AF wrote:Forboding Angel wrote:That's exactly one of the huge problems. AI devs want all of the access but none of the responsibility.
For the longest time we had all of the responsibility, and little to no cooperation.
You have a history of abandoning your spring related projects and leaving those who were depending on those projects high and dry. You've done this to me twice in the past 10 years.
AF wrote:
Then you should:
- Have not bundled unmaintained dead AIs you never bothered to test in your installer
- Reported the AAI crash, which would have immediately revealed it was crashing on purpose. Instead it was only reported and fixed in the last month by somebody else, revealing the Errors AI copy pasted the same code into it's initialisation routine
- Suggested the NullAI be renamed to Sandbox AI ( I support this action, and agree it's not a user friendly name, and luckily it's a 5 minute job, rename a folder and change a value inside that folder ), infact it should probably be turned into an example LuaAI
1. I should
never need to delete files from the official engine package
1b. Steam is not an "installer"
1c. Further engine updates may very well be downloaded automatically by the lobby. The steam build process is not fun and is is not fast in any way shape or form. I only update steam builds when I have significant number of changes in the base content of the game.
2. I did, but not on mantis (that I remember). Native AIs should never have been distributed with the engine for precisely this purpose. I preferred to preempt the problem ever happening again. Ikinz and Carrepairer agreed with me.
3. I have. Smoth has. Others have. There is even an old flamewar over it from 7 years ago on this forum somewhere. Probably around the same time that argh was arguing that salmon pink was red 255.
AF wrote:I tried working with you, but it killed all motivation and almost killed the entire project. You pick something and you pursue it relentlessly, raging against it and refusing to consider alternatives. It saps all the energy out of things and drives away contributors. AI development isn't a continuous stream of activity, people need to go away for a few weeks and gestate on ideas or all you'll get is incremental gains, and the approach you've taken over the years is toxic for that workflow.
What is everybody afraid AI devs will do if they're the ones whitelisting and blacklisting games? All the examples here are for mothballed AIs bundled with the engine, RAI/AAI/KAIK/etc, those will get set to the old XTA/BA versions and that'll be that part done, so why is everybody so scared of the active AI devs? You can't all seriously be blocking a fix because of an ideological standpoint over who has control?
I tried it your way multiple times, and every single time I was eventually left holding my balls in my hands while you abandoned yet another project. Then, I prodded you forcefully to turn Shard into a LuaAI, because I
knew you would abandon it again and I had no intention of being on the receiving end of getting screwed,
again.
Instead, you threw a giant tantrum, threatened to delete Shard, it's repos, and god knows what else because you want control. That is literally your argument. I get it, but your control could be had in a local mutator where you could work. You could put your luaai on rapid where gamedevs could simply depend on a version of it and have the config files in their game. This is an extremely reasonable approach and satisfies your need to control the AI while allowing gamedevs to prevent themselves from being left in the cold when you inevitably disappear.
No one is afraid of what you would or would not do with a whitelist. You can do whatever you want. If your past tantrum is any indication, you would likely blacklist anyone that you happened to have beef with that month. That's fine, I don't care. What I want, is a whitelist in my game that allows me to list what AIs the players get in a choosable list in the lobby. This is not an unreasonable request. A new AI developer is not going to know every single game to whitelist. What if I start a new side project (not unheard of by any stretch). Do I then have to go and hunt down every single AI developer, including ones that have disappeared and left their AIs to bitrot for half a year or a year begging them to add my game to their whitelist?
I'm getting the feeling that even after all this time you
still don't understand the amount of work that goes into a spring game. I say this because you are elevating AIs as though they are the same as spring games, and they aren't. Not even remotely close.
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Say what you will. I'm done with this conversation in regards to you. No ill will. Simply you have made it clear that you refuse to budge on your position, regardless of how flimsy it is, so I don't really see any reason to add more to the conversation other than to re-state...
Native AIs have no business being bundled with the spring engine.