Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: Droid803 on May 06, 2021, 04:49:42 pm
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some of you may have known for a while now, but i can't be motivated to do anything related to FS modding for a couple years now
i occasionally still get the itch but them i'm almost instantly reminded of all of the problems and the feeling quickly fades the magic's just not there anymore it's just that it isn't an enjoyable experience once the initial high of thinking of all the things you could possibly do fades away and the reality of how much making any of it actually work just plain SUCKS for one reason or another
it has nothing to do with petty things like criticism or how well my projects are received - to be honest, i could give less of a **** about that
need to get this load off my chest and rant about it - on the off chance that some people out there agree with me and maybe want to make some real changes to improve the experience so let me list some hard truths that have turned me off from FS modding for good:
- backwards compatibility. is a myth. don't let anyone tell you otherwise. things that work perfectly fine will stop working a month later if you don't touch it for the most inane reasons. the more you try to push the boundaries of what the engine could do instead of sticking to what it was made to do (read: retail), the more likely you are to run into this. don't even speak of developing a mod, simply making sure that the mission you finished last week would work this week is a not something you can rely on. there's a topic on hosted project collaboration that basically illustrates the problem here (where a perfectly functioning feature that was available for many release versions was just straight up deleted and nobody was told about it, and the answer to why that could even happen was something along the lines of "this is a known problem with how things are done, but it isn't fixable without an absurd amount of manpower/hours (which doesn't exist), so just get used to it".
- engine bugs. they exist. they're everywhere. i'm not going to go into much detail but they make me pull my hair out because of how hard it is to actually nail one down, have anyone actually admit one even exists, then finally waiting for it to get fixed (and when that finally happens it's been long enough that point 1 rears its ugly head and everything else you've built no longer works so you have to now figure all that **** out. codethulhu is real and lives inside the fso spaghetti code somewhere, just pray he doesn't come visit your mod, because if that happens the end is nigh.
- fred. i hate it. it's kind of archaic, and wrestling with it can be a nightmare in of itself despite some valiant efforts to make it a bit less awful. a true replacement is still vaporware after like over a decade of talking about it. notepad++ is a superior alternative. 'nuff said tbh.
- knossos. on paper this is an amazing and powerful tool, and by all rights its should be, and it probably is for the casual player. but it isn't for modders. in practice it is awful because of some exceptionally questionable design decisions that affect how it works "behind the scenes" with the whole needing an entirely separate FS2 installation folder, and how it butchers the perfectly-functional file structure. it just makes development a nightmare since it's, whoop de doo, not backwards compatible with traditional FS2 file structure, you know, like the ones we used to build and test our mods are have SVNs on? it's stupid and for this reason i have always refused to use it. the fact that it's the new standard is off-putting. this one could very well be a me problem, but at the same time, this is a hill i will die on.
- the whole debugging/polish process. the most un-fun and unrewarding part of modding. probably just a personal thing. can't stand it. because it feels like everything is done but i must keep staring at the same **** over and over until go from liking what i've made to hating what i've made. it literally sucks the soul and enjoyment out of creating anything since i wind up hating everything i've made purely because of this last part of the process. successfully finding a bug is extremely stressful. heaven forbid it's not actually a fredding mistake or something you can easily fix on your end and it's the aformentioned engine bug - in which case abandon all hope because it then leads to point 1 again and the cycle begins anew - an endless spiral of testing, bughunting, waiting, and then repeating. i find enjoyment in the creative expression and putting ideas in my mind into tangible form in the form of a model or mission, not debugging - that is just a burden. in hindsight i should have just released all my mods as dumps/open betas and never attempted to test or fix bugs. it would have saved me so much sanity and enjoyment of the whole thing because i don't give half a damn if anyone actually plays or enjoys my mod to begin with.
- the community. this used to be one of the things i enjoyed most about fs was the terrific community and i've met some great people here, but i honestly don't ****ing know what happened these last couple years the community's quality has really gone on a ****ing nosedive. i don't know what's going on in the discord server, but it's probably at least twice as cancerous as the spillover here i have less than zero interest in finding out more. the objective results are obvious - new and old members alike have been driven away. quite distressing honestly, and it's kind of the last straw.
i don't expect any of this can or will be fixed at all
it hasn't in over a decade, its only gotten worse, if anything
theres probably a point or two in there that could be fixed but it doesn't really matter in the long run since the biggest dealbreaker problems just can't be fixed period so yeah, if you're still making mods: good luck you'll probably need it. you can have some of mine since **** this ****, i'm out.
tl;dr, found out hard way making mod sucks because reasons. reasons won't ever be fixed because can't be. solution is not make mod.
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Dammit droid can I at least add you on Discord before you leave forever :(
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The irony that this is posted at the same time that I post a major mod update and a teaser for a 2nd chapter...
I feel you. In a lot of ways I agree. Backwards compatibility is definitely a problem. I was pretty done with trying to keep up with it for a while. I was even scolded a few times over the fact that I didn't update BtA past 1.5.8 for so long. I had my reasons. But really most of the bugs that cropped up over the years shouldn't have happened. I also agree that this particular problem seems unsolvable.
Oof engine bugs and getting them fixed. Fortunately I often enjoy the debugging process. Call me a masochist, I guess. To me it's like solving a puzzle. That said, I usually bend over completely ass backwards when I file bug reports because they'll go ignored otherwise. SCP has always been that way. You have to provide a retail based, simple reproduceable set of data that can be tested in mere moments and downloaded even faster. That or you just have to be annoying enough to the right SCP members. Neither is particularly fun... but those are the only two ways I've found success getting things fixed reliably.
I would pay cash money for SCP to absolutely prioritize QtFRED and ACTUALLY finish it for real. I don't know that I understand the hold up. Everything we do here is based around missions. Models, scripts, code features... it's all meaningless without missions to play. You'd think a FRED update would be top priority.
I'm not gonna say you're wrong about Knossos. It has it's issues, sure... and Ngld is working on a major overhaul/update that I would hope will address your issues. That said, I do exclusively mod with Knossos and I use SVN through it for both BtA and FSU. I'd never go back to the old way, personally. For what it's worth, there's one person on the BtA team that does not use Knossos while the rest of us do. I don't know how he makes it work, but it's possible!
+1 on point six, though... Especially on Discord. I know I've sometimes been part of the problem, but the people have been out to absolutely eat each other. The forum mods are at least making an effort. As for the Discord, the problem unapologetically comes from the top and that's all I'll say on the matter. What major mod creators are left on the Discord? Goober? EatthePath? Darius was still there a few months ago. Axem's gone entirely. Spoon's gone. You're not there. I'm not there. Battuta purposefully gets himself banned. What mission/campaign creators are left?
Honestly, the biggest boon for me was finding a solid group of individuals to mod with. The group currently working on BtA is fantastic. Great individuals laboring together creatively to tell a story. DefCynodont119 put it best a couple weeks back and I hope he doesn't mind me sharing... he said as a result of this group working together "This has honestly made me a better person". Same goes for me. So, my advice if you really want to scratch the modding itch and avoid the fuss of everything else.. find yourself a few individuals you enjoy and labor together. And for you specifically, find someone who enjoys debugging lol. Sounds like that's just not your cup of tea.
I know we never collab'd or even spoke much. But I always appreciated your work and what you've done for HLP. Wish you the best.
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I don't know that I understand the hold up.
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Honestly, the biggest boon for me was finding a solid group of individuals to mod with. The group currently working on BtA is fantastic. Great individuals laboring together creatively to tell a story. DefCynodont119 put it best a couple weeks back and I hope he doesn't mind me sharing... he said as a result of this group working together "This has honestly made me a better person".
For qtFred, I know a good chunk of the problem is that those who were working the hardest on it are no longer active. Niffiwan put in a lot of work into it, and probably would have finished it, if he were still around. Dahblount has been less active also because of his master's, and I heard that will end in a few weeks.
It's been mostly me, Asteroth, Goober, Taylor, and, when they have time, The_e and m!m still making contributions. (Sorry if I forgot anyone, my memory is not the best)
I actually got the qt environment set up yesterday, which means that I can start making some contributions to it. I started designing the campaign briefing editor. It has most of the buttons, but not the menu set up.
Also, really glad you found that kind of a team! That is a unique thing.
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This actually reminds me of a post of mine from a few months back when I quit the SCP. Some of the reasons were personal to do with how things are organised and some were to do with how on a personal level my fraustration with those issues were having the effect of making modding a lot less fun for me.
Ironically, since I quit, I've spent more time looking at code and modding than I have in years.
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I'm not here to naysay or deny your experiences. Your experiences are your experiences, they actually happened and I'm sorry that they did. But I don't want this forum to be filled with vocal negativity, when there is also positivity to be had that would otherwise be quiet. I can't say much to counteract any of your experiences, you described them well, and why you feel the way you did. But I really need to express pretty much the opposite opinion on almost all your points. Again, not to contradict you, but merely to provide other voices to this community, to show that not everyone here feels negatively. That onlookers can balance the good with the bad.
There is a lot of things I could say about your other points, that I've wrote and re-wrote, but really, all I mostly want to say is about the community. I've had almost entirely positive interactions with the community, here and on the Discord. In general, people are very helpful and its been very enjoyable to collaborate and help people where I can. There is occasionally drama, but this is exception, rather than the rule, and there has always been some level of drama, even here on the forums and as long as this forum has existed. The low barrier to communication on the Discord is why I personally am drawn more there than to the forums, as it allows for much quicker iteration, when it comes to collaboration and bug fixing. I can't recount how many bug fixes and features I've implemented and put in a nightly the very same day it is brought up on Discord!
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As much as I don't want to diminish your work or the issues you have faced while doing it, you still should consider this. This is modding for a game and a community that is over 20 years old by now, and I think literally everyone doing anything in this community is doing this in their free time as a hobby. Obviously this means not enough manpower, not enough time for making massive changes in the game, large projects being made overnight, ect...
So I personally am trying my best, as a player, at appreciating what I have right here within reach. It's got its own magic to it.
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You shouldn't be modding if you hate it. There's plenty of things out there to enjoy. But I for one always enjoy coming back to HL and seeing what the community keeps making. The work you do do isn't unappreciated.
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I can only really echo Asteroth, pretty much everything he said is true of my perspective as well. There's probably a lot of conversations that could be had about all of this, but I don't think I know how to start any of them right now.
At the risk of receiving a fresh venting of spleen, I do want to ask...
there's a topic on hosted project collaboration that basically illustrates the problem here (where a perfectly functioning feature that was available for many release versions was just straight up deleted and nobody was told about it, and the answer to why that could even happen was something along the lines of "this is a known problem with how things are done, but it isn't fixable without an absurd amount of manpower/hours (which doesn't exist), so just get used to it".
What's this about? I can't see the forum in question, and I've been haunting SCP development for a while now but can't think of anything this would fit.
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What's this about? I can't see the forum in question,
You have to be a person of contact for a hosted project to see it.
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That part wasn't too mysterious to me, I'm more interested in the feature being refereed to.
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Backwards compatibility has always been a problem and there isn't really any good solution to it. It's very hard to keep track of changes over time that break things or worse, alter them in subtle ways. Debugging and playtesting missions is definitely a chore, but when you put a lot of work into something you want to make it perfect. It's tedious and grindy but you get motivated when you think of the final product. I think FRED is decent as far as game editing tools go, better than many tools I've seen for other games. Knossos has its quirks and I've never done much development with it, but it's great for getting new people into the game without hassles, which is increasingly important over time.
I have not been very active here in many years, but this community is really what spurred all the campaign and content releases over time. This place became a social hub for many of us at various points in the past, and making campaigns, models and other stuff and sharing them with others and hearing their feedback made it all worthwhile. I'm actually pleasantly surprised there is still so much development going on here.
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The a major problem with FRED when you start making missions of a certain complexity in one image:
(https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/764184678672105497/840270146161082458/Unbenannt.png?width=1248&height=683)
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True, the event editor has always been frustrating. It would be better if it was like a scripting language where you could type stuff instead of going through those dropdown menus.
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True, the event editor has always been frustrating. It would be better if it was like a scripting language where you could type stuff instead of going through those dropdown menus.
Sure, that is one of its biggest advantages (if the functionality you are looking for is among the SEXPs, which it may not be - sometimes to a baffeling degree).
But have you ever tried making a mission which responds to player loadout or campaign progress in any meaningful way? - as soon as you have event structures that are either paralell or mutually exclusive, the fact that FRED was design only to support linear event structures is a cliff that is coming at you fast.
EDIT: reason was interrupted by a telephone call
The issue there is not that you cannot do it but the easiest way seems to be the most counterinitutive - making almost the required segement of the event list multiple times and using a variable as limiting condition to keep them from interfering with each other.
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5. the whole debugging/polish process. the most un-fun and unrewarding part of modding. probably just a personal thing. can't stand it. because it feels like everything is done but i must keep staring at the same **** over and over until go from liking what i've made to hating what i've made. it literally sucks the soul and enjoyment out of creating anything since i wind up hating everything i've made purely because of this last part of the process. successfully finding a bug is extremely stressful. heaven forbid it's not actually a fredding mistake or something you can easily fix on your end and it's the aforementioned engine bug - in which case abandon all hope because it then leads to point 1 again and the cycle begins anew - an endless spiral of testing, bughunting, waiting, and then repeating. i find enjoyment in the creative expression and putting ideas in my mind into tangible form in the form of a model or mission, not debugging - that is just a burden. in hindsight i should have just released all my mods as dumps/open betas and never attempted to test or fix bugs. it would have saved me so much sanity and enjoyment of the whole thing because i don't give half a damn if anyone actually plays or enjoys my mod to begin with.
I can relate to this, I know that boring slog. In the past I tried to power through it, but the results were not satisfying. So I stopped trying to finish X by date Y. Instead I only work on modding stuff when I'm in the mood for it and let it rest otherwise. The result is that I haven't released anything in years and sometimes I don't touch anything FS2_open related for half a year.... but I always come back to it and work on stuff in creative "spurts". In the end, I dabble around with models and mods for my own enjoyment... maybe something release-worthy comes out of it, or maybe not.
tl;dr: take a break and play other games, your enjoyment of FS2 modding may come back with some distance.
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I like the polish part the most, it's when you get to add all the special touches and grace notes :nervous:
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True, the event editor has always been frustrating. It would be better if it was like a scripting language where you could type stuff instead of going through those dropdown menus.
Counter Argument: the drop-down menu setup makes it much approachable for new users, It's not like everyone who opens FRED is a programmer,
That said It would be awesome if there was some kind togglable "script view" that would show the events list in text-file form. :yes:
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True, the event editor has always been frustrating. It would be better if it was like a scripting language where you could type stuff instead of going through those dropdown menus.
That said It would be awesome if there was some kind togglable "script view" that would show the events list in text-file form. :yes:
I mean... FSO has a scripting system for a reason....
There's absolutely nothing stopping you from coding your entire mission in a script
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True, the event editor has always been frustrating. It would be better if it was like a scripting language where you could type stuff instead of going through those dropdown menus.
That said It would be awesome if there was some kind togglable "script view" that would show the events list in text-file form. :yes:
I mean... FSO has a scripting system for a reason....
There's absolutely nothing stopping you from coding your entire mission in a script
I know SCP loves to just tell people to go script it when a potential feature is discussed, but knowing Def, he was absolutely not suggesting SCP add the ability to lua script a mission into FRED. He was suggesting a toggle in the Events Editor that switches from the Event Tree view to the actual Event list text that gets saved to the mission file. This is an idea I would so fully endorse.
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I mean... FSO has a scripting system for a reason....
There's absolutely nothing stopping you from coding your entire mission in a script
While certainly possible, this strikes me as a bad idea.
Counter Argument: the drop-down menu setup makes it much approachable for new users, It's not like everyone who opens FRED is a programmer,
That said It would be awesome if there was some kind togglable "script view" that would show the events list in text-file form. :yes:
Having a text editor with some sort of syntax highlighting magic would be good, yes.
.... that shouldn't even be impossible in any way, we already have a lot of the stuff we'd need to do syntax evaluation in the engine, it's just a matter of tuning it for that purpose ....
*Goes away, thinking furiously*
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, but knowing Def, he was absolutely not suggesting SCP add the ability to lua script a mission into FRED. He was suggesting a toggle in the Events Editor that switches from the Event Tree view to the actual Event list text that gets saved to the mission file. This is an idea I would so fully endorse.
That is Correct, :P
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Having a text editor with some sort of syntax highlighting magic would be good, yes.
.... that shouldn't even be impossible in any way, we already have a lot of the stuff we'd need to do syntax evaluation in the engine, it's just a matter of tuning it for that purpose ....
syntax highlight, autocomplete suggestions, and paren matching/code folding... normally I'd say in that order, but for the LISPy syntax, paren matching might be the most powerful tool to have.
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A text window in the event editor would be perfect. You can have it side by side with the tree view, and edit events either way. There would have to be some auto-checking for all the spacing, tabs, etc. though.
I can relate to this, I know that boring slog. In the past I tried to power through it, but the results were not satisfying. So I stopped trying to finish X by date Y. Instead I only work on modding stuff when I'm in the mood for it and let it rest otherwise. The result is that I haven't released anything in years and sometimes I don't touch anything FS2_open related for half a year.... but I always come back to it and work on stuff in creative "spurts". In the end, I dabble around with models and mods for my own enjoyment... maybe something release-worthy comes out of it, or maybe not.
tl;dr: take a break and play other games, your enjoyment of FS2 modding may come back with some distance.
I do the same thing with other creative hobbies too. I may work on something intensely for a while, then leave it half-finished if I run out of ideas, and come back to it years later.
That being said, one problem with game mods is many people never finish their project but don't release it either, even after doing a lot of work. At some point releasing what you have allows others in the community to benefit and build off it, especially models or other assets.
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Having a text editor with some sort of syntax highlighting magic would be good, yes.
.... that shouldn't even be impossible in any way, we already have a lot of the stuff we'd need to do syntax evaluation in the engine, it's just a matter of tuning it for that purpose ....
We do? FRED literally error checks missions by saving them and then loading them back in again IIRC. Getting a text editor to work in FRED doesn't sound like a simple issue to me, getting it to work alongside the current system sounds like a nightmare, especially given the number of things a bracket in the wrong place can mean. One major advantage of the current system is that it makes it very hard to make that sort of error.
But if you think it can be done, I'd be interested in hearing how.
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We do? FRED literally error checks missions by saving them and then loading them back in again IIRC. Getting a text editor to work in FRED doesn't sound like a simple issue to me, getting it to work alongside the current system sounds like a nightmare, especially given the number of things a bracket in the wrong place can mean. One major advantage of the current system is that it makes it very hard to make that sort of error.
But if you think it can be done, I'd be interested in hearing how.
On a basic level, we can throw any string at the event parser and see if it can make sense of it, and it will even generate error messages telling you pretty precisely what it chokes on. We have a comprehensive set of validators for any data type the engine supports, we have a comprehensive list of allowed operators and their arguments and returns. That's already most of the hard and tedious parts of making a code completion engine in place (but, as said, not tuned for that purpose).
It's not going to be easy or anything, but it's certainly not an impossibility.
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Being able to view multiple events without scrolling would be a help, e.g. by having them displayed in a seperate, read-only window on request.
A text edit would also help with certain applications, e.g. when you have events that do the same operations but to different lists of arguments and using a different variable (things similar to the image pasted above). I got a bunch of those and the whole song and dance* could be a lot smoother by just being able to make the edits in text format.
* (of making them once, creating the duplicate events, saving the file, opening it in a text editor, copy and pasting the event's operations, search and replacing the variable names, and then reloading the mission in FRED)