Griefed. I had to play plants vs zombies yesterday night since it actually works. I understand why you wrote your own rendering engine but I hate you for it. Why not you just licenced the old HL2 souce engine since the very beggining while saving all the money and failboat in development; it would be a fast prototyping with most bugs in physics, performance & compatibility issues and netcode kinda fixed at a comparatively low price; I would pay twice the special edition for a plain polished working mod of it after some years waiting for this game. It was unable to run in a decent rig I build just for it with top hardware. 2 more years minimum for somehting playable since you can't give away your source code so we can't really help you with your black box. So basically all you are getting is spam while the SDK has, instead a huge coding community solving problems. Seems like you have been bitting more than you can actually chew. And we are your hostages.
<!--quoteo(post=1786593:date=Jul 27 2010, 08:02 PM:name=31337)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (31337 @ Jul 27 2010, 08:02 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1786593"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Griefed. I had to play plants vs zombies yesterday night since it actually works. I understand why you wrote your own rendering engine but I hate you for it. Why not you just licenced the old HL2 souce engine since the very beggining while saving all the money and failboat in development; it would be a fast prototyping with most bugs in physics, performance & compatibility issues and netcode kinda fixed at a comparatively low price; I would pay twice the special edition for a plain polished working mod of it after some years waiting for this game. It was unable to run in a decent rig I build just for it with top hardware. 2 more years minimum for somehting playable since you can't give away your source code so we can't really help you with your black box. So basically all you are getting is spam while the SDK has, instead a huge coding community solving problems. Seems like you have been bitting more than you can actually chew. And we are your hostages.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Because they wanted to. As someone who does a fair amount of programming, including OpenGL stuff, I can see why they wanted to make their own engine instead of licensing an outdated one from a larger company.
I get as far as choosing a server and it "attempts to connect" forever. Nothing I can do will allow me to exit. WHY????
Then I try to create a game and it just plays some background stuff and I see nothing but a very black screen. It then crashes and I'm asked to send off a debug report which I do.
Someone having a joke at my expense right?
I've got bog standard Windows XP Pro sp3 with a AMD 2.8GHz quad Core, 4GB of RAM and ATI Radeon HD 3400 pcie GPU.
Plays all my usual Steam games perfectly.
No doubt this will be my second attempt to report total failure and the second time I'll get no feedback from the developers on when they'll fix my problem.
I've discovered I can get into the main room (I can see Go Marines portal in the corner) if I set my NS2 res settings to 1280x800 (non-windowed) AND set my desktop to this.
But it is little good as the mouse doesn't work and it generates a debug report right away.
<!--quoteo(post=1786631:date=Jul 27 2010, 01:35 PM:name=bigsteve)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (bigsteve @ Jul 27 2010, 01:35 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1786631"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I never got the mail with the code, have i done something wrong?????<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I think the email servers were maxed out for a while. If you didn't get yours still, though, you can retrieve your keys:
Put in your personal e-mail address (or the e-mail address of your paypal account, if you paid that way), and it'll e-mail you the special edition and black armor codes.
The black armor code is the one you have to register with Steam in order to gain alpha access. (I used them both - Special Edition key for the game download, black armor code for alpha access.)
Hope this helps!
Now to address something else...
<!--quoteo(post=0:date=Jul 27 2010, 01:02 PM:name=31337)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (31337 @ Jul 27 2010, 01:02 PM)</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Griefed. I had to play plants vs zombies yesterday night since it actually works. I understand why you wrote your own rendering engine but I hate you for it. Why not you just licenced the old HL2 souce engine since the very beggining while saving all the money and failboat in development; it would be a fast prototyping with most bugs in physics, performance & compatibility issues and netcode kinda fixed at a comparatively low price; I would pay twice the special edition for a plain polished working mod of it after some years waiting for this game.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
First of all, I would imagine that if the Half-Life 2 engine would have been more applicable to what Unknown Worlds Entertainment was doing, they would have licensed it and used it for production. Natural Selection 2 and its dynamics seem like they are in a completely different place than Half-Life 2... it may very well have been more work to try to hack and use the Source engine than it was to build from the ground up - I don't know for sure, I personally haven't worked with it.
To my understanding, most "plain, polished" games and mods have large development teams, or a large number of smaller teams working on various game aspects. Unknown Worlds Entertainment is a smaller, independent company with a single small team of developers. Considering their numbers, what they've accomplished in the amount of time that they've been working on this game is amazing.
Writing code for games is a completely different animal than writing code for anything else; to give some perspective, a team of four other people and myself created two relatively buggy, two-dimensional games in about a six week period. The first was more "finished" than the second; but they were far from "production quality," and a far cry from anything currently out on the market. They were basically graphic aids to teach computer science concepts, and the ONLY reason we were able to get it done in that small of a time frame was because we used Python and Pygame for everything. Python eliminated most (if not all) of our syntax errors and simplified a lot of otherwise-painful concepts.
Adding that third dimension of graphics adds an almost exponential amount of time to any project. For one moving model, you have to build the model, generate the wireframe in order to create the texture, create the texture, apply the texture to your model and make sure that its attached and weighted properly, and if you're creating animations for it, you have to animate it and check through it quite a few times to make sure it's perfect. For the number of models in this game, that process alone could take months.
That's not even taking into account having to create texture packs for various structures and things throughout the game, and I don't even know how the "dynamic infestation" texturing works itself.
That's also not taking into account the code back-end that has to be developed to make those models move and react to game events - to make the game a game, instead of a pretty-looking model display gallery.
To put things into perspective, I believe that each of our two games consisted of something on the order of 12,000 lines of code. Again, that's less than it would be in another language, because we used Python.
Unknown Worlds Entertainment may or may not have used Python for their game engine, and if not, there's <i>way</i> more than 12,000 lines of code for NS2. That many lines of code to debug for just syntax errors, could take months, not taking into account code refactoring as the design of the game changes during production. That also doesn't take into account the logic errors that don't show when a compiler runs through the code.
In short, it's absolutely amazing that Unknown Worlds Entertainment was able to produce a game with the complexity of Natural Selection 2 in the time frame that they have, even if it is only in its alpha stages. Creating your own game engine to handle physics is no easy task, and I'm sure they knew that and took into account every option they had before they decided to bite the bullet and code it all on their own.
Which brings me to another point...
<!--quoteo(post=0:date=Jul 27 2010, 01:02 PM:name=31337)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (31337 @ Jul 27 2010, 01:02 PM)</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->It was unable to run in a decent rig I build just for it with top hardware. 2 more years minimum for somehting playable since you can't give away your source code so we can't really help you with your black box. So basically all you are getting is spam while the SDK has, instead a huge coding community solving problems. Seems like you have been bitting more than you can actually chew. And we are your hostages.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The performance issues right now are the least of their concerns. As I've seen posted just about everywhere else, it's an alpha -- just because it runs, doesn't mean it runs well. It's not shipping quality yet, and it's really been opened so that the community can help debug issues that wouldn't be apparent unless deployed to a larger number of people... such as the networking bug. Since we can't modify the game's source code, we can still help; the more information we are able to provide about bugs, the easier it is for the developers to narrow down their search to relevant code. I believe that was the whole idea behind the alpha release.
As far as "biting off more than [they] can chew," I don't think that. I'd say that they undertook an extremely ambitious project, but it was the same way with NS1 - the only other mod I'd seen close to what NS1 did was Vampire Slayer, and all of those were still human...
I wouldn't so much say "hostages" as "testers." I think that was the point... including the community every step of the way, even allowing us to test and provide feedback on products that Unknown Worlds Entertainment knows aren't ready for full deployment yet.
...I think I'm done with my rant now. Apologies if I was offensive, but I was trying to put the achievement of an alpha-level product of this complexity into a bit of perspective.
<!--quoteo(post=1786706:date=Jul 27 2010, 02:37 PM:name=quatermass)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (quatermass @ Jul 27 2010, 02:37 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1786706"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I've discovered I can get into the main room (I can see Go Marines portal in the corner) if I set my NS2 res settings to 1280x800 (non-windowed) AND set my desktop to this.
But it is little good as the mouse doesn't work and it generates a debug report right away.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Have you posted in their feedback forum for this? If you can't get to it in-game, the link is here: <a href="http://getsatisfaction.com/unknownworlds" target="_blank">http://getsatisfaction.com/unknownworlds</a>
It's a cool little network they've got set up to report bugs and other issues. I'd post there and provide as much information about the hardware you're running and the issues you're having. What causes the error? What information does the debug provide, if it gives you a preview of it? Little things like that will help them find problematic code.
<!--quoteo(post=1786468:date=Jul 27 2010, 06:28 PM:name=gobot)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (gobot @ Jul 27 2010, 06:28 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1786468"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->The switch axe was a really great idea :) I like it<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
You know, I thought it was going to be stupid and I would hate it. But it actually fits in pretty well.
Nice essay Keilaria, I didn't get to the room you mentioned; I would like to practice the teletransporting-fadelike-rines fun with you guys but sadly I just drooled at the start screen and the beautiful black scifi-like screen with little fail characters. Was epic I have to confess.
I know it is an alpha and have always been a part of the patient supportive community. BUT you gotta fix the lag issues so we can give you reasonable amount of feedback. I can't discover any bugs at all
<!--quoteo(post=1786655:date=Jul 28 2010, 04:00 AM:name=quatermass)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (quatermass @ Jul 28 2010, 04:00 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1786655"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Yet another version that doesn't work.
I get as far as choosing a server and it "attempts to connect" forever. Nothing I can do will allow me to exit. WHY????
Then I try to create a game and it just plays some background stuff and I see nothing but a very black screen. It then crashes and I'm asked to send off a debug report which I do.
Someone having a joke at my expense right?
I've got bog standard Windows XP Pro sp3 with a AMD 2.8GHz quad Core, 4GB of RAM and ATI Radeon HD 3400 pcie GPU.
Plays all my usual Steam games perfectly.
No doubt this will be my second attempt to report total failure and the second time I'll get no feedback from the developers on when they'll fix my problem.
This game was suppose to be out by now....<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> Its called Alpha release For a reason.
First of because I didn't know about this sequel before and now that I can't get the the SE anymore. But that's life, I was too softcore to keep track.
Nevertheless, the attitude you chose towards the community seems flawless and may easily lead to the same or greater effect as it happened with Killing Floor per say (you can't deny the massive sales this development attitude granted for the game, albeit it's far from a golden title).
As a last note, I can see the developers are very much interested in making this a highly valued competitive title. As an admin on ESL L4D/L4D2 EU sections and an oldschool competitive player, I am very much interested in helping that happen. The German section has already established some news about the game, but I am unaware about any more direct cooperation ESL-wide. In case the developers are interested, please let me know.
The whole thing just looks too good to pass by, great work.
Im getting the same problem just like a lot o people , Once a try to enter the game there is only a black screen and the debug report:
log.txt minidump.dmp
can someone tell me how to fix it?????? u guys could at least post a tutorial on how to install it so we know if we are doing the right thing or its just a bug waiting to be fixed
Comments
pleeeeeeeeeeeeease.....cn't w8 till home..
Because they wanted to. As someone who does a fair amount of programming, including OpenGL stuff, I can see why they wanted to make their own engine instead of licensing an outdated one from a larger company.
I get as far as choosing a server and it "attempts to connect" forever.
Nothing I can do will allow me to exit. WHY????
Then I try to create a game and it just plays some background stuff and I see nothing but a very black screen.
It then crashes and I'm asked to send off a debug report which I do.
Someone having a joke at my expense right?
I've got bog standard Windows XP Pro sp3 with a AMD 2.8GHz quad Core, 4GB of RAM and ATI Radeon HD 3400 pcie GPU.
Plays all my usual Steam games perfectly.
No doubt this will be my second attempt to report total failure and the second time I'll get no feedback from the developers on when they'll fix my problem.
This game was suppose to be out by now....
But it is little good as the mouse doesn't work and it generates a debug report right away.
I think the email servers were maxed out for a while. If you didn't get yours still, though, you can retrieve your keys:
<a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/retrieve" target="_blank">http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/retrieve</a>
Put in your personal e-mail address (or the e-mail address of your paypal account, if you paid that way), and it'll e-mail you the special edition and black armor codes.
The black armor code is the one you have to register with Steam in order to gain alpha access. (I used them both - Special Edition key for the game download, black armor code for alpha access.)
Hope this helps!
Now to address something else...
<!--quoteo(post=0:date=Jul 27 2010, 01:02 PM:name=31337)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (31337 @ Jul 27 2010, 01:02 PM)</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Griefed. I had to play plants vs zombies yesterday night since it actually works. I understand why you wrote your own rendering engine but I hate you for it. Why not you just licenced the old HL2 souce engine since the very beggining while saving all the money and failboat in development; it would be a fast prototyping with most bugs in physics, performance & compatibility issues and netcode kinda fixed at a comparatively low price; I would pay twice the special edition for a plain polished working mod of it after some years waiting for this game.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
First of all, I would imagine that if the Half-Life 2 engine would have been more applicable to what Unknown Worlds Entertainment was doing, they would have licensed it and used it for production. Natural Selection 2 and its dynamics seem like they are in a completely different place than Half-Life 2... it may very well have been more work to try to hack and use the Source engine than it was to build from the ground up - I don't know for sure, I personally haven't worked with it.
To my understanding, most "plain, polished" games and mods have large development teams, or a large number of smaller teams working on various game aspects. Unknown Worlds Entertainment is a smaller, independent company with a single small team of developers. Considering their numbers, what they've accomplished in the amount of time that they've been working on this game is amazing.
Writing code for games is a completely different animal than writing code for anything else; to give some perspective, a team of four other people and myself created two relatively buggy, two-dimensional games in about a six week period. The first was more "finished" than the second; but they were far from "production quality," and a far cry from anything currently out on the market. They were basically graphic aids to teach computer science concepts, and the ONLY reason we were able to get it done in that small of a time frame was because we used Python and Pygame for everything. Python eliminated most (if not all) of our syntax errors and simplified a lot of otherwise-painful concepts.
Adding that third dimension of graphics adds an almost exponential amount of time to any project. For one moving model, you have to build the model, generate the wireframe in order to create the texture, create the texture, apply the texture to your model and make sure that its attached and weighted properly, and if you're creating animations for it, you have to animate it and check through it quite a few times to make sure it's perfect. For the number of models in this game, that process alone could take months.
That's not even taking into account having to create texture packs for various structures and things throughout the game, and I don't even know how the "dynamic infestation" texturing works itself.
That's also not taking into account the code back-end that has to be developed to make those models move and react to game events - to make the game a game, instead of a pretty-looking model display gallery.
To put things into perspective, I believe that each of our two games consisted of something on the order of 12,000 lines of code. Again, that's less than it would be in another language, because we used Python.
Unknown Worlds Entertainment may or may not have used Python for their game engine, and if not, there's <i>way</i> more than 12,000 lines of code for NS2. That many lines of code to debug for just syntax errors, could take months, not taking into account code refactoring as the design of the game changes during production. That also doesn't take into account the logic errors that don't show when a compiler runs through the code.
In short, it's absolutely amazing that Unknown Worlds Entertainment was able to produce a game with the complexity of Natural Selection 2 in the time frame that they have, even if it is only in its alpha stages. Creating your own game engine to handle physics is no easy task, and I'm sure they knew that and took into account every option they had before they decided to bite the bullet and code it all on their own.
Which brings me to another point...
<!--quoteo(post=0:date=Jul 27 2010, 01:02 PM:name=31337)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (31337 @ Jul 27 2010, 01:02 PM)</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->It was unable to run in a decent rig I build just for it with top hardware. 2 more years minimum for somehting playable since you can't give away your source code so we can't really help you with your black box. So basically all you are getting is spam while the SDK has, instead a huge coding community solving problems. Seems like you have been bitting more than you can actually chew. And we are your hostages.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The performance issues right now are the least of their concerns. As I've seen posted just about everywhere else, it's an alpha -- just because it runs, doesn't mean it runs well. It's not shipping quality yet, and it's really been opened so that the community can help debug issues that wouldn't be apparent unless deployed to a larger number of people... such as the networking bug. Since we can't modify the game's source code, we can still help; the more information we are able to provide about bugs, the easier it is for the developers to narrow down their search to relevant code. I believe that was the whole idea behind the alpha release.
As far as "biting off more than [they] can chew," I don't think that. I'd say that they undertook an extremely ambitious project, but it was the same way with NS1 - the only other mod I'd seen close to what NS1 did was Vampire Slayer, and all of those were still human...
I wouldn't so much say "hostages" as "testers." I think that was the point... including the community every step of the way, even allowing us to test and provide feedback on products that Unknown Worlds Entertainment knows aren't ready for full deployment yet.
...I think I'm done with my rant now. Apologies if I was offensive, but I was trying to put the achievement of an alpha-level product of this complexity into a bit of perspective.
But it is little good as the mouse doesn't work and it generates a debug report right away.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Have you posted in their feedback forum for this? If you can't get to it in-game, the link is here:
<a href="http://getsatisfaction.com/unknownworlds" target="_blank">http://getsatisfaction.com/unknownworlds</a>
It's a cool little network they've got set up to report bugs and other issues. I'd post there and provide as much information about the hardware you're running and the issues you're having. What causes the error? What information does the debug provide, if it gives you a preview of it? Little things like that will help them find problematic code.
You know, I thought it was going to be stupid and I would hate it. But it actually fits in pretty well.
The weapons look and sound great, the map looks good, I love the way the structures I've seen so far work.
I can tell this is going to be the making of something fantastic.
Also the switch axe is badass.
the first, former intro soundtrack was better
I get as far as choosing a server and it "attempts to connect" forever.
Nothing I can do will allow me to exit. WHY????
Then I try to create a game and it just plays some background stuff and I see nothing but a very black screen.
It then crashes and I'm asked to send off a debug report which I do.
Someone having a joke at my expense right?
I've got bog standard Windows XP Pro sp3 with a AMD 2.8GHz quad Core, 4GB of RAM and ATI Radeon HD 3400 pcie GPU.
Plays all my usual Steam games perfectly.
No doubt this will be my second attempt to report total failure and the second time I'll get no feedback from the developers on when they'll fix my problem.
This game was suppose to be out by now....<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Its called Alpha release For a reason.
I wish my graphics card hadn't burned out on me. The game still boots up on my integrated card, but runs at about 1 fps.
First of because I didn't know about this sequel before and now that I can't get the the SE anymore.
But that's life, I was too softcore to keep track.
Nevertheless, the attitude you chose towards the community seems flawless and may easily lead to the same or greater effect as it happened with Killing Floor per say (you can't deny the massive sales this development attitude granted for the game, albeit it's far from a golden title).
As a last note, I can see the developers are very much interested in making this a highly valued competitive title. As an admin on ESL L4D/L4D2 EU sections and an oldschool competitive player, I am very much interested in helping that happen.
The German section has already established some news about the game, but I am unaware about any more direct cooperation ESL-wide.
In case the developers are interested, please let me know.
The whole thing just looks too good to pass by, great work.
log.txt
minidump.dmp
Anyone got any idea of what I've done wrong?
Once a try to enter the game there is only a black screen and the debug report:
log.txt
minidump.dmp
can someone tell me how to fix it??????
u guys could at least post a tutorial on how to install it so we know if we are doing the right thing or its just a bug waiting to be fixed
thnx