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

[eva-251]

There's way too much stuff that I'd like to address and too little time to do it, but I have to:
-Agree with Renegade fully
-Apologize to being guilty of some of the aforementioned issues myself.

I don't test/use beta builds of Ares nearly as much as I should. I check SVNs religiously- svn.renegadeprojects.com and svn.icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces (A Quake 1 engine) are my most visited sites by a wide margin. I watch for feature implementations, bug fixes and performance improvements.

When I test feature additions in my Quake mod, I have the Command Prompt window open with the compiler ready to run upon pressing enter. I run DarkPlaces in windowed mode, I test the feature. If it doesn't work, I move my mouse over to Notepad++, tweak a few lines of code, recompile it, click on the Darkplaces window, go to the console, and type "map e1m1"- code is reloaded and I am ready to see if the bug is squashed. All in the course of 30 seconds. If I need to compare its functionality to say, a stock Quake feature, I abort the map, go back to the console, deactivate the mod and run stock Quake. All in the course of 15-20 seconds. And if my code is bad, it bounces me back to the console, only very rarely will it send me to the desktop.

In RA2/YR, I have to drag around tons of files, mixes, CSFs, bags, yrms, idxs, plus any loose files around, use external mod managers, etc. I need to close the game and restart it to test a feature. I need to make "developer mode" tweaks to quickly test minor changes (IE setting the build-time really fast or making the unit cost nothing/buildable with basic tech). Errors in my code bounce me back to the desktop.

But the speed and ease (or lack thereof) at which I can test features is just one issue for me.

The other issue is that most of the features have either too much or too little utility to me. I honestly don't care about Radar Jammers or Chrono Prisons. I can't even think about where to start with that absolutely awesome custom super-weapon feature. I mean that seriously- when I made Star Strike, I built it being consciously aware of the limitations of Yuri's Revenge, so when I see "HOLY SHIT GUYS UNLIMITED SUPERWEAPONS", I don't know where to start.
So ultimately I would have to create a sandbox mod for testing Ares features and manage it with my other modding projects. And given how slow testing stuff is in CNC games, it would wear on my patience and I'd eventually give up with the sandbox mod and leave it alone, going back to testing the features I will use on Ares.

I guess in "tl;dr" form, it boils down to me being lazy, rather than not caring, disliking or having something against the developers.

I will try to be more productive in regards to Ares testing in the future. It's the least I can do for effectively leeching off your hard work for so long.

edit- and I guess it is interesting to show that so many people are ignorant of how a project is properly developed. People can laugh at how Ares is developed, but it's effective, efficient.