[Announce] Poschengband 7.0.2 released

[Antoine]

Do we have some means of communicating with Chris, is he on email or ...?

[Antoine]

Well, here we are and we should make the best of it.

A

[AnonymousHero]

Look, let's try to be a little bit charitable here.

Now, the language (and reasoning!) in some of those commit messages looks pretty strange[1]. Obviously, Chris can say what he likes, but he doesn't have the power to prevent anyone from posting "modded" Poschengband games on the Oook ladder/forums, so I'll just chalk that up to bad phrasing on his part. I think he may have meant that he only wanted to read feedback on completely unmodded games. Maybe I'm being too generous, but text discussion/commentary makes it very easy to get the wrong idea because there's no quick correction mechanism.

(EDIT: As an aside, it would be nice if the ladder could actually split the "format" version of the dump from the "code" version so that we could e.g. just specify git commit IDs as the "version" for example. I think the ladder is one of our best ways to gather statistical information, but it's marred by people playing forks under the "same" version number. Again, I think this is a reasonable "objection" by Chris. It's really hard to gather actionable information from ladder dumps if you don't know what exact code people are playing.)

Legally, morally, etc. AFAIAC there's no leg to stand on wrt. forbidding others from modding PosCheng, but frankly the codebase is so awful that I'm not sure why anyone would want to. To be clear: The codebase was awful before Chris "inherited" it. Vanilla angband has a much better code base.

[1] I really don't understand removing patches from people you've since had a falling out with. If the code works, what's the problem? I say this only because there was no game-play justification for the removal of some of clouded's patches. In fairness, some did have gameplay justification that I felt was reasonable.

EDIT: Btw, reported the "Chlis" account.

[Derakon]

Not funny.

[Antoine]

I wonder if Chris is OK in himself these days. Not impossible that he is working through a rough patch

A.

[wobbly]

Gotta hit open source game developers with the outrage of 1000 suns. It's what fuels their inspiration.

Looks (I haven't played yet just read) a bit more balanced than 7.0.0. Trying to finish my character in 7 before taking a closer look though.

[debo]

This is a lot of drama and outrage for a game that maybe a few hundred people play.

[Gwarl]

I gave the maintainer the benefit of the doubt before (a courtesy he did not extend to Clouded) but these remarks cross the line

Clouded maintains his innocence and the maintainer has not provided solid evidence
The maintainer makes accusations and then disappears

The second quote shows unbelievable contempt for his (former?) players

The maintainer is a nasty piece of work

The Variant Maintainer says 'Wait until you see the next release!'

[nikheizen]

I am livid
I am thinking of forking and stealing all his players out of pure spite

I don't think that's the right state of mind to jump into any kind of creative project with.

[krazyhades]

I would take "the forums" to mean the entirety of angband.oook.cz/forum, not just the PCH threads. And I agree with krazyhades, that's a bit much to ask. Unfortunately it's a little hard to glean what exactly chris meant because they're not available to further explain. Oh well.

Given the sentiments expressed in chris' removal of clouded's content contributions "out of personal disgust for the contributor," and in his removing the easy_lore and easy_id options because "players of this ilk deserve neither respect nor consideration of any kind," and so on (taken verbatim from commit messages), I rather expect he intentionally means any posting of such games to the forums and ladder at all so as to minimize visibility and playerbase of sub-variants that he considers morally wrong to enjoy.

I can sympathize with the unpleasant feeling of seeing new players asking where to find competing versions of your baby, or having people openly and sometimes very harshly criticize what they see as flaws in one's creation. Complainers feel more incentive to speak up in hurtful ways than satisfied people have to report their enjoyment. Certainly I understand the frustration of trying to track down what looks like (and are) instances of buggy behavior that ultimately are rooted in the tweaks made in a modder's custom version. But dealing with such tribulation, discomforting competition, and tinker-happy users is part and parcel of running an open source project.

Chris does also throw in the line in the original post about having expected more full forks, which perhaps indicates that it's not all bad. Hopefully he just wants a clearer distinction between modded and unmodded games so that for his own bughunting, balance, etc purposes he can actually trust the results he gets when searching the ladder for poschengband dumps.

[Derakon]

I would take "the forums" to mean the entirety of angband.oook.cz/forum, not just the PCH threads. And I agree with krazyhades, that's a bit much to ask. Unfortunately it's a little hard to glean what exactly chris meant because they're not available to further explain. Oh well.

[Fnord]

But you didn't ask this, you've asked folks to stop posting modded games entirely. You've also in prior posts and in the recent commits gone off the rails attacking folks for enjoying play experiences in ways different from your intent. I love a lot of what you've done, but I also strongly disagree on some design choices. I in no way intend to kowtow to a "stop having fun wrong" sentiment. This is an open source game and community for sharing discussion, play, and development, not a managed subscription service created to deliver uniform content to a captive base.

Okay, so while I'm among those criticizing some of Chris' choices, let's be fair and clear: He said "on the forums". I think he refers to providing feedback on the pcb threads that is based on variants. And I can completely understand that request.

I also agree that posting dumps of modded variants should be marked clearly. That's in everyone's interest, not just Chris'.

[Bostock]

Blue Mages

from comments

"...will take a major rewrite to bring [Blue Mages] back.If somebody asks I might..."

Please consider this a somebody asking.

Else it's play a fork to get my Blue Mage on, rather than your game.

[krazyhades]

It's one thing to ask modders to alter their sub-variant's dumps so that they are categorized under different names on oook, so that you can clearly tell which games were played on your specific versions versus other players' altered versions without having to read comments or guess.

But you didn't ask this, you've asked folks to stop posting modded games entirely. You've also in prior posts and in the recent commits gone off the rails attacking folks for enjoying play experiences in ways different from your intent. I love a lot of what you've done, but I also strongly disagree on some design choices. I in no way intend to kowtow to a "stop having fun wrong" sentiment. This is an open source game and community for sharing discussion, play, and development, not a managed subscription service created to deliver uniform content to a captive base.

[Nivim]

If you are posting on oook, please play the actual Poschengband source code. If you mod, that is fine, but please don't post on this forum. This is just common courtesy and is the only price I ask for all of my hard work on this variant.

I get the sense this would be better solved by making sure that dumps of different Poschengband variants are actually marked as such in the dump, perhaps even with commit indicators. You can't really tell people to stop playing and publicizing their games, after all.

Judging by chat, Gwarl is already taking a shot at such a change, but I suspect there are reasons it wasn't done already, such as uncertainty about how the ladder works and potentially needing to change savefile code too.