Project OEM

This is probably a question the majority of you ask yourself on a daily basis. Let me elaborate and explain a bit from our POV, as this is easily being overlooked by many of the players – however greatly appreciated by those that think a bit further and understand us before reading this.

MX Bikes currently has ~56.000 registered GUIDs, meaning, atleast 56.000 players have bought this game and played it online once. How many of those refunded the game again is unknown because the official player database saves a GUID as soon as the player finishes one online lap.

The game has an average player count of ~1.450 and a peak of 2.345 players in the last 30 days. These are huge numbers considering the game had 7 online players 5 years ago when I started playing the game with a friend.

Why am I mentioning that?

The game isn’t what it used to be anymore. Back then, Asdrael was working on the OEM bikes alone and did them the way he wanted. Surely he listened to feedback and changed the bikes to match the inner workings of the game. However, when he pushed an update, he delivered it to maybe 20-40 players. Easy, you might say, but even that caused people to voice up and scream “ughh I have bike mismatch” – “ohh a new update, thanks man!”. Manageable.

However, with the current size of the community – and still growing – you might eventually realize that this task isn’t as easy as it used to be anymore.

Let me go back a bit to when we started being the “OEM Team”.

We are a team.

Yes, we truly are. After years of working on the OEM Bikes physics as a one-man-army, Asdrael decided to leave the game for good. This had several reasons and they’re all understandable and fine. In the end, we all are wasting our important time after, before or during work to provide stupid mods for the community of a game. Getting shit thrown at you for doing some mistakes that were simply overlooked or felt good to you personally but not for others, is just upsetting and kills the fun. We’re interacting less with partners, friends or families because we’re thriving to provide a product we’re happy with to thousands of players. There is a huge load on our shoulders that some people can’t, don’t or won’t understand which is really not understandable for any of us.

Asdrael and I started working together because I started messing around with bike imports as I wanted to re-import the bikes and give them a more uniform look, add missing things, iron out issues and so on. Asdrael was doing the physics, I was doing the visuals. As he left, I was left alone in the dark because I didn’t want to touch the physics since I’m terrible at the game anyways. So, what do?

The first iteration of “new bikes” without Asdrael on our side was OEM v0.16 if I remember correctly. Those were just little fixes and game features added to the bikes which I could easily do. Back then, it was me and GreenLenux delivering the whole pack. But we knew we had to work on the bikes due to how the game changed and that was when Mulock joined us and worked on the tyre patch everyone saw as “life saving”. That made the ball roll.

The “OEM Team” was formed.

However, the OEMs are not done by just a single person anymore, but by a group of passionate modders. And by saying that, I really mean it that way. Why would we still be here, if we’re not fully behind what we’re doing and trying to achieve? We’re not here to upset anyone, we’re not purposefully trying to disappoint people or “kill the community” – as some might’ve said and still say (which leaves us speechless and disappointed). We’re trying to make these bikes better each time we’re releasing an update. When the team was founded, Mulock was relatively new in the whole bike physics and BikeEd stuff. With the guidance of Zonta from GPB and Asdrael and his OEM treatment forum thread, he was able to learn the ways of doing things. And he still has a long way to go, as we all do. If you want to re-read the story about the early-ons of the OEM Team, read here: Project OEM – Project OEM (mxb-mods.com)

So why no frequent updates?

The sole reasons why we’re not doing more frequent updates are multiple:

• we have more than 40 bikes currently
• the game has several thousand players
• it is still too complicated to move one folder into another
• Bike & Data Mismatch

It is incredibly complicated to “just quickly” release a patch/a hotfix/an update where we again put tens of hours of fine tuning and testing bikes. We have an internal feedback group of not “us” – as in “The Team” – but many high paced, fast and good players you all know. We’re relying on their given feedback and if something feels off, the physics dept. tries to fix the addressed issues as quickly as possible. You might not believe that, but we really do.

The OEM pack is the absolute must-have to play this game. Sure, there’s other bike packs out there which have an absolute right of existence and it’s good to have more fish in the sea. But when we’re pushing an update, we have to hit up all the big players like Mouk (MyMXB), MxWayGamer (MXBServers), Pepiti and Piboso (to reset stats) and let the whole community know there’s an update coming and they have to install it otherwise they get mismatches all over the place. To add to that, as soon as we do updates to a single value in the bike physics, that bike has to be re-registered. A bike registration is a time-taking task because you have to boot up the game, select the affected bike, go to track, wait until synced, press a key combination, store the generated code somewhere and register it in the online form (see: Bike registration (mx-bikes.com)) – rinse and repeat for any single affected bike.
Change one value in the tyre physics, you’re forced to do it to any existing bike that relies on the tyres.

It’s not done by simply clicking here and there – well technically it is but it’s A LOT of here and there. It does take a lot of time and that has to be decided wisely if the bikes are completed, or not. If they’re not, we can’t just skip two steps. It all has its order of doings.

Now imagine doing this on a weekly basis. The game quickly becomes a job and precious time you could spend otherwise will be wasted to explain people minute-by-minute and repeat yourself. The community does have a lot of helpful, nice and supporting players that are able to guide newlings correctly – and we’re absolutely thankful for those guys. I am not here bitching about the whole community, there’s as always just some rotten apples that like to trash talk or insult us where and when they can.

Also, this is why we started giving out the “Preview” bikes for OEM Supporters. We push out bikes at some point that show a glimpse of what we’re working on, without having to force thousands of players and server hosters to update their bikes. We can improve and modify the bikes to our liking without really having to worry about bike mismatches and other common issues.

They don’t listen to feedback

It’s absolutely possible that if you’ve given feedback it might’ve not been addressed in the next patch or update, which we’re not doing on purpose but it simply happens. It definitely shouldn’t, but we’re working on so many bikes the same time so it does happen that things might’ve been overlooked. But as said, not because we don’t care about what you say, but because we’re simply so deep into fixing or changing other issues.

This is not meant to be an empty apology at all. I’m just trying to describe why things are the way they are.

When we’re doing internal tests, we wait what our feedback guys say to the newest revision of a bike. And if it’s fine we move on to the next one, while also working on addressed issues that were noted down – rinse and repeat all of that for currently 41 bikes.

To sum it up, saying “they don’t care about feedback” is a mean insinuation. We’re really working our butts off to provide improved bikes every time we release an update. We won’t release an update where we’re not 100% behind it and on par with our feedback guys. Some people that seem to have personal issues with us would probably continue going on us for “crying” “talking shit” “lying” and what not. I repeat, we don’t have to be here, we’re doing all of this because we think we have the right visions – we’re just not there yet but with recent findings we’re more motivated than ever and are positive we’re getting there at some point (hint for the OEM Supporters at the bottom).

Final words

To come to an end in this article, I want to say thanks to anyone trusting and supporting us. As already said, we’re here for fun and are trying to provide a good product that is free to use for everyone after all. The OEM Supporter programme is no must-have at all, if you don’t want, don’t get, as simple as it is. It is just our most direct way to say “thank you” to anyone contributing and wanting us to continue our journey and have some worth for our time.

We absolutely know we’re not there yet regarding our physics, we noticed that and hear you loud and clearly. As mentioned in the previous post (Enduro Bike Pack v0.15.4 – Project OEM (mxb-mods.com)) we’re currently working hard on the new bikes and we’re doing huge steps in the right direction.

And remember, we love to hear feedback as long as it’s constructive and helps us thrive for the better. Never expect that feedback will be fixed the moment you press “send message”. This never happens in any bigger project because it’s almost impossible to do so. However we always do our best and aim at fixing issues, as described earlier.

The whole OEM Project was never as transparent as it is currently. Words hurt and we want you to know how we feel and think, since the whole project is our little baby we want to see grow successfully.

Written with 🧡,