I came back after a 2 year hiatus to be pleasantly surprised with the work being done. The coding still has a way to go (multiplayer campaigns seem to crash clients left and right, which bums me out!) but the core is being worked on, which is great. I didn't think Barotrauma needed much in the way of additional assets at this point, and certainly not revamps of some tried and true ones. My sub pack, for instance, had remained surprisingly compatible even with the additional mechanics. In my absence I received requests to update them, yet it turns out some people were doing that already because the needed changes were so minor. Everything added since 0.4 had improved the gameplay without rendering a lot of designs hopelessly obsolete, keeping much of the variety that has built up alive and well.
Then I saw this on Regalis' Twitter:
What bothers me are the parts inside the ship. It's clear that Regalis wants to make a facelift of existing parts, and so long as the art direction remains consistent I'm all for it. But look at the sizes of them. The sonar console seems to stretch almost twice as high. The console next to it (navigation?) is now gigantic. Likewise it appears the lockers have been made both taller and wider, out of proportion with the originals.
Changes like these will immediately render 90% of subs that have been designed over the years obsolete. Parts will punch through walls, floors and ceilings, not only appearing garish but potentially risking system failures due to contact with water. You can always swap out graphics of parts with the same proportions, but changing proportions will force people to redesign entire hulls around those parts, compartment by compartment. The more compact and "artsy" the design, the more these changes will hurt. Even shrinking the parts would hurt less than this. The stock boats will probably survive thanks to all their wasted space waiting to be filled. But what about the rest of them?
I understand the need for room to update these things, but is this really the intended result? I'm far from the only one whose work will be flushed. A pragmatic argument is that forcing everyone to rebuild everything they made over the past several years will keep them engaged as the game reaches completion and release, but that's also a pretty cynical business practice. Rigging up a good sub, taking advantage of all the fancy electrical mechanics the game offers, takes quite a long time to get right. The most complicated ones even need to have sea trials to work out all the bugs. For many of us, making designs and providing them to the community is one of the few ways we have to give back to the game's development, and the ever-expanding library has done much to keep servers interesting. Having to scrap most of our ships and deprive everyone, both community and designers, of all that work, is a sour reward if you ask me.
Everyone understands that the game is in development and that things may and often will change along the way to the finish line. But this is like designing racetracks, only to be told that the cars are now twice as long so all the roads have to be stretched this way and that to accommodate them. Thoughts?
