You mean this: 
?[/quote]
I actually have three different sets of tiles ready to be plugged in and fleshed out, but I need to get a reply from GE first before I continue to work. Once we sort it out (I hope he replies soon) I will be able to make a tileset in no time.
I am not in a hurry here, I still have Pixel Pirates tileset to work on, but the sooner, the better.
cib I got your message but it actually IS full time that seans working he just had one known event he had where he would be working from here on out it will be 4o hours a week
Looking forward to it!
I just want to give the grumblers a gentle reality smack - in capitalists society the first rule of business is “BUYER BEWARE.” The burden of responsibility is on the one contributing the funds because it’s their property they’re putting into play. You do due diligence, risk assessment, contractual obligation to mitigate the chance of loss but ultimately it’s your money and if it goes up in smoke it’s on you.
Shadowrun Returns was a recent kickstarter that got 1.7 MILLION projectile vomits dollars to produce a remake of the outstanding Genesis/SNES title. I recently stole this game from a torrent and thought the devs, a professional team, did an outstanding job and have a lot of room for continued growth. Many of the donors, not a majority but a lot, were butthurt because their expectations were not met. I read through their expectations and what the devs promised and concluded the following 1. the donors had overly high expectations and 2. the devs were somewhat irresponsible in their goals. But only one party is at fault - the donors because they acted in faith with real money and while that is morally admirable it is capitalistically terrible.
The Kickstarter for this excellent game is ultimately cobbling together beer/PS3 game money from a few hundred people to pay a freelance coder double minimum wage for a few months. To do what exactly? Completely remake a crazily complicated game THAT HE DIDN’T EVEN MAKE. DING DING DING. RISK ASSESSMENT ALARM! What leverage do you have to mitigate a loss? A contract? The only stipulation in this contract is that Galen, or someone to replace Galen, tries in good faith for a few months. I could have a contract to cure cancer, and strive mightily to do it, but duders that is not necessarily going to happen. Legal recourse? The consultation fees alone are far higher than the total invested. Hit his reputation? Real employers would give two %$#% about this, assuming you can even find an avenue to make a complaint.
What’s my point? The Kickstarter goals are EXTREMELY AMBITIOUS. Even if Whales or even Toady were working on this I would still be worried about project completion. I would not be surprised if only one or two goals become successful after three months when the funds are exhausted. But since even the professional Shadowrun team, working with 1.7 million, can overstep themselves, this cannot be held against the devs. I’m not doing this to throw icewater on the party or rag on people, hell, for all I know Galen will blast the Kickstarter goals in one night of Adderol fueled delirium. But make no mistake, the main dev people can, right now, say #$#@ this @#!# and leave the project forever and that will be the end of Cdda. Galen will have to obligatorily make updates for a few months saying, “working hard, but it’s not working out” and that will be it. The ONLY thing keeping this project going is the passion and good faith of the devs, who seem to be doing this as a labor of love. The money is essentially charity designed to bring in extra code power, it in no way guarantees anything.
Moral of the story I didn’t donate 
Are you talking about this kickstarter, because I can assure you that’s not what this is about.
What's my point? The Kickstarter goals are EXTREMELY AMBITIOUS.
No, they’re not. In fact, they’re humble/realistic enough that there’s a fair chance GE will be able to get more than just the KS goals done in that time(if he actually works on it fulltime).
Honestly, you don’t seem to have the remotest idea of what is happening, so I suggest you just keep your mouth shut.
Wow, what a great tone to take with a project defender. I’ve been following this game longer than you have bucko. I can spin this the other way just as easily: 1. the Kickstarter IS behind schedule. 2. You’ve already had one dev BAIL 3. There is no inherent quality control to the Kickstarter other than “we promise” 4. It was a bad idea to go into the Kickstarter without Whales as the dedicated upgrader.
But like I said, I’ve got no skin in the game, so enjoy yourself.
I hear people saying the kickstarter is behind schedule, but I don’t remember seeing any hard dates listed on the kickstarter. Was this schedule released to backers?
The KS will/would be behind schedule if we don’t have tilesets after the first month(+1 week), but that’s not actually the issue. The actual issue is, things not done in those 3 months won’t be done at all, except by people sacrificing their free time(and trust me, kevingranade is doing a lot of that already). So right now my concern(and that of others I expect), is whether we will see the features promised(and more, because more can definitely be done in those 3 months) implemented by our hired hand, or whether we’ll have to rely on effort from our voluntary devs(which would make the KS somewhat futile), which might take significantly longer and will indeed put the “schedule” behind a bit.
My main issue is that we do not get any feedback from the developer which means we cannot help even if we want to sacrifice our time for free. Mind you, I have other stuff to do, so I don’t complain :).
And I threw my 20$ at the game because I want a survivor customized after me and tileset support, as long as it’s done in future I am fine with any realistic time schedule. That’s not a lot we pay.
Yes, that’s also a very good point. Though I guess the two of us might be an exception there, since we’ve both worked on cataclysm tileset support in the past(one way or the other). The point there being, there’s people who have experience with this in the community, why not build on that experience? Oh well, hopefully we’ll hear from galenevil soon.
As CIB mentioned, we have 1 month + 1 week for the first dev goal (tiles) to be completed. Since it’s only been three weeks we are still ahead of schedule.
2. You've already had one dev BAILYeah, and from what we heard his family was unable to get in touch with him either, so there it's pretty likely that he managed to get hit by a bus or something similar. There isn't much you can do against the chance of a serious accident like that happening.
3. There is no inherent quality control to the Kickstarter other than "we promise"Isn't that the way that Kickstarter works? Like you are giving money to someone under the assumption that they will take it and use it to produce what they said they would. That's why there are stories of people taking the kickstarter money and running away with it (though some of those end up with legal action later).
4. It was a bad idea to go into the Kickstarter without Whales as the dedicated upgrader.WE ASKED WHALES. HE SAID NO. I don't know how many times we need to say this. We've contacted Whales before. He said he was done with the project.
I love this game. I like the expansion. But raising money over something you didn’t create is sort of extremely hinky.
The money is to pay the developer to work on the game full time. It is not to earn money for all the devs or anything like that.
These last two are complaints/thoughts that strike me as the sort that ought to have been occurring during one’s decision to donate.
I feel like Albert may have had some legitimate complaints. He seemed disgruntled, but he didn’t exactly seem like whoever it is. There’s this guy on the Reagan IMDB page. He calls everybody who disagrees with him by the name of this one particular guy who disagrees with him. We can’t just have some witch hunt and have a petty Stalinist “You’re a Trotskyist” type rhetoric.
Now, I could be wrong, but he just seems like someone impatient with the deadline. I’m a patient person, but others who are not so patient are wondering where the update promised a week after the kickstarter was funded is. It’s been… three weeks.
Now, I know you folks have lives, but you could have put out a superficial update. Or you know, spent your points in character gen on computers, find some meth, and get the update done. Nine grand? Goddamn. That’s a sizable inheritance. You could go to Vegas on that money.
I don’t mean to sound ingrateful to the developers, but I feel there is an air of standoffishness.
I understand the concerns and am working my way towards alleviating the majority of them tonight. There was an update put up in the KS updates section for my week #1 dev diary, and last week’s wasn’t posted due to a trip that prevented just about all work for that week and some of this one. GlyphGryph should have a spot for me to put dev diaries on this site soon, hopefully over the weekend or before the next weekend.
$9,000 was the total pledged, and ended up somewhere around 7-8k (I think) after all of the pledges came in and fees taken out.
I am working on fixing up my JSON file and a test tileset so I can play around more easily, but the functionality is there. I am a perfectionist and don’t like putting unfinished things up onto GitHub when at all possible which is the reason why my activity has been nil since I started working on this. I am at an almost satisfactory position and will be putting it up in about 2 hours after I get something to eat and tinker more.
Sorry for seeming standoffish.
Look I have no doubt that a year from now this game will be fracking Skynet. It’s improving in leaps and bounds every day. The moral dilemma if you will is that the improvements seem to be irrespective of $9000 being deposited. The $9000 is instead given toward goals that one man would struggle with over a year, let alone three months. Implementing numerous Z-levels (I read somewhere 25???) rendered continuously and simultaneously in a way that doesn’t blow up an average CPU or shatter the parameters of the current game is a ridiculously complex goal. What happens if you drive a car off a cliff? What happens if you snipe from different levels? What happens if you throw something? Will it fly parabolically? Implementing parabolic flight is alone probably a month long goal. You could probably just cancel every other goal and give a person the money to work on Z levels for three months and it would still be a tenuous situation.
Have you all considered just paying a person the $9000 to merge code for a year? Code that organically arises in a stress free, fun manner from the community? That is far more reasonable, practical, achievable and I don’t see anyone objecting to it since it is the most important and miserable task required for project advancement. And it’s inherently transparent and progressive: people will tune in to Github every day and say “oh, look what my money helped integrate!” If you feel that’s too much for one man you could split it amongst multiple mergers. Or pay by merge, $10 for every merge until the funds are exhausted. Anyway you want it. As for the original goals, they will be met inevitably, in good time, in a stress free and transparent manner that won’t call anyone’s morality or competence into question.
He was using a fake e-mail address and connecting through a proxy server, and his use patterns matched LazyCats completely. It wasn’t hard to track it back and get a positive id. Considering upon being banned he immediately recreated a ban dodge account, revealed himself to be LazyCat and copy-pasted his posts (getting banned three times in the process), I’m 100% sure he’s LazyCat. And bandodge accounts get re-banned, it’s that simple. He may seem like he has legitimate concerns, but they aren’t - from his own mouth, he just wants to see us fail so his own version will look better in comparison, and will do whatever he can to insure this happens. Arguably legitimate complaints is just his latest tactic.
Also, we didn’t actually begin coding as soon as the Kickstarter ended - it takes up to two weeks for the money to come through, and I explicitly told Sean that we’d be waiting before he began - he spent time working on another contract and that went fine.
He then worked for one week until his family reunion (which he told me in advance he’d be attending), and now he’s back to work.
I have put out updates saying all of this - the dev diary from the first week was released, and I put out an update explaining that he was taking a week off for the reunion and so the second dev diary would be pushed back a week. Since it’s only been three weeks since we’ve started working, I think two updates is more than enough for most people, since there’s a third one in the pipe that will be released on Monday.
I’m open to suggestions for improvement here, but I’m not exactly sure what the complaints are, exactly, other than that he should be even further ahead of schedule than he is.
There’s no moral dilemma, I have no idea how you’re reading morality into this. The goals are in general things that NO ONE WAS PLANNING ON WORKING ON. Maybe some one would have worked on tile support, maybe someone would have worked on z-levels, you can second-guess all you want, but here’s what happened, the core project developers got together and discussed whether a kickstarter was a feasable, a good idea, and how we could leverage some funds to push the project forward. What we came up with was “pay a dev to work full-time on a list of features it would be difficult to impossible to complete”.
You don’t seem to appreciate the difference in productivity between a developer working on a project in their spare time and working on it as their job. Working on a project in your spare time is HARD, I get home from work in the evening, and instead of relaxing and shutting my brain off, I put in several more hours of work on DDA that’s generally more challenging than what I do at work, but here’s the thing, for even that short amount of time, I’m not operating at 100%, because I’ve already put in 8 hours of coding, and DDA gets whatever is left over. If I have a hard day at work, I might not be able to accomplish much at all because I’m too tired to focus properly. Additionally, I can’t work on a single problem for more than a few hours at a time, because I just don’t have that much contiguous free time I can put into DDA, so my coding sessions are all broken up. There are several features in the game that I coded in single long coding sessions, but I can’t those very often because I rarely am well-rested enough and have enough time to do that kind of thing. Pretty much all of the other devs are in a similar situation, where DDA gets what’s left over after the rest of their life.
Being able to fully concentrate on the project makes a massive amount of difference. You can make far more effective use of your time, because you don’t have to keep switching between this project and work projects, and you can use your most productive hours of work time for the project instead of more likely spending them on your dayjob. In “professional” games, there are usually only a handful of core coders, and they can be massively productive because that’s all they do, they can absolutely move mountains.
The “difficult” scenarios you outline aren’t actually that much of a problem, the real issues are infrastructure and performance, but I’m confident those will be tractable. Not easy, but we can do it.
Paying for “bugfixing” or “merging” or “testing” might have been nice, but it literally wasn’t an option, Kickstarter requires you to have deliverables, so we could have a kickstarter for features, but not something nebulous like “stability” or “project management”. Also paying for someone to do merging is problematic in general for the same reason, there’s no simple way to judge progress, so you can’t really say whether someone is doing their job. It literally suffers from the “someone would have done it anyway” problem, because well I’m not getting paid, and I’m doing it Finally there’s a super-specific problem with paying someone to do merges, because it would pretty much have to be me, and I’m not in a position where I can quit my job and do DDA for three months like GalenEvil can. You can’'t just hire someone to do merges, because it requires deeper understanding of the project than anything else you can do.
If you really want to contribute money toward merging, my btc address is 1LFeCofMPEkbVkB4T61KwWbXYZfySZC4TG, you can flattr me at https://flattr.com/profile/kevingranade and I can give out paypal contact info on request.
I don’t know. I’m sorry if I was wrong and it was Lazycat. But I don’t understand why you and KevinGranate, and the people who are the real people on this don’t get the money? I mean, you work hard on this project.
Kevin, don’t take this as an indictment on you, I think you do good. But it’s just that we haven’t seen much from this fancy new guy even though we’re paying him.
I’m sorry, Glyph, if I gave ammo to a troll. But I feel like the populace is beginning to get a bit impatient, as of current.
It’s just a bit of Project Zomboid syndrome, where the devs say the updates will happen sooner than they actually do. I know you’ll put out the update, but it’s really frustrating.
Could you please work on adapting addiction files to JSON?
I want to make custom addictions without editing CPP files.
Thanks for continuing the game, but please keep it going on time.
Often update timelines come up as best case scenarios if they are given early. I had very much planned on having the tileset support finished at the original time, but that was ignoring the time I needed to prepare for my trip. On getting back I had to re-focus myself on the task at hand, and decided time would be best used to clean up code and make it less of a pain to read. Things got rather obfuscated and unwieldy quickly while I was pounding out code before the trip. I am working to add in a few remaining supports that take full advantage of the json format being used, and will be doing a bit of data entry to convert utunnels’ JSON file to work cohesively with my own format. Visible progress is being made, and I feel confident in saying that the next Dev Journal will be an interesting one. Probably will be rather long as well. I hope that the coming days will put any restless minds at ease.