Author Spring RTS Book-Packt Publishing - Page 2

Author Spring RTS Book-Packt Publishing

Various things about Spring that do not fit in any of the other forums listed below, including forum rules.

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Neddie
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Re: Author Spring RTS Book-Packt Publishing

Post by Neddie »

You failed to listen to anything I said on the subject, AF.

First, we could not write an engine text but we could write a game development text using the engine, however that requires clarification on Packt's end and structural pre-mapping of the text and the engine - i.e. a plan with definite goals for the immediate future of engine development, and writing to mirror these coming features.

Second, this is an open offer and thus I cannot close it, and without other contributors I probably could not fulfill it, whatever my stance may be.

Third, I'm not holding on to anything. I'm not doing anything either way right now, I've set aside any thought of it until I have the time to expend. I suggest you look up the definition of fallacy before using the word again.

In addition there are a number of deceptive statements in the remainder of your post.

We did not learn of Packt's offer until, maybe, two weeks past. Discussion did not move anywhere, and not enough time has passed to make a judgment on the forum. Various random people haven't been added since the first day, as far as I know.

No consensus was met by the engine developers, contributors, AI coders and game developers. Some feel that anybody who buys a programming or development text is an imbecile. Some feel that a text about, say, making a game could be created given dedicated effort. Some feel that this is not an option at the present time.

A book is not guaranteed to have little use or value to those who buy it - unless, of course, we produce a bad book without taking the changes in the project into account or by focusing on the engine rather than producing content. It is fairly obvious that if this were written it would involve various people with specific talents or interests and some sort of facilitator. It is not about whether "we" would spare a team but whether people would wish to contribute.

~~~

In my opinion, if this were done it would require robust planning and various writers. I could see Caydr and Tribulex contributing and receiving some percentage, but the project would need one or two engine developers, probably an AI developer, and two or three other people. As I said, I have not had the time yet to decide whether or not to pursue this.
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hoijui
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Re: Author Spring RTS Book-Packt Publishing

Post by hoijui »

i agree with AF.
all i have read so far, about what has come from them to us, is little more then mass mail (eg. pre-configured mail, where they can replace <project> with "Spring"). and even doh asking for it quite a few times, we never got an answer to the question, what part of the spring universe the game would be about. this brings me to the conclusion that they really do not know enough about spring. as a week or two have passed already, and they did not really show a sign of trying to learn more to be able to answer our questions.
even doh i can imagine some scenarios that could in some way possibly benefit spring, if this and that and..
the only realistic conclusion seems to be, that our imagination just went through with us, and this really is just a waste of time.

i did not say anything new, and AF said it better ...
me agree
Regret
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Re: Author Spring RTS Book-Packt Publishing

Post by Regret »

AF wrote:community that fails to document and keep up to date a basic wiki
AF wrote:Your all wasting your time, get your arses into gear and do something productive
neddiedrow wrote:Some feel that anybody who buys a programming or development text is an imbecile.
Key sentences.

Conclusion: Ignore profiters like "sam", realize that what he is doing is elaborate spam, fill wiki if you feel like writing about Spring.
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Caydr
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Re: Author Spring RTS Book-Packt Publishing

Post by Caydr »

Here's another key point:
imbaczek wrote:it's not a bot. we have been contacted by packt but couldn't really figure out how to respond; we've been discussing this proposal in quite some detail in private.

i suggest keeping this thread civil.
So I guess I'm the only one that's got a PM with details about royalties, advances, promotions...?

They have allegedly donated over $100,000 to FOSS projects.
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AF
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Re: Author Spring RTS Book-Packt Publishing

Post by AF »

Neddie:

Discussion consensus and activity:

Activity in the publication forum had an initial burst, but of all the activity of the last week involves a post by Tobi saying the forum is dead with a quoted reply to the email, and a post by you, and a post by Argh having newly found goodies to feast his eyes upon speculating in a very short post.

So far people have either agreed with me, or expressed the exact same views before I had even uttered a word, and I just agreed with their logic and paraphrased in my post.

Neddie, you may occupy some position high up but you haven't taken count or polled the entire body for a consensus. Instead a majority have expressed common views of their own accord.

Hope:

A book offer is a potential compliment and the benefits if it could be pulled off leave us starry eyed and hopeful, but that's just it. Right now it cant be pulled off.

AF not listening & engine vs content:

Utter nonsense.

All my arguments still apply to content development. We have seen some major changes and shifts to how content has managed, such as the introduction of lua animations, removal of engine unit spawning, legacy functionality being moved from the engine to lua gadgets, and the pace has speeded up.

For proof please look at the commit log


I think it would be accurate to say, there is interest but the engine is not ready yet. When the time comes people will be happy to contribute, and we'll contact you, but not just yet.

Until then, don't bother obsessing over book deals, and get the engine and connected projects up to speed
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Caydr
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Re: Author Spring RTS Book-Packt Publishing

Post by Caydr »

What "publication forum"? :|
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Tribulex
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Re: Author Spring RTS Book-Packt Publishing

Post by Tribulex »

Caydr wrote:What "publication forum"? :|
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AF
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Re: Author Spring RTS Book-Packt Publishing

Post by AF »

Since this topic is now in the public domain I see no reason to withold vague details. There is nothing in there that hasn't already been said here.

The highlights of the publication forum are:
  • Lots of organisational Neddie posts
  • Counting and reporting on who recieved emails
  • A small discussion between developers generally agreeing that focusing on the C++ aspect of the engine wouldnt work for reasons mentioned earlier
  • 2 verbose posts from Argh that do nothing but tell us what we already know
  • A quoted reply written by tobi to an email to the person who started this thread citing the publication forum as dead
Created Tuesday Feb 23rd by neddiedrow in response to the revelation in the #sy channel in order to prevent a public fiasco unfolding as various characters attempt to muscle in on the proceedings

It should be noted that the OP cannot see this forum as far as I am aware, and has not posted in it.

There are 29 posts in the forum, and 5 threads, of which 3 of those threads should be merged into the "List Of People Contacted Directly By Packt" thread.

It's a rather dull and transitory forum which should really be put into cold storage for all the forum to see so we can go over it oneday and go "ah, how interesting" before moving on
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Caydr
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Re: Author Spring RTS Book-Packt Publishing

Post by Caydr »

Oh sweet, invite-only forums are cool to the max, yo.
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Tribulex
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Re: Author Spring RTS Book-Packt Publishing

Post by Tribulex »

AF did i ever mention the joy your bring to my life regularly? You just summarized an entire subforum in 1 post, so I dont have to pull strings to get into it.
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jK
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Re: Author Spring RTS Book-Packt Publishing

Post by jK »

I wonder why you guys are so pessimistic, someone offers us a real chance to create a compendium of Spring development.
Atm it's pretty hard to jump into development and even engine devs only know their part of the source code.
Also I can't accept the argument, that you don't need to write a single line C++ to make a game in Spring. This apply to many other engines too and there are many books for those (e.g. Unreal Engine).
Also I think it could be written on a much higher academic degree than most of you assume.

A problem I might see is that Spring is a continuous project, which affects primarily the map, unit scripting & model rendering code. Those parts are under heavy changes atm and they would make a huge part of the book, so it would be very bad if the book is already outdated before it's finished.
A second problem might be the language. Perhaps it just affects me, but writing a whole book in your native language is already a huge project, but for someone who's native language isn't English it's even more. Sure some people of the community could work as co-authors, still 95% of the work has the author himself.


Still I am grateful that Packt gives projects as ours such a chance.
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AF
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Re: Author Spring RTS Book-Packt Publishing

Post by AF »

Indeed, but first I think our own project documentation should be upto scratch, then we can embark upon books and advertisement within the wider community.

The wider community it seems on the other hand is becoming aware of us and in part actively contributing to fix this, as is noted in AI development where academia and development throws up surprises every year
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FLOZi
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Re: Author Spring RTS Book-Packt Publishing

Post by FLOZi »

Caydr wrote:Well, I could definitely write it, I made AA which BA is based on. Regardless of your opinion of how AA/BA has become a positive or negative influence, my level of engine knowledge, past and present, is undeniable. This means that from late 2005 to early 2007 I had a period of being, uninterrupted, the developer of choice for 2/3 to 3/4 of Spring's players. In a sense I still am; BA is in essence just AA without all the things I screwed up in the last couple months I was running AA (due to time constraints brought on by my getting my first job).

My problem with committing to anything is simply that there are a ton of other people who would undoubtedly like to take a shot at this as well. Regardless of their past/current/future success in actually creating popular mods/games, they as individuals and as teams undoubtedly have a tremendous amount of knowledge as well. As such, they're going to also possibly want to write the book.

So how would you decide which individual/group actually writes the book? It's a lot of time an effort that would be spent only to have you tell me, "Sorry, some other guy is going to write it."

I'm in a unique position right now because I'm actually working on the first stages of completely reworking AA from the ground up, it would largely be a matter of just documenting what I'm doing and why. I also happen to be quite good at technical writing, English spelling/grammar, etc.
This is a joke and or troll right?

(If not, consider how many noob questions you had to ask every time you 'come back')
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AF
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Re: Author Spring RTS Book-Packt Publishing

Post by AF »

This thread appears to show people in a rather curious light

Take note people
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Argh
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Re: Author Spring RTS Book-Packt Publishing

Post by Argh »

The way I see it, a Spring book talking about game development in a detailed, organized and serious way would be useful to the Project, and could substantially boost Spring's visibility to game developers looking for an engine... and it probably wouldn't be outdated too terribly fast. While a few things are fluid atm (engine-side spawning of starting units / resources has been deprecated in the next release, for example), that's unusual. We're usually pretty strict about backwards-compatibility, so that things don't get too horribly broken every few months.

The engine-side code is a tougher issue, because it's getting touched daily, and it's still improving, not just adding tinsel, which is the really amazing thing.

But the real problem is that the community's pretty small and many of us are very busy.

Oh, and one last note, for would-be authors: it took somewhere around 3 months of spare-time work to write Silent Dark (which I suspect none of you have ever read, but hey, it's a tabletop wargame I wrote, and it got nationally distributed before I decided to quit bothering with it because the money it made vs. the hassle wasn't remotely worthwhile to me, and I didn't have anywhere near enough capital to start a line of miniatures). Five months, if we count time spent messing with PageMaker and making the illustrations. Keep that kind of time commitment in mind- a really good book about game development with this engine could easily run 150+ pages, and if you take this on, you need to charge appropriately, unless you're just doing it for the work experience (and can afford to spend that kind of time). Another way to look at it is that each page will take, on average, after editing, corrections, etc., at least two real hours of work, when it's all said and done- and that's being optimistic.

And of course... you can't just bang out some pages of random crap; it has to be organized and concise and focused. While the editors can and will correct your punctuation and English, they won't know when you're just spouting irrelevancies, and I'd honestly suggest that whoever tackles this runs it as an open project, and shows the community the work as it's planned and executed. I think it's fair to say that nobody here knows every last detail of everything about everything that goes into a game, and a book that faced some peer review would probably be a lot more useful than one written without. Just my two cents on that topic, having been through that particular wringer once...
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hunterw
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Re: Author Spring RTS Book-Packt Publishing

Post by hunterw »

Spring RTS book has written itself, just CTRL C this whole thread in to notepad
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Gota
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Re: Author Spring RTS Book-Packt Publishing

Post by Gota »

Interesting,I find this thread very interesting.
Is it me or are there like a ton of people ATM,secretly hoping to make money out of Spring?
Also,why was this thread allowed to go on and not deleted if there is already a closed forum thread about the same subject?
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Gota
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Re: Author Spring RTS Book-Packt Publishing

Post by Gota »

Caydr wrote:Well, I could definitely write it, I made AA which BA is based on. Regardless of your opinion of how AA/BA has become a positive or negative influence, my level of engine knowledge, past and present, is undeniable. This means that from late 2005 to early 2007 I had a period of being, uninterrupted, the developer of choice for 2/3 to 3/4 of Spring's players. In a sense I still am; BA is in essence just AA without all the things I screwed up in the last couple months I was running AA (due to time constraints brought on by my getting my first job).
What can you possible know about the engine from making a TA mod?Seriously enough with the bullshit and the motivational self confidence speeches...
I really hope,after all this endless talk,you'll deliver AA like you'v boasted about,for what?the past several years now?
Anyone,of many,who made a TA mod "knows the engine" just as much as you and can "write" those segments in the "book".
Last edited by Gota on 06 Mar 2010, 11:24, edited 1 time in total.
imbaczek
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Re: Author Spring RTS Book-Packt Publishing

Post by imbaczek »

the forums were made private precisely to avoid the flamewar that's going on here. i'm pretty sure everybody understands there isn't any big money to be made making this book. as such, the only question left is if there's anybody who has the time, skills and wants to help spring for a modest sum.
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Neddie
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Re: Author Spring RTS Book-Packt Publishing

Post by Neddie »

At this point it is clear that there are many more people who want to undermine those who might be interested, or merely derail any conversation on the topic, than those who are genuinely considering the Packt offer.

~

Just because you're picking the people who agree with you doesn't create a consensus, AF. It is not consensus, the participants did not come to any form of general agreement on anything related to the point. That and you are not listening - you can plan for coverage of a developing topic, you can write a structure tailored around content which is not presently available. Your perspective of hopelessness is predicated upon laziness and fatalism, and cannot claim to be more reasonable than my own which you imply is naive and "starry eyed".

Also, when you posted in the forum, you surely read this...
This forum is private at the moment, with only a select number of users party to it. For the time being, it would be prudent not to discuss it outside this forum and #sy.
Perhaps I should have been clearer. As it is, you're taking information about said forum and the contents thereof out of context to further your agenda - this is disruptive and will not be tolerated. You've stated your point over and over; repetition will not make you right.

~

jK, I agree on most of what you've said. There are serious obstacles to such an endeavour, but I believe a good work could be produced given dedication, cooperation, and a little ingenuity.

I think, if this project were undertaken in earnest, one english-native author/planner/editor would need to lead the work. In cooperation with the section writers, he or she would need to create an overall structure of the text and set minimal requirements for different sections and then delegate these to their respective section writers. Upon completion he or she would review and revise the sections. The revised portions would be read over by the section writer and some third party for comprehension, and then the central author/editor would write the lead-in and lead-out of the section to create a relatively seamless text.

Addendum: I feel that a number of people believe I should take on the central role if we decide to move forward with such a book, and I grudgingly must agree. I would like to write something which is less demanding than a quality creative work while still enjoyable, but I am loathe to commit to - or even seriously consider - such a project without the clear activity of others.

~

As for the profiteering aspect, Gota, I suspect a handful of people are pursuing other projects with that eventual goal, but this is not one of them - Packt is fairly above board, and only a fool would expect to recoup the time invested in authoring such a guide monetarily.
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