Feelings about recent "development"

[Timo Pietilä]

Hello all devs and maintainer.

With all the changes game is going thru I have a feeling that vanilla angband stopped being vanilla angband in 3.2 and now people are developing a variant and vanilla angband is no longer maintained. Too many changes with too little testing and too few opinions asked. That's no longer community-based development, it is few people shared view variant development.

Takkaria, I think you are still maintainer, right? Stop this madness. For a year or so after 3.3 is released freeze the development and allow only bug fixes. It feels like Robert was the last maintainer, not you. Now things have been taken over by committee that does whatever they feel like doing.

[d_m]

Hello all devs and maintainer.

Hi Timo!

[Timo Pietilä]

Hi Timo!

For some reason forum decided to submit when I clicked the edit screen with mouse in order to get back to it after accidental tab-pressing.

[konijn_]

Hello all devs and maintainer.

With all the changes game is going thru I have a feeling that vanilla angband stopped being vanilla angband in 3.2 and now people are developing a variant and vanilla angband is no longer maintained. Too many changes with too little testing and too few opinions asked. That's no longer community-based development, it is few people shared view variant development.

Takkaria, I think you are still maintainer, right? Stop this madness. For a year or so after 3.3 is released freeze the development and allow only bug fixes. It feels like Robert was the last maintainer, not you. Now things have been taken over by committee that does whatever they feel like doing.

Greetings,

I share your feelings, but only half way. A very good read by Takkaria in the beginning was whether the maintainer should maintain or develop. And since only maintaining is dreadfully boring and not rewarding, it was ventured that there should be maintenance plus development ( evolution ).

This has resulted in Angband being awesome on Macs, something that hasnt really been the case since a long time ( never ? ). This has also resulted in some great separation of game/ui/logic. It also has resulted in a slew of warnings the maintainers conveniently turned off, no easy way of natively compiling on Windows and it would seem a greater number of Angband players.

All in all that seems like a win.

For the minority of fogeys like you and I there most certainly is a loss, but I guess once the fog clears we can always make a true Vanilla variant that stays game-wise where robert left it ( although I never liked the kobold race myself )

On a remotely connected side note, please do keep giving your feedback on this game, I think you are the most active/experienced/crazygood player we have and your words have weight.

T.

[Derakon]

I'm pretty confident that Takkaria has a say in everything that's going into the mainline branch. So basically what we have is a bunch of developers each working on their own minor variants, whose changes periodically get merged back into mainline on Takkaria's say-so. It's probably not quite that strict, but you get the idea.

Nobody's going to be interested in being a maintainer of the game if they don't get to tweak things, so expecting development to basically halt for a year to let the game stabilize seems unrealistic to me. As usual, if you don't like the current version of Vanilla, then please say so (with specifics, ideally) -- but there's also the previous versions, which are still perfectly good games in their own rights.

[buzzkill]

I've said it before and I'll say it again, just call it V+.

Vanilla should be maintained. Variants should be developed.

[Netbrian]

Nobody's going to be interested in being a maintainer of the game if they don't get to tweak things, so expecting development to basically halt for a year to let the game stabilize seems unrealistic to me.

I agree with this -- I see most of the current work as revisiting Angband gameplay elements that have been with the game for a long time, but aren't necessarily good ideas. Now, some kinds of changes may make things worse, but I think we still need to look for what can improve the game.

[Timo Pietilä]

Nobody's going to be interested in being a maintainer of the game if they don't get to tweak things, so expecting development to basically halt for a year to let the game stabilize seems unrealistic to me. As usual, if you don't like the current version of Vanilla, then please say so (with specifics, ideally) -- but there's also the previous versions, which are still perfectly good games in their own rights.

It's not the changes themselves necessary, it is the pace of the change. I not had yet time to get to know 3.2 well enough to pinpoint where potential problems are or what could be done better, and 3.3 is like entirely different game. It is scary. It takes that year to experiment all the changes fully.

There is no point to make changes in sake of change. Don't fix things that are not broken, that's the basic rule to keep things working. To me it looks like new features creep in too easily, way too many things are changing and they all would need to work together which is plain impossibility without decent playtesting. It feels this rate of change is just disaster in making.

[Timo Pietilä]

I agree with this -- I see most of the current work as revisiting Angband gameplay elements that have been with the game for a long time, but aren't necessarily good ideas. Now, some kinds of changes may make things worse, but I think we still need to look for what can improve the game.

How do you propose to do that if there is practically no playtesting whatsoever? Few games is not enough to get any feeling of the complete picture.

[Netbrian]

How do you propose to do that if there is practically no playtesting whatsoever? Few games is not enough to get any feeling of the complete picture.

Isn't that why we have development releases in the first place, so we can test things and try to revert them?

(I wouldn't mind bugfixes being applied to the stable release a bit more often though -- isn't the most recent release still Angband the Game of Shoes?)

[Timo Pietilä]

Isn't that why we have development releases in the first place, so we can test things and try to revert them?

Considering the speed of change there it just doesn't work. I haven't yet got around with changes in 3.2 completely. 3.3 changes a lot more. And every single development version seems different in a ways that you don't even get decent picture of it before it is again changed.

Pace of change must be slowed down. This fast you can only fix the most obvious errors, the more subtle ones that sometimes turn out to be much worse than the obvious ones don't get noticed until later. Changes in big picture. Like the reason why the 3.3 is made so much harder: because 3.2 got too easy. Too many changes, too little playtesting.

Also it seems that bugs in 3.2 don't get fixed because devs are so busy tweaking everything. Like the rarity fix in leather boots. Still no bugfix release for even that, and that is MAJOR bug because it makes artifact and speed boots way too common. Fix is trivial if you know what you are supposed to change, but I bet several players have no clue, and even more don't care. Same thing with ego-DSM which are pretty much all broken.

Which reminds me: in dev versions several artifacts are weakened, but things like ego-DSM are still there. Permanence is removed, but speed stays, while permanence was way less broken than speed. Permanence is not much better than resistance which is still there. Elven was added, and that is arguably even better than permanence (stealth vs sustains. I take stealth any day).

[Nick]

Simple solution - play 3.0.6.

[Timo Pietilä]

Simple solution - play 3.0.6.

That's not solution to too fast development speed. Not a solution to new players, not to developers themselves. From recent messages I have got a feeling that even developers themselves are no longer sure what is going on and who is changing what and why. It was not long ago when Eddie posted that he can't make changes (to ID by use IIRC), because every time he tries to do something something else has broken/changed/affected the feature he was planning to change. Discussion was between Magnate and Eddie at that point.

[dos350]

eee~ blah blah blah, plz no rage.

no doubt , the game is getting worse,

why make changes that will hurt the game lol, seems real silly to me.

a bout 1million examples , nearly every proposed change is one for the worse,

pointy penalty remove
making items worse
etc etc etc
and its been happenin since before 320,,

plz , keep a good game good in its latest state

[Timo Pietilä]

eee~ blah blah blah, plz no rage.

no doubt , the game is getting worse,

Eh, no. Game is getting better. All of the new features and thingamodos are something people have agreed at some point that they would be good to have in the game. It is just changing too fast. There is no time to balance things. Some things are changed just for a sake of change. Things get half-done, like the new and improved visual editing from knowledge-menu. Very good, except that you can't save the changes there. Edit the current game, then exit and reload, change is gone. Three symbols for permanent walls. Only one which you can edit. Whoever did that change did it only partially. Old system, as flawed it was visually, did work, this one doesn't. Things like that. All over the place.