A "hack" is a funny thing to call a user message nicely documented in cl_dll/menu.cpp.
~dvander
Alfred Reynolds wrote:
3rd party plugins have been using a hack to trigger an unused bit of game code. We provide them with another, maintained, user friendlier version of menus that work across all mods, they need to start using that.
- Alfred
----Original Message---- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mattie Casper Sent: Friday, May 20, 2005 9:42 AM To: hlcoders@list.valvesoftware.com Subject: [hlcoders] To Valve: Developer Forewarning
Alfred or other Valve representative,
There are many, many plugin and mod developers displeased at the moment because of your recent decision to change CSS menuing behavior so drastically.
I'm not precisely sure why the decision was made to suddenly push such a big change (now rolled-back temporarily) on everyone in the world, but this has wounded our confidence in the support Valve provides to their SDK community. Last night, plugin developers were inundated with yells for help as plugin menuing systems were obliterated in one fell swoop. Those same developers spent frantic hours trying to reverse engineer what caused the problem, all the while trying to communicate the issues to their own users.
As far as I can tell, there was absolutely no forewarning. Nothing to indicate to the developer community what could be changed to fix the problem. In turn, there was no warning developers could provide to their users or even early code changes they could make to limit the impact. With some sort of notice, it would have been possible to do a great deal to help the situation.
It really comes down to the fact that it's Valve's community of game players that suffer when this happens. If 30% of the servers out there run popular admin mods and those mods suddenly cease to function painfully, people get a much worse impression of "steam updates". They, as you know, even come whining to you about why you broke their favorite 3rd party plugin.
Now, we certainly aren't asking you to indefinitely support every little feature we use, but we absolutely *must* have forewarning before things changed in sensitive areas-- especially when things are deprecated. Without a heads-up from Valve, the developer community relationship is simply going to crumble into name-calling and constant bickering. None of us want to go that route, but we're going to need better support from Valve in order to avoid it.
So, I'm asking nicely for the Valve teams to provide us additional forewarning before making large changes. Deprecating *anything* should be announced well beforehand so that plugin and mod developers can act accordingly. The unannounced update we saw last night simply cannot continue if you care anything about the developer community. Even if you feel something is a "hack", you should at least work with us a little more rather than letting us fall onto our own swords.
While I appreciate what you guys have done for the developer community, I still think there's more needed or we're all going to suffer. Please give us warning before you change things like this.
Thanks for your time.
Respectfully yours, -Mattie
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