Moderation

[Gota]

Farm porn on the office computer?tsk tsk

[Caydr]

I'm offended by your post!

Someone moderate Gota, now!

I believe this may be consistent with the definition of backseat moderation, and I do not advocate any course of action to punish or warn you about it.

Yes, the moderation here sucks ass, mainly because of the inconsistency. You get nice, easy-going people like Sinbad who tolerate a fair bit of stuff but know where to draw the line, and then people who won't tolerate a fart in a windstorm but who only actually moderate once a month. Add to the mix moderators who stalk users, posts getting deleted without warning, notice, or recourse, and of course newbie moderators that think they need to rape someone on their first day so everyone knows who's boss.

I for one would be a lot better-behaved if I knew what the "real" definition of good behavior was and knew that it would be enforced upon everyone equally at all times, not exempted if you're a developer or friends with a moderator. I've not been a model citizen, but what gets me banned for a month? Some kind of actual misdeed? I don't even know, the post that I was cited for was so tame and clearly in jest I have no idea what the problem was. All I can see is that I was finally banned after I inoffensively shat on Linux for a week solid. Was I banned by an individual? Was it a group decision? Individually, I have some degree of confidence in several of our moderators here. As a cohesive team? None.

The whole project has gone to shit. There's no clear direction anymore, just people doing whatever they feel like. We've got bump-mapped dynamic water, but things that will actually elevate Spring into something greater - something people can quickly and easily get into with a minimum of fuss and confusion, mainly little things - these things are ignored. It took 5 years to get a startup screen. I feel like I'm playing the ideal Linux RTS.

This project started its downward spiral around the time SJ left, and really went to hell when JC left. We've had progress, but for every step forward, we take two back. In the name of attracting developers and getting more players we've gone hardcore FOSS. Anything you want to add to the code is automatically an improvement. We've got a few more developers now and they're smart people, but we've lost just as many. The engine as a whole is just turning into a bloated hellmess of features nobody knows about.

I've said it before and I'll say it again now: This project needs some kind of development roadmap. Random changes whenever someone feels arsed to do something are not the way this engine is going to make real progress. The engine has been at a virtual standstill since around the time I stopped working on AA. Back then we got real significant features added with every update. Now we get bugfixes to fix the previous version's broken bugfixes, repeat, repeat, with the odd "woo one more thing we can turn into LUA" every now and then. Spring needs REAL LEADERSHIP, not heavy-handed "you do this", but people who actually have a vision for what this engine should be and who take pride in all aspects of their work. I'm not the person for the job and I don't know who is, maybe JC if he wanted to get more actively involved again but I doubt it. He left this project because he saw it turning into what it's become.

Our problem isn't a lack of competent developers, it's a lack of a clear vision for the future and the leadership to get us there. With the state this project is in, I don't blame the moderators for slacking off of phoning it in. Myself I'm constantly battling against my instinct to just wait a couple years and see if anything's improved. Last time, that didn't work so well though. I'd do anything to get back the dev team we had back with 0.66, Spring was golden then...

[smoth]

When you stopped developing AA was some time ago. The engine has has many really good improvements in that time. I do agree that features like splatmaps for smf, skeletal animation/mesh deformation and modern shader support are lacking and probably features that would help make spring better. I think you are only giving a cursory glance of the changes spring has gone through. If you did take a real look at what progress has been made you would likely note that it is the same pace it always has been.

[Caydr]

Back with .66 and before that, we were getting new things that could be implemented without writing pages of Lua. Not all of it was good stuff, but it was the kind of broad feature expansion you'd expect from a really cutting-edge RTS engine.

Shields, man! You remember how awesome they were? Or how about when we were first able to define weapon impulse? Beam lasers! Group load/unload. Stuff that made the engine more flexible. I'm doing all kinds of crazy stuff right now and I'm still only scratching the surface of what's possible with what we currently have.

But even things like that aren't what I'm missing the most. I can't remember the last time the control panel was updated. It's a mess and there's more than a few things that just need a checkbox added but nobody's been bothered with that since it in no way involves lua or bump mapping or specular... diffusion or some shit.

I'm not saying progress isn't being made, I'm saying progress is being made in areas that aren't important to normal people. Human beings. The kind that install a game and expect to have something resembling a functioning RTS without going through a... Smoth come on, you KNOW very well what I'm talking about here, I've seen you complaining about the very same stuff.

The stuff that gets all the attention now tends to be exclusively the kind of thing that gets Linux people all hot and bothered. Woohoo, I can now write the very same things in Lua instead of FBI. It is therefore superior! In only 3 months I can make a groundbreaking Lua script for a new unit! Sure, it means I'm working on worthless cosmetic things that probably won't work on ATI or Intel cards, sure I'm working on it to the exclusion of all else, but now I've got a guy that shoots arrows and then collects the ones that missed! Woo!

[smoth]

The lua scripts allow for units to have acess to lua which grants untold amounts of power to the ancient scripts that we "grew up on" in the TA community.

Yes, the engine is still very much shit out of box as far as ui but the ui, gameplay etc are all on the content devs. That part has never changed, I do dislike the very tech toy nature of the engine but I cannot be choosy and can only hope that things get better. The change to spring.exe (adding a menu)was one my biggest begging points for some time, I love it. I do bitch a lot about the engine though and I do think it is fucking retarded that they use programfiles and userland... I tried to fight that and af drove me out of the thread, it happened and I raged.

[Caydr]

Moving data directories? How about fubaring gl.text just so they could say it was "proper" now? I've been apprehensive about getting to invested with Lua stuff because I'm afraid that exactly that sort of change will happen. People told me, no no, Lua is totally rock-solid. Three months later this happens, and I'm not even especially badly hurt since I can just rely on other people to fix most of the stuff. My few custom things were broke but oh well...

Some developer gets a tick up his ass and decides he wants something to behave differently from now on, forget what common sense dictates. Well now I have to rewrite a bunch of crap that wasn't broken or malfunctioning in any way. That's called lack of planning, lack of leadership, lack of responsibility. Now I'm just waiting for the next "standards revision" to come along and break something else.

Why should I invest time in something that is at the mercy of any random developer who can make a unilateral decision and screw everyone up? And then maybe a month later the next patch comes out and, great, it got reverted, unfortunately I've already implemented the change.

We've got development, for sure, all kinds of stuff changes and gets improved. I'm just not positive I'd call it progress when it seems like so many things are just being done because someone felt like it. There's no clear direction, and this all started when all our first-generation developers got fed up and left. I don't know what their reasons were but I know what mine would be if I was in their shoes. Pretty soon we'll have Spring OS - play battles on your desktop while you answer your email - sorry, we removed terrain and unit rendering because we found they were resource hogs. The particle effects and real-time weather simulation, however, are spectacular!

[smoth]

I can definitely understand the frustration over the font stuff being changed and yes, I agree on the fact that lua is like sand, you can stand on it and it will likely move while you are standing. That is the reason I have held off on unit scripts in lua. Of course the dev working on them gave me fair warning that they are still being revised.

I am happy to say that the lua thing that was changed seems to be teh exception as of late and really it only made the lua text off by a few pixels hardly game breaking.

[maackey]

@ Caydr: you've made some pretty good points in your original post about the moderation, but your focus has drifted more towards the actual engine developers -- which are not the same as the moderators. Don't you think your comments would be better suited in another thread?

[Caydr]

The engine and everything related to it has lost direction. There's no active leadership to be seen anywhere, which creates a self-destructive environment. This is a school where the teachers haven't shown up to work, and the student hall monitors have just stopped giving a damn about the kids playing their music too loud. The visible lack of moderation and the perceived lack of real progress being made on any front are two symptoms of a greater problem, and that is what I'm posting about.

[Regret]

I could singlehandedly keep both forums AND lobby clean (GMT+1 timezone).

And no, not joking.

[FLOZi]

Caydr is talking rubbish about years he hasn't even been here.

The devs are working hard and the 'lack of direction' is the same as its ever been. Yes there are some devs that can be total arses, but on the other hand they can also do some really useful stuff that's been exactly one of those things we've been wanting for ages.

The reason there have been limited changes to the UI is because its now in the hands of the content developers - and we've seen lots of full UI projects coming out of that, nevermind all the individual widget based improvements.

[Gota]

Seems to me some people might be a bit angry at the change from a single engine/game into a pure engine that allows game devs to work with it as oppose to mixing it all in in one pot where the engine is kinda chained to a single project.

As the engine becomes more flexible adjusting things to be how you want them takes more work.
The engine no longer develops features for say,TA but rather for a general batch of games that might be very different from one another.

Unfortunately there is absolutely no point in saying the project needs leadership or that it is bad people are only working on what they want and when they want since those people will not start working differently.

Random contributions,dry dev spots,and times of a lot of work are inherent to such a project.
It is small and hasn't had enough devs that are interested enough in doing exactly the things you want done.
The only thing non devs can do is hope for the best or attract some people to the project who are interested in making contributions in the areas we want to see improved.
Also making some stuff be modside/gameside is a good thing IMO since it means more people can take part in coding and the development process becomes much less dependent on the few actual spring engine devs.
Now you have a hierarchy of the main devs and the lower ones that are making scripts using lua.

[Caydr]

it is bad people are only working on what they want

I never said anyone was "bad", least of all our developers.

Random contributions,dry dev spots,and times of a lot of work are inherent to such a project.

Random contributions are no problem, as long as they don't break anything. However I disagree that dry dev spots are inherent to a project like this.

FreeOrion for instance is in many ways comparable to Spring, but they have a roadmap and a new release isn't made until the features dictated by that roadmap are completed.

I'm not too familiar with projects like Ubuntu, but I think it's probably safe to say that they don't just aimlessly add whatever features they feel like and call it a new release every so many months.

I don't think anyone would've started the ball rolling on UI improvements if we hadn't had that IceUI thread years ago endlessly detailing what everyone wants.

Yes there are some devs that can be total arses, but on the other hand they can also do some really useful stuff that's been exactly one of those things we've been wanting for ages.

Yes, and how did they know you've been wanting those things? Did you endlessly post threads about it every 3 months until people got sick of you? How is this not just a roadmap but more irritating and spammy?

[zwzsg]

Yes there are some devs that can be total arses, but on the other hand they can also do some really useful stuff that's been exactly one of those things we've been wanting for ages.

You had been wanting a 404 for ages?

[FLOZi]

Not 404ing for me zwzsg. It's a link to git log of jk's commit for s3o transparency divorced from advanced shading settings.

[Nemo]

As someone who has been actively developing a game this whole time, I don't think I can make any serious complaint about the engine. Some things would be nice, but nothing is perfect (some things will always be nice, so to speak), and so much of Spring has been opened up to non *A designs. Cadyr...I don't mean to be a jerk, but you have no idea what you're going on about. You're incorrectly extrapolating from a single datapoint (the one frustrating experience you had with jK adjusting gl.text..which caused a furor because it was so strange for a universally breaking change to be made without much advance notice/discussion). In most cases engine devs contact/work with game devs for changes that need backwards compatibility/might break stuff.

As for moderation, eh. clearer/more universally applied standards would be good, but the recent additions seem to have been working out well.

[Caydr]

d_b apparently just got a warning for calling someone an asshole. ON THE INTERNET. Warned by a moderator who has been active here for all of a year and has 230 posts. He was given this role because probably 2 people (he and his smurf) were in favor of him being a moderator, and nobody knew he existed to de-nominate him. The moderator elections were held in secret, with no way of knowing who was nominated until they were already made a moderator. This is, in a community of several thousand people. Also, he has been most active in the CA forum, which is almost actionable on its own.

For reference, approximately 282 people have been called assholes, including the entire continent of Australia. 18 of them were by Swiftspear alone. And LathanStanley is a virtual encyclopedia entry on unnecessary obscenity, but hasn't been warned once.

To be fair though, the last time he was active here was over a year ago, just before it became commonplace to censor, delete, or ban over trivialities. Sometimes.

As for moderation, eh. clearer/more universally applied standards would be good, but the recent additions seem to have been working out well.

[Neddie]

The selection process took place in the moderation area of the forums. We decided that all new moderators would be both forum and lobby moderators in order to reduce the disconnect between the forums and lobby which persisted in the past.

I took all the nominations in private and forwarded a large list to the rest of the team. This list was pre-filtered to exclude self-nominations, smurfs, habitual trolls and people who have expressed a clear desire not to enter moderation - these last I consulted directly before removing their names. We then debated the inclusion of different people from the list and made our decisions.

At that point I offered the positions to those we selected, with the caveat that they could decline without any penalties. One nominee was not online for a week before and a week after the nomination, so I retracted the offer. One nominee declined.

The new moderators - Beherith, Maackey, Imbaczek, Google_Frog, YokoZar - are technically still on probation. I plan to conduct their final reviews with the other Administrators engaged in moderation and moderation reform sometime following Christmas.

[Caydr]

That is very encouraging to know, thank you.

[AF]

Of which I thought imbaczek already had those powers, and I believe beherith is doing a good job.

The rest I cannot comment on yet