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Important member banned


CarltonTroisi

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I had no idea this was going on for such a long time. Just the other day I was asking myself what had happened to some past prominent members of this community and always just thought it was the normal private life becoming more important. It's a shame it had to come to this, as BD helped so many people, but that obviously doesn't mean that he should get a free pass to do what he wants. I know how much time is involved in making even a small map and then seeing your own vision changed or copied by another person without permission, I understand the anger this could induce. I've read some comments where people said that maybe it could have been done differently (not banning BD), but IMO you should be able to expect some common decency from people on the forum and in everyone's mind should be an unofficial gentlemen's agreement to respect the work of other people. Playing police is always an option of course, but if it has to come to that, then it has already gone too far. In all the years I've been part of this forum, I think just a few members have been banned from this forum and they always received enough opportunities to change, which is also again the case with BD. I respect him and all the work he has done for this community, but a ban was the only choice really.

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Cleaning Up The Neighborhood mission is still coming, if that's what you meant.

 

Btw. Biker was also banned from TTLG quite some time ago (both nicks he used there), although no idea why.

lol I was thinking he could publish the mission he's been working on over at TTLG. guess that idea got shot down pretty darn quick. Dunno if the TDM crew would still host it provided it adheres to the rules.

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I don't think Biker was banned from TTLG, I believe he kind of pulled a jtr and asked the admins to remove his username from the boards completely. This doesn't delete your posts, but it makes it so you cannot search for them by name (I think).

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I also liked Biker quite much and got to know him as an extremely helpful person, so it is sad that the ban was necessary. From the posts I have read most transgressions appeared to start with helping out and then seizing projects for himself. I think many bugfixes turned to a "maybe this would be even better that way" on parts that were not his to decide. What drove him to copy/paste the city section, I do not know and it does not seem like him... I have not picked up all the drama surrounding him and at times most likely attributed it wrongly (e.g. AirshipBallet seemed quite snappy and aloof (sometimes even arrogant), so I assumed it was her own attitude that made her leave. However, I don't want to reopen any old wounds). It is sad that it had to come to this and even only knowing the public posts, I completely understand the decision and know that it, unfortunately, was the most sensible thing to do.

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nbohr1more knows of the interactions me and Bikerdude had because he was a beta tester for my mission. While BD helped me optimize KoD and added to the map, I can't say that working with him was the smoothest. Multiple times I was extremely frustrated with changes he made without declaring his intentions first, changes that I had to take time out of my day to revert, which prolonged the beta testing period and speaks to what Judith is saying at the start. Multiple times I would plainly revert his changes, yet he would revert my revert back to what he did, like some stupid game of slapsies. I don't want you to get the impression that I'm still bitter about it, it was a long time ago, but I want to speak to a specific point.

 

Excuse the stupid question, but... what does it mean you had to revert your map back? Is there some kind of repository somewhere online where people work together on mao, without a copy of the map stored locally, so you can get back to it any time you want anyway?

Edited by chakkman
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I was shrewd enough to keep backups of previous versions of the map on my Google Drive, the most primitive way of version control. To use the same example, when I received the decal version of the map, I just had to take one of my backups and revert back to working from that, instead of the decal version. BTW, the backup wasn't that recent, so I still had to redo a fair bit of work I had already done. That's on me for not copying my map to Drive on every single change I made, but should I have been expected to paranoidly do that? It's miraculous I even kept backups to begin with. Imagine if somebody had no concept of version control, they would just have to accept Bikerdude's additions with no recourse, save for manually editing out what he did and walking the entire map back. I guarantee you it would not be easy to do so, in that case, for he had a habit of not keeping the slightest courtesies like making all of his changes on a seperate Layer in DarkRadiant. edit: for the smaller changes, I had to do just that, manual reversion, which was not very fun at all.

Edited by Spooks
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My FMs: The King of Diamonds (2016) | Visit my Mapbook thread sometimes! | Read my tutorial on Image-Based Lighting Workflows for TDM!

 

 

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@Spooks

 

My apologies.

 

I guess that KoD experience rattled you more than I was aware of.

 

To me, it looked like you were a Svengali, carefully coaxing Bikerdude to provide

some assistance while remaining firm to your vision of the final product.

 

I was pretty certain that EVERYONE knew how illogical and rash Biker could be...

so it was only the coolest heads and strategic thinkers would know how to gain

any advantage in these co-author situations.

 

I estimated you to be the penultimate type of strategic player.

 

I still think you made some brilliant decisions and you managed to release one

of the best missions I've ever played.

 

Sorry you had to deal with all the accompanying drama to achieve it.

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Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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Excuse the stupid question, but... what does it mean you had to revert your map back? Is there some kind of repository somewhere online where people work together on mao, without a copy of the map stored locally, so you can get back to it any time you want anyway?

 

I was shrewd enough to keep backups of previous versions of the map on my Google Drive, the most primitive way of version control. To use the same example, when I received the decal version of the map, I just had to take one of my backups and revert back to working from that, instead of the decal version. BTW, the backup wasn't that recent, so I still had to redo a fair bit of work I had already done.

 

This is the part I don't understand either. If I work on a document (TDM map, or Word document, or spreadsheet or whatever), then send it to someone else for review, I'm not going to delete my local copy of that document then replace it with whatever they send back to me before I've even seen what changes they've made. That's ludicrous, like just throwing away your own work for no good reason.

 

I'm not arguing that Biker's behaviour wasn't unacceptable, but it seems that some people's asset management practices are shockingly risky. It's not difficult to use local version control (Git, Subversion, Mercurial, whatever you find most comfortable) to track changes to your assets, but if you don't want to do this, you should at least save multiple versions, back these up somewhere (cloud or external media), and not just blindly overwrite a single version of the map with a modified copy you received from someone else.

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Excuse the stupid question, but... what does it mean you had to revert your map back? Is there some kind of repository somewhere online where people work together on mao, without a copy of the map stored locally, so you can get back to it any time you want anyway?

I helped a bit with Shadowhide's map and there we used a (the?) svn, which (if I am not mistaken) lets you revert to previous versions. I would recommend something like this in each joint venture, just in case something goes wrong (not necessarily due to one overbearing person, but due to any possible errors).

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You know what's the biggest tragedy about this? That so few people who still make missions for this mod have to fight against each other. I can see why Bikerdude was a controversial figure, but, man... this is a real shame, especially as it also involved a member who has never created a single map for this mod. I just hope that someone will join the community who is as big as a workhorse as Bikerdude was.

Once the new version finishes beta I will be working a lot on the code. I have also started mapping (about a month ago) and Ive been putting in 4-6 hours a day. Hopefully I can be that guy. I had a terrible tragedy in my life last year and so now besides a fulltime job I have literally no life, so it seems possible if not probable.

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Maybe some of you would care to know, that Bikerdude is doing ok. I have talked to him just now because I felt bad for him. He is very understanding and also seems to think that it's maybe for the best this way. Aaand he is still mapping like a boss, so no worries there. ;-)

 

Thanks for asking him and telling us. It is good to know how people are doing after getting to know them here, even if I never met anxone here personally.
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Once the new version finishes beta I will be working a lot on the code. I have also started mapping (about a month ago) and Ive been putting in 4-6 hours a day. Hopefully I can be that guy. I had a terrible tragedy in my life last year and so now besides a fulltime job I have literally no life, so it seems possible if not probable.

 

This is one of those times when I'm not sure whether to press the Like button. Oh well.

Edited by jaxa
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Once the new version finishes beta I will be working a lot on the code. I have also started mapping (about a month ago) and Ive been putting in 4-6 hours a day. Hopefully I can be that guy. I had a terrible tragedy in my life last year and so now besides a fulltime job I have literally no life, so it seems possible if not probable.

 

That doesn't sound like a healthy situation at all. As we've already seen, compulsive mapping isn't a solution to real-life problems. It might help you for a while, if you need to feel you have control over something just to stay sane. But it obviously doesn't replace things like proper grieving or moving on. So no, don't be that guy, for your own sake.

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What i'm getting from this is that the editor needs a way to mark 'checkpoints' or something like that for a budget version control because people don't just think about it.

 

I'd say something like 'exporting' a map immediately places a copy of that map (but not assets ofc) on your editor dir. If later what gets returned to you is unacceptable and you didn't think to keep copies, at least it's right there. The roundtrip between different installations of the editor would mark the file as 'different' and the backup wouldn't be replaced. Some kind of warning about that backup dir growing too much could be useful too, or to open different versions of the map on the gui.

Edited by i30817
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I wonder, how version-control-friendly map files are.

If changing something in a map does not alter the order and representation of unchanged stuff in the file, GIT or any other version control software could be used. That would even allow collaboration on one map by different authors at the same time - as long as they don't change the same area.

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If you just email a map to somebody using your modern webmail account (Gmail, etc), you should have a copy of the map before alterations...

 

If it's too big to send that way, just keep multiple copies in a directory somewhere. Split off a new copy when you do anything of significance. And periodically back them up onto at least an external hard drive.

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Yes, map files can easily be tracked with version control.

 

Create a private repository on GitHub/GitLab/BitBucket and push your changes there. That way you will not only be able to track previous versions, but also have some cloud storage in case your hard drive dies.

 

Or if you don't like Git, use Mercurial, which is probably easier to use. Or if you prefer the old-school approach, use Subversion or even CVS.

 

Don't pour hours of work into a single map file that is not backed up anywhere, and just save that single file over and over again. That's utterly insane. You are more or less asking to have all your data lost if the editor crashes during a save or you accidentally hit the "delete all" button right before you hit Ctrl-S.

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