Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
Where the Wild Downloads Grow
#12
I am not quite sure how to reply to that post, since it consists entirely of misconceptions...I will try to address each point individually and hope to clear things up.

(30.09.2011, 20:46:09)pd Wrote: Concerning leaks, I believe you kinda had it coming.
We did not have a leak. You cannot leak something which is open and public. What we're suffering from is mishandling and false advertisement regarding our testing builds, which is something we're trying to control and contain. But no one distributed anything that wasn't available anyway. (You will notice that it wasn't us who had read the license that ganged up on Gangster.)

(30.09.2011, 20:46:09)pd Wrote: It's that over-organization I believe I talked about in the IRC channel once, hard to describe for me. Ares suffers from it. You have a designated somebody for everything, which can be good, but is probably unmaintainable in a community consisting of limited people and dedicated to a game that's over 10 years old.
First of all, personally, I don't see any over-organization, and I have yet to hear credible arguments for one to exist. We have developers, we have testers, we have The Amazing Doc Man, we have Nighthawk to manage non-code issues.
What lines would you like us to blur? Do you think it'd work better if we asked SM to learn Assembler and start digging around the exe? If we asked NH to go edit the documentation?
Having dedicated people for certain activities does not constitute "over-organization". Especially if specific people have specific abilities and talents that others don't have.

(30.09.2011, 20:46:09)pd Wrote: Naturally people have something better to do, which you really shouldn't be mad about.
Secondly, do you realize your entire argumentation is "people have better stuff to do, so give the individual people more work to do!"?
Seriously, having less people dedicated to singular tasks means more work for everyone. Instead of focusing on development alone, we'd have to focus on development, user documentation, advertisement, tester applications, etc., etc. Which means development would take about four times as long, and people burn out four times faster.

Speaking of which, you should read this great article about community burnout linked by Graion recently. Says there, among other things:
The Article Wrote:Graner further suggests that free software work, "needs to be a team effort so no one person is responsible for it all."

[...]

Another suggestion that Graner makes is that project roles be clearly defined -- something that rarely happens in a distributed project staffed partly by volunteers. That way, people might be less apt to take on new responsibilities.
Read the whole article to get the context.
Point is, everybody can't do everything. Without structure, all you get is overwhelmed people. Look at the normal modding projects in the community: Are they not constantly looking for Voxelers, SHPs, testers? Past a certain size, one person can't do everything anymore.

(30.09.2011, 20:46:09)pd Wrote: Sure, they applied as testers and kindof lied about being available or willing to test every bit, I can understand you being mad about them. But then again, what's the chance of somebody dedicating a lot of their time to something like this, especially if you bitch back at them if they miss a few days and go on vacation and delay releases for ages.
That is pure polemic and nothing else. We have never once done that. Quite the opposite, we've always understood when people came up and said "I'll be gone for X, got Y".

(30.09.2011, 20:46:09)pd Wrote: There has been one Ares release since I started working on the DLL system 3 years ago...
According to the forum archives, you quit almost three years ago. The release was one and half years later.
Direct question: How many releases would there have been if it hadn't been for the rest of us? And in what frequency would they have come? In what quality?
After all, it's not like you never added a feature to Ares and lost interest before it was finished...

(30.09.2011, 20:46:09)pd Wrote: I say use these leaks as public testing versions.
See above, both the first part of this post as well as the grandparent.

(30.09.2011, 20:46:09)pd Wrote: Those developing mods will know best about what's wrong, a lot better than these designated testers having to test by protocol. I'm a professional software dev by now, and I know how testing sucks.
Yesterday, I was linked to a mod's page which distributes an ancient 0.2 development build from a non-trunk branch with 0.1's ares.mix. Billed as stock Ares rev. Foo.
Sorry, but we simply can't trust the community to handle development builds properly. There are too many confused and stupid people out there.

(30.09.2011, 20:46:09)pd Wrote: If people who illegitimately use Ares 0.2 leaks report problems (yes, even if it's some n00b bitching about it and set the wrong severity in the bugtracker and is illiterate...), stop calling them fucking morons, but be happy that somebody is finally testing stuff and use the input.
Again, nothing but out-of-context polemic. We have never called people names for proper reporting of issues. In fact, several people have been giving steady bug reports over a long time without ever officially being testers.
What I called stupid up there was the production use of test builds in the first place.

(30.09.2011, 20:46:09)pd Wrote: It's enough to emphasize that those builds are inherently unstable, and there's also nothing wrong telling mod developers to not f'in distribute them. But voluntary, motivation-driven cross-testing is the best thing that can happen to you these days.
Which is why we're happy about proper issue reporting, and have, contrary to what you're claiming, never discouraged it.

(30.09.2011, 20:46:09)pd Wrote: I'm not turning into n00b-friendly Banshee v2, I just think all these politics don't work for a project like this.
What "politics"? The "policy" of wanting to be represented by actual, proper, stable Ares, instead of a random, broken, mislabeled, half-finished testing version that somebody mass-distributed and sold as the real deal?
There are no "politics" here. It's a very simple thing: We're a bunch of people doing a bunch of stuff that want to be associated with the stuff they did, not broken shit that some impatient asshole associates with our names by force.

If you're fine with people mass-releasing broken shit under your name, that's your good right. Personally, I want my name on what I release, not what some random downloader deems releasable.

(30.09.2011, 20:46:09)pd Wrote: The result is delayed releases [...]
Bullshit. What's delaying releases is that everybody wants the release, but nobody's willing to invest a little work in it. All it'd would've taken is that all these supposedly interested people would've helped out for a month, got this thing properly tested, and all would've been well. They would've played with latest Ares, we would've fixed the bugs, 0.2 would've been stable and released a long time ago.
Instead, only a handful of people even claim to want to test, and even fewer actually do it.

If you were actually around, you would've seen how, last time people claimed Ares was oh-so-stable, around July, my push for more testing uncovered several additional issues that needed fixing, one of them so obvious that it's ridiculous no one noticed before.
Just two days ago, Graion reported high probabilities of Reconnection Errors under certain conditions, despite the fact that people keep claiming Ares is so amazingly stable. With what magic are we supposed to fix this issue, if nobody continues testing to narrow down the cause?

"Politics" is not what is holding us back. It's the fact that Ares is a big, complex piece of software that people just don't grasp needs proper testing before being released.
Because the same people who are vocal about releasing Ares now are the ones who'll be first to whine when actually using it uncovers unfixed issues.



If you have actual criticism of stuff that is actually happening, I will be glad to listen to it and see if we can change things for the better.
But that post was as far from historic and developmental reality as it could get, and we cannot fix lies and fantasies.
Forum Rules

(01.06.2011, 05:43:25)kenosis Wrote: Oh damn don't be disgraced again!

(25.06.2011, 20:42:59)Nighthawk Wrote: The proverbial bearded omni-bug may be dead, but the containment campaign is still being waged in the desert.


Messages In This Thread
Where the Wild Downloads Grow - by Renegade - 21.09.2011, 20:56:40
RE: Where the Wild Downloads Grow - by Guest - 22.09.2011, 20:28:01
RE: Where the Wild Downloads Grow - by Renegade - 22.09.2011, 23:23:22
RE: Where the Wild Downloads Grow - by Guest - 23.09.2011, 02:18:26
RE: Where the Wild Downloads Grow - by WoRmINaToR - 24.09.2011, 00:23:22
RE: Where the Wild Downloads Grow - by eva-251 - 24.09.2011, 20:09:54
RE: Where the Wild Downloads Grow - by WoRmINaToR - 24.09.2011, 20:34:38
RE: Where the Wild Downloads Grow - by pd - 30.09.2011, 20:46:09
RE: Where the Wild Downloads Grow - by Renegade - 01.10.2011, 17:07:13



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)