Hi guys,
I was just informed of this thread and asked by somebody via FB, "I'd like to know why my order for Defender of the crown has been on hold since Nov 2016. Also will I ever get wings?? Its a bit crazy to not get a reply back on these things."
Here's my reply:
I have nothing to do with Defender or Rocket Ranger or Wings-PC, I am
only the programmer of the Wings-Amiga port. So for anything related to the other stuff you have to ask Cinemaware Retro.
Wings-Amiga-Port:
Yes, unfortunately it takes muuuuch longer than initially thought. No, it's not done yet and anyone claiming anything different spreads fake news.
However, CinemawareRetro sends boxes to some people who reserved it. Those boxes only contain a recent unfinished dev-build. Those people know what they get, of course.
It's meant for people who explicitely asked for it because apparently for them it's more important to have the box already instead of the finished game (pure collectors it seems).
Anyway:
note that Wings-Amiga is no Kickstarter or whatever. By paying you simply reserved your copy. If you are tired of waiting you can simply cancel it and get your money back.
The money was not touched. I have not seen / spent a single dime.
Wings-Amiga will still require some more time to finish. I won't do any further estimation though. Right now it's completely on hold until Tower57 is done. After that I will continue and hopefully be done soon.
@Niding
I think Daniel is accepting too much work. There are limits to what 1 man can do in x amount of time. Espesially when it doesnt yield any cash back to him personally.
That turned out to be true, unfortunately. It was hard to forsee though:
1. the work required for Wings turned out to be much higher than initially thought. This has all kinds of reasons but mostly it's due to the extreme degree of asset optimizations required plus the high amount of large levels which have to be checked over and over again, whenever applying a more heavier optimization or whatever. Simply strongly underestimated this.
2. Tower57: bad luck. When I agreed to do those ports I asumed that what I was told was right: that it's simple basic OpenGL etc. That's why the Kickstarter-stretch-goal was that low and why I thought that it would be a straight simple some-weekends-port like e.g. BattleSquadron Deluxe was.
Unfortunately it turned out that the game's code was running so extremely slow (or not at all due to RAM requirements) on even mediocre NG-Amiga-hardware that I essentially had to insanely optimize / rewrite huge parts of the game completely to get decent performance. And on top of that I had to go the software-rendering route because many NG-Amigas couldn't handle the huge textures / huge VRAM requirements. And also come up with a hicolor-version for systems with < = 512 MB RAM like the 440ep or old PowerMacs.
So the point is: I asumed that this would only allocate very few of my time and it turned out to be a nightmare consuming man-month over man-month.
FYI: I did performance comparisons recently and it turned out that my optimized code runs more than 13-17 (!!!!!!!!!!!) times faster than the original code... And that was just enough to make it *playable* on 440ep and such... Just to give you an idea about the amount / quality of work (at most likely about 1 EUR per hour, at the end
).
Anyway, for T57 we have a release candidate, my testers are very happy so this will be done very soon. And then back to the other nightmare, Wings
Cheers,
Daniel