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Alberto Salvia Novella

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Everything posted by Alberto Salvia Novella

  1. Well probably there's nothing else you can do on that regard for the moment being. I have tried providing the game as an alternative version, lets see if it sticks. By the way, compared with the official standalone, the software provides the following features. In case you are interested in them: Separated saved games and mission cache for each user, so they cannot delete each other's. Missions auto-cleanup. If you delete the mission saves from inside the game, and the mission isn't the current installed one, it will be removed automatically on next game launch. This is important as the game folder will be out of view for the user. Enhanced installation speed. As it uses the fastest mirror by default, and provides the package building method that minimizes recurrent copies.
  2. In their own words, the reason why they are rejecting the software is that it doesn't come from The Dark Mod project. And nothing different than that will make them change their mind. Without this software the game cannot be installed system wide and work, since a system wide folder cannot have write permission for holding the saved games and campaigns. For instance after posting this thread we had a huge fight about this, because the game cannot work without this software but they wanted it out nowadays. Then they decided to ship the game as it is, and the game is no longer able to save games or download campaigns.
  3. What the software does is stated under its title: it builds a root tree adequate for packaging the game into Linux. You simply run the program, and that is done. There's nothing else to explain. The documentation is under the "info" folder. There you can find a file called "usage rights.txt" with a link to the GPL. Those extra requirements you mention are there by mistake in the human readable summary, and can be fixed.
  4. As you probably know I have created a software that fully packages The Dark Mod for Linux. Without that software the game cannot be installed system wide. The problem I'm facing is that that Arch Linux won't allow me to use it under their operating system because it's not an officially provided software. So I was wondering if The Dark Mod community could endorse that software somehow. I guess that mentioning so in this thread would be enough, otherwise I could notice. Although I'm opened to further suggestions. I can provide a digital signature that warrants that I can be held liable for that code.
  5. I guess that printing to the console and to the top of the screen would be the ideal, as long as there aren't an abundance of missing assets. Otherwise it would need a still obvious, but not as invasive, way to notice the error. Perhaps a frog could croak every time there's some warning, not joking ? That way it would be clear without affecting the game-play. Or just having an easy way to show the console in game...
  6. Yeah, you keep nailing it ? I have been involved in collaborative projects for the latest twelve years, coordinating the Ubuntu Papercuts project for three. The Ubuntu origami look and feel was inspired in one of my designs. Keep spinning for jackpot ?
  7. Yeah, it won't make sense at this point crashing the game for missing assets, as that could lead many campaigns as broken. It was just more like an ideal outlook. Nevertheless probably there could be ways to make any error noticeable for sure, even if there's no crash. Better quality is what increases speed, enabling Agile and Lean methodologies. The sooner you figure out mistake proofed ways of working the faster you can move to new features and ship, instead of constantly firefighting past issues and rely on in dept testing. For instance my latest software is DevOps software, which I use for packaging apps using continuous integration. I'm considering releasing daily, or even hourly. More time creating, less maintaining. Be smart lazy, not dumb lazy. Mistake proof today, release quality now, relax tomorrow.
  8. Thanks @taaaki? There's still an error. If you go to svn.thedarkmod.com it no longer redirects to svn.thedarkmod.com/publicsvn/darkmod_src/trunk. It simply shows 404 not found.
  9. I personally only ship technology that after testing it from all angles I don't find bugs in it myself, and even then I have to correct plenty of thing. My advantage is that I correct them as soon as possible, I don't continue buying furniture when my home is on fire. Sure there are bugs that are undetectable at first, but missing assets don't belong into that category. It's like shipping a car without mirrors, and saying you didn't see it. Cause if you haven't had time to do it right, what makes you think that you will have time to fix it? I have already seen many brilliant ideas during my lifetime that failed just because the program was buggy. All the business that did that were out of the game on the fast track, and this project is not exception. For instance the Dark Mod installer seems to fall into that type. Great idea, but my friends won't install it because the installer simply crashes on their Windows computer. Adding that the infrastructure is now down, it doesn't matter how great the game is. For them it simply doesn't work. One think is making mistakes, but seeing them as such and prone to correction. On the other hand saying that shipping with half assed bugs is gud, I strongly think that's a joke. This isn't even difference of opinion, this is playing phony on me. Further refute from my side is waste.
  10. When I said crashing I meant doing so before starting the mission, not while in it. This creates quality by design, by forcing people to deliver only maps which have all the defects corrected beforehand. In the Doom 3 context that won't make sense, cause it's a standalone product. A crash would mean crashing the entire game while playing, not as previous check before loading a map. Big difference.
  11. The game also returns success even if crashes. But anyway as rule of thumbs any error shall stop the process and crash the appliance for preventing further damage, and encourage people to fix it in situ before continuing further operation. For example if there is a missing asset the user is better noticing it by a crash, so they can figure out why as soon as possible, than start gaming with damaged contents around. The only exception of this is when that stop could cause a systemic collapse and there won't be a person able to fix it in a timely manner. For example, when the software is a system or server component.
  12. I think that the data that matters is the recent one, just in case a recent commit messed something up. The rest irrelevant. And the bug tracker being highly capable won't matter to me, as I will fix 100% of bugs anyway before developing more. I only need a list of bugs which isn't too convoluted on features and items. At the same time I would use tags for differentiating critical bugs, suggestions of improvement, and regular bugs. That classification would be good enough for knowing where to start working, further than that I don't see how the bug tracker could help. Bottom line is that the tooling doesn't matter as much as the process you use behind it. If the process encourages accumulation of bugs, the lack of clarity isn't due to the bug tracker but the strategy.
  13. I mean instead of work-arounding the problem, just fixing it.
  14. Nevertheless you are better reusing existing infrastructure than managing your own. Also having at least two people with access to it at any given time.
  15. If the main server is reliable, and easy to reinstall, that isn't needed. For example you can have the home folder in a different cloud drive than the system, and a script with all the installed software. So in case of breakage you only have to reinstall the system drive, and run the script for having the same software installed in ten minutes. The server is up again in an hour.
  16. I have also notice that in the Thief series hitting on objects would make the animation like "stop there", as there is a real object.
  17. By the way I feel the game misses an important feature, which is being able to remove campaigns from within it. Without having to manually remove files from the file manager.
  18. You don't. You download the mission you want manually from Google Drive, and place it onto the game folder. Inside "fms/[campaignName]". The list of missions is handy for that.
  19. No because the game has to write its own config files in its own folder, so this creates two problems: - All users share config, save-games and campaigns. Any user can freely modify other user's data. - And the fact the game can write in that directory means that they can also delete it. So this is why the code I made. It creates a separate game folder for each user, and it links all the shared resources to the system wide folder. Plus it regenerates this folder in case of update. I saw the bug more than once, and a friend of mine was also unable to install the game. Any transient Internet disconnection will hang the installer, as it isn't coded to retry. That isn't reliable enough to be a method for packaging. Also my installer uses a faster mirror than the default ran by the official installer, making downloads faster. The official installer doesn't check mirror speed before downloading, and the mirror list is outdated with servers no longer working. That's good, although if I was in that situation I would simply rewrite it on a higher level language. And if it's error proofed like Go, the best option. Nevertheless the repository has been down for a week.
  20. Archive.org is backed by the USA government, and archiving software you are no longer capable to get by comercial means is a copyright exception.
  21. @honzi Call it necessary complexity, there's no simpler way to make this game work on Arch than the AUR package itself. The official installer leads to an standalone download only usable to one user, where the AUR package makes it available system wide. And yes that exit status is a bug, and it's not the only one. For example the official installer frequently hangs forever on a transient Internet disconnection on any platform. That's why I coded a separate installer, cause otherwise many times the package never finished building. Don't insult my software boy! Everything I do is for a reason, think thoroughly ?
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