Quick question for the engine devs. - Page 3

Quick question for the engine devs.

A place for offers of Bounties and discussion of funded proposals.
User avatar
Jools
XTA Developer
Posts: 2816
Joined: 23 Feb 2009, 16:29

Re: Quick question for the engine devs.

Post by Jools »

gajop wrote:
PicassoCT wrote:Is there a "refund" if it doesent work out option?
No please. You can't refund the dev's time, can you?
But we don't pay for time. We pay for results.
User avatar
PicassoCT
Journeywar Developer & Mapper
Posts: 10450
Joined: 24 Jan 2006, 21:12

Re: Quick question for the engine devs.

Post by PicassoCT »

gajop wrote:
PicassoCT wrote:Is there a "refund" if it doesent work out option?
No please. You can't refund the dev's time, can you?
Im stateless and opionlesser when it comes to refunds or no refunds - i just want this to be clear, as in every endavour there is a small chance of failure.

Once that is out of the way, and every party involved recognised it, thus minimizing the potential negative outcome, all hail breaks loose.
User avatar
Anarchid
Posts: 1384
Joined: 30 Nov 2008, 04:31

Re: Quick question for the engine devs.

Post by Anarchid »

I would say it has to work, or there is no real incentive.

The work has to be delivered, and the ransom needs to be paid once the work is delivered.

It should not be possible to not pay the ransom, and it should not be possible for it to get paid without work being delivered.
User avatar
Jools
XTA Developer
Posts: 2816
Joined: 23 Feb 2009, 16:29

Re: Quick question for the engine devs.

Post by Jools »

I could consider donating for infrastructure costs and similar...

But for development, you must be kidding. Not unless there is an improvement of attitude.

Half of the xta team are banned or threatened by the dev team or their moderator minions, we have no one with rights to post in the news channel. And you think we would be donating money to people who behave like that? You must be out of your mind.
MetalSucker
Posts: 98
Joined: 22 Sep 2014, 20:29

Re: Quick question for the engine devs.

Post by MetalSucker »

A third party escrow (and arbitration) system solves a lot of things but usually gets a % - this can come in the form of a freelancing site... however there are a few things:

-an already tense relationship between provider and supplier will go wrong no matter what precautions are taken (actual experience, humans will be humans) - it's no longer a matter of delivering the set of features agree upon, it becomes a nuance thing - subjective criticism will push things down a slippery slope ("but it's not the right shade of blue and I remember it differently, I think I want something cooler, it wasn't delivered until 8 PM UTC, it was 5 minutes too late")...

-the learning curve involved keeps developers away and you are limited to people who already know the engine well, no paid programmer will learn it for free but someone who treats it as a hobby would - or someone having an interest in developing something that he/she could sell.

If anything I honestly think you should pay some people for the work they freely put in so far...

Donations from successful commercial games that use spring would make most sense (TODO: list of things keeping commercial games away from this engine - yes, I know unity is everywhere) - I don't think the best way is to get money from current players, this needs an infusion of capital from an external source, that then gets distributed between infrastructure, man hours, fairy dust and whatnot.

I don't think it's the engine itself that holds things back, it's the other gazillion small things that make up the ecosystem.

~2c
User avatar
PicassoCT
Journeywar Developer & Mapper
Posts: 10450
Joined: 24 Jan 2006, 21:12

Re: Quick question for the engine devs.

Post by PicassoCT »

MetalSucker wrote:- yes, I know unity is everywhere

~2c
Do not worry about Unity- they have EAids by now..

Soon there will be a in Editorshop and very *** funny**** conditions in there licensing rules.
Greed will kill it.
Kloot
Spring Developer
Posts: 1867
Joined: 08 Oct 2006, 16:58

Re: Quick question for the engine devs.

Post by Kloot »

Jools wrote:But we don't pay for time. We pay for results.
No, in principle you pay for time. Results can never be guaranteed for the simple reason that real life happens to contain an unpredictable element called "death".
Anarchid wrote:It should not be possible to not pay the ransom, and it should not be possible for it to get paid without work being delivered.
You've just reinvented the basis for legal contracts.

Ideally, trust (the magic word again) in a developer should obviate the need for those.

NB: with donations there is an additional asymmetry in that the more donators back a hard feature, the less individual financial risk each donator takes, while the risk a developer takes increases (more wasted time, larger missed income). This is why payment should be upfront, or at the very least follow a "x% upfront, (100 - x%) on delivery" rule. (You could also issue weekly installments, and then you would have reinvented the idea of salary as well.)
User avatar
Tim Blokdijk
Posts: 1242
Joined: 29 May 2005, 11:18

Re: Quick question for the engine devs.

Post by Tim Blokdijk »

smoth wrote:
Tim Blokdijk wrote:
Kloot wrote:$500
I'm willing to match 50 cent for each dollar donated by others. Granted that the total pledges made reach the full 500 dollar. So effectively I'm pledging 166.67 dollar if others pledge for the other 333.33 dollar.
Ok, I'll bite, I will pledge 250$. Who else wants to see this feature?
500 − 416.67 = 83.33

Who's going to set Kloot loose? Or who is going to shrink the price some more?
Google_Frog
Moderator
Posts: 2464
Joined: 12 Oct 2007, 09:24

Re: Quick question for the engine devs.

Post by Google_Frog »

I would pay at least $500 to fix the engine (and possibly ZK) to work as well as 91.0. We've got benchmarks to measure this but the final measure would be whether ordinary players are ambivalent towards which engine is used. Live tests in the past have always had them quickly complain about performance.

This sounds a bit difficult/nebulous for anyone to take up.
hokomoko
Spring Developer
Posts: 593
Joined: 02 Jun 2014, 00:46

Re: Quick question for the engine devs.

Post by hokomoko »

Kloot wrote:

Code: Select all

Spring.LoadMap("DSD")
Actually IMO it'd be more versatile to reload based on a script and not on a map (maybe players will change, maybe we're in Chililobby and want a different game etc.)


btw, that raises another issue of bounties/donations/payment.

EDIT:
Google_Frog wrote:I would pay at least $500 to fix the engine (and possibly ZK) to work as well as 91.0. We've got benchmarks to measure this but the final measure would be whether ordinary players are ambivalent towards which engine is used. Live tests in the past have always had them quickly complain about performance.

This sounds a bit difficult/nebulous for anyone to take up.
I planned to make a profiling of the engine (for free) after exam period (I hope...), I hope we'll be able to point out the real goals of optimisation.
gajop
Moderator
Posts: 3051
Joined: 05 Aug 2009, 20:42

Re: Quick question for the engine devs.

Post by gajop »

I appreciate the enthusiasm (I really do), but I think we should hurry up and organize this a bit better to make it usable for more than just one issue*:
1. Make a subforum for posting issues and dealing with funding. (assign Anarchid to the job and assist him in any way possible)
2. Decide how funding should be done (community polls?):
a) do donators give money before the project starts or only when there's enough to complete it?
b) is money given for issues or (issue, devs) pairs (e.g. are we paying 500$ to get Spring clean, or are we paying 500$ for kloot to do Spring clean?) ?
c) who or what is going to hold the money, and in what format ($, bitcoin, etc.)?
d) is money given to devs before or after they produce results?
e) is money given in parts (weekly/monthly) or in entirety?
f) who decides that the issue is completed successfully (devs, donators? majority voting?) ?

*Although I won't mind if you just try and get this particular issue funded ad-hoc just to get things going. I don't think I can help as I still don't have a CC here.
gajop
Moderator
Posts: 3051
Joined: 05 Aug 2009, 20:42

Re: Quick question for the engine devs.

Post by gajop »

Google_Frog wrote:I would pay at least $500 to fix the engine (and possibly ZK) to work as well as 91.0. We've got benchmarks to measure this but the final measure would be whether ordinary players are ambivalent towards which engine is used. Live tests in the past have always had them quickly complain about performance.

This sounds a bit difficult/nebulous for anyone to take up.
I think you've done a fairly good job at making reproducable testing. The particular issue (of funding) could include what kind of testing should be done and what kind of results are saught.
This is hard if you include online tests with arbitrary configurations, but not impossible (would just take a while to do them). The dev who does this should also not be expected to be able to organize these tests (this is something that the issuer should assist with).
User avatar
Anarchid
Posts: 1384
Joined: 30 Nov 2008, 04:31

Re: Quick question for the engine devs.

Post by Anarchid »

I would like to bump googlefrog's bounty to 750.
You've just reinvented the basis for legal contracts.
No: i reiterated it, for a reason.
User avatar
Silentwings
Posts: 3720
Joined: 25 Oct 2008, 00:23

Re: Quick question for the engine devs.

Post by Silentwings »

Spring.LoadMap ... 500 − 416.67 = 83.33 ... Who's going to set Kloot loose?
I am. I'll pledge the last $83.33, and I'll make a separate forum post, which I'll link to once it exists, for the proposal. It can be a trial run of the idea, hopefully we can learn more about what the best format for such things is.

edit: http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.ph ... 67#p564467. @smoth, Tim, if the description of the proposal doesn't match exactly what you're thinking (since its been discussed before I am reasonably confident that it does), pm me and we'll fix it.

Given the strength of support for such things already received above, I think creating a separate subforum (maybe in development? or feature requests) dedicated only to such threads, one per proposal, for such things is needed. + what gajop said http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.ph ... 66#p564459.
User avatar
smoth
Posts: 22309
Joined: 13 Jan 2005, 00:46

Re: Quick question for the engine devs.

Post by smoth »

Cool so how do I get kloot my share?

On what if the dev doesn't deliver. Are any of you considering how it works in the professional world? This is what happens, you pick a dev you feel confident in achieving a task, you pay that dev for their time OR until the task is complete. Part of ensuring the work is done in time is clearly establishing a task. There are people who would weasel out of payment arguing "oh, that isn't what I asked for" when they clearly did! There are devs who warp the request etc. In the end it is about trust between the client and the dev. I believe Kloot is an honest guy, I believe JK is an honest guy, I would back certain features from either one.

Some random guy on the internet entirely unfamiliar with the engine, no. His time would be largely spent learning the way the engine works, possibly ending up realizing the task IS much larger and he would need more hours, thus suddenly costs rise. That is how most real development goes. This case, we have a dev who is intimately familiar with the code in question and has a history of doing good work, so I trust his time evaluation.

You don't trust him, don't donate!

@Google, there is no telling what the slowdown is, in order to save cost, I think you as a client need to find ways to do some of the benchmarking work, then once you get your target areas, asking hey how much would it cost to say "adjust the input portion of the code where it checks for mouse press etc" Not "make it faster" that is too obscure. I am not shooting anything down but I suspect that the engine performance is linked to several areas at once and investigation prior to the alteration would save a lot of money.

@silentwings, I have to go do a dance class today, I may look at this later today. For now I would like to get the information about how to get kloot his money. I think that having a dialogue with myself, you, tim and kloot on the specifics would be a good idea.

Some questions for the 3 of us to consider:

What does the spring restart control? Can it add players? How does it specify mod/map options? does it carry data from the last map? if so what? what is the scope of that data? After that we need to see how kloot feels and what exactly he feels the 500$ worth of his time would cover. We need to be reasonable with our request. There is always some kind of snag or snaffu so some of these answers would be nice to haves instead of requirements. How will we test? Will we test the map load in order to try and help kloot as he is working or after he is "done?" because him waiting on our feedback can slow the process down.
User avatar
FLOZi
MC: Legacy & Spring 1944 Developer
Posts: 6240
Joined: 29 Apr 2005, 01:14

Re: Quick question for the engine devs.

Post by FLOZi »

Seems we are proceeding with this experiment, so I have set up the subforum for easier moderation, particularly of the Spring.LoadMap thread wrt the rules outlined by silentwings for non-donors.
User avatar
Silentwings
Posts: 3720
Joined: 25 Oct 2008, 00:23

Re: Quick question for the engine devs.

Post by Silentwings »

I have set up the subforum for easier moderation, particularly of the Spring.LoadMap thread wrt the rules outlined by silentwings for non-donors.
Thanks!

I can't see the bounty forum unless I'm logged in (and based on #sy, googlefrog and gajop can't see it at all) - although I think discussions on those things ought to generally be between pledgers & devs, I didn't want to make them invisible to others. I think it would be good to have it visible to all, and also good in general to have development discussion on display.
User avatar
FLOZi
MC: Legacy & Spring 1944 Developer
Posts: 6240
Joined: 29 Apr 2005, 01:14

Re: Quick question for the engine devs.

Post by FLOZi »

phpbb permissions defaults are weird. Everyone should now have 'standard acess + polls' and moderators have full acess.
abma
Spring Developer
Posts: 3798
Joined: 01 Jun 2009, 00:08

Re: Quick question for the engine devs.

Post by abma »

(hopefully) fixed permissions. guests had no right to read the forum, should be ok now.
User avatar
FLOZi
MC: Legacy & Spring 1944 Developer
Posts: 6240
Joined: 29 Apr 2005, 01:14

Re: Quick question for the engine devs.

Post by FLOZi »

abma wrote:(hopefully) fixed permissions. guests had no right to read the forum, should be ok now.
Was left like that intentionally, seen as this is but an experiment as of yet. Not hugely bothered either way.
Post Reply

Return to “Bounty Offers”