MaceMadunusus

Because buying at release time usually means theres reviews out for the game provided there is no post-release embargos (and in which case is usually a dead giveaway that the game is crap like batman arkham knight and assassins creed unity) that include the full content more than just the beta. Like for example, Total Biscuit could have his review out on release which gives you a more full picture of what the game is like than a few trailers. Read reviews before you buy anything people. That is why you are an idiot if you preorder. Do you go buy PC parts without reading reviews? Nope. Do you go buy a car without reading reviews to see if it has high maintenance for example, nope. Would you go to a movie if you knew the reviews were crap (I'm not talking about the meh 5-7 range, more like a 2-3/10 range)? Nope. Should you buy anything without reading reviews? nope. Then why are you doing it with a video game?! Are reviews out for Battlefront yet? Nope. Then should you buy? Nope. Video is 2 years old but a lot still applies. Protect yourself. The pre-order bonuses are not worth you potentially getting figuratively shot in the gut by a terrible game.

Wait, don't you mean brushing Warfighter, Battlefield 4, Hardline, Mass Effect 3, Sim City, Sims 4, Titanfall, Need for Speed, The Old Republic, under the rug?

You completely missed the point where EA is going to be making a 70-80% profit on it. Which means the value per box is $12-18. It becomes $30 because they still have to make a profit. BUT OKAY LETS IGNORE THAT. You cannot disagree that it is only a $30 value. There is no opinion for that. It is a fact that based on numbers alone, you are overpaying.

The UI covers 2.5 of 13 pages. And the rest of it definitely isn't just PC issues. Half of the things, especially the level design stuff is far from personal preference and you're just dismissing it all on the basis of that. I kinda started level design 12 years ago you know that right? It isn't like it is a new topic to me. Kinda know what I'm talking about there. Want to see what a lot of effort it takes to creating good balanced levels? Check out Dirty Bomb. Battlefront doesn't even come close. You can like the game, and I would like the game if it was a $30 release from an indie team as that is what this game actually is. It isn't AAA quality and nor does it have the content to justify a $60 purchase. I'm never going to insult someone for liking a game. You can like what you want. You are a complete idiot for pre-ordering though. If you want to have even better games STOP PRE-ORDERING

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lmobunOdWI9F1bGVGUjWZxwak0DxXjzUMgDsrA_TIgc/edit Read this. Seriously read it. Every person I have talked to was like, holy crap I didn't realize 90% of this, these are good and well written. You aren't even looking at the valid complaints about it and are blindly falling into EA's trap just like they want you to. The only reason Battlefront doesn't have more is because they wanted to release it before the movie, rather than on a normal game development timeline. They put restrictions on themselves rather than just trying to make a good game and releasing it when it is finished. You see some of my things regarding First/Third person FOV options, or AT-AT crosshair aligning properly? Guess what, I made a system that does both of those in a couple hours for my new game and I'm not even a programmer. Not having things like that IS a half-assed product. And you know enough about the product? Before full game reviews were even out because you tried a beta? Please man. Did you even see the Battlefield 4 Beta vs release? That was a massive shit show that took DICE almost an entire year to fix and like I mentioned in my post and link above, those flaws that were on Battlefield launch were in the beta, and they didn't even add the fixes DICE did recently. I'm not even capable of nitpicking for 13 pages, so I'm just going to throw that statement out of the window.

Alright. I can see you won't be swayed. I guess you're okay with overpaying for something developers didn't take the time or money to make where most of their budget went into art assets. That is something that I feel is horribly wrong with consumers today and is the reason companies like Comcast exist in the first place and are able to extort them for money. Especially when almost all of their content is from the original source models and audio. Imagine what MB would be if we had that. The fact you pre-ordered makes me sick. NEVER PRE-ORDER. The reason for pre-orders doesn't exist anymore with the advent of digital distribution. I guess what ever, people will do anything for their star wars fix even if its utter crap.

Which doesn't exist in the new Battlefront if you read my 13 page reddit post. So many basic quality features present in even current Battlefield titles went completely over their heads. Ya know, like the dead bodies absorbing shots thing that they fixed in BF4 but somehow made its way into Battlefront? Yeah, nice quality there DICE. Oh, and I would like to note this. EA is has 70% profit margins for Q4 2015 and 80% for Q1 2016 respectively based on an internal report. So, lets just take Battlefront for example and the 70% value assuming (and assuming no other game sales) a lot of sales will be around the movie and before Christmas. At this quick and inaccurate calculation, actual cost for Battlefront is $18 per box (For however many millions of copies they expect to sell). Yep, money well spent.

That is roughly in line with everything else said in regard to the Single Player and the amount of levels they have. Usually when you get this close to a game release, there is actually more in those specific files than may actually make it in-game as no one wants to go trim string files for stuff only in the beta (or may have been delayed for DLC/Jakku update). If they wanted to do that, we wouldn't have been able to see any of that content in the first place. When the game is that close to release it is very likely that all of those are in place already because QA already had to go through them by this point. So, in the end that number shouldn't move too much. I can tell you the co-op level count will not move till the jakku update (and who knows if it will then too).

There are 6 single player missions, 4 coop survival missions (one per planet) according to the beta files.

Beta's for companies like EA are nothing but stress tests and demos. I can tell you from playing the alpha almost nothing was fixed. I saw two level bugs fixed, and a couple mechanic bugs. Every single other bug transferred and in fact they created more than they fixed. The game was a little over a month from release during the beta and with all the issues I noted I can tell you that they do not have time to fix all of them.

Yeah, and maintained some of the depth. So there isn't anything wrong with Battlefront being a clone of Battlefield just like Battlegrounds is a clone of Age of Empires for example. Problem being is the current Battlefront took out about 3/4ths of the complexity of current iterations of Battlefield. Okay, but you can't expect to run newer games on a system that old. You just can't. It isn't realistic Edit: Reddit post on my thoughts of battlefront: https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/3p4czq/battlefront_feedbackissues_from_a_movie_battles/

1) Yes but was given until the 27th of September to do it. He manually shut it down 2 weeks before the teams known deadline. 2) That is no excuse. I have Aspergers, have suffered from severe depression, severe enough anxiety attacks that I cause myself to vomit, PTSD (all of those diagnosed) and I still deal with the MB2 communities shit. In fact, He bitched about getting questions every once in a while. I get 3 questions a day almost and I answer every single one of them if I can. It comes with the territory and you have to toughen up and deal with it. If answering basic questions is harassment to anyone, then they need to go look up the definition of the word. He claims harassment when he had a friend of his register an account just to let the entire community know some of what I had gone through when only the team itself knew. He is a piece of shit. 3) Nothing excuses the fact that he intentionally shut the servers down and blocked access while the backup was in progress by lou and jack. Nothing excuses the fact that he intentionally let almost 10 years of movie battles file archives expire. This is the most severe breach of trust in MB2 history. Dacks Zero was permanently removed from the MB team for doing far less. Sxx will never ever be pardoned for what he did regardless of what he was going through. He is old enough to know better. Arguably he was the worst leader we've had on the MB team for other reasons as well. And believe me I know how rough life can get. That is no excuse to do what he did.

I played it, this game ran on an 8 year old computer. Only thing is I happened to upgrade from 4gb to 8gb a few years ago. It is incredibly optimized and no one should have 4GB of RAM anymore, even having a really old PC isn't an excuse.

Announcement post here: https://community.moviebattles.org/threads/downtime-cause-and-consequences.4/

http://jkhub.org/topic/6319-mbii-offline/?do=findComment&comment=93024

There is likely an engine limitation that prevents it, which is why OpenJK is needed.

I played the alpha personally. Even wrote up a pretty big post on my opinions of it on the MB2 forums before they got taken down recently. I'll just give my overall impressions of it really quick. The base gun mechanics felt solid and smooth. However there was zero depth in any of the mechanics. Movement and animations worked well except for a couple locations with the AT-ST that had weird interactions. Level design had both massive overarching flaws as well as little minor ones very obvious to the trained eye. If you watch some of the videos on the alpha you can see some of the massive balance issues the hoth level has which makes me incredibly worried for other levels with how much they pushed that one. Honestly though while it felt good and fun to play, and visual/audio assets were amazing the content did not have the depth or complexity to keep me playing past a few weeks. It gave me the overall impression of a $40 game from a smaller developer, not a $60 AAA franchise reboot. It felt like 90% of their budget was on audio/art and nothing else. I will likely grab it to see if it is actually good (not preordering) and mainly to rip some assets from it. I already ripped some assets out of the alpha just for fun

I can confirm the servers were taken down by a retired lead. All servers were manually taken down and access denied to other developers. We are working to restore them, but I don't know the full plans as webhosting wasn't any area I dealt with. I also do not know how much information was lost. However I do know that some information was saved before things we down, I just don't know how much because access got shut off part way. Hopefully things won't be down too long but I have no guarantees there. For now as mentioned above you can get a server list from here: http://my.jacklul.com/mb2servers/ If you are missing part of the download for the build, it is on moddb here: http://www.moddb.com/mods/movie-battles-ii/downloads/star-wars-movie-battles-ii-v131 I also believe to be able to change the master server you need to be running OpenJK with MB2.

I'm assuming its how the actual saber combat is handled. Which is something that is hard coded into MB2, and without getting a coder to answer, I would say it wouldn't be the easiest to separate. Plus the fact that it is one of the things we would like to keep to ourselves.

Mostly what I did. It wasn't just about converting them straight through though. Everything had to be tested. On the initial run through for example, the RGB model's PNGs didn't convert properly using a simple batch conversion and required a bit of a different process that took slightly longer; then going through the RGB models to make sure everything converted properly without aliasing around the edges. I also had to do the conversion a couple times for some assets because map minimaps were updated in beta, or style changed, or went through a design change. An example of that being originally I just had to convert the mini-maps, but then I went through and removed the BaseJKA backgrounds in the obj screen which required those being converted at a different time.

It is absolutely true, and it was proved in the V1 release of MB2. I spent tons of time converting hundreds of .PNG image files to .TGA. The load time for CommTower was reduced by 20-25 seconds out of ~43 overall second load time (I cant seem to find the exact values) on my computer due to that reduction. That is also just a level, and not every asset is loaded immediately when you load into a level either. Just about everyone I talked to (provided they had the same settings) also experienced much quicker load times. Eez is also correct in the fact that when compression happens, TGA does in fact roughly mimic the PNG in size (Sometimes the same, sometimes slightly higher, sometimes slightly lower but it usually ends up being very close in the end).

Bot support would be really difficult for us to add with our current level of manpower. Plus the fact that not many on the team have AI experience, and those that did are retired. Remember, BaseJKA's bot routing system uses waypoints. If we wanted something even remotely good enough for MB's case, it would have to be converted to a navigation mesh (I think xycaleth had prototypes of this at one point?). In addition to new entities being created in order to determine points of cover for boxes and walls, as well as the ability for bots to understand objectives and how to accurately make decisions and strategies. As well as understanding the saber system and asymmetrical class balance. We can't just have bots chose random classes fan out at the beginning and go different routes and chose cover based on that, its really lack luster and doesn't have much depth. I'm not saying its not possible because it certainly is. I also personally believe that it could add a few years onto MB2's life span by allowing people to play once the population cannot sustain itself any longer. The main issue is the manpower, and the level of work required that makes it something very unlikely to happen, even if all of us wanted it to happen.

It isn't just about the audience. Lets say people here learning from modding, eventually want to go and make their own game or work on another game with a team as a level designer. Now that they have OpenJK's Rend2 to allow them to experience some of the more modern art practices (still outdated but better than base) with the normal maps, gloss, parallax, etc, this makes this even more possible without classes or a lot of personal time learning these. This would give them examples of things to do and consider that they never would have before. This doesn't even just apply to mappers within this community either. There have been many instances of coders venturing out into other areas as a one man team for a mobile game, and who knows, maybe what we say helps them in some degree depending on their game. Just about every game is different in how things are constructed, and have different sets of rules. However, having insight towards what goes into other games can be a pretty big thing in learning how to design your games or things to consider. If you know some things before hand, rather than having to figure them out down the line, it can be very beneficial. I think the community in general being able to learn from the mistakes and things we have learned from in MB can be pretty good, as they aren't all MB specific.

We blocked torso freeze entirely in the latest release, which is why this topic is being brought up. People liked the "hugging" ability that freezing the torso allowed. However, it also allowed for insta-kata as well which is the reason it was blocked in the latest release. People would like to have the hug portion back without having the bug. If we cant get it fixed so that it can use the normal method without allowing for other issues with it, it likely will come back as a "gesture" using the voice commands menu. Eezstreet noted a fix being in OpenJK in the other thread, but that fix isn't really the optimum method as Xycaleth stated as theres other issues, especially in a more combat rich environment that MB2 has.