Do We Have a Roadmap?

[REVENGE]

Just curious.

[Auswaschbar]

Code: Select all

while (true)
{
    FixBugs();
    AddFeatures();
    Release();
}

Seriously, there is no roadmap (or at least I am not aware of any).
Everyone just implements stuff that he wants to do.

[clericvash]

Code: Select all

while (true)
{
    FixBugs();
    AddFeatures();
    Release();
}

Seriously, there is no roadmap (or at least I am not aware of any).
Everyone just implements stuff that he wants to do.

hahaha, omg, thats seriously funny

[PicassoCT]

You know - we had a Print of the Map- and well, i was told to spread to the springcomunity, in tradtional ways. So i packed my trolly, headed for the Airport and somewhere there i had a Luggasswap with some Secretary for Outer Affairs... long story, but interesting what he had in his case...

Anyway.. the Spring Road Map is currently used in some Middle East Crisis with -ahem.. interesting results - so yeah, we need a new roadmap...

[jcnossen]

Road maps only really work if you pay people

[Jonanin]

Not really, see: Gnome, Ubuntu, Mozilla.

[jcnossen]

Yes but those are much bigger projects. For spring its hard enough to find people already.

Spring has had roadmaps before, but never the people to actually follow them. Maybe times have changed though, i dont know.

[Jonanin]

Yes, you are right about that.

Maybe a "tentative roadmap" that encourages specific goals and puts emphasis on the most important things that need to be done. And not just for devs and coding, for the whole community. Something that will encourage the community to get involved and help could really be beneficial. You'll notice that a lot of bigger projects really stress the fact that ANYONE can help, even if they can't code. They work hard to give tasks that anyone can do. Maybe if Spring had more of that, it would help.

[Argh]

The problem there is a very simple one: most of the people qualified to help Spring already do. Some of us test stuff, some of us code, some of us build content. Some do all three.

Most game developers are involved with Spring's development process to one degree or another. Trust me, you'll see how it works, if a major change or a new feature with a lot of utility is proposed, you just haven't seen it happen yet

Getting people to help, beyond stuff involving the core engine, is a lot harder. Then, we're talking about people making requests, usually for content. The number of people who are really qualified to make content is relatively small- this is Spring's Achilles heel, in a way, because we have a rather steep learning curve for artists and animators. Almost all content makers are involved in active game development, which means time for a developer's request means time directly taken away from their projects.

So, requests are typically judged on their merits- requests without merit, requiring a lot of time investment (i.e., really fricking hard) or a lack of popular support die on the vine, unless somebody's really dedicated to that cause.

This is part of what makes things work, despite the amount of controversy it sometimes creates- people can't get special stuff unless it's clear that it has benefits beyond their immediate need, unless they're willing to make it themselves.

As for an overall roadmap... I think that, beyond the issue of people getting paid, the main obstacle is also a strong point- there is not a lot of centralized direction on the development end. Having a stronger development team would put game designers at their mercy- we'd become like most OS game projects, where devs play god, or focus very narrowly on a single game design. Instead, the game designers play that role, developers can choose to support them or not if they have specific requests, and people help them, or ignore them, based on what they think they're going to get out of the deal. Moreover, developers are trusted here, unlike many places, because their record of not screwing with people is very good, due to the way our system works.

I didn't trust coders farther than I could throw them, until I came here, frankly. I've been involved in projects where people would code stuff, get me roped into making content and investing months of time, then they'd abandon it, and I'd be screwed. Spring's open development process means that I'm not in the dark about what's going on, who's done what, or what's being worked on. That means that, while I don't get what I want all of the time, discussions are pretty straightforward, and nobody's feelings get hurt. And we all can take pride in how much the engine can do- every major game developer's ideas are in it, embodied in feature requests or patches they wrote themselves.

As a practical example of this give and take, I'm about to unveil a major new way to deploy content on maps. I've been working on it for about a month now, and it's pretty cool, but it'll need a few things added / changed in Spring to work as perfectly as it should, in an ideal world.

If nobody likes my demo, however, my chances of getting what I want are zero. Therefore, my incentive to make a very nice, useful demo, and releasing it for others to use, instead of something purely proprietary, and focused only on my project, is very high.

See how that works? It doesn't require me to be nice (which I'm not) or generous (ditto). I don't have to get paid, either. I just need to want something badly enough

Because of these factors, imposing a very strict roadmap is implausible, unless you have the skillsets required to deliver a very Big Wish, such as Trepan's virtually complete control over how LUA is integrated into Spring, or jcnossen's earlier work with map and model formats, or Tobi (and many others') contributions to making multiplayer sync work a lot better, etc., etc. Even then, there's usually a lot of give and take here- developers learn pretty quickly that if they destroy backwards-compatibility without a really compelling reason, for example, they generate a lot of resistance, and that if they change a key feature, they probably need to communicate with game developers, so that everybody remains on the same page.

I think it's been a fairly good system- the only bad part has been attracting good core engineers, for the seriously difficult stuff, and getting more content creators on board with Spring, trying to build games.

Overall, I'd say that this project has done pretty well at both tasks, historically. Would-be creators have a lot of material they can read through, and can generally get help with questions or problems, and we've been fairly lucky about getting developers for key areas when there's been a real need.

There are a lot of people who lurk here, and some of them pop out've the bushes when they think they can contribute something useful, then fade away again- the real constants around here are the game development teams, who have to invest months or years to deliver a finished product- we're the people with the biggest investment in terms of time, and I've outlasted... hrmm... 4 Release Managers, thus far. Tobi's lasted the longest, at what must be a fairly nasty job, but I expect that sooner or later, he'll burn out, probably before I do.

Because we (game designers and content people) have a long-term investment in the engine, we have no incentive to make developers unhappy, and since the developers don't have a centralized vision they're trying to impose, they don't have any incentive to mess with the game developers, either. As systems go, it's worked better here than anywhere else I've been, frankly.

The only real downside to our system is that, since the game engine is always in flux, always changing and gaining new features... game developers are in a constant, and Darwinian, technological arms race. This leads to longer development cycles, and it leads to a lot of public friction between game developers- we're a feisty, and occasionally nasty, bunch. But it generally doesn't spill over into the developer space, and the devs don't have any incentives to mess with each other, either, which is good for the health of the project, and one of the reasons why in most areas, Spring is a fairly advanced game engine.

Anyhow, sorry for the long-winded post, I just think that, with the exceptions of the Main Bugs, which we're all pretty aware of, and the Big Wishes, which nobody with the right skillset feels like working on right now, a roadmap is not terribly important, nor all that useful- the system we have, while imperfect, like anything involving people, runs in ways that make sense, if you understand the incentives- we have a check-and-balance system that is a lot different than most large game projects, and for the most part, it works.

[Tobi]

Didn't read it entirely yet

But I do plan to make a roadmap again sometime, or at least some focus points or whatever you want to call it
(Maybe in trac or something even, didn't really look at it yet.)

[imbaczek]

Argh: long rant, didn't read all of it, but I kinda agree with the first half; my diagnosis would be that spring mostly inherited its development community from TA. Other open source games that were started from scratch don't have such fragmentation issues.

Not that it matters, spring isn't just free TA anymore and it's slowly starting to show.

As for the roadmap, there is none. Mantis is full of bugs though, so if you feel the need to help, start from there :)

[Kloot]

Indeed, if Spring ever had an official roadmap, it was probably
"make it run content from the game Total Annihilation" and then
thrown away in a wide arc.

[Argh]

Sorry for the length, I got a bit carried away with philosophical crap, as happens from time to time

For the TL:DNR crowd: "Not having a roadmap isn't always terrible, and reflects where Spring came from"

[lurker]

Indeed, if Spring ever had an official roadmap, it was probably
"make it run content from the game Total Annihilation" and then
thrown away in a wide arc.

Yeah... Why not use one of those replacement banners?

[LordMatt]

Only thing I would add to Argh's post is that tobi had a huge role in making spring cross platform iirc, and that has also attracted a lot of the current devs that use linux.

[SwiftSpear]

We don't have roadmaps so much as wishlists... Ultimately the roadmap objectives have mostly already been met for spring. We got an engine that runs TA in 3D, we got huge advances in multiplayer support, we got huge advances in modding capability... at this point things you might put on a roadmap are dependant on individual talent sets. So if someone exceptionally talented comes and decides they want to rewrite the renderer, they will receive no resistance... but until something starts to show there is little incentive for anyone to help them either.

I'd like to see the new map format finished, I'd like to see a better rendering engine, I'd like to see better physics calculations for hit boxes and what not, I'd like to see many things... but I don't really see them as roadmap objectives, they aren't really vital so much as they would be nice to have if someone has enough love of the project to make it so.

Maby put background music on the roadmap though...

[Felix the Cat]

A roadmap would necessarily include things like cleaning up Spring's code that few people have both the ability and desire to do.

We haven't really had a problem with getting features that the community wants in, plenty of useful features have been added, including the ability to add your own features via Lua.

[LordMatt]

Single player/campaign support is probably the most glaring thing that is currently missing from spring.

[Neddie]

Single player/campaign support is probably the most glaring thing that is currently missing from spring.

Truth.

[REVENGE]

Heh, I guess no one will ever play spring for graphics niceties.