Hi Thomas,
I wanted to offer my two cents here, in case the feedback may be useful to
you in some way. I think the reaction you got was very much to be expected
since, at least to me, your intentions were not too clear. All that people
really knew was that there was a new cross platform beta, and that a bunch
of features were removed or degraded in performance. I think if you had
posted the message that you just sent now, along with the actual beta
announcement, things would have been a lot clearer. You could even have
called it an experimental alpha, which would have stressed the fact that
this was not production code but rather a testing ground even more strongly.
This is also why I don't release public betas myself, because I don't want
to communicate with the community at large while I am doing tests on
bleeding edge code that may or may not perform as people expect. With a
smaller group of testers you can make things a lot more obvious, what you
want them to test and what issues are known etc. With a fully fledged
community tested project as Mota has very nearly become, you'll always run
into issues like this. Especially since the cross platform endeavour, while
naturally important to you personally, is not something that a lot of purely
Windows folks will have use for and thus will not really take into
consideration when judging your software.
This, at any rate, is my feeling for games. BGT was totally different since
it was a lot more modular, rather than one specific story so to speak. There
the public testing really worked wonders, but I would not do the same for a
game.
This is not to say that community testing of games is always bad. Far from
it. With Entombed, for instance, I think it worked rather well. But when a
developer decides to do it they naturally have to consider if it is worth
the extra work that it takes to keep everyone up to speed with what needs to
be tested in this particular release, what known problems there are, etc
etc.
As always, these are just my own personal views. I'm interested to hear your
thoughts.
Kind regards,
Philip Bennefall
----- Original Message -----
From: "Thomas Ward" <thomasward1...@gmail.com>
To: "Gamers Discussion list" <gamers@audyssey.org>
Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2011 5:45 PM
Subject: Re: [Audyssey] MOTA Audio Support
Hi Trouble and all,
Well, I think alot of it comes down to a lack of patients and a
complete lack of understanding where developers and development is
concerned. Many of the people quick to point fingers, quick to make
judgments, etc have no personal experience with any kind of long term
project. Which programming games is a long term project and commitment
that requires time, skill, and experience to bring to completion.
Therefore they have unrealistic expectations about how and when the
project should be completed, and even jump to the wrong conclusion
when things aren't going the way the expect them too.
For instance, when I decided to compile beta 19 using the
cross-platform Genesis engine I knew joystick support and mouse
support wasn't fully operational yet so I removed them from the
settings menu, and I also knew that the audio panning was way off. I
only intended these to be temporary issues, problems, and my purpose
of testing beta 19 was to find out if the basic engine was sound,
would run on a number of Linux and Windows PCs, and after I found that
out I'd go back in and fix the joystick support, mouse support, and
see what if anything I could do about the audio later. My soul
purpose was to find out if the basic engine ran ok on a number of
Windows PCs and Linux PCs.
However, the community at large didn't understand what I was doing.
Right off I got a lot of e-mails on and off list saying that the beta
sucked. There was no joystick support, no mouse support, and the
panning was terrible. If creating cross-platform games was going to be
like this one they weren't going to buy the game etc. In other words
they expected this release to be as good as or better than beta 18 and
didn't understand I was going to address those issues in future
betas. For the moment all I wanted to know from them is how well did
the game work besides the audio and missing game controller support.
Apparently it must have worked ok, because the only complaints I got
were the obvious ones I knew about.
Basically, my point in saying this is that if these people were more
use to the way developers really worked, perhaps test software on a
regular basis, they wouldn't be as judgmental. I've tested Linux open
source applications where the developer says, "try this and let me
know how it works," and sometimes it fixes something and sometimes it
breaks something in the process, and the developer has to find out why
it broke and fix it.
For instance, we have a similar issue right now on Linux with the new
Gnome 3.0 desktop. When the Gnome developers moved from the 2.x branch
to the 3.0 branch they made a lot of changes that ended up breaking
some accessibility with Orca and AT-SPI in the process. The only way
the Gnome developers are going to be able to resolve it is by having
Orca users test it, find out what broke, report those bugs, and the
developers will address and fix all of those issues in the Gnome 3.2
version. Sometimes its a case of take two steps foward and one step
back. I.E. development by trial and error.
Cheers!
On 6/14/11, Trouble <troub...@columbus.rr.com> wrote:
That is just it a rep. Don't think that will go far in the blind
community. Because, they don't care, Oh, they say they do and at many
time actually do. However, when it comes to games. Your dealing with
very
<http://www.google.com/hws//hws/search?br=&client=dell-usuk&channel=us-psp&safe=high&adsafe=high&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=vicious>vicious
people that strikeout at will.
Just look at what was done when they found out Tom had to stop and
rewrite, because someone nailed him for a copy right.
Yes, I think someone turned him in, because hardly anyone sighted
bothers with this list. Also I do know blind people that will go that
mile just to see something destroyed. I went to the site Tom gave
that hit him. It was there and a joke if you ask, but still the same
had a claim to the game. Surprising!
Tom had his rep with previous games that were already out. So if
anyone doubts, there lose.
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