notice your kind call of helping them.