[DONE] Making the Roadmap more Flexible & Useful

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eleazar
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[DONE] Making the Roadmap more Flexible & Useful

#1 Post by eleazar »

EDIT: The new Roadmap is live


The FreeOrion Roadmap was a plan, and like any human plan dealt with the ever-elusive future. It has turned out to be impractical over that last couple years to take everything in the order proscribed, and now we find ourself in a place in development that really isn't on the map.

Taking the issues that i've seen and other have pointed out in many places over a long period of time, i created a provisional New Roadmap.

The changes are intended to make the Roadmap again useful and informative for developers, casual contributors and onlookers. I told Geoff what i was working on a few days ago, to give him the first chance to comment, and he's made some additions/corrections.

How this Roadmap is different:

* This Roadmap doesn't specify the sequence that development should take.
Features will be added according to the interest and expertise available at the time, and other practical considerations. Features may be added piecemeal.

* Point versioning becomes flexible.
v0.4 happens when enough improvements have been made over v0.3 that we want to highlight it (which will likely be soon). It is not necessary that everything listed under "Currently Under Development" is complete, but of course only the complete features would be moved up to the "Complete" subhead.

Similarly v0.5, v0.6 happen when we decide we've accomplished enough for a major release. It doesn't matter if we never have a 0.8 and 0.9, or if we end up with 0.10 through 0.27 before finalizing 1.0. Software version numbers are not simply decimal numbers. That's how it is normally done.

* The Roadmap gives some hints about future design.
There have been quite a few things decided in the course of development that officially should be part of a future design discussion. Without becoming bogged down in too much detail, statements like, "Custom species can easily be created by players," and "Players have minimal or no interaction with ground combat" give contributors an easy way to see the intended general of future features, and help they understand and plan towards those goal-posts.


:arrow: So comment, discuss, approve, reject, question, etc.

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Re: Making the Roadmap more Flexible & Useful

#2 Post by Freesword »

Thank you. For a newcomer like me, such higher level over-views are really useful to get a better understanding of the journey

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Re: Making the Roadmap more Flexible & Useful

#3 Post by eleazar »

You are welcome,
and welcome to FreeOrion. :D

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Re: Making the Roadmap more Flexible & Useful

#4 Post by neuro »

Thank you for doing this! I'm a huge fan of this project and the idea of iterating. I did some investigative work on Space Combat, and whole-heartedly agree that a linear roadmap makes it difficult to show progressive improvements from a planning perspective.

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Re: Making the Roadmap more Flexible & Useful

#5 Post by Bigjoe5 »

I don't necessarily think that we need to alter the roadmap - rather, we just need to change our expectations for v.4.

We don't need pretty 3D space combat for v.4. V.4 can have ugly space combat. What we need for v.4, in my opinion, is functional space combat.

In my (probably isolated) opinion, v.4 should be the stage where everything moves to the tactical map, and every system action, such as colonization, blockade, etc., can be handled by a primitive tactical AI. The AI doesn't have to be good. It can be "fly in a straight line towards this planet without bumping into the star or other planets, enter planetary orbit, colonize planet", or "fly towards the nearest enemy ships and fire your weapons". Like the graphical interface, it can be improved later - we just need to lay the foundation for future gameplay.

Laying the foundation for future gameplay was precisely the motivation for a roadmap to begin with. Stuff that gets added later on is expected to be dependent on stuff that gets added earlier. For this reason, I feel like a lot of the current work that's being done on space monsters will ultimately just be a conceptual foundation for the "real" implementation, as most of the cool things spacemonsters do will actually occur on the tactical map, and a lot of their uniqueness will be related to their behaviour on the tactical map - hence they were scheduled for v.8. Similarly, stuff like leaders and espionage are likely to have effects that influence the entire game, whereas other gameplay aspects are less likely to affect espionage directly, so they're also in v.7/v.8, after all the stuff that they can affect is already in place, and minimal changes to existing code will have to be made to implement them. Species goes in this category as well - we didn't really need species yet, and there's not a whole lot of cool stuff that can be done with them, but once we have stuff like espionage, space combat and diplomacy, we can really flesh out and balance species.

So basically, I think implementing the tactical map and a quantized combat phase is essential for building most of the rest of the game, whereas improving AI and making the tactical map pretty and 3D is just polish, and can happen any time between v.4 and v.9. As far as I can tell, the main reason that the roadmap has been so badly ignored is that space combat is taking forever. If it's possible to make a very basic implementation of space combat - just enough to base other gameplay elements on - then I'd say let's do it and get back on the road.
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Re: Making the Roadmap more Flexible & Useful

#6 Post by eleazar »

Bigjoe5 wrote:We don't need pretty 3D space combat for v.4. V.4 can have ugly space combat. What we need for v.4, in my opinion, is functional space combat.
Even ugly space combat would be a serious load of work (though admittedly much less than full 3D combat), work which would need to be mostly thrown out to implement pretty 3D space combat.
Bigjoe5 wrote:Laying the foundation for future gameplay was precisely the motivation for a roadmap to begin with. Stuff that gets added later on is expected to be dependent on stuff that gets added earlier.
...
So basically, I think implementing the tactical map and a quantized combat phase is essential for building most of the rest of the game.
I don't know what the motivation for the roadmap was, but i have to disagree it's order is entirely based on dependancies. Governments, Leaders, Espionage, Diplomacy, Species for instance could be mostly or entirely completed without any additional work on the tactical map or combat. Lots of the items could reasonable shuffled forward or back a slot.
Bigjoe5 wrote:As far as I can tell, the main reason that the roadmap has been so badly ignored is that space combat is taking forever.
Yeah, there's that, more specifically, available coders may be effective in one area of the game, and not so much in another. But there's also the important fact that following the old roadmap ceased to be useful. We don't need a roadmap to tell us when species (for instance) can be worked on. Bits and pieces of Species have been implemented over the years as parts of their design become clear.

And there may be very compelling reasons to implement things out of the roadmap order. As i said 50 days ago:
eleazar wrote:With the addition of space monsters, and minor species, FO has IMHO become a lot more fun to play. ... once a game reaches the point that it is fun --even if incomplete-- attracting interest and assistance is so much easier.

I think we may be wise to focus for now the issues that most hinder playability and are most easy to fix.
Since then, working mostly outside the old roadmap, we've added and tweaked, and brought FreeOrion very much closer to being fun and enjoyable. We've made real progress on the actual game. If we had stuck to the roadmap and/or a stop-gap ugly tactical map, the game likely would be no more fun to play than it was 50 days ago.

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Re: Making the Roadmap more Flexible & Useful

#7 Post by Bigjoe5 »

eleazar wrote:
Bigjoe5 wrote:We don't need pretty 3D space combat for v.4. V.4 can have ugly space combat. What we need for v.4, in my opinion, is functional space combat.
Even ugly space combat would be a serious load of work (though admittedly much less than full 3D combat), work which would need to be mostly thrown out to implement pretty 3D space combat.
No, the majority of the work would not have to be thrown out when we implement 3D space combat. The idea is to implement something that we can build on later. The bulk of the work that needs to be done is to allow ships to move around and interact with other objects on the tactical map. This is expected to be the same regardless of what the ships, map, other objects and UI look like. In contrast, a lot of the work done on making the game playable right now will need to be replaced or heavily revamped when there is a tactical map and we can have objects do things and interact on it.
eleazar wrote:
Bigjoe5 wrote:Laying the foundation for future gameplay was precisely the motivation for a roadmap to begin with. Stuff that gets added later on is expected to be dependent on stuff that gets added earlier.
...
So basically, I think implementing the tactical map and a quantized combat phase is essential for building most of the rest of the game.
I don't know what the motivation for the roadmap was, but i have to disagree it's order is entirely based on dependancies. Governments, Leaders, Espionage, Diplomacy, Species for instance could be mostly or entirely completed without any additional work on the tactical map or combat.
I strongly disagree. Tactical combat is a large part of what Governments, Leaders, Espionage, Diplomacy and Species are going to be affecting. If we go ahead and try to complete those now, we're going to have to go through them again and practically remake them to affect combat as well, when there is tactical combat. This is true whether or not you agree with my crazy plan to put all system action on the tactical map. There is going to be tactical combat, and it's going to be influenced by the above gameplay aspects significantly, perhaps as much as the strategic level.
eleazar wrote:But there's also the important fact that following the old roadmap ceased to be useful. We don't need a roadmap to tell us when species (for instance) can be worked on. Bits and pieces of Species have been implemented over the years as parts of their design become clear.
If we want to move a particular item out of order, that's OK. Getting rid of the whole tree because one item worked fine out of order is a little reckless. Now, whenever we complete a new aspect of the game, we need to go back and heavily edit the tech tree to include new stuff, and we need to go back and heavily edit all the species to include new stuff, and any balancing we might have done also goes straight down the toilet. Do you also want to go back and edit/rebalance governments, espionage, diplomacy and leaders when the tactical map is finally finished, or would you rather create them when most of they're supposed to affect already exists?
eleazar wrote:And there may be very compelling reasons to implement things out of the roadmap order. As i said 50 days ago:
eleazar wrote:With the addition of space monsters, and minor species, FO has IMHO become a lot more fun to play. ... once a game reaches the point that it is fun --even if incomplete-- attracting interest and assistance is so much easier.
OK, it's gotten more fun to play, but there's only so much we can do with it right now. The focus, IMO, still needs to be on the foundation, and tactical combat is the last piece of that. Once tactical combat is there, everything else can pretty much just be created to do what it's supposed to do and we can balance it.

Basically the choice is between

Do tactical combat (as little as possible while still providing a foundation for other gameplay elements), then do all the other stuff, or

Do the other stuff, then do tactical combat, then practically redo all the other stuff to take tactical combat into account. That's not good, because what we want the other stuff to be able to do is so much more dependent on tactical combat than vice versa.
eleazar wrote:I think we may be wise to focus for now the issues that most hinder playability and are most easy to fix. Since then, working mostly outside the old roadmap, we've added and tweaked, and brought FreeOrion very much closer to being fun and enjoyable. We've made real progress on the actual game. If we had stuck to the roadmap and/or a stop-gap ugly tactical map, the game likely would be no more fun to play than it was 50 days ago.
The game is more fun to play, yes, but it's not that much closer to being done, because all the content that was added will have to be mostly redesigned once tactical combat is added. I think it would be wiser to create a simple tactical map now, then make content and design decisions that will actually relate to the final version of the game.
Last edited by eleazar on Tue Sep 20, 2011 9:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Making the Roadmap more Flexible & Useful

#8 Post by eleazar »

Bigjoe5 wrote:No, the majority of the work would not have to be thrown out when we implement 3D space combat.
....
Tactical combat is a large part of what Governments, Leaders, Espionage, Diplomacy and Species are going to be affecting. If we go ahead and try to complete those now, we're going to have to go through them again and practically remake them to affect combat as well, when there is tactical combat. This is true whether or not you agree with my crazy plan to put all system action on the tactical map.
It seems you are relatively very optimistic about the amount of wasted labor in making a stop-gap 2d tactical map, but take a much more pessimistic about what might be wasted in any other context.

I grant that we should settle this "everything on the tactical map" question before undertaking a lot of other things because it represents a large disparity in vision. If i'm not mistaken the (or one of) roots of this disparity is that you are trying accommodate the existing stealth/detection system, while consider it more expedient to change the underlying system to eliminate the difficulties it has caused. More on that in another topic soonish.
Bigjoe5 wrote:Getting rid of the whole tree because one item worked fine out of order is a little reckless.
We've been "off road" for at least a year. If anything we should have done this sooner.
Bigjoe5 wrote:Now, whenever we complete a new aspect of the game, we need to go back and heavily edit the tech tree to include new stuff, and we need to go back and heavily edit all the species to include new stuff, and any balancing we might have done also goes straight down the toilet.
The tech tree is always going to need to be heavily edited to add in new stuff, weather or not we implement in the order of the roadmap.

Balancing is always going to be tentative and likely broken whenever major new parts of the game are implemented. The roadmap doesn't change that. If anything ignoring the roadmap allows us to mitigate the problem. We can implement/design part of diplomacy, then part of species, or whatever, and then back to the rest of diplomacy if that at the time seems like the best way to banish uncertainties and to resolve important dependancies.

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Re: Making the Roadmap more Flexible & Useful

#9 Post by Krikkitone »

Bigjoe5 wrote:
eleazar wrote:
Bigjoe5 wrote:. Tactical combat is a large part of what Governments, Leaders, Espionage, Diplomacy and Species are going to be affecting.
This I Really disagree with.
I don't see Anything that those would affect in tactical combat that they couldn't do in non-tactical combat.

Tactical Combat Boost... easy +X% to ship strength...later when tactical combat is put in, separate out whether that is Range, Speed, Weapon Accuracy, Weapon Power, Evasion, Field Repair, Sensors or Stealth... Later.

Now a species that has "accurate weapons but poor evasion" will just have to get by with a 0 net combat effect for now.

Diplomacy + Governments affects Attack or Not, Invade or Bombard... not a Tactical decision.

Espionage has almost No relevance to the tactical map, unless you want to have to move the spy ship around every turn in system to make sure you are getting good data on the planet and not being detected by the sentry ships.

The major aspects of Species, Diplomacy, Governments, Espionage, Leaders, etc. should have nothing to do with combat of any kind, much less tactical combat.
Last edited by Krikkitone on Mon Sep 26, 2011 1:12 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: [DONE] Making the Roadmap more Flexible & Useful

#10 Post by eleazar »

OK, the new roadmap is live.

The biggest change from the old roadmap to note is the list of Optional concepts. It's not that we don't like those ideas, but it is possible to make a fun 4X game without them, so they may or may not be included before 1.0. Proposals should work with and without any of the following.
  • Optional for 1.0
    Espionage
    Leaders
    Governments
    Random events
    Galaxy map saving and reuse
    Map editor or "God Mode"
    Scripted "campaigns"
    Strategic resources
    "Hall of Fame" high score list

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Re: [DONE] Making the Roadmap more Flexible & Useful

#11 Post by MikkoM »

eleazar wrote:OK, the new roadmap is live.

The biggest change from the old roadmap to note is the list of Optional concepts. It's not that we don't like those ideas, but it is possible to make a fun 4X game without them, so they may or may not be included before 1.0. Proposals should work with and without any of the following.
  • Optional for 1.0
    Espionage
    Leaders
    Governments
    Random events
    Galaxy map saving and reuse
    Map editor or "God Mode"
    Scripted "campaigns"
    Strategic resources
    "Hall of Fame" high score list
You can most likely make a fun game without those things, but you can also add a lot of variety and options by having those optional features. Now it must of course be recognised that since the the core development team is currently quite small it makes sence to have a more flexible roadmap, but if I was an outsider and heard that FreeOrion version 1.0 has been released, I would expect a finished product that has all of its features in it. And version 1.0 would most likely also be the version that I would form my opinions about the quality of the FreeOrion project compared to other 4X space games. So is there a huge hurry to get version 1.0 released, especially as there is already a commendable effort...

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5712

... to make the game more playable and balanced?

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Re: [DONE] Making the Roadmap more Flexible & Useful

#12 Post by eleazar »

My observation is that few, if any 4x games have all the features on our "optional" list, plus the planned and implemented ones. So why does FreeOrion need them to be "finished?"

Adding more features has a very tenuous connection to making a game more fun. But it has a very solid connection to increasing development time and increasing the time to it takes to balance everything. It also increased the probability that the project fails under it's own weight. So why should we promise an insanely ambitious feature set?

I'm much more concerned with disillusioning future players with:
1a) a 1.0 that's bloated and unwieldy with too many features, or
1b) a game that never reaches 1.0 because it was too complicated to balance, rather than with
2) a 1.0 that lacks some features other 4X game have.
MikkoM wrote:So is there a huge hurry to get version 1.0 released, especially as there is already a commendable effort...

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5712

... to make the game more playable and balanced?
I wouldn't call making a plan that might be possible in years rather than decades a "huge hurry".
"A few simple things to make FO more playable" is more of a stop-gap measure, with emphasis on the word "more". There are still too many holes in the game to really do an effective job of balancing and making it truly fun.

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Re: [DONE] Making the Roadmap more Flexible & Useful

#13 Post by Bigjoe5 »

The only one I would disagree with is Espionage, since it's something of a favourite gameplay element of mine.

I don't suppose it really matters, though, since Espionage is something that can reasonably done after just about everything else anyway.
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Re: [DONE] Making the Roadmap more Flexible & Useful

#14 Post by MikkoM »

eleazar wrote:My observation is that few, if any 4x games have all the features on our "optional" list, plus the planned and implemented ones.
And my observation is that at least partly because of that most of those games are pretty average. (Although in most cases those games also fail to deliver even some of the features they promised to deliver.) Now personally the two most significant features for me are good quality space combat and diplomacy, which are part of the new roadmap, but still in the long run the more interesting ways there are to win and play the game, the more inclined players will be to come back to it. So while I do recognise the need for a more flexible roadmap, I also hope that the focus for FreeOrion will remain on quality instead of just quickly getting something released to join the ranks of endless masses of average space 4X games.

So what this could probably mean in practise would be to try to add more variety to the game before v.1.0 is released by implementing as many of the features on the optional list as seems reasonable, while at the same time trying to keep the game as playable as possible in different stages of development, since as you somewhat said...
eleazar wrote:It also increased the probability that the project fails under it's own weight.
... there is always the scary possibility that a non commercial project such as this can end in any stage.

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