[HN Gopher] The Maddest My Code Made Anyone
___________________________________________________________________
The Maddest My Code Made Anyone
Author : signa11
Score : 150 points
Date : 2023-05-15 10:18 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (jackkelly.name)
(TXT) w3m dump (jackkelly.name)
| wgjordan wrote:
| > I was very taken aback when I first saw this comment, but these
| days I cherish it. It reminds me one of the first times my code
| had a big impact on a community.
|
| This is a great perspective. When I was a highschooler I worked
| on a fan translation project that, 20 years later, someone called
| a "god awful piece of festering sewage that should never have
| existed to begin with" [1]. I'm quite proud to have done
| something in my youth that generated so much online rage for
| decades.
|
| https://legendsoflocalization.com/which-final-fantasy-iv-tra...
| Super_Jambo wrote:
| "the most ridiculous concept I have ever seen on these fora".
|
| for some context I suspect this forum was the same place that
| gave us:
|
| "Natural Selection needs a new alien, like a Scorpian that hovars
| without flapping."
| jholman wrote:
| Okay, I had utterly forgotten "hovars without flapping", thank
| you. Or damn you, I'm not sure which.
|
| And just to be clear, we definitely need more turrents,
| commando.
| mst wrote:
| Poasted with no ragrets.
| egeozcan wrote:
| Why would you make a junior developer develop an entire
| shopping/order module to a CMS? Because f that particular
| developer who happened to be me in the beginning of my 20s, in my
| first real job as a programmer.
|
| I used JS, C# with NHibernate and lots of weird HTML and CSS to
| create something which satisfied all the requirements I've been
| given. But guess how good the code was? We had zero review
| process except someone looking over your shoulder by chance and
| quickly distancing themselves as what I then thought to be the
| "any code I didn't write is bad code" attitude.
|
| I did the "just ship it" thing before it was cool. Views
| accessing database? Lots of those. Classes skipping dependency
| injection and instantiating random god classes to achieve all the
| things? Plenty! Using extremely complicated and dog-slow JS when
| a couple lines of CSS could do? Sure! Converting numbers to
| floats to decimals then back to floats then to string then again
| to god knows what only to store integers in the database? Got you
| covered!
|
| Then the customers wanted more and more features, and when I was
| doing ERP integration (really!) I finally thought I needed some
| guidance. Oh the humble me!
|
| I went to the lead developer in our department because those
| other inexperienced (!) developers wouldn't have understood the
| challenges I was facing. He took the time to listen to me, and as
| I was having my first "rubber duck" moment, his face started to
| change. We later sat at my station and the horror in his eyes
| when I was passionately explaining the "intelligent code" I've
| written was remarkable. He ended up creating a task force and
| rewriting the whole thing later.
|
| A year or two later, he was doing a presentation of the state-of-
| the-art review process "he designed" (pull requests), and used my
| code to the same effect as those WAT moments in the "The Birth &
| Death of JavaScript" speech by Gary Bernhardt[0].
|
| Funnily enough, I never took offense. To be honest I didn't know
| how to feel. What I knew was that a lot of customers were
| complaining that it took way more time/budget to develop features
| for the order module and nobody understood why we had to take a
| few steps back out of nowhere when everything was going so
| smoothly.
|
| Now being a technical lead myself, I know the importance of not
| just reviewing code, but reviewing the circumstances and trade-
| offs that lead to that code being written. Actually, reviewing
| those is much more important than reviewing the code itself. More
| important is to have linters and other tooling review code, not
| people.
|
| I know this post is more about what you create being hated rather
| than how you created it, but I just wanted to get this off my
| chest, and thought it could still be relevant :)
|
| [0]: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-
| death...
| chris-orgmenta wrote:
| Ahhh, NS & Day of Defeat. Wow that takes me back.
|
| Interestingly, I have little-to-no memory of this 'combat' mode,
| I think nostalgia cemented just the original playmode into my
| head.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| From a vague memory, I think a chap I went to uni with made the
| Warcraft3 mod for HL2.
| atoav wrote:
| Programmers sometimes have that experience, as do musicians,
| hardware designers, film directors, novelists, painters, game
| designers and all other professions that create things regular
| people interact with casually.
|
| Consumers (specifically the sub-genre of critics) often have no
| real imagination what making a thing _means_ and under which
| constraints it happens. They often see publishing a imperfect
| work to the public as an affront to their sophisticated intellect
| and taste, even (or especially?) if it is free.
|
| In German there is the saying: _Wer macht, hat recht_ which
| translates to _who makes is right_. Complaining is simple, just
| shut up and do it better.
|
| Of course complaining is totally okay if we e.g. talk about
| social or political conditions, or some mandatory process you
| have to subject yourself to by law. But even there I hate people
| who just complain and leave it at that without even trying to
| change a thing.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| Different people interact with things and have different
| reactions. Some are moved enough to develop strong feelings.
| Some share them nicely. Some write hyperbolic forum posts full
| of hate. That's just the reality of having an impact.
|
| My main take away from the post is that anything worth making
| will receive its share of critics. As a creator you should be
| aware of that and be ready to focus on the people you actually
| bring joy to and who appreciate what you do rather than the
| haters and take pride in actually moving the needle enough to
| be reacted on.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| I'm at the opposite: I think people have the right to complain
| about anything, especially when they're the target audience (in
| this case, the game player). This doesn't change even if the
| product is free.
|
| I do think they should stay polite and if the author isn't
| willing to change (for either objective or subjective reasons),
| move on.
| onion2k wrote:
| _I think people have the right to complain about anything,
| especially when they 're the target audience (in this case,
| the game player)._
|
| What people do not have any right, or entitlement, to is
| agreement from the person they're complaining to. People are
| allowed to dismiss a complaint and not do anything about it,
| no matter how unhappy the complainant might be about it. You
| have no right to demand someone does something; you can only
| inform them that you're not happy about the status quo.
| moi2388 wrote:
| Yea I do have the right to demand that, but you have the
| right to ignore my demands.
| brookst wrote:
| I think it's the semantics of "demand." To me, that
| connotes a claim of control or power or moral authority.
|
| I have a right to complain that it's raining. And I have
| the free speech right to say "I demand it stop raining".
| But I have no right to come to you and demand that _you_
| make the rain stop, because that implies a claim on you
| that I do not have.
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| Oh boy, that reminded me of a flame war that started when
| someone wrote in English, "I demand ..." when they were
| really just _asking_ for further details about something.
| They woke up the next morning to find a thread dozens of
| messages long of people arguing back and forth about
| whether this person was rude or not. Once they explained
| that French was their native language and how they would
| write that sentence in French, things eventually calmed
| down.
| lynx23 wrote:
| There is one counter example to your position that immediately
| comes to mind: architects! If you create something, the primary
| driver should be its users, and not your ego. I believe there
| should be a law which mandates that architects need to stay at
| least 5 years in every building they "design" so that they
| actually see and feel the consequences of their work. Art might
| be a different issue, but just because someone is creative does
| not free them from the responsibility to build something
| useful! If the user experience is no fun, the user has every
| right to complain.
| atoav wrote:
| Of course. I have been talking about building small projects
| mostly for yourself. If you build your own house in a weird
| way, knock yourself out (especially if there is no family).
|
| This is about expectations. Good architecture serves many
| users. Good films serve many viewers. Good software ...
|
| You get the point. And it is _always_ better if you can serve
| two target audiences at once instead of one - IF you can do
| it without compromising.
|
| But _some_ software doesn 't want or even need to serve all
| users. Take vim for example. For most people it would be a
| horrible experience to use it and they could criticise it for
| a ton of things. But what value is there in this cricism as
| they don't understand how vim is intended to be used? Their
| cirticism comes from a true place, but it still isn't worth a
| lot, because if you followed it to the end you would end up
| with something like notepad.exe or MS Word and loosing
| everything that makes vim special and interesting.
|
| So if anything, what I say here is: good criticism is
| critcicism by people who see the same thing in your thing as
| you do, as their vision likely aligns with yours. If you are
| painting impressionist pictures for example, the criticism
| "it could look more photorealistic" by some guy is utterly
| useless, while the criticism "I think you should rely less on
| simple complementary color combinations" by someone who
| understands impressionism might be really helpful. The
| photorealism guy just tells you that there are people looking
| for this out there, but as you already know and/or actively
| decided against it, there is no use in this.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| >If you create something, the primary driver should be its
| users, and not your ego.
|
| Again, it depends on why you are designing something. If your
| goal is to just stroke your ego then you probably aren't
| going to care about the end user.
| lynx23 wrote:
| Which is fine as long as your end users are not implicitly
| forced to use your creation. So an artist creating a
| controversial sculpture is totally fine, nobody forces the
| recipient to consume their art. But buildings are
| different, they should be user-centric, not vanity-projects
| to boost your career.
| mejutoco wrote:
| They should, but they do not.
|
| Whenever I see "should" in a sentence I think: why is
| this not how things are? What are the incentives? In this
| case: who is the person deciding what gets built? What
| are the consequences for being over budget? (Calatrava I
| am looking at you).
| algorias wrote:
| The special thing about architecture is that it imposes on
| others. You can't not see a building. So I agree with the
| conclusion but not the reasoning. It's not users vs creators,
| it's the public who are not the users that get harmed by ugly
| buildings, even if those buildings are private and desired by
| those who pay for them. (The government commissioning ugly
| public buildings is a problem with the government, not the
| architects)
|
| Meanwhile, anything on the internet you're
| reading/watching/listening to is by your choice.
| jzb wrote:
| You're not "harmed" by an ugly building. Annoyed, maybe,
| but you're not harmed. Ugly is subjective. Even if the
| majority agree that it is ugly, there's likely a group that
| enjoys it. Should they be denied the ability to have
| architecture that pleases them?
| mattacular wrote:
| > In German there is the saying: Wer macht, hat recht which
| translates to who makes is right.
|
| Closest thing in English that I could think of: history is
| written by the winners. Similar concept.
| ncarroll wrote:
| I'm not sure that it is really similar. I would translate
| "Wer macht hat recht" to something more like "the creator
| knows best" or "the creator gets to choose". "History is
| written by the winners." has, I think a less creative
| context. Perhaps because history is what is written after
| wars, conquests and other applications of violence. The word
| "winners" requires and implies losers. Creation requires
| neither.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Not similar at all, and an absurd comparison. The former is a
| value/moral judgement while the latter is an empirical
| observation about how history is written, and not _at all_ an
| embrace of such a supposed fact (which would effectively
| translate to "might makes right").
| mattacular wrote:
| Hrmm ok... since mine is so absurd, what's an English
| equivalent in your mind?
| _jackdk_ wrote:
| Not that I've actually heard it, but you could describe
| the creator as "the man in the arena", which alludes to a
| Theodore Roosevelt speech:
|
| https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Learn-About-
| TR/TR-En...
|
| > It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points
| out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of
| deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to
| the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is
| marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives
| valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again,
| because there is no effort without error and shortcoming;
| but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows
| the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends
| himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the
| end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the
| worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly,
| so that his place shall never be with those cold and
| timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
| Karellen wrote:
| "Put up or shut up"?
|
| Or maybe "patches or GTFO" :-)
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| "The customer is always right"?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| That's the opposite! :)
|
| Which I guess speaks to how consumerist the US as a
| society is (said as an American).
|
| The closest I can come up with is "Those who can, do."
| (Usually seen with "... Those who can't, teach.")
| mbwgh wrote:
| > In German there is the saying: Wer macht, hat recht which
| translates to who makes is right. Complaining is simple, just
| shut up and do it better.
|
| There's unfortunately also the saying "Nicht geschimpft ist
| genug gelobt", i.e. something like "Not being scolded is enough
| compliments".
|
| If things work, they are taken for granted and some people only
| speak up if they are irritated.
|
| Which of course leads to a biased perception of how satisfied
| the people on average really are with your work.
|
| Last week I wrote an email to an author to a blog I have been
| following for a year or so. Just wanted to let him know his
| work was appreciated and I hope he continues writing.
|
| He replied and told me this little gesture made his day. So I
| guess I should do more of that.
| geoffbp wrote:
| Sometimes a good way to get feedback is to listen to who is
| complaining
| account42 wrote:
| > Complaining is simple, just shut up and do it better.
|
| This is an absurd position. We can't all be masters of anything
| but that doesn't mean we can't recognize flaws. Sure, sometimes
| there is a good reason for something a novice would perceive as
| a flaw but just throwing the concept of criticims away entirely
| and demand that people accept whatever you crap out is
| ridiculous. Building echo chambers where no one dares to
| criticize does not help the art at all - that way lies
| mediocrity.
|
| All creators should learn to find value in criticism,
| especially negative. That doesn't mean that you need to always
| follow laymen opinions but even things wrongly perceived as
| faults _are_ perceived as such and you should at least think
| about why that is and if that means you can do something better
| rather than ignoring the ignorant plebes.
|
| It's also pretty arrogant of you to assume that "consumers"
| (what a dehumanizing term that is) should care about your
| constraints at all - especially constraints that are self-
| imposed. If you are selling something (either for money or for
| the expectation of time/resouces put in by the user) then your
| struggles are and imho should be irrelevant - all that matters
| is how well you fill the need that the user is trying to fill.
|
| > In German there is the saying: Wer macht, hat recht which
| translates to who makes is right.
|
| Jeder hat so viel Recht, wie er Macht hat.
|
| If people have the means to complain, they have the right to.
| You can ignore them (unless you depend on them) but others
| might not.
| burnished wrote:
| I think you two may have a confusion of terms. I'm just
| guessing here, but I suspect the complaining they are
| referring to is the zero content anger spew some people think
| is appropriate, not critique.
|
| I see it a lot in small communities centered around open
| source games. It is easy for some one to vent their anger in
| a useless fashion (can we agree that pr teams calling it
| passion is a euphemism they use to avoid insulting people
| giving them money?), and comparatively difficult and rare for
| people to put their experience into relatable terms or to
| criticize a change as it pertains to the project's goals.
| atoav wrote:
| > This is an absurd position. We can't all be masters of
| anything but that doesn't mean we can't recognize flaws.
|
| Maybe I need to clarify a little bit. Of course everybody
| hast the _right_ to complain about everything (as people do).
| But not every criticism is sound cricism. Everybody may just
| get themselves a Turbo Encabulator and complain that the
| malleable logarithmic casing is misaligned with the
| pentametric fan. That is okay. They sold you a turbo
| encabulator after all and you rightfully expect the
| pentametric fan to be surmounted by a malleable logarithmic
| casing in such a way that the two main spurving bearings were
| in a direct line with it - this is what they told you, you
| will get.
|
| Whether criticism is "sound" by my definition or not has to
| do with expectations one some part. If someone sells you a
| backup software that is "guarantueed to be 100% formally
| correct" for 100kEUR and it then proceeds to munch your disks
| and set your computer on fire, criticism is not only okay, it
| is outright needed. But if someone puts their "works for me,
| but I strongly advice anybody else against using
| this"-backup-script on Github and it munches your disk, you
| may complain, but the other person is not at fault. A lot of
| people complain about things where someone basically just was
| like: I made this for fun in my spare time, take it or leave
| it. And they complain about it as if it was a commercial
| product they sold their firstborn for.
|
| My other point with making and being right has to do with
| instutional experience. You don't have to be able to build a
| turbo encabulator yourself, but before you criticise it maybe
| make sure you have read its manual. Maybe that is my first
| level IT-support trauma speaking here, but many people are
| very quick in voicing criticism, and don't do the research
| whether the thing they criticise is wrong or they just had
| the wrong expectations. Of course a product can also be
| designed badly so it produces these false expectations and
| such things should be criticised.
|
| Other things are purely subjective and criticism is worth
| nothing. You may complain about a experimental noise rock
| band being noisy of having nasty lyrics, but that is no
| meaningful criticism as this was very likely their goal. That
| person's feeling of "I hate that sound" is totally valid and
| true, and the musicians may or may not decide to take it
| seriously, but it is still just bad criticism - like
| complaining water is wet or complaining a weight is heavy.
| That is sort of the point of the thing.
|
| That being said, as a creator I value negative criticism. And
| I take the feeling from where it comes from seriously most of
| the time. I just don't trust what they tell you the solution
| is.
| Retric wrote:
| Criticism has zero inherent value. It's easy to assume that
| stuff people like is inherently better, but anything with
| widespread appeal ends up really bland. You can't do better
| than simply ok while making everyone happy.
|
| This obviously gives rise to picking an audience, but this
| idea goes beyond just demographics. There is no greatest book
| of all time for 12 year old boys only individual preference
| which doesn't result in an absolute rank.
|
| Commercial art is at best a compromise. No artist is going to
| inherently prefer exactly what the market wants directly,
| they only want the indirect things associated with that. Aka
| money, fame etc.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >Criticism has zero inherent value.
|
| I get what you're saying here, but part of any art program
| is critical review of each others' works. You don't have to
| change what you created, but to hear other perspectives on
| how it is received is important.
|
| One professor told me how it is, partly, about keeping the
| artist from falling down their own rabbit hole. Sort of
| like the story about the servant who followed Marcus
| Aurelius around to whisper "you are but a man" in his ear.
| Highly creative types tend to have somewhat fragile mental
| states, and they can spiral out if not kept in check.
| Retric wrote:
| Criticism from a professor is useful for passing, and
| some things are simply errors in technique.
|
| But from students the content of their critique may be
| important than what it implies. ie: Did they fail to
| notice some specific detail intended to be obvious. So,
| it's definitely a useful practice, but not necessary
| useful as criticism.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I don't get how someone could get really, really good at
| any sort of creative process without the benefit of
| encountering and engaging in criticism, of one's own works
| and of others'. Simply calling out what does and does not
| work, and why, is criticism and is _super helpful_ for
| learning how to do things right.
| duxup wrote:
| > This obviously gives rise to picking an audience
|
| Even that is hard. App stores are full of negative reviews
| for apps because X app is not just like Y app.... when X
| app isn't at all supposed to be Y app. Or situations where
| the user simply misunderstood how the app works and etc.
|
| It's so hard to get things in front of the right audience
| who understand.
| brookst wrote:
| Yes, and it is very very hard to tell prospective
| customers that a product is not for them. The temptation
| is always to cast as wide of a net as possible and sell
| product X as being product Y, often with the best
| intentions of evolving to be X+Y in a future revision.
| account42 wrote:
| [dead]
| pwagland wrote:
| One small point.
|
| > If people have the means to complain, they have the right
| to. You can ignore them (unless you depend on them) but
| others might not.
|
| Having the means to do something in no way gives you the
| right to do so. I have the means to speed in my car. I have
| the means to murder someone. I don't have the _right_ in
| either case to do so.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Makers (HN supermen): the strong make what they want; the
| weak endure the fruits of that (as they must).
|
| Complainers: I am certainly strong enough to complain your
| ears off.
|
| Makers: No, not like that! That's immoral!
| mughinn wrote:
| I think they are talking specifically about complaining
| though, not about anything in general
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I would absolutely say that having the means to complain
| does _not_ inherently give you the right to complain.
|
| Right is _earned_ through investment.
|
| A creator invests a substantial amount of time and effort
| into something.
|
| A complainer can invest no time or effort into something.
|
| And specific to the gaming community, there's a
| distinction between investing _consumption_ time (e.g.
| playing) and _creation_ time (e.g. modding or building).
|
| I'd allow that playing confers substantial rights ("I've
| played this game over 1,000 hours and I think..."), but
| those rights should never be confused with creator
| rights.
|
| Which is what makes amateur game criticism so toxic to me
| ("I can't do what you do, nor have any interest in
| investing the effort, but let me tell you how to spend
| your time to do what I want").
|
| Especially in the performance-limited era of Half Life,
| most gamers didn't know a damn thing about the boundary
| of the possible.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| > Right is earned through investment.
|
| Rights are absolutely _not_ earned, they are granted. You
| do not earn the right to vote, or to have legal
| protection. A right is granted either by the state, by
| society, or by 'god'.
| Taywee wrote:
| You still have the right to complain, you just don't have
| the right for anybody else to care about your complaint.
|
| The ability to complain doesn't need to be earned, only
| the respect itself needs to be earned.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| The wrinkle is zero-context internet, where there's
| little ability to tell what respect someone is due, which
| leads to people who aren't due it assuming they should
| get it (because they also don't know what others
| complaining have done).
|
| Which I guess boils down to "Don't listen to the
| internet."
| Arainach wrote:
| Regardless of knowing what's possible, this is the origin
| of "the customer is always right in matters of taste".
|
| You don't have to have invested in creation to know what
| you like and you don't. Claiming that the creators are
| the only ones who understand things enough to critique
| them is vanity and is toxic to projects.
|
| Every time I've seen project leaders talk like that it's
| been a disaster. Jensen Harris et. al used that language
| to dismiss feedback about the Windows 8 Star Screen, for
| example.
| brookst wrote:
| I don't disagree, but I think you are largely conflating the
| right to speak complaints with the right to be an entitled
| jerk.
|
| Few creators will object to criticism that shows an
| understanding of the work/product. Most will object to
| personal abuse empty of any actual criticism.
|
| Understanding the context of a product makes for better
| complaints. Just venting is not helpful and often abusive.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| >Complaining is simple, just shut up and do it better.
|
| This is a good rule to go by. It is always way easier to
| critique a thing for whatever reason and critique can be good,
| but only to a point. When you start writing articles about how
| thing X is bad because of Y, you aren't doing any favors for
| anyone. You should instead try to channel that into something
| positive.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| HN superiority complex summarized in one comment.
|
| Of course we know nothing about that inflamed moderator. Oh
| well.
| [deleted]
| roenxi wrote:
| There are other things at play here. It is important to
| understand that the average human is unbelievably limited and
| delicate (in the modern era, they don't understand any of the
| systems that sustain their lifestyle and have skills of only
| marginal use). There are multiple systems in place to take all
| these delicate humans and set them up to live comfortable
| lives.
|
| The first layer is the makers, but after that there are a
| couple of layers of assessors and distributors before ideas and
| products hit the masses. For someone in a community that makes
| things, criticism isn't so useful. In the other layers that are
| there to work out what ordinary people should do armchair
| criticism is a lot more useful. Still not very impressive, but
| more useful.
|
| The armchair critics aren't at all interested in making things.
| Their self-appointed role isn't to make things. They are part
| of a community that generates chatter to help guide the
| conversation of the people who actually decide what should
| happen at the mass-market level.
| expertentipp wrote:
| > Wer macht, hat recht which translates to who makes is right.
| Complaining is simple, just shut up and do it better.
|
| Ain't dealing with an avalanche of _Abmahnung_ , and ain't
| going to shut up either.
| prennert wrote:
| Maybe the solution is to brand yourself as an "auteur
| programmer".
| umanwizard wrote:
| Programmauteur
| martin_a wrote:
| Sounds Swiss, I'd be careful with that.
| prennert wrote:
| I think you are confusing this with Programmauteuhr,
| which is basically a mechanical emacs made by a
| Programmauteur. Its very fringe, but critics love it.
| capitol_ wrote:
| But people who write criticisms provide a valuable service to
| me as an consumer.
|
| I have limited amount of time and before I spend 20 hours on a
| book or game I would like some indication that it's not a waste
| of time.
|
| One could argue that both the good and the bad should be
| highlighted, but my experience is that I'm get most value from
| knowing about the bad parts.
| nsplayer wrote:
| Was fur eine Uberraschung, ein arroganter Deutscher, der nie
| Natural-Selection gespielt hat, halt einen Vortrag.
|
| Hier geht es um die Gemeinschaft des Spiels, nicht um das Spiel
| selbst. Dieser Mann hat das Spiel nicht programmiert, nur eine
| kleine Erganzung zu einer Erganzung.
| scns wrote:
| Apologies in advance for my choice of words.
|
| I used to be a person that criticized a lot. One day i realized
| what an cheap ass i was. Talking is easy. Now i say silently to
| myself:
|
| "Shut up or do it better yourself."
|
| It is very healthy to remove narcissistic micromanagers (driven
| by subconcious anxiety) from your life if you can.
| scns wrote:
| Apologies again for commenting before RTA. He got blasted by
| a religious person.
| moi2388 wrote:
| ?!
| ever1337 wrote:
| This reminds me a lot of my experience programming for the open
| source game Space Station 13. We simulate basically everything we
| can in that game, and it fills me with so much satisfaction to
| think about how my code is responsible for the operation of the
| organs inside every player's body, ticking away silently but
| allowing for really complex and nuanced interactions when
| necessary. Most people will never know where that code came from
| or what the game was like before, but that's fine. It just
| existing is enough, in a sea of code made by hundreds or
| thousands of other people.
| drekipus wrote:
| This is a great write up. I'm so envious of those days. I was
| around and got a taste of it, but my mum perpetually banned the
| computer from me, and limited my internet usage to 1 hour for
| brief time I did get.
|
| "To keep viruses out of the power supply and to stop me from
| talking to pedophiles"
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Because of course /buildmenu took users away from regular Natural
| Selection servers, resulting in a holy war dynamic:
| https://gwern.net/holy-war
|
| >The endur[?]ing phe[?]nom[?]e[?]non of 'holy wars' in
| com[?]put[?]ing, such as the bit[?]ter[?]ness around the
| pro[?]longed Python 2 to Python 3 mi[?]gra[?]tion, is not due to
| mere pet[?]ti[?]ness or love of con[?]flict, but be[?]cause they
| are a co[?]or[?]di[?]na[?]tion prob[?]lem: dom[?]i[?]nant
| plat[?]forms enjoy strong net[?]work ef[?]fects, such as
| re[?]duced 'bi[?]trot' as it is regu[?]larly used & main[?]tained
| by many users, and can in[?]flict a mirror-image 'bit[?]creep' on
| other platforms which grad[?]u[?]ally are ne[?]glected and begin
| to bi[?]trot be[?]cause of the dom[?]i[?]nant plat[?]form.
|
| >The outright neg[?]a[?]tive ef[?]fect of bit[?]creep mean that
| hold[?]outs do not just cost early adopters the pos[?]si[?]ble
| net[?]work ef[?]fects, they also greatly re[?]duce the value of a
| given thing, and may cause the early adopters to be
| ac[?]tu[?]ally worse off and more mis[?]er[?]able on a daily
| basis. Given the ex[?]tent to which hold[?]outs have
| ben[?]e[?]fited from the com[?]mu[?]nity, hold[?]out
| be[?]hav[?]ior is per[?]ceived as par[?]a[?]sitic and im[?]moral
| be[?]hav[?]ior by adopters, while hold[?]outs in turn deny any
| moral oblig[?]a[?]tion and re[?]sent the meth[?]ods that adopters
| use to in[?]crease adop[?]tion (such as, in the ab[?]sence of
| for[?]mal con[?]trols, in[?]for[?]mal ones like bul[?]ly[?]ing).
| tourgen wrote:
| [dead]
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The trouble with the Python 2 => 3 transition is _just how much
| work_ it imposed on everyone in the ecosystem, and the general
| lack of care for backwards / forwards compatibility in the
| ecosystem - the fact you need something like "virtualenv" at
| all is damning in itself, out of the major stacks only NodeJS
| requires similar hacks (e.g. nvm).
|
| The PHP world, for example, is very famous for its focus on
| compatibility: breaking changes are generally announced far
| before they are released, and the amount of actually breaking
| changes is very very small - out of my mind, the only thing
| that _really_ bit a lot of very old code was the removal of
| implicitly provided global variables and the mysql legacy
| functions, which by that point were deprecated for like a
| decade and in many cases could be resolved by more-or-less
| simple search and replace runs. Other than that, a lot of
| legacy code works fine or with similarly minor modifications in
| PHP 8 - while the runtime itself is capable of running code
| with syntax features of the modern world.
| zerocrates wrote:
| The 8 series has made a lot of little changes that are
| currently deprecations but if converted to errors as promised
| in 9 will be the end for lots of legacy code without changes:
| most of the standard library not taking null arguments where
| it used to, changed/added typehinting for the standard
| classes affecting anything that extends/implements them, and
| disallowing dynamic properties on objects are some big ones
| that come to mind.
|
| Once 9 makes some of this mandatory it'll also be much more
| difficult for a single codebase to work across a wide range
| of PHP versions. That's possibly even an explicit goal:
| forcing narrower support from applications and libraries will
| prod more hosts and end-users to update.
|
| Not that these are bad changes, but that the philosophy of
| extreme compatibility really isn't in force anymore. It's not
| a Python 2/3 scenario but a gradual constant shift.
| digging wrote:
| On the flip side, and to be crass, PHP is a hell language
| that many hate or refuse to program in. I do wonder if
| there's a correlation.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Most of the PHP haters haven't worked with PHP since the
| 5.x days. PHP 7 started to reverse the trend and PHP 8
| together with a decent IDE is on-par with Java.
| bionhoward wrote:
| I love Natural Selection! Hope it survives or folks pay more
| attention to how great that game is because a new take on the
| same concept could absolutely be a hit
| ptdn wrote:
| The golden age of moddable games ended a long time ago, and it's
| a major shame. Mods for Starcraft, Warcraft III, Half Life, etc.
| spawned thousands of sophisticated game modes that turned into
| dozens of independent games.
| hutattedonmyarm wrote:
| There's plenty of moddable games still available though.
| Factorio, Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Beat Saber. Even Dota 2
| has what they call "custom games".
|
| Sure, maybe not a golden age, but they're doing alright
| ptdn wrote:
| The mods for modern games involve making those games better
| for a specific audience. I've played a bunch of Stardew
| Valley and Minecraft mods. High-end Minecraft graphics and
| massive content packs make for an interesting (if buggy)
| experience.
|
| On the other hand, it's completely different from the Use Map
| Settings games I grew up playing in Brood War, which were
| radically different games using Starcraft assets. DotA was
| literally the same thing in WC3. The game became a game
| engine. There's nothing like that now. (Garry's Mod?)
| justinpombrio wrote:
| Roblox, I think, though it's targeted to kids and I don't
| know much about it.
| porkbeer wrote:
| Roblox is a scam. The biggest games in the world like
| csgo still allow and cekebrate modding, itself originally
| being a halflife mod.
| justinpombrio wrote:
| In what way is Roblox a scam? Remember that most people
| here know very little about it.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| I wish any of those hit the levels that Warcraft 3 did.
| Having infinite, sophisticated game modes to play online with
| others was so fun. Unfortunately Fortnite, Roblox, and Dota 2
| have not been able to do this nearly as well.
| bionhoward wrote:
| Lotta good mods (addons) for WoW these days! I'm particularly
| enamored with TellMeWhen
| maccard wrote:
| The people that would have made mods for those games are still
| able to make mods for TES, Witcher, GTA, Stardew valley (off
| the top of my head), but the people who made full blown mods
| like DOTA in WC3 are now using tools like Unity or js
| frameworks like pixi and publishing on itch.io instead.
| npteljes wrote:
| I don't think so. Steam, for example, supports mods directly
| from the Steam client. Many of the games I play specifically
| support mods from within the game itself, integrated with this
| Steam mod functionality, and it even takes care of upgrades,
| dependencies and such.
|
| There's a thriving ecosystem of games and mods out there, no
| such thing as a golden age that has ended.
|
| Starcraft II for example has a host of excellent mods. My group
| doesn't even play the original Starcraft game, and I don't have
| any interest in it either, but we have sunk many hours into
| different custom maps.
| adityaathalye wrote:
| Fun story! I think I would be happy if I found myself in the
| author's place. Someone getting mad at creative code I wrote
| would mean it got used in ways I didn't imagine and/or by people
| I didn't know of. Prompts for more creativity.
|
| (edit: typos)
| moi2388 wrote:
| You added building to CS? That sounds a lot like Fortnite.
| speps wrote:
| Not CS (Counter Strike), NS (Natural Selection).
| mrkeen wrote:
| These days you can sometimes still find a combat map with a few
| players in NS2.
|
| I don't know how modded it is on the server-side, but you can
| still drop a few buildings as aliens, and a sentry turret as
| marines. Good fun!
|
| (ORB forever!)
| c0nfused wrote:
| One of the neatest part about ns2 development is that the
| source is the product you are just distributing lua files that
| the engine runs.
|
| The uwe implementation of combat for ns2 was last stand and the
| source is here https://github.com/unknownworlds/ns2_laststand
|
| Looks like the combat mod is there too
| https://github.com/AlexHayton/NS2Combat
| bakugo wrote:
| I still write plugins like this for source engine games using
| sourcemod/sourcepawn (the successors to amx and pawn
| respectively) occasionally, and it's still fun. Much harder to
| get people to play your mods since the games aren't as popular as
| they once were, but there's something about the engine that makes
| it really satisfying to mess with and bend to your will despite
| it being a massive pile of spaghetti. Helps that the entire
| source code tree has been leaked multiple times before, too.
| revskill wrote:
| THe fact that human love games proved that human is always God's
| child.
| pkasting wrote:
| Ah, angry Internet people. I have my own collection of responses,
| from someone who argued that my choice of a default value for a
| setting was tantamount to forcing someone to have an abortion
| against their will, to the time when restricting comments on a
| bug another team had WontFixed led to a change.org petition to
| get me fired.
|
| People feel like they have very little control, and that no one
| is listening. In that environment they sometimes scream into the
| void. It's counterproductive, but understandable.
| nsplayer wrote:
| I used to play NS a ton, even was in a clan for a while. It was
| one of the most original and novel video games i've ever played,
| only planetside comes close.
|
| Combat played a sizeable role in killing the original game and
| turning it into something i'd expect from a CS mod. An entry
| level, bland generic version of the original that gutted all the
| strategy and coordination and teamwork that you required to win
| on ns_ maps. (A good commander alone was worth gold)
|
| You built upon what many people considered cancer (combat to some
| extent, but definitely xmenu combat) - tumors get serious when
| they hit the lymph nodes, and they probably saw it as that.
|
| I quit before this era happened but I probably would have hated
| you if i hadn't - even if you aren't technically the one to
| blame.
| gipp wrote:
| > It was one of the most original and novel video games i've
| ever played, only planetside comes close.
|
| I think I'd throw Tribes (2) in there as well. Those were the
| days.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I could never figure out the bunny jumping. And the eyeballs in
| mouth thing bothered me for a while, but people on the forums
| thought I was nuts. :(
|
| That said, NS was prob my favorite multiplayer game of all
| time... After Age of Empires 2, OFC.
|
| Combat is fine to fill the server with enough players for a
| normal NS game.
| _jackdk_ wrote:
| I'm the author, and I agree with pretty much everything you
| wrote - NS was special and trying to preserve that specialness
| was why I put the buildings into Combat in the first place. I
| miss that era of experimentation both in mods and commercial
| releases. I would've loved to be online during the heyday of
| Tribes 2 or Planetside.
|
| Ironically, I don't think I ever consciously built in
| xmenu<->buildmenu support (though I don't have the .amxx file
| to hand to check); that was a surprise to me. IIRC, both
| ExtraLevels and Combat Buildings used the NS module for AMXX to
| read write the "unspent level points" for the player. Placing
| buildings was a lot less crazy when you had to spend one of
| your nine precious levelups on a welder or a gorge morph, and
| then spend another on each building.
|
| Combat Buildings made Combat pretty stupid, ExtraLevels made
| Combat really stupid, but the combination was way stupider than
| the sum of its parts.
| nsplayer wrote:
| Fate was probably determined at the point that combat came
| out, xmenu just accelerated it with absurd upgrades that let
| one person steamroll the server (though it was sometimes fun
| to be that one person, it wasn't for the other half of the
| server...)
|
| At least your mod brought back the building aspect, cheers
| for that.
| bennyelv wrote:
| I couldn't remember if I'd played this mod - then I saw the
| teeth/mouth that surrounds the screen when you play on the
| alien team in one of the screenshots and it all came flooding
| back.
|
| Original HL had an absolutely awesome modding community. As
| well as the huge one (CS) there were tweaks to make it better
| in all sorts of ways: - Adrenaline Gamer or AG - which changed
| the movement a little to make deathmatch super fast-paced. -
| Bubble Mod - which make a few gameplay tweaks to make
| deathmatch more sensible and manageable in large servers
|
| ...and I even wrote my own for the deathmatch games we played
| on our LAN at Uni, which announced a particularly annoying
| players name whenever he got fragged.
|
| Don't really have time for these things any more!
| ok_dad wrote:
| You guys should try the current crop of FPS games like "Hell
| Let Loose" which actually require a lot of strategy and
| coordination! HLL, for example, has huge battles with
| commanders and several squads of different types with squad
| leaders, and you earn upgrades and abilities over the game as
| you take positions and etc. I haven't played that one for a
| while, but it could scratch that same itch that NS scratched.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I play NS2 sometimes, which still has a pretty active
| community.
|
| It's a tough game to get into and even harder to get good at
| commanding since being a bad commander will sink your whole
| team. But it feels extremely rewarding to play on a well-
| coordinated team.
| jeffwask wrote:
| Gamer rage is the most incandescent of the rages.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > But as absolutely terrible as /xmenu is, /buildmenu is the god
| damned devil. Buildmenu is an abomination upon the lord that is
| causing the universe to unravel and all heretics who follow the
| terribleness that is buildmenu shall perish in hell. I'd like to
| give a big thanks to whoever created /buildmenu for making THE
| WORST COMBAT PLUGIN EVER.
|
| This reads more like sarcasm and tongue-in-cheek hyperbole than
| an actual really mad person.
| nsplayer wrote:
| It unironically helped accelerate the death of the game. This
| wasn't counter-strike with millions of players and a huge
| esports scene, this was a tiny mod with maybe a few thousand
| players that required ~5v5 or higher for a good experience
| vrglvrglvrgl wrote:
| [dead]
| h2odragon wrote:
| Nowadays, you can get SWAT called on you for upsetting the wrong
| people with a game mod.
| komali2 wrote:
| Wow, I really really wish I was a little older during the Half
| Life / Flash era of game development. Will we ever get anything
| like that again? Nowadays this kind of creativity always seems to
| exist in walled gardens like Roblox. I feel like the concept of
| software freedom as the gnu folks pitch is the environment that
| that half life / flash area of modding and game dev existed in.
|
| Ugh now even if you formally make a game you can't even publish
| it to anything other than PCs without getting permission from
| console companies or google / apple! Well I guess f-droid is an
| exception, or, if you make your game a browser game.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| Minecraft is comparable. I think the general trend is right
| though, there was a lot more creativity in random Warcraft/Half
| Life mods. Shit, DOTA was a Warcraft mod first.
|
| Arma also comes to mind as a moddable multiplayer game.
| Crossfire as well, not super popular in the West nowadays
| though.
|
| I miss Flash games!
| xwdv wrote:
| There is nothing stopping you from making a web browser based
| JavaScript game right now that you can throw up on a basic
| webpage and share a link for people to go play instantly. You
| just don't want to!
| tuvan wrote:
| Wasnt the modding scene a result of game dev from scratch being
| inaccessible? Downloading UE/Unity/Godot and making your dream
| game is probably easier nowadays than trying to make it as a HL
| mod then.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| It had more of a cobbled together feel.
|
| You could inject code in a lot of places and people were
| doing wonky things. I think it had to do with the user base
| being far smaller at the time. Knowledgeable people were
| still a significant part of it and security was far less of
| concern.
|
| There was also far less money involved which is always a
| great filter for the kind of personality you want in this
| kind of community.
| deniska wrote:
| Yes and no.
|
| Modding a game means that you have a specific starting point,
| the original game, which you are probably a fan of. And you
| may want your creation to be a part of this original world,
| share some (or most) of gameplay elements, design elements,
| story elements etc.
|
| People modded Half-Life not only because modding Half-Life
| was somewhat easier than making an FPS game from scratch, but
| also because they wanted to explore the original story from
| another angle, or they liked how engine feels to play, or for
| whatever other reason wanted a starting point to be a
| complete game. Kind of the original asset store: the assets
| of the game you are modding.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| To me it is about focus. If I am interested in game AI, I can
| mod a game and focus on just the AI. No need to build out the
| rest of the art assets and design.
|
| If you are a big fan of open world games, GTA and Skyrim took
| teams of a 100 people, years of effort to make. Not something
| an indie is going to be able to reproduce. Modding allows you
| to create in that world.
|
| Third would be reach. Getting people to try out a mod for a
| game is often much easier than getting them to try out a
| whole new game.
| ohwellhere wrote:
| Over a decade ago I rebuilt a small business's web application.
| By small I mean it was a one person company, the app was used by
| maybe a dozen clients, and the rewrite took me 10 hours.
|
| Imagine my surprise when one day I'm browsing Hacker News and I
| see a comment on some unrelated article absolutely lambasting how
| I built the core feature of the web app. It was referenced by
| direct URL, no mistaken identity or projection.
|
| (Their critique was correct in many important ways, but also: the
| client loved it.)
| imp0cat wrote:
| I much preferred Gloom, the Quake 2 mod. Apparently, some servers
| are still alive: http://www.planetgloom.com/servers.cgi
|
| Here is a quick comparison of NS, Gloom, Tremulous and
| Unvanquished.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ns2/comments/4bsws2/the_ultimate_co...
| physicles wrote:
| Natural Selection was a fantastic mod. For a couple golden years
| we played it at LAN parties with 8-12 people in a single
| basement. It was like FPS StarCraft: the two races were entirely
| different but also totally balanced.
|
| I also wrote a super simple half-life mod back then. It was like
| Juggernaut mode for Halo, which came out later: one person was
| nearly invisible, with an insta-kill crowbar, and whoever killed
| them took their powers.
|
| I miss those days.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I've had a couple complaints about Empire:
|
| 1. I was threatened once with fisticuffs because the person spent
| too much time playing Empire
|
| 2. I was blamed for causing one person's divorce
|
| 3. I was blamed for a student flunking out
|
| 4. Empire was blamed for consuming all the resources of Caltech's
| PDP-10, and was banned during daytime and during finals week
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-05-17 23:02 UTC)