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Accoridng to my brother, who's a Somethingawful denizen.....

DEREK SMART WANTS TO BUY THE FREESPACE LICENSE

nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

http://forums.avault.com/cgi-bin/ultima ... 3;t=005485

Derek Smart [3000AD]
Developer
Member # 2860

Topic: Freepace License. What if...

....Derek Smart, yeah, that would be me, got the license from my friends at Interplay (a publisher I had very good experiences with); would you buy Freespace 3 if I made it?

Discuss. Rave. Rant. Argue. But this is something I am seriously considering, given that it looks like Interplay has started off loading properties (starting with Fallout3). I mean, just think. Would you rather see this legacy license fall into the wrong hands?

**********************8

*wtf*

MKSheppard wrote:Accoridng to my brother, who's a Somethingawful denizen.....

DEREK SMART WANTS TO BUY THE FREESPACE LICENSE

nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Get your guns, Shep! We're goin' Derek huntin'!

Not good, not good indeed. Smart is a decent enough programmer, but he doesn't have anyone to slap him on the head when he comes up with a stupid concept.

COmmentary on this in SA:

http://forums.somethingawful.co*/showth ... id=1132319

People, Derek Smart cannot be allowed, MUST NOT BE ALLOWED
to have the FS license, AT ALL COSTS. I cannot EMPHASIZE THIS
ENOUGH!

Rofl, is this the guy that beat up the coke machine?

For those people who do not know who this guy is

I haven't even played the freespace games and I'm scared of this.

What is this guy still doing in the industry?

On the other hand, this may renew interest in the Freespace license, and somebody with talent may try to snag it up instead...

Fuckin bloody hell! If the latest BC game demo is any indication, FS is about to get royally fucked over. There goes one of my favor game series...

This guy getting the FS license would be like KJA writing another novel....nothing good can come from this.

I had thought that Volition themselves were also out to get the license back from Interplay. Let's hope they succeed, as I don't see Smart doing anything good for the series.

Cant we get this guy a restraining order to keep him at least 50 ft away from any computer.

I thought BC3KAD was pretty decent, except the tedious clickfest that was required sometimes.

All hail, his mighty Smartness!

Datana wrote:I had thought that Volition themselves were also out to get the license back from Interplay. Let's hope they succeed, as I don't see Smart doing anything good for the series.

All we know is that they're interested in making FS3, according to a single employee that attended E3.

He may not have a clue, and he may not have style. But everything he lacks... well, he makes up in denial.

I don't care- he's displayed a huge commitment to his BC3K series in face of all odds, it really wasn't his fault that Take 2 fucked him all those years ago, and the current version of the game that he's making actually looks impressive (they were always just a little bit behind before them).

If he can bring that sort of passion into Freespace 3 (which he wouldn't turn into BC3K, because ... well, FS3 isn't BC3K)- why not? He obviously has talent. And his ideas looked cool. He certainly has the capability to implement them- I've *played* BC3K (the fixed version of the origianl, known as '2.0' IIRC) and it was impressive from a gameplay, if not graphical, standpoint.

(his latest game, Universal Combat, previously known as BC Generations, has had a demo out since Feb. I'm now downloading it).

Slartibartfast wrote:He may not have a clue, and he may not have style. But everything he lacks... well, he makes up in denial.

Ugh, I finally just remembered where that line came from...

The reaction from SB.com is as the same as here.

Well, for one, a hallmark of Freespace has always been its visuals. And...uh...well, I'll sum up what my friend Kevin said upon playing Universal Combat.

The nineties called, they want their engine back

That, plus horrible controls, ZERO sense of 'feel' to the flight (especially the atmospheric flight)...plus a habit of awful control schemes, REALLY freakishly awful graphic design for his human models...the list goes on. He's got a lot of good ideas, but couldn't make a good game if you beat him with a rubber hose. Not that that's not tempting in any case.[/quote]

Dark Primus wrote:The reaction from SB.com is as the same as here.

Replace "SB.com" with "everywhere".

Hell, even people I know who freaking loathe Freespace are aghast at this latest development.

For my part, I was sympathetic to Mr. Mr. Mr. Dr. Smart until I saw what he had done on the HLP boards. That pretty much destroyed any vestige of respect I may have had for him or his work.

hell just look at what Penny Arcade has to say about the sale of what's left of interplay....

His games looked interesting from an idea standpoint, but from reading reviews, it seems like they fail to live up. I'm just wondering, because he doesn't work for a large brand-name software/game company, how large have the development teams been for the last couple of projects? Because I doubt that he can get people to stick with his private firm after having so many flops. After reading the flamewarrior information on him though, I have lost my pity I had for the him and his development firm, he just seems to immature to be making games, like one of those kids who randomly pop-up in forums, wanting to make a game, and have some skills, but have no good experience, cohesiveness, or reasonable ideas.

I'll tell you what is wrong with Smart's concept: it's a stupid concept. Sure, it sounds very nice to make a "true" space simulation, complete with stupid controls and 300-page technical manuals. Like some people like their flight simulators, right? because they want to feel like they're in the real airplane, right? and they want everything from the throttle to the landing gear to the flaps to the air conditioning button to the switch that controls the seat dildo to the snow plower in the front of the F16, right? Same with tank simulations, submarine simulations...

So it stands to reason that people want a Starship/Battlecruiser simulator, right? FUCKING WRONG! I'll tell you why: there's no such thing as a "space warship simulator". What we really have is 3D space shooters - from Wing Commander to X-Wing to FreeSpace, we have fucking awesome shooters (like First-person shooters but in space), and they're fun as hell, but nobody gives a shit about accurately simulating a starfighter that DOESN'T EXIST. All we need to know is which button makes the other fighter go boom, we don't care about nonexistant technical aspects like activating the warning lights before we turn on the hyperthrust because otherwise the spacewing undermajigs get spacefrost otherwise.

Sure, sometimes it's fucking great to give the "illusion" that you're doing stuff like power management (all power to front shields! match speeds! turn down the inertial compensators!) but we really don't want 500 controls and gauges with nonsensical, nonintuitive three-letter labels on them. We like our INS or our ECM or our AIM missiles because we kinda know what they mean (and if not, learning about them military terms can be fun and enjoyable) but if you're going to make up a thousand fake acronyms to confuse people into thinking you're a god, well that's just completely retarded. And so is Mr. Smart

Honestly, it's the "pilot" equivalent of Technobabble.

Slartibartfast wrote:I'll tell you what is wrong with Smart's concept: it's a stupid concept. Sure, it sounds very nice to make a "true" space simulation, complete with stupid controls and 300-page technical manuals. Like some people like their flight simulators, right? because they want to feel like they're in the real airplane, right? and they want everything from the throttle to the landing gear to the flaps to the air conditioning button to the switch that controls the seat dildo to the snow plower in the front of the F16, right? Same with tank simulations, submarine simulations...

So it stands to reason that people want a Starship/Battlecruiser simulator, right? FUCKING WRONG! I'll tell you why: there's no such thing as a "space warship simulator". What we really have is 3D space shooters - from Wing Commander to X-Wing to FreeSpace, we have fucking awesome shooters (like First-person shooters but in space), and they're fun as hell, but nobody gives a shit about accurately simulating a starfighter that DOESN'T EXIST. All we need to know is which button makes the other fighter go boom, we don't care about nonexistant technical aspects like activating the warning lights before we turn on the hyperthrust because otherwise the spacewing undermajigs get spacefrost otherwise.

Sure, sometimes it's fucking great to give the "illusion" that you're doing stuff like power management (all power to front shields! match speeds! turn down the inertial compensators!) but we really don't want 500 controls and gauges with nonsensical, nonintuitive three-letter labels on them. We like our INS or our ECM or our AIM missiles because we kinda know what they mean (and if not, learning about them military terms can be fun and enjoyable) but if you're going to make up a thousand fake acronyms to confuse people into thinking you're a god, well that's just completely retarded. And so is Mr. Smart

Honestly, it's the "pilot" equivalent of Technobabble.

I thought BC3K (patched) was actually quite fun (then again, I sort of cheated by hunting for scrap and using the BC's point defenses planetside against ground targets rather than using interceptors planetside like I was supposed to) . Again, the clickfest in order to select which marines do what is annoying though.

Pray, who is Derek Smart? And what is BC3AD?