Pondering Rapid Iteration - Natural Selection 2

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  • OscarTheCouchOscarTheCouch Join Date: 2005-01-10 Member: 34647Members, Constellation, Reinforced - Shadow
    Good reason for me to catch up on my other games i guess.
  • Jones108Jones108 Join Date: 2012-12-10 Member: 174670Members
    edited December 2015
    Software is not an easy thing with its many lines of code. It is good to have some time for builds. The only thing you can change (without blowing it up) is opening this up under beta build, so the people that want it can more easily join.

    And this is something that surprises me aswell, but let me tell you from this side of the earth there are many in this game that dont even wanna try custom maps, so i dont think you really have the people for that.

    Also what i would like to see is lastman standing mode (you already had that at some point, why it got remove? *sadface*) aswell something with gorges.
    The things Cory makes got so much character.

    Gotta do something with it!

    Im sure you guys can.


  • Kouji_SanKouji_San Sr. Hινε Uρкεερεг - EUPT Deputy The Netherlands Join Date: 2003-05-13 Member: 16271Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue
    edited December 2015
    In other news, our planet called Earth is a "sphere". This results in the sun not being able to shine on all of the planet's surface at any given time, which give us our day and night cycle. If you take this one step further it's also tilted, not that this has anything to do with the point I'm trying to make right now. But it does give us summer/winter vs winter/summer on the north and south sides of the planet...


    What am I going on about you ask...


    Timezones and the chaos that comes from, that if a patch goes out and is bugged. While mr patchmaker and all the server ops in the night time areas are doing their sleepything

    Also observe as the UWE team is indeed scattered across the world:
    http://unknownworlds.com/about/

    Enjoy your chaos

  • simple_simple_ Join Date: 2013-09-10 Member: 188102Members
    Jones108 wrote: »
    Software is not an easy thing with its many lines of code. It is good to have some time for builds. The only thing you can change (without blowing it up) is opening this up under beta build, so the people that want it can more easily join.

    Having complex software and a fast update cycle are not mutably exclusive, not at all.
  • Kouji_SanKouji_San Sr. Hινε Uρкεερεг - EUPT Deputy The Netherlands Join Date: 2003-05-13 Member: 16271Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue
    simple_ wrote: »
    Jones108 wrote: »
    Software is not an easy thing with its many lines of code. It is good to have some time for builds. The only thing you can change (without blowing it up) is opening this up under beta build, so the people that want it can more easily join.

    Having complex software and a fast update cycle are not mutably exclusive, not at all.

    In an ideal single player environment perhaps, that's using a beta/live branch. But the issues that have been brought up:
    • This is a multiplayer game dependent on a lot of factors
    • All players are now essentially PT's
    • Game is kinda back in alpha/beta mode, for a game that people paid money for as a gold version
    • Server ops having to babysit their servers 24/7
    • Competitive matches having different version between matches or crashes of a player
    • Timezones...
    • Version difference for newbie players who don't understand that NS2 is now in rapid fire patch mode
  • simple_simple_ Join Date: 2013-09-10 Member: 188102Members
    Kouji_San wrote: »
    [*]All players are now essentially PT's
    I think thats an advantage. More feedback. Also keep in mind that smaller updates will have smaller impact.
    Kouji_San wrote: »
    [*]Server ops having to babysit their servers 24/7
    [*]Competitive matches having different version between matches or crashes of a player
    [*]Timezones...
    That would be solved by my earlier proposal about having two versions and letting the server admins decided when to switch/update.
    Kouji_San wrote: »
    [*]Version difference for newbie players who don't understand that NS2 is now in rapid fire patch mode[/list]
    I doubt that rookies notice the differences between smaller patches.
  • Kouji_SanKouji_San Sr. Hινε Uρкεερεг - EUPT Deputy The Netherlands Join Date: 2003-05-13 Member: 16271Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue
    edited December 2015
    simple_ wrote: »
    Kouji_San wrote: »
    [*]All players are now essentially PT's
    I think thats an advantage. More feedback. Also keep in mind that smaller updates will have smaller impact.

    Right, so forcing your customers who paid for the game to be testers... The ones who are not in the slightest interested in giving feedback and just want to play the game. Playtesting requires a special brand of crazy :trollface:

    simple_ wrote: »
    Kouji_San wrote: »
    [*]Server ops having to babysit their servers 24/7
    [*]Competitive matches having different version between matches or crashes of a player
    [*]Timezones...
    That would be solved by my earlier proposal about having two versions and letting the server admins decided when to switch/update.

    That could be a solution, but given that steam servers aren't exactly known for superb reliability for quick patching. With their special needs, slow update rate and random hiccups from time to time. That is a very big gamble putting that amount of trust in a third party like Steam servers. Not to mention, being forced to have two NS2's installed on your server box. And heck even some clients have tiny hard drives still.

    And competitive players and NSL will not be happy having constant interruptions with version changes, let alone gameplay changes... But yeah UWE has forced those patches during league matches before and look how that was received...

    simple_ wrote: »
    Kouji_San wrote: »
    [*]Version difference for newbie players who don't understand that NS2 is now in rapid fire patch mode[/list]
    I doubt that rookies notice the differences between smaller patches.

    They will definitely notice, if their game doesn't show proper servers to join if a patch is out and their friends are on one server while they still can't update due to Steam Server being slow bastards with spreading those patched across the world wide Steam network.



    This is all gambling on perfect scenarios, which is not possible when you're dealing with a not ideal and slow update system like Steamworks... I just understood that this "25min update patch schedule" was a nonsensical statement by @Hugh it seems, AGAIN with the buzzwords or edgy text, to sound hip... Biweekly/Weekly, that could be done. But even that caused problems back in alpha/beta days, with the above issues...
  • ZEROibisZEROibis Join Date: 2009-10-30 Member: 69176Members, Constellation
    Obraxis wrote: »
    This doesn't sound practical in a multiplayer environment.

    It actually already happens. With NS2+.

    Mendasp can update it as much as he wants, as often as he wants. As an example, if you put the latest build of NS2 into a mod on Steam, it will auto-update everyone & servers at the end of a round, or on map-change. And with more than 1 person developing this 'mod' (which is NS2) iteration can be faster, and bugs fixed quicker. A new Hive backend can be constructed so that if Steam fails, the 'mod' can always be got.

    I'm not saying this is the best way to do it, but to me, it's the most practical. Emulate NS2+ and how Mendasp has updated and worked on his mod, and apply it to NS2's own development. He proved that it can work very well, it might be time to emulate his methods for NS2 itself.


    Except that there is no dependencies on his mod. Changes to his mod do not require changes to be made by other independent mods in order for a server running these things to work.
  • MaxAmusMaxAmus UK Join Date: 2003-12-26 Member: 24779Members, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Reinforced - Shadow
    I just dont see this working, as has been pointed out -

    You release new / changed features to a game that is already hard to learn and play for new palyers, So they play a few rounds, enjoy it, come back a few days later - and stuff has changed and they dont like how its changed because they just spent nearly a day learning parts of the game, Now they have to spend another day trying to catch up with the new changes.

    I think everyone is all for changes if it makes the game better - But this, this just wont work, there is so much that can break, its already been pointed out.

    So what "updates" should we expect ? what changes?
  • ZEROibisZEROibis Join Date: 2009-10-30 Member: 69176Members, Constellation
    If you want to be able to have servers updated often UWE needs to reach out to the seDirector devs and see if they can get NS2 supported. This combined with an ingame plugin like how it works for source games can enable servers to automatically notify users of a game update and reboot/update the server while at the same time providing the normal crash detection that we all need to keep our servers online. I believe seDirector also works for game server providers so it resolves a lot of issues they would run into trying to be supportive of a rapid update model.
  • ZEROibisZEROibis Join Date: 2009-10-30 Member: 69176Members, Constellation
    Could be that they want to be able to push fast DLC changes without needing to wait for a big patch to be ready. If you do not want sales to be held hostage by your patch schedule you want to make it so that you can apply DLC and content changes on the fly without messing with the work being done on the "next patch". When you think of what is being discussed here in that context it sounds a bit more logical.
  • .trixX..trixX. Budapest Join Date: 2007-10-11 Member: 62605Members
    ZEROibis wrote: »
    Could be that they want to be able to push fast DLC changes without needing to wait for a big patch to be ready. If you do not want sales to be held hostage by your patch schedule you want to make it so that you can apply DLC and content changes on the fly without messing with the work being done on the "next patch". When you think of what is being discussed here in that context it sounds a bit more logical.

    DLC's are for EA and Microsoft... xP I'd rather have this game stay the way it is, with a bit of performance polishing (load time patch was awesome). UWE kind of gave up on it because it stopped making (enough) money... I'm not blaming them for that, it's perfectly logical. But now they want to upset the community which has been working on the game instead of the publishers? That's insane. Not to mention that this game will NEVER be a best selling big name, because it's too complex. I'd dare say even more so than any RTS, because of the FPS player factor... It's just simply not a casual game. You have to have some freakness in you to love this game.
  • HoeloeHoeloe Switzerland Join Date: 2014-03-02 Member: 194487Members, NS2 Playtester, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Shadow
    I really don't like the idea of rapidfire updates. Imagine you publish a new build at 20.00 CET. With the allready updated client i woudn't be able join a single server, while others still playing with old builds on old servers. It would be a mess for players and serveradmins. And we allready had this with frequently updated Mods, remember "Missing required Mod." ?

    The only "rapid" development process I could imgaine would be weekly updates, something like every thursday we push an update. But I would prefer more every 3rd week or monthly updates and if necessary hotfixes within 1-2 days.

    And this is also because I think every build needs to be testet, you never know when you break something. Worst case: Any Dev pushes an update (wich unwitting breaks the game) late night and then goes to bed.
  • G_of_the_JG_of_the_J Join Date: 2013-08-12 Member: 186764Members
    Blogpost as a Too Long; Didn't Read:

    Game is back on beta. Everybody is a Playtester now.
  • aeroripperaeroripper Join Date: 2005-02-25 Member: 42471NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators, Constellation
    Use the beta branch for rapid fire updates, if anything doesn't explode, do a weekly update on the main build. Maybe on Thurs night. That would make more sense than bringing down the reliable branch often with large bugs.
  • FoxyFoxy United Kingdom Join Date: 2014-08-19 Member: 198032Members, NS2 Playtester, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Shadow
    I'm pretty into another game that has a model I think NS2 would benefit from. Rust (Experimental). Its the survival crafting game by Facepunch (garrys mod) and It's still early access so every build is essentially one that needs playtesting. Currently they release a patch on the first thursday of every month to the general public, but the development branch is being constantly updated and they receive constant feedback as a result, as more and more commits are merged into main and everything remains stable, it obviously moves toward a full release in a controlled, yet frequent way.

    There is a community led slack for people that operate servers, both modded and vanilla, The facepunch team are on there as are the oxide (mod platform) devs and a plethora of other community members including staff from EAC (Easy Anti Cheat). I know various organisations in the community have their own respective slack platforms and this is good, however I believe it would be good for the cohesion of the community to have a main UWE slack, with a twitter feed set up by UWE for the community to see who commits what and into what branch, perhaps one to feed from trello cards being updated and maybe something like JIRA for bug tracking that could also feed into the slack.
  • SantaClawsSantaClaws Denmark Join Date: 2012-07-31 Member: 154491Members, Reinforced - Shadow
    @FoxyUK Let's not confuse early-access-games, like Rust, with fully released games, like NS2. People have bought this game with the expectation, that the game is finished. People bought Rust, with the expectation that it would have frequent updates and the occasional gamebreaking bug.

    It is NOT fair, to force the remaining NS2 population to be beta testers after they already committed money to the product, on the premise that they are paying for a full product.
  • DaphistoDaphisto Hive Janitor Join Date: 2002-11-16 Member: 8917Members, Reinforced - Shadow
    I'm definitely on board with what UWE is now planning to do with NS2.

    We all knew that something needed to change with this game as it is a dying game, yet it has so much potential to be popular/amazing.

    There's no doubt in my mind that this game can indeed become a top-tier game on steam (at least in the top 50 for player count). It will be good to see some outside-the-box thinking go into streamlining the player experience and remove some of the down-time in the game that causes players to leave and never come back.

    The future is bright! I'm excited.
  • AeglosAeglos Join Date: 2010-04-06 Member: 71189Members
    Daphisto wrote: »
    I'm definitely on board with what UWE is now planning to do with NS2.

    We all knew that something needed to change with this game as it is a dying game, yet it has so much potential to be popular/amazing.

    There's no doubt in my mind that this game can indeed become a top-tier game on steam (at least in the top 50 for player count). It will be good to see some outside-the-box thinking go into streamlining the player experience and remove some of the down-time in the game that causes players to leave and never come back.

    The future is bright! I'm excited.

    Perhaps you may enlighten us as to "what" is as nobody seems to have committed to anything so far.
  • CCTEECCTEE Join Date: 2013-06-20 Member: 185634Members, Reinforced - Shadow
    I don't get the 'OMG game is dieing, let's do something NOW!'-'panic', including the motivation for UWE to get into development.
    We had a group of volunteers who made life for the few remaining fanboys and now-and-then new joiners better, for free.
    Why force this new development experiment on us? The game is old, old games die after awhile.
    You want to make yourself usefull and make some actual money? Start on NS3.
  • NordicNordic Long term camping in Kodiak Join Date: 2012-05-13 Member: 151995Members, NS2 Playtester, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Supporter, Reinforced - Silver, Reinforced - Shadow
    edited December 2015
    I am still not sold on the Why part of rapid iteration.
    Aeglos wrote: »
    Daphisto wrote: »
    I'm definitely on board with what UWE is now planning to do with NS2.

    We all knew that something needed to change with this game as it is a dying game, yet it has so much potential to be popular/amazing.

    There's no doubt in my mind that this game can indeed become a top-tier game on steam (at least in the top 50 for player count). It will be good to see some outside-the-box thinking go into streamlining the player experience and remove some of the down-time in the game that causes players to leave and never come back.

    The future is bright! I'm excited.

    Perhaps you may enlighten us as to "what" is as nobody seems to have committed to anything so far.

    This was posted awhile back. https://docs.google.com/document/d/15RIkv_zrvS_8d_7UHG0vOFu3K5XVXv2BocKKShiK-MI/edit?pli=1#heading=h.l3mz7kqqrodp
  • AeglosAeglos Join Date: 2010-04-06 Member: 71189Members
    Nordic wrote: »
    I am still not sold on the Why part of rapid iteration.
    Aeglos wrote: »
    Daphisto wrote: »
    I'm definitely on board with what UWE is now planning to do with NS2.

    We all knew that something needed to change with this game as it is a dying game, yet it has so much potential to be popular/amazing.

    There's no doubt in my mind that this game can indeed become a top-tier game on steam (at least in the top 50 for player count). It will be good to see some outside-the-box thinking go into streamlining the player experience and remove some of the down-time in the game that causes players to leave and never come back.

    The future is bright! I'm excited.

    Perhaps you may enlighten us as to "what" is as nobody seems to have committed to anything so far.

    This was posted awhile back. https://docs.google.com/document/d/15RIkv_zrvS_8d_7UHG0vOFu3K5XVXv2BocKKShiK-MI/edit?pli=1#heading=h.l3mz7kqqrodp

    It says proposal right at the top, I didn't take that as a commitment. It also says "approved by Jekt" at the bottom now though, so...
  • Deck_Deck_ Join Date: 2014-07-20 Member: 197526Members
    edited December 2015
    CCTEE wrote: »
    I don't get the 'OMG game is dieing, let's do something NOW!'-'panic', including the motivation for UWE to get into development.
    We had a group of volunteers who made life for the few remaining fanboys and now-and-then new joiners better, for free.
    Why force this new development experiment on us? The game is old, old games die after awhile.
    You want to make yourself usefull and make some actual money? Start on NS3.

    Yeah, but that requires a lot of work and no guarantee NS3 is going to do well. NS2 already has a player base (even though it's small) you see a lot of the same people stay with this game. They haven't even tried to add fun things to the game recently that I can remember. It's mostly been focused on performance which this game really needed. Now it's a lot easier to play this game with decent frame rate most of the time (when not in huge servers). Now I hope UWE focuses on adding things to make people stay with the game, and adding fun things to hook people. It's worth a shot, this game has great game-play. NS may always be a small game because it takes many hours to get the movements down, and you have to be willing to go through many painful rounds to learn things.

    It looks like UWE does see potential. If the game wasn't fun to play, I would say give up on it. I don't think most people that play this game think that though. It does a lot right game-play wise, it just needs the hooks and some hope for the future.
  • FrozenFrozen New York, NY Join Date: 2010-07-02 Member: 72228Members, Constellation
    I play this game alot and I don't think it's fun most of the time lol @Deck_
  • alsteralster Join Date: 2003-08-06 Member: 19124Members
    Hugh's big goals are almost impossible in 3 months unless he gets things done in the way he discusses. Pain for servers, modders, and players will be part of it. If this is the only way NS2 will live on than I'm all for it.
  • NominousNominous Baltimore, MD Join Date: 2012-02-18 Member: 146518Members
    I don't see why rapid iteration is necessary. I assume this idea came about in order to take full advantage of the new build machine. This seems to be backwards thinking, though. You have a "how" and you don't have a "what". What would rapid iteration combined with public feedback benefit? Game play/balance changes come to mind first, but I'm afraid how this would work. Compared to the existing play testers, the entire player base has varying degrees of in-game experience, skill, professionalism, trustworthiness, etc. The first two points might be good for diverse feedback, but the latter two can be problematic. Would devs have to sift through hundreds or thousands of typed submissions in order to determine the worth of individual feedback? Would feedback only consist of radio button-filled surveys that might not fully express player concerns?

    I thought the features listed in Obraxis's and BeigeAlert's project proposal could be a possible "what", but they're really not. Asset creation and coding would take up the majority of the devs' time and the features would need to be implemented and tested internally before they're patched. It makes no sense to release these features untested and there is no need to make lightning-fast changes to them. Feedback is not terribly important here either unless you're accepting ideas for achievements, skins and whatnot.

    I say take advantage of the new build machine's speed, sure, but keep releasing patches after internal testing. Players want a silky smooth game experience and the majority would not appreciate being forced to become "release testers". I suggest attracting more playtesters and incentivizing them with in-game rewards if you feel like you're unable to test changes quickly enough. Something like a patch every week or two is a lot quicker than the previous monolithic patches and it isn't as turbulent as patching every 30 minutes.
  • UncleCrunchUncleCrunch Mayonnaise land Join Date: 2005-02-16 Member: 41365Members, Reinforced - Onos
    To be honest i think everyone focuses too much on "faster iterations" while this really is about agile software development.

    The Agile Manifesto

    Everyone of us is very much aware that daily builds are not an option at the moment due to:
    1. We have no way to automatically validate builds
    2. NS2 relies on mods that we can't afford to break
    3. Server admin take about 1 day to update
    4. We have no way to gather user feedback fast enough to react on critical changes.

    But if we find a way to solve some of those issues a faster release cycle (not directly daily builds) is possible to do.

    What's the idea behind using agile development for NS2 is basically that the past has shown that often features which were developed over month had absolute no effect on the player base and went unnoticed/unused. From now on we do not want to invest any time on a feature that you neither want nor use in the end.

    Secondly NS2 builds often got rather complex with many features depending onto each other. Then when one of those feature turned out to be broken we often had no other choice but to revert a complete set of features. That should not happen anymore. Of course we don't want to use the player base as testers but there will be always edge cases all our internal tests won't cover. Those issues have to be uncovered and reacted on much faster than they have been reacted on in the past 2 years.

    @elodea Every update will come with a change log as we have to make sure you are actually aware what to give feedback on. We even already went a step further and made the ns2 repositories commit history public (still WIP): http://goo.gl/hDlYAU

    Thank you SOOOOO much! They didn't see it at all. Thank you again... (1000 times). Whoooo, it's a better day suddenly.

    I would add : they focus on changes only in the code. A map fix or texture fix is quite acceptable in this case. Many things aren't directly related to the "coOOOode". What about the web interface on servers ? They all are supposed to be tested differently as they are actually different. etc. Up the the dev/contributors to stick with it. Nothing is perfect, and we aren't in the fanboy wonderland.

    @Hugh
    This would need a transition time to make it slowly taking over (take the time, remember ?). Though I think we can't get rid of processes in the development area (People miss to understand that concerning Agile), it worth a try. I think it would make a good publicity. Only fanboys care about big patches. I prefer many non disrupting little patches (art, translation, etc) than huge A'patch'calypse. People would see it goes forward. Again, non disruptive patch is ok. The danger zone would be to do the same with more important things. just don't

    That said: it is quite intriguing to see you having this idea while it may not be your field. I may be wrong on that, forgive me if I'm not aware of something. Could you be more specific about all this ? Many posts I saw here were imagining the worst while no specification are given for what i could read so far. Is there a draft with some details on it ?
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