Author Topic: An open warning to SCP modders  (Read 4979 times)

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Offline IPAndrews

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An open warning to SCP modders
Are you writing a mod using the SCP game engine? Consider this a warning from the ex project leader of the game's biggest and one of it's most famous total conversions - The Babylon Project. A few months ago we declared our game final. Having worked for nearly ten years the team had dwindled and mostly moved onto other things, but we made a final push to release a game as complete and as stable as those who remained could make it. The end result was something everyone was very proud of. The result was TBP FINAL.

Within the last month the SCP team turned up in our internal forum. An internal forum for what is for all intents and purposes a dead mod with only a few caretakers including myself continuing to watch over it to offer very limited support to gamers. The SCP team started demanding we revive the mod, create a new team, and start updating again! The stick being if we don't do as they say they will drop support for The Babylon Project. That is to say all support calls for the game will be ignored and any problems with new versions of the game engine will be ignored. This will potentially kill The Babylon Project's multiplayer gameplay.

What I wanted to warn everyone is this. If you're a modder, team leader or whatever, you have to be aware that the SCP team will expect you to update your mod - forever - or they will drop support for your mod. I'm not up for debating whether their behaviour is justified, or not. I'm simply informing you all that these are the rules of the game and now you all know. So don't act surprised when the SCP team drop your hard work like yesterday's garbage.
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Offline General Battuta

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Re: An open warning to SCP modders
Hrm. So what's the other side to this story? I'm sure it's reasonable.

 

Offline karajorma

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Re: An open warning to SCP modders
Nope. It's just as unreasonable and stupid unfortunately, with only some of us showing a lick of sense. :rolleyes:

I'll post a longer explanation eventually.
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Offline chief1983

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Re: An open warning to SCP modders
Oh ffs.

This is going to go down into HLP history as the source of some major lulz if some things aren't sorted out post-haste.

IPA, all things considered, I think this post is going a bit overboard.  It's filled with flamebait.   Just for clarification, in my own spare time, I started work on a patch at work to clear up a lot of the issues with TBP.  In an afternoon, while I was at my regular job and working off and on with this little project, I managed to fix numerous issues, including:

Updates to ships.tbl to the correct objecttypes
Missing textures
Effs with wrong frame counts
Some Null MOI errors
Rounding up a collection of files that should have been removed before creating the installer

I'm not even that much of a modder myself either.  Now obviously some testing would have to be done to ensure a lack of breakage, but I don't believe any of those changes should be affecting gameplay.  If you really want to have a go as to why this kind of cleanup (especially the stuff that was warned about even in 3.6.9 builds) was impossible before 3.4's finalization, please keep it off of the public forums.  You're more than welcome to discuss this in Hosted Project Support or through PMs.

Anyone working on a mod can get all the help they need to create a stable platform through the support of the forums, even if there is the occasional thorn in the bunch, there's still plenty of cool-minded people around to help out anyone intending to mod for FSO.
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Offline karajorma

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Re: An open warning to SCP modders
Actually now that this is in the open we might as well solve it here. Certain people will be less inclined to act like twatblankets if they know everything they say is on the record.
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Offline captain-custard

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Re: An open warning to SCP modders
i started reading this and said "oh no " then "wtf" this cant be true.....

tbp is a great total conversion and atm the only one that has a great deal of game play and many mods , final or not.....

i spend a few hours each week with a few other ppl running through the multiplayer and 3.6.10 and seriously tbp holds its head up very well

i find a little shocking your statement chief.......

Quote
Just for clarification, in my own spare time, I started work on a patch at work to clear up a lot of the issues with TBP.  In an afternoon, while I was at my regular job and working off and on with this little project, I managed to fix numerous issues, including:

Updates to ships.tbl to the correct objecttypes
Missing textures
Effs with wrong frame counts
Some Null MOI errors
Rounding up a collection of files that should have been removed before creating the installer


just to say it felt like , you spent 10 years doing this while in one afternoon with my hands tied behind my back i fixed this ,

it felt like your arguement was too belittle the prior efforts of a whole team because they do not agree with your present opinion,

lets hope that you are in a minority chief and that reason and respect stand up and are heard


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Offline Shade

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Re: An open warning to SCP modders
Trust me, chief is not being unreasonable. Him trying to make a patch is quite the opposite. The fact that he could fix so many issues in such a short time is simply a testament to the sheer amount of minor and easy-to-fix problems in TBP - And if you doubt this, I dare you to try running TBP under a debug build without turning off warnings :p
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Offline Vasudan Admiral

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Re: An open warning to SCP modders
Um, andicirk; Chief's saying he's been trying to fix the bugs in the data of TBP that are causing this entire argument. As I understand it, so is Wanderer. He's not at all trying to belittle the efforts of the team - just pointing out that the bugs themselves are easy to fix and indeed have mostly already been fixed.

Remember - the whole issue here is existing bugs in TBP data that are causing loads of problems for the SCP people on mantis and in general testing. That's what they would like to see fixed by TBP - and between Chief and Wanderer they've been providing many of the fixes themselves. If those bugs are fixed and distributed, the SCP coders will have a much easier time debugging the mod in the future, and would be happy to continue to do so.

They're not demanding the mod make new content to keep up with SCP enhancements or anything like that - just that the data bugs be 'officially' patched to save the coders a lot of time, effort and frustration in their efforts to help TBP users with bugs they encounter when running on new builds.

'Dropping support' does not mean that they're going to intentionally break TBP in future builds.
(Incidentally, if I'm wrong about any intentions here I apologise - I've only come across this entire conflict about an hour ago. ;) )
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Offline karajorma

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Re: An open warning to SCP modders
You've basically summed up the sane position VA.

Let's not go into what the insane position was. :rolleyes:
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Offline blackhole

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Re: An open warning to SCP modders
This entire situation is almost as ridiculous as rainbow colored text

 :D

 

Offline Flipside

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Re: An open warning to SCP modders
I remember when I first released the Azaes, I'd made a couple of simple errors that allowed the model to be parsed by the standard game, but threw out a whole slurry of errors on the test build. They were simple oversights on my part.

Although they didn't cause a direct error, there was a chance that it was cause unpredictable behaviour later on in the game.

From what I understand, this is much the same thing, people might be getting errors in TBP that are caused by something totally unrelated to the crash in question, like an avalanche having virtually nothing to do with a single snowflake once it gets moving.

From what I understand, it's going to be a lot easier to fix problems with the code if the problems with the table entries aren't doing their snowflake bit in the background, because a whole load of problems could be easier to track or removed altogether?

  

Offline Goober5000

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Re: An open warning to SCP modders
W. T. F.

Look, this is an internal issue; nothing has been decided yet; and some of us are still hoping (against all odds) for a peaceful resolution.

Posting this thread in the SCP forum is basically trolling.  I have no intention of letting this turn into a mudslinging match, so thread closed until further notice.