The majority feel favorable about our progress, a third don't feel either way, and a small fraction feel unfavorable.
An even larger majority can notice our divergence from Tremulous. The remainder are split between not noticing it and not being sure.
Most people are on the new renderer. This is good, because we want to kill it soon. We don't see a point in maintaining the legacy renderer.
Nice, most of you are Linux users. One guy actually put Android down as his OS, if you wonder what "Other" was.
This is what I don't get. People complain about not being able to run or install the game, but the vast majority say they don't have problems.
Nearly everyone picked gameplay as one of the things they cared the most about, even more than the next two highest-scoring choices combined. Very few people seem to care about sounds, models, or renderer effects. Oddly enough, more people picked gameplay than players. Don't you need players to experience gameplay? Regardless, there is an important point I want to stress. If you care so much about gameplay, come to the development games. They are where we test new gameplay features and you can give your feedback on them. Otherwise, you don't have much of a basis to complain about things. It's like complaining about how a politician acts when you didn't bother to vote in the election.
Those were the short responses. Now I will answer some of the longer ones that I feel qualified to answer. Perhaps the other heads will reply to the survey results that fall more under their own domains.
The development pace is slower than most other games, especially asset generation, but it's good for an independent, nonprofit dev team.
We don't have much control over that. I do my best to constantly recruit new artists for the team, but here's the thing. Half of the new artists don't get around to picking out an assignment, half of those don't end up finishing their assignments and the other half don't end up reaching a second assignment when they're done with the first. There's no profit incentive, all of us are working out of our free time. Sometimes we get cool people that are hobbyists, and they stick around for years. Other times we get people who are just looking to put something on their portfolios. That is perfectly fine to me, and we get a cool model from their effort, but I would appreciate it if they were at least open about only being able to complete one thing before vanishing. However, that only really applies to modelers. Our mappers have stuck around for a very long time, and we have some great concept artists. Hilariously, we have gotten dozens of sound effects people, and none of them have produced a single sound before vanishing.
However the game is really unpolished, I guess it is normal since you are in beta but the menus are terrible, the game doesn't look like the advertisement screenshots. Also there is noone to play with :(
Yes, we know. The lack of a consistent playerbase is something we are trying to work on at all times, which is why we have those weekly development games and we're trying to expand with new time slots and events. Our general consensus is that things are going to pick up in beta, because during beta you won't have to install every single month, and a stable community will be able to form. With regards to the menus, wait for when we add librocket. You're going to love how the new menus are going to look.
I would like to be able to add bots to a locally hosted game without screaming at my metal tippy-tappy machine in frustration at a guideless console.
Haha, yeah, I know. One thing I've been proposing is an "instant action" mode where you can either choose to automatically connect to the server with the best ping and most players, or a sort of single playe with bots. This will need to wait for librocket before we start doing that, because it's mostly just interface-side.
The GL renderer is holding us back. To become more recognized we need to dump old tech and move on, yes some fans won't be able to play but in the end game it will be useful to making more people play the game and enjoying it.
The presence of the vanilla GL1 renderer is one that I've found absurd. Why do we need to support hardware that is a decade old? It's only going to become more ridiculous in a few years when some of that hardware is going to be older than our players. Getting rid of it will mean we only need to support the GL3 renderer, and everyone will be able to see things like they're actually supposed to look, because the legacy renderer makes things look downright awful. Also, if your hardware is not capable of GL3, you may want to consider a graphics card more recent than the Bush presidency.
A few of the alien models don't really match up
I think this is kind of unavoidable given our circumstances. With a commercial game you'd have a single guy or a couple of them working off the same artwork and doing everything all together in a period of months. For us, we have had multiple artists working off multiple concept artists over the span of two years. We try our best to make the aliens look consistent, but we take what we get.
Not enough progress. I realize this is all being done free of charge, and on everyones spare time with very few developers, however I feel like things should still be progressing a bit faster.
They can't, exactly for the reasons you specified. If someone is working on their spare time, you can't make them work faster, they're already working as fast as they want to. Nobody wants to make a full-time job out of something that does not pay money. If we were a commercial team, we'd have a finished game by this point, but we're not. Personally, I find it more impressive that we managed to do all of thus without a budget and with full commitment to open source and free assets. Our engine has been public from day one and we've never hidden any assets, they're released the moment they're done. It will take a while, but be patient and you'll have your Tremulous successor in a couple of years.
I have always disliked map editors for the id Tech engines. Especially Radiant. It's no wonder games with tiny communities like Red Eclipse have so many maps, as their editors are so easy to use (but still very powerful). This is not really Unvanquished's fault though.
Yeah, nothing we can do about that. We're stuck with Radiant. It's awful, it has a steep learning curve, and there are features we want to add but cannot add because of how awkward it all is. We do what we can, and I'm grateful that we have some Radiant experts around that can actually make maps with it, but otherwise we're screwed in that regard. On the other hand, it forces us to focus on quality. Would you rather have a handful of amazing maps with nice effects and great gameplay, or several dozen crappy maps? The barrier of entry works in both directions, you know.
