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Drama / Re: So, what've I missed?
« on: August 13, 2014, 08:35:54 PM »
News flash, I have left, that's why people made a big deal about old names coming back to this one thread.
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Drama / Re: So, what've I missed?
« on: August 13, 2014, 07:38:03 PM »If you spend that much time on a game you spent so little on how can you possibly, in good conscience, say it's not worth the time or money for others players to buy and play it?If the game has changed enough into something you genuinely don't like playing, and you decide if you bought it now you would regret it, then you absolutely can say it's not worth the time or money. The updating nature of many games can make someone think the game was worth it but is not. To call this opinion ridiculous and disrespectful is itself ridiculous and disrespectful.
The reason I'm replying to something so old is that the topic devolved back into random uninteresting childish bullstuff about nothing so hard that I couldn't even read past page 40.
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Drama / Re: So, what've I missed?
« on: August 11, 2014, 03:52:43 AM »
The biggest problem with Bisjac's logic is that people also say you have no right to criticize a game until you've played it "long enough" to truly understand what it's all about. So either you haven't tried everything yet and you're being unfair, or you enjoyed it enough to get through everything and therefore you have no right to complain.
story time (tl;dr what's already above)
Like when I was playing OnLive at PAX once, it was the new Human Revolution game which I was interested in playing so I tried it out. The lag was awful but I was really interested in the game and I decided to be fair and play a while to see if I could get used to it. After 20 minutes or so I felt like I had enough of a demo and stopped; the lady asked me "So what did you think of it?"
I said I thought that the lag was unacceptable to a hardcore gamer especially considering this was on a fat pipe in the middle of downtown Seattle, and only hardcore gamers would consume enough video games to justify a subscription service to play a library of many games, so I didn't really know who the target market for the service was. She replied, "Well, you just played it for 30 minutes, so it must have been pretty good..."
I was thinking, bitch, do you not know how subjective judgements work? If I think it was bad then it wasn't pretty good. I'm not gonna tell you to your face that it sucks when I like it.
Anyway the point I'm making as that you can't win with people who want to be apologist to anything that takes a period of time, which is basically everything in the universe.
story time (tl;dr what's already above)
Like when I was playing OnLive at PAX once, it was the new Human Revolution game which I was interested in playing so I tried it out. The lag was awful but I was really interested in the game and I decided to be fair and play a while to see if I could get used to it. After 20 minutes or so I felt like I had enough of a demo and stopped; the lady asked me "So what did you think of it?"
I said I thought that the lag was unacceptable to a hardcore gamer especially considering this was on a fat pipe in the middle of downtown Seattle, and only hardcore gamers would consume enough video games to justify a subscription service to play a library of many games, so I didn't really know who the target market for the service was. She replied, "Well, you just played it for 30 minutes, so it must have been pretty good..."
I was thinking, bitch, do you not know how subjective judgements work? If I think it was bad then it wasn't pretty good. I'm not gonna tell you to your face that it sucks when I like it.
Anyway the point I'm making as that you can't win with people who want to be apologist to anything that takes a period of time, which is basically everything in the universe.
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Drama / Re: So, what've I missed?
« on: August 09, 2014, 02:38:01 PM »
Well having only read a small fraction of the thread, the most dismissive thing I've seen so far is to just have the single word "pretentious /\", and Badspot liked it; based on that and many other examples over the years, I'm fairly certain that Badspot's own self-imposed rules only apply to you if he doesn't happen to agree with you. This may perhaps be seen as another reflection of his inclination towards the study of jurisprudence.
On the other hand, reading trinick's stuff, I can totally understand where the dismissive people are coming from. Thinking about even trying to respond to his stuff is like looking at a plane wreck and trying to decide how to start cleaning it up; except that the wreckage violates euclidean geometry. Currently my only bookmark to this site is to the previous page because his quotestorm post was so hilarious I was almost in tears.
On the other hand, reading trinick's stuff, I can totally understand where the dismissive people are coming from. Thinking about even trying to respond to his stuff is like looking at a plane wreck and trying to decide how to start cleaning it up; except that the wreckage violates euclidean geometry. Currently my only bookmark to this site is to the previous page because his quotestorm post was so hilarious I was almost in tears.
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Drama / Re: So, what've I missed?
« on: August 09, 2014, 06:20:58 AM »
forget the modding posts, trinick's last post is amazing. It's like a fractal of ouroboros.
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Drama / Re: So, what've I missed?
« on: August 09, 2014, 05:50:04 AM »
You can't expect to make a metaphor, immediately follow-up by saying that your own metaphor is inappropriate, and still have anyone take you seriously.
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Drama / Re: So, what've I missed?
« on: August 09, 2014, 05:37:05 AM »
Ohhh okay
Am I the only tool-user in existence that doesn't care about having to bash my skull against a nail or tighten bolts by hand?fixed that for you
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Drama / Re: So, what've I missed?
« on: August 09, 2014, 04:51:19 AM »
Awesome post M, basically went into all the stuff I didn't want to re: mod support.
I never had any serious problem with the mod support in this game - it's well above average in the scheme of all indie PC games ever - but Badspot calling modders having complaints "total bullstuff" in this thread left me completely baffled. I just wanted to post about the whole post-deleting thing but then when I was reading Badspot's posts to get some context I found that one and then my post turned into an essay.
@trinick
No, my jab was pretty well-thought-out. I have diagrams and forecasts and everything. Seriously though, I'll keep this short because I feel my open letter says everything I really wanted to say:
And trace() is not like any kind of documentation that does anything. It is not documentation of any kind. A runtime description of program flow is not documentation and it never will be, and as someone who loves both debugging tools and documentation I somehow manage to find the very idea mildly offensive.
Thankfully, GarageGames has always and continues to document its part of Blockland's code better than Badspot's part has ever been documented, so I really have no idea what you're talking about in that regard. One could crowdsource the BL documentation better than with a single forum if one gave a stuff (by setting up a wiki for example); but we both seem to be in agreement that one does not give a stuff, so I also have no idea what the deal is with your aggressively apologist stance vis-a-vis the not-stuff-giver.
And please don't start introducing terms on my behalf like Badspot having an "obligation" to do anything; surely, we must already misrepresenting each other enough as it is.
I never had any serious problem with the mod support in this game - it's well above average in the scheme of all indie PC games ever - but Badspot calling modders having complaints "total bullstuff" in this thread left me completely baffled. I just wanted to post about the whole post-deleting thing but then when I was reading Badspot's posts to get some context I found that one and then my post turned into an essay.
the player list certainly didn't have much non-malicious useYou may find it mildly interesting that when player list access was removed, I was at that time using it on my server to convey extra info to players. Aside from things in the shift from beta to retail, I think that's the first time I ever made a real complaint about the game on these forums.
@trinick
No, my jab was pretty well-thought-out. I have diagrams and forecasts and everything. Seriously though, I'll keep this short because I feel my open letter says everything I really wanted to say:
Quote
If you read my post again, you can see that the entire point of my post is that the existing features are enough to live with, not that they're a proper substitute for documentation.No, I cannot see that at all. In fact it if I had to choose one or the other, I would say it sounds more like you're trying to imply that feasibility is mostly irrelevant as long as something is technically possible given infinite time and effort. Maybe you should read your post again.
And trace() is not like any kind of documentation that does anything. It is not documentation of any kind. A runtime description of program flow is not documentation and it never will be, and as someone who loves both debugging tools and documentation I somehow manage to find the very idea mildly offensive.
Thankfully, GarageGames has always and continues to document its part of Blockland's code better than Badspot's part has ever been documented, so I really have no idea what you're talking about in that regard. One could crowdsource the BL documentation better than with a single forum if one gave a stuff (by setting up a wiki for example); but we both seem to be in agreement that one does not give a stuff, so I also have no idea what the deal is with your aggressively apologist stance vis-a-vis the not-stuff-giver.
And please don't start introducing terms on my behalf like Badspot having an "obligation" to do anything; surely, we must already misrepresenting each other enough as it is.
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Drama / Re: So, what've I missed?
« on: August 08, 2014, 10:32:07 PM »tl;dr but hi wallethi truce ilu
For the tl;dr crowd, Crispy's summary of my post is flat-out wrong which is why it doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense.
@Trace
It's not like I ever asked nor expected Badspot to go out of his way and spend a huge amount of his time to set up a giant reference site with detailed descriptions of everything, but hypothetically if he did, you would know the loving difference. Defending the use of trace(), dump(), echo(), and searching this forum as a proper substitute for documentation, rather than a "whatever, good enough, I can live with it" kind of compromise, only proves to me that (in a programming context) you don't actually know first-hand what "documentation" is.
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Drama / Re: So, what've I missed?
« on: August 08, 2014, 01:32:17 AM »
I also realize I said section 1 wasn't a warning and then contradicted myself in section 3 by using a slightly different definition of "warn". Woops.
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Drama / Re: So, what've I missed?
« on: August 08, 2014, 01:25:25 AM »
An Open Letter On Enforcement and Modding
I submit a public complaint in opposition to the deletion of opinions that the establishment finds disagreeable in nature, which do not impair the function of the site, do not present a danger to the community computationally or otherwise, and do not present a legal risk to anyone by remaining on the site.
No civilized society on Earth believes that it is in the best interests of any community for judgements to be handed down such that all evidence of violations is summarily deleted from the record; this only serves to make the community paranoid at the prospect of secret policing and promotes disharmony. The continued existence of evidence is formidable only to those judges who do not have conviction that their actions will be accepted for the true and just things that they are; and in a case such as this topic, even the briefest of explanations or perhaps none at all would be sufficient to explain the policy and how it was violated, if the offense itself was available publicly; and so when evidence is removed and explanation is not forthcoming alongside it, the mind of the public is drawn irresistibly to the assumption that the powers-that-be are full aware that their actions are indefensible in any discourse of reason.
Reading carefully, one may note that the aforementioned complaint is only concerned with the natural consequences on a community resulting from a particular course of action; it is an argument regarding natural human reactions to a situation, not regarding rightness or justness; as such it does not pretend to be any kind of warning or threat, nor any kind of claim that the establishment is obliged to operate its private forums in any particular way; only to caution the establishment of a lesson in jurisprudence, of which mankind has been keenly aware for centuries.
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As a modder, I would also like to confirm that I have complaints about a lack of features/documentation.
Without bringing up those specific complaints - which I already know from years of first-hand experience would be totally ignored anyway - I'd like to address what was specifically mentioned in Blockland's defense:
To my knowledge the overwhelming minority of gameplay features are open source in any reasonable sense (unless one classifies every individual asset as a gameplay feature on par with features like the planting of bricks or the functioning of jets, which I hope we can agree is ridiculous). As a game mode modder, literally the majority of my time ever spent developing mods for Blockland has been spent reverse-engineering gameplay systems so that I could duplicate or modify their functionality for my own purposes. The claim to gameplay elements being mostly open source, or to call a lack of documentation "total bullstuff", is so patently false that it bears no further comment.
The idea that no game has better mod support than a low-budget indie title, which I've mentioned to literally dozens of people and none of whom have ever heard of, is (to put it nicely) an extremely bold statement. I give the benefit of the doubt and assume you exaggerated in anger.
But if not, then you might want to take a look at some of Bethesda Softworks' or Blizzard's publicly-available tools for some context on what might today be considered roughly the level of a would-be role model for the entire industry.
Finally I would like to weigh in that, as someone who almost exclusively worked on game modes when he was an active modder, and who has an interest in releasing some (though admittedly in my day I only released Creeper and Bot Wars), and who released several other mods: I never found an issue with helping other people to install and use my mods - documentation and self-explanatory design being my responsibility as the designer. On the other hand, I have found the Gamemode system cumbersome and rushed, with a cumbersome interface. Since Badspot himself has recently made a joke about strawmen, it distresses me that I need to dispel the generalizations made in the "explanation" for the lack of Gamemode adoption: I am not worried about anyone stealing anything of mine and have long encouraged people to "steal" any ideas from anything I've done and any code from anything I've released, so there's nothing to do with glory; yet I find it more convenient to manually execute a script from the console in a Freebuild game than to start a new game with a Gamemode. Granted, I am a mod developer, so that wouldn't be true of normal users, but when that's the situation - even if just for people like me - then there is indeed a flaw in the system, and it's not sociological. To dismiss the issue as a problem with the community in general is to both deny the opportunity to improve the existing system, as well as to divert the discourse away from the possibility that perhaps a different solution can engage creators and can break the cycle of toxicity, if we suppose it indeed exists, and so improve the existing community.
Valve employees speaking publicly (search YouTube for talks by Gabe Newell or peruse some Steam Dev Days) often talk about their great success in giving their community "the tools to create value" and then "getting out of their way"; this proves that success and user engagement from a community-content-driven model is completely possible (yes, including game modes and conversions), and to blame failure on the community, rather than assume that the correct model hasn't yet been found, is ultimately defeatist and counterproductive, and serves neither the developers' interests nor the community's.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The most depressing thing about this entire matter, I feel, is that I wrote this entire post, and then hesitated for a very long time in hitting the "Post" button, out of a fear of being banned for my heartfelt, thrice-revised, solution-oriented commentary. That I genuinely fear being banned for reaching out to Badspot and trying to give him new perspective that he may not have considered, so that he may continue to do what he feels is best for the game, as he's always done. This fear, a fear of providing feedback, a fear or contributing, a fear of being a part of the community at all, is exactly what the first section of my post intends to warn about.
Then I realized that I barely come to these forums anyway, and there's really no sense in trying to preserve membership to a club where trying to be a good person gets me banned; and so this open letter finds its way to the internet, hopefully to open minds and willing hearts.
I submit a public complaint in opposition to the deletion of opinions that the establishment finds disagreeable in nature, which do not impair the function of the site, do not present a danger to the community computationally or otherwise, and do not present a legal risk to anyone by remaining on the site.
No civilized society on Earth believes that it is in the best interests of any community for judgements to be handed down such that all evidence of violations is summarily deleted from the record; this only serves to make the community paranoid at the prospect of secret policing and promotes disharmony. The continued existence of evidence is formidable only to those judges who do not have conviction that their actions will be accepted for the true and just things that they are; and in a case such as this topic, even the briefest of explanations or perhaps none at all would be sufficient to explain the policy and how it was violated, if the offense itself was available publicly; and so when evidence is removed and explanation is not forthcoming alongside it, the mind of the public is drawn irresistibly to the assumption that the powers-that-be are full aware that their actions are indefensible in any discourse of reason.
Reading carefully, one may note that the aforementioned complaint is only concerned with the natural consequences on a community resulting from a particular course of action; it is an argument regarding natural human reactions to a situation, not regarding rightness or justness; as such it does not pretend to be any kind of warning or threat, nor any kind of claim that the establishment is obliged to operate its private forums in any particular way; only to caution the establishment of a lesson in jurisprudence, of which mankind has been keenly aware for centuries.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As a modder, I would also like to confirm that I have complaints about a lack of features/documentation.
Without bringing up those specific complaints - which I already know from years of first-hand experience would be totally ignored anyway - I'd like to address what was specifically mentioned in Blockland's defense:
To my knowledge the overwhelming minority of gameplay features are open source in any reasonable sense (unless one classifies every individual asset as a gameplay feature on par with features like the planting of bricks or the functioning of jets, which I hope we can agree is ridiculous). As a game mode modder, literally the majority of my time ever spent developing mods for Blockland has been spent reverse-engineering gameplay systems so that I could duplicate or modify their functionality for my own purposes. The claim to gameplay elements being mostly open source, or to call a lack of documentation "total bullstuff", is so patently false that it bears no further comment.
The idea that no game has better mod support than a low-budget indie title, which I've mentioned to literally dozens of people and none of whom have ever heard of, is (to put it nicely) an extremely bold statement. I give the benefit of the doubt and assume you exaggerated in anger.
But if not, then you might want to take a look at some of Bethesda Softworks' or Blizzard's publicly-available tools for some context on what might today be considered roughly the level of a would-be role model for the entire industry.
Finally I would like to weigh in that, as someone who almost exclusively worked on game modes when he was an active modder, and who has an interest in releasing some (though admittedly in my day I only released Creeper and Bot Wars), and who released several other mods: I never found an issue with helping other people to install and use my mods - documentation and self-explanatory design being my responsibility as the designer. On the other hand, I have found the Gamemode system cumbersome and rushed, with a cumbersome interface. Since Badspot himself has recently made a joke about strawmen, it distresses me that I need to dispel the generalizations made in the "explanation" for the lack of Gamemode adoption: I am not worried about anyone stealing anything of mine and have long encouraged people to "steal" any ideas from anything I've done and any code from anything I've released, so there's nothing to do with glory; yet I find it more convenient to manually execute a script from the console in a Freebuild game than to start a new game with a Gamemode. Granted, I am a mod developer, so that wouldn't be true of normal users, but when that's the situation - even if just for people like me - then there is indeed a flaw in the system, and it's not sociological. To dismiss the issue as a problem with the community in general is to both deny the opportunity to improve the existing system, as well as to divert the discourse away from the possibility that perhaps a different solution can engage creators and can break the cycle of toxicity, if we suppose it indeed exists, and so improve the existing community.
Valve employees speaking publicly (search YouTube for talks by Gabe Newell or peruse some Steam Dev Days) often talk about their great success in giving their community "the tools to create value" and then "getting out of their way"; this proves that success and user engagement from a community-content-driven model is completely possible (yes, including game modes and conversions), and to blame failure on the community, rather than assume that the correct model hasn't yet been found, is ultimately defeatist and counterproductive, and serves neither the developers' interests nor the community's.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The most depressing thing about this entire matter, I feel, is that I wrote this entire post, and then hesitated for a very long time in hitting the "Post" button, out of a fear of being banned for my heartfelt, thrice-revised, solution-oriented commentary. That I genuinely fear being banned for reaching out to Badspot and trying to give him new perspective that he may not have considered, so that he may continue to do what he feels is best for the game, as he's always done. This fear, a fear of providing feedback, a fear or contributing, a fear of being a part of the community at all, is exactly what the first section of my post intends to warn about.
Then I realized that I barely come to these forums anyway, and there's really no sense in trying to preserve membership to a club where trying to be a good person gets me banned; and so this open letter finds its way to the internet, hopefully to open minds and willing hearts.
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General Discussion / Re: Rise of Blockland
« on: July 16, 2014, 07:03:05 PM »What about an open-source release? (long shot)It's an extremely long shot considering the end of the post just before yours is me specifically explaining why I'm not going to do it. I guess I have to admire your boldness.
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General Discussion / Re: Rise of Blockland
« on: July 16, 2014, 12:03:23 AM »
I should really keep an outbox because I just had a PM convo about this not too long ago.
First, thanks to RingsOfSaturn for telling me about this thread.
Second, I'm super-busy finishing my college degree. When I'm not doing that I'm wasting my life on youtube and video games.
When I'm not doing that, all "productive free time" is spent on learning a serious grown-up technology, specifically for the purpose of trying to make something that can be of use to Blockland mod creators. I've been chipping away at it for almost 2 months and I'm getting close to the point that I can actually start working on the project itself, rather than learning the tools. I'll probably want feedback from scripters as I'm putting it together, so expect an announcement someday in the coding help forum.
I really liked Rise of Blockland too and I would like to revisit it (or something very much like it) but for now my plate's full.
edit: oh, right, I need to explain why I don't "just release it": Major patches have completely broken RoB, and the codebase is bad enough that starting over from scratch would be about as much work as trying to retrofit it so that the bookkeeping stuff worked again. I don't want anyone trying to build anything out of it because it's a total mess.
First, thanks to RingsOfSaturn for telling me about this thread.
Second, I'm super-busy finishing my college degree. When I'm not doing that I'm wasting my life on youtube and video games.
When I'm not doing that, all "productive free time" is spent on learning a serious grown-up technology, specifically for the purpose of trying to make something that can be of use to Blockland mod creators. I've been chipping away at it for almost 2 months and I'm getting close to the point that I can actually start working on the project itself, rather than learning the tools. I'll probably want feedback from scripters as I'm putting it together, so expect an announcement someday in the coding help forum.
I really liked Rise of Blockland too and I would like to revisit it (or something very much like it) but for now my plate's full.
edit: oh, right, I need to explain why I don't "just release it": Major patches have completely broken RoB, and the codebase is bad enough that starting over from scratch would be about as much work as trying to retrofit it so that the bookkeeping stuff worked again. I don't want anyone trying to build anything out of it because it's a total mess.
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General Discussion / Re: Blockland on Steam's 'Community Choice' vote thingy (80%-off)
« on: June 26, 2014, 01:27:32 PM »
Grats BL to finally having some real players instead of like 500 concurrent users