"It's all gone quiet" & "Dev Forum, Why?"

Seriously.

Not everyone is without a day job or a life over the weekend. Not posting in two days is not the end of the world.

 

True true...

I'll be back to little-or-no-life-after-work about the middle or end of this week, so me and nomad can coordinate a transfer of files from him to me, and then I should be set to handle that end of things. That and I'll get programming time to figure out a way to merge or at least compare troika's patched dat files to ours once they release their patch. erm, "Atari's patch". Bureaucratic bastards.

Wow, and MS Word doesn't know how to spell burocratic, but OpenOffice correctly suggested bureaucratic for me Go Open Source :thumbsup:

 

I dont know about other people that are just starting out but i enjoyed the conversations on the atari board about portrait edditing

Personally even if i could only read the boards it was a good way to learn watching you guys go , im working in the data files now playing mostly but thats how we all start and i learnt alot that first week just reading threads so even if you dont open it up to posting alot of us would love ot read the information

 

First off, don't take this personally. Alot of posters start taking things personally, and get into a flaming match.

There's actually ALOT of fluff.. (Non-mod threads).. (i.e.

• is X fixed in the patch?(I'm only counting three seperate threads like that in the first 2 pages of the forum)
• what "I" want to see in a mod(there's only 6 threads on that in the first 2 pages of the forum).
• other general questions. (some answered in the README ) and others answerable by non-modders with reading the DMG or other SRD document.

There also was the question of load. We were crashing forums left and right. We have now moved 4 times. It slowed mod/dev time CONSIDERABLY.

So, having a dev only forum, 1 gave us a guranteed place. And also a easily controllable (i.e. don't have to spend most my time moving threads) place to discuss modding (and only modding).

If we created a few more forums, where people could post the above, then sure they don't need to be private. I jsut want to be able to read information about the current file I'm working on... (or just game modding information).. Not neccesarily all that other stuff.

The reason this was done was because we couldn't gauge the users computer use skill level. (Though I didn't want to tell people that at the time, I told them it was so it doesn't get distributed all over the place..) Using those zips, you need to erase the files manually from version to version... Just opening up the "Alpha" versions to the world would have been a support nightmare when we went to release the "REAL" mod. There was such a demand (again we crashed four forums on the way here), we would have to include instructions on how to manually delete files, and Which ones (as there are regular game files in these directories too). This would not have been good telling people that they now have to reinstall the game because they didn't delete files right.

IOTW, Passwording the ZIP allowed us to restrict the number of people who would be later saying we didn't fix something (or worse, broke something), with our 1.0, even though the real reason things aren't working are they didn't manually remove the files they received from the zipped alpha.

BTW, back ontopic...ME? The reason I haven't posted much is I only have I-net access from work... RR won't be re-hooked up at my place until friday.

 

Just clearing things up...

I was only asking if the forum existed, and I do realise the need for it.

Aside from all that, given I don't have access to the dev forums, when are you planning on bringing out a 1.1?

Going to leave it until there's more content, and bring out 2.0, or going to put out a fixed 1.1? (Ref metamagic feats problem (and yes I do realise this is fixable by hand by taking a file from here))

Personally I think you should be releasing as often as a bug is fixed. Last thing you want is people to submit a modified file which isn't up to date...

E.g. someone does some changes to weapons, meanwhile someone else releases a CTD involving weapons, and someone else adds a couple of new weapons. You've now got 3 copies of the file. See what I mean?

As modifying becomes easier for people to do (meaning tools become available, or more powerful etc) then there will be more people doing things, and if you want to continue in the extremely worthwhile route of putting all the fixes/additions/etc together and releasing them then you'll need to be good at avoiding having 5 or 6 different versions of the same file all needing to be merged together.

Whether this means regular releases, or if it means having someone 'owning' individual files and changes that are to make it to co8 packages having to go through that person (or someone else taking over).

 

Due to the negative response, AFIAK, They've been shutdown! Joy. We now have our own version of the atari forums. Yay.. All kidding aside, I think we will need to start subdividing the forums a little bit... User Requests, Bug reports, Questions, all of these probably deserve forums.

Since I can only access the Internet during the work week, I'm not exactly sure what the plan is.. All of the posts regarding future plans was there.

Yeah it's called a "Merge". It's not neccesarily hard (when you have tools to do it). The real pain comes when people want to do...

You're talking about "client side merges". I.e. Some kind of app that lists all the mods, and the user "checks off" which ones he wants to use. The application then merges all the checked off conflicting subfiles into the 1 file that the game will use. Until that application is available (which BTW, is never (no one is working on it AFAIK), you'll need to depend on the Co8 (or other "community" patches.)

Thats the other problem. What goes in, what doesn't? So far this hasn't been much of an issue, as there haven't been many people submitting changes..
I know for a fact that we are pretty steadfast on sticking to the 3rd ed rules. But other than that I'm not sure we've even agreed on criteria..

 

Nomad, you beat me to it (wow I really detest that smiley)

I'm actually going to be working on something like this for when we need to deal with any changes in the official patch. It won't be quite this full-featured (because it'd be way too complex) but it'll let memerge our changes into the "official" changes, hopefully without breaking anything.

The other thing that I'd like my tool to do is allow a bit of split functionality, and have a couple of levels to the mod. By default, it'd be just bug fixes (hopefully we can get rid of this at some point ), with an option for expansion (some of the crafting, ioun stones, expanded/more varied dialog, etc.) of existing content, and another option for "mature" content (brothel obviously).

As far as I'm concerned (and I make no attempt to know what anyone else feels about this, as you say it's a moot point at the moment) the core Co8 mod should be about fixing the gameplay, and making the game as it is the feel-good dungeon romp we all want it to be. Anything more than this (like adding brand spanking new quests, evil or otherwise) should belong in auxiliary patches. I'm not sure how I'd want to handle that sort of thing, because as you say it'd be a bitch to handle without a mod manager app, and that app is going to be a pissload of work to write if someone does. Without it, individual mods will either be mostly non-compatable with each other, and will only be compatable with us at a specific patch point, which isn't good for anybody.


And Halk, I'd say that unfortunately, the earliest we'll come out with a 1.1.0 patch would be the weekend. Real Life has intruded on quite a few people, and between tests and moves there's a distinct lack of time to be spent modding for most.

 

I didnt want you to take my comments the wrong way i love what you guys are doing and its great to see so much activity , as i said id be happy with just being able to read the boards , limit posts to people that are on the team and leave the current forums for the rest of the posts about ideas and things

On a side note you guys really need to get together and outline what your trying to do with a group consensus and get some orginisation going so you know what everyone is working on or duplication is going to happen with you guys and with other comunity memebers that arnt part of co8 and that seems like a waste

 

No offense taken.. Just it sounded like some people posting here didn't understand some of our decisions(and how could they, we never clued anyone in on why things were done the way they were.)

 

Sorry it sounded that way personally i just want to learn more , lol i do realise there are good reasons for keeping it private after sifting through all the repeated questions and requests listed below