Argh! I can't believe it's the middle of 2019 and I'm writing about something so ridiculous. Pathea Games, developer of Planet Explorers and My Time At Portia have lost the multiplayer code for Planet Explorers.
As a little reminder, Planet Explorers was funded on Kickstarter way back in 2013 with the help of over four thousand backers providing them well over one hundred thousand dollars. When it released in 2016 it was…rough. It had a lot of promise, some elements of it were interesting but it also had a lot of bugs.
In early May this year, Pathea Games wrote on Steam about their server being down, then in early June they wrote about there being "more loss than we anticipated" and then late June where they announced "our lobby server had an issue where all the code base got deleted from its server" and "it's a lost cause unless we completely rewrite the code from scratch".
Backups, Backups—Backups!
They don't seem to have any kind of backup of their working version, which is completely crazy considering the masses of free storage you can find online. It's also very easy to start using version control systems, with plenty of free storage for that also available in numerous of places, so I'm struggling to understand how they could lose everything like this.
Pathea Games have now made the game free and they said they will be looking to "make the game code available online" hopefully under a decent license allowing others to hack away at it, perhaps giving it a new life.
On top of that, they also said they're working on Planet Explorers 2 and they've "matured as a studio", but I don't really know how they could write that with a straight face in these circumstances.
You can find Planet Explorers on Steam.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: TheSHEEEPThere is a Pathea Games developer and light bulb joke somewhere in here...
Quoting: TheSHEEEPThere is a Pathea Games developer and light bulb joke somewhere in here...
How about :
How many Pathea developers does it take to change the light bulb ?
Trick question ... they lost the light bulb.
Quoting: GuestTo be fair though, even "professional" software development mistakes happen.
As a professional software developer I can tell you that there is no such thing as professional software development. There is only deadlines, managers, investors, deadlines, workarounds, hacks, deadlines, cut corners... Did I mention deadlines?
Luke_Nukem Jul 3, 2019
Quoting: PsychojauQuoting: liamdaweQuoting: EhvisThis almost sounds too silly to be true. Of course there is the "don't attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence" idea, but you do have to wonder whether there may be an ulterior motive here. Possible they just want to get on with new stuff and not spend time fixing horrible broken old code for a game that won't generate much in sales from this point.If it's a case of them wanting to move on, it's the worst kind of marketing possible to make your studio sound like a bunch of complete fools.
LOL agree, it would be incredibly stupid ! :D
It's always complicated nowadays when you are a small indie : free storage is nice but... is anything free ? Versioning systems for closed sources have a cost and there is always the bandwidth problem : game projects are HUGE. Not only you have all the game content and it's sources, but you also have a lot of garb** *erm* a lot of things that won't always be useful in the near future lol.
This is mental... I do gamedev on the side, and I use gitlab publicly, and also use gitea on my own private server - my git commits go to both at all times.
My small server? It's basically a collection of random parts I had from various upgrades, running openSUSE Kubic and docker (for gitea, plex, and owncloud), and also NFS access. Even if "free" wasn't suitable, this little setup is dead easy. I have a permanent IP address too, so remote people can also get access.
Hell, you can buy a cheap ready-to-go NAS like QNAP or Synology, or even ASUSTOR and get set up with gitea/owncloud/NFS/Appletalk/Samba etc super quick.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
justsomejosh Jul 4, 2019
Quoting: Nanobang......
I agree with you about the the controls and the building. But once you get the hang of it... this game really had a lot of potential. Ultimately I got tired of the bugs and one crash cost me a lot of work and time. So I gave up on it. I always liked the way it looked through.
QuoteUnfortunately, it really is due to incompetence on our part. We really didn't know that our server programmer was writing some of the code directly to the server until we went looking for it after the server deleted our code. We thought we'd just pop the backed-up code directly onto the new server and that'd be the end of it.
Still, loosing the servers and the multuplayer support kills the game, since you needed to use multiplayer to download and share models, even if you didn't play in a multiplayer map. So saying something that's broken beyond repair is now "free" is kinda cheating. Still, cool of the devs to open the code, as the article say, let's hope they'll choose a good license.
Also, on the "we have matured as a studio" statement, let's hope it's true.
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