Nintendo Switch

[Odbarc]

Have the developers thought about putting SPAZ2 on this thing? I heard some company got 30X more sales doing this over Steam. Couldn't find the source but it seems to be a better place to sell one's game.

Maybe MinMax will try that too and make lots of money and get them to make a full expansion to SPAZ2?



Only 506 hours played.
Does anyone have a good sandbox setting combination that works really well while also offering an alteration to play styles? I've messed around with it a lot and I can't come up with a really good one that doesn't make the AI overpowered or underpowered.

I think my current sandbox is set to something like "Strikecraft sizes late game, higher average power per star", combined with "very low regeneration, much higher HP and shields" to compensate while also defunking any "run away for 5 minutes and come back at full strength" nonsense.

One thing I've tried to get (but haven't been able to effectively balance) is a mode set around very few pirates, few low resources, and encouraging the player (myself*) to only be able to gain substantial increases in power by attacking other captains.
Challenges include having Faction Leaders not have ridiculous amounts of money but also not having their power so high that they're the ones who kill everyone, lots of people end up with nothing because the few pirates that do remain end up killing everyone and THEY are the ones that gain power, strikecrafts being more powerful than the motherships or they end up being a total waste of money because they die.

[Kindred Spirit]

I have to agree to try porting to the Switch if possible.
The ecosystem of Steam isn't really like how it was when SPAZ1 arrived.

[Odbarc]

Yeah, Steam is a nice place to buy games and whatnot but I can't really find anything good anymore. I think I've found like 2-3 games via Twitch or youtube that I had no idea came out that I would probably like that I would have never found otherwise and I frequently look at new games on Steam.

[Blorf]

It would be interesting to test, but also a huge and somewhat risky time investment mainly due to the Switch's processing power. We need at a bare minimum 2.4GHZ on a single core and the Switch cannot do that. Even the new Xbox 1 X doesn't have the horsepower we require, so consoles are pretty much out of the picture. Graphics wise, SPAZ 2 isn't a real resource consumer, but all the physics really hits the CPU hard.

Early on we looked at the Shield with Nvidia which has similar specs to the Switch but in the end that contact dried up since SPAZ 2 just wasn't going to run on that machine without a serious decrease to the PC version, which is not something we would ever look at. Maintaining two unique versions also wasn't going to happen. Having the Mac, Linux, and VR builds has taught us the amount of time overhead with that. An entirely new game branch with different core gameplay would be even more crazy.

Another issue is that we are using Unity 5.4.5, but Switch support came online in 5.6. Between 5.4.5 and 5.6 a non trivial amount of changes were also made to Unity which make porting to the newer version a major undertaking as well. Usually from one version of Unity to another there is about a day's worth of fixing to deal with old systems becoming deprecated, but since 5.4.5 there has been a major acceleration of changes under the hood that makes engine upgrading problematic. SPAZ 2 started development on Unity 4, and the upgrade from Unity 4 to 5 was less of a headache than from 5.4 to 5.5 so that should give you an idea of how much things are changing behind the scenes. Now Unity is on version 2017.3 which has tonnes of new cool features, but going from 5.4.5 to 2017.3 will never ever happen. Luckily 5.4.5 seems like a very stable Unity version and works for just about everyone so we are happy with it.

Audience wise, who knows. SPAZ 2 in my mind isn't a typical switch game, which could be good or bad, but who knows. It would be a big roll of the dice in the end which is just too dangerous.

We have to be as smart as we can with the time we have because MinMax doesn't have a publisher or kickstarter or any of that. We just pay for development out of our own pocket so the risk is all on us. It's stressful, but also keeps us from being beholden to anyone.

[Cusuno]

A real shame. Would've been really nice to play it on the go, but everything said seems logical.
The Switch isn't a powerhouse by a mile, but its portability is its big selling point. Many AAA games I've seen that have been ported to the Switch had to be downgraded like DOOM did.

I would've asked for the original SPAZ to be on the Switch as it shouldn't be such a huge problem spec wise, but then I noticed that it runs on an outdated engine, which also isn't supported at all.

[sbm311]

Originally posted by Blorf:

Graphics wise, SPAZ 2 isn't a real resource consumer, but all the physics really hits the CPU hard.

I just speculated on this...

For comparison, you can take two other games on the Unity engine - Besiege and Kerbal Space Program(KSP for short). Both allow to build things where each part is destroyable and physical calculated. And they both load the CPU less, in spite of more details.

For example, my wooden PC in KSP can support ships up to 200 parts without lags, even 500 parts ships with little lags. And this is for single ship, not considering docking manipulations with
other ships, which brings additional calculations. While in SPAZ 2 lags appear at the full battlefield + strikecraft.

I know that physical calculations hits the CPU, but why so hard?

[Odbarc]

I kind of really enjoy the amount of attention the forum gets from Blorf and Narlak.

[Blorf]

Really no idea of the internals of KSP or Besiege so I can't really speculate. We do usually have thousands of physics objects in motion at a time once the bullets start to fly and our individual part pieces are made up of dozens of sub components and even more sub objects. I don't know what is inside the objects for KSP or Besiege but I assume those parts are mostly there as mesh colliers with some center of mass info, but the pieces themselves don't need to do a lot, but I am just guessing. Its apples and oranges really.

[sbm311]

Originally posted by Blorf:

I don't know what is inside the objects for KSP or Besiege but I assume those parts are mostly there as mesh colliers with some center of mass info, but the pieces themselves don't need to do a lot, but I am just guessing.

As far as I know in both of these games, each part is independent and can be disconnected, break away or destroyed due to overload, damage; also pressure and temperature(external/internal) for the KSP. There is a familiar situation - the more parts, the greater CPU load, but somehow these games give more freedom without forcing within certain limits.

Of course in these games there is no combat system as in SPAZ 2, so they can use these resources. A very long time ago with the help of "Cheat engine" I made 50?(do not remember exactly) cores ship, start 1vs3 battle and had no performance problems until my ship battlewagon began to aim enemies. When switching to manual mode - lags are gone. This can explain additional requirements of SPAZ 2.

I still hope that someday there will be some max cores, max ship number, expanded strikecraft command points(to make less strikecraft number) sliders. For example more ships, though smaller size and with fewer strikecraft number.