On Ares, Probabilities, the Future and the State of the Community

[DCoder]

While you may think they're switching, rewiring an entire game from one patch system to another is NOT the easiest thing in the world to do, and would set them back so much time it's not even worth doing for current mods.

Like Worm said, if our stability and features are worth less to them than the time investment in switching, they should stay where they are. Simple rational reasoning.

Don't forget that NPatch has online stability that can't ever get tested by Ares by the slack testers.

There's a shocker... I don't see what we can do about that though, short of threatening to wipe the tester list (again), and that is getting old.

- The rather professional approach to Ares, the BugTracker, and testing can be quite intimidating to some of those not experienced in the community.

They laugh at Ares because modding is a hobby, and the Ares development treats it like a job.

Like I said earlier - we established a process and workflow, which is needed for any serious software project more complex than "Hello World". It might be unfamiliar to modders, but working without it is ineffective for us. You'll just have to get over it.

(Oh, and having a working process is one of the reasons we don't lose progress due to system crashes. pd lost his research at one time, iirc Hyper did too, and I'm not even counting how many times I've seen a post about a mod being canceled/put on hold because the author's PC went titsup. Or even "halp I don't know what I changed since yesterday, but my unit no longer works!!1!". Backups and version control are a good thing.)

I can't test Chrono Prisons because I have no fucking clue how they were implemented. [...] I remember testing the radar jammer feature with no real idea on how to implement it on a unit until Reaperrr posted the tag after delving into the .dll with a Resource Editor.

Fair point. Both of those were developed by Ren though, he might want to take note of this.

Members on PPM may not be quite interested in Ares when they know the developers won't come support them

And at PPM, native English speakers have had issues understanding the "comprehensive" documentation.

It's PPM, who cares.

At times, I've even had difficulties determining exactly what I'm supposed to do due to the language usage in the documentation.

Got an example? If it's that bad, open a bug about it, or preferably offer an alternative way to write it... Feedback matters.

not everyone who mods speaks perfect fluent English

People who don't speak English having problems reading English text, surprise? This is not unique to Ares documentation.