Engine fork and Ingame Community

[Ares]

Although nothing can undo the harm that was done to our community. The following steps need to happen to treat us fairly like everyone else.

1. All Coil devs need to resign their admin from Spring forum. So they can no longer use it to unfairly ban users and developers from their own games. Including beherith, gajop, bluestone.

2. All Coil devs need to resign their admin from Spring official server. So they no longer have the power to use botflags to harm other mods. Including beherith, bluestone and floris.

3. All Coil devs need to resign their admin from Spring discord. As they no longer use the official Spring engine. It should be transferred to the remaining users of the official engine. Including Gajop and forboding angel.

4. The 3do2s3o.lua tool to convert models to the new engine format needs to be released publicly as Beherith agreed. Community engine tools should not be used to privately gatekeep mods and play favourites based on Beheriths personal grudges.

5. Unban the BA developer from BAR and unban SaturnV


User was warned and banned for this post. Felony 2 and 4 (Beherith)

[Forboding Angel]

You're so cute.

20140702__0711joan1-1132824871.jpg (19.76 KiB) Viewed 480410 times

User was warned for this post. Felony 1 (abma)

[MidKnight]

It's nice to see that, ten years after I stopped visiting these forums, the drama is alive and well!

I just wanted to jump in and say that, in my limited experience, the character of change over time is guided by the ones who actually do the work and live where the users are. My yakking in forum threads was tons of fun, but it counts for nothing - my work product was cheap wit and my customers were the same two dozen forum regulars. However, a few of my models are still in games people play, which is heartwarming.

The future of Spring (or Coil, or whatever) will be determined by the people who do the work (i.e. create content, make commits, review PRs, ship features and experiences players are excited about).

[abma]

It's nice to see that, ten years after I stopped visiting these forums, the drama is alive and well!

yep it is.

Please clarify your stance up front of how you expect games using such a fork of the Spring engine should be interacting with springrts.com, and its related services.

as coil is not using the services of springrts.com and not contributing back i see it as offtopic and not part of the spring community. when you create a fork you should also take all consequences.

[sprunk]

and not contributing back

lol

explain what https://github.com/spring/spring/pull/559 was, if not a contribution and a massive extension of good will

explain how else you expect contributions to happen if you have issues with the above

also explain your own contributions while we're at it, have you done anything useful other than driving every game away through your bad leadership (106 was largely Kloot's work)?

[abma]

lol

sorry, you've lost my attention after this.

[raaar]

There's extensive contributions by Abma on the official spring repository with merges and fixes on various projects. He's been silently keeping things running and we're grateful for that!

It'd be nice if these conversations led to some understanding that leads to convergence of the engines, which would make life easier for everyone in the long run, instead of deeper splits.

Alienating people = bad, etc.
(in all directions)

[sprunk]

sorry, you've lost my attention after this.

Fine, here's a less snarky post.

There's extensive contributions by Abma on the official spring repository with merges and fixes on various projects. He's been silently keeping things running and we're grateful for that!

Some background. Spring can be understood to be two things: one is just the Spring Engine itself, and the other is Spring as a project/platform and the surrounding infrastructure - meaning this website (springrts.com), the lobby server (uberserver), springfiles (now also hosted here), etc.

The first issue is that these two are of course very connected but could still be led separately. Abma is currently in charge of both. I agree that it is fine that he is in charge of the platform part - I am mostly talking about the engine. ZK and BAR are generally not using the platform (having their own websites, lobby servers, etc.) and I don't think Abma, in his role as the leader of Spring as a platform, could have prevented them from leaving the platform (mature games generally want to have their own infrastructure for various reasons). He's silently keeping the platform running and that's great.

But I think that he is responsible for the fork happening as the leader of the engine, that he has not done much to remedy the situation, and that he has effectively not "kept the engine running". ZK and BAR use a fork, but the fork is not done just for the sake of having a fork - they both would have very much liked to use the official engine if that was an option, and the fork is mostly a way of doing things that aren't possible under the current engine management. This would have been fine if the fork and the official release were offering a trade-off; if some alternative things were actually possible under official engine, since understandably some things naturally aren't possible together. In particular, the fork used to have somewhat of a "move fast and break things" mentality - the official engine could offer stability in return. This didn't happen: in comparison, the 106 release is a "move slow and break even more things" - see earlier posts or other threads on how 106 fails (not being back-compatible, not even offering interface to draw a rectangle, etc). The fork is essentially superior in every way that actually matters for games actually using the engine.

Depending on how you look at it, the fork even had official endorsement! The 'maintenance' branch has been in the official repo for a fairly long time and the BAR/Coil fork is essentially just a continuation of that branch. The decision to discontinue that branch despite games actually using it over the broken develop branch was bad, and it wasn't just a judgement call - the evidence was all there.

Abma seems mostly just unaware of that evidence, of the issues and needs of games in the context of the engine. As people mentioned before, this may be because he doesn't communicate outside of the Spring platform (the old "does not use discord" complaint). This would've actually mostly been fine if his role was just being the leader of the platform! But whoever is leading the engine should communicate with the actual users of the engine, independently of the platform. We, the game devs using the fork, still come here to talk, this very post is an attempt at communication. But this is a two-way road, and it was his responsibility to display some initiative and use whatever people actually use to communicate to discover what the issues are. This is because the platform only exists as a, well, platform, for the users of the engine. The engine is fundamental. If the engine dies, then so does the platform, but not the other way around. That is why maintaining the engine requires more communication/effort. The reason why the situation is so egregious and why I think Abma is unfit to lead the engine is because despite everything, he is in an extremely luxurious situation where every game known, including those that stay on the platform, uses one method of communication, the one that Abma refuses to use. There isn't any company using the engine so you don't need to exchange emails with guys in suits, the engine isn't used by aliens only reachable by astral projection. The first step towards solving the most burning problems of members the community would be making an account on a chat website and he consistently refuses to even do that.

Now, who else could lead? The obvious answer is the guys in charge of the fork (which is also endorsed by various other engine devs - gajop, hokomoko etc, community leaders like Beherith etc) since they are doing the actual development work. Abma would still have a place as an important voice of the community, except as one of multiple people like in the old times and just not be a dictator. The more important problem would be what to do with the code - 106 is a dead end release and BAR105 doesn't flow from that. The solution to avoid more time wasted on this would probably be to bite the bullet and take whatever currently exists on BAR105, release as 107 (it is as stable as any historical Spring engine release, despite the "move fast and break things" phase earlier) and go on from there.

[PicassoCT]

Well, obviously open source goes were the life is and life is were the community, software needs life.
But i also understand abmas perspective.

We poured so much work into lobbys over the years and now we replace it with proprietary who then can bend us over and fuck as after embrace honeymoon is over. If that was at least acknowledge as - it will happen- rather soon then later (cheap investor money runs out).
So if there was a fallback solution for the open web and that day, i guess the acceptance would be easier.
Like a drop to website, some fallbackdoor to mastodon or similar, i dont know.

Still, one must acknowledge that discord has the full feature set. And its were the community is now. It has won the competition.
Reality is real by vote of feet.

But is also difficult for single guy to integrate a full game into triple AAA infrastructure and software you guys make nowadays.

I have no answers, just moods i can grasp and express, and attempts to find compromise between sides who are all very reasonable, and opposed none the less.

[sprunk]

We poured so much work into lobbys over the years and now we replace it with proprietary who then can bend us over and fuck as after embrace honeymoon is over. If that was at least acknowledge as - it will happen- rather soon then later (cheap investor money runs out).
So if there was a fallback solution for the open web and that day, i guess the acceptance would be easier.
Like a drop to website, some fallbackdoor to mastodon or similar, i dont know.

We (or rather, to his credit, Abma and a bunch of other people) poured work into lobbys to have an alive community, that's the primary thing! And the lobbys are still there for the purpose of playing. The only problem is that the lobby is not there for talk, because there are better tools for talk. It doesn't matter what specific tool is used for communication, what matters is that maintainers use the same tool as everybody else. If discord dies tomorrow, then maybe everybody moves back to the Spring platform for cross-game talk and suddenly, without any outreach of his own, Abma finds himself in the middle of a lot of people talking about various issues with the engine and gets to see what is really going on. But people move to whatever is the most convenient, so it would probably be another proprietary tool. By using a tool outside the Spring platform (whether it is proprietary or not) we lose some control, but by using a tool that is convenient and used by people we get an alive community in return, and that is more important. It's good to have the platform as a backup but for the purposes of major games it's just that, a backup.

But is also difficult for single guy to integrate a full game into triple AAA infrastructure and software you guys make nowadays.

Yes, but nobody said a bad word about the Spring platform. You can use uberserver to host your games, for your standalone game it's IMO better than being a 2nd category citizen on ZK or BAR servers or trying to make your own server. The platform is great for your kind of single guy. But that doesn't mean you are prohibited from going elsewhere to talk to other people who make games, and it just so happens that most people worth talking to are the easiest to talk outside of the platform, including some that aren't reachable from the platform at all.

when you create a fork you should also take all consequences.

This is a great example of communication problems. When you refuse to merge a friendly fork you bring consequences upon yourself as well. Don't you see you're the one taking all the important consequences here?

• BAR people don't get to use a half-dead forum to advertise an event (the specific case at hand), or generally don't get to use the platform to boost themselves. But the people here are just a fraction of the playerbase they have on their own platform, BAR has multiple 8v8 games going on in parallel nowadays! The majority of people around here likely know about most happenings anyway, because they're on discord as well. This generalizes to most forms of knowledge - anything people using the fork (or basically anybody else from the community) would want to announce on this platform, they're mostly talking to Spring people who know about it anyway because almost everybody here already uses the same non-Spring communication tool (which happens to be discord, but as I said above the specific tool is unimportant as long as everybody is there). For this to be a real consequence, the platform would have to be where everybody is. As is, that's a nothingburger.
• devs of game using the fork might not get support with engine problems, they have to rely on whoever develops the fork for support. But the fork has a ton of competent people working on it, more than official Spring, and their support is better than official Spring had ever been (this is not to discredit old engine devs, development tools have gotten better over time, but - most importantly - the fork is very alive and there's just more people working on it than Spring ever had). Not a real consequence.
• the Spring engine is taking the consequence of not having the sort of active development I talk about above. The consequence for the engine is then stagnation and death.
• the Spring platform takes the consequences of using a dead engine. The consequences for the platform is then stagnation and death.
• you, either by being unable to, or refusing to, recognize all of the above, are taking the consequence of being remembered as a stubborn man who would rather let Spring die than relinquish control, instead of being one of the maintainers of an alive engine.

The main, and perhaps only, negative consequence for the fork is that it will have to make a name for itself. There is some recognition of the name Spring, while the fork will have to build up a reputation of its own, from zero. But Spring's recognition does not come from nowhere, it's the result of effort, and right now all the effort is on the fork's side. And this is bad for both sides - the fork building up its own reputation is effort that is not going towards the continuity of Spring.

It would be interesting to hear your own concerns though. Why not merge the fork, what are your worries?

• the original concern behind dropping the maintenance branch (of which the fork is a continuation) was that this incentivizes games to stay on GL3, giving the engine a bad name by having ugly old graphics etc. But I think that worry is unfounded, despite having major GL3 components ZK and BAR are moving to GL4 already, the issue is just manpower and support. Small games (like Picasso's or raaar's) will also prefer to have nicer graphics if they can just take existing code. I don't know what the plans on dropping GL3 in the fork are but I'd expect it would be once the loss of GL3 can be afforded, and not arbitrarily on somebody's whim.
• some of Kloot's 106 work would be wasted. That is unfortunate, but if there are no 106 games it gets wasted regardless. A lot of it is recyclable though. Similarly game code making use of 106 should be fairly easy to migrate to the fork.
• maybe there's a fear the new leadership would keep the engine BAR/ZK-centric? In some ways the engine has always been biased towards whatever game was the largest, but I think the fork is doing well in that area. For example here's a handful of examples (1, 2) where product oriented BAR people request something silly that would break other games and so far the requests haven't been implemented. Here (3) is somebody recommending to drop a very non-Total-Annihilation oriented feature (that allows C&C or Starcraft style resources) and getting pushback.
• others?

[raaar]

I agree there's failures of communication, but discord's not that important, or shouldn't be.

Abma being active on discord would help. Imo he should at least be more available in this forum and the lobby server itself (namely channels which are mirrored across servers and into discord), perhaps more visible. Maybe people assume he's missing/busy and don't even try to interact.

ZK and BAR use a fork, but the fork is not done just for the sake of having a fork - they both would have very much liked to use the official engine if that was an option, and the fork is mostly a way of doing things that aren't possible under the current engine management. This would have been fine if the fork and the official release were offering a trade-off; if some alternative things were actually possible under official engine, since understandably some things naturally aren't possible together. In particular, the fork used to have somewhat of a "move fast and break things" mentality - the official engine could offer stability in return. This didn't happen: in comparison, the 106 release is a "move slow and break even more things" - see earlier posts or other threads on how 106 fails (not being back-compatible, not even offering interface to draw a rectangle, etc). The fork is essentially superior in every way that actually matters for games actually using the engine.

Depending on how you look at it, the fork even had official endorsement! The 'maintenance' branch has been in the official repo for a fairly long time and the BAR/Coil fork is essentially just a continuation of that branch. The decision to discontinue that branch despite games actually using it over the broken develop branch was bad, and it wasn't just a judgement call - the evidence was all there.

I read here and there that regarding bar engine devs working again directly on the official spring, the "ship has sailed". Ivand just asked himself to be banned from this forum. All this is reversible and forks work both ways. Abma can unilaterally add branches that mirror popular forks of the engine and make builds off them here and there.

He could also revert the bad decision he made when built 106.0 from the develop branch instead of the maintenance branch that people were actually using : put the content of the current develop branch in another branch, then make the develop branch the mirror of the bar105 engine and keep it updated.
It's probably easier to resume development starting from the current bar105 engine that's being actively used/developed and cherry pick stuff from the code that's currently in the official develop branch instead of the other way around.

I think if things progress in a way that simplifies collaboration and the door for it is kept open, things will turn out fine.

[Google_Frog]

I agree with what Sprung wrote.

[sprunk]

He could also revert the bad decision he made when built 106.0 from the develop branch instead of the maintenance branch that people were actually using : put the content of the current develop branch in another branch, then make the develop branch the mirror of the bar105 engine and keep it updated.

This would be a step in good direction.

discord's not that important, or shouldn't be.

I am going to let the comparison between how the fork is doing vs how the official engine is doing be the judge of that. You might counter with things like "oh but the fork just has more people" but that is downstream of removing low hurdles to communication.

[raaar]

discord's not that important, or shouldn't be.

I am going to let the comparison between how the fork is doing vs how the official engine is doing be the judge of that. You might counter with things like "oh but the fork just has more people" but that is downstream of removing low hurdles to communication.

I think the snowballing effect of having more people (including nearly all devs) and tied to a growing game that's shiny with lots of work put into it (and that also attracted the BA veterans) affected the outcome more than whether Abma used or not the more popular means of communication.

I keep seeing people that show up on the official server and sometimes play on the MF rooms and are not on discord. Some play for a significant time and don't get on discord or post anything there despite being directly told to go there.

That said, sure, removing hurdles to communication is a good thing.

If he'd been there the whole time but made the exact same decisions we'd still be in this situation, though. So Abma, what are you going to do now?

[sprunk]

If he'd been there the whole time but made the exact same decisions we'd still be in this situation, though.

That's the whole point, if he was there the whole time he would not have made the same decisions, because those decisions are the result of being horribly underinformed. Maybe the engine devs and game devs behind the fork would have made different decisions if Abma was not willingly absent from every talk.

[Fastdeath]

I agree with abma.

[DeathFast]

I disagree with abma

[Fastdeath]

as coil is not using the services of springrts.com and not contributing back i see it as offtopic and not part of the spring community. when you create a fork you should also take all consequences.

I don't know what BAR/coil is currently giving back, other than taking Games as well as players away from Spring.

On the other hand I don't know what Spring is doing to improve Spring btw. who's behind Spring atm?

I'm very gratefull for Spring, very very gratefull for everything that has been done for Spring and I want this "Drama" to end. Let's come together and find a way to let it end.

Please let us think what we can archive together and let's stop thinking about how we got hurt / disrespected from others in the community.

Kind regards,

[KING]Fast aka [ur]opa.

[raaar]

I don't know what BAR/coil is currently giving back, other than taking Games as well as players away from Spring.

An improved spring engine that's more compatible with the official 105 than the official 106. Both them and ZK make new maps and related tools. People asking for help regarding engine, etc. on discord also mostly get help from people who are mostly invested in either BAR or ZK.

[Fastdeath]

An improved spring engine that's more compatible with the official 105 than the official 106. Both them and ZK make new maps and related tools. People asking for help regarding engine, etc. on discord also mostly get help from people who are mostly invested in either BAR or ZK.

I admit that I was completly wrong with the first 2 sentences of this Post. I'm sorry.