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Re: [glob2-devel] We must do a game, not an engine


From: Kyle Lutze
Subject: Re: [glob2-devel] We must do a game, not an engine
Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 08:16:51 -0700
User-agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.10 (Macintosh/20070221)

Cyrille Dunant wrote:
The short: we have a semantic problem. “rewrite” is a bad word.

pick a better one
The long:

On Thursday 26 April 2007 16.14:39 Kai Antweiler wrote:
I sure can't prevent him. And as long as it works as well at the end,
never mind.
The bad thing is that you insult Bradley's work and try to prevent it.
Also you constantly propose very bad code design.

No. In fact I have not proposed code design. Ah, yes, I suggested the functions used to read old maps could be kept. What horrible design!

Do you know why Bradley is saying that a new one needs writing?
But I am afraid that the "rewrites" are never quite complete (see nct and
his skins)...
Uh, trying to make feel Bradley feel bad about his editor rewrite?

What if nct feels bad about his code being arbitrarily dumped ?

steph, opinion?

This does not mean they are unclean! Optimized code is painful to look
at. Example: I needed sparse matrices.

1) std::map<std::pair<size_t, size_t>, double> -- 0 lines of code, works.
2) operator overloading, valarrays and dedicated classes. speedup x 10 --
50 lines of code
3) clever aliasing tricks to get rid of temporaries. speedup x 3 -- 500
lines of complicated code
You forgot:
4) implementing everything in assembler

Not portable unfortunately :)

/me chooses option 2 (I'm a ricer kind of guy)

Uhhh, writing a campaign would make the game more valuable. With _no_
additional code.
And it wouldn't improve the code.  So glob2 would slowly die, if we just
do campaigns.  Anyone for allowing improving code and creating campaigns?
I am.

Glob2 is slowly dying from lack of players. a game dies because no one plays, not because it is not developed anymore.

negatory, developers are also players. if developers are working on it and playing it, the game is not dead.

You mean like rewriting the map format instead of fixing the desyncs?
I could say:  "You mean like doing animations instead of fixing the
desyncs?"

Ha. Probably I should not have. Because obviously this game nct and nuage did, and I contributed to is a putrid pile of crap.

Please stop to command us around!
We are working for free.  Get this into your head.

So am I, believe it or not.
does it count that drazak and I are helping out with -$ funding? bastard ISPs, they just don't understand the value of free and open source :P Oh well, it's 100% worth it to me and I'll keep on doing it for as long as it doesn't break my budget.

I mean,
everyone can do what he well pleases, but let us not be deluded on what
is actually useful _from_the_player's_point_of_view_.

>From the players point of view.  The unit-building allocation was needed.

We talked about it last year.  Steph and nuage started a rewrite.

No, they started an new unit allocation mechanism algorithm. Not a rewrite.

if one is already in place, and they are creating a new one to put in it's stead, doesn't that constitute a rewrite?

Believe it or not I have dumped games with really nice graphics before,
simply because the gaming sucked.

Everyone has. But no one tried a game with horrid gfx in the first place.
Of course, what is horrid depends on when in time we are :)

So doing nice graphics will not make a game.
It will help.  And I appreciate it very much.  But a game consists of
engine and other code, graphics, sound, maps, ...
Just picking something out and telling everybody who works on something
else that he's harming the project or at least not contributing is ... -
bad!

We are in a dynamic where bit after bit gets rewritten with no gain for the player. I don't see why or when it should or would stop.

Then I am afraid the game will die, because it will have the ultimate engine, and no game.

Because we are forgetting the players with all this rewrite talk, are we
not?
Are we forgetting the coders when we talk about campaigns?
I don't think so.  I can keep more than one subject in mind.

You miss the point. The _only_ interesting subject is the players. What you do, everything you do, is ultimately for the players. If you do something that will not, in any way, shape or form help the players, however indirectly (making code more maintainable for example is in fact good) you are hurting the project.

NEGATORY! if we were paid, it would only be about the players. This is for us to have fun, and if for us to have fun means that players wait an extra few months with a semi-usable game while we make a fully usable one with code that we like, I'm amenable to that and the hardcore players seem to be patient.


What are the issues they raise? what works not so well?
Everytime I looked into user wishes and thought this should be easy
to implement, I recognised that the code so tangled that I can't do it
without harming the whole game.

Example ?

What are the game balance issues?
Are you telling me that the blue globs are stronger than the red ones?

No, a game balance issue was for example the excessive power of the harvest attacks.

All of those points are important, and not one requires a rewrite, only
tuning.
Ah, only tangling up the code some more.
Brilliant!

uhh To get rid of abovementioned issue, nct needed about 5 mins of code...

I an getting angry.
I know.  So you try to insult everybody so that you feel better?

yes.

THE CODE NEEDS NO REWRITE. IT NEEDS REFACTORING.
Bigger letters but still fundamentally wrong - sorry.

look up rewrite vs refactoring. You might realise that the issues you raise are solved by refactoring. In many case, this is what Brad does, and not rewrite.

But you still call it a rewrite, which is insulting.

most of the work in making a game is not code, it is graphics and writing
and maps. Look at the number of each profession at Blizzard :)
And I really appreciate every commiter of graphics.
I tried to, and failed.  Face it.  Just because you would like more
graphics contributed, doesn't mean that this will happen.

I am sadly aware of that. It happens sometimes, though. But it is rare.

Once upon a time, a TODO was done which essentially said that the 1.0 is
the current state, debugged, with gfx and campaign finished.

Are we working in that direction? NO.
And we never should go in this direction again, because it
turns developers away.

versus turning other contributers away?
I pray that you won't succeed in scheming this nonsence back into
the project, because I don't think glob2 would survive it.

Scheme? what scheme, this is an open ML!

Actually, from Rama's drawing, I did ~90% of the graphics.

And you know what?

they need a redraw.
Huch?  Ergo crap?

well, yeah. They are wayyyy worse than say, those of starcraft.
Your insulting Cyrille!
Wasn't that your reasoning?

Yes. Absolutely. The difference is that I don't care whether people criticise my work. I actually appreciate it if the criticism is cogent. I am however sensitive to the constant dragging in the mud of nuage and nct's work.

And unfortunately, you cannot refactor drawings. You can touch them up however.

I don't feel like reading the rest of this, my belly is growling at me to get out of bed and get food, I'll let others take my place for using the flame throwers on each other as long as no one comes out dead (or leaving the project).

Kyle





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