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Staff roles: Balance Dev
(05-19-2023, 10:02 PM)Chronicron Wrote: 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.