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What happened to greebo ?


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Greebo stated awhile back that he's only doing this as a casual side activity and that he's effectively "retired".

 

I suspect that if you provide new feedback to the DR 2.0.3 testing thread he'll stop in to comment.

 

Just like any activity, there are fun parts and no-so-fun parts and he may not want to work on the current bugs because they "aren't fun to fix" or involve tedious coding tasks.

Especially bugs that involve stuff where the UI and Windows OS are mysteriously fighting.

That's not what he got into this for and Microsoft should be fixing that stuff not some unpaid hobbyist coder doing miracle workarounds for OS infrastructure bugs.

 

Fun bug: When I select entity A, it transposes entity B 2 units

 

Not fun bug: When I've been using DR for an hour, and I drag a large prefab 5 units over sometimes I get a lockup or crash to desktop. Only happens when

I have Windows Media player open to preview audio tracks.

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

 

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Maybe he is just busy with real life stuff or needs a break.

FM's: Builder Roads, Old Habits, Old Habits Rebuild

Mapping and Scripting: Apples and Peaches

Sculptris Models and Tutorials: Obsttortes Models

My wiki articles: Obstipedia

Texture Blending in DR: DR ASE Blend Exporter

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that may be.. I figured maybe he could just warn us about hiatus ;)

 

Btw, there is Trenchbroom 2.0 (still raw) which has new arch and can support Doom 3 / TDM mapping. The author now accepts third party commits, so if you feel strong, might want to add support for Doom 3 into Trenchbroom.

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  • 1 month later...

Well, I'm still around, sort of. I'm not exactly singing the blues, but my current situation rather sucks and doesn't leave me much opportunity to work on TDM. I won't try to explain, most of you won't understand anyway. With the little energy that's left, I try to focus on music and improving my Guitar playing.

 

It's very well possible that I pick up C++ or DarkRadiant again, but at the moment it's on my motivational backburner.

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Best of luck to you and your family, whatever you do, and wherever life takes you. My daughter gets married in 3 weeks and my son is expecting his second child. Life goes by too quickly, so enjoy it as much as possible.

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I appreciate the comments, but it's not like I'm dead already. I've been pausing work on DR for, what, three months, maybe? That's not the end of the world. TDM itself has seen pauses like that in the past, and it's still there. Maybe I'll pick it up again during summer, or during one of my vacations, or maybe things will look better in autumn, who knows. Maybe somebody else does his own fork.

 

With the above post I just wanted to state that DR is not high enough a priority in my life right now to justify spending a 10-20 hours per week on it (that's what it usually takes to make serious progress). Also, there's fun DR coding and there's not-so-fun DR coding. Some of the issues and comments on the bugtracker are just plain motivational poison, working on some of those is definitely not what people might consider fun, and I've had quite a few of them in the past. Non-programmers might not understand that easily, but other coders might see my point. Every not-so-fun bug squashed is draining your energy, supply is limited. Thinking about taking on one of these bugtracker issues just makes me go "Meh" or "Bleh" right now, but that might change, as I know it has changed a few times over the past 9 years.

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Yeah, don't push yourself in directions you don't want to be going. Take it easy, and come back when you feel like it. And DR is already a very robust editor; everything else is more icing on a cake already laden with icing.

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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Thinking about taking on one of these bugtracker issues just makes me go "Meh" or "Bleh" right now, but that might change.

On that score I know exactly how you feel, been there so many times with either my own TDM work or with someone I have been helping.

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Also, there's fun DR coding and there's not-so-fun DR coding. Some of the issues and comments on the bugtracker are just plain motivational poison, working on some of those is definitely not what people might consider fun, and I've had quite a few of them in the past. Non-programmers might not understand that easily, but other coders might see my point.

 

Yep, that's programming alright. Spend hours on a painting or a piece of music or a TDM map and people will be awed by your artistry. Spend hours hacking on some bug and all you'll hear is "Yeah, but what about these other 10 problems?!?!?".

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I just wanted to say that we do appreciate the efforts of the coders.

 

Pointing out bugs, I understand, may look like "Yeah, but what about these other 10 problems?!?!?", but what we really are trying to do is to help you.

 

As coding is beyond our capabilities, the only thing we can do to help is to report bugs in as detailed form as possible.

 

The maps we mappers give to the community, I hope, are a sufficient reward and indication of appreciation to the coders for a job well done.

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Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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I just wanted to say that we do appreciate the efforts of the coders. Pointing out bugs, I understand, may look like "Yeah, but what about these other 10 problems?!?!?", but what we really are trying to do is to help you. As coding is beyond our capabilities, the only thing we can do to help is to report bugs in as detailed form as possible.

 

My comment was not to suggest that you are ungrateful. In fact a lot of the "what about the other problems" sentiment comes from the programmer himself: all I see when I work on a program is other bugs that haven't been fixed, missing features that will never get implemented, and ugly code that I won't ever get time to improve.

 

The point is that in contrast to other types of creative work, where you can reach a point where the work is "done" (or at least "good enough to stop fiddling with") and release it, programming is an endless treadmill where the list of things that need doing rapidly increases beyond the capacity of any finite number of programmers to get them done. So I can totally understand why greebo would feel more motivated to spend his time playing the guitar rather than slaving away on yet another tedious bug that will only reduce the total number of open issues by 0.01%.

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Ah, I see. The Perfectionist's Syndrome.

 

A mapper can, too, fiddle with the final stages of a map forever. Nothing ever gets perfect, and at some stage Good Enough is Good Enough. Then it is release time. The work will have it's flaws but it is Good Enough and out it goes.

 

A key difference is probably that once a map gets out, the mapper starts again from a clean slate, and can do the foundations better next time. The coder still faces all the mistakes that were made in the past.

Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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