Originally posted by PEGShane

A staged release wouldn't work for the game as currently designed. There are systems that run throughout the entire experience that aren't finished. If we get funding but less than it would take to complete the entire project, that's certainly something we'd consider.

Shane

Thanks for taking the time to answer the question.

Which I am surprised, most developers never answer it.

Thanks again, Shane.

After a short investigation, I've found this interesting interview:

I quote:

FiringSquad:How hard will it be to integrate the Unreal Engine with Big World's server technology?

Chris Bernert: Unreal said … Really difficult, many have tried, none have succeeded. BigWorld said … Impossible, you are mad. It is an incredibly difficult task and probably one of our largest technical challenges.

So, it seems that the issue was mainly on the technical side and that's probably why CME failed. What is quite surprising is that the team had to go for R&D (working on the engines, to make them play nice together), rather than to develop THE PRODUCT. Well that seems to indicate somebody did not make his job properly, OR that, much on the contrary... somebody did it a bit too well, but in that case, that would indicate the initial scheme was indeed to screw the many investors first and foremost...  : humm, you're not supposed to spend hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of bucks in licensing technologies prior to conducting any serious technical research to make sure these engines will fit with your needs and work quite well together, aren't you? Unless there IS a valid reason that absolutely convinces you that it's a wise move not to indulge in years and years of R&D in building your own engine from the ground up, and you'd be much more comfortable in licencing 3rd Party techs that cannot but achieve the work in less time, and at much less risk, of course. Probably something to consider if other funds are injected for the development of SGW...

Originally posted by _Pix_

Thanks again, Shane.

After a short investigation, I've found this interesting interview:

I quote:

FiringSquad:How hard will it be to integrate the Unreal Engine with Big World's server technology?

Chris Bernert: Unreal said … Really difficult, many have tried, none have succeeded. BigWorld said … Impossible, you are mad. It is an incredibly difficult task and probably one of our largest technical challenges.

So, it seems that the issue was mainly on the technical side and that's probably why CME failed. What is quite surprising is that the team had to go for R&D (working on the engines, to make them play nice together), rather than to develop THE PRODUCT. Well that seems to indicate somebody did not make his job properly, OR that, much on the contrary... somebody did it a bit too well, but in that case, that would indicate the initial scheme was indeed to screw the many investors first and foremost...  : humm, you're not supposed to spend hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of bucks in licensing technologies prior to conducting any serious technical research to make sure these engines will fit with your needs and work quite well together, aren't you? Unless there IS a valid reason that absolutely convinces you that it's a wise move not to indulge in years and years of R&D in building your own engine from the ground up, and you'd be much more comfortable in licencing 3rd Party techs that cannot but achieve the work in less time, and at much less risk, of course. Probably something to consider if other funds are injected for the development of SGW...

Nice find, and confirms what some of us here already suspected. It just didn't make any sense to any objective observer. The marriage of Big World and Unreal just seemed so impractical and expensive. When you invest in a 3d engine you will get some kind of training or help from the company inorder to educate your developers in using the engine properly and to its full potential. Maybe a dozen will get a course in person from the company.

With two engines you're going to need to have staff that can use both and a team working to marry the two and get them working together. Double the cost, double the training then another team is needed to marry the technologies which both companies say is either very difficult or impossible.

This is just a tradgic waste of time and money, it would've been much simpler for Gary Whiting to have put the money in a bag and thrown it over the bridge. This is incompetence at its highest and most basic level in the MMORPG industry. I hate to say it but this kind of bungling idiocy makes John Smedley seem like an MMORPG Einstien!

Originally posted by _Pix_

 

humm, you're not supposed to spend hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of bucks in licensing technologies prior to conducting any serious technical research to make sure these engines will fit with your needs and work quite well together, aren't you? Unless there IS a valid reason that absolutely convinces you that it's a wise move not to indulge in years and years of R&D in building your own engine from the ground up, and you'd be much more comfortable in licencing 3rd Party techs that cannot but achieve the work in less time, and at much less risk, of course.

Thats a good point.

I honestly am not sure how this works though. When a game developer needs to get a license for a game engine to base his game on, is he allowed to TEST the technology in question before he pays for the license? Or does he have to pay to obtain the license first and THEN test it?

Hi Raltar,

It all depends on the company you're licensing it from, but it is immensely complicated.

The typical procedure is for your best engineers to get it and eval / test it for a few weeks, then you make your decision. The problem there, of course, is once you start adding in all the other departments. One engine I worked in, for example, was great in many ways, but had a terrible effects system. To fix that requires a couple of senior engineers a couple of months, along with the art team that's going to use it. That's *relatively* minor.

A more complicated scenario is trying to get a handle on the back-end server tech. That's something you can run bots through or something, but you really don't know if it works until you get a couple of thousand people to stress test it.

Again, I wasn't part of CME when those decisions were made--just sharing the info I was told.

And despite posts here, we do have a server room with two huge racks running just fine. It is true that our external provider wasn't paid and is in litigation with us, though I think if we could pay the bill that would go away. Those servers were used for the beta--not for internal development.

Thanks :)

Shane

PEGshane I was for one looking forward to seeing this game released but after all the dramas over the past year I have started losing interest.

My question is do you think its possible to still repair what damage that has been done even if you get the funding to complete it??

Originally posted by Raltar

Thats a good point.

I honestly am not sure how this works though. When a game developer needs to get a license for a game engine to base his game on, is he allowed to TEST the technology in question before he pays for the license? Or does he have to pay to obtain the license first and THEN test it?

In our industry, either you can test technologies prior to licencing them, or you cannot, depending on the contract. It's often offered to test through an evaluation product. But in any case, once you've tested either prior to having licenced or afterwards, if the technology(ies) doesn't fit your needs, typically you're not going to write pre-launch press-releases  claiming that you use such and such technology, since after testing you've concluded this or this technology simply doesn't work for your future product.

To make it simple, in our industry, generally, developers like to communicate on the technologies that they use  and are working well for their developments: that makes a lot of sense to me. So that implies that you do not build a whole marketing campaign until your product has reached at least alpha stage, which has given you time to verify everything is working fine together on the technical side.

CME tested the technology prior to making the commitment.
 

In a side note, Superstition Studios tested the Hero engine and began their game development for this engine. Fortunately, for the investors, CME had just started to hit their cash flow problems and could not afford to license another engine. Superstition ended up going with Unreal after the Hero trial time locked.


 

Seeing a former employee post   " In the end, it's the high level CME management that killed this game. They had offers to fund just SGW that they refused to accept, because they wanted to fund the entire company."   makes the coldness of my frozen heart melt.  
 

Misinformation my ass! I know we nail it here.

Jerith has always been a reliable, truthful source.  He'll bash CME when they deserve it , but when he got paid his back pay (all but the last 2 weeks or so I believe) he said so openly.

[quote]Originally posted by AngeluxMedia

2) MMOGULS was never the official plan for anything directly related to CME. Gary Whiting does own MMOGULS and CME, and if he makes money on one it's certainly his perogative to support the other with *his share* if he decides to do so. Whether you care for him or not, Gary has put everything he owns into the company and is the most passionate person in the world about SGW.
Moguls did originally show SGW and other internal projects at their presentations. I know because some of them went up on Youtube. But they also showed World of Warcraft and other games. We at CME asked them to stop showing our projects because we felt it would be seen exactly as you've seen it, and it would imply an official relationship since Gary was involved with both. But an MLM gaming site is not illegal and no different than Amway or Avon from a business perspective, as far as I know. And if it ultimately proved to be a "pyramid scheme" rather than a legitimate MLM, those behind it would be prosecuted, I'm sure.
How it all works I'm not privvy to--MLMs are definitely not my cup of tea either--and as I said before we have no official involvement with them whatsoever. We don't know the people who work there and they don't know us.I beileve some of our artists did a few pieces for their website at one point, but that was before I was involved with that group, and those people are gone now. We also had some people do some freelance work for them way back in March, I think.
[/b][/quote]

This is pure bunk. Whether or not you say it believing it to be true doesn't change that. In pretty much every presentation that Gary Whiting does for MMOGULS he talks about SGW, how it would be intricately connected to MMOGULS, and how the people that play mmos form into guilds, which would be called commands in SGW, and how these commands in SGW would be perfect recruiting grounds for investors.

Originally posted by BlakeySGV

In pretty much every presentation that Gary Whiting does for MMOGULS he talks about SGW, how it would be intricately connected to MMOGULS, and how the people that play mmos form into guilds, which would be called commands in SGW, and how these commands in SGW would be perfect recruiting grounds for investors.
 

WOAH!

Seriously? That is NOT cool. As a former guild leader/founder myself I can tell you I did not like it when people tried to treat my guild as their own personal little army to use for their own purposes. If I were leading (or even just a member) of one of these "commands" in SGW and Gary came along thinking that my group was his personal recruiting ground to scam people into joining his absurd little pyramid scheme I would be PISSED. I don't know how he was planning to do this but if any of his goons tried to show up on my guild website or forum they would get ban hammered into next week very quickly and discussions of moving the guild to a new game would begin very shortly.

There was a MMOGULS associate's website (now defunct, unfortunately), that described how normal retail customers ("retail orphans" they were called) would be automatically distributed into the downlines of the "ultra Platinum" members (those that got in early).

if true, it shows how MMOGULS was going to be baked right into the DNA of SGW, leaving no one unscathed.

In many CME interviews, they (Joe Yabarra, Dan Elggren, Rod N., etc.) refer to iSnap (incentivized Social Network at play) as being the launching portal for Stargate Worlds and other games CME produces. I imagined it to be something like facebook meets pogo, or a glorified chat room before starting your game(s).     Sounds like the most Senior Management knew all along.

However, every mmoguls page (even the official facebook one) talks about how MMOGULS is iSnap. I thought it was pretty damning that Shane could not answer that simple question if MMOGULS is iSnap.

Shareholders should be livid that CME let Whiting walk away with and control the iSnap idea. I wonder where that Board of Director resolution for that is hidden? Unless Gary has put CME in the top of the downlines, so CME would have received a super large chunk of that revenue for putting their games out there for free. Of course, that puts CME at the top of the involvement with MMOGULS.
 

Originally posted by Raltar

Originally posted by BlakeySGV

In pretty much every presentation that Gary Whiting does for MMOGULS he talks about SGW, how it would be intricately connected to MMOGULS, and how the people that play mmos form into guilds, which would be called commands in SGW, and how these commands in SGW would be perfect recruiting grounds for investors.
 

WOAH!

Seriously? That is NOT cool. As a former guild leader/founder myself I can tell you I did not like it when people tried to treat my guild as their own personal little army to use for their own purposes. If I were leading (or even just a member) of one of these "commands" in SGW and Gary came along thinking that my group was his personal recruiting ground to scam people into joining his absurd little pyramid scheme I would be PISSED. I don't know how he was planning to do this but if any of his goons tried to show up on my guild website or forum they would get ban hammered into next week very quickly and discussions of moving the guild to a new game would begin very shortly.

Indeed, and the MMOGULS lot are deluded if they think the reaction would be any different to this for 99% of the MMO population.

Another fuzzy answer

forums.stargateworlds.com/showthread.php

"Hi all--quick update. A lot of people are on leave right now (including myself) but the guys showing the game to investors and upper management are all there trying daily to get us re-started.

My understanding is a significant portion of the funds have been raised, but it's one of those situations where everyone involved (us and the investors) want to make sure there's enough to cover all our needs. To be clear, let's say we need X million. If someone puts in $100,000 right now, that's great and much appreciated, but it doesn't get the game shipped and that investor would lose his money if the rest isn't raised in the long-term.

Needless to say, every single investor does substantial due diligence due to the delay of the game and negative press we've received. A significant number *have* pledged money on completion of their research into our books, however, so I find that very encouraging.

Otherwise, it's an ongoing process and there just won't be much news until then, but the day we return to full operations I'll let everyone know. In the meantime, thanks very much for your support and well-wishes.

Thanks"

That's a lot of typing to answer the OPs question when "No" would have sufficed

Originally posted by ariccaron

 That's a lot of typing to answer the OPs question when "No" would have sufficed

More precisely, "We have some money but not enough. And because of our screw ups, investors will pledge the money ONLY IF we get the full amount needed to finish the game. So it's really ALL or NOTHING."

Of course, supremeaaron read it as, "Yes, we have it but cannot tell you. Go celebrate and fap."

All of his "answers" are designed to be vague and ambigious. Meaning that wether I want to hear yes or no it is superflous since he has all bases covered. Most of his answers contain yes, no and maybe in there somewher. I call out the obvious fallacy in his reply concerning the financing of the cash sink studios and he just refuses to answer any further because he realizes that just got busted and does some damage limitation. I also asked questions to which I already knew the answer 100% confirmed, and he lied or at the very least he's been working there for over three years in a tiny microcosm and is totally ignorant of his time there.

In short Whiting or one of his cronies paniced and sent shane off to do some damage limitation about nine months too late. He had a list of stuff he was supposed to tell us and anything else was met with the vague/ambigious answer that could mean anything depending on what you wanted it to say. Trouble is he's told us nothing that we haven't already dug up ourselves, and only further exposed the disdain that upper managment at CME has for the potential playerbase.

this: 4/07/09

"We are currently negotiating several deals that will cover our financial responsibilities and fund the remainder of development.
When we sign those deals, you’ll hear about it"

then this:

"the day we return to full operations I'll let everyone know."

I guess the investor talk  damage control after the Brad Wright interview really was just a smoke screen.

So got in a discussion at the local Oregano’s the other night. Seems after Dan left, and before Shane officially accepted his promotion, Shane did a full assessment of SGW.  He meet with all departments to have a fresh look at what was finished and what needed to be completed to get the game out the door.

I will not bore you with all the details, but the figure ‘Management’ came up with to complete the game was closer to $20 Million.

I wonder if the investors received a copy of Shane’s findings.
 

Originally posted by Kyriesunset

So got in a discussion at the local Oregano’s the other night. Seems after Dan left, and before Shane officially accepted his promotion, Shane did a full assessment of SGW.  He meet with all departments to have a fresh look at what was finished and what needed to be completed to get the game out the door.

I will not bore you with all the details, but the figure ‘Management’ came up with to complete the game was closer to $20 Million.

I wonder if the investors received a copy of Shane’s findings.
 

Interesting findings. I was wondering what did he include in his figures? Was it just the 4 months back wages and money for development or was it those 2 and the money they owe to all the companies that have sued them over late payments.

Originally posted by Kyriesunset

...

I will not bore you with all the details, but the figure ‘Management’ came up with to complete the game was closer to $20 Million.

...

$20 million?  Could build another MMO for under $20 million.

So, if I'm correct, the total SGW budget would be USD 70M+, right ?

Originally posted by _Pix_

So, if I'm correct, the total SGW budget would be USD 70M+, right ?

70mil total.

that 20 and the 25 or so they spent on SGW = 40-50mill on SGW. they pissed away/pocketed 20-25 mil on opening up ghost studios that also never released a product.

Wow!  these forums are great.  A whole bunch of people who know part of the story and make up the rest.  Be assured that the facts are stranger than the fiction and the real story will be even more outlandish than the made up version you find in these forum posts.  Shane is the only one who really has some facts and he wasn't at SGW the whole time.   If anyone really wanted to know what was going on it wouldn't be hard to find out, but what fun would that be.  Know one really wants to know what is going on - that would be boring and there wouldn't be anything more to talk about.  From Shane's posts it sounds like SGW won't last much longer - and many of us on these forums can say that we had some small part in bringing it down -  but is that really what we wanted to do?