Sea of Thieves in Project Spark

very interesting I didn't know about the Project Spark I should look it up although I have Unity and Unreal Engine I thought someone would most likely use that first to create something related to SOT.

@IOnEI-Falcon said in Sea of Thieves in Project Spark:

Is there a way to share files in Project Spark? I know you can't search and download through the game itself anymore.

If you have PS on PC you can through SparkShare. Xbox One, unfortunately no. I will be making this available on SparkShare once I'm done. Mostly doing it for the entertainment value on YouTube since can't share on XB1 anymore. :'(

@Death-Sword22 said in Sea of Thieves in Project Spark:

very interesting I didn't know about the Project Spark I should look it up although I have Unity and Unreal Engine I thought someone would most likely use that first to create something related to SOT.

A little easier to make something quickly in PS. Wouldn't be anywhere near the multiplayer experience we've seen so far. Just seeing if I can get the same atmosphere since I did quite a bit of pirate content in PS when it was live, and it's a fun little project.

A minor update: the terrain of the main island is mostly done. I've added some foliage, and the latest episode of this series includes a brief tour at the end. I'll be building the pirate village and other structuresin ensuing episodes as well as starting on additional islands.

Well done. I didn't realize the "game" could still be played since they stopped service.

That looks pretty legit man.

Wasnt project spark one massive flop? Or am i thinking of something else?

Project Spark hasn't been available for download for some time, but if you had it before they took it down from the store, and didn't delete it, you can still play it. You just can't share worlds through the service, which is now offline permanently.

@Mi6-x-NeRo said in Sea of Thieves in Project Spark:

Wasnt project spark one massive flop? Or am i thinking of something else?

It was not a runaway success by any means. For some reason MS did almost nothing to promote it. It's demise was probably as much political as anything else, as support went sharply downhill after MS acquired Minecraft, which is likely not a coincidence.

@Lucid-Stew yeah i suppose micecraft and spark had similar ideas

@CaptnJaq said in Sea of Thieves in Project Spark:

what are the other features of Prjt Spark asides from world creation?

It's a bit like the junior version of Unity. The breadth of genres it can cover is near total. The scripting has some limits compared to high-level languages, but it's very powerful. The difference is that PS does a much larger percentage of the heavy lifting for you.

An example: if you look at the end of 4th video in my series, the trees appear to sway in the wind. None of that is default behavior. I coded it.

@Lucid-Stew such code. Very realistic. Much wow

@Lucid-Stew LOL - I had no idea you were hanging around here too Lucid. I obviously haven't made anything in Spark really since the X-Zero days but it's cool to see you here. It's a real shame what happened to Spark but it's really the devs own fault for not listening to what the community kept telling them and wasting their time on champions and other useless stuff instead of focusing on fixing the bugs.

@ST-Aabra said in Sea of Thieves in Project Spark:

@Lucid-Stew LOL - I had no idea you were hanging around here too Lucid. I obviously haven't made anything in Spark really since the X-Zero days but it's cool to see you here. It's a real shame what happened to Spark but it's really the devs own fault for not listening to what the community kept telling them and wasting their time on champions and other useless stuff instead of focusing on fixing the bugs.

I'm not surprised with all the pirate c**p we made on there! Yeah, the demise of PS is an interesting tale. Ultimately I think their problem was aiming it at kids but having the logic be damn-near high-level. Then once the adults showed up, refusing to aim it at the adults.

@Lucid-Stew I spent a long time working on some pretty good pirate ship code complete with working cannons and rocking back and forth with the waves etc. Only problem was running around on deck while the boat was moving or rocking caused all kinds of glitches within Project Spark that the devs never fixed. :-(

Anyways - my Ocean waves worked well. You should use them in any pirate project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rjs_bVKa7Hw

@ST-Aabra said in Sea of Thieves in Project Spark:

@Lucid-Stew I spent a long time working on some pretty good pirate ship code complete with working cannons and rocking back and forth with the waves etc. Only problem was running around on deck while the boat was moving or rocking caused all kinds of glitches within Project Spark that the devs never fixed. :-(

Anyways - my Ocean waves worked well. You should use them in any pirate project.

Yes! I have similar kode that I'll be adding on my next video or two. Actually I forgot to put it in the last one. Putting two and two together on that was a great insight on your part. One of my biggest challenges is going to be recreating this roiling ocean that Rare has devised. I'm thinking giant water pools configured in some way with various effects attached? Dunno yet. Though it will take some work, helm and cannon control just like SoT are of course possible. The sails might be impossible. Some guy made sails out of like 200 primitives, but I don't think I have the budget for that, plus the unfurling, etc... I have a solution for the moving deck problem, but it excludes the character from jumping. First person I might be able to get around it completely by making the character hover just above the surface it's "standing" on.

Avast, me hearties! I return from the briny depths of the community college semester. I've brought treasure with me, in the form of a new Sea of Thieves in Project Spark episode.

Building a tavern for the pirate village

Thanks everyone. A quick, all-in-one response here...

@KillaSaint they did, but if you downloaded it before it got canned, and did not delete it, you can still use it. The servers are down, but there is still a very small active PS community sharing through SparkShare, YouTube, and also XBL video captures

@Gnik-Nilbog Thank you, sir. I have been using PS vigorously since the beginning of the Xbox One beta in March of 2014. I can not take all the credit, as I incorporate many ideas originated by other members of the very talented and creative former PS community. This includes one who frequents these forums, ST Aabra.

@mikelim I think variations of Minecraft can accomplish most of what they tried to do with PS. Frankly PS did not do well and had plenty of problems. Speaking as someone who got their start with PS and aspires to be a developer, I can say that PS is only an inspirational starting point, and never really had the potential to create viable titles. It's too limited and had too many problems.

@mikelim said in [Sea of Thieves in Project Spark]

If Microsoft gave up on Windows 1.0, where would we be now? Nothing is ever perfect when it is first released. By my reckoning, it takes Microsoft at least 3 generational iterations of anything to get it to the point where it's actually robust and usable. Had they done that with Spark, imagine what kind of tool it would be now? They gave up on XNA, then they gave up on Spark... which seems like a lot of wasted effort and really, in my honest opinion, a huge lost opportunity.

Ultimately though you're talking about something that would compete with Unity, UE4, Lumberyard, CryEngine, etc. Project Spark was never about that. It was actually aimed at kids. It was kind of a place to graduate to from Kodu. Much to MS's surprise a bunch of 20 and 30 somethings, like myself, showed up to play. This is part of the reason it failed. Had they remade Project Spark into something more like what users were looking for, it would have ended up like a Unity-light, which I don't think has a place in the market. People wouldn't pay for it, and they wouldn't pay for the games produced. PS was awesome while it lasted, but it was never going to be what people wanted it to be. It wasn't super easy to learn. Kode's syntax isn't that far off from C# scripting in Unity, so it takes quite a while to get proficient at it starting at zero. Most people didn't have the patience for it. And really, if you already knew enough to be good at it, why bother? Go use Unity or UE4 instead. It had built-in distribution but the community was a haphazard mix of creators, half-interest players, people goofing around, and achievement hunters who couldn't have cared less. At the same time, both Unity and UE4 are adding systems like Blueprint which make logic a lot easier for users without programming knowledge to use. And Steam makes it easier and easier to distribute indie titles. That leaves even less of a market for something like PS as an actual game maker. On top of that, PS was a mess. It has major, major issues that the developer was absolutely unable to address over the course of 2 years. They probably would have needed to start over from scratch if they were going to try to get it anywhere. At the same time, they'd just spent a couple of billion dollars acquiring Minecraft.

As I said earlier, I think Minecraft accomplishes most of the things MS wanted to do with Project Spark, and it's also a huge money maker. I resent that MS cancelled PS, and especially how they went about it, but I understand completely why it happened.

@mikelim said in Sea of Thieves in Project Spark:

@Lucid-Stew You certainly make good points, but it still sucks that MS killed it off. It's not like they lack money or resources to fix this if they wanted to.

Agree 100%. At a minimum it would have been nice if they'd left the servers up so people could still share, because I guarantee they would. The game has been totally dead for 9 months and people STILL use it. (granted not very many)

Great to see people actually still play this "game" Totally underrated!!! This could and maybe should have become a competitor to MineCraft