User:Sebilis/Fin du conte

Pluribus: Ok all, Lets get this started.... First let me that tale has been a great game since I started playing it in 2001. This telling has been a blast. I cant remember a smoother one really from things working. I really hope that all of you have enjoyed it.

However, it is with a heavy heart that I need to annouce that this will be last telling as things are currently.

To be blunt, the game has barely paid its bills, I personally havent taken pay from it since I took over in early 2014.

For those of you in the US, you will understand this next part. I am a small business that got squeezed for an extra $1200/month in health insurance cost increases for the coming year. I cant absorb that plus the constantly increasing taxes in my state and afford to live.

Combine that with the costs needed to make the majority of players happy, and I dont see any other choice. (Hint: I am a single guy company, so requests for "Just rewrite the game engine and redo all the game graphics to rival the AAA game companies with multimillion dollar budgets" isnt realisitc.

What have I looked at? I CAN list the game on steam, however, there are two graphics issues that really would kill me in steam reviews... (The sky that peeks through the terrain occasionally, and the !@#$%^ Intel driver on Windows 10 which seems to kill terrain rendering.) Both require a rewrite of the terrain engine to correct. So far every OpenGL programmer who has looked at it has run screaming away and refuse the contract)

The REAL fix is to rewrite the entire render engine from scratch, however that is prohibitively expensive for this game to fund. The side issue with rewriting the render engine is that there is a large chance of breaking exisiting art resources. Some of you may not be aware, but sometime toward the end of T4, Teppy experienced a double drive failure on his storage array and lost the majority of the source artwork for the redone graphics. That means that any of that artwork that needs modification would need to be remade from scratch.

The Windows 10 compatibility with the Intel graphics driver is a primary blocker for Steam. (The percentage of players with it and the resulting bad reviews would kill the game on steam) Steam is a huge risk as well since they require 30% of revenue to use them as a distriburtion platform

Tehn: and I assume Steam doesn't mean they do the web hosting to reduce your ongoing costs, right?

Pluribus: Correct. Nor do they host the game servers

The issue with kickstarter.... There is a ton of work that needs to go into the running a kickstarter and it is a purely all or nothing thing

to Rhoam, YadNi: eCal3D was spun off of Cal3d 0.7 many years ago and has a slightly different file format and structure. They submitted everything upstream but they didnt like how Teppy/Josh did model scaling. to Yendor: All existing art resources are done in (at the latest) 3DS Max 9.0 I havent had too much success in getting the exporter plugin to work on anything newer

Here are the options as I see them. (People can bring up others if they think of them) 1) Raise prices to actually cover my expenses (Not really realistic, Most players who left reasons for cancelling cited financial or cost reasons) 2) Steam (already discussed.) 3) Patreon - Possibly the most likely to draw players.... 4) Convert to FtP model and nickel/dime everyone for everything

Just to keep the servers alive, pay business insurance, pay taxes, payment processing etc... runs about $900/month (about 1/3 of that is actual servers) but that is absolute min to keep servers alive while I works elsewhere.

Remember, I actually have to spend money on lawyers right now because we have had players threaten lawsuits over content they didnt like.

Costs are constant. The full telling model worked well for this telling. The insane personal costs are what is the killer.

Knuumbaf: so, if the players covered the minimum for keeping the severs alive with minimum involvement for you, could the game be ran as a bastet style automated mode, where GMs (obviolsuly more would be needd) ran the weekly passes etc. Meaning no mre new tests or content, but a new telling/T7 replica?

Pluribus: Knuumbaf, that is pretty much it. I may be able to get some changes in before getting a new job, as long as there is semi agreement on what people would like to see (and it is realistic)

I may even be able to get the test passings totally automated. (That actually was on my list for T7 but never got it done)

Yeah, you dont want to know what I had planned if I went FtP mode... (Inventory capped at 10 item, Initiations only, buy more inventory, TT, each offline chore, each test....)

Rhoam, Worst possible outcome with kickstarter.... I spend 6 months of my life working on the campaign, promo videos etc, to have it NOT make its goal, and I personally go broke because I had no other income while working on it.... (You did say worst case) (That and the fact that I have never done one personally and really have NO idea how to go about a successful one)

Knuumbaf: have you explored the possibility of sellig the game to another developer/company? I know it's hard to make money on ATITD and I love how you have brought Tale back to life, yet its perhaps possibility, maybe to another legacy player/group of players.

Pluribus: Actually, I got a question about that just today. It is possible, but I can say definatively, there are very few people who understand the server architecture and script code. There is a FAIR learning curve. (Not terrible, but not easy) has a licenese to use the engine in his own game, but ATITD kinda put that on the back burner... it required a LOT of care and feeding to get this solid.

The hosting (while expensive) is fairly easy for the players to cover. It is the getting the added funding for game enhancements and covering my expenses.... The game engine enhancements are the expensive ones.

tehm, The vast majority of the "new" tests are me bringing back all the old tests that got killed with the player legacy tests.

The wiki is running on a machine that Teppy has been paying for forever, and which I in reality owe him for paying for. in adition to the server that I setup in 2014 to get moved to that is running on modern hardware.... I ownly had one requirement, it had to run a supported version of wiki software since thier authentication had been hacked at least once before... Alas, there seems to be no interest in supporting the wiki.... so I pay for 2 servers ....

Ok, here is my plan for the end of T7. I have to get one piece of artwork uploaded and working and I will release the last Test, (Alchemists Rune) I will probably release the monuments shortly after that...

I would expect mod Feb.... Exact date gets set with release of monuments

Orchestra is dead for now.... That one is an issue with the way the audio was handled... (It is actually coded as a sprite system that winds up being framerate dependant so sounds are 100% impossible to syncronize)

New engine is only possible with a LARGE influx of cash (Thing 1-2 years of a good OpenGL coder, so roughly $200K+ loaded cost.)

blablablabla

Ok so to summarize things just to make sure we are thinking the same things... 1) General concensus is that a replay of T7 is acceptable (Personally, I would still re-arrange the regions, and change world seeds. (The random seeds that control where things are when they have a random component) 2) indiegogo / gofundme / patreon for ongoing work? with end goal to prep for steam or larger rollout