Studio podcast highlights

[Sneaksie]

Recently @Han has participated in the Russian-speaking podcast, which was usually focused on other projects of our studio. Some English-speaking players were asking us what has been said, so here's a short version:

 

- Managing projects: back in the RoF days the development team was serious about making a thorough development plan in Ms Project. They did it and for some reason decided to print it on paper - it took several A0 plotter sheets with text size 8, the room walls were nearly covered by them. After that they have decided that doing a project planning like they teach you in the books has its shortcomings.

- BoM was more like BoS technologically wise, while BoK was a significant leap forward.

 

- In BoM the team decided not to include Moscow in the playable area to keep the city in low-res to increase performance and avoid the option of bomb raids. Churches were also made indestructible. The other reason for choosing low-res was the fear of repeating mistakes made by our predecessors when the team lead by Oleg Maddox attempted to model London, and as a result spent too much time and resources on this task.

 

- 1C Game Studios certainly doesn’t have any plans to make sims less hardcore.

 

- We thought about moving to a popular 3rd party engine, but the fact that we and our competitors didn't do it and each hardcore sim studio develops its own engine gives you a hint why - it means spending years trying to tailor another engine to your needs while the competitors can get ahead.

 

- Marshall multiplayer mode was a very ambitious idea (it is basically an online players’ dream), but after half a year working on the project, it became evident it is too hard to develop. Unfortunately it would have been better to put it on hold right away. Then Covid hit and eventually Marshall was stopped. This is even more frustrating because the system was almost finished (in beta-testing stage), but there were many performance problems and bugs caused by its complexity and reliance on network stability and speed. All in all, this system is very complex and hard to implement.

 

- Gameplay and balance - we don't balance aircraft on purpose to make it more attractable to customers. So it's hard to implement interesting and balanced gameplay with real world performance taken into account.

 

- War Thunder and World of Warplanes are not our direct competitors, we are competing for player attention though. The difference is glaring - while our games technically can be played with keyboard and mouse, for free-to-play games this usually means WASD while for us it is the whole keyboard layout with many key combinations.

 

- Daniel's favorite aircraft is MiG-3, and Albert's is P-39.

 

- We made tanks module because in 2011 our lead programmer made a tank chassis prototype for a side project (even before we have started working on BoS).

 

- We have discussed what the next project will be and now the team has an energy surge.

 

- We are extremely grateful to the support we receive from the community. Big thanks to Oyster_KAI who updated all the cockpits in 4K textures and even refused to be paid. Martin helped us immensely with 4K aircraft skins. There are other community enthusiasts whose help is also invaluable - for instance, server hosters. And particularly we would like to commend the work of volunteers who help us with testing. It is hard to overestimate your contribution to the project!

 

- Unlike other modern sims where an aircraft carrier, if modeled, is a small fraction of the whole product and any shortcomings of its modeling don’t affect the quality of the whole sim, in the case of an integral, all-in-one BoX title about the war in the Pacific EVERYTHING should revolve around carrier operations and a carrier is ought to be its central part. This means that any shortcomings of the carrier modeling and interaction with it, any performance and other issues that may arise become super-critical, jeopardizing the whole product. In the current situation this makes it a huge risk we can't afford to spend 3 years on.

 

- AnPetrovich leaving the company won't affect our plans because little has changed actually - for the last 1.5 years he worked on an isolated part of the product. We have a strong engineering team that is currently being replenished with new members. The new engineer lead is Roman, you may know him as Gavrick on the forums.

 

- Our partners who make 3D tank models are very professional and passionate. Churchill is gorgeous (although it's design is very strange). You’ll have it in a couple of weeks.