The History of fleetops.

posted on September 28th, 2010, 7:07 am

Now the last thing I want to do is make more work for dom, we all know he has alot to do as it is keeping up with all the updating the guide, (maybe someone should help him?) however i had an idea about a cool new section to the guide.

One thing that ive always been curious about since i first started playing fleetops and then joining the forum, is where the heck did Doca and Optec get these ideas for this Modification, who are Doca and Optec and how are they so skilled that they can do this? How did fleetops first start out? What were some key breakthroughs early on in the various versions? What has changed in the versions since? How did this game evolve to get where it is today?

Basically my proposal is a history of fleetops, a page which could talk about and describe these various things, complete with pictures of various versions, perhaps a few comments from the developers, and other pertinent information about the evolution of this game.

We all know where the game is now, and we have somewhat of an idea of where its going, but i think it would be cool to know about its past, its roots, the history of fleetops.

Comments, thoughts, or ideas please post!

Thanks, Ray 320

posted on September 28th, 2010, 2:54 pm

Hrm, that sounds like something that would have to be entirely written up by the devs - nobody else is precisely sure how many trial versions started out, and I don't think anybody has the programming knowledge here to explain it besides them. As for how ideas came about - well, that's partially explained in the apocrypha section  - but of course to get the full story you'd need to have the devs write out exactly what caused what. Lastly, there's a lot of personal stuff in there that I don't think the devs want to really share 

posted on September 28th, 2010, 3:16 pm

Puh, sounds indeed like an interessting idea. We will try to cover future development within the new DevBlog forum, but the past is shrouded in darkness (yep a catched this phrase of an rpg game lately! reuse is everyting)

The precise ways ideas are brought into the game is quite complex and much less fixed as you would expect from a development team (thats the bonus if you are not a company, but a hobby project). It usually starts out by someone having a good idea, discussing about it, and the majority if ideas gets discussed down by this point some survive and make it into the game as a feature of some sort.

But i dont think even we could write a real "where do ideas come from" topic, as since beta2, there was a hell of community input into Fleet Operations. The vast majority of new gameplay features were not developed by us, but by YOU! We do only shape and alter them a little to fit into the game

posted on September 28th, 2010, 3:29 pm

Well said optec, however the second part of my Ide about the history of patches and such, I was mainly thinking most info could be found from news updates, and information included could be sort of a timeline in fashion, for instance things like:

*3.0 was a very special patch that added new features....etc

Sort of stuff like that because a person who joined today would never know that sfc didn't used to exist and the descent used
To have two deflectors, or that fleetops was originally for armada 1

posted on September 28th, 2010, 3:33 pm

Isn't that what the changelog is for? 

posted on September 28th, 2010, 3:43 pm

Just a shot in the dark but, maybe you could add a timeline chart or picture for milestones and patch improvements/storyline arc changes ect to simplify it down for those who dont like to read.

posted on September 28th, 2010, 3:57 pm

Thats actually kind what i was going for, yes we all know there are the changelogs, but for those who dont want to read every little change....

Just bigger breakthroughs

-In patch so and so, mixed tech ships were added, and some mixed tech had their own unique ship never shown before, (picture of miranda mk2)

-In patch so an so, a major interface redo happend, also included were some key changes to bla bla bla....

-Cloak was a major focus of this patch, and it forever changed the way that people cloak

-The borg evolved greatly from stock armada in what we see them as today, (maybe some evoutlution of races features as well) the addition of uplinks forever changed the way borg were played in patch.....

Like i said dom i dont want to give you more work, but i belive this could be somthing cool to add...

posted on September 28th, 2010, 4:35 pm

I wouldn't know what to add and what to remove Ray. I mean, most of the major stuff is announced in the news posts and the changelog (the gameplay stuff I mean) - you could always write up a compendium as you see fit of course  . As for what affected gameplay, each person is going to have a different idea of that one, and there are so few active players from even the release of 3.0.0 that I'm not even sure how'd you'd get people to agree 

Just a shot in the dark but, maybe you could add a timeline chart or picture for milestones and patch improvements/storyline arc changes ect to simplify it down for those who dont like to read.

Optec will be releasing a database for historical Fleet Ops stuff (in-universe) in the future - the Apocrypha section of the guide is subject to change till then, and is not the whole story, as Optec wants to save the new stuff for his database