Several hours later the Devs walk to the mic, dragging that damn plumber behind them...
Ok guys, a lot has happened over the last 24-ish hours. Hopefully this post will clear up everything. We decided it would be easy to make this more of a “FAQ” in style, since there were a lot of questions asked and a lot of answers given. So without further ado:
NB: Anyone that posts “tl;dr” will receive a one-day ban to start with. This is your only warning. If you cannot be bothered to read this thread, do not post about it.
WTF is the SF Design Team doing?
The SourceForts Design Team is a group of players who are essentially developers, without any specific technical skills or technical tasks to work on. Instead, they contribute ideas, participate in discussions, and assist in making decisions regarding v2.0. Currently, the design team consists of snuffy, entRo, Scatman, Master Dana, Kas, NocturnO, Monty, Fail, and RedXIII. Yes, they are all members of Suverin and/or were part of the old SF 2.0 leak. They were not chosen simply because they were in Suverin or because they were involved with the leak. They were chosen because they were part of the original “Haven” development team, and have experience with the concept behind v2.0.
How did we get here anyway?
A while back, when the "old devs" still were running SF, there was a group of people that didn't really like the way SF was heading. They initially started developing their own mod, called Haven, and even had a working alpha. However, their lead coder dropped off the face of the planet, taking Haven’s source code with him. They decided to keep working on the mod as much as they could, although they knew they would eventually need a coder and more resources. Sometime in the summer of '07, some of the SF Devs got involved with Haven, really liking the concept behind it. Long story short, the team decided that SF was pretty much dead-in-the-water development wise, and the best option would be to merge the two mods, with "Haven" becoming 2.0 and being remade from the ground up.
Fast forward a bit, new SF development team gets some coders, a modeler, and a new mapper or two, and rushes the release of v1.9.3. Realizing how poor 1.9.3 was, the team decides to develop 1.9.4 before putting its full resources into 2.0 (this would be December '07). HisChild continued to work on 1.9.4, with the mappers fixing some bugs in maps for 1.9.4. The concept artist (o_nobody_o) works on some stuff, Slice works on some stuff, flow of progress is pretty good.
Exactly where are we right now?
Since HisChild had more experience with the Source SDK, we decided that he would be the Lead Programmer for v1.9.4; Black, Commander, Khuskan, and Sayyan worked on the various bugs in the official maps. Right now, v1.9.4 of SourceForts is being wrapped up. We think we’ve finally gotten rid of all, or at least the majority of, the bugs in v1.9.3. Before we release v1.9.4, however, we will be conducting much more extensive testing than what was done for v1.9.3.
But what about v2.0? Well, since Zoc didn’t have much experience with the Source SDK at the time, we decided that he would start coding v2.0 from the ground up. We felt this would be a good learning experience for him, and we were right. He has picked up the Source SDK very quickly and has been making great progress. Right now, he has managed to get some of the basic SF features in, such
as flags and capturezones, the beginnings of the scoreboard, and has even gotten blocks into the game. His next tasks include finishing the scoreboard, a block-spawning mechanism (most likely a gun of some sort at this point), and a block-freezing system.
Besides Zoc, our concept artist o_nobody_o and our modeler Slice began working on some of the weapons for Phase 1 of SourceForts 2.0. So far, Slice has finished the model for the SF 2.0 minigun (
originally posted here, final
here and
here), and is currently working on the “flechette gun” for SF 2.0.
He just posted a Dev Diary with some images of the gun, and everyone should check it out.
Now, a question from concerned community member Disturber:
Why are we still months away from an alpha (my analysis of the comments made here) when we are almost eleven months out from the leak and over ten months out from the major exits from the old dev team? I'm a little hazy on the time line, but it seems to me (again from posts made here) that the separate Haven project was active at least by early April of last year, if not earlier. The dismissive and vague responses are hurting you more than any argument that I (or nip, or Bobert, or TommieV) could possibly advance. You really need to explain this, and that was the original point of the thread, as staff shortages and source code loss still don't seem to fully account for the shortfall at a conceptual level -- classes not even roughly determined, etc. The lack of confidence has nothing to do with aptitude or experience; I think our concern is with your collective ability to execute.
So, why has progress on v2.0 been so slow? The short answer is that we haven’t been working on it for that long now.
The current Dev team only took over on October 6th, 2007. For the first two months we worked on v1.9.3. Zoc began working on v2.0 on December 1st, 2007 (or within a few days of the release of v1.9.3), and has made good progress so far. The code for v2.0 is much cleaner than the old SF code, and the clean code will make it much easier for our coders to add onto later. What Zoc is working on now is probably the most time-consuming part of the project: creating the basic game rules. Still, it is important to remember that Zoc, like the other Devs and everyone on this forum, has a life outside of SF and cannot spend all of his free time working on the project.
As to the “conceptual shortfall”, I’m not entirely sure where you’re getting that from. We already have the basic plans for the classes laid out, and as soon as we have them in a more understandable format we can share them with you. For those that missed it the first time, you can also check out our public design document, which contains a description of the gameplay in Haven.
Anyway, why haven’t we been keeping you guys more up-to-date?
Well, part of the answer is that we didn’t feel there was much to tell you guys about. To us, lots of posts saying “Hey guys, HisChild just fixed this bug that you guys have never seen before because it in v1.9.3” or “Hey, HisChild just fixed another bug!” doesn’t really mean much. There was the possibility of doing a “bug tracker” in HisChild’s user title like we did with v1.9.3, but for v1.9.4 we didn’t really have a clear number of the bugs, what with the constant fixing of bugs and discovery of bugs.
We were planning on doing at least two Dev Diaries, one with Slice’s new weapon and one with Khuskan and Commander’s first v2.0 map. However, we first showed some images of the map to our beta team, and someone leaked those images. The leak worried us a bit and we were reconsidering our media release policy. We initially decided that we would wait until v1.9.4 was out before we showed anything more from v2.0. The community, however, began to question what was going on behind the scenes with SourceForts; this of course erupted in the “wtf is the ‘sourceforts design team’ doin?” thread, which is viewable
here. So we decided to have Slice post his Dev Diary early. To make it more clear: yes, we posted the Flechette Diary now because the community was asking us to.
Closing thoughts…
We've structured our entire development process around allowing feedback. We are 100% insistent that the only way to judge a game is by playing it, and that's why we settled with a far less glamorous two phased release - so everyone could get their hands on it and provide feedback before we spent too much time and effort prettying everything up for a final release.
It's like… we know everyone wants to have their say, and we want everyone to have their say, but when people have their say we think they should be given the opportunity to speak from a justified ground. If we were to just post a load of ideas we were having, the community wouldn't be able to pass any more judgment on them than we can at the moment. We aren’t saying we're better than the community, we’re just saying that if you haven't tried an idea you can't judge it - it's like saying a style of music sucks when it's only been described to you. There is no plausible way that the entire community can test out every feature as we do, and it just the way things played out that resulted in the design team being purely Suverin/leakers.
Well, this has been quite a bit of text, and we’d like to thank everyone for making it this far. There may have been some things we missed along the way, and it’s ok for you to remind us of them. We just ask that everyone discusses and asks questions in a reasonable, mature manner (and uses periods and proper capitalization. Please, for the love of god, don’t give us huge blocks of text with no breaks.) Once again, thank you for reading this all the way through, and we look forward to working with the community in the future.
Man, why did we hire that plumber...
Hybrid Mode
