A very important topic.

Guys... Im starting to lose faith in this game.

i mean, we have been working on this for what, five years now?

guys, not to be a dick here, but we need a kickstarter or something similar or this project is going to fail and be forgotten.

i love the idea of thrive, but lets face it, we can't keep this up for another five years.

you can do the math for money cuts when you get there.

until then, i will stop posting on the forums for a while.

Work is continuing at the moment. It's a slow time of year.

IMO if you want to get the most out of this project don't focus on the game, focus on what you can learn about while the game is made. Do you know a lot about microbiology? If not maybe this is a good chance to read about it. I have learned a tonne in making this game and that has made my time worth it many times over.

We've discussed taking money but the problem is it will ruin everything. First there will be the question of how to split it up. Second who wants to get paid to do something for a while and then go back to doing it for free? Third the people who pledge on kickstarter will expect something on a set timeframe. Fourth the scope of the game is too big to fund long term with kickstarter. Fifth we probably don't have a big enough fan base to raise a lot of money, kickstarter is really for established people.

So that's probably not going to happen.

Sometimes I wish the development would move faster too. If you really want it to learn lua and become a programmer. If you don't want to do that then it'll take the time it takes.

Just out of curiosity, how long would it take to become useful to this game's development if I had no prior knowledge of programming (except for some basic Robot C in a high school robotics class that I lost interest in) if I started learning lua? I'm debating if I should rush to help develop this game, or if I should take my time and maybe learn C++ first before I learn Lua. I am definitely going to learn lua, and I also plan to learn C++ eventually but I really want to be a part of this.

I don't agree that without Kickstarter Thrive will fail. Sure, progress will be slow but I'm pretty confident there will always be people carrying the project on for their own interest, if nothing else.

0eragonbioly0 wrote:

Just out of curiosity, how long would it take to become useful to this game's development if I had no prior knowledge of programming (except for some basic Robot C in a high school robotics class that I lost interest in) if I started learning lua? I'm debating if I should rush to help develop this game, or if I should take my time and maybe learn C++ first before I learn Lua. I am definitely going to learn lua, and I also plan to learn C++ eventually but I really want to be a part of this.

My suggestion if you want to program (and I am a very weak programmer and you should probably be looking for advice from moopli or jonj or someone like that) is to try out something like this

https://projecteuler.net/archives

it's a big list of problems. You can solve them in any programming language you like, that's not important. What it will do is get you stuck on some programming problems. Do you like being stuck on programming problems?

If yes then maybe you could invest some time into learning more.

If no then you will never be a good programmer.

Basically you have to like problem solving and also problem solving with programming. It can be super fun and rewarding and it can also be a terrible, pedantic, grind.

That's my suggestion anyway, have a go at some of the problems and see how you get on.

As I say seek better advice.

Thanks! I have always likes problem solving, so I should be ok. Can't wait for this game to come out. I guess Ill have to play spore while I wait for it...

Programming seems to be the biggest problem area we currently have. It's not that we don't get enough programmers, and it's not that the code isn't good. I never started to help on this project because I couldn't set things up. A big problem is for new people or hobbyist like myself who know how to code can't or don't want to overcome the intro barrier of setting up a new IDE, and figuring out someone else's code.
Nothing is going to get done sitting here complaining about it, we can either find a way to rework the way we do the entire programming system which has a possibility of devastating everything or wait for the few who actually work on the game. Or the last resort, you know help program on it.
Also for all the people that ask about a kickstarter recently, it would literally take of millions of dollars. We are trying to do a project on a massive scale, with high quality. We wouldn't even raise $100,000 on our current prototype.

Hughie72 wrote:

i mean, we have been working on this for what, five years now?

Don't say "we", say "you". You aren't a developer, you're some guy on the internet who's asking the developers to do something. You want us to make this game faster, likely so you and others can have it sooner. Nothing wrong with that. However, most of us developers (I haven't asked everybody) work on this game simply because we enjoy working on it, which means our preferred pace is probably slower than yours. In essence, it's a mismatch of priorities.

Quote :

until then, i will stop posting on the forums for a while.

Good idea. This is the dev forum, and griping about how you've lost faith may be on-topic somewhere there, but not really here.

tjwhale wrote:

Sometimes I wish the development would move faster too

Same here.

Earthium has a great point, the game is finicky to get a build setup started with, and of course, it's C++, with a home-grown engine, which also serves as a barrier to entry. Some people some time ago suggested switching to UE4 to reduce those barriers (and of course, make a bunch of our development work easier), and I dismissed them before but I'm looking into it a bit more seriously now. I'm not sure yet how/if we could port everything, so I can't say yet whether it would be a godsend or would end up being a few months wasted. There are a few risks I've uncovered so far, like the component system (which isn't yet super-flexible), but I'll keep looking into it.

I feel like it would be easier to change this to the community forums. it's already used like it. How many true devs do we have, I mean the people who have contributed something since thrive started, like 20? This is the first thing that comes up when you google thrive game forum so, obviously we are going to get irrelevant posts.

I am for switching to UE4, essentially what we are doing now is going very slow, and if you don't have any drastic changes the development will continue to go slow. I think before we go overboard we should maybe have a poll asking people would prefer they have. I'm for dropping lua we need to make this project the simplest it can possibly be, and if that means sacrificing making thrive a multi-platform game, or restarting the project, so be it. Also it would be wise to not drop everything, if you randomly decide to go with like opengl or anything that would scrap the entire project, split the development team and see where people work, and if the old development team sticks to the old and no one touches the new half just drop it and continue where you left off there is no need to scrap everything, you can always jump back to a backup if whatever you choose doesn't work.