Forged Alliance Forever

Re: Consider a FAF lobby with an earlier verison for mods.

2015-11-06T23:31:26+02:00

UI Lagfix never even worked in the first place

Honestly I like that the mods are rendered obsolete so quickly as many UI mods and others like "eco mod" need review before release. There are too many things out there like power management that make the game questionable...

Statistics: Posted by Morax — 06 Nov 2015, 23:31

Re: Consider a FAF lobby with an earlier verison for mods.

2015-11-06T10:52:09+02:00

its obvious that current faf devs break tonnes of stuff - every other release.

there is a reason why other teams dont 'fix the crazy code' and its because there is an insane amount of legacy stuff that just gets snapped.

so i personally wouldn't refactor and 'fix' too much... instead i would just try and smash in some more features over the top - even though it is ugly... i would declare it out of scope to try and fix up an 8 year old code base.

but you guys made a different decision and i can respect/admire that. however i think coming with that decision is an acknowledgement that
a) its a long term commitment and
b) your gonna snap a lot 3rd party stuff

Statistics: Posted by nine2 — 06 Nov 2015, 10:52

Re: Consider a FAF lobby with an earlier verison for mods.

2015-08-14T15:37:53+02:00

Like Zep said, Diamond is locked to earlier FAF patch and because of that it is still fully working with zero maintanance. And if you aske me I'd like to keep it that way.

Statistics: Posted by Vault54 — 14 Aug 2015, 15:37

Re: Consider a FAF lobby with an earlier verison for mods.

2015-08-14T14:12:32+02:00

Vault52 is still around , he's the main Diamond guy.

Statistics: Posted by Gorton — 14 Aug 2015, 14:12

Re: Consider a FAF lobby with an earlier verison for mods.

2015-08-14T14:00:32+02:00

Fact is a mod is a mod. As one of the longest-running modders in the community, part of this means that it's not supported by the developers, whether that be GPG or the Council of Setons. Modders ply their craft in full knowledge that they may well move on in the future, and that the product may move on, and that their mod may become unusable if they themselves neglect it.

The people who use these mods are a seriously small minority here. Just take a look at big games for how this is done properly; the base game always takes precedence. It is on the head of the modder to keep up with the developer, never, ever the other way around. That would just hold things back. Skyrim, Team Fortress 2, Counterstrike Source. These are all massively modded games where two things are true: The mods are extremely popular, and the vast majority of mods are broken every single time the developers do a primary game update.

I am working on getting permission from the BlackOps crew, who I know of old, to modify and update their stuff to be compatible again, but they are hard to reach these days. As the biggest FA mod, I think it's an important one. Likewise for 4th Dimension. As for Diamond Mod, I've no clue where those guys went.

Statistics: Posted by IceDreamer — 14 Aug 2015, 14:00

Re: Consider a FAF lobby with an earlier verison for mods.

2015-08-04T15:57:59+02:00

Col_Walter_Kurtz wrote:
Ze_PilOt wrote:
ckitching wrote:As far as I know, there is a plan to start having a longer open beta period for new releases to give mod authors additional time to fix their shit.

Thus far, we've not really been fixing people's mods for them: we'd never really get time to make much progress with FAF if we had to do that at the moment, though it would be notionally nice at some point.

Most of the mod authors are not active anymore. (ie. blackops, just to name the most used one). So you can wait forever.

Also, I doubt that changing the codebase will make active mod author really happy as they have to do extra work just to keep making their mod working.

It's a valid point. I wonder if this was considered enough before the code re-work, that was ultimately meant to increase compatibility and longevity of the FAF project. Losing mods because they are broken permanently due to FAF development, could significantly hurt the player base I imagine.

I had to do that thinking 3 years ago, and it rapidity emerged that modifying basic functions in FA would be a terrible mistake.
I was done twice : When changing the shields behavior and when changing the teleport FX.
Both time it was carefully weighted and modified in a way that compatibility was kept for most of the cases.
Still, it took several weeks to adapt some mods for it (or to be exact : to adapt the FA code for the mods).

FA is not a young-ling. At this point, compatibility should NEVER be broken. Too much things are inter-dependent to allow that.

That's even more true if these changes are just cosmetics for OCD coders.

Statistics: Posted by Ze_PilOt — 04 Aug 2015, 15:57

Re: Consider a FAF lobby with an earlier verison for mods.

2015-08-04T10:48:49+02:00

Ze_PilOt wrote:
ckitching wrote:As far as I know, there is a plan to start having a longer open beta period for new releases to give mod authors additional time to fix their shit.

Thus far, we've not really been fixing people's mods for them: we'd never really get time to make much progress with FAF if we had to do that at the moment, though it would be notionally nice at some point.

Most of the mod authors are not active anymore. (ie. blackops, just to name the most used one). So you can wait forever.

Also, I doubt that changing the codebase will make active mod author really happy as they have to do extra work just to keep making their mod working.

It's a valid point. I wonder if this was considered enough before the code re-work, that was ultimately meant to increase compatibility and longevity of the FAF project. Losing mods because they are broken permanently due to FAF development, could significantly hurt the player base I imagine.

Statistics: Posted by Col_Walter_Kurtz — 04 Aug 2015, 10:48

Re: Consider a FAF lobby with an earlier verison for mods.

2015-08-03T17:26:40+02:00

ckitching wrote:
As far as I know, there is a plan to start having a longer open beta period for new releases to give mod authors additional time to fix their shit.

Thus far, we've not really been fixing people's mods for them: we'd never really get time to make much progress with FAF if we had to do that at the moment, though it would be notionally nice at some point.

Most of the mod authors are not active anymore. (ie. blackops, just to name the most used one). So you can wait forever.

Also, I doubt that changing the codebase will make active mod author really happy as they have to do extra work just to keep making their mod working.

Statistics: Posted by Ze_PilOt — 03 Aug 2015, 17:26

Re: Consider a FAF lobby with an earlier verison for mods.

2015-08-03T14:04:30+02:00

Ok thanks, makes sense.

Statistics: Posted by Col_Walter_Kurtz — 03 Aug 2015, 14:04

Re: Consider a FAF lobby with an earlier verison for mods.

2015-08-03T13:28:02+02:00

Col_Walter_Kurtz wrote:
It doesn't sound ideal at all, that mods will force the use of an older FAF version. Unless I'm misunderstanding something it means that as soon as you get used to new balance changes utilizing a certain mod would suddenly force the old situation?

Anyone playing with game mods like what we're talking about here, which significantly change the balance, will most likely not care about playing with the most recent balance changes.

Blackops for instance, is based around old FA balance values -- 3599 or 3603. It's entirely 'broken' in terms of balance if you just naively play it with current FAF anyway.

Statistics: Posted by Sheeo — 03 Aug 2015, 13:28

Re: Consider a FAF lobby with an earlier verison for mods.

2015-08-03T11:45:52+02:00

It doesn't sound ideal at all, that mods will force the use of an older FAF version. Unless I'm misunderstanding something it means that as soon as you get used to new balance changes utilizing a certain mod would suddenly force the old situation?

Statistics: Posted by Col_Walter_Kurtz — 03 Aug 2015, 11:45

Re: Consider a FAF lobby with an earlier verison for mods.

2015-08-03T11:06:59+02:00

there is a plan to start having a longer open beta period for new releases to give mod authors additional time to fix their shit.

again. the dont fix anything during that period. May be they plan... but they release new version after new FAF patch release.

So: FAF test period -> announcing final version of patch -> mod test period (2 days) -> release.

The new patching system will allow mods to specify a range of versions of other mods they are compatible with

so what if they switch mod to a new version, then it does not work. Can they switch back? Do i need to update mod to get proper specifications? Cuz mods are not autoupdated(why?)

Statistics: Posted by justmakenewgame — 03 Aug 2015, 11:06

Re: Consider a FAF lobby with an earlier verison for mods.

2015-08-03T10:58:28+02:00

I should also just add that this problem is going away permanently in the next few months anyway. The new patching system will allow mods to specify a range of versions of other mods they are compatible with, including FAF. At which point it will entirely stop mattering how much mod compatability we break in future versions, as older mods will just continue to use older faf.

Statistics: Posted by ckitching — 03 Aug 2015, 10:58

Re: Consider a FAF lobby with an earlier verison for mods.

2015-08-03T10:49:14+02:00

As far as I know, there is a plan to start having a longer open beta period for new releases to give mod authors additional time to fix their shit.

Thus far, we've not really been fixing people's mods for them: we'd never really get time to make much progress with FAF if we had to do that at the moment, though it would be notionally nice at some point.

I do not understand why they had to make the mods incompatible.

Nobody set out to "make the mods incompatible". Indeed, 3641 had a (perhaps somewhat too short) beta period for mod developers to fix their shit, in which basically nobody got in touch to ask for information about how the changes affect them.

I see some questionable changes; specifically renaming functions because capitalization and removing functions because they are not used. That, to me, sets some bad precedents. What if in the future someone comes along and says, I do not like how this is spelled. Then we are back in this mess again, for no good reason.

By and large, these are not the changes that are causing mods to break (there are a few cases where they are, however, but these represent somebody fucking up).
I've got a local copy of the mod vault I scan for uses of a certain function before refactoring in this way: if it is still used it gets a deprecation warning instead of deletion. If it turns out to not be used, deleting it now is an effective way to make sure it stays that way.

In general, simpler, clearer programs are easier to maintain: an oft-undervalued property of software. While changes like renaming may seem "pointless", they can meaningfully impact legibility of a complicated piece of logic elsewhere that makes use of the renamed function, which can in turn make an error easier to spot (or to avoid introducing when trying to modify behaviour).
Usually, given a choice between "there's a chance an obscure mod might depend on this" and "this makes it easier to prevent regressions", the latter is going to win.

On the other hand, where things do get completely overhauled (such as the new UI library introduced with 3640), they also get in-tree luadocs and the promise of a stable API for modders to use in the future. Introducing the UI updates to the lobby and elsewhere that we did that that point without the new UI library wouldn't have been viable, and for the same reasons modders will find it easier to do their thing with it than the old way: it just slightly breaks parts of the old way.

On the GitHub site it is difficult to see sometimes why things had changed. If you try to look at a files history of changes you get all the files that were changed at the time, which makes it tedious for no reason. The bitbucket site was good for that. You can look at a single file and see the history of changes that were done. The documentation there is not so good in general.

There's a big shiny "history" button at the top right when you're viewing the content of a file that takes you to a page like this showing only the commits that have touched that file (allowing you to view changes, the commit, or browse the file/repository at that point in its history):
https://github.com/FAForever/fa/commits ... m/Unit.lua

GitHub/Bitbucket have feature-parity.

Statistics: Posted by ckitching — 03 Aug 2015, 10:49

Re: Consider a FAF lobby with an earlier verison for mods.

2015-08-03T10:31:50+02:00

ITT more salt than in Don Juan Pond

Statistics: Posted by Blodir — 03 Aug 2015, 10:31