Re: a flaming hot worm being bait [glob2-devel] We must do a game, not an engine

[Cyrille Dunant]

> >
> > I sure can't prevent him. And as long as it works as well at the end,
> > never mind.
> > But I am afraid that the "rewrites" are never quite complete (see nct and
> > his skins)...
>
> steph, rebuttal?

well, _he_ raised the issue somewhere in a previous thread ;)

> >> 2) Cyrille: you seem to think rewrites are worthless and that time
> >> should be concentrated elsewhere, such as neat-o graphics. That's
> >> good, except that the guys doing the rewrites are coders, and that's
> >> their passion and they may not want/be able to do graphics that
> >> would do the game justice. On the other hand, what's stopping you?
> >
> > I did the anims last week or so. Because I believe in nice graphics.
>
> sweet, thank you :)

You are most welcome.

> >> 3) I always like to point at the kernel development for this, if we
> >> had more developers it would be much more practicable too (at least
> >> from what I read this is how they do it)
> >>
> >> each major release, such as 2.4 to 2.6 is a complete rewrite. The
> >> rewrite is done when they find a block in the previous release that
> >> prevents them from moving forward, but they keep working on the old
> >> version to help it keep going in the meantime.
> >
> > And we just got Yet Another Scheduler. But the usb layer still sucks, and
> > some devices won't work. Of course everyone is free  to do what they
> > want. But be honest, say it is for fun, don't rationalize it.
>
> those bastards! Although they did manage to fix my keyboard issue
> which was nice. Did you ever ask them why this is though? Maybe it's
> that they can't fix it because they forgot to include some necessary
> code to allow them to implement something that is needed?

I believe it is more an issue of what is sexy to code and not... But in fact, 
it is fine, as long as you consider the fun you had in doing that as the 
_only_ reward.

> >> that skinny version in context of glob2: as bradley said, the code
> >> started out decent, and steph and nuage did a great job, but then
> >> more futures were to be added that the current code couldn't support
> >> and two choices were presented: rewrite all the code to make room,
> >> or hack it in, many chose the ladder.
> >
> > Actually, if you look at the codebase, you will realise that the vast
> > majority of the code comes from nct and nuage. They did not, mainly,
> > "hack" new features. However, certain parts of the code are written in a
> > very convoluted way.
>
> Steph, what do you think about your code? I would prefer not to put
> words into your mouth.

His code is very good. :)

> > Someone seeing that and going into the internals would say huggh, this is
> > horrible. I need to rewrite. And we would be back to step 1, which, let
> > us admit it, is wayyyy, cleaner.
>
> I'm not that good of a coder, so I'll let everyone else poke and
> prod at that.

The answer to that is "you could have used some external library". There are 
many very good sparse matrix libraries. They are all very limited in their 
own way, which defines in which way they are very good.

> > You mean like rewriting the map format instead of fixing the desyncs? 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_.
>
> Umm I was talking about eve there, and eve-online doesn't exactly
> work by using maps, and their desyncs are much more dramatic than
> ours, and from a player's point of view we're all complaining about
> the lag, bugs in the ships, etc.  and not the agent storylines
> they've been working on instead

well, I can't comment on that, never played eve :)

> > Because we are forgetting the players with all this rewrite talk, are we
> > not?
>
> back to glob2, we are players too, and we're not forgetting us, or
> the other players that aren't devs

I hope.

> > What are the issues they raise? what works not so well?
>
> do you ever sit on irc? 

Actually, I consider myself in IRC rehab, I don't want to fall again. It is 
hell, hell I tell you !

> ask them when they come in about what's 
> driving them nuts when they keep dropping back to the lobby because
> of a desync.
>
> > What are the game balance issues?
>
> blue beats red 100% of time, because I like the color blue, and it
> was a special day of the year for me when we wrote that code. ;)

Balance is also the relative efficiency of the various strategies, and how 
diverse the ways to victory are.

I don't think this is something which can be well explored without many 
players.

> > All of those points are important, and not one requires a rewrite, only
> > tuning.
>
> /me screws up and drops a tool into the engine :P

Modern engines have no place left for you to drop a tool in :)

> >
> > 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 :)
>
> I'll agree that graphics, making maps, and writing campaigns are
> important, I have to disagree with you on the most of the game not
> being the code. how could you say that? 90% of a game is code, where
> do you think 9/10th of the time goes into when a company like that
> creates a game? do you really think that they start out by writing a
> few thousand lines of code and call it a day and then spend all the
> rest of the time doing graphics?

Quasi, yes. Many a times they buy the engine. You have to think in terms of 
time consumed. If you are more clever, you can code more efficiently, but 
making a good map will always take some fixed incompressible amount of time, 
which corresponds to the many test games.

> umm, yes and no. We are going to a 1.0, just taking a different
> route to go there. As long as people are working on the game, it
> will never die. As long as even the developers are playing, it won't
> die. The general public's interest in the game may die down until we
> get to the 1.0 release, but the game itself will not die, I won't
> let it, and I'm certain steph won't either. 

Well, he did give up maintenership. And despite all my flames, I believe Brad 
is doing a good job.

> I've put too much time 
> and money into the game to let it, so we shall never go there again.

You will, see, it will be on and off...

> > I do gfx, sometimes. When I have the time and motivation. Yes, I am a
> > bottleneck, sorry.
>
> I never said you were a bottleneck, I meant I've been out of date
> and really had no idea what some of you guys have been up to. I
> didn't mean it as any sort of insult, thank you for letting me know.

no, no, it is just that I rais issues for which I am also partly guilty.

> > Actually, from Rama's drawing, I did ~90% of the graphics.
> >
> > And you know what?
> >
> > they need a redraw.
>
> idea.compare (redraw, rewrite);

see my flame on refactoring, below.

> > :)
>
>
> >  -- CFD
>
>     -- I have no idea what that means

My initials, actually. Or Computational Fluid Dynamics, as you like :)


-- 
-- Cyrille Dunant
-- EPFL-IMX-LMC 
--

   Kleptomaniac, n.:
        A rich thief.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.