ROHOS: a question of FOV

The gates to Red Orchestra: Heroes of Stalingrad have been thrown wide. That means you can download it from Steam right now, people. Many players reported that the beta performed much better after the most recent (September 8) patch, so we can hope that the full game will be in fair working order this evening. 

Do note, however, that Tripwire has rolled-back support for horizontal fields of view ("hFOV") other than 75 degrees for the release build. That does not mean you won't be able to set your own hFOV, but it does mean you might have problems if you choose to tinker with that particular setting.  Note also that the 75 hFOV applies only to 4:3 aspect ratio monitors.  On a 16:9 setup, the view angle equates to somewhere between 85 and 91. Eyefinity users should be able to get 120 degrees or better.

Tripwire's Ramm-Jaeger explained the decision on the dev's official forums:

I'll reiterate and expand on what Yoshiro said. The ability to adjust the FOV between 70-90, as well as the ability to set different FOV zoom for ironsights were features that were added very late in the dev. Mostly I did it as a personal favor to Zetsumei, and I stayed late one nite and worked til almost 2 in the morning one evening to get those features added into the game (unplanned and unscheduled features). Both of the features ended up causing a lot of bugs. We spent a LOT of time trying to fix the bugs (too much time to be honest) and decided to pull official support for these last minute features.  

The game was developed for 5 years with a default FOV of 70 (on a 4:3 monitor, which is actually 80+ FOV on a widescreen monitor, which is pretty close to the FOV of Ostfront). After testing with 90 we discovered it caused a lot MORE clipping issues (yes there are a few remaining clipping issues at 70 degrees, but they are FAR worse at 90). They were bad enough we felt we couldn't officially support them for shipping, and there wasn't time to fix bugs in an unplanned feature. The ability to set an FOV up to 90 will likely return post release after we fix the clipping issues with it. It will also include an "are you sure you want to do this, you may get bad performance" warning when you set your FOV that high.  

Regarding the weapon zoom settings, those don't have any exploitative benefits, but they also don't work 100%. So we took them out of the settings menu, but left the functionality in game. So those of you that still want to use them, feel free to set them up in your ini, they will still work. But because of the issues with them, we can't officially support them right now. And as this was an unplanned feature, we didn't have time to fix ALL of the bugs with them. Essentially, if your monitor is set to certain resolutions (5:4 for example) it could still cause your aim to get off. Now those of you that are willing to take the risk, feel free to edit the inis. In the future we'll likely fix the remaining bugs with the system, and add the settings back to the menu.  

In summary, these were last minute features that I BUSTED MY REAR to try and get it. They just didn't quite make the cut for tommorow, but will be back in the future.

Enjoy.

The cascade continues

Ed. note: this post is a follow-up to "The Space Barbie Failure Cascade," published on this blog on June 25.

Not three months ago, the looming specter of "pay-to-win" mechanics provoked a player riot in Eve Online. The Council of Stellar Management (CSM) flew to CCP's headquarters in Iceland, ultimately receiving assurances from the developer that so-called "gold ammo" would never find its way into the MMO. The most visible result of the conference was this video, which CCP apparently hoped would bring an end to the Incarna scandal.

Of course, it didn't. Eve's player base continues to shrink, and it seems Incarna has the dubious distinction of being the first Eve expansion to fail to increase the game's "Peak Concurrent Users" even temporarily.

Now begins the anti-CCP public relations blitz over the developer's neglect of its flagship game. It started in earnest with a long diatribe* by Alexander Gianturco (a.k.a. "The Mittani") on Kugutsumen.com, and continues with this Eurogamer interview with the same. Gianturco is the Chairman of the CSM, and a leader of Goonswarm, arguably the most powerful alliance in Eve. Love him or hate him, the man has real influence.

* Readers interested only in the subject matter of this post may want to skip to the section entitled "The CSM, PCUs and FiS Neglect" (FiS = Flying in Space).

A couple of choice quotes from the diatribe:

In other areas, particularly upper management, the company seems hell-bent on running Eve Online into the ground to try to make a reality out of the foolish business decisions they made during the Icelandic banking bubble. In 2006 they acquired White Wolf and promised to develop a World of Darkness MMO; similarly, they committed to developing a FPS that will somehow link to EVE out of Shanghai. Then the bubble popped, and everyone began to ask tough questions about the notorious overconfidence of Icelandic males. One of these projects at a time seems reasonable; developing both of them simultaneously is 'Fearless' and 'Innovative' using Hilmar's favorite buzzwords. Elsewhere we call it groupthink-fueled folly [...] 

What we see here is the impact of the neglect of what CCP now calls "Flying in Space", what you and I call "Eve Online". Usually after an expansion there is a surge of players who join the game; these create peaks and valleys in PCU (Peak Concurrent User) numbers as people kick the tires on the new content and then either stick around or leave. Incarna, which has taken a tremendous amount of development and marketing resources from FiS, essentially had no impact.  

Read that again. No impact. Millions of dollars and months of development, into a toilet. Meanwhile we suffer a backhanded Sanctum nerf and have had no new FiS content besides Incursions since the introduction of Wormholes.

In the Eurogamer interview, Gianturco says his views are "100 per cent representative of the Council members."

Incarna still isn't finished, and the CSM thinks that and the general absence of new content in Eve is due to declining resource allocation in favor of Dust and World of Darkness. That's a tough pill to swallow when you're a player forking over a monthly subscription fee.

Eve Online's idiosyncrasies don't end at its emergent gameplay and unitary economy. It has given birth to an omnipresent and somewhat peculiar politics as well. CCP has never been able to control the latter, and I'm betting that their "media strategy" is going to be humbled before that of the CSM.

It will be fun to watch.