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Author Topic: Third party interfaces and "Losing control of the project"  (Read 133990 times)

isitanos

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Re: Third party interfaces and "Losing control of the project"
« Reply #225 on: July 31, 2008, 03:43:17 pm »

Quote
What about Battle for Wesnoth? It's pretty much a bazaar, and it's a wonderful game.
You have a very different definition of "wonderful" than I do, then. Wesnoth is an aimless pile of crap, tugged in all sorts of directions by people who want to make it into different things.

It's a fun game with very nice graphics, that keeps improving despite (or because?) the big mess that the forums are sometimes. Anyways, if open-source development is always bad and inefficient as you seem to think, then Toady doesn't have anything to fear from open-source third-party clients isn't it? They'll be so bad that nobody'll want to use them. I don't see the point you're trying to make.

Quote
I'll say that you're being disrespectful if, as in this case, I think you are--because if you read his post, it's pretty plain that he's already considered what you brought up.

This just goes to show that, no matter how carefully you word your post to show that you're suggesting and not demanding, no matter how much you try to stick to the facts, and so on, someone somewhere will think what you wrote is offensive. You really have a weird concept of "respect". Am I supposed to magically agree to everything Toady says the second he posts, and also suddenly understand all his motivations and all his reasonings? If you read my post, it's pretty plain I'm pointing out things that he might not have considered, and I'm interested to have details on some things he said.

Overall this over-protective attitude toward Toady is really annoying. If someone was insulting him on the forum, I'd certainly be among the ones who step up to tell that someone to shut up. But since I'm politely suggesting some things, he's just free to ignore me if he wants. You're just crowding this thread with useless posts, and with your "How dare you contradict Toady" attitude, you make him sound like a Japanese emperor instead of the friendly and rational guy that he his.
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Andir

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Re: Third party interfaces and "Losing control of the project"
« Reply #226 on: July 31, 2008, 04:09:43 pm »

with your "How dare you contradict Toady" attitude, you make him sound like a Japanese emperor instead of the friendly and rational guy that he his.
Toady once told me, "If you don't wash my feet, I will kill your family and countless millions by flooding half the world!"
Ever since then, I have never once questioned his motives or stepped up to make suggestions to his holiness.  Why would I want to question such an omnipotent power!

True story... I think.
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Tormy

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Re: Third party interfaces and "Losing control of the project"
« Reply #227 on: July 31, 2008, 04:30:12 pm »

Cant you guys just stop this flaming?  ::)
I guess the situation is pretty clear now that even Toady has replied in this topic. All of you can make suggestions regarding the interface instead of this flaming.

PS.
Wesnoth... It was open source from the start, the devs have stated that it is basically a game what the community will build up, and that is what happened. It was a very bad example isitanos.

PPS.
I think that Toady should lock this topic for good. There are other, polite threads about the interface. This topic is full with flaming, and we dont need topics like these I guess. Correct?
« Last Edit: July 31, 2008, 04:32:40 pm by Tormy »
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dreiche2

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Re: Third party interfaces and "Losing control of the project"
« Reply #228 on: July 31, 2008, 06:14:33 pm »

isitanos, if it makes you feel better, I'm fully with you that you are not disrespectful, and you're being attacked harshly all the time unnecessarily.

I just wanted to get this out now, because yeah this thread might get locked because some people still act agitated.

PPS.
I think that Toady should lock this topic for good. There are other, polite threads about the interface. This topic is full with flaming, and we dont need topics like these I guess. Correct?

I think we got your opinion on that this thread should be closed by now (I got it by page 7 already).

Edit ps: Btw, pretty crazy how big this thread got so quickly hu?  :) Record?
« Last Edit: July 31, 2008, 06:22:50 pm by dreiche2 »
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Langdon

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Re: Third party interfaces and "Losing control of the project"
« Reply #229 on: July 31, 2008, 09:04:16 pm »

Quote from: dreiche2
yeah but did the whole negativy and hostility bring anything beneficial here? And did the discussion hurt anyone? We could have the same discussion in a polite fashion, voicing opinions and laying out arguments, then Toady joins in with a long reply that further ellucidates on what he thinks about it and why, and everyone is smarter in the end. No need for insults or "shut up" comments.
What did it do beneficial? It finally caused Toady to step in and give us a detailed explanation of his point of view thus I guess the best way to get him to respond is to insult one another. Or just report posts.

You do know that he would have chimed in eventually, even without all the flaming? it's that there were too many posts in too short a span of time that it seems he took his sweet time getting here, but in truth, barely a day had elapsed between thread start and full on insult-mode, and another day before he responded. Assuming he checks the forums at the same time every day, he responded pretty quickly for someone who isn't doing forum moderation full time.

Edit: replace "checks the forums" with "checks reported posts"...
« Last Edit: July 31, 2008, 09:10:37 pm by Langdon »
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Toady One

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Re: Third party interfaces and "Losing control of the project"
« Reply #230 on: July 31, 2008, 09:19:41 pm »

A... am I going to have to convict people of failure to chill?  Let's just, Baby, relax!  Ain't no thing.


I tried hard to put myself in your shoes and see things from your point of view, but apparently I failed to understand one thing (correct me if I'm wrong): the general atmosphere of the forums and feedback you receive from players is an integral part of your happiness. I was imagining that you could just let the mess settle down by itself after every release, but since I am not this forum's moderator, I can't really tell how it feels to have a big mess of threads about stuff not working.

It generally sucks to have a bunch of people complaining that things don't work, especially when there's something I can do about, that is, work with the interface modders more closely, having in this scenario sanctioned third party interfaces and released a public API.  It's the pressure that would make me unhappy.  It's good when the forum people are happy, but that wasn't what I was getting at so much.

Quote
When you speak of pressure, are you picturing direct pressure? I have a hard time imagining people screaming at you on the forums, except maybe for the occasional moron that can be ignored. Wouldn't people rather be putting pressure on the third-party developers to update their interface ASAP? But maybe you'd feel pressure nevertheless because you dislike seeing that people cannot play the game.

There would be direct pressure on me to work with third party developers -- this isn't about screaming.  This thread itself is direct pressure to work with third party developers (or at least get the ball rolling).  That isn't to say I disagree about you posting it.  I'm simply stating what it is, and I think that yes, there'd be a lot more of this, a lot more I'd have to reply to, and a lot of...  pressure.  Additionally, I'm not just talking about external pressure, in fact, principally not -- having created the situation, I would feel some obligation to make it run as smoothly as possible, and I would rapidly become irritated by this, because it's some of my least favorite kinds of work.

Quote
One thing I'd like to point out, though, is that you seem to think that a single interface, "The front-end", would come out of third-party development. Even though that's possible, open-source usually seems to bring diversity (look at the number of linux distros), especially in a single-player game where people don't have to use compatible clients, so they can play together. So I think we'd likely see an improved ascii client, a 2d tiles client, an isometric client, a 3d client, and maybe several of each one. In my view it would distribute the uproar, so that at least not everybody would be complaining about the same thing  ;D . But I don't know if you see that as a relief.
[emphasis added]

He he, of course not.  It's worse actually -- more parties to work with.

Quote
Lastly, I may have a good way of mitigating the breakage of third-party clients at every release, without requiring your direct involvement. Assuming that you develop your own open-source interface at the same time as your closed-source server, you would likely publish your interface changes to a public SVN server. You would probably do it incrementally, at the rate of one or several commits a day - akin to backing up your work whenever you've made a step. In that case, you can bet that enthusiastic developers will watch those changes keenly, to see what's going on with the interface. This means that third-party client makers will already know that moving "dwarven armies around on the world map, with a tactical view and various options" is coming for the next version (from your very detailed dev notes), so they'll have time to plan which kind of interface they want to provide for that. And since they'll see the necessary code changes evolve gradually, because you'll always need an up-to-date interface for bugfixing, they'll be able to follow closely your development. They might have to adapt to your last minute changes, but otherwise I believe that the days of bugfixing prior to release could be enough for some of them to finalize their clients on time.
Now of course, you have to feel comfortable with that way of working.

Yeah, this somewhat mitigates breakage with those third parties that are active and approaching the situation with some dedication, but the trade-off of working with my day-to-day changes under that sort of scrutiny is definitely a minus for me, and I don't think it could really happen in a vacuum without questions about changes and so on, or without me feeling like I have to provide some sort of documentation as I add things.  I don't know if that sounds like quibbling, but I can't easily overstate how much I hate managing code or collaborating on code or anything along those lines.

Additionally, I think breakages would still happen, especially when staff leave projects hanging (work obligations, got tired of it, vacations, etc.), and it wouldn't change the fundamental situation I'm imagining, although in the case of project abandonment or delays with staffing, where there isn't pressure to work with the (missing) people in question, it's more the pressure to incorporate changes back into the base API, which as I stated in my previous long post, I wouldn't be able to do without potential legal problems.


I don't mean to write as if I'm sure about any of this, but once I drop this bomb in my project, I can see every day becoming "oh man, what a goddamn hassle" instead of what I've got now, which has less of that.  Again, I think the OP is justified in starting this thread, so I'm not raising that as an issue, but I've also spent some hours in here, reading posts and composing these replies.  That stuff just starts to magnify, and I'll either end up ignoring people I don't feel like I should be ignoring, or not ignoring people to the detriment of the core game itself and my own well-being.


What I would like to hear from Toady is what kind of graphics he has in mind for when he gets to the interface overhaul. That way we could at least prepare some sprites ahead of time and have nearly complete graphics sets as soon as the version with the new interface comes out. I personally waste a lot of my free time doodling in GIMP, so I might as well do something useful.

Depending on the stage of the interface overhaul, ultimately I'm going to be support 2D tilesets (probably in dimensions of multiples of 4 because I'm lazy with image file headers).  So if you want to draw up some 32x32s or something, you won't be wasting your time, I think.  It should be fairly straightforward to support single z-slice isometric stuff as well, once I get that going, since I'd just have to change the print locations and print order, though transparency decisions are probably annoying, and it's slightly more annoying to get multilayer isometric stuff going, since people are going to want various options about display there, so I don't really have a clear opinion on the future of isometric.  The support for a resizeable viewport/window is definite, but nothing has been decided on layering there (for instance, critters walking over grass tiles, that kind of thing -- people will want more and more out of this system, such as inventory and wound displays, and I'm not sure where lines will be drawn, or where it will bog down, anyway).

Quote from: dreiche2
yeah but did the whole negativy and hostility bring anything beneficial here?
What did it do beneficial? It finally caused Toady to step in and give us a detailed explanation of his point of view thus I guess the best way to get him to respond is to insult one another. Or just report posts.

In case you weren't joking, I wouldn't overstate the value of the report.  I was already following this thread and was planning a reply.  The report got me to come in a day early or so, since things were starting to get sort of silly.  And they still are.
« Last Edit: July 31, 2008, 09:23:14 pm by Toady One »
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Puzzlemaker

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Re: Third party interfaces and "Losing control of the project"
« Reply #231 on: July 31, 2008, 09:39:55 pm »

Wait; this thread is -still- going?

I thought everything was made pretty clear?

A lot of you act like you have some sort of control over Toady or think you know what's best (And you might).  For the first point, it's a symbiotic relationship.  He does this because he wants to, and we are on this forum and play this game because we want to, and there really isn't much to it.  For the second point, it's not your decision.  It's not, it's Toadies, and it's his project.
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XmasApe

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Re: Third party interfaces and "Losing control of the project"
« Reply #232 on: July 31, 2008, 09:59:43 pm »

Wait; this thread is -still- going?

I thought everything was made pretty clear?

A lot of you act like you have some sort of control over Toady or think you know what's best (And you might).  For the first point, it's a symbiotic relationship.  He does this because he wants to, and we are on this forum and play this game because we want to, and there really isn't much to it.  For the second point, it's not your decision.  It's not, it's Toadies, and it's his project.
Thank you, nobody had yet pointed out that Toady is control of this project. It's good that you came around at this juncture, both to bump a thread you disapprove of to the top of the list and to tell us this brand new information. It's fortunate that you thought to point out the only programmer is in fact in full command of the development of The Precious. I will immediately slit my belly for the impertinence.
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Omega2

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Re: Third party interfaces and "Losing control of the project"
« Reply #233 on: July 31, 2008, 10:01:30 pm »

Now this is amusing.

Toady, who (at least according to some people here) has all the reasons to be angry/ frustrated/ annoyed, is being perfectly civil and understanding about the whole issue, providing rather interesting developer insight while at it.

Some of his "defenders", on the other hand...  :D
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Puzzlemaker

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Re: Third party interfaces and "Losing control of the project"
« Reply #234 on: July 31, 2008, 10:05:55 pm »

Wait; this thread is -still- going?

I thought everything was made pretty clear?

A lot of you act like you have some sort of control over Toady or think you know what's best (And you might).  For the first point, it's a symbiotic relationship.  He does this because he wants to, and we are on this forum and play this game because we want to, and there really isn't much to it.  For the second point, it's not your decision.  It's not, it's Toadies, and it's his project.
Thank you, nobody had yet pointed out that Toady is control of this project. It's good that you came around at this juncture, both to bump a thread you disapprove of to the top of the list and to tell us this brand new information. It's fortunate that you thought to point out the only programmer is in fact in full command of the development of The Precious. I will immediately slit my belly for the impertinence.

I posted 15 minutes after Toady did, so no, I didn't bump it.

I also don't disapprove of this thread as a basic concept, but I do disapprove of a lot of the content in this thread.

Also, don't call it The Precious, it's creepy.  Seriously.

@ Omega2:  I think that might be directed at me, so... sorry?  I didn't mean to make it sound angry or whatever.  Maybe I used too many bolds.  Oftentimes I find subtly is lost on the internet without using a huge wall of text, though.

But the amount of, well... Ego-centric posts is really getting to me.  A lot.  Inform me if I start sounding angry/annoyed, though.  I need to get better at that.

Edit:  Also, people need to stop treating him like some sort of superhuman.  Come on now.

I swear, people idolize him in a desperate attempt to make it mutual so they can get what they want.  It's generally creepy and weird.  Stop it.
« Last Edit: July 31, 2008, 10:11:51 pm by Puzzlemaker »
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SirPenguin

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Re: Third party interfaces and "Losing control of the project"
« Reply #235 on: July 31, 2008, 10:16:00 pm »

Some of his "defenders", on the other hand...  :D

My thoughts exactly. It's like he didn't even read the posts, just thought, "omg, toady under attack? most post general blanket statement!"

Anyhow, Toady, I understand where you're coming from much better than I did before, and that's because you took time out of your day (night) to tell us. And I love that about you, and indie development in general. But I can't help but feel that your need to please is not only unfounded, but I don't think anyone will ever point a finger at you. The only one thinking you'd be responsible is...well...you.

I mean, take Bethesda and Blizzard. Bethesda caters like hell to their modders. They give them a kit to play around with, a forum and outlet to discuss it all, and why? Because they know that they laid down a fantastic gridwork, but it's the players who know what the players want, and they know that it was the modders who put the Elder Scrolls series on the map, not the developers. And who reaps in all the money, yet none of the blame when Naked Nords For Hire mod doesn't work? Bethesda. When a new patch breaks mods, no one ever looks to the developers. It's the modder's shoulders that the responsibility falls on. Rightfully so.

Now take Blizzard. Blizzard couldn't give two shits about the modding community for World of Warcraft. They offer a very limited ability with AddOns, and even the slightest patch causes every mod to either go haywire, bitch and moan that it's not updated, or downright fuck up your display...just because it feels like it.

And yet I can name 5 WoW AddOn websites off the top of my head. And I'd say over 50% of the userbase, and probably 90% of the "dedicated" userbase, swear by at least a COUPLE of AddOns, and a lot say WoW would be nigh unplayable without some.

Two very different ways to approach modders. Yet the outcome is the same. Players know what players want. By allowing them to do so, even if it's limited, it can only IMPROVE both your game, AND your developer's image and renown. The only thing you DON'T gain is the responsibility to work with 3rd parties. Not even Bethesda will provide hands on help. They understand they're doing gamers a service, and gamers understand this as well.

This has turned out much longer than I expected, so I'll stop. Point is, you have everything to gain from this. And you will not lose control over the project - not by a long shot. Honestly, if you just gave us some tools/insight, then never touched it again, and entire new set of awesome things will flourish, and you don't have to do a damn thing. It's all benefits.

I think that what it comes down to. We're only asking that you understand this thing has an amazing number of pros with a very limited number of cons.
« Last Edit: July 31, 2008, 10:31:18 pm by SirPenguin »
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Puzzlemaker

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Re: Third party interfaces and "Losing control of the project"
« Reply #236 on: July 31, 2008, 10:20:41 pm »

SirPenguin, I have one thing to add to your post.  Yeah, it has a lot of Pros, but it also has a very large Con; it requires a lot of work to put together even a basic grid for addons and interfaces to be put in, if I understand correctly.
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SirPenguin

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Re: Third party interfaces and "Losing control of the project"
« Reply #237 on: July 31, 2008, 10:31:56 pm »

Agreed. The initial effort is a bitch. But you can rest assured that all the community is asking for is the ability to turn clay into things. They're not asking for you to actually make anything, just provide the clay.

How's that for an obscure analogy?
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Omega2

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Re: Third party interfaces and "Losing control of the project"
« Reply #238 on: July 31, 2008, 10:34:47 pm »

Who knows? Considering how some of the modders here are working right now, the clay could simply be some extra documentation on memory addresses. Those guys are pretty resourceful. ;)
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Puzzlemaker

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Re: Third party interfaces and "Losing control of the project"
« Reply #239 on: July 31, 2008, 10:37:18 pm »

And I guess an IDE would be a Kiln...

What kind of clay are we talking about here?  Probably harder clay, I would think... clay with a large sand ratio...

And maybe it would be imported clay... from Asia... of course, then you would have to deal with PIRATES!  I wonder what that could represent...
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