It has been a while since I had time to stop by and read this thread, and I apologize for the fact that by now my reply is dragging an oldie out of the archives - but there were quite a few points I felt worthy of reply (and frankly, the arrogant and condescending tone of one particular post rather bothered me).
That’s a very lengthy critique from someone who is not even a user of the product.
That might just be because I care whether the product is good enough. I took the time to make a reasoned post because I do see that Ship Simulator shows promise - but that it could be much better.
You are among the legions who compare this simulator to FSX, or some similar product without any real understanding of the reasons why this simulator should not be thrown open to third party providers.
You assume that you're correct that it shouldn't be "thrown open". I happen to disagree. We all have opinions; yours differ from mine.
You're a little off base to suggest that just because mine differs from your own, that I have no "real understanding", though.
You seem to be trolling this forum for posts that you can parrot to support your position. At the same time you ignore, or are not able to comprehend, those posts that explain the effort involved in making a player vessel.
...and you seem to be unable to handle somebody having a differing opinion without resorting to belittling them and ignoring the substance of their comments, for example claiming I was "trolling ... for posts that [I could] parrot" without any evidence to back this assertion up.
Believe me, I very much understand that a LOT of work is involved in the creation of new vessels, especially quality ones. I clearly indicated I was aware of this when I pointed out that the reason VStep was misguided in its approach was because they were "simply too small an organization to provide a reasonable pace of addons". A larger organization might be able to work on new vessels, environments, etc. at a good pace, but because of the sheer volume of work involved, it would take dozens if not hundreds of employees to manage this.
While the pace at which VSTEP is able to produce ships and environments that meet their very high standards might not satisfy the impatient kiddies—most of whom treat the sim more as a 3D photo album than as a way to experience the operation of ships—there is a large, but generally silent, customer base that appreciates the care and effort that VSTEP puts into the product.
Again, with the belittling. I'm not a "kiddie", I'm 35 years old - and while I no longer work in the maritime industry, I worked full-time for many months on (and have many hours of experience at the helm of) a *real* ship - a 139-meter, 11,630-DWT LPG carrier regularly calling at ports in eight countries on both sides of the Atlantic, to be specific.
We would not want to see VSTEP relax their standards just to cater to someone’s non-qualified idea of what their business model should be.
...and you make assumptions both as to my qualification to offer an opinion on their product and business model, and the community's ability to produce models that are not just of equal quality to VStep's models, but quite possibly of significantly higher quality than VStep has the ability to produce in-house.
Your dissatisfaction with the development of the program suggests that you are perhaps not a prospective customer that VSTEP should court. They would be getting a constant complainer who would never be satisfied, and would soon abandon the program without significantly contributing to either the program or to the bottom line.
I would suggest that your inability to believe that VStep could be wrong (and that to believe them to be anything other than perfect disqualifies one even to be a suitable prospective customer) probably suggests *you* are the one whom VStep shouldn't be listening to.
*Every* company has the ability to offer a better product than what it currently offers - no company is absolutely perfect. One very good way to improve is to listen to why prospective customers have failed to become *actual* customers.
A better example might be the freedom that Train Simulator users have to create their own routes, scenery, locomotives, carriages and so on.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of what is produced is just bug-ridden junk that has been plagiarised from the few top-quality creators (ahem!).
No, I think Vstep did the right thing by sealing it off.
Yes, much of what is produced by the community is of sub-par quality - but it is easy to filter out the chaff. Indeed, were VStep to open up, they'd find that the community would rapidly offer mechanisms to do so on the user's behalf, in exactly the same way as the flight sim community has done. There are numerous websites that offer comprehensive reviews of the best community-provided products - whether they are free or not. Some of those websites even have reviews authored by real industry professionals with extensive experience of the real-life counterparts to the virtual products they are reviewing.
There is absolutely *no* question in my mind that while there would be plenty of chaff, the cream of the crop would easily meet - and quite likely exceed - the quality of the models VStep provides. If you believe otherwise (and if you have any knowledge of aviation), I suggest you take a look at the products that PMDG offers for flight simulator as one example of the incredibly quality that can be provided by an active third-party development community:
http://www.precisionmanuals.com/
The level of detail in PMDG's models is far, far in advance of anything offered by VStep for Ship Simulator. Their models are incredibly close to the real world. Look at what's involved just in preparing an aircraft to taxi (and never yet leave the ground) in one of their models:
http://ops.precisionmanuals.com/wiki/PMDG_747-400_Type_Rating_Course_Lesson_1
And that's one of their older models for Flight Sim 2004, not even a current one.
It has only been about 2 months with the shipyard and you are already complaining. There are 4 ships now!
And as I pointed out, of those four ships, two aren't even new models - they're pre-existing models that were already available for sale in New Horizons.
So really, there's only two new ships so far, in two months.
With an active third-party community in place, there could easily have been an order of magnitude more available in the same time period, of equal quality to those created by VStep.
It seems to me that too often if someone disagrees with another person then we end up getting aggressive, which is unnecessary, and I fail to see where the aggression is in Marty's post. He is simply pointing out a few truths.
You might want to re-read his post - or do you consider referring to anybody whose opinion differs as "kiddies" and casting unfounded aspersions on their knowledge and experience to be a normal part of a reasoned and rational, adult discussion?
