Feelings about recent "development"

[Antoine]

I guessed that you wont agree with me. It was worth saying I think, maybe it did raise some concern about what is happening. If it did, then I consider this as success.

I would call it a success. They acknowledged your problem and provided a considered response. They are not going with the idea of a year long moratorium on development but that was always a long shot. And their proposed strategy does look very good (single vision, bugfix releases, focus on balance).

I would think that everyone concerned should be pretty pleased with that outcome.

A.

[the Invisible Stalker]

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vanilla angband stopped being vanilla angband in 3.2 and now people are developing a variant and vanilla angband is no longer maintained.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.

I agree with most of this. I don't have much time to play Angband, but when I do it's mostly OAngband or Ironband now. I regard the fact that O's maintainer hasn't been heard from in years as a feature rather than a bug.

[Derakon]

In that case, you can always go play the Angband that was "new" years ago and get the same feeling.

[buzzkill]

In that case, you can always go play the Angband that was "new" years ago and get the same feeling.

That's not a solution, but instead the reality that we are faced with. I can't speak for Timo, but I believe this is the point he was stressing. The current dev team is maintaining a variant, an impostor, a shadowy clone of the original, and that Classic Vanilla Angband has no maintainer.

[kaypy]

Classic Vanilla Angband has no maintainer.

I regard the fact that O's maintainer hasn't been heard from in years as a feature

Yep, sounds like exactly what he wants.

Never mind years, dig up the frog-knows download and its just like vanilla has had no maintainer for nearly 2 decades!

Snarkyness aside, while I may not 100% agree with all of the changes, I have been looking at Vanilla (or, if you prefer, "Vanilla-ish") again for the first time in ages, because things actually seem to be happening. Excessive activity is better than a dead project.

[Timo Pietilä]

Excessive activity is better than a dead project.

Thing is that this is not a project. It is a ready product. Has been a ready product for a long time. Product that works. Excessive activity changing that has tendency to ruin the working product. Small tuning was all that it needed except that now it needs more work to fix all the things previous excessive changes ruined.

Thinking it as a project is coder talking, not player talking. Coder that doesn't care what happens to the product as long as he/she can continue on working with it.

[kaypy]

Thinking it as a project is coder talking, not player talking.

I'm not exactly on the dev team here. I'm talking as a player who has been ignoring vanilla for some time as 'been there, done that'.

[PowerDiver]

Thing is that this is not a project. It is a ready product. Has been a ready product for a long time. Product that works. Excessive activity changing that has tendency to ruin the working product. Small tuning was all that it needed except that now it needs more work to fix all the things previous excessive changes ruined.

My complaint is that there is [edit] not nearly enough testing IMO. I'm fed up with coding for V after running into code that could *never* work one time too many. If you make a change, at least try one single test to see if it does what you want it to do. If it doesn't work, don't submit it!

I think that gameplay changes should require testing too, for gameplay in addition to correctness. If someone wants to change gameplay, they should be required to play a full game with the change, and they should only submit it if the gameplay is improved. Play with cheat_death if that's what it takes to make it to M, or if even that is too hard get yourself a proxy. Try several gameplay changes at once if you like, but if there are problems don't submit the collection. Try another full game with a pruned collection again and again until you get it right, and submit only then.

Test code before submitting it. That's not no changes for a year, but at least it would slow development from a hurricane to a gale.

[Derakon]

Of course there's dev testing to be done before code goes into mainline, but gameplay testing is what the nightlies are for. The nightlies are betas. And while 3.2 could probably have gotten more testing before going out, I don't think the devs are going to make the same mistake with 3.3.

[Timo Pietilä]

Of course there's dev testing to be done before code goes into mainline, but gameplay testing is what the nightlies are for. The nightlies are betas. And while 3.2 could probably have gotten more testing before going out, I don't think the devs are going to make the same mistake with 3.3.

Are devs playing nightlies? Currently at least shards don't do any cuts and dungeons are too small. Maze-levels are more like odd-shaped rooms than levels. You just want to get out of there ASAP, because there is no reason to stay.

[Derakon]

All of those are known; the shards bug is fixed (read: will be fixed in the next version) and d_m's working on the dungeon levels. If you keep an eye on the current dev version thread, you'll see reported bugs and acknowledgements from the developers.

[AnonymousHero]

[..snip..]
Test code before submitting it. That's not no changes for a year, but at least it would slow development from a hurricane to a gale.

Are you seriously suggesting that a developer should test every gameplay change with every class (because let's face it, that's what's required to fully test) before submitting code to the development branch?

The result of that would be that nothing would ever get done.

Maybe there should instead be a set of people testing changes, let's call them "beta testers". Every once in a while this group would get a new executable to play with, let's call this the "nightlies" which they could test for balance, stability, etc.

[Timo Pietilä]

Are you seriously suggesting that a developer should test every gameplay change with every class (because let's face it, that's what's required to fully test) before submitting code to the development branch?

The result of that would be that nothing would ever get done.

Basic testing with one char for every gameplay change is enough. Balancing is a bit different thing, change can be seen much faster.

Maybe there should instead be a set of people testing changes, let's call them "beta testers". Every once in a while this group would get a new executable to play with, let's call this the "nightlies" which they could test for balance, stability, etc.

I just found Cammithrim and was wondering should I keep the Cestus of FA instead of that one. That's do I want (+2,+2), FA and sust CON instead of (+0,+3), FA and no sustain. Not an easy question, especially since I have only RoFA giving me FA currently.

Decided to go with my current Gauntlets of Power (+3,+5)(+4) and RoFA and store Cammithrim to home for a possible case of finding some ring that beats those gauntlets. Not very likely though. Maybe if I find Thorin....except that Thorin has FA.

[Magnate]

Basic testing with one char for every gameplay change is enough. Balancing is a bit different thing, change can be seen much faster.

Unsurprisingly, I disagree. Balance is actually really really difficult to see. If you haven't played the game much, you don't really know what balance is. If you have, you *think* you know what balance is, but you have a much harder time adjusting your perceptions to accommodate new features and paradigms.

As Derakon and AnonymousHero have both helpfully pointed out, dev versions are published precisely to increase the amount of gameplay testing of changes. The devteam make sure that there are no obvious crash bugs [cough]usually[cough], but since most of us are not very proficient players, it is not sensible to hold back dev versions while we playtest.

There is an alternative, of course - we could stop producing dev versions. That way everybody waits for six months while we make changes and test them, and then all the complaints come at once after each new release. Sounds far less good to me, but you might be able persuade takkaria to go there...

I just found Cammithrim and was wondering should I keep the Cestus of FA instead of that one. That's do I want (+2,+2), FA and sust CON instead of (+0,+3), FA and no sustain. Not an easy question, especially since I have only RoFA giving me FA currently.

Decided to go with my current Gauntlets of Power (+3,+5)(+4) and RoFA and store Cammithrim to home for a possible case of finding some ring that beats those gauntlets. Not very likely though. Maybe if I find Thorin....except that Thorin has FA.

That sounds superb - you've really had to think about that, and neither your current choice nor your future choices were obvious.

[buzzkill]

If you have, you *think* you know what balance is, but you have a much harder time adjusting your perceptions to accommodate new features and paradigms.

This almost rubs me the wrong way. It almost sounds like "You'll know we've achieved balance when we tell you that we've achieved balance." I almost feel obligated to add the smiley face. Ehh, what the hell! .