All everyone does (I'm looking at you, Pickled), is harass the dev when he posts a possible solution. Why the fuck don't you use your brains for once?
You know, Pickled is a dick. And he's not very intelligent. But I can't help but think he's absolutely right when I go through this thread. It pains me to say it, but the fact of the matter is, he has a point. Scripts made by the developer team have been the problem of every single version. Back from overpowered rails in 2.12, to overpowered standard armour in 2.23, to overpowered reflective armour in 2.24. The inherent problem is that they can't be changed when the problems arise, and standard "testing" in tests simply doesn't work. It never has, it never will. If 2-3 script packages arise above the rest, do you know what that means? It means the community did a better job than the developers did. So why, when steamworks comes out, does it matter? A new server which just appears by some large game community (CVG anyone? They dumped a KPD stats system on the moment they made the mod server, having no idea about it) isn't going to be successful with things. Their server won't get populated, and so it won't matter. It's called Natural Selection. Regardless of whether Spawwn's script ideas are good or bad, the point is he can test them the same way we can. It's totally irrelevant. The whole point of the script manifest is that better scripts WILL arise. IMO it's the vets who populate the servers, the noobs follow. And the vets will go where the best scripts are, simple as. As I said, Natural Selection. There is no reason to remove it, because by the time steamworks comes out, the best script sets will be there already. That's not to say there shouldn't be a developer-endorsed STOCK server that newbies are encouraged to go on, or a reason why Brutos's suggestion of giving trusted servers a key to allow the script manifest system. Those are compromises that will work. But to simply remove a good idea because you don't trust the community to do the job as good as you is just wrong.
picked_heretic is a fucking twat, moderate but allow script manifests if needed id like to see a function that makes it clear a server has stock scripts though
The problem is with taking away the script_manifest after the community decides on the best script. Spawwn will then use that script for the official version, I'm assuming.
But there won't be one best script. There will be 2-3. So really, it's which the developer's personal preference is after that.
@CobaltBlue Don't be a drama queen as well. I'm not planning on taking out script_manifest, I'm trying to find a way to justify keeping them in indefinitately OR get people used to the idea that in a year or so it may be a feature that is removed... think of it this way, this is a beta, and since it's a beta we're unlocking the ability to balance things server-side. Once this is no longer a beta (or once that phase of development is complete), I believe we do not want this feature in the game. If I'm wrong, tell me why. If I'm right, then okay, glad I could warn you instead of in a year just doing it all of the sudden. It's of my opinion that we want one uniform game, I understand the fun factor of everryone and their dog making a script set and testing it out, but at the end of the day, we're trying to make a game, not a sandbox. This feature does not fit the model of a game, and will not cater well to a large amount of new players in a short amount of time. Again, if I'm wrong, help me understand. Tickster you have read in to it wrong. "But to simply remove a good idea because you don't trust the community to do the job as good as you is just wrong." sums up your misinterperetation for me. My issue is with steamworks if our playerbase grows, we are likely to have 10-20 populated servers instead of 2. Now the way that will play out is much like how it is now... we have all these servers (House of Rage, Grad Center, JPL server, CW server, etc) and they will presumabely all have different scripts but still be empty. Now add a few thousand players... they're going to jump in to populated servers sure (G4TC, ELC) but when those fill up and they want to play, they will go into an empty one... with some unknown set of scripts that may not even work right (we don't know) and no admin or vet around to so much as explain it. Yeah that sounds fun. I completely, I mean 100%, agree with the natural selection statement, what I'm suggesting though is that once the natural selection has run it's course and we have a single balance script set (that the majority feel are fun as well) then why not make it the official scriptset and disable script_manifest for the public version? Does that mean no more community side testing? I don't think so, I still think there can be a place for that, either by the scripters who made the eventual official scripts joining the dev team or by setting up something like keys such as Brutos mentioned... I don't know where we'll go, but disabling it for the public servers is the only option I've come up with so far, and everyone posting here has either agreed or raged without offering an alternative... so I'm still at square one.
I find it a bit odd that people are objecting to something that has never been part of empiresmod and isn't even in the current version, people can still make their own balance without the script manifest and if it's better than the current balance than theres a big chance it might just become official. The past however has proven that custom settings on servers do create rifts within the community and can have bad outcomes on new players, Napalm's server at 2.0 release is a very good example, it had high res and quick research and it ruined the game IMHO, yet all the new players would join Napalm and think that it was how the real game was supposed to be played.
Which, Dizzyone, is why Empires must not have the s_manifest for the steamworks release. And then we hold a vote. Durr da durrrrr.
And yet these things are both still changeable in the game in the form of trivial cvars that any server owner or root admin can change on a whim, and still they very rarely are changed from the default, even today. They didn't need to be removed by developers for the community and server owners to be satisfied with the default settings. In fact, I'm willing to wager that several of the empty servers have non-standard resource settings and they are empty because, in part, they have non-standard settings. And while I prefer not to play on servers where tank wars is perpetually turned on, I am not particularly bothered by their existence. Meanwhile, many cvars have been changed to the benefit of games, such as increased tickets on the european 64 player server where people are dying more often and games are otherwise ending too early, or non-fatal fall damage on maps where fatal fall damage is crippling to typical infantry gameplay. I can only see more benefits from allowing server owners to control more aspects of gameplay. I am unaware of one mod in existence that executed this model of development and failed because of it. Quite frankly I believe the onus is on those who assert that script manifest will be harmful to empires to prove it before we continue the discussion.
I'm sure this has been said but just because something is popular doesn't mean its good for the community. I think weapon balance should be internal but I am kinda up in the air with the research tree.
They are changeable indeed, the point I was making is that it creates a different experience, in the case of Napalm's I found the experience to be quite negative for the game play. I am unaware of any mod that executed this model to begin with, there aren't a lot of them around. There is a reason why mods and commercial MP games tend not to allow it, I don't have a judgment on it, but as a player I tend to dislike having to figure out every little thing that's been changed on different servers, I wouldn't bother playing on different servers with different settings, I would probably stick to a single one I like. Which is what I was saying, it'll segment the community into smaller parts, whether that's good or bad is not up for me to decide. I do think weak balance and short sighted changes are harmful to Empiresmod, mix it in with server admins having their own idea of how Empiresmod should be played and the script manifest could actually be harmful, I wasn't suggesting nothing good could come out of it. But again, past experience has proven that it is rarely the case. For every server you personally like there probably will be 3 others you will hate with a passion, do you really want to confine yourself to just a small portion of the servers just because you think something good will come out of it? What if the servers you like in some odd case isn't actually populated, but the ones you hate are. This is a completely feasible situation and I don't see why you would want to find out whether it's going to happen or not. There is a big chance that once Empiresmod hits Steamworks it will no longer be the same community as you know it, resulting in unpredictable behaviour withing the community, which on it's turn means you can't possibly know what the script manifest will contribute to. It's a double edged sword, and your mistrust in those who develop the primary game is the only thing that you're expressing with that post, you might have good reasons, but saying server owners have a better idea of how certain aspects of the gameplay should work out than the developers is obviously flawed. It's not their main objective and if it was they would probably try and make games instead of run servers. When you allow people to change the whole balance, you're talking about making extreme changes to gameplay, you could have a dozen unique types of gameplay come out of this, that's a completely different subject than changing fall damage or tickets, it's not comparable. I don't disagree with allowing Empiresmod to become more sandboxish, most of the features in Empiresmod allow it to happen, but I wouldn't mind if the script manifest was removed, if you really want to change the scripts, you can, but instead do it for the game as a whole and not a single server.
However all those cvars have far greater visibility of the changes involved and their effect on game play. With scripts you do not have the same level of visibility of the changes involved. Also I will take issue with your statement that the empty server are empty because of their settings. I think that there are far more important factors which determine server viability than the scripts and svars. Also the level of adaptability which the scripts offer far exceeds that offered by svars and plugins alone. If you cannot see the downsides to this idea than either you have not given it a large amount of consideration or you have found a solution that has managed to escape us. If it is the latter than please share, the last option in the poll does exist for a reason. I would like you to prove that the concerns that have been raised to be as baseless as you believe them to be, rather than lobbing the burden of proof. Also examples of these games that have done so in these circumstances would be helpful as an object lesson is always useful.
As far as I can tell, it is a general rule that amongst computer gaming, more moddability is always a good thing. I have never seen any example to make me think otherwise. Apparently other posters and I have some sort of fundamental breakdown in understanding, because I can simply not fathom how more diversity in the form of community-generated content is a bad thing. Some of this content may be presented poorly, and in those cases, those servers will likely be unpopulated and unsuccessful, and some of it will be presented exceptionally well, and in those cases, they are more likely to be successful. As far as diversity causing factionalization, well yes. That already happens. There's a large group of empires players who hate emp_money enough to ragespec for a full hour waiting for the next map, and there is another large group of people who constantly nominate it to be the next map. I'm sure that if the community were larger, the people who don't like money would gradually gravitate toward servers that remove emp_money from the rotation, and the latter group would gravitate toward servers that play emp_money more often (perhaps even a 24/7 server, much like there are dust2 24/7 servers on counterstrike). Just like there are zombie mod servers on counterstrike, and some people play them exclusively. or warcraft 3 or superhero mods on counterstrike. or DOTA players on warcraft 3. or roleplayers on garry's mod. or any mod that has ever been made for any commercial game. These are all little factions of a larger playerbase, but these factions nonetheless help the playerbase of a given game to grow. If steamworks really does grow the playerbase, then having diversity will help the mod grow faster. If steamworks never comes, or if steamworks fails to make much of a difference in the number of players, well that's just fine too because things can only get better with more people interested in balancing and adding content and more power to do so.
Well I talked to brutos at length, and he said he's probably going to add a feature that reloads the scripts every mapchange or at a console command. Which is basically going to make scripting 9000 times easier, whether we add a manifest or not.
Digin is a prime example of why you should leave in the manifest. How the hell can we expect the devs to do a good job at fixing the gameplay if they can't fix something as fucked up as digin in a timely fashion?
The last 2 patches have changed Digin, or atleast 2.23 did, so I'm not sure if you're pointing out that the patches aren't released in a timely fashion. Pickled: I thought you were going to give examples of mods, CounterStrike hasn't been a mod for over a decade and Garry'smod is based around customization, those examples have very little relation to the situation Empiresmod is in. I don't disagree, I doubt however that the script manifest should be a part of the feature set. Besides, things like zombie mod or warcraft 3 mod for CS weren't made because CS had features that allowed modability, it's similar to !ri and knowing the owner of a turret, people do those anyway. It's a matter of magnitude, not the possibility to do so.
If you are truly willing to accept that you might be wrong then the best solution is to assume that you ARE wrong and be proven otherwise. As of yet, I've seen no evidence to support your claim, I've only seen evidence to your contrary undergoing a light breeze from malarion's hand-waving, and dizzyone's auditory flailing. Not to mention(altough it has already been mentioned a number of time), if you were truly interested in being right, you'd have some patients, and take-up this discussion at a more relevant point in time.
I am raising a number of legitimate issues and problems with keeping the script_manifest in. If you think my problems are non-existent than please post your rebuttals to them, otherwise it looks like you are trying to wave away some very real concerns. The best way to address these concerns is to make people aware of them ahead of time and hope that someone can find a solution to the current problems. The main issue is the steamworks release period, that is a one time only opportunity to greatly increase the mod's player base and if it goes badly then it will require far more effort to attract people if the release publicity is squandered. Therefore there will be little point to learn from experience as that opportunity will not come around again. Before steamworks and after steamworks and its aftermath many of the concerns would be reduced (but not removed entirely) however to keep it in over the steamworks release period would either be unneeded or an inhibitor to player retention. Please advance arguments for keeping this thing in after steamworks, so far arguments in support of it have not been forthcoming despite a large amount of empty rhetoric. P.S. Could you please spell my name correctly.
There have been valid arguments for allowing script manifest throughout this entire thread, Melanin. Meanwhile, the only argument anyone has seen on the other side is "this is probably bad, because noobs will be a bit confused." I wonder what empires mod would look like if we used that statement to inform every decision we made about empires mod? In addition, Melanin, you do the same thing every time you post in one of these threads. You either miss the point every time you respond or you completely ignore good points that the other side brings up. Anyway, a dozen good arguments have been put forth in this thread. I'm not going to farm the thread to try to find them, but the ones I can think of off the top of my head are: instant hotfixing of bugs instant hotfixing of balance issues easier to add content more diversity more interest in the community to add content increased ability for developers to beta test scripts and changes allowing 'market' to determine best scripts balance and fun And the more stuff the developers move over to scripts, the more powerful this utility will become. This list will gradually expand.
Just because you're ignoring the downsides doesn't mean tthe only argument is that it's confusing for noobs. Bugs aren't "hotfixed" with the script manifest, you'd probably just make the bugs less noticable at the expense of balance. The idea that balance issues need to be hotfixed might just become outdated once the best balance has been chosen and the game is updated more often, you won't need the script manifest for this, infact, for most things you could already do this without the script manifest. If a server owner was smart enough, he could've already "fixed" reflective right now, without the need for a script manifest. It won't make adding content easier, it'll make distributing content easier, it isn't the same thing. For the latter, I'd rather have God sort out the good ones. Diversity has to be one of the weakest arguments I've heard, Africa houses a big diversity of insects that carry deadly diseases. Theres nothing to discuss when it comes to diversity, removing the script manifest isn't going to kill off diversity, it will just mean that you will have to be a bit more persistent on getting your script out in the open. more interest in the community to add content. This isn't Garry'smod, it's about playing a game, not adding content. I'd say the last 2 arguments are favourable, but you don't need the script manifest at all times to achieve those.
