Current, Future, and Eventual state of script_manifest

There are already a few scripts out, I really don't see why it should be dropped outright when it would bring out so much more in the community. People make maps and models already, the community cried out to the devs to make more options available. I know for one particle changes used to be wanted by many of us.

Sure you can add functionality to the core function of the scripts and change the way they work overtime, but I find the underlying current trend is that you want to close off variety in exchange for a fixed way of playing.

It's fine if someone wants to step up to the plate and take over scripting, but what happens if the scripts suck. It's a step backwards. The script manifest was putting the balance and playability in the community's hands and that is a much higher and noble step forward than trying to do that by yourself.

If you want to do a scout overhaul, then code the ability for the community to overhaul it themselves. In the long run it's less work, and much more expandable. The reasoning doesn't make sense unless you're deliberately trying to control the game. If that is so then fine, I'm not happy with that decision but there's nothing I can do. If it's not an intentional way of slowing development then someone lacks common sense.

 

Spawwn disagrees with the script_manifest. As does HSM. As does Beerdude. As does RKB. As does melarion.


Anyone here notice a pattern?

Also, I spoke to someone else within the developer team. They informed me that actually, script_manifest isn't "incomplete" but actually fairly close to being done.

This isn't a thread about not getting script_manifest now, it's about never getting it. Because we won't. Ever.

 

Yes, we have devs, devs that talk to us and pretend to actually give a shit about our opinion. Sorta like voting Obama in after Bush - even in the worst scenario, at least it looks like he gives a shit, rather than just pissing in your face.

2.24 was also the least tested release of this game. By us. Get what i'm trying to say here?

Beerdude did fail to listen to us for one version though, which he's still paying for. Hopefully we'll be able to grab his attention this time.

The way I see it is, either we have devs and you guys pipe down, or we have no devs and the mod goes down...oh, and you get the ability to modify the game how you like it. I'd rather see all of you join the scripting team then go on and on and on about this thing...wouldn't that be easier? Don't beat down on them, join 'em.

Let me just point out something else, if we actually get our current devs to stay longer than one or two versions, you're not really going to want to be fighting them all the time. We've had enough good devs leave because they weren't having an easy time, and these guys turned up at the right moment. Brutos can't do it all himself, he just doesn't have the time, so until you guys take over development, this is who you're going to have to work with.

I seriously don't see the problem here. Yes it'd be nice to have a feature handy so we don't have to rely on the god awful balance going on for 8 months, but is it worth stopping development on Empires completely for that? Just test mhoar so we don't have to get in this situation.

 

http://forums.empiresmod.com/showthread.php?p=277365

 

*sadface*

Oh snap, you mean BSID right? Well, BSID brought the talent. Last I checked, EPIC is devoting their resources to the neo-axis project. Boo hoo, trickster. Maybe you can focus your negative energy into positive energy and work on your own project.

Well, there is still discussion about how to go about implementing this sort of thing.

I think the biggest thing though, is that spawwn is working to add more to scripts, and because adding to scripts, and changing core mechanics would effectivly break them each release, then it seems logical to post-pone the script_manifest.

As for modability, HL2 is the platform, and empires is the mod. Modding a mod while its not yet ready because it has not gone through the proper changes/additions just doest feel right with me.

I will say though, that I agree with you scardy that I am a bit bummed about script_manifest not being immediate, because I did have some things I was working on.

 

Sounds like you should do a sequel to "Loose Change". Also, Empires is now called BSIDpires

"Fairly close" still isn't close. We have an internal deadline, and we would like to make it. Too bad our reputation keeps getting shat on by people, some of them working on their own fucking version of Empires (how pretentious can you get to then bitch about the version you already left?).

If you're right, at least the player base can use the script manifest your mod gives them. I think you've convinced all of us that your non-existent mod will be thousands of times better than this one, so just crawl back to your own developing space and stop trying to destroy ours.

 

So right, let me get this straight. Because I work on another project that happens to be similar to empires, any issues I have with this one being...I don't entirely know the word to describe it, damaged? They should be discounted, because I work on another project. No. Fuck you.

And, at HSM. "Scripts are limited" blah blah what? Are you having a fucking laugh? You can do so much with the scripts right now, since all the stuff got moved over. Sure more would be better, but we can already do so much. Hell we can implement aircraft with that.

Funnily enough, I still play this game, even though I work on another project, which is more than I can say for the majority of you. Notice the people kicking off about this, are the people that still play this version, 2.24d, no matter how broken it may be. Myself, Pickled, both producing scripts with the best we can do considering the low amount of room we have to play with. Empty still doing particle work.

So in actual fact, it's the other way round. You're being the pretentious bitch, because unlike you guys (the majority of people agreeing that script_manifest is bad), the majority of us actually play the game. Seriously Beerdude, I was going on in IRC about how you're actually one of the nicer guys in the development team, but to support this, pretty much goes against nearly every opinion I've ever heard you have regarding this mod.

Also, I'm not in any way going "omg BSIDpires". It's nothing to do with that. I'm pointing out that whilst Spawwn's opinion happens to be against script_manifest, and whilst I don't know about yours personally Beerdude, the rest of the BSID are CLEARLY just joining the bandwagon to give their own member support. I would stake money in the fact that if Spawwn wanted to implement it, and you did, they all would too. Instead of discounting people's opinions because they happen to have other interests, discount those who support/oppose ideas for no other reason besides their friends doing it.

 

Because your opinion means so much.

 

Ok D:

No we can't. There is a ton of functionality that can be added from hard code, and mechanical changes that can be done to alter current weapons/vehicles, etc...

In other words, more stuff.

which is the heart of the matter. Script_manifest isn't coming out this version so you're whining and complaining.

Pretentious:
A. making usually unjustified or excessive claims,
B. expressive of affected, unwarranted, or exaggerated importance, worth, or stature

No, I have justified claims for my position.

I don't play the game? Really? I may not put in my +40 hours a week that I used to, but I still come back to empires. I've been around a lot longer than you have, and have played a lot longer than you by far.

So because beerdude supports this, you think lesser of beerdude? Have you ever thought to consider someone elses reasons? Beerdude still supports the idea of script_manifest I believe, but as he said, empires 2.25 has an internal deadline and would like to keep it.

Features aren't added when you sprinkle fairy dust on them. : /

 

Yeah, I don't buy the 'post-poning the script manifest is for the best because we'll break it on each release'. Exactly how the feck are you coding this to make it suck that much?

Also LOL at the 2.25 internal deadline. What exactly is the plan for 2.25? I tested it not long ago and it's still unplayable, so when exactly is this 'deadline'.

 

lol, rkb

 

The point of an internal deadline is that it's internal. Not known to the outside. Therefore you can't disappoint. Internal deadlines are no argument.

What you stated about playtime HSM proves everything. You don't play as much as you used to. Which is why you, and so many "oldfags" so to speak are totally out of touch with everything. Funnily enough, I bet Deif has triple your playtime, because he's been around as long as you and he never left. So don't give me any bullshit about "I played 140 hours a week solidly between 1.0 and 2.0" because that counts for jackshit. You either play it currently and know how things are, or you don't. Simple as. And next to no-one opposing is active currently. And you know full well what I mean by active.

 

it would be awesome to release it on 04/03/2010

empiresmod on source 4 year celebration!
(yes, had to look it up, found in the archives: http://www.empiresmod.com/newsArchives_2.php)

 

you guys say there is a time constraint for the script manifests which was officially announced for 2.25 early on and greeted with applauds.... yet you guys spend a fk ton of time on a balancer hardly anyone care about...

So the whole thing about "time constraints" doesnt really make any sense what so ever.

Just say out loud that there was a change in plans about implenting the scriptmanifest after spawn took controll, noone is buying the crap about time constrains.

 

Well, you don't have to buy anything because empires is free...

Hur Hur

I'm out of touch with the fact that only a handful of servers exist, I'm only out of touch with the fact that physics is the single, dominant tech tree? I'm out of touch with the fact that despite the long time it's taken to release 2.25, empires is still alive? I'm out of touch with the fact that many bugs had to be addressed through SM because no official patch has come out to fix them?

What exactly am I out of touch with? The community? The community is always the same. New faces come, old faces leave, and the heart of empires remains. People have ALWAYS bitched about my actions, and the actions of BSID. Listen bud, we've been around long enough to know we don't need to worry about the likes of someone like you. ove:

You're cute when you're angry

Actually, I played a ton the first few months 2.24 has come out, and I now only play occasionally whilst I go to school, and make time for empires. Many of the problems that exist before, still exist today.

Trickster, I love you. Not you as a person, but you as this thing that when squeals and whines, sends a shiver of delight down my spine.
*giggle*
Oh there it goes again. :D

Oh snap, someone found out.

 

I'm sure there are more who would deliver their opinions in this thread if it weren't for fear of getting banned for dissenting.

The cause for concern is that every script set from 2.2x has been complete and utter garbage. Sure, people want 2.25 because it means Empires on Source isn't [yet] dead. However, the script set is the most important thing that determines whether the majority is having fun or not. (I'm not saying that 2.12's were perfect, indeed they were far from it - but they were fun. Right now on 2.24 default scripts everyone knows it's mostly Physics, Physics, Physics, Physics, Physics).

Trickster's script set isn't being run on any servers at the moment from what I understand, as I heard Napalm pulled them from G4TC. The ELC has been running pickled_heretic's script set, which is near-identical to Trickster's but with additional changes that pickled considers imperative (I understand they were intending to work to reconcile their scripts). Thus far, this script set has been quite successful.

Anything else is very untested, so just picking a set & tossing it into 2.25 is silly with the script_manifest unavailable. Please take more care than that, and please don't just let anyone author scripts for 2.25 unless you have thoroughly reviewed their strengths and weaknesses in-game and find out whether players actually enjoy them. Also, don't let PreDominance touch them, I don't want to my CV getting rammed in the rear by an Anthropomorphic Artillery Elephant and have to fend it off with a Lion Tank.

I love it how all of these deprecated individuals show up to defend a dev thread simply because it's a dev thread - you know, people who haven't been playing the mod or developing much of anything for it for nearly a year. They think they are justified in telling people to stop whining, and they even pretend not to care after they've already shown that at some point they did care about the progress of the mod (otherwise why would they ever have committed in the first place?) - I have no desire to indulge their silly mind games, and they should know very well who they are.

A few previous lead developers of this mod opened it up and made solid attempts to empower the community to make up for historical shortfalls of the devs. When the devs carrying a Mapper title were no longer interested in or available for updating the official maps, Coffeeburrito put them in the hands of custom mappers (which proved fruitful for more than several of the official maps - at least the ones that are complete or near-complete), and Kylegar (and whoever helped him, from what I understand) saw fit to at least make an effort on the script_manifest front, even if it is primitive. Coffeeburrito and others were also good about adding very important and long-awaited mapping entities for us (from what I understand Spawwn has done a few or intends to, which is great - but new mapping entities are a bit less important when the balance is entirely out of whack).

We server managers need at least a thread of hope on the scripting horizon, and "We want to bring more scripters onto the team, whoop-ti-doo! " is of absolutely no consolation.

I understand the cons of the script_manifest, and I was once opposed to the idea. But given 2.24, my opinion on the script_manifest shifted some time ago and not only do I think it's a solid idea, I think it's increasingly becoming a necessity - I can wait for it, but this does seem like a ploy to phase it out completely. I don't have any reason to believe Spawwn is sincere in wanting to postpone it, rather than discard it. As for the balancing plugin, it's a waste of time and it isn't very helpful. I have absolutely no intention of letting it enforce teams on the ELC. Its rankings are far too volatile from round to round to be representative of a player's capability, and certainly not with any accuracy.

I guess we have no choice, as usual. We shall have to wait for it in the future. However, stop trying to discourage our feedback or silence us. Banning contributors from the forums won't work, and it doesn't help any of you devs or your images. We really need solutions now, rather than promises.

I sure hope you guys can deliver an acceptable script set for 2.25. Everything else about 2.25 will be better already, and I especially look forward to enjoying all of the optimizations that have been made, as well as all of the bugfixes.

 

I pulled mine from Napalm's after he bitched at me for not filling in a log, and I hate logging things. I decided it would take me less time to remove them than write a log entry about a server which was getting DDoSed for the foreseeable future (as it was, it took about a week or so to fix). I know, probably a little immature on my part, but by the time the DDoS was fixed, I went away to scotland and knew I'd be unable to access the server or play for a week, so I left them off. I checked later and Napalm added pickled's in my absence, which (apart from him ruining my wall jumping turbo boost) is fine with me, because I'm not around to maintain the server until tomorrow anyway. You can almost bet I'll try and "better" pickled's scripts, and you can bet after that Pickled will do the same. Thus improving them in a way that a single scripter team on the mod will not be able to do.

Either way, Shandy is absolutely right. And G4TC won't be running that balancer on either server as well. There are currently 3 main servers, none of which will include the balancer. You may claim that you shouldn't develop for the whim of 3 server owners, and I would agree in your position, but when every "decent" server (not just these 3, but also including clan servers) is run by an experienced empires player at the least, and when the majority of JPL opposes it, and a fair few CW, you can see that it's more than likely going to be time wasted. Time better spent developing something that every server could take advantage of.

At the very least, make the script manifest stuff a custom DLL, and give them out only to ELC, G4TC, CW, BSID and JPL servers. Don't give it to the likes of server conglomerates like ConVictGaming who come along with no experience of the mod and just implement dumb stuff (anyone remember their KPD stats plugin?), although they'd have no idea how to use the script manifest anyway.

 

I don't really care about this. First of all I think the community needs to be A LOT bigger for people to levitate and use 1 script more. Like when CSS changed the prices of guns by the amount people used them. This community is like ok im euro so I goto euro server or I am american so I goto american server.. I doubt the scripts will have any influence on where people play.

Plus I see this fucking up clan matches with people arguing over what scripts to use.. And it seems like people are already able to change the scripts enough as it is.

 

Trickster is upset that there is NOT dissension among BSID about a development decision? It's called camaraderie, my friends always have an opportunity to talk things over with me before I make any public statements, and I remain in BSID because the members are people I consider friends. Is there something explicitly wrong with that?

There has been a time constraint since, at the very latest, the first time I spoke to Brutos after joining the team. Perhaps he came up with a release date in an epiphanic moment, but likely he already had the date in mind. Around a week ago when Beerdude began going over our options to actually push updated files to clients, it became apparent that the only quick fix was distasteful and that really much more work needed to be done before the feature would be ready.

Given we have only a hand full of bugs that need addressed before release, we can make our deadline without script_manifest, but cannot come anywhere close with it.

We will be adding to the game in ways that will require supported scripts (two examples of features that if implemented would break scripts: additional chassis types which would conflict with any custom scripts additional chassis, or implementing a required line such as "turret model" for chassis/tank-turret combination support which would break scripts not containing the line), the best option is to bring players wishing to create scripts into the fold. If we send out script_manifest and just say "okay good luck" then start adding stuff ourselves, it will break custom scripts, and inevitably we will end up in a spot where we are expected to help troubleshoot/fix custom scripts and code around them. Support for server-side script enforcement will be implemented once it will not disrupt the ability to develop features... just like any commercial game would do.

The jury is out at this time exactly what scripts will be used for 2.25, I should be able to make an announcement before Monday (GMT). Regardless, the scripts implemented will be viewed as a "patch up" job to buy time in growing a scripting team and doing a complete re-haul. Please PM me if you are serious about being a scripter, and keep in mind we are not looking for people who will simply carry out commands, we want a think tank, we want new ideas, nothing is off limits. Depending on turnout, the likely eventuality is that we will have a scripting lead among a scripting team that will coordinate the collective groups ideas and feed any coding/move-setting-to-script requirements to the coding team. I'm thinking more like team of 3-6 than team of 30, but that too is open for discussion. Within that, we would desire people more focused on research, vehicles, and weapons... so the team could easially hit 6+ if people were more specialized in their work.

**Late add**
Shandy` - I understand, I don't disagree with your concerns. Two things though, one is that Beerdude has been actively developing, as evidenced by GIT logs which I believe are still available for public viewing, and two is (probably not the best place for it, but I will say) the reason ELC saw volatility was actually because somewhere between drummer and I a setting was changed which increased the amount of points given for a kill... from 1 for every 50 point difference to 1 for every 1... so if you had 200 points and he had 500, killing him would net you 302 points instead of the intended 8. Since the latest bug fix and getting that setting squared away, I have been quite happy with the numbers returned. Just saying. At any rate, the balancer has eaten up exactly zero hours of time that would have otherwise been spend coding, so it's a non-issue.

 

99% of the problems with balance are related to the research tree, which we can't change as it is. What Pickled and I do can only be referred to as "damage control".

Clans can simply agree or disagree to play with a certain script set. It's no different to arguing over which server to use.

I'm not "upset" at it, I'm merely pointing out that whilst people like pickled get banned for justifying their opinion, albeit with flaming, because people such as RKB support you, they're free to spam threads with "DOWN WITH SCRIPT_MANIFEST" etc like he has been doing.

Brutos is for script_manifest as well, so I'm fairly sure he has no issues with the time constraints, especially considering it isn't nearly as incomplete as you said. What's the point of a deadline for a version that won't add anything? And so what if it breaks scripts later? You think that after we've wanted this for so long (we being the scripters) that we're not willing to work out the changes and update our scripts as necessary, should you update them? We can make compromises, so can you.

The problem with a "script team" is that, well actually, let me give you an example. Let's say for theory's sake you took me, pickled and mashav on as scripters. We all have TOTALLY different ideas, none of which we could test in that situation. Mashav aims for diversity, I aim for balance, Pickled is somewhere else. You won't get any coherency unless you recruit people purely based on the fact that they will agree blindly like sheep. You say you want a think tank, but all it'll be is a team based around implementing the ideas from the coders and passing it off as their own.

The biggest part of script_manifest is natural selection. If I develop scripts, which I believe to be awesome, we test them. It could be that they suck, totally and completely. But if I was on the development team, and I had managed to convince you that in theory, my script ideas were awesome (which is easily done, convincing people without actual implementation - And don't say you won't fall for that, your escapades in the suggestions section prove you will) and they were implemented, and sucked, people are still stuck with them. But supposing they're actually tested in a real-game situation, not SVN testing where everyone just fucks about. Then they're decided to have some issues. We fix them, change the map, try again.

It's not about a developer scripter team, it's about having the best way to test it. About trying out different ideas along side eachother. Shandy is right when he says "We want to bring more scripters onto the team, whoop-ti-doo! " is of absolutely no consolation."