elexis
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Posts posted by elexis
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On 2/18/2019 at 3:03 PM, (-_-) said:
The people who wrote the code for rmgen did what seemed most sensible for them at the time. With time, issues were found and fixed. A couple years down the road, it’s not unlikely who ever picks up from where you left off does the same thing. Kinda feel like taking one step forward only to take two steps backward.
Disagree, I can read Spahbod on the forums complaining that he couldn't read his own code anymore, despiting never having seen Spahbod online.
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Did you try a cleanup?
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7 minutes ago, Sundiata said:
When a group of ranged units attacks another group, the ranged units each individually and randomly select 1 out the 10 nearest enemy units in range to fire on. This would cause groups of ranged units to fire across a front, not an individual. Dancing would be rendered ineffective and ranged combat would start looking a lot more natural.
Unless the opponent dances with 10 unit. Though I agree that might reduce the problem already to the point where people don't collectively push each other into using this thing. Notice that even if we'd nuke or restrict patroling, players can script such things (at least Lefo scripted his base building commands already). Another issue is that the likelihood to strike a unit is reduced with the distance to the unit.
Mostly I wonder whether the trajectory code itself doesn't offer a nearby solution.
9 minutes ago, Sundiata said:why it's difficult to move forward on gameplay decisions
We only need a consensus amongst coders, not everyone. If the problem is gone either way, the topic will be gone. If the problem only morphed into another problem, we have something new to talk about the alpha following that
14 minutes ago, Sundiata said:Secondly, directional defence should be a thing. So that units carrying a shield would become less vulnerable when attacked from the front, and far more vulnerable when flanked or attacked from the back. Currently a unit's attack has a direction, no? How come the defence stats can't be applied differently to a direction (front, back, left, right)?
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I remember getting into that state to once and not being able to get it resolved. I guess one can google for the error message and In doubt can do a new checkout.
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On hostrules:
There's always some overpowered unit or mechanism that is ruled out by players. Last alpha skirmisher cavalry accuracy was off by 20% or something and it lead to players banning the unit from matches altogether, or resulted in every player being forced to only train cavalry as soon as possible and as much as possible. Another common user-specified matchrule is to prohibit wonders (because they allow each player +50 pop and that can lead to significant additional lag when playing with 8.). Also every player has a different understanding of what they consider toxic chatting, or when they chose to hand out bans. If that's put into some field that needs to be accepted like the other gamesettings, the player at least cannot start the game unless having formally agreed to the hosts rules.
On dancing:
Since it was in doubt what dancing is, I would define it as every command where the player moves units not to relocate the unit but to dodge arrows. (It means the sum of all units move vectors is about zero and covers a very small area.)
Hannibal_Barca has demonstrated how far one can take the bug. Practically one can send out a single hero or champion unit and do the dancing, and even if 100 archers shoot at it, there will just be 100 arrows piling up left and right of the unit every second. So to me it appears to be something that can be addressed in the accuracy code. By chance some of the arrows are expected to hit. On the other side, just reducing the accuracy to accomplish that might make the unit ineffective. So I suppose it needs a good idea how to change the projectile trajectory model without changing how much damage the unit practically delivers.
Given that one can with slightly more effort than using the patrol feature trigger the 'trajectory bug' using manual moves, changing the patrol feature just covers up the symptom. If a player patrols in place, they should be an easy target for the attacker in theory.
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3 minutes ago, (-_-) said:
One would assume they are allowed to use features built into the game. But evidently not.
/nick is not a chat command that is available without hackery as far as I know.
I guess it should be implemented, because the code implements XMPP and can be used as a chat client for your favorite other XMPP chat server.
But just because the protocol implements a feature doesn't mean that the service provider needs to enable the feature. We should patch ejabberd to allow disabling nickchanges. Or not displaying nicknames but JIDs (the room is configured to show real JIDs, and could be configured for anonymous / nickname JIDs on some other multiplayer lobby).
6 minutes ago, (-_-) said:You don't really get to decide anything regarding your account.
If you delete an account, someone else can create that account and can pretend to be you. So we would like to avoid that.
You get to decide to use Wildfire Games lobby under our terms and conditions, and users have GDPR rights in accordance with the privacy policy.
5 minutes ago, Angen said:1. Only create one account per person on the service unless authorized by Wildfire Games.
If people develop a patch for the new developmental version of 0AD, they won't be part in the main lobby where everyone else plays, so they can't disrupt the service, hence that is granted in most cases. But using that account to evade muting is not covered by that.
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After upload filters against copyright, there's upload filters against terrorism next (Terrorist Content Regulation). Supposedly an AI shall scan our uploaded text messages for terrorism. Surely that will work well.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6J-68_xALU
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The issue should be fixed by some kind of code solution obviously. Until then:
For rated games such things can be considered cheating.
For non-rated games, the purpose of the "ready" button is that every single player agrees to the rules. So the players who like (gamesetting X) can play in the game if and only if they agree with (gamesetting X). The server (host) is the one who provides the service, therefore the server can enforce his own Terms of Use (i.e. ban). When players click the "I am ready" button, they "agree" to whatever terms the host has stated (gamesettings, custom rules). (That doesn't mean that hosts can violate WFG Lobby terms of use though).
The only problem with custom host rules (Terms of Use) is that they can only be posted in the chat, and often players can't read all that and miss rules. Perhaps a custom hoster Terms of Use dialog field might be reasonable. (Otherwise, there were also proposals for effect-free voting systems.)
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I can't really answer to the merchandise shop idea until I have checked the legalities. The links will be helpful for comparison.
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On 3/14/2019 at 1:22 PM, (-_-) said:
Well, seeing it as "only temporary" is much better than seeing it as "the project is doomed".
There is an important case distinction to make between the project 0 A.D. and the SPI member project Wildfire Games. The software is free, a public good, by design free software is supposed to be "continuable" by everyone. If Wildfire Games servers are offline from tomorrow on, alpha 23b is widely available on the internet and not unlikely being picked up by future freesoftware RTS enthusiasts.
I think the point isn't that the stalling is considered temporary (i.e. with an expected arrival of a new era of development), but development stalling is not a unique event in history, but a repetition of history.
From 2001 https://web.archive.org/web/20080711014849/http://wildfiregames.com/0ad/page.php?p=1492:
Quote"We were about to disband the project and the mod team when a new door was opened to us."
From 2009 https://play0ad.com/about/the-story-of-0-a-d/:
Quote"Over time, programmers for 0 A.D. were becoming hard to find as well, stalling development of the game"
From 2016:
Quote2016-12/2016-12-04-QuakeNet-#0ad-dev.log:16:15 < Philip> The game has gone through periods before where there weren't really any active core developers, but I think it just took one or two people to step up and start making substantial progress again
16:16 < Philip> but after a year or two it tended to die down again when those people got tired/bored/distracted/etc
It's a mathmatical inevitability that the project is stalled every few years if the project takes more decades to implement than desirable and developers can only work to such an extent for few years. The thread topic "monetization" would also impact project stalling. There are probably many more examples, I don't have the time to go through all sources right now.
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48 minutes ago, (-_-) said:
Either that, or user1 is constantly online and monitoring the chat
Or the bot is monitoring account registrations, but informs a moderator instead of autobanning.
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But there is a 1 hour register delay setting in ejabberd.
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5 hours ago, (-_-) said:
It’s a bot that instantly bans people
That would be new to me. I only know the bot who mutes people that use the banned words.
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12 hours ago, Gurken Khan said:
If the proceedings are handled correctly (through SPI?) I don't think there would be a risk for WFG's status. I know some ~projects (small businesses, youtubers) make some money extra by setting up a merch shop with one of those services. I believe it's actually pretty much as easy as '1. upload some graphics 3. profit'.
Wildfire Games has no legal status, thus also no PayPal account or anything else. SPI has the legal status, and all the financial accounts Wildfire Games can use, restricted to non-profit purpose. A for-profit WFG action could risk the membership status to SPI, and it could even risk SPIs non-profit status if for-profit funds go through their non-profit system. So "3. profit" is in contradiction to non-profit orientation, but revenue for charitable purposes isn't. Non-profits can interact with for-profit entities to further the exempt purposes. Some kind of online merchandise system to support donations is certainly possible and we did so before with the indiegogo campaign. SPI doesn't have much manpower, most probably not enough to coordinate individual transactions. So it depends a lot on the service. Got an example?
13 hours ago, Gurken Khan said:And while I totally dig the non-profit mode, I can't really see a volunteer making t-shirts in the living room then packaging and mailing them, thus 'accomplishing the same' as those services in regard to range and quality of the products, and don't know if it actually would be cheaper.
As mentioned, non-profit does not mandate voluntarism.
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15 hours ago, ffffffff said:
So the only open bug is how to decide what the money is spend for?
That's one of the most critical open bugs.
Also, that involves some legal aspects. For example what about the donor intent - did people in the 2013 indiegogo campaign donate with the intend that this donation is used for pathfinding and a singleplayer campaign? Depending on whether that counts as a purpose restricted donation, the money wouldn't even be allowed to be used for anything else. But practically the campaign was considered failed and now it seems we don't restrict the funding to the explicit campaign goals but used it as a general purpose fund. It's a bit contradictory, we fund IT and travel cost because the funding is general purpose, but we fund no or only exceptionally development or art creation because the donations were intended to be used for pathfinding. (At least I don't recall that campaign speaking about IT & travel cost, opposed to the play0ad.com donate page).
It's not only the purpose question ("How to decide what the money is spent for"), but also the amount question ("how much to spend on the purpose").
For example, imagine people donated because they really liked Kushites, we have no means to tell, or whether donors still hunt the purposes of the 2013 campaign.
If the idea is that developers should be compensated for their contributions because there are donations and they did some worthy work, how do you tell how much each of the active developers receive individually? Are Kushites more worth to the project than diplomacy colors? How much work was involved? How could one justify deciding to give one contributor 10cent per hour and the other one 30 cent per hour...
That's why developer compensation is difficult with current premises.
15 hours ago, ffffffff said:Maybe for new coaching to players becoming developers?
Good item on the list of charitable purposes! The question is only whether it's also a purpose that donors want to support when they read it.
11 hours ago, Diatryma said:you always find the same questions, "When will you go out" "when to see the next monetization campaign".
I admit I didn't go out as much as I used to. Maybe I'm wrong, but I assume that most people who ask "when will the game be released?" didn't play it yet and noticed that it's already providing a "complete skirmish match experience". (As mentioned I uninstalled in 2014 after seeing a discouraging hint that the game was incomplete and apparently not really playable).
People ask for new funding campaigns? I've never seen people on the lobby or forums who were eager to donate but didn't know that they can do so on play0ad.com. Mostly assuming that people propose specific funding campaign platforms without having the capacity to donate themselves. Since I almost never hear about donors (that's a key aspect), that might be brutally false. We will see.
11 hours ago, Diatryma said:But once again what you see externally in the forums (because I know you have another forum inside where you are going to have a lot of things that must be very cloudy) never comes out of all that is discussed externally (forum) even though it is a small group of trees like the Lordgood has climbed on the Trac.
I understand, you're missing out on the staff forums stories. But it's almost only formal and administrative stuff on the staff forums. Almost all of the source and art development is done in the public, with the help of the general public, for the general public. Not only for noble reasons but also because the platforms (#0ad-dev on irc on quakenet, code.wildfiregames.com, trac.wildfiregames.com) are the most suitable ones for discussing the code.
In fact current Wildfire Games has the same problem. There were 4 or 5 previous Wildfire Games that had internal staff forums that are now lost or only accessible with archeology. The less information relating to the project is private, the easier it is for the general public to participate, migrate, fork, or whatever.
11 hours ago, Diatryma said:They are never shared on the official website and this is a big waste.
Not on play0ad.com, that website needs to become much more informative, agreed. But many stories that start on the staff forums are later posted on the forums (even on play0ad.com). Also many stories on the staff forums continue stories from public places on IRC and Phabricator. The people who post in the private places are the same ones that post in the public place, they show the same behavior in all places. So you don't really miss much. If there is any conspiracy from the public, it will be in private mesages I guess. For example Kushites were kept in a conspiracy PM for some reason, perhaps we should read that again and check whether we can share it. Another example was the mod.io page, the patch was set to private until after it was committed. I think that was the only time something was invisible on code.wildfire.com. Anyway, you don't miss much that you can't already get on the forums, IRC and phabricator, and we definitely need to uncover more of WFG history (but more the old closed source development that isn't published at all currently).
11 hours ago, Diatryma said:public relations department as "small" errors in a chain of communication that highlights how bad you are doing in this area
If we don't show great success, it's either because we are bad at presenting it, or it's because we currently don't have it. You liked the a23 trailer and release announcements though? It's hard to do trailers and announcements better every time (the trailer and announcement took 2 weeks or so to create, 24h to render, killed one graphics card). Doing it even better next time and considering how nerve wracking all of that was, I'm skeptical whether we can achieve that. But I do think that we need a software to automatically report on developer progress on the different platforms in a central place. Trac has the RSS API, Phabricator has a REST API, IRC logs have a fixed format, we can parse that and post automated stories of who did what and when. With such a tool one can then explore what other folks did with less effort and write better posts for play0ad.com. I guess that's offtopic too unless we consider better WFG-historywriting and play0ad.com / facebook / twitter PR as a primary means to gain more financial backers.
11 hours ago, Diatryma said:for example there is no development in terms of "what is being done in art"
I rarely followed art development, as far as I know it's on the public forums in almost any case. Stan could tell you more. I don't know if there are many private threads where art is created, would be better to have it in public if there is no real reason for it to be private.
The forum format is also machine-readable, it could be integrated into such a "WFG history tool".
11 hours ago, Diatryma said:or what is needed as volunteers and what departments, have not asked if they need volunteers on social networks, it seems to me that it is not as if they do not need help more than in programming and art.
because it seems to me that the documents you handle also need some kind of curator, or some expert to fix what it is without updating within the WikiI didn't understand these words, but experts are what we need. The walls to hell are painted with good intent. Experts in the field they are working on - and everyone can become an expert if they have enough interest and willpower to overcome any technical hurdle, missing knowledge, or communication issue, enough self-doubt to be their own greatest critic and enough time to gain the experience and knowledge of how experts in their field operate. Guess I'm only spilling empty phrases, but it's true.
11 hours ago, Diatryma said:"why is it not in Steam?"
The last decision was not going on Steam because the user ratings would reflect the current state of the game, not the more finished state of the project. So 0 A.D. might be underrated on Steam in the future. I haven't seen indication for that to be true though.
The other (legal) aspect about Steam is that we can probably offer it as a download on steam, but we can't use the Steam features that would require 0 A.D. to be compiled against a proprietary Steam API.
There is also the ethical aspect if one disregards the free software license. Do we want to administrate the online service that we provide (for example multiplayer lobby, or hosting games) or do we want to put that into the hands of one corporation that gives a (swearword) about 0 A.D. and free software?
11 hours ago, Diatryma said:many ignore this kind of projects or their nature
I would guess that's because they didn't see how great it looks and because they either have a favorite other game, or too much money, or download illegally.
6 hours ago, Sundiata said:Agree with everything that you said! Except that donations or even reasonable compensation (average wage!) wouldn't hurt.
5 hours ago, (-_-) said:Well, seeing it as "only temporary" is much better than seeing it as "the project is doomed". (The latter was something a staff member said on multiple occasions after 23 was released, maybe he changed his mind now, don't know).
One could wonder how much he contributed to get to that state.
5 hours ago, itrelles said:why bad rts games are more known than 0 ad? why did i just met 0AD in 2017?
You should know - how did you know about the other games? I guess because you didn't know that free software games exist at all. And the ones that know that free software games exist have only seen the games that look like the best games of 1994.
5 hours ago, itrelles said:modern digital slavery
That's what I see when I look into the mirror, so @#$% this. People equate unpaid acts with recreation. So if working for 0 A.D. is hedonism, I might just as well watch youtube videos instead and spare myself from the shitshow if one actually does try to help. But legalese considers us voluntarists, philanthropists. In fact the IRS says "the law places no duty on individuals operating charitable organizations to donate their services; they are entitled to reasonable compensation for their efforts.", to share only one of the interesting things in the IRS documents.
5 hours ago, itrelles said:game is fine for me, it just need more players
So rare to hear that. To me too btw, except for few big things, otherwise I hadn't wasted so much time playing that.
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Response to the first three posts after my last post:
5 hours ago, (-_-) said:Doesn't make it any less of a problem. You would still need to do something about it. Things do not fix themselves. Therefore, a better question to ask is what is being done to fix it this time?
What is being done to fix this is a subset of what can be done to fix this. We can remain in the historic inspection and can do some case studies what has been attempted to fix this and how much that has yielded, followed by an evaluation. Secondly one can look at what has actually brought the project the most success and consider where influencing that is in our capacity, and whether doing so would come with other disadvantages (dilemma, trilemma, or mexican standoffs). (Also offtopic unless a considerable answer is monetization)
15 hours ago, Gurken Khan said:a lot of companies who'd be happy to handle all that
Considerable. Just always keep the non-profit state in mind when looking for for-profit interaction. We don't want companies taking 5% or 10% of the revenue if we don't need their services to accomplish the same in non-profit mode.
15 hours ago, itrelles said:profitable magical future
You mean a magical non-profit future with reasonable compensation.
15 hours ago, itrelles said:its time to get and retain gamers inside 0 ad
My genes determine it is time to take shelter and create backups of the genes instead of perpetuating martyrdom.
15 hours ago, itrelles said:why should be difficult to fraction donation in a profitable magical future to each memeber iof the team
No, it's hard with the current approach, because one can't determine who should get how much for what purpose. For example everyone getting the same amount per hour is unfeasible because we don't know how productive people were during that hour. And then one still didn't factor in the difficulty, importance or qualitative worth of the task that was compensated for. One can only change the premises to become unable to determine who get's what for what purpose, but that doesn't necessarily make it 'fair'. Usually non-profit organizations determine the income by comparing with average wage, which is astronomical in comparison to what we have in terms of funding. So it's a dilemma, the compensation will always be uneven in selectable ways.
19 hours ago, itrelles said:1000 different players per month
0.001 retaining gamers %
I guess one can leverage more there, yes. There are presumably more than the 0.1% "retained" players, people just play other games after they played 0 A.D.. In theory one could do surveys to figure out what people would want best. But when I think about what I read on the forums and lobby, it's terribly hard to figure out a coherent and widely shared ideas. Creative works, from my limited experience, are usually best when they are done by a sole visionary or group of visionaries who figured out the entire createive work already and able to implement it or able to persuade others to implement it (as opposed to trying to survey ideas from people who only consume the game but don't envision a future game).
15 hours ago, itrelles said:if this game reach 100.000 different players per month
This 100k download / account number is certainly a thing, imagine everyone donating $1 per year to further the tax-exempt purposes.
15 hours ago, itrelles said:u want more (software quality) cause u are all beatifull perfectionist, but its nt time to be that
On the one hand, closed source and obfuscated source allow getting away with all kinds of crimes against software quality, while free software provides source code as the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it and can't hide or obfuscate their skeletons in the closet.
On the other hand, regardless of the licensing framework of the work, quality does pay off. If one actively choses negligence over verification, one will never reduce the number of bugs, just changes from one bug to the next. The systematic defects, antipatterns, that are the result of spaghetti code and implementing without designing mean that one either will give up a lot of artistic freedom or have to rewrite the same piece of code many times until one figured out what one wanted to achieve to begin with. If one doesn't prioritize quality but just cares about satisfying the formal conditions to a goal superficially, one will ultimately pass on the bad quality work to users who will notice the bad quality too. (Not to the extent that readers of the code see the mess, but still.) When I think back about every commit that I ever read, I don't regret anyone chosing quality. Only regretting the time spent trying to determine what the best quality change is without actually achieving that.
I can sing so many tales of spaghetti code that went unreadable, unmaintainable and just reached a dead end because of that, and for-profit corporations really like to do such stuff. The website has to look funky, no matter what happens with the machine. The code has to be done tomorrow, therefore the bugs can be fixed, like, not.
15 hours ago, itrelles said:i think sometimes u just have to act, but u op iq math guys overthink a lot
Hard to determine a priori where thinking something through ends and overthinking begins.
15 hours ago, itrelles said:it is normal in southamerica for people to use and charge free linux software, even our president son made that w venezuela goverment, u are not sellmans
If it's free software in the GPL sense, then noone can stop people from distributing the software gratis. Only a proprietary copyrighted work with licensing fees, or proprietary online service with usage fees can charge people.
Wildfire Games can't charge anything, because Wildfire Games is not a legal entity. Software in the Public Interest (SPI) can't charge anything, because they are a non-profit organization. But the for-profit people that work for Wildfire Games or SPI can charge SPI something for furthering the tax-exempt purposes, such as developing free software or bookkeeping free software projects.
I didn't read about Venezuela, but free software means they will find someone offering it without charge. They might either support free software creation with donations, or by purchasing copies they can get for free elsewhere, or they hire for-profit developers through a non-profit organization.
Non-profit organizations can use salesmen, as long as it serves the charitable purposes (don't ask me how).
16 hours ago, elexis said:14 hours ago, itrelles said:18 hours ago, elexis said:The third problem is finding someone who can actually accomplish the decided purposes
money do that
16 hours ago, elexis said:Doesn't
15 hours ago, itrelles said:yes it does
Didn't, at least.
Merely continuously increasing the offered wage means that not (only) the most qualified person to accomplish that will offer their service, but mostly any person who is interest in that amount of money, not in the product or the idealism.15 hours ago, itrelles said:why random (person)?
Quotewhat if paid could never run out
At least predicting whether a candidate (be it a known person or not) can succeed in writing a new pathfinder seems impossible. Even judging what the requirements of the task (pathfinder) is, whether the possible developer is qualified to accomplish the task, and whether the developer ultimately succeeded to satisfy the tak goals requires a team member who is qualified to understand the task, the work and compare the work with the ideal solution. For the pathfinder there may be a bunch of obvious and easy performance improvements. But if the task is to use a new algorithm, then the ones deciding on the funding and on the approval of the work would either have to have knowledge about pathfinding algorithms or rely on luck and the assumption of unlimited funding.
15 hours ago, itrelles said:u can make it free later
That would make SPI have to double check or reconsider Wildfire Games as a free software project. I think I have a much better idea to fix everything, but I'm not done yet "overthinking" it. For once one needs to know what non-profit status forbids and enables, secondly what SPI offers and how WFG relates to SPI, third, one needs to know what the (charitable?) purpose of Wildfire Games was to f'ing begin (and end) with, fourth, one needs to find software that "breaks the paradigm" or write it oneself, fifth, convince everyone else that it's a good idea (sixth notice that this will already require months of unpaid work with limited prospect). So lots of material to "overthink". But dedicating an extra amount of time to think about these questions will allow furthering of more purposes than funding itself. For example answering the third question (what is the official purpose of Wildfire Games?") non-superficially will enable us to develop a vision of these purposes, leading to an implementation of the vision if we can succeed (as opposed to just exploring ways to getting money without thinking about a mission statement).
Increasing the efficiancy and effectiveness of non-profit funding seems very well possible to me without involving for-profit changes to the project. I'd like to finish my "overthinking" however before claiming a solution and I spent several weeks already on legalese and €3,80 defeatism.
15 hours ago, itrelles said:but if for you freedm its beeing 12 hours in front a pc workinf for 1 dollar an hour,,, we thin very different
Programming smartphone spyware operating systems, remote control and trolley-problem-decision software for cars, building hardware to break and become irreperable (planned obsolescence), smart homes where every ravioli is connected to the internet, monopolizing social media for the purpose of gaining spying and political censorship means are examples of what international megacorporations do to maximize profit, and they have no worries outcompeting and lobbying against middle class companies.
Even the middle class companies are guilty of creating empty product for the purpose of maximizing profit, opposing theinterest of the user, keeping their code a secret to increase the cost of using it.
If that is the alternative (to free of compensation development), then at least one didn't further such preposterous causes for the given time of involvement, as opposed to these actors...
Now imagine a world where 0 A.D. developers can have the freedom to eat ravioli every day AND further 0 A.D. as free software.
Non-profit funding "just" has to become sufficiently effective.
15 hours ago, itrelles said:he was willing to donate 200 dollars
Great! Remember to inform donors that they can (depending on country) write off the donations from the income tax!
15 hours ago, itrelles said:i thought u where here from start =O
So I only missed 15 years of 0 A.D. development.
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3 minutes ago, itrelles said:
i dont understand how u pay cause im an outsider,
As mentioned, the financial data is public https://spi-inc.org/corporate/annual-reports/. Right now the donations are used to pay server costs, travel to software conventions and held in reserve otherwise. The point was that it would be hard to decide who deserved which fraction of the donations with the current means.
14 minutes ago, itrelles said:donations are aleatory, like moral of wfg workers
Not if the money is not used for developer compensation. Also I would assume that the ones who are motivated by less than 1$ per hour are the exception.
15 minutes ago, itrelles said:and when donations are negative? what will happen?
Running costs to exist, about $100 per month for the servers. Luckily not a problem for now. I guess one can ask what happens if one divides by zero (and even find the result).
5 minutes ago, itrelles said:define satisfaction?
I meant software quality. We had two developers who succeeded to create a new pathfinder for 0 A.D., and two people who created new pathfinding code that was rejected.
12 minutes ago, itrelles said:decade discussions are op for fillosofers
and for people who want to get to know the board, the pieces and create a strategy before rolling the dice.
14 minutes ago, itrelles said:the proposal was an alliance so u could finish the game, i give money so wfg workers could do a living and then we shared, if no money gets in well i guess it was a wrong investment to do.
Well that sounds a lot better than debt. Still, the question is how return of investment should be possible without breaking the free software ethics.
24 minutes ago, itrelles said:1 hour ago, elexis said:501(c)(3)
non hackerman language plz
501(c)(3) is the non-profit status. Otherwise: "If you understood me, I might not have expressed myself inscrutable enough." (attributed to Alan Greenspan)
31 minutes ago, itrelles said:1 hour ago, elexis said:The third problem is finding someone who can actually accomplish the decided purposes
money do that
Doesn't. You can hire a random guy to create a pathfinder with 20k, but he will stop working on that once he runs out of paid time (and a pathfinder can take a year depending on the scope of changes), and then it's not clear whether it's of the quality necessary for Wildfire Games. If one has millions and billions to throw at it, money may solve that. But for $1 per hour there's not much that this money can provide beyond symbolic support and ravioli.
19 minutes ago, itrelles said:payed game (500 AD)
That would be legal if one creates a for-profit entity to handle that money instead of going through SPI, and if the interpretation of GPL would be stretched. The question is whether it would be right ethically to do that. 0 A.D. was started in 2001 as an Age of Kings mod, but they failed because it was closed source, so they created the entire game from scratch. It would betray our founding ideals to not make 500 A.D. free software. Still possible to do that, but for me, I'm here because this is free as in freedom and puts the user first, not the corporation.
35 minutes ago, itrelles said:persons are very dumb
You are right about that, in the sense that one needs to minimize the threshold for the donor and maximize the incentive to donate. Many players don't even know that it's possible to donate. There's some potential to gain.
26 minutes ago, itrelles said:wikipedia does once a year but w a campaign reward at the end
They have rewards? I don't know. Wildfire Games campaign in 2013 came with merchandise as a reward, it cost somewhere above $5k of $33k donations received. One could also do a merchandise shop under non-profit status I think. But the problem is that includes ordering, receiving, packaging and sending out all the physical items.
The reason that WFG had not run further funding campaigns (other than the PayPal Donate button on the website) is that we already had trouble finding someone to legitimately receive the funds from last campaign (it said donations for the pathfinder and for singleplayer campaigns, and the one developer who did create a new pathfinder didn't want the money). If one changes the formula, one can try again.
35 minutes ago, itrelles said:i first dl 0 ad and i saw it hasnt campaing it took me like 8 month to dl it again
I downloaded 0 A.D. in 2014 for the first time and saw a big message that the game is totally unfinished and unplayable, then I uninstalled it immediately and regretted that lot after noticing a year later that it was very playable by then already.
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11 minutes ago, itrelles said:
i even offer to finance wfg...
That proposal was lending, i.e. going into debt. You had proposed selling a singleplayer campaign to get return of investment, but that violates the idea of free software for the public benefit, even if one can find some legal way around it; on top of being likely to not gain sufficient payments. If on the other side one assumes that enough people would pay for a singleplayer campaign, then the same people could donate to that cause in advance instead of buying a license afterwards; and the result would be a free singleplayer campaign for everyone. The only difference to a for-profit model is that one can't make more money than covering the costs of creation.
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31 minutes ago, Diatryma said:
the official channels through social media do not share much news
Software development and artwork are rarely discussed on the internal staff forums. Wildfire Games software development social media feed is http://irclogs.wildfiregames.com/. Everytime a bug is reported on http://trac.wildfiregames.com/, everytime a patch is uploaded to Phabricator at http://code.wildfiregames.com/ or a comment posted in response, the irc bot posts a comment in the chat. So by following IRClogs, you will follow most of what developers did that day. Artists use the public forums.
31 minutes ago, Diatryma said:people who wonder if it is dead.
The project struggled with many obstructions and unsolveable conflicts, even since it's founding in 2001 if we can believe the records (failed total conversion mod). In 2009 it was made free source because of a serious lack of developers. So the problem is not new at all.
48 minutes ago, itrelles said:i love this game, but its feels like a boat, where us players are the sailors (1000) and then there are 30 captains that dont make decissions, so boat doesnt move and sailors leave
You're implying that donations equal content, but it's not as simple as that. First of all one needs donations, WFG received ("only") USD 2000 in surplus 2018. Secondly if one has funds, then one still needs to decide for which purpose they will be used, which is quite difficult (one person gets 28cent per hour, the other person only 8 cent per hour? or one person gets 25k for a new pathfinder and everyone else gets nothing at all?). The third problem is finding someone who can actually accomplish the decided purposes to Wildfire Games satisfaction (people who are capable of writing and integrating a new pathfinder are extremely rare, people who can write it in a bug-free, well planned way even more rare). There are a number of unutilized means in 501(c)(3) to address some of these problems creatively, hopefully in this decade. But even if the revenue is increased by a factor of 5, it would remain mayonnaise paygrade. 0 A.D. is a public good, written for public interest and unless we change that, it will inevitably depend on voluntarism.
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1 hour ago, itrelles said:
Donations for me are like begging for coins in the street.
Yes, donations are done without return value consideration. But that's not everything that 501(c)(3) is.
1 hour ago, itrelles said:Break paradigms
-> Hat
11 minutes ago, itrelles said:elexis come play lms we miss u sad face
1 hour ago, itrelles said:Doing something again and again is the deffinition of insanity.
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So you redact your expressed donor intent that I acted upon for 4 weeks?
I guess everyone posting here only wants to play with less lag and doesn't really mind whether it's achieved by threading or by writing a new pathfinder, so perhaps one can satisfy that demand already with the existing but unfinished pathfinder threading patch.
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If none of you have smurf accounts, it's your guys responsibility to avoid games with people who do things you don't like. Games don't take place on Wildfire Servers, but it's your guys connection. Only when someone posts untruthful data on Wildfire Games services, for example toxic chat on the lobby or faked rating stats, Wildfire Games becomes involved. There may be peer pressure to play that 4v4 where all your buddies are in, but it remains your guys choice if you continue to play with people who you already know will do things that you don't like. The precondition to that is that noone uses smurf accounts.
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35 minutes ago, fabio said:
Selling code or art should be possible, STK does just that (as well as Red Hat and other commercial free software companies): https://supertuxkart.net/Donate
Just because one organization does it too doesn't mean that it's ethical or legal.
The key point is one needs a legal entity in order to receive money and explain it to the tax people.
I had asked stk once how they are organized with that regard and it seems all money goes to one specific contributor. The natural person is the legal entity who is part of the contract of PayPal and has or would have to pay taxes.
Wildfire Games is in a different situation, we are a member project of Software in the Public Interest. They are a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, hold Wildfire Games funds and accept donations. An organization is only then a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization if they are run exclusively for charitable purposes.
Notice that this doesn't make Wildfire Games a non-profit organization, but surely everything that goes through SPI (most notably the SPI PayPal account) must be exclusively for charitable purposes.
So that doesn't stop individual Wildfire Games members from using their natural person as a for-profit legal entity. But once the payments exceed "reasonable compensation" and the charitable purpose / free software status of 0 A.D. would be in question, then the IRS would also have to reconsider whether SPI is operated exclusively for charitable purposes.
I just wonder whether Wildfire Games would actually have to sell licenses, or whether offering services to achieve charitable purposes against reasonable compensation isn't already sufficient. If people want a new pathfinder and if a new pathfinder costs much more than we have in the account, and if we know someone who can actually do one, then do we really need artists to create some custom player models instead of going for a new pathfinder campaign?
11 hours ago, elexis said:The purpose of Wildfire Games is to create free software. From what I can tell 0 A.D. is one of the highest quality free video games and probably the most qualitative free RTS videogame. It seems silly to depart from that unique position to become a lower tier proprietary RTS.
Also need to mention that historically 0 A.D. was created specifically for that reason that people were unhappy with proprietary Age of Empires 2 and wanted to have free software that gives them the freedom to change every aspect of the game. So it's not only a unique position and a charitable cause to give up, but creating proprietary content also gives up on the historic reason for 0 A.D. being free software:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080711014849/http://wildfiregames.com/0ad/page.php?p=1492
QuoteWe were continually banging our heads against the wall trying to work around the limitations imposed on us by modding the AoK game. Members were frustrated.
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The purpose of Wildfire Games is to create free software. From what I can tell 0 A.D. is one of the highest quality free video games and probably the most qualitative free RTS videogame. It seems silly to depart from that unique position to become a lower tier proprietary RTS.
Doing free software means that one can't sell licensed copies of code or artfiles like thankforpie proposed if one wants to remain an organization operating exclusively to produce free software (because free software grants everyone the right to make free copies).
That doesn't mean that one can't use crowdfunding to further 0 A.D. And the fact that free software is a charitable cause gives WFG and donors tax-exemption at least.
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SVN Checksum mismatch while updating
in Game Development & Technical Discussion
Posted
(was trying to be funny)