I wrote this out in Hoogh's quitting post, but I wanted it be more visible than that. Here's why, in my opinion, C2 is so disliked.


C1 was good because it worked for this kind of game. Yes, the graphics were simplistic and cartoony. They were not, however, bad. It gave the game a unique feel, and made everything very clean and streamlined, allowing you to easily tell what was going on. C2, on the other hand, is a clusterfuck of flashy particle effects and as many pointless graphical extras as the admins could squeeze in.

Most indie games use unique, simple graphics because it makes for an enjoyable game experience without requiring a ton of manpower. SS does not have a big enough dev team to make a game with conventionally high-end graphics to compete with other major games, yet they tried to do so anyway, and the result is a mess. Many things still look low-quality, but so much of the effects are garish and overdone that it ends up with roughly the same effect as a hooker wearing a half-inch of makeup.

It's impossible to tell what's going on in large-scale fights, and there's graphical errors everywhere. Even ignoring all the obvious bugs, many things were just rushed or badly converted. Lots of ships are still basically two-dimensional, with an impossibly thin depth. Instead of starting from scratch, admins tried to convert 2D images to 3D models, and there are many places where it obviously just didn't work.

I'm sure that after a year or two of bugfixing and polishing, the game will get a bit bitter, but it's not the old SS that the playerbase loved. Noone had a problem with the old graphics, noone asked to have our fun small-time MMO try to force itself into competition with giants such as EvE. It's not good enough to stand against games like that, and it's lost what originally made it enjoyable: the unique look and feel that, while not as shiny as modern graphics, worked perfectly for the game itself.

I didnt read your whole post, cuz most posts over a paragraph or two are mostly too long and boring...

I like C2. Its obviously not going anywhere and all these posts are just spam on the forums...

-ERMAN

Tl;dr: C2 needs more gui and graphics tweaking.

There's two reason that made me quit ss when c2 came out.

1. The graphic weren't as good as I expected. At least how the weapon looks, and the delqua looked cartoonish (i wish all ships had great graphic like some i saw). Also, I couldn't distinguish the pax/serentiy line.

2. I have two old laptops. One dual core compaq presario cq60, and a thinkpad 4gb ram 64bit windows with a intel(r) hd graphics 3000 and none of them can run ss2 like i would like them to.


I'll have to buy a personal computer (station) in order to play ss nicely, but then again, i'll have to wait until graphics are enhanced as well.

C1 was mariokart, simple, awesome

C2 is gran turismo released with bugs (currently)

But.. Ss is what Jeff wants. It would be so easy to make ss a success but this is Jeffs hobby, and he's obviously comfortable with that. Jeff loves playing with the graphics, so be it I guess.

Not sure what all the hate is about, C2 is fine.

Bro you mad?

C2 is not fine currently.
Also you are basically correct on the points listed.

Still it is the largest step towards a better game that has been done in the last few years here.
You can't tell me seriously that you had no clue that this is still a beta client and that we're all (at least the ones who pay) beta testers who pay for it.

Also the attitude of the game staff seems to be a lot better in the last few months. I hope that continues and progresses further.
I didn't notice anymore feedback anywhere including the support tickets in the style of "Sorry no, please fuck off" or "No, Fuck off". This is a major improvement.

If all this does not suite you and you don't have fun playing anymore you should look towards other games. It would be a sad thing to see you go.

There are two kinds of fools. One says, “This is old, therefore it is good.” The other one says, “This is new, therefore it is better.” -Dean William Inge

personally i think SS would benefit from a scale change.

make the ships smaller, make the planets bigger, make the orbits bigger, and increase max speed to compensate.

it would decrease the clutter while making the game seem more realistic

A lotter of the clutter comes from the GUI and the aspect that most ships are looking especially colour wise quite similar.

When I tried to DG following happened:
My BSTs (11 of them) launch (22) fighters, all of the fighters have rather large names on a smalll area, the tractors (e.g. Forgones and my slaves) are huge rings covering up half of my EFDN in size, the auras (the usual stuff with EFDN + trade slave aura generators) are in that too. Now the AIs (e.g. Forgones) you can't tell apart from my slaves and on the mini bar (where my slaves AND fighters are listed (along with the drones)) you can't also really tell which is what (as the mini bar is NOT ordered) so you can't tell what to heal either.

They didn't either put in options to organize the mini-bar, reduce the useless clutter (by hotkeyable options to disable stuff) or make the enemy AIs better distinguishable from your own fleet (like with a red glow on the whole of the AI ship).



A nice quote but doesn't cover the fact that it's wrong.

As briefly mentioned but not enlisted in detail C2 is a major improvement (just think of Seer in PvAI) with a lot of stuff being worse than in C1.
Not because it's old or new but how well it fits the task.

thats not really a c2 thing tho. c1 had just about as much if not more lag coming from huge battle like anatolia (hell even my pc would drop to 10-12fps when all the drones started firing).

But yea, i agree, it is indeed limiting to lag so bad when there is so much on the screen. We are working on that, but we also always have to keep in mind the huge difference in load there is between an empty gal and an heavy gal.

I understand your frustration, as we do both play this game. But I stopped reading when I saw this remark, rather than attempt to explain what I would like to say in a clear manner which you can understand; let me leave you with a different quote.

Open-minded people must accept the possibility that being closed-minded is better. Close-minded people can take comfort in knowing that they are right.
Steve W.