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What cool new things are coming for FG in the near/long term future?
The Lab forum hasn't had any test release information since August. Haven't noticed any "super secret" posts since LOS was hinted at coming. And most feature request posts mostly say "not on the radar" or "not on a short list" of things to be done. What is on the short list, one wonders?
Get us excited here again! A little peak would be wonderful.
To the best of my recollection of what has been said around the place is:
Moon Wizard is working on ruleset updates
Other team members are working on Forge, networking, graphics optimisation, onboarding new team members
Mostly it sounds like incremental improvements.
I can understand playing cards close to the chest - I *hate* promising things and not delivering. I rarely announce stuff until it is finished and in the release queue for my own business, because otherwise I get customers emailing me about the set I posted a teaser pic from three years which still isn't ready.
We've had a couple of huge milestones in the last 18 months with the switch to Unity and the release of lighting, and I'm very cool with the team concentrating on refactoring, bug fixes, stability for the next year or more. Goodness knows the sheer amount of code underpinning the rulesets and so forth. And I think there's a lot of untapped potential in the FX, image and lighting system which can be expanded upon.
I would also be very interested to know a little more about how the team sees FG developing over the next few years, though!
Are some of the major suggestions from the idea informer going to be looked at to see how feasible they will be to implement? Are there some under-the-hood things that really need attention which might improve performance? I'm excited to see that Smiteworks are recruiting and that one of those positions is going to concentrate on ruleset developments - there's a LOT of great smaller systems out there which I'd love to see get decent FG support with 80% automation.
I know what *I* think are exciting and interesting ideas. I wonder what the FG team is interested and excited about tackling once they've got Unity purring along a bit more smoothly.
A few mysterious hints would be awesome :)
Cheers, Hywel
I concur with @damned. I think there is mention of some optimization and some very needed UI changes. The original Kickstarter mentioned possibly something to do with audio, but I think that would be a couple of years away. I hope Smiteworks will pursue the online character & campaign management tools portal. One can wish and vote on the Idea Informer.
https://fgapp.idea.informer.com/ is probably a reasonably accurate sneak peek.
Filter to In Process and you will see nothing listed. Filter to complete and we have 5 items. One had 500 votes (LOS), decal (60 votes), and 3 others <10 votes.
Not sure what we are learning from that tool aside from a lot of votes...
Status is not really kept up to date, don't filter on it. The point they were making is the high voted items are probably the things SW is working on since they do a good job keeping customer focused.Quote:
Originally Posted by DM_BK
I still think it would be good to have some form of roadmap, or at least go through that ideas list and update the status. I mean, what is that? An afternoon's work?
The thing here is that sensible project management isn't just a case of picking the most highly requested feature and working on it till it's done. What most project managers tend to do is look at the change requests, consider the amount of effort required to implement, and then schedule that based on cost v benefits. Sometimes it's really good to go through them and see which ones you can blast out really quickly.
Even if you consider the top three most requested changes, you can see that Aura Effects (778 votes) is likely a huge amount more work than Targetting Shapes (737 votes). Then you've got Multi-Monitor support (640 votes) which could be months of work. However, I'd say that multi-monitor support is the bigger issue since it's a huge issue for those people that have multiple monitors whereas Aura effects is a minor niggle. And yes I have considered that fewer people use more than one monitor.
I really hope they aren't just focusing on the ones with the highest votes. There's a lot of quick wins in there. They should also be looking at parity with competing products.
If you look at the history of the wish list you'll find that what you are saying is exactly what the devs have done in the past. Easily coded items have appeared long before anything on the top of the list on many occasions. The most voted for isn't really a great indicator of what the devs might be working on and in fact often what they are working on isn't even on the list - or at least is a bigger behind the scenes type of thing which might actually - almost as a side benefit - knock off a few of the lesser voted for items.
One of the things which has been talked about for a long while is a better system of creating effects for example; that is moving away from the text parser based system to something which would allow for effects to be added to items, NPCs etc directly. You can see this in the 2e and especially in the Pathfinder 2 rulesets and a good deal of this is pushed into CoreRPG so that many different rulesets can benefit. In fact pushing more of the donkey work into CoreRPG is something else that's often been mentioned by the devs. Multi monitor support by the way is extremely unlikely ever to happen since it isn't supported universally by Unity.
Having said all this Smiteworks never gives out a roadmap; we just have to rely upon Doug getting over excited and leaking stuff :)