Outsourcing to the community

I see modders and other enthusiasts everywhere on this forum, talking about modding and stuff

why not let us help with the development itself?
Let us support beyond money.

The devs should of course have the final say, be able to change everything, but I think the community should be able, if willing to do certain mundane tasks beyond bugtesting.

I do not know how large the man power is for the art for PA and I can understand if the team wants to everything themselves. But if they would allow the community to help with, say modeling, I would myself, build a model or two...

Just a thought.

Edit: I am not suggesting the community writing code for the project.

Do some things even need to be actively outsorced to modders?

As an example: Some people have expressed interest in an army painter, while Uber dont need to build an editor, designing the game in such a way that leaves the unit textures open to a modder building an editorat some later date. Personaly i'm not sure how i feel on the concept of custom army painting (or the comparative difficulty) but it was the most readily available example.

that would involve quite some programming, while they could follow your approach and keep this option open...

that was not exactly the point of my topic.
I don't think they will easily outsource programming

I was thinking mainly of:
-art(modeling/texturing/animation,maybe)
-spell checking
-and of course bugtesting

design is already done actively by the community here on the forum, to help the devs find possible plotholes/loopholes in their design.

Frankly, as much as I'd love to help Uber out, fact of the matter is out of all the people that only a small portion have the relative skills/experience needed to work on the same level as the Uber Staff. And for coders it'd be really tough because they don't have access to the engine at all yet.

I mean, I'd love to get some stuff into the game, but I know I'm not up to the same skill level as the Guys at Uber.

That's already part of Beta Testing.

Mike

I am in the security community, and I know several others watching this/backing this who are as well....

I'm not sure where exactly our expertise would come in handy, presumably with regards to a modding API and security concerns around that... .... and maybe some anti-cheat etc. measures.

That said, probably the only thing we can offer freely is advice and suggestions.

If someone at Uber was actively looking for a security consultant, I'd be happy to help them, or refer them to someone more qualified or otherwise with the particular skill set they need.

bad idea. While I heavily agree on deep involvement of the playerbase with an early alpha, I dont think we could do much for the guys at uber. Until we have a playable testverion(alpha), we can only discuss ideas about the game and hope that uber will listen to us players, which seems to be the case.

of course this would not work at this stage, I was just curious if the team was open to this in a later stage.

Hopefully not to much, I dont want to see 5 different versions of interplanetary artillery in the game, just because "genericnoob1337" proposed it. :?

Several members of uber worked on TA and Supcom/FA and from what I have read how they plan the game(only 2 techs, no/very few experimentals, no shields), they learned from the faults in those games.

Advice from a wise programmer:

Recruiting help from everyone to actually develop the game is a bad idea. That's not a parallizable task, especially outside of the company with volunteers.

You can hand off mods, tutorials and balance feedback to the community, and perhaps other things that are not core game code, but you can't trust just anyone to write good, performant C++ code that's going to work.

It's also a management problem. With every developer you add to a project you have a more-than-linear amount of communication that has to occur. Uber devs don't have the time to do this, especially with part-time volunteers. Everyone on their team is going to have years of experience to draw on, and be fully dedicated more than full time to this game.

No, Tutorials need to be all set to go at launch, it doesn't matter have great community tutorials are if by the time they are available half the player base already left out of frustration inducing confusion.

Mike

I guess you're right. The community could just take tutorials much further than Uber has time for.

The hassle involved with outsourcing development to the community is far larger than the code we could contribute. Much as I'd like to think otherwise.

I know that w

I never suggested writing code, for the reason you mention, as well as compatibility issues...

I mentioned mainly art as my suggestion:

If the team suddenly needs more, or the community demands more art, the community is probably able and willing to help (for fame and everything )

just an example of this is Infinity, Quest for earth, where the community also helped a lot with the art work of the game. The devs still decide what makes it into the game and make changes, but it could help.

http://www.moddb.com/games/infinity-the ... 1#imagebox

random funny idea: they could make a contest in the backer-only forums: "make a nice design for unit x, the best one might make it into the game"

I would absolutely love to help, and would gladly donate my time. The problem is that I have a student version of Maya, and I'm not permitted to produce commercial work on it. I am allowed to produce work on my version of the Adobe creative suite (for texturing and the like), but I can't use Maya to model, unfortunately.

I had considered contacting Uber myself to ask if I could donate my time as a freelancer, or to see if they were considering outsourcing any work to the community, but it occurred to me that I can't use my version of Maya, unfortunately

Would it still count as Commercial if it was Donated?

Frankly as long as the file goes through their system is should be fine no?

Mike

I'm pretty sure it would be. I'm still producing work that would ultimately be making money for somebody. Also the scene files are permanently marked - when you open them and save them a box pops up letting you know they were made in a student version. Nothing you make or render is watermarked in any visible way, but the file is marked in a way that you can see when you open and save it.

well I guess you would have to save it as something as .fbx .dae or .obj anyways

but I haven't really thought of it that way...

on the other hand, mods also indirectly generate revenue to companies

Well the guys at Uber would have to run it through their programs, wouldn't they commercial versions overwrite the student version?

Mike

Nope. Oddly enough the file stays marked even if you save it in a commercial version.