Tprosser56

5 hours ago, Squad 65 said:

New hub is up if you haven't seen it yet, a lot of cool new and old stuff has been added.

How do you get to it?

It looks like things in the emergency community have continued to get worse since the release of the new free-to-play emergency title was released. It seems that the German emergency forums have closed up shop for good. They have released a statement on their website that you can read here. This has appeared to have happened without any notice to the public beforehand. It seems that a lot of assets, mods, and information provided by those forums are now going to no longer be accessible to the public. I therefore hope this same fate does not make its way over to this forum. I'm curious to hear others thoughts on this.   

1 hour ago, NoYes said:

One bug I have encountered that you might already know about is sometimes when pressing 2 to send units back to base, they get to the car door and just sit there while the car is stuck in place. 

Would it be possible to add a script, similar to the scripts used in Miami and Montana mod in em4, to debug the traffic and clear stuck vehicles. If it is possible it would be a easy solution for traffic bugs that happen either with vehicles going into other vehicles or cars getting stuck after being redirected by traffic, because for the most part, it's almost impossible to completely remove bugs like those.

There is a debug menu in the top left corner that will allow you to delete items one by one, its a little time consuming to delete a heavy traffic back up but its there along with a bunch of other tools to change the time weather and start certain missions/events. 

looks great EmC

18 hours ago, Sangmi said:

The problem now is that Sixteen Tons is owned by a publisher whose only real interest in the company is the potential for profit, something that is the downfall of most small game studios. Why spend a bunch of money making something great when you can make something okay that returns a huge profit? Though our community here keeps the game alive some 17 years after its release, our opinion matters much less in the eyes of the developer than that of the people who will casually play whatever free-to-play EMHQ style game they release next. EMHQ was released in 2008 and is still running strong today. It is clearly a revenue generator, and Phoenix Games (who bought 16T in 2020) is only concerned with continuing to improve the cash flow coming out of the game. 

Because I have no life, I went digging around while reading this thread and stumbled upon a case study on Phoenix Games' website and reads like so: 

So, to kinda come back and non-rhetorically answer your question (and this is really just my two cents)...

Sixteen Tons hasn't made a better game since 2006/2014 because they haven't needed to. Unfortunately, they'll most likely be swept up in the "free to play/gacha game that makes tons in microtransactions" hysteria and devote all of their development time to this premise, and you can't even say that they were forced into it by the publisher because the CEO of 16T himself is on board with it. I don't like to be a pessimist, however.. I'd say this will be 16T's business practice until they get acquired by another studio, or go under.

Who knows, when the game releases it may not be that bad. However... I've seen a lot of studios sacrifice their passionate fanbase in exchange for easy money, so I'm on the fence. 

Very interesting find, I had no clue the studio was bought out in 2020. With the case study that Phoenix Games has listed on their website as well as what you quoted from the case study, it looks to me that the beloved series that we know of is most likely dead. I feel this might be more of the case because when doing additional research on Phoenix and the game studios they currently own it seems that all of the studios owned are primarily producing free-to-play titles that are exclusive to IOS and Android devices. There was only one game made from sister studio Wellplayed Games that has a game that is for Xbox, PS4, Switch, PC . besides this title the only other game(s) that Phoenix has under all of their game studios is 16T with all of the Emergency titles that are available on either Steam or the Mac App Store. Thus after doing this research it makes me believe that in my opinion that they seem more primarily focused as an organization with creating games for mobile devices. Phoenix Also states on their website that,

Quote

"We are driven by a single purpose, to help entrepreneurs unleash their true potential. We release the untapped value of our acquired studios, changing their economics from day one to vastly improve the profitability of their output."

Phoenix Games

 

This just added more fuel to the fire that building games that have the features that the community want will be outweighed by the leaders and administration at Phoenix Games to please their investors. I don't like to have such a negative outlook on everything but it seems more likley than not the "Classic Series" of Emergency might be dead in the water. 

On 5/2/2023 at 11:52 PM, itchboy said:

I have a lot of very negative things to say about the new game. I won't say them here.

In fact I feel like im grieving the loss of a series that I love.

I won't be so damn negative though; there is some silver lining. One that, it might funnel more casual users, who could potentially have modding talent, into Em4/5

Another one is that 16T is starting to re-establish communications with the community. We as a community could push for the "opening" of Em2012/13 to modding, so that we can have 90% of Em4 as a game but with updated graphics.

We will see what the future holds.

At least we still have the current titles.

How so has 16T re-established communications with the community? 

This new game looks like a huge money grab, buying upgrades and skins for your units with real life money. It seems like they are selling out to a way where they can receive the greatest amount of profit. with that being said we will most likley not see another new title for the emergency series for the next couple years as they will be focused with this new FTP game and the life cycle that goes along with this new title. That makes me ask the question what's next for the series after this new game is released? Will they continue to create FTP games if this new game has a good reception with with the community? or if this game fails will we see a return to what 16T states on their website as a return to the "classic series"? 

Is it in the communities best interest to have EM12/13/14 edited to support mods which seems like an unlikely thing they would do now as EM12/13/14 is around 10 years old depending on the version. I think at this point what would be able to unify the community more would be either a full on remaster or complete remake of EM4/911FR. I for one will not be playing this new title once it releases. 

@bama1234  @itchboy  Saw that the mod was updated the other day, glad to see the water drafting function finally implemented and works without any issue. Keep up the good work.

@itchboy 

Been playing the mod for a while now and have not really run into any game altering issues. I want to say that I love some of the fine details that you have implemented into the mod including having a police unit automatically follow an ambulance when that ambulance is transporting either a suspect or an injured officer. Bravo!  One of the issues I did have was in reference to the Montana User Guide that came with the mod, as stated on page 11 to get a BLS unit from off map requires you to press Shift + Click but on my end of the mod it seems to only work on left CTRL + Click, This only seems to be for calling a BLS ambulance while all other times needing to use a Shift + Click for grabbing sand for the oil portions of car accidents or grabbing the K12 Saw works correctly.  Not technically a game altering bug but maybe a possible typo within the user guide.  Keep up the amazing work!

22 hours ago, itchboy said:

It would be super useful to me if I had consistent numbers on how much playtime you have before the game crashes, or the textures begin getting corrupted which preceeds a crash.

I'd also be happy if you are able to find out by how much the selection lag worsens over time.

I can get around 30-35 minutes of play before the selection lag gets noticeable.

I would say somewhere from 100ft to 150ft. My local volunteer department has a 100ft 110ft and a 200ft.

Its also sad too because i feel like so many people have invested their money into em5-20 because they thought the modding community would be just as great or if not better than what em4 has/had in the past and people could just be buying the game over and over but never play it because there are no mods. 

I feel like 16t just cares about money at this point they release a brand new em5 each year and they don't really do anything new in my opinion. If 16t cared they would actually listen to the community so they can make the game better for the people who have loved it for years but for now its just a cash grab to them.