how to actually contribute

[rivalin]

I know I'm gonna get flamed to pieces for saying this but here goes;

I've been a member of the forums here and have been interested in the game for quite a while, I havn't posted here before so I feel I can post this without really caring if it pisses anyone off, so here goes;

Vega Strike is a really impressive acheivement, clearly put together by some extremely able people. However it isn't without a considerable amount of flaws in the way it is managed and run.

The constant impression one gets when browsing the forum is that the developers are part of their own little club; they take the game in whatever direction they want, without really justifying or explaining themselves to the fans of the game. The developers do not care what the average player of Vega Strike wants to see in the game, nor can they really be bothered to tell them anything about where the game is going either. The dev blog and news announcements go without update for months or often longer and the roadmap for development doesn't go past 0.5 even though the developers no doubt have plans beyond that, they just lack the motivation to share them with the plebs. As a contrast games like Infinity have such active communities because the single developer, despite acheiving far more than Vega Strike in a shorter time period, interacts with the fans and constantly writes immensely detailed blog posts. The basic rule here seems to be "if you have something to contribute we'll take it, otherwise shove off"

However much that sounded like a complaint, it really wasn't, just an appraisal, it's fair enough to say that if you do the work then you call the shots, no one can argue with that. What I am complaining about is that the one area where input does seem to be desired is a joke. There seems to be a severe lack of prioritization and coordination when it comes to art assets. The wiki pages are pitiful; half complete and months out of date and the forums are full of threads where people have spent large amounts of time working on art only to be told something like, "oh, we don't need Aera stations but re-texture it and we can use it for the rlaan" or "oh, we can't use that kind of model any more, we switched to a different rendering engine six months ago but didn't bother to tell anyone"

The end result of all of this is a game that has cutting edge shader implementation but a hud and gui that looks like it stepped out of 1992. There seems to be almost no balance in the speed at which different parts of the game are being developed.

If you don't want to waste the potentially maassive contribution that new people could make then the manner in which assets are coordinated and acquired is in dire need of overhaul. I'd suggest appointing someone to an official position, with the sole task of doing administrative work (if this has been done already then they're asleep on the job); updating the news pages, encouraging the devs to do more blogs, assessing the exact priorities for art assets, keeping the wiki up to date on a day by day basis. It would be a somewhat thankless and inglorious job, but it would make the way this project operates far more efficient. In any case I doubt any of the devs will even read this, let alone respond, but it was worth a try.

Anyway, please feel free to flame/ignore this post as appropriate, but remember I wouldn't have bothered to write such a rambling tirade if I didn't want to see the game succeed as much as you all do.

[Breakable]

This post sounded like a constructive criticism. I hope it wont demotivate any developers, and instead inspire an effort on better administration.

Anyway rivalin do you have anything else to contribute?

[rivalin]

I really do want to contribute, it's just that one thing that I hate, and I suspect many others do as well, is spending time and effort on something that isn't wnated, or is stylistically incorrect, or low priority. The best guidance I've seen is "we could always use more ship models" and the like, I'm always afraid I'll spend time working on something and be told that someone has done it already, but noone updated the "to do" list. I really want Vega Strike to do well, but it seems that the time and effort of a lot of very talented people could be used much more effectively than it is now.

[loki1950]

First things first welcome rivalin we do have a few admin types like me but i am limited by bad typing skills and no knowledge of media-wiki mark up so i stay here in the forum and try to be helpful to who ever shows up.As for the impression of distance from the devs you are not the first to mention it.part of that impression may be related to the the limited time they have ATM most of them are balancing academic endevours with this project and other demands on there time the bane of any OSS project.The road map beyond 0.5 is the move to OGRE for our rendering backend that will also mean a major refactoring so the next release may be some way off.there is a framework in svn already but since it uses the previous version of OGRE is unbuildable as is lots of us are looking forward to that and CEGUI so we can bring the interface out of the dark ages as currently GUI coding is tedious in the extreme so people avoid it

Thx for the comments
Enjoy the Choice

[ace123]

Sorry if I'm making this really long.

The constant impression one gets when browsing the forum is that the developers are part of their own little club; they take the game in whatever direction they want, without really justifying or explaining themselves to the fans of the game. The developers do not care what the average player of Vega Strike wants to see in the game, nor can they really be bothered to tell them anything about where the game is going either. The dev blog and news announcements go without update for months or often longer and the roadmap for development doesn't go past 0.5 even though the developers no doubt have plans beyond that, they just lack the motivation to share them with the plebs.

Actually, that's a misconception, but I understand why you might have it. My personal contributions in the last month are fairly minor, and that is true for many people contributing to this project. In my case as with others, school is a big reason that we can't keep up at this time of the year.

I think I see where you are coming from with the "club". I guess I could see the club as the group of people who have figured out how to navigate the complicated and poorly(/not) documented code. There are also people who have been here for many years.

But in reality it only takes a little bit of motivation to make something and become "known" that way. If you get into the project we (any of the devs like me) will be happy to give you Sourceforge access.

The 0.5 issue is actually a bit complicated. The big plan a few years ago for 0.5 was to have switched to the OGRE engine, which will allow for modern graphics and many awesome things, for example 3D bases.

About a year ago we started to realize we would need another big release so that people would stop having to download the development version, and we didn't see the OGRE port coming much closer. Already so many changes had accumulated since 0.4.3 that we called this one 0.5.0 rather than 0.4.4, and we will now call the ogre release 0.6.0.

The reason developers don't "care" what people see in the game is more that I / they only have enough time to fix the important bugs at the time (I spent much time this weekend getting it to run on my new Macbook), much less add new features.

However there is no reason that you or anyone can't join.

As a contrast games like Infinity have such active communities because the single developer, despite acheiving far more than Vega Strike in a shorter time period, interacts with the fans and constantly writes immensely detailed blog posts. The basic rule here seems to be "if you have something to contribute we'll take it, otherwise shove off"

Correct me if I'm wrong on the following... these are just my initial impressions based on what I could see on its web site:
last I checked Infinity hadn't been publicly released yet. I believe the developer has chosen to do everything himself (I see the forum, but I mean development/coding), and probably intends to make money off it in the longterm, and so can afford to go without a job.

In addition he has an advantage in that he is starting from scratch. A lot of Vegastrike's bugs happen because of some feature put in 8 years ago, that turned into a bug 5 years ago, and then hacked around. A perfect example of this in vegastrike are the ".mission" files.

Writing a complicated game is much harder a task than it sounds like. For that reason I am impressed that Inifinity is doing this, but I have a feeling based on the closed nature of his web site that none of his work will end up back in the community (as open source). However it sounds really cool.

There are many different ways you can go about doing something. Vega Strike kind of has chosen a path of open development but part time development.

However much that sounded like a complaint, it really wasn't, just an appraisal, it's fair enough to say that if you do the work then you call the shots, no one can argue with that. What I am complaining about is that the one area where input does seem to be desired is a joke. There seems to be a severe lack of prioritization and coordination when it comes to art assets. The wiki pages are pitiful; half complete and months out of date and the forums are full of threads where people have spent large amounts of time working on art only to be told something like, "oh, we don't need Aera stations but re-texture it and we can use it for the rlaan" or "oh, we can't use that kind of model any more, we switched to a different rendering engine six months ago but didn't bother to tell anyone"

The engine formats have been relatively stable lately, except for texture formats which are easy to convert anyway. If you find instances about this, start a new thread or create a Wiki page.

I agree, I have seen instances of this myself, but I am also disorganized, and I forget if I am busy with something else for a few days.

The wiki has helped a lot since we added one, but it has indeed fallen out of maintanence lately.

The end result of all of this is a game that has cutting edge shader implementation but a hud and gui that looks like it stepped out of 1992. There seems to be almost no balance in the speed at which different parts of the game are being developed.

If you don't want to waste the potentially maassive contribution that new people could make then the manner in which assets are coordinated and acquired is in dire need of overhaul. I'd suggest appointing someone to an official position, with the sole task of doing administrative work (if this has been done already then they're asleep on the job); updating the news pages, encouraging the devs to do more blogs, assessing the exact priorities for art assets, keeping the wiki up to date on a day by day basis. It would be a somewhat thankless and inglorious job, but it would make the way this project operates far more efficient. In any case I doubt any of the devs will even read this, let alone respond, but it was worth a try.

It is a lot of work to keep stuff up to date. Again I agree with you. It's surprisingly hard to do this. That is partially why we have tried to add development blogs and SVN logs a few months ago.
When I want to do something vegastrike-related... assuming I don't spend an hour on the forums first, I will usually jump right into my current programming project.

Anyway, please feel free to flame/ignore this post as appropriate, but remember I wouldn't have bothered to write such a rambling tirade if I didn't want to see the game succeed as much as you all do.

We all want the game to succeed...

I really do want to contribute, it's just that one thing that I hate, and I suspect many others do as well, is spending time and effort on something that isn't wnated, or is stylistically incorrect, or low priority. The best guidance I've seen is "we could always use more ship models" and the like, I'm always afraid I'll spend time working on something and be told that someone has done it already, but noone updated the "to do" list. I really want Vega Strike to do well, but it seems that the time and effort of a lot of very talented people could be used much more effectively than it is now.

Everything that is done is wanted, no matter what impression you have gotten. There is no real central management system.

However despite how wanted something is, if it breaks something or takes too long to get working, it may get lost or forgotten.

I'm sorry if I didn't help your impressions at all.

I would be very interested in helping you get going writing code. If you want to talk to me in person, my AIM account is phrh 8.

The most important thing at the moment is integrating the OGRE engine into Vega Strike. Little progress has been made in this way lately but if we can get this in this will be huge.

Really the biggest task in this is getting ships to render in OGRE, making a preliminary interface and then tying that into the engine.
Klauss has been the leader in this project, but he also has other jobs and things to do.

Many other things involve: Multiplayer support. Fixing any last outstanding issues before 0.5 final (Actually, should we branch off the 0.5 release if any big changes to the trunk happen?)

-Patrick

[rivalin]

Well I don't think I would have gotten such a reasonable answer to a post like that anywhwere else, and thanks a lot for taking the time to respond, it's much appreciated. Anyway I suppose I'll spend a few weeks poking around the code to really get acquainted with it and work out if there's anything I can do there, otherwise my main forte is more on the art side. Anyway thanks for the friendly replies

[jackS]

The project could probably have benefited greatly from appointing some good administrative assistants beginning probably around when HellcatV started graduate school back in fall of 2003. However, as was mentioned of the indicated tasks, if not untenable in complexity, they are tedious, require constant vigilance, and are generally thankless. Thus, they don't get a lot of volunteers. The "constant vigilance" part in particular has been very difficult for the key developers (as primarily undergraduate or graduate college students) as we have tended to have underlying schedules that are both irregular and bursty in their demands. It is, unfortunately, very easy to lose track of the threads-in-hand in VS-land when one has to spend a few weeks racing full-tilt at a conference paper deadline (aside: for those in real science disciplines, the prestigious Computer Science publications are heavily conference oriented -- the journals tend to take too long to publish things relative to the rate of change in the field). The only silver lining I can see is that most of the administrative tasks we're in need of assistance with are independent (that is, any one person need not be burdened with more than one of them), so incremental management improvements should be possible.

Additionally, there are other non-glamorous tasks that are not organizational in nature (many of them bounded in effort required) that would benefit the project, such as utility development and reference creation tasks. In particular, debugging/polishing/verifying or otherwise completing incomplete art submissions is a tedious but ultimately productive undertaking, albeit one many may not find individually rewarding :-/

@rivalin: you mentioned that your primary forte is art-side. If you're looking for something art-oriented to do, there's a particular one of the above-mentioned non-glamorous (in this case: not directly resulting in new art going in-game) tasks that comes to mind that we A) need a 3D artist for and B) would familiarize you with how the engine handles 3D art assets and in-game units. If you're more comfortable with 2D art, or sketching, or evthen there are other tasks equally in need of doing in the arena of concept art and overarching style development.

The task in question is (loosely) as follows: the engine has some features that many units do not utilize. This may be not only a valid, but a preferred choice for many smaller models, but to address the scale (up to several kilometers) of larger capital vessels and stations, it's important that some of these features be exercised more routinely. However, until there are solid examples utilizing these features, it's unlikely that submissions will make use of them. The upside is that there's no reason that said examples have to be VS related -- a battlestar or giant candy-bar would serve just as well to illustrate the same points, thereby bypassing meddlesome aesthetic equivocations (albeit, looking nice in some way still counts for something -- if the coders did up such an example, it'd probably be all boxes and the point might be lost ).

If you have any interest in this or other alluded tasks, please let me know. External to these forums, I can be reached for VS related topics at my ministerofinformation gmail account.