Public access to development versions

[AluminumHaste]

18 hours ago, Amadeus said:

Why? Do you have resentment toward these 10 missions in particular? Do you not care if you break any and all missions on your whim and then release a public build? Breaking existing missions and then making a public dev build available with broken FMs doesn't really seem like a great thing to do. I get that missions get broken from time to time because improvements need to be made to the core game, but this is essentially a public release (even though it is a "dev build" it is still a "public dev build" available to anyone and everyone, and with that comes certain expectations). You didn't even notify the affected FM authors beforehand. This is just not cool. 

Seriously, if devs are never allowed to make changes that break things, then the mod never moves forward.

It's a bandaid, rip it off, get it done. That's the point of dev builds.

And if people are downloading DEVELOPMENT BUILDS to play the mod and shits broken, guess what, they should have read the very first post of this thread.

 

For the people eager to play with the latest state of development

P.S. Needless to say, all of this comes with no support.
Although we would be glad if you catch and report bugs before the next beta phase starts

 

[Amadeus]

1 hour ago, AluminumHaste said:

Seriously, if devs are never allowed to make changes that break things, then the mod never moves forward.

 

Yeah, as I said elsewhere, it's not so much that the missions are broken that is frustrating to me and several other affected authors, it's that there was zero communication to the affected authors that this was going to be happening beforehand. There is no reason why a message couldn't have been sent to the affected authors saying "hey, this will be broken in the upcoming dev build for X reasons. I thought you'd like to know before surprising you." Or even an open discussion beforehand about why these authors decided to make these customizations to begin with. Plain and simple, that's just a lack of respect. If you have the time to break these, you have time to communicate and see if there might be a solution to avoid all this (and there is!). 

And perhaps from YOUR perspective, you might think this reaction seems silly, unnecessary, and that this is totally fine, but from my perspective and that of a few others, it's not.

 

EDIT: In addition, when creating or modifying existing assets, I and others take great care in making sure that these changes don't break existing maps. And if they do, we do whatever we can to own up to that and fix it. I do expect that same level of respect to be shown to existing maps so they aren't just broken with reckless abandon and no clear path forward.

[MirceaKitsune]

I understand some changes that break backwards compatibility, long as they're kept minimal and hopefully don't render old FM's unplayable unless patched. We should keep in mind some maps may never get updated, especially ones who's authors might no longer be around... at the same time some things can't be easily improved because keeping it backwards compatible is more challenging, I felt a few things were limited for that reason a couple of times.

Edited Monday at 02:25 PM by MirceaKitsune

[stgatilov]

3 hours ago, Amadeus said:

Yeah, as I said elsewhere, it's not so much that the missions are broken that is frustrating to me and several other affected authors, it's that there was zero communication to the affected authors that this was going to be happening beforehand. There is no reason why a message couldn't have been sent to the affected authors saying "hey, this will be broken in the upcoming dev build for X reasons. I thought you'd like to know before surprising you." Or even an open discussion beforehand about why these authors decided to make these customizations to begin with. Plain and simple, that's just a lack of respect. If you have the time to break these, you have time to communicate and see if there might be a solution to avoid all this (and there is!).

I created discussion here and mentioned authors (maybe I missed someone though).
Unlike the previous thread about main menu GUI overrides, I think the new one does not look aggressive . The main question there is why this was done, and how to adapt to avoid this problem now and in the future.

Indeed, all the missions will be fixed by 2.13 even if some authors don't respond.
Dev builds regularly break something, although usually it is done unintentionally. I added "known issues" point on the dev build, which happens pretty rarely.

Quote

And perhaps from YOUR perspective, you might think this reaction seems silly, unnecessary, and that this is totally fine, but from my perspective and that of a few others, it's not.

I apologize for the negative emotions this change has caused.
Sometimes I am too rough in communications.

Moreover, I am not a creative kind of person, I'm more a technical type of person.
Thus I believe in interface boundaries, so in my mind the blame for breakage is always on the side that violates these boundaries. Anyway, I know I'll have to fix the breakage, probably myself if necessary.

[Amadeus]

Thank you for saying as such and clarifying the path forward with regard to these missions, I do really appreciate it