I'd like to tip my support to Licho/Aegis.
Both have been a pleasure to work with in the past, and I cannot think of a single conversation with the two in the last year that hasn't be informative and straightforward ( though I admit I haven't kept much in touch with Aegis preferring instead to continue my policy of
quiet development is quiet ).
I can even testament to Aegis providing additional means of communication. Why it was on Sunday morning I was half naked asleep in bed with a 'friend' when my phone rang, and lo and behold, a wild Aegis appeared purporting to be called 'Bob' said hello. It's not often you're given a courtesy wake up call by the lobby administrator, nevermind such an entertaining greeting. I just wish 'Bob' had been more forward in his advances, he sounded rather handsome.
Anyways, Licho is perfectly right to be angry, I'd be pissed off, all i can say are the following two things:
The whole idea of:
One spring install to rule them all, One spring install to find them,
One spring install to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
Style installs on Windows and Linux are silly outside of development. Now that we have games maturing it's an untenable position. Sure if you want to develop things its great, and we're all developers, but, players aren't, and we need to set things up for players. Forb as I'm aware is the nearest to achieving this on Linux but he would know more, and Licho has gotten pretty far under windows in his own way. Whatever happened to the Zero-K linux package or the BA linux package with their own islands of spring engine binaries and dependencies, drawing from the common pool of maps/contents?
I also have the one phrase for Licho:
Welcome to the club
I've built ~30 bots of varying kinds for the lobby, some public some not public, my own lobby client (and many smaller experiments variants and rival codebases that never made it to the v1 stage), even attempted my own server and protocol. But all of that is worthless. Unless I have my own lobby or server project in active development, then all that time and experience is deemed worthless, only what you did this week/month appears to count, which is incompatible with my current slow development cycles out of plain view. It doesn't matter if I tried the proposed command privately in experiments or if I have a better method I never put forward for other reasons until now.
Q: Who noticed Protobot sitting in my channels silently updating out of view the last 6 months?
So just as much, Lichos massive financial contributions are worthless in the current status quo, his protocol modifications of the past, his bots, his various lobby and web based infrastructure, are all swept under the carpet, because he didn't make a brand new lobby with a web 2.0 name in the last 3 months, and his large powerful position means his opinion needs to be dampened and muffled to counterbalance so everybody can be equal. But not everybody is equal.
Not everybody has invested and researched as much time money and effort, but they all expect to be treated as equals. When you lump everyone together and say that they're all going to vote, and that the decision is binding and it forces the point, you'll reach contention.
As I said before these meetings, it won't work, anyone can do anything they want, and there's nothing stopping them going off and implementing things anyway. I bet that Satirik would be the most likely, but I was wrong. That was my warning, and if kept in mind you could have avoided it, instead you alienated the person in the best position to do it, and now that it's happening people aren't happy, and you're all surprised...
This meeting will not work as it currently does so long as you don't account for:
- Problems that affect major stakeholders being ignored because they don't affect everybody. Lichos large amount of nonstandard functionality is an example, ignoring it or discarding it is not in the interests of the greater whole
- Developers with non public projects - Quiet developers are quiet, you won't have a horde of new projects suddenly appear out of nowhere if they decide to ragequit before you know they exist, or if they're alienated before they make their first code drop. I've seen this happen 2 or 3 times to projects that nobody would knew about until I announced their death and posted screenshots both in Lobby and AI development.
One of the privilledges of screaming and hyping loudly is that your very visible to these people and they talk to you, and I'm sure since I stepped away from AFLobby that this trend has no died, afterall NOTAlobby had to have had testers at some point? Who did Cheeselobby get shared with before it was put out there?
I shall say no more on these subjects.