The Maddest My Code Made Anyone
jackkelly.name
jackkelly.name
Combat played a sizeable role in killing the original game and turning it into something i'd expect from a CS mod. An entry level, bland generic version of the original that gutted all the strategy and coordination and teamwork that you required to win on ns_ maps. (A good commander alone was worth gold)
You built upon what many people considered cancer (combat to some extent, but definitely xmenu combat) - tumors get serious when they hit the lymph nodes, and they probably saw it as that.
I quit before this era happened but I probably would have hated you if i hadn't - even if you aren't technically the one to blame.
Ironically, I don't think I ever consciously built in xmenu<->buildmenu support (though I don't have the .amxx file to hand to check); that was a surprise to me. IIRC, both ExtraLevels and Combat Buildings used the NS module for AMXX to read write the "unspent level points" for the player. Placing buildings was a lot less crazy when you had to spend one of your nine precious levelups on a welder or a gorge morph, and then spend another on each building.
Combat Buildings made Combat pretty stupid, ExtraLevels made Combat really stupid, but the combination was way stupider than the sum of its parts.
At least your mod brought back the building aspect, cheers for that.
Original HL had an absolutely awesome modding community. As well as the huge one (CS) there were tweaks to make it better in all sorts of ways: - Adrenaline Gamer or AG - which changed the movement a little to make deathmatch super fast-paced. - Bubble Mod - which make a few gameplay tweaks to make deathmatch more sensible and manageable in large servers
...and I even wrote my own for the deathmatch games we played on our LAN at Uni, which announced a particularly annoying players name whenever he got fragged.
Don't really have time for these things any more!
I think I'd throw Tribes (2) in there as well. Those were the days.
It's a tough game to get into and even harder to get good at commanding since being a bad commander will sink your whole team. But it feels extremely rewarding to play on a well-coordinated team.
That said, NS was prob my favorite multiplayer game of all time... After Age of Empires 2, OFC.
Combat is fine to fill the server with enough players for a normal NS game.
Consumers (specifically the sub-genre of critics) often have no real imagination what making a thing means and under which constraints it happens. They often see publishing a imperfect work to the public as an affront to their sophisticated intellect and taste, even (or especially?) if it is free.
In German there is the saying: Wer macht, hat recht which translates to who makes is right. Complaining is simple, just shut up and do it better.
Of course complaining is totally okay if we e.g. talk about social or political conditions, or some mandatory process you have to subject yourself to by law. But even there I hate people who just complain and leave it at that without even trying to change a thing.
I used to be a person that criticized a lot. One day i realized what an cheap ass i was. Talking is easy. Now i say silently to myself:
"Shut up or do it better yourself."
It is very healthy to remove narcissistic micromanagers (driven by subconcious anxiety) from your life if you can.
Again, it depends on why you are designing something. If your goal is to just stroke your ego then you probably aren't going to care about the end user.
Whenever I see "should" in a sentence I think: why is this not how things are? What are the incentives? In this case: who is the person deciding what gets built? What are the consequences for being over budget? (Calatrava I am looking at you).
Meanwhile, anything on the internet you're reading/watching/listening to is by your choice.
This is about expectations. Good architecture serves many users. Good films serve many viewers. Good software ...
You get the point. And it is always better if you can serve two target audiences at once instead of one – IF you can do it without compromising.
But some software doesn't want or even need to serve all users. Take vim for example. For most people it would be a horrible experience to use it and they could criticise it for a ton of things. But what value is there in this cricism as they don't understand how vim is intended to be used? Their cirticism comes from a true place, but it still isn't worth a lot, because if you followed it to the end you would end up with something like notepad.exe or MS Word and loosing everything that makes vim special and interesting.
So if anything, what I say here is: good criticism is critcicism by people who see the same thing in your thing as you do, as their vision likely aligns with yours. If you are painting impressionist pictures for example, the criticism "it could look more photorealistic" by some guy is utterly useless, while the criticism "I think you should rely less on simple complementary color combinations" by someone who understands impressionism might be really helpful. The photorealism guy just tells you that there are people looking for this out there, but as you already know and/or actively decided against it, there is no use in this.
This is a good rule to go by. It is always way easier to critique a thing for whatever reason and critique can be good, but only to a point. When you start writing articles about how thing X is bad because of Y, you aren't doing any favors for anyone. You should instead try to channel that into something positive.
I have limited amount of time and before I spend 20 hours on a book or game I would like some indication that it's not a waste of time.
One could argue that both the good and the bad should be highlighted, but my experience is that I'm get most value from knowing about the bad parts.
My main take away from the post is that anything worth making will receive its share of critics. As a creator you should be aware of that and be ready to focus on the people you actually bring joy to and who appreciate what you do rather than the haters and take pride in actually moving the needle enough to be reacted on.
Closest thing in English that I could think of: history is written by the winners. Similar concept.
Or maybe "patches or GTFO" :-)
Which I guess speaks to how consumerist the US as a society is (said as an American).
The closest I can come up with is "Those who can, do." (Usually seen with "... Those who can't, teach.")
https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Learn-About-TR/TR-En...
> It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
This is an absurd position. We can't all be masters of anything but that doesn't mean we can't recognize flaws. Sure, sometimes there is a good reason for something a novice would perceive as a flaw but just throwing the concept of criticims away entirely and demand that people accept whatever you crap out is ridiculous. Building echo chambers where no one dares to criticize does not help the art at all - that way lies mediocrity.
All creators should learn to find value in criticism, especially negative. That doesn't mean that you need to always follow laymen opinions but even things wrongly perceived as faults are perceived as such and you should at least think about why that is and if that means you can do something better rather than ignoring the ignorant plebes.
It's also pretty arrogant of you to assume that "consumers" (what a dehumanizing term that is) should care about your constraints at all - especially constraints that are self-imposed. If you are selling something (either for money or for the expectation of time/resouces put in by the user) then your struggles are and imho should be irrelevant - all that matters is how well you fill the need that the user is trying to fill.
> In German there is the saying: Wer macht, hat recht which translates to who makes is right.
Jeder hat so viel Recht, wie er Macht hat.
If people have the means to complain, they have the right to. You can ignore them (unless you depend on them) but others might not.
This obviously gives rise to picking an audience, but this idea goes beyond just demographics. There is no greatest book of all time for 12 year old boys only individual preference which doesn’t result in an absolute rank.
Commercial art is at best a compromise. No artist is going to inherently prefer exactly what the market wants directly, they only want the indirect things associated with that. Aka money, fame etc.
Even that is hard. App stores are full of negative reviews for apps because X app is not just like Y app…. when X app isn’t at all supposed to be Y app. Or situations where the user simply misunderstood how the app works and etc.
It’s so hard to get things in front of the right audience who understand.
I get what you're saying here, but part of any art program is critical review of each others' works. You don't have to change what you created, but to hear other perspectives on how it is received is important.
One professor told me how it is, partly, about keeping the artist from falling down their own rabbit hole. Sort of like the story about the servant who followed Marcus Aurelius around to whisper "you are but a man" in his ear. Highly creative types tend to have somewhat fragile mental states, and they can spiral out if not kept in check.
But from students the content of their critique may be important than what it implies. ie: Did they fail to notice some specific detail intended to be obvious. So, it’s definitely a useful practice, but not necessary useful as criticism.
People naturally want to provide criticism, but it’s surprisingly inefficient without a great deal of context.
> If people have the means to complain, they have the right to. You can ignore them (unless you depend on them) but others might not.
Having the means to do something in no way gives you the right to do so. I have the means to speed in my car. I have the means to murder someone. I don't have the _right_ in either case to do so.
Right is earned through investment.
A creator invests a substantial amount of time and effort into something.
A complainer can invest no time or effort into something.
And specific to the gaming community, there's a distinction between investing consumption time (e.g. playing) and creation time (e.g. modding or building).
I'd allow that playing confers substantial rights ("I've played this game over 1,000 hours and I think..."), but those rights should never be confused with creator rights.
Which is what makes amateur game criticism so toxic to me ("I can't do what you do, nor have any interest in investing the effort, but let me tell you how to spend your time to do what I want").
Especially in the performance-limited era of Half Life, most gamers didn't know a damn thing about the boundary of the possible.
The ability to complain doesn't need to be earned, only the respect itself needs to be earned.
Which I guess boils down to "Don't listen to the internet."
You don't have to have invested in creation to know what you like and you don't. Claiming that the creators are the only ones who understand things enough to critique them is vanity and is toxic to projects.
Every time I've seen project leaders talk like that it's been a disaster. Jensen Harris et. al used that language to dismiss feedback about the Windows 8 Star Screen, for example.
Rights are absolutely not earned, they are granted. You do not earn the right to vote, or to have legal protection. A right is granted either by the state, by society, or by 'god'.
That kind of nonsense might be how some theoriticians discuss such things. But no normal person cares about that.
I didn’t say that I earned it.
> Making this into some sort of weird history lesson and berating "the state" (?) is not helpful.
Weird? It’s about the causal origin of rights, i.e. history.
Weird philosophy lessons on “rights” are not helpful.
Complainers: I am certainly strong enough to complain your ears off.
Makers: No, not like that! That’s immoral!
Maybe I need to clarify a little bit. Of course everybody hast the right to complain about everything (as people do). But not every criticism is sound cricism. Everybody may just get themselves a Turbo Encabulator and complain that the malleable logarithmic casing is misaligned with the pentametric fan. That is okay. They sold you a turbo encabulator after all and you rightfully expect the pentametric fan to be surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two main spurving bearings were in a direct line with it – this is what they told you, you will get.
Whether criticism is "sound" by my definition or not has to do with expectations one some part. If someone sells you a backup software that is "guarantueed to be 100% formally correct" for 100k€ and it then proceeds to munch your disks and set your computer on fire, criticism is not only okay, it is outright needed. But if someone puts their "works for me, but I strongly advice anybody else against using this"-backup-script on Github and it munches your disk, you may complain, but the other person is not at fault. A lot of people complain about things where someone basically just was like: I made this for fun in my spare time, take it or leave it. And they complain about it as if it was a commercial product they sold their firstborn for.
My other point with making and being right has to do with instutional experience. You don't have to be able to build a turbo encabulator yourself, but before you criticise it maybe make sure you have read its manual. Maybe that is my first level IT-support trauma speaking here, but many people are very quick in voicing criticism, and don't do the research whether the thing they criticise is wrong or they just had the wrong expectations. Of course a product can also be designed badly so it produces these false expectations and such things should be criticised.
Other things are purely subjective and criticism is worth nothing. You may complain about a experimental noise rock band being noisy of having nasty lyrics, but that is no meaningful criticism as this was very likely their goal. That person's feeling of "I hate that sound" is totally valid and true, and the musicians may or may not decide to take it seriously, but it is still just bad criticism – like complaining water is wet or complaining a weight is heavy. That is sort of the point of the thing.
That being said, as a creator I value negative criticism. And I take the feeling from where it comes from seriously most of the time. I just don't trust what they tell you the solution is.
Few creators will object to criticism that shows an understanding of the work/product. Most will object to personal abuse empty of any actual criticism.
Understanding the context of a product makes for better complaints. Just venting is not helpful and often abusive.
I see it a lot in small communities centered around open source games. It is easy for some one to vent their anger in a useless fashion (can we agree that pr teams calling it passion is a euphemism they use to avoid insulting people giving them money?), and comparatively difficult and rare for people to put their experience into relatable terms or to criticize a change as it pertains to the project's goals.
Of course we know nothing about that inflamed moderator. Oh well.
Hier geht es um die Gemeinschaft des Spiels, nicht um das Spiel selbst. Dieser Mann hat das Spiel nicht programmiert, nur eine kleine Ergänzung zu einer Ergänzung.
I do think they should stay polite and if the author isn't willing to change (for either objective or subjective reasons), move on.
What people do not have any right, or entitlement, to is agreement from the person they're complaining to. People are allowed to dismiss a complaint and not do anything about it, no matter how unhappy the complainant might be about it. You have no right to demand someone does something; you can only inform them that you're not happy about the status quo.
I have a right to complain that it's raining. And I have the free speech right to say "I demand it stop raining". But I have no right to come to you and demand that you make the rain stop, because that implies a claim on you that I do not have.
It's amazing how relatively mild denotational differences can have such wildly different connotations and perceived tones.
The first layer is the makers, but after that there are a couple of layers of assessors and distributors before ideas and products hit the masses. For someone in a community that makes things, criticism isn't so useful. In the other layers that are there to work out what ordinary people should do armchair criticism is a lot more useful. Still not very impressive, but more useful.
The armchair critics aren't at all interested in making things. Their self-appointed role isn't to make things. They are part of a community that generates chatter to help guide the conversation of the people who actually decide what should happen at the mass-market level.
Ain't dealing with an avalanche of Abmahnung, and ain't going to shut up either.
There's unfortunately also the saying "Nicht geschimpft ist genug gelobt", i.e. something like "Not being scolded is enough compliments".
If things work, they are taken for granted and some people only speak up if they are irritated.
Which of course leads to a biased perception of how satisfied the people on average really are with your work.
Last week I wrote an email to an author to a blog I have been following for a year or so. Just wanted to let him know his work was appreciated and I hope he continues writing.
He replied and told me this little gesture made his day. So I guess I should do more of that.
>The enduring phenomenon of ‘holy wars’ in computing, such as the bitterness around the prolonged Python 2 to Python 3 migration, is not due to mere pettiness or love of conflict, but because they are a coordination problem: dominant platforms enjoy strong network effects, such as reduced ‘bitrot’ as it is regularly used & maintained by many users, and can inflict a mirror-image ‘bitcreep’ on other platforms which gradually are neglected and begin to bitrot because of the dominant platform.
>The outright negative effect of bitcreep mean that holdouts do not just cost early adopters the possible network effects, they also greatly reduce the value of a given thing, and may cause the early adopters to be actually worse off and more miserable on a daily basis. Given the extent to which holdouts have benefited from the community, holdout behavior is perceived as parasitic and immoral behavior by adopters, while holdouts in turn deny any moral obligation and resent the methods that adopters use to increase adoption (such as, in the absence of formal controls, informal ones like bullying).
The PHP world, for example, is very famous for its focus on compatibility: breaking changes are generally announced far before they are released, and the amount of actually breaking changes is very very small - out of my mind, the only thing that really bit a lot of very old code was the removal of implicitly provided global variables and the mysql legacy functions, which by that point were deprecated for like a decade and in many cases could be resolved by more-or-less simple search and replace runs. Other than that, a lot of legacy code works fine or with similarly minor modifications in PHP 8 - while the runtime itself is capable of running code with syntax features of the modern world.
Once 9 makes some of this mandatory it'll also be much more difficult for a single codebase to work across a wide range of PHP versions. That's possibly even an explicit goal: forcing narrower support from applications and libraries will prod more hosts and end-users to update.
Not that these are bad changes, but that the philosophy of extreme compatibility really isn't in force anymore. It's not a Python 2/3 scenario but a gradual constant shift.
People feel like they have very little control, and that no one is listening. In that environment they sometimes scream into the void. It's counterproductive, but understandable.
Sure, maybe not a golden age, but they're doing alright
On the other hand, it's completely different from the Use Map Settings games I grew up playing in Brood War, which were radically different games using Starcraft assets. DotA was literally the same thing in WC3. The game became a game engine. There's nothing like that now. (Garry's Mod?)
2) Roblox Corp does all it can to obfuscate this from parents/guardians and maintain the predatory system to benefit from a cut.
It's basically just a game engine now.
I remember playing the brainy tekkit modpacks (which tend to have 300+ mods inside) that add a whole bunch of new mechanics to the game to the point where you're designing each piece of a factory and trying to put it together to automate resource collection. Then after a week once you finally have all the pieces created, and fuel refined, you can launch off in a rocket to the moon and beyond.
I remember playing the competitive UHC (ultra hardcore) servers. These were the inspiration for pubg/fortnight. Once you die, you're out, last-man-standing wins. 350 players would be randomly dispersed in a 10x10km world. And after 1 hour the world border would shrink in 1km every 10 minutes. If you were outside the border you would be teleported to a random space inside the playzone. What do you do to win? Create alliances? Head for the center to try and build fortifications to get the drop on players who are teleported near the center? Collect resources to build the best weapons and defences to fight people coming in with the ever shifting border? Sneak around to backstab a player and steal their resources? etc... etc... (Badlion UHC was my server of choice, there's some great youtube videos out there)
I remember playing in the casual fun mario-party style minigame servers.
I remember try to survive in the hardcore survival modpacks like the one where you're in a plane that's crashed in the desert next to an abandoned city, and you have to very carefully manage your heat/water while trying to scratch enough to survive while being assaulted by extremely difficult enemies.
I remember playing the nostalgia filled pixelcraft (literally just pokemon in minecraft).
I remember playing the challenging skyblock. This is where you're on a tiny island with a single tree floating in an infinite void, and you need to very carefully use your resources to expand your island to create your own world.
I remember the enhancement mods that just added new features to the game (biomes, creatures, dimensions, technology, magic, etc...)
I remember playing the adventure maps that creators would upload. These are worlds that are essentially read-only, and you're only allowed to interact with what the creator lets you. Essentially an adventure game like Legend of Zelda or Tomb Raider.
I remember just playing the base game with friends.
There's so much to love in minecraft and its mods expand the game so much further.
There's a thriving ecosystem of games and mods out there, no such thing as a golden age that has ended.
Starcraft II for example has a host of excellent mods. My group doesn't even play the original Starcraft game, and I don't have any interest in it either, but we have sunk many hours into different custom maps.
1. I was threatened once with fisticuffs because the person spent too much time playing Empire
2. I was blamed for causing one person's divorce
3. I was blamed for a student flunking out
4. Empire was blamed for consuming all the resources of Caltech's PDP-10, and was banned during daytime and during finals week
"To keep viruses out of the power supply and to stop me from talking to pedophiles"
Ugh now even if you formally make a game you can't even publish it to anything other than PCs without getting permission from console companies or google / apple! Well I guess f-droid is an exception, or, if you make your game a browser game.
Arma also comes to mind as a moddable multiplayer game. Crossfire as well, not super popular in the West nowadays though.
I miss Flash games!
You could inject code in a lot of places and people were doing wonky things. I think it had to do with the user base being far smaller at the time. Knowledgeable people were still a significant part of it and security was far less of concern.
There was also far less money involved which is always a great filter for the kind of personality you want in this kind of community.
Modding a game means that you have a specific starting point, the original game, which you are probably a fan of. And you may want your creation to be a part of this original world, share some (or most) of gameplay elements, design elements, story elements etc.
People modded Half-Life not only because modding Half-Life was somewhat easier than making an FPS game from scratch, but also because they wanted to explore the original story from another angle, or they liked how engine feels to play, or for whatever other reason wanted a starting point to be a complete game. Kind of the original asset store: the assets of the game you are modding.
If you are a big fan of open world games, GTA and Skyrim took teams of a 100 people, years of effort to make. Not something an indie is going to be able to reproduce. Modding allows you to create in that world.
Third would be reach. Getting people to try out a mod for a game is often much easier than getting them to try out a whole new game.
This reads more like sarcasm and tongue-in-cheek hyperbole than an actual really mad person.
for some context I suspect this forum was the same place that gave us:
"Natural Selection needs a new alien, like a Scorpian that hovars without flapping."
And just to be clear, we definitely need more turrents, commando.
Imagine my surprise when one day I'm browsing Hacker News and I see a comment on some unrelated article absolutely lambasting how I built the core feature of the web app. It was referenced by direct URL, no mistaken identity or projection.
(Their critique was correct in many important ways, but also: the client loved it.)
(edit: typos)
This is a great perspective. When I was a highschooler I worked on a fan translation project that, 20 years later, someone called a "god awful piece of festering sewage that should never have existed to begin with" [1]. I'm quite proud to have done something in my youth that generated so much online rage for decades.
https://legendsoflocalization.com/which-final-fantasy-iv-tra...
I don't know how modded it is on the server-side, but you can still drop a few buildings as aliens, and a sentry turret as marines. Good fun!
(ORB forever!)
The uwe implementation of combat for ns2 was last stand and the source is here https://github.com/unknownworlds/ns2_laststand
Looks like the combat mod is there too https://github.com/AlexHayton/NS2Combat
Here is a quick comparison of NS, Gloom, Tremulous and Unvanquished.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ns2/comments/4bsws2/the_ultimate_co...
Interestingly, I have little-to-no memory of this 'combat' mode, I think nostalgia cemented just the original playmode into my head.
I also wrote a super simple half-life mod back then. It was like Juggernaut mode for Halo, which came out later: one person was nearly invisible, with an insta-kill crowbar, and whoever killed them took their powers.
I miss those days.
Maybe that’s how trolls feel.
I used JS, C# with NHibernate and lots of weird HTML and CSS to create something which satisfied all the requirements I've been given. But guess how good the code was? We had zero review process except someone looking over your shoulder by chance and quickly distancing themselves as what I then thought to be the "any code I didn't write is bad code" attitude.
I did the "just ship it" thing before it was cool. Views accessing database? Lots of those. Classes skipping dependency injection and instantiating random god classes to achieve all the things? Plenty! Using extremely complicated and dog-slow JS when a couple lines of CSS could do? Sure! Converting numbers to floats to decimals then back to floats then to string then again to god knows what only to store integers in the database? Got you covered!
Then the customers wanted more and more features, and when I was doing ERP integration (really!) I finally thought I needed some guidance. Oh the humble me!
I went to the lead developer in our department because those other inexperienced (!) developers wouldn't have understood the challenges I was facing. He took the time to listen to me, and as I was having my first "rubber duck" moment, his face started to change. We later sat at my station and the horror in his eyes when I was passionately explaining the "intelligent code" I've written was remarkable. He ended up creating a task force and rewriting the whole thing later.
A year or two later, he was doing a presentation of the state-of-the-art review process "he designed" (pull requests), and used my code to the same effect as those WAT moments in the "The Birth & Death of JavaScript" speech by Gary Bernhardt[0].
Funnily enough, I never took offense. To be honest I didn't know how to feel. What I knew was that a lot of customers were complaining that it took way more time/budget to develop features for the order module and nobody understood why we had to take a few steps back out of nowhere when everything was going so smoothly.
Now being a technical lead myself, I know the importance of not just reviewing code, but reviewing the circumstances and trade-offs that lead to that code being written. Actually, reviewing those is much more important than reviewing the code itself. More important is to have linters and other tooling review code, not people.
I know this post is more about what you create being hated rather than how you created it, but I just wanted to get this off my chest, and thought it could still be relevant :)
[0]: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...