[Black Wolf]

Took some initiative and set this up:

https://www.instagram.com/freespacehlp/

I'll be adding more on a regular basis and experienting with various hashtags, for now.

If anyone who should have them wants the login details I'm more than happy to share.

[General Battuta]

Took some initiative and set this up:

https://www.instagram.com/freespacehlp/

I'll be adding more on a regular basis and experienting with various hashtags, for now.

If anyone who should have them wants the login details I'm more than happy to share.

Ah, this is a super good idea! Instagram is where it's at

[Spoon]

On a few rare occasions, I've seen posts of animated gifs of indie devs move to the front page of Imgur. Which is needless to say, a lot of free exposure.
So following Black Wolf's example of taking some initiative, I created a HLP imgur account: http://imgur.com/user/Freespace2HLP
I'll create some public galleries filled with Freespace related screenshots and gifv's soonish. What I'll need some help with though, is for someone to write a compelling public profile blurb. (Currently it's just a link to the forums, I'd link the front page but its absolutely ****ing dreadful in its current state) Additionally, this imgur account won't really add any extra value unless the posts created with it get a bunch of upvotes to kickstart it into visibility.

[Colonol Dekker]

That'd be a good one to upload the finer shots from a celebration of free space to. 

Instagram more for the screen shot thread winners and "glamorous" stills.   


Edit--shared both groups on facebook. Cross "platform" support is key! tweets may be required.

[Sandwich]

If someone hasn't played FS2 for ten years, perhaps it might be worth finding out why they haven't played for that long instead of trying to bully them into playing more and then saying they shouldn't be offended by it. Someone who hasn't played FS2 in a long time sounds a hell of lot like one of our target audiences.

*sheepishly waves*

I, uhh... I fit into that category.

The main reason I stopped playing FreeSpace was because way back at the beginning, I had a joystick button config meticulously set up for FS2, and a few years later the joystick died. It took me ages until I could find another joystick that could emulate the most valued feature of the dead joystick—the shift button (i.e. main trigger was fire current primary weapons, whereas shift+main trigger would cycle through the selected primary weapons).

Anyway, all that to say, my muscle memory of the old joystick's button mappings made anything less comprehensive frusting, and by the time I got a worthy joystick with shift key functionality, well—I had both forgotten the old mappings and become busy with RL™ stuff.

So yeah, that's my story of why I haven't FS2'd in years. On the other hand, I've had it in the back of my mind that while building out the frontpage and the mandatory installation guide that would go along with it, I'd try it out step-by-step to get screenshots and the like, and perhaps end up—*gasp!*—actually playing a mod! I hear BP's pretty good...

So, what about this idea of having a Help Wanted board?

I'm struggling to articulate why I don't really like the idea. I don't know, my gut feeling is I'm not sure if that's a good idea. Yeah, it aggregates all the possible help that currently existing projects need, but... I don't know, it draws away the attention from the project board (at least if it has one)? I guess it would be viable if project boards are removed or ones that don't have one can make a thread there.

Noted. I think for Phase 2 of the website (which includes Project Hub pages on the site), I'll include checkboxes for the various types of talents needed by projects—modellers, texture artists, FREDders, etc—so a project can tick whatever box they have need for.

[Grizzly]

FS2 plays just as well with a mouse, Sandwich!

[Colonol Dekker]

FS2 plays just as well with a mouse, Sandwich!

I'm a keyboard purist.

[AndrewofDoom]

Just as a note, Karajorma has made the Help Wanted board. I've made my post on help wanted for a noobs2pro project.

[jr2]

You know what really might get me back into FSO, once I get a good graphics card?  The ability to play multi that isn't a lag-fest.  When you need playtesters for ironing out multi, I'll try to help with that.  But yeah, I'll play some new FSO stuff once I get the new card.  I actually quit playing Subnautica for the most part for the same reason (hard playing at 20FPS dipping to 8FPS occasionally).

[Phantom Hoover]

Multi is not going to happen. FSO is a single-player project now. We don't have the resources to fix it or the playerbase to make it worthwhile.

[jr2]

Multi is not going to happen. FSO is a single-player project now. We don't have the resources to fix it or the playerbase to make it worthwhile.

I thought karajorma had it on the backburner?

[Phantom Hoover]

With the best will in the world, Karajorma presumably has the next release of Diaspora higher on his list of priorities, and look how long that's taking. Multi, if it ever happens, will take several years. I think we can probably get promising results from a more proactive marketing strategy and a better installer within the year, so it's worth focusing our attention on that rather than multi.

[AdmiralRalwood]

Multi is not going to happen. FSO is a single-player project now. We don't have the resources to fix it or the playerbase to make it worthwhile.

I thought karajorma had it on the backburner?

Multi has been "on the backburner" for, like, a decade (if not longer). Without a coder that knows netcode, someone would have to basically learn how it works from scratch to be able to perform even marginal improvements, and nobody has that kind of time for something that our active playerbase does not use (of course, improved netcode would increase our potential playerbase significantly... but the people who currently use FSO obviously don't use it for multiplayer).

[xenocartographer]

I know it's a massive codebase, but I've been looking for a project and wouldn't mind taking a look. At the very least, I can get a sense of how quickly I should run away

[jg18]

[Cross-thread quoting FTW]

As some people know, I'm interested in improving the playability of Internet multiplayer, starting with FS2 retail and eventually branching out to mods/TCs. If you're interested in helping me test some things out once I'm ready for that, let me know by PM and I'll PM you when I have something ready to test. Be advised though that between RL and my other SCP tasks, it could be at least a few months before I can really look into it. EDIT: Also if you PM me, please let me know what time zone you're in. I'm in US Pacific Time (GMT-8).

PH: I don't think it'll take years of work to make multi playable, more like several months to a year (famous last words?) once I'm able to focus exclusively on the FSO netcode (there are a couple of other SCP tasks  that have to take higher priority for various reasons).

We've spent some time discussing the netcode in the SCP internal board  and at least some of us (namely taylor, chief, and I) think that the existing netcode might be able to be fixed up rather than our having to replace the netcode and rewrite it from scratch. I'm not 100% sure it'll work but I think it's definitely worth a shot.

We already have one piece of evidence that the netcode might be fixable: the high server pings that were being reported in game turned out to be the result of bad calculations rather than actual lag.

AR: I've studied a fair bit of multi network programming in general  (although I still have quite a bit to learn) and have made significant progrress on understanding several components of the existing FSO netcode. I've done some work documenting what I've learned and have a fair bit more that I could write about what I've found. IF I ever find someone who's seriously interested in helping with the netcode, I can give them a brain dump of everything I've learned about the existing netcode  to help them get up to speed.

xenocartographer: if you're really interested in working on the netcode, PM  me and we can talk about it. You wouldn't need a strong knowledge of network programming or game network programming to start, although of course you'd need to learn it (I can point you to resources) but you would need reasonably strong C/C++ skills at the outset for it to be feasible. The netcode is admittedly not the easiest code to understand, but once you have some background in both general network programming and also multiplayer programming, the netcoe should start to click. But it does take some commitment. I don't want to scare you off but I want to give you realistic expectations for what it'd take.

It's true that the multi player base doesn't really exist anymore. I'm hoping that it'll be a case of "if you build it, they will come" but of course I don't know that'll happen if a TC with a strong multi component releases, that'd help with attracting players who are interested in multi, although getting non-retail features working with the existing netcode is a considerably taller order than getting FS2 retail multi working.. By "several months to a year" that I mentioned above I was thinking FS2 retail multi only, with no support for mods/TCs multi or other non-retail features  yet. That'd come later.

[Spoon]

I started making a post http://imgur.com/a/lgu8K (as far as I understand Imgur, it isn't made public to usersub yet)
Turns out making actions gifs and gathering some screenshots is easy enough. But writing words isn't really my forte, kind of struggling to write a good short summary of FS2 and FSO.

Someone help me out here please.
Also feel free to write up some summary of the mods in there (I just took the descriptions of the mod.ini's for now).

[Phantom Hoover]

PH: I don't think it'll take years of work to make multi playable, more like several months to a year (famous last words?) once I'm able to focus exclusively on the FSO netcode (there are a couple of other SCP tasks  that have to take higher priority for various reasons).

I don't disagree, but in terms of practical real-world results? Who knows how long it'll be until you have several months to a year to focus exclusively on netcode. Blue Planet has, as I understand it, been 'several months of focused work' from a complete release for the better part of a decade now. Real lives get in the way of volunteer modding, and there's nothing wrong with that, but don't let's get distracted by stuff that could easily stay just around the corner for years.

[Colonol Dekker]

I started making a post http://imgur.com/a/lgu8K (as far as I understand Imgur, it isn't made public to usersub yet)
Turns out making actions gifs and gathering some screenshots is easy enough. But writing words isn't really my forte, kind of struggling to write a good short summary of FS2 and FSO.

Someone help me out here please.
Also feel free to write up some summary of the mods in there (I just took the descriptions of the mod.ini's for now).

Needs more hashtag. 
Words are perfunctory.  Hashtags get stuff noticed.

[xenocartographer]

Hashtags don't do much of anything on Imgur. Your post is gonna get seen no matter what; what matters is appealing to usersub, who will (hopefully!) upvote it to the front page.  To that end, I'd suggest more GIFs than still images, because frankly they're more eye-catching. Your opening GIF is also something of an odd choice because it doesn't really transition well at either end and also gives people the idea that the Infyrno is a good weeapon. If I were putting this together, I'd look into staging something that tells a little story - show a transport get blown up with the player coming in guns blazing a second too late, or something like The Little GVB Bakha That Couldn't from 4:44 in QD's Rebels and Renegades playthrough, or... you get the idea. More images in general are also good, because Imgur's gonna want a lot of details, and textwalls don't go over so well on an image-sharing site.

The UEF orbital could also benefit a lot from being a GIF; things drifting stately looks really nice, especially when they look as good as Fed hardware does.



...anyway, I can help with writeups and so on.

[Spoon]

Imgur's video to gif converter only allows for an amazing 15 seconds. Imgur also doesn't allow direct uploading of mp4's or webm's.