I'd like to see the CDT planning process made public
Hugh
CameramanSan Francisco, CA Join Date: 2010-04-18 Member: 71444NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Reinforced - Silver, Reinforced - Onos, WC 2013 - Shadow, Subnautica Developer, Pistachionauts
CameramanSan Francisco, CA Join Date: 2010-04-18 Member: 71444NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Reinforced - Silver, Reinforced - Onos, WC 2013 - Shadow, Subnautica Developer, Pistachionauts
Hi guys! I spend most of my time working on Subnautica these days. I am looking forward to assisting with getting the word out about a future update when the time comes, and playing lots of NS2! Something is bugging me, though.
One of the biggest successes UWE has had with Subnautica is making our entire planning process public. There are a gazillion ways for people to yell at us when we do stupid stuff, and pat us on the back when we do good stuff. This results in consistently better development decisions than when things happen behind closed doors.
I've been trying to get more information about what exactly CDT is doing, but I've been told that plans are 'still be worked on' and 'will go out to the public' when 'ready.' I feel like CDT plans are something that happen separate from the NS2 community, rather than within in. I wonder if there is any support out there among you all to try to open this process up more.
Sometimes I hear things like 'new game modes!' and 'new weapons!' I want to argue that this is a bad idea - That crushingly massive load times, poor animation responsiveness, downright atrocious match discovery, and other fundamental things are more important. But I don't have a vector to do it. An example from Subnautica might be memory crashes - We didn't realise memory crashes were as big an issue as they were, and it was only community feedback that made us realise. We had to stop, drop everything, and improve the memory situation. Perhaps there is an NS2 parallel here.
What's the feeling out there? Is CDT already open enough? Could we open it up more? Maybe these vectors already exist? If so, what's the best way to see this stuff?
One of the biggest successes UWE has had with Subnautica is making our entire planning process public. There are a gazillion ways for people to yell at us when we do stupid stuff, and pat us on the back when we do good stuff. This results in consistently better development decisions than when things happen behind closed doors.
I've been trying to get more information about what exactly CDT is doing, but I've been told that plans are 'still be worked on' and 'will go out to the public' when 'ready.' I feel like CDT plans are something that happen separate from the NS2 community, rather than within in. I wonder if there is any support out there among you all to try to open this process up more.
Sometimes I hear things like 'new game modes!' and 'new weapons!' I want to argue that this is a bad idea - That crushingly massive load times, poor animation responsiveness, downright atrocious match discovery, and other fundamental things are more important. But I don't have a vector to do it. An example from Subnautica might be memory crashes - We didn't realise memory crashes were as big an issue as they were, and it was only community feedback that made us realise. We had to stop, drop everything, and improve the memory situation. Perhaps there is an NS2 parallel here.
What's the feeling out there? Is CDT already open enough? Could we open it up more? Maybe these vectors already exist? If so, what's the best way to see this stuff?
Comments
It was all great stuff - I'm looking forward to the possibility of a public automated build process, I reckon this will address alot of the 'what is going on questions' for many of us. It will also give the CDT the chance to show off all the hard work they've been doing. Many of these guys and girls are busting gut in their free time, all so we can enjoy a better NS2 in future.
All of them actively offered help in the form of crash reports with dull dump files, weeks of performance records carefully and individually selected in 10h shifts, logfile archives, stats on stability, performance stats, player preferences, game improvements to raise ns2 playercount, bug reproductions, and much more...
One server eventually managed to capture the engine devs attention with exceptional datasets. 200 emails later, ns2ds performance was improved by a total of 20% with potential for more.
However once found out by CDT Lead, that activity was quickly and silently shut down.
Before they were suddenly required to even get a build machine running (that's the parallel you're wondering about btw) without any warning I thought the way they managed community interaction and got feedback was great. They're all extremely active forum users, Wasabi used to do semi frequent blog posts and the Trello board are all enough for me to know what is happening. Once everything is back on track and they can actually start pushing fixes and content I'm sure it'll go back to how it was before. If enough volunteers are still working on improving the game.
The Trello reports I feel are always enough, with the last 5 month update interval as the only exception.
Remember Hugh, that there are going to be more unhappy people in the long-run if long standing primary issues (performance & bugs) are not addressed. New content isn't as important to me at least.
--
Really the best thing that could be done for everyone's interests are streamlining the development overhead. That begins with UWE. The quicker appropriate changes are accepted, integrated and published - the better for the developers & players.
Here is to another year of NS2, and may many more years it will stay.
I just pray that they get one working soon so that we can finally get this next update out, it has started feeling like the next NS2 update will be bundled with HL3.
An operator that doesn't play on his own server to see whether people are enjoying themselves as much as possible will ultimatively crash and burn.
If you don't play ....