A slightly unfortunate attitude....

#41

Quote:Rather than think of it as a "weird charity" (made me chuckle - I like that) think of it more as a social experiment. Can we pull together as a community and knock the rust off of the Torque engines?

I agree. But that's not what people come here for, they come here for an engine to make a game with. So I definitely understand that they are a bit surprised at what they find.

That's not to say Torque isn't a good engine, or that you can't make a game with it. But I think we should be careful in dealing with each other, and especially with new users, and take care to figure out whether we're talking to someone who A) is interested in programming/engine development, maybe even for its own sake, or B) just wants to make a game. I think I've seen lots of type B people come here and ask something like 'does Torque have a script editor like kismet?', and are told 'no, but you can make one yourself'... their natural and incredibly rational response is 'no thanks, I'll just use UDK.'

For the record, I'm definitely a type A person :P. And I'm here because I'm invested in Toque, even more so now that it's open-source: it has a huge opportunity to be the premier open-source game engine.

#42 I am also type B person and you have to understand that the programming/scripting part is really hard to figure out, if you are totally new to this.
There is a lot of tutorials about the editor, making art and so on, but not much about coding/scripting, so if you want to get the B persons you have to make it easier somehow.

#43 I'm not against some of the sentiment of the message, but i do have some outspoken comments to make, take them as you will or ignore them as a rant, up to you :p

you have the source.. Fix IT! was one of the attitudes years ago that drove away community members and potential community members. One of the reasons why historically torque is shit on by other communities, the engine may be better now than ever, but the community has gone full circle back to selfishness on the whole post-MIT (with notable exceptions of course, though there were always a small select group of helpful people).


As far as contributing is concerned, somebody needs to tot up the amount of hoops you need to jump through before you can do so. The unnecessary complexity of how you get the github projects, how you must format this way and that way and yes sir, no sire, 3 bags full sir, and while i do manage to work with github, every time i try to read up on the complexities of more advanced git operation i'm reminded of Clarkes 3rd law *Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.* which adequately describes git from the viewpoint of the overwhelming majority.

and this quote *They gave you two entire game engines for free. What have you given them in return?* really tugged a nerve with me, not only is it condescending but it makes assumptions about the members of the community that i honestly thing are unfair.

For one, ive yet to be convinced that the T3D MIT release was anything other than a pure business decision based on poor sales projections, that a) absolves GG of any commitment or care towards its current customer base and b) gets them free fixes for the engines they use commercially.
(as a disclaimer i'll point out again that is is from a T3D perspective i know how much work mich puts into T2D)
I was against the idea of MIT for reason a). Having spent money on multiple licenses of an engine that had a lot of known bugs and a fairly lengthy todo list of improvements I personally was looking forward to being fixed/added by professional paid programmers who knew the engine inside and out.

While the contributors to T3D are seemingly many, the list of high quality programmers is short with many (most?) people like me fumbling around in the engine only fixing bugs as they come across them while working on their own projects.

As for what ive done for GG, almost a decade of loyalty to the engine, $000s, and try to be as helpfull as possible without uttering the words, you have the source fix it.

#44 @Bloddknight
thanks for taking the time to write this

it means allot


1 major thing about this thread is disturbing and totally displaced
its in the wrong forum
@Richard Ranft
see what has this todo with · in Torque 3D Professional
not only that this is the wrong place for it
the whole discussion here is moving towards nomansland
especially when seein words like
"we oldtimers" - Let me ask what you expect here? only becuase you bought a license
for it years ago that there is something untouchable about your person?
(see how does that one feel?)

and yes the best one is
They gave you two entire game engines for free. What have you given them in return? and ofc you have the source.. Fix IT!

thing is this is just not the way you play the opensrc ball
and the attitude here is really gettin dense

and am glad that someone like Bloodknight( one of your oldtimers)
took a min to write his pov down

Now
what i really would love to see
is a stop of we oldtimers/ we been here ages ago stuff
and the endless discussions about newcomers
who ask for features and so on
you will have that always nm what you do and nm how many threads like this are gettin written

the only thing you accomplish with writing a thread like this is
splitting this community apart
and i have seen already a couple of those threads

#45 @Bloddknight and @J0Linar

you put it very well. If we want new people to use the engine we need to stop saying words that makes people run away. We need to be more helpful and open minded even when reading about how frustrated a user is.

The codeword should be "be helpful, patient and open minded to new and old users alike" whenever possible.

With that attitude I think we will get more people to hang around and use the engine. I mean I my self have enjoyed that most users here is friendly.

About whether the T3D going open source was from decided from a business view or a charity view then it is logical it was taken from the possible revenue perspective that any company always will need to take into account. Their ain't no such thing as free lunch. Hence Garage Games is a company with people employed who need to catch their paycheck and use it on their families etc. It always fair for a firm to earn money and I find that perspective acceptable.

When T3D went open source I must say I was rather split in my mind about too. In some ways I saw many new possibilities but I also found it a little frightening that it all was up to us now.

I mean how would this end?

Would the engine be left for users and the community left barren like dead dead?

Also I do not think I owe garage games anything because they gave away two engines for free. In fact I still have my Torque 3D 1.2 engine license. You see I bought mine. However, when possible (skills and time come into mind here) I shall help out because I feel I owe the community a lot as a whole. I have gotten many good replies from many very smart people here on this site(okay thanks for sustaining this site then Garage Games... guess I owe you some gratitude after all).

No matter what I really like this community for being helpful(also you Richard Ranft).

Best,

Dwarf King

#46

Quote:see what has this todo with · in Torque 3D Professional
not only that this is the wrong place for it...

@J0linar - I agree, I should probably have dropped this in General Discussion. If a moderator would please move this there....

Quote:Also I do not think I owe garage games anything because they gave away two engines for free. In fact I still have my Torque 3D 1.2 engine license.

Me too (at the $1000 price tag), and TGE, and TSE/TGEA and TGB. That question was really aimed more at the post-MIT users and I should have made that clear. Dave is GG's full-time contribution to T3D and he's chugging along on the engine as well as handling merging pull requests. Perhaps it would be nice if GG could add another hand at least half-time, but we all labor under our own constraints.

I'd like to say that I have known unpaid hobbyists who are just as skilled (perhaps more skilled) than paid professional programmers. Some of them are members of this community....

I'm starting to realize that my tone was wrong at the start of this - I appologize. What I meant from the get-go is that this community is full of smart, talented people and it seems that we are losing "heart." Negativity breeds negativity - but I have confidence in the awesome people in this community and I wanted to prod everyone into staying away from negative thinking. Sometimes I come across rather harsh and insensitive (I am rather insensitive I suppose), but I want you all to remember that you are good at what you do and getting better every day! Keep your chin up and do what you can, focus on the good and work to correct the bad - we are the team here. We can do this.

#47 Moved to general discussion.

#48 I think we need to understand that there are many kinds of users here, from pro programmers to pro artists and all shades of abilities in between including all kinds of novices to game development be it teens or just hobby game makers.

We (the community) have been collectively asking for things to be added for years, navmesh and decent pathfinding is one example, there are dozens more, we make additions to the feature requests and we even vote on it, which is apparentlly some form of joke since its GG wishlist, but GG have washed their hands of it so not quite sure what thats all about, if somebody with some smarts organized that list they would see that Mac port, linux port and OpenGL port are basically the same request, and has close to 1000 votes, thats close to double the rest of the votes for every other feature combined, yet the new features we got added were occular rift and razor hydra, i must have missed the wishlist for those, but i'm sure the 5 people on the planet that use them are happy (yes, snide sarcastic (lake placid reference))


While mich has made a point about a wide variety of people being able to help out, but only the pro programmers are the ones who can influence the engine development, i'm pretty sure there are not going to be any pull requests for 'improved health pack models' or such likes, and nobody, but nobody likes documentation, hell people dont like reading it, much less writing it :p

#49 thx Michael

@Richard Ranft thx for letting it move
see this for example already changes the nature of this thread
as it is no longer in the EyeView of possible T3D Consumers
and the content here is just a Discussion

sadly there are plenty other totally displaced threads

#50 After spending a great amount of time last year trying to lay some foundations to improve the scripting engine only to have it mostly ignored I'm a bit skeptical as to whether or not the steering committee is truly capable of coordinating Torque3D development.

If i'm just going to get stone-walled for months I have to say my incentive to contribute anything else is essentially nil, which is a shame. Torque3D has the potential to be a good product, but only if there are people willing to contribute their time and efforts to maintaining the code.

Similarly the Steering Committee has the potential to be an effective driving force in the development of Torque3D, but only if there are people on it who can coordinate others and get pull requests through the pipeline.

#51 @James Urquhart
true point there
how much stuff got ignored or let me rephrase
overlooked as it didnt looked mature enough to be considered
to be included into T3D Mit

now the real thing in defense of the steering comitee is
not enough manpower - if you look at how many ppl are really working at it
and how many at the end contribute

especially when considering the fact that Commercial Driven Teams
(No need to mention them namely)
are using T3D Mit and there is almost nothing that they have contributed
now comes the fun part
The Engine isnt just OpenSrc - its MITed
therefore noone has to give a peanut
and at the same time this is a problem

sooner or later - T3D is going to be splitted
this is only logical as its what happens with OpenSrc Engines

splitted in the way that there isnt just going to be another OpenSrc Version under a different license (yes you can combine GPL with MIT)
of it but there will be plenty of propierity Engines
born

#52

Quote:sooner or later - T3D is going to be splitted
this is only logical as its what happens with OpenSrc Engines

Out of good stuff more good stuff will be produced :o)

I call it innovation and progress. The MIT license makes sure that people have an interest in making new stuff from the T3D MIT as no one can force the new stuff you make to be made public for all(in the end that is a company's own decision).

#53 I don't want to be negative. So I won't be.

I know I have probably asked this question before:
Where is the list of things the steering committee needs help with "right now"? Not a single post somewhere in the sea of forums posts, but a concrete maintained Wiki list. I looked at the Github wiki and I can find everything else: feature requests, blogs, etc, but I cannot find anything on the "help now" list. I have also looked at the Github pull requests to see if I could help resolved some of them. Most have something attached to them, or I have no idea how to resolve them. I think people want to help, but are really not sure how to contribute to the current direction of the steering committee. I feel bad that Mike is seemingly the only guy working on the templates. If Mike or anyone else wants help the list would help "steer" people that direction.

@James,
I am sorry. I am probably one of the few people that could review your work on the script changes. I got busy and forgot about your code. I will see what I can do about looking into it. I understand where you are coming from on adding/improving the scripting in the engine. I have gotten some interesting "opinions" on the value of Python in a game engine. However, I have watched people ask for or add in C++ features that only take me an import statement to get. SQLite is one.

@All,
I know people are feeling like the engine is moving too slow. I have felt this, but I don't know how big the community is anymore. It seems like it has gotten smaller or something. I feel like my best opportunity to help build this community is to build my game and be very vocal and contribute back code I develop. I have some tech I am planning on generalizing (not game type specific) and eventually contributing to the engine. I think this particular tech will draw people to the engine because of the popularity of the sandbox games currently on the market.

#54 @Demolishun and all - Would something like this be useful to the T3D contributors/consumers? Torque 2D MIT Trello. The T2D committee has been working on it for a little while, finally making it publicly available today. There are boards for documentation, core engine, modules (scripts), and editors. Each board has a list of tasks, author, assigned developer, status, etc. Anyone can leave comments and vote up tasks.

I like it a lot more than GitHub for tracking issues, whether they are bugs, feature requests, or just pie-in-the sky things. Anyone can easily look at it and say "Oh, finish the Leap Motion integration? I can do that. Assign it to me."

#55 @Michael,
Wow, that looks very nice. Yes, that would help to find tasks that need done. In addition it would be great if there is a way for the steering committee to prioritize the tasks to try and get people to work on certain things first. Obviously that will have skill mix issues, but at least we can see what needs to be done first.

Yes, I like this very much!

#56 The levels of prioritization currently work like this:

Backlog < Issues < Pull Requests < Up next < In progress

Users can vote on the different cards. The more votes, the more obvious the priority based on user needs. Higher priority items shift to the right.

This is just step one of the T2D committee's plan to streamline the contribution process. We are also writing up some docs for the wiki that are simpler and to the point on how to contribute to T2D, if you want to. We are going to open up alternate ways of contributing, with or without GitHub.

If you like this approach, contact your Torque 3D committee members and let them know. Contribution can even be as simple as letting your voice be known, so long as it is constructive and well informed.

#57 It seems easy to use and very intuitive. Just tried it out. I think we should use this.

#58 Well, Torque 3D's Steering Committee is reformed.. Post on the blog, congratulate the new comers, and let them know what can be worked on next =).

#59 There's very little GG could do to shake the "programmers-engine" stigma, at this point, and I don't think they need to. I'm still working in TGB, and every once in a while I come across things that just don't work the way they should. Not bugged, just incomplete or incorrectly tied into a system.

I'm not a very savvy engineer, so I don't have the extra capacity to fix someone elses' problems, let alone my own. Torque was really the first game engine I learned, and I think it actually made me a scrappier developer as a result.

However, as I move forward and wish to work on more ambitious stuff, I feel like I need more solid tools instead of spending my time sharpening the ones I have - in that sense, I agree with the original quote. I certainly don't mean it as an insult to any of the GG staff - What they've done is awesome, but some parts of the engine are just scaffolding at this point.

#60 Given that I'll likely rather soon be putting up what constitutes a fairly big/important project if the community purchase angle works with the behavior/component system, I'd posit I'm one of the ones attempting to progress the engine, even if it's not coming off of someone else's to-do list.

Given that, my input on the subject would be thus:

I think first and foremost we need a comprehensible way to make any kind of contribution to development, as well as a better way of understanding what is being done, and what needs to be done.

On the first part, it boils down to I'm used to SVN where there was no muss or fuss. You grabbed a version, submitted updates, yada yada. I find github to be an unfortunate blemish on development efficiency. I've read in various places that the branching functionality is awesome and all that, but I have exactly zero idea how to make it happen, and I'd rather spend time working on my code(the part everyone is complaining isn't happening) than wrestling with understanding how to deliver it.

SVN is wonderfully efficient, and GG's resources page is likewise. From what I've seen, most people have no idea how to do anything with git. If you want more contributions, you need a for-dummies explanation on how to use it. I've seen some people say they're working on it, but it's not out yet. If people are complaining that 'others aren't doing their part in the community' I'd posit maybe they should do theirs in getting it so the community CAN pitch in and help with git documentation?

As for the second part, what Michael posted for the T2D Trello looks awesome. That'd help a lot with organizing what the steering committee and the community think need to be fixed. It has my vote.

Taking care of both of these issues would go a long, long way to ensuring people contribute. If you give them a practical way to help, they'll do it without strong-arming them or complaining.
Look at GG's resource section sometime. This community LOVES to pitch in. If I had to guess, the only reason no one has, is because no one knows how.