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because of the fact that if I pay for it, it's awesome and accepted, but if TDM team needs to open their wallets, or even run crowdfunding - it's a no-no. Sounds quite hypocritical to me.

Why don't you stop the passive aggressive bullshit? You're the one who started that line of thought by stating:

Personally I think I will fork DR and have _paid_ professional to fix what needs to be fixed

 

To which Biker replied essentially, "go ahead if that's what you want to do".

 

You don't get to then turn around and call us "hypocritical" for telling you to go do whatever the hell you want to do. Nor did we ever say, anywhere, that we would never accept anything into the mod that had ever been payed for, as your petulant strawman suggests (the fact that we work on an engine that people were payed to make should probably be the first clue).

 

People have given you multiple reasons why we don't want to have money involved. You either genuinely don't get it, or you're being willfully obtuse on the subject. Either way, I'd recommend you take your own advice:

 

No need to further comment in this thread.

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I didn't. I said "whole level of insanity" not because of their views, but because of the fact that if I pay for it, it's awesome and accepted, but if TDM team needs to open their wallets, or even run crowdfunding - it's a no-no

I think you missed the irony. ;)

 

However, +1 on what greebo and the others said. People are doing this for the love of TDM and the original Thief lore, not for money. And it should stay like that.

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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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TDM team needs to open their wallets, or even run crowdfunding - it's a no-no.

 

The TDM team doesn't need to do anything. As you have rightly pointed out, under the conditions of the GPL it is perfectly legal for you to make a fork of DR and hire a developer to work on it, either with your own money or via crowdfunding, and nobody here has any power to stop you. Your developer is even free to submit his patches to the main project, and I myself certainly would not reject anything just because it was developed for hire.

 

But nobody else is obliged to donate or get involved in any way. The GPL grants you the freedom to hire a developer; it does not give everybody else an obligation to pay him.

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My take on that topic is this: There are fun things and not-so-fun things in every project (not just this one). It involves some kind of determination to take on the not-so-fun tasks that have to be done, these tasks are unavoidable in every project. Team spirit might help to gather motivation.

But maybe it won't. Or maybe the team just does not have anybody capable of doing the not-so-fun things. These not-so-fun things are the bane of all FOSS projects and the reason why most critical projects end up getting money involved.

 

Once money comes into play, the motivational momentum towards these tasks are changing, that's just how people are functioning. Somebody working on one quality task getting $20 per hour, and someone doing the same quality work getting nothing at the same time? That's not going to work out well. The one person getting nothing will most likely stop contributing, at least I would if I were the one doing the same (or maybe larger) amount of work for free. I'd still like the project itself, but my motivation for the not-so-fun tasks would be down at zero level. Maybe maybe I'd do something for fun here and there, but you'd be surprised how few of them one is actually encountering in the current DR codebase. In the end there would only be paid folks left working on something. You can't have non-paid and paid coders in the same project team, that's my estimation.

there are many projects out there with paid and volunteering contributors so I don't think that kind of general statement is true. still it's true money will affect the motivation of people involved but there are many different ways to use money. you don't have to hire someone as a team member to do work 9to5 on the project. you could use it for specific services like external code reviews (yeah i doubt that's really relevant for TDM/DR it's just the most obvious example) or maybe bug bounties.

 

agreed to everything else.

btw. i'm not saying TDM should start using money. if the team did think this through and decided against it then stick with it. i just felt some statements needed a counter-argument :)

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It's stuff like this that makes me wish I was a better coder. I wouldn't mind putting in all these hours for free for this if I could actually understand the working codebase. I have the time just not enough of the know how, getting there though. I really believe in you guys and this project so I'm looking for something I can help with that will help out and make an impact , I got a lot of time but not as much skills. If anyone has any ideas for me, I can code well above a basic level but I'm not a professional. I can make sounds effects and write little tunes. unfortunately when it comes to artsy stuff like 3d modelling or animating I'm retarded but I would really like to make a difference in this project so let me know. What I wish I could do is make mission intros like the ones from thief 1 and 2 those were very inspiring to me as a young lad so if anyone knows how I can learn how to make stuff like that that would be amazing.

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Better focus on the stuff you already can do instead of starting all over again with mission intro videos if you never painted before ;) Sounds and tunes sounds quiet nice to me and they can also be essential for mission intros too! :)

"Einen giftigen Trank aus Kräutern und Wurzeln für die närrischen Städter wollen wir brauen." - Text aus einem verlassenen Heidenlager

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It's stuff like this that makes me wish I was a better coder. I wouldn't mind putting in all these hours for free for this if I could actually understand the working codebase. I have the time just not enough of the know how, getting there though.

 

Working on a project like this is an excellent way to extend your skills and as a bonus it gives you great material for job interviews. Right now there's useful work that could be done by someone new to the code in both TDM and DR, with a bit of guidance from existing coders of course. The core code for both is c++ but even if you don't want to learn c++ there are some things that could be done for DR in python or even any language of your choice, such as file format converters for our modellers. Feel free to start a thread in the "I want to help" section to get ideas from people what they need, or to PM me for a suggestion from the bugtracker if you want to try your hand at it.

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I'm in luck c++ is the first language and is the one I mainly do. I will start posting in " I want help " as well as try to come with some ideas on my own, Thanks fellas.

Good for you trying to learn programing with C++ but IMO you really choose the harder path to it, i never recommend people starting to code to go with C++, i usually recommend python or LUA and for the most adventurous C#.

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The way I first learned was "c with classes" in high school, it almost helps in a way to learn like this because because there are a lot less levels of abstraction so it can be easier to learn in a way. the abstractness of scripting languages confused me when I first started because I didn't know how anything worked under the hood .

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The way I first learned was "c with classes" in high school, it almost helps in a way to learn like this because because there are a lot less levels of abstraction so it can be easier to learn in a way. the abstractness of scripting languages confused me when I first started because I didn't know how anything worked under the hood .

 

I prefer learning that way too, but most people prefer to start with something that works and build up experience from there. Both ways equally valid of course. Python makes it incredibly easy to get going and make a little program that works, but it's so high-level it will make your head hurt if you're the type who needs to know the mechanics before they feel they understand something. c++ on the other hand is so flexible that you can write code at any level of abstraction. You can use libraries to do all low-level tasks, and use references instead of pointers, and feel like you're in a scripting language. Or you can get down and dirty with the void*s and program like you're making a complex and beautiful tiny mechanism, that does the job in as few processor operations as humanly possible. I love it :)

 

That said, I do use python a lot. For small jobs where processing speed is not the limiting factor, it's usually the right tool. If I need to write a standalone file converter or parser, I'll always write 10 lines of python where I can see the results of each line of code as I write it instead of 200 lines of c++ that I need to debug in a special debugging environment.

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Just curious, but apart from a programming education, what aspects of developing DR and the the TDM have cost actual money to make? Ie if one (or many) were to throw money at some aspect of the program, wherein is the biggest bang for buck?

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I'm a relative newcomer to the project, so almost anyone else on the team would be able to give a better-informed answer :-) But I haven't heard of any of it having been paid for. I think the entire project has has been built purely by voluntary work. We do use external open-source code of course.

 

The principle of paying for stuff has been discussed a couple of times in the last year. In general, we're against it. Firstly, there's no need. Top quality work is already being done, and offering money wouldn't necessarily increase the amount of output. Plus, it could demotivate volunteers. Who's going to join and donate 100s of hours for free when someone else is getting paid for doing the same work? And make no mistake, between mappers, modelers, and coders, there are 100s of hours of work going into the project every week right now. When we get close to the next release (not scheduled yet), we'll need play testers to donate 100s of hours too. Paying for the odd 12 hours freelancing here and there won't significantly alter the output.

 

Lastly, on the coding side, imo this project is too mature to benefit from quick freelancing anyway. Changes have to be backwards-compatible with 80-odd maps. A freelancer would have to spend at least a month familiarizing themselves with the game full time, else they'd end up submitting broken code that an unpaid volunteer would have to fix.

 

The project work I mentioned is on TDM. DR has had a lot of recent development too -- it's not long since greebo released the last version, and not long since he single handedly ported the entire project to wxwidgets. But I'm sure he'd appreciate another pair of hands picking up some bug reports, if you guys were thinking of offering :-)

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As far as I know the only area where money has been involved is when a number of team members donated towards the cost of running the server. But this was several years ago and I don't know what the current status of server funding is (perhaps it is all now hosted on servers that people are running anyway and doesn't require funded external hosting).

 

Anyone is of course free to enter into a private arrangement to hire a developer to make contributions towards certain parts of the project, but as Steve said, don't underestimate the amount of hours you would need to pay for in order to make any significant progress. You're not going to give someone fifty bucks to implement soft shadows and fix all bugs in DarkRadiant. It would probably take several days of work just to get set up with the appropriate build environment and start becoming familiar with the code, and the daily rate for programmers is likely to start in the hundreds of $LOCAL_CURRENCY and increase from there.

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