Pardon me for asking, but what multiplayer FPS do you know of has "dozens" of vehicles with even the same basic functionality of Ostfront's? Call of Duty 3 had only the Panzer IV and the M4 Sherman and World at War featured the Panzer IV and the T34/85, all driven from a third-person view with [sarcasm] such wonderful realistic touches like perks that make your turret traverse faster [/sarcasm]
. Most shooters these days have one tank, maybe two, per faction.
Here's Battlefield 3, as an example. Just so we're clear, their art team alone is several times larger than Tripwire's entire employee base:
Tanks
M1A2 Abrams
T-90
That's two tanks. TWO! You can't unhatch, the tank "armor" system is a joke, your tank's hitpoints regenerate, you can bail out instantaneously, you control the whole tank from a fixed camera view, you can't zero your sights... some "competition". Give Tripwire the same money, manpower and resources and they'd blow Battlefield 3 out of the water any day.
APCs / Infantry Fighting Vehicles
LAV-25
BMP-2
Anti-air vehiclesLAV-AD
Tunguska
Transport vehiclesHumvee
Vodnik
Growler
VDV
RHIB boat
AAV Amphibious Assault Vehicle
Between the tanks, APCs, AA vehicles, and the AAV, that makes a total of just seven dedicated frontline armored vehicles, none of which has anything even close to the complexity of an RO2 tank.
On the other side of the spectrum, Steel Fury: Kharkov has 30 tanks... using last-generation graphics. Ostfront and DH were comparable (once the modders got to work) in terms of the sheer number of vehicles, but UE3 is just a whole new ball game even if we did cut out animations, etc... especially given the new complexity of the armor calculations and the improved graphics.
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I understand you were working on an Sdkfz. 222 and that you found that between researching the interiors and having to code all the animations and vehicle behavior, you had to put the project on hold because you didn't know enough to continue.
That said, I don't think it's just the learning curve and the bar set by the current tanks that is discouraging modders. It's that learning curve, combined with the small playerbase and a few noticeable bugs in the tanking system. If RO2 had 2000 people online every day, clamoring for new vehicles, I'm sure a good modeler would start looking for a skilled coder and a talented animator to put some custom vehicles together--because the demand, support, and appreciation would be there!
And I'm still optimistic about the future. Once TWI pushes the new content out along with the major bug-fixes and Classic, they might be able to spare a minute here and there to put together some helpful guides and share resources for vehicle creation. Once Rising Storm is complete, we will see some very talented modders, fresh from the mod's completion, looking for something else to take up.
(And for the record,
I fundamentally disagree that new content alone will fix RO2's currently lower-than-desired playercounts. Gameplay is the issue--the bugs, the performance issues, and the design of the gameplay itself are. Newcomers entered in September to a bug-riddled release, a chaos-filled community, and were getting shot out of windows left and right by the demanding gameplay. Not many stayed. Poor design choices meant that many Ostfront players were disappointed.)
(New content won't bring back that RO fan who can't get more than 15 fps and who has to lead a target by 5 meters. Neither will it bring back the Ostfront player who got sick of hearing the Mkb's death rattle on every round of every map of every game, nor the newcomer who got frustrated with getting his role invisibly taken, falling through the map on spawn, and getting headshot by a tank 150 yards away without warning. Only gameplay changes and bug fixes will resolve those issues.)