A couple of days max. Because at this point I'm just sick and tired of waiting, and really don't give a **** anymore. Here look I'll demonstrate:

"New turret types":

Minmatar small turret:

Take three small missile turrets and scale them down in size. Angle them upward. Attach them to the top of one turret stand. Take the mass driver projectile animation bend the arc on the projectile flight path and extend the flight time. Paint the whole thing redish brown. Specs are eyeballed, best ballpark. The community can play test it for us. Simple numerical modifications can be made in the following several days after release.

BLAM!!!! Minmatar small artillery turret.

Minmatar large turret:

Take the large missile turret and angle the turret upward. Take the animation from the massdriver projectile and scale up the size a little. Do the same as above with the projectile flight path. Paint the thing redish brown. Eyeballed stats.

BLAM!!!!-áMinmatar large artillery turret.

Amarr small turret:

Combine a blaster turret and the animation from the laser rifle. Scale the laser animation up in size a bit. Paint the whole thing gold. Eyeballed stats.

BLAM!!!! Amarr laser turret.

Amarr large turret:

Same as above.

BLAM!!!! Done.

"A respec for vehicle users":

We've already seen how this works. Start immediately.

BLAM!!!! Done.

"Dropship cloaking":

Module is activated dropship animation is removed. Nothing fancy just gone. Specs are eyeballed.

BLAM!!!! Dropship cloaking. Done!

"A new vehicle type":

Speeder:

Take the animation from the LAV. Split the animation down the center. Cut roughly one meter from the center side of each half. Reattach both halves. Take the animation, and, -áfrom front to rear end, squish the animation together slightly (should only have two wheels after it is done). Stats are eyeballed.

BLAM!!!! Speeders.

Race variants:

Take the Gallente stuff (tanks, LAVs, speeders) and paint it gold. All stats are eyeballed for community testing.

BLAM!!!! Amarr suff.

Take the Caldari stuff and paint it redish brown. Copy and past some of the art from the Minmatar medium frame dropsuit (like canisters and all that other crap, scale them up a bit) and slap that stuff onto the Cal vehicles.-áAll stats are eyeballed for community testing.

BLAM!!!! Minmatar stuff.

BLAM!!!! Done!!!!

You guys need interns... without interns an office can't operate. it reduces office stress . Just don't end up like this guy

Out of curiosity, how long do you expect people to be civil in waiting for things promised months ago?

Out of curiosity, how long do you expect people to wait around while you get your house in order?

Out of curiosity, does CCP get some sort of stat when someone biomasses their character?

If I had to guess?

30,000 Man Hours for One Outpost.

Lol@theseresponses. A bunch of children who probably don't know the first thing about game development trying to act like designers.

Seriously guys, the last thing we need is for CCP to rush any more content. No, you're not allowed to be OP again.

Hmm, didn't the ships, suits, etc. have concept art and some modeling done back at fanfest? If so, then the path to completion is something more like finishing up the modeling and the design element that is "stats/balance". The weapons were apparently usable back in fanfest (referring to the missing rifles here), as the dev talked about how nice they looked and how they felt to play with. That was... May?

So, I would think the amount of man-hours for the missing rifles/pistols specifically (if they already had models and were being play-tested) would be relatively small; it's more a matter of balance, and the theoretical role/range profile/etc. was already talked about in a blog since then. Fanfest was over 4 months ago now.

So, on that logic, the weapons should've have already been released if they were already at the point of being tested and having models back then. It makes you wonder on that point if they just withhold things for balancing purposes, since if they don't really get balanced till after being released to us, it might be quicker to have us in on that element.

The vehicles/suits that are missing weren't modeled/playable at the time of fanfest. So, that's basically 2 missing dropships, 2 missing havs, 2 missing lavs, 2 missing light suits, and 3 missing heavy suits (ignore things like missing MCCs, RDVs, etc. for the moment since those are more cosmetic and impact player experience to a lesser degree.). So, of 11 missing models as of four months ago, how are finished now? Presumably the people making maps aren't the same ones making these models.

I dont see how CCP can be so slow at making single items. Sure maps, and all that will take a long time, but single items themselves take very VERY little. I worked on a dev team and we used the unreal engine (before we switched). It took us (a four man team) about 8 hours to make a new weapon. Now this is without skill coding and such but still.

We made a chainsaw and I spend 6 hours cutting threw different body parts of cows to get the right sound files for it. It was enjoyable.

Yep, we did this a lot, we'd be play testing and one of us would say "hey, know what weapon I'd like to see in game" then we spent a day or two straight working on it, adding it and then play testing the next day. God I miss those guys, RIP Dave. ; __ ;

Was called Epic Bar Fight and was never released, our programmer Dave passed away from cancer and we fell apart after that. Was a small indie game, first person melee combat. I was the sound tech / engineer.

I don't think it takes 4 months though.

Mass Effect 3 had a multiplayer mode with its own little dev team, right? It was just a side-mode to a larger game, and they had a separate much smaller team to work on that. Mass Effect 3 also uses the Unreal Engine, so modeling/rendering, etc. is similar. Both are also online shooters.

Mass Effect 3 launched in March of that year.

Resurgence expansion launched in April (1 month later):
2 new maps, 6 more playable characters, 3 new weapons, 4 new consumable items

the Rebellion expansion launched that May for it (2 months later):
2 new maps, 3 new weapons, 6 new playable characters, new equipment slot, new game objective/mode

Earth was released in July (4 months later):
3 new maps, 3 new weapons, 6 more playable characters, 5 weapon mods, 11 gear upgrades, new objective/mode, new difficultly level

Retaliation was released in October (7 months later):
6 variant maps add environmental conditions changing the nature of battle, 16 new characters, 3 weapons, a new enemy faction, 3 new ammo types, 5 new types of gear

Reckoning was released in February (11 months later):
6 more characters, 7 weapons, 5 weapon mods, 2 gear upgrades

These expansions included newly modeled/animated/rendered/voiced/etc. weapons, characters (player models), and maps. Within 1 month of release 3 weapons modeled, animated, etc. and integrated with all prior existing models, and the new 6 characters. In two months, 3 more weapons, 6 more characters, 2 more maps, and in 4 months, another 3 weapons, 6 characters, etc.

All of this happened at the same time as weapons being balanced (balance was tweaked weekly), bug fixes, gameplay mode expansion, and adding new maps.

So, in 4 months, that's 7 maps, 9 weapons, and 18 characters (about 9 actually different models, though you can adjust appearance on them) aside from the other stuff they did. The weapons were also moddable (you can add things like barrel extensions and scopes that visually change the weapon).

In 4 months in Dust, (since Fanfest had the weapons playable) we've seen ZERO new suits, ZERO new weapons, and some new maps.

It takes time to model and animate things, but as another dev team shows using the same engine - it doesn't take that long.

Actually, we're currently topping out at just over 3k concurrent users:

http://eve-offline.net/?server=dust

Mostly because they have no idea what they want to do with vehicles and by extension pilot suits.

I agree with whoever said that Dust needs some new content fast, even unbalanced or buggy ("since that's how we get it anyways"), before the game dries out anymore.

Basically the risk of releasing unpolished content, at this point, does not out weigh the risk of releasing nothing. And again, it'll come out that way anyhow so why not speed up that process and include us in it earlier.

if anything, there should be a respec for everyone. there were so many changes, it would just be fair (or atleast a respc when all racial suits, weapons and vehicles are ingame)

If you think that throwing more money at a coding problem will make it happen faster you need to get the f*** out of IT.

Listen, I am a software developer. I work on applications for oil companies, brokerage firms and large energy companies with project budgets larger than CCP's annual income. Coding accounts for <40% of our time. Most of it is is investigation, design, approval, mockup, approval, (then coding), then unit tests, then fixing, then unit tests again, then QA pass, then staging release, then more QA tests, then full integration tests, then production release planning, then the production mock release, then (finally) the production release.

They are on a 1 month agile release cycle which means 1 week of investigation, design, approval. Then a 2 week sprint of coding. Then 1 week of QA, integration testing and release. And that's if everything works out perfectly. If they find a nasty bug then they miss the release and make it to the next one.

Throwing money at a problem helps to bring on more resources to spread out work. But suddenly adding 10 more programmers wont speed things up, in fact (most times) it slows things down as you need to dedicate man hours to training the new resources and deal with the bugs they will introduce due to not being familiar with the code. Eventually they will get up to speed, but even then you'll probably run into the problem of "too many hands in the cookie jar" which causes you to have to divvy up tasks into micro-projects which causes a nightmare with code merges / task management.


- You yell when CCP doesn't tell you what's coming in the next patch.

- Then when they do tell you whats coming you yell when it's delayed due to it being buggy and scream "release it anyway".

- Then when they do release it anyway you yell that they don't know what they're doing and the new feature is broken and shouldn't have been released.

- Then they don't tell you **** and you yell but they ignore you because no matter what they do you're going to yell.


So for everyone commenting here who doesn't work as a programmer, shut up. I don't come into your workplace and tell you how to flip burgers faster...

Get a degree, or a bunch of certifications (degree for large companies, their HR departments will ignore your resume without one). Learn .NET MVC which is what is in demand right now, and consider adding emphasis on javascript libraries like JQuery, Breeze, Durandal and Knockout. Those are getting big, but could also bubble and die like previous web technologies (cough cough Silverlight). DB knowledge in SQL Server and Oracle always helps.

I am lucky and work in Houston, TX which isn't really known as a "Tech City". However, since we have a lot of the big oil / energy companies here (and more keep coming) there's as large amount of demand for software developers to overhaul their systems and reduce costs. Look for places like that to move to. Where demand for developers is growing quickly but supply is low. Avoid places like Silicon Valley because everyone and their mother who wants to be in software goes there (like Hollywood for actors and New York for MBAs). So you're fighting a lot of competition (but it could pay off handsomely).

Good work, sounds like you have got a plan.

Study these design patterns. RIght now they may not help if concepts such as Interfaces, Abstract Classes, or the difference between Client and Server code are unknown to you (took me awhile). But once you get those concepts down these design patterns help land you big jobs (interviewers love to ask about the Factory Pattern or how to implement a Singleton) and make things a lot easier.