Yeah joonicks, have patience. Lots and lots of patience. There are only a few coders, and they have jobs and lives to live. We all contribute to Pioneer as a hobby. Right now there are major things in the Pioneer engine that are being rewritten. It's mostly over my head, but people are already working on many other things which use up their Pioneer time. For example, I read that the random number generator may be bugged. They have to fix stuff like that first.

Oh, and your contributions are welcome! 😀

joonicks you're contributions are very welcome, in fact I've merged your PR's faster than any new contributors PR's since I started being able to do so!

The limiting factor for me merging your stuff is two-fold.

1. I spend approximately 1 hour per-PR doing code review, compiling and testing.
2. You often don't describe what something does or is for, so I have to figure that out from the code, so that I can then review the code and then test it which takes even longer.

You've had 7 closed and have 3 open PR's, some we've closed because you opened a new PR with the same changes, but you've had at least 5 hours of my time so far.

I don't mind giving that time but it is mine and I have my own stuff to work on, a full time job, my girlfriend who was in a car accident last Thursday (she's fine thankfully, car written off), a house that need it's roof repairing, etc.

Also our PR's tend to stay open for between 1 week and 1 YEAR because we're pedantic assholes 🙂

Finally we're not arguing with your patches, this is a collaborative project, there's several coders, scripters, artists and people of various walks who drop in and out at times - there will nearly always be some discussion about a PR before it's accepted, especially when you don't put a description for it.

That means that our experience of the game is divided across many individuals, who as Marcel has pointed out each their own have jobs, lives & families.

When we have asked you questions it's because of a number of reasons.

• we don't personally understand the area you're changing,
• we think it's good but needs some more work to meet either our coding standards or we know that it's been discussed in the past and there's something you might not be aware of like with #3486,
• the PR is good but it doesn't seem finished yet like #3474 which seems like a good piece of work but does it need discussing because of how it changes the gameplay?
• and more reason because each PR tends to be a bit unique.

We haven't rejected any of your PRs, which is quite unusual as it's common for people to come in and do some really weird things at first.

You're absolutely right about about the balance, and the hyperdrive jump bug, that need doing.

A lot of the reticence to change the trading system is because we're not entirely sure how to change it yet - we could make some random change that we don't understand but how will we be better off with the new system we don't understand the side effects of than the system we do?

• Should we change cargo capacity to volume from mass?
• Have separate cargo and equipment "volumes"?
• Increase the cost difference of products between world types?
• Increase the value of all commodities?
• Randomise the prices slightly between Star systems?
• How about doing that across factions?

That's just off the top of my own head, right now at 10am, whilst waiting for my day job to compile and because this isn't just my game, or yours, or anyone else's, but a collaboration.

So we'll have to discuss it a bit and come up with a plan that enough (not all - it's "Democracy-lite") people agree on and that someone(s) willing to implement all of the changes.

You're doing great so far, sorry if it hasn't been said before, but you really are off to a great start.

Andy

Ive submitted patch after patch and usually the response is "why?"

As mentioned, none of your patches include any descriptions as to what they do, and why the should be included. Thus we are forced to ask you why. Look at the other pull requests that are currently open for an example of how to clearly motivate them, e.g. #3485.

...or has to be fought over tooth n nail because its just a step towards improvement and not a complete perfect solution wrapped up in a neat package.

Yes, I've noticed this is your reaction. When someone doesn't see things exactly as you do, you get quite sarcastic, and (what I consider) rude/passive aggressive. Let me say this, until now, I have never (that I know of) been rude or attacked anyone for not sharing my opinion. Nor have I ever seen nozmajner be rude to anyone, yet you called/hinted at him being an "ego", you've hinted that I'm some sort of "besserwisser" (trust me, I know I don't know anything), and you start demanding that your pull request be merged after only having been open some two days (which is very short in pioneer community time), and you have an attitude towards robn, and accusing towards the dev team for not working fast enough. We do our best to help anyone submit code, or work on contributions. But please keep in mind that time is limited to us.

When someone has an idea, code, or shows a model, it's a positive thing that others come with constructive feedback:

- "What about if you tweak it to do this instead"

- "We should be aware that this also has a possible negative side effect, namely..."

- "In what way is the game improved, what new possibilities does this open up for the player?"

Let me make an analogy with my own field, which is research. In the world of science, if you give a talk at a conference, the absolute worst and most embarrassing thing that can happen is not that you give a bad talk (with your fly open), or someone points out an error, or says you could do it better by doing things like so-and-so, or someone doesn't buy the thesis you are presenting, but rather, when there are no questions at all. Questions are good, and are the core for a good scientific community.

So since you've chosen to vent your frustration in public lets have a look at your pull requests as see if it's as bad as you say, so we all know what is being discussed:

- boot screen visuals take

This was merged after a normal review process.

- Make trade analyzer module into a non-removable module

This removes function for the player, and I don't see how that makes the game more fun, thus I suspect this might not be merged in its present form.

- commodity language fix

This was merged after a perfect normal review process.

- systeminfoview target box

This is currently open, since at least I want to check with nozmajner when he gets back, and let him have a say as well, since it touches upon user interface. If someone else merges it, I have no objections.

- expose table mouseover hover color to lua interface

No description given to why this is good, and it is hardly obvious to me (or anyone else) why anyone would want this. The discussion that follows in the pull request is thus warranted. Through review process robn better understood what you're trying to do, and suggested how to do it in a better way, you fixed it and opened the fix here:

- exposing full color values instead of only alphas in skin.ini, getting rid of hardcoded black colors

This was waiting merge or further review, and robn gave thumbs up, and during me writing this reply fluffyfreak merged it.

- commodityMarket rewrite

This was merged, after a normal review process considering it was a big change. New ideas were pitched for the future, and it was discussed if the "almost there" code should be merged (which is was) due to it being a significant improvement, or if it should be tweaked further.

it disturbs me a lot that noone is taking the severe imbalances in pioneer seriously right now.

Yes, pioneer is unbalanced, but how to fix it is very difficult and a big project, and none of us have time. The suggestion you had was based on a single trade run you had made, which is why I was a bit reserved. You are free to make whatever modifications you want to your own pioneer copy, and play the game with those, and see what works.

starter ship has a 120ly jumprange

As I've said, I agree completely, 120ly is insane (10 ly would be in the right ball park for a start up ship, in my opinion). But this hasn't been fixed because no one (including you) have submitted a fix for it. If you submit a PR, we are more than happy to include it. But please beware that it will be reviewed when we have time* and if we see something odd about it, we will point it out.

*(as I've understood it flyffyfreak is working more or less two full time jobs, and I myself am working more than full time as well (and really aught to work even more), jpab has stepped down for now due to his job, as have laarmen, thus time is not in abundance)

jumprange is bugged

Same here. Please submit a pull request.

even if you fix the jumprange bug, starter ship still has 70ly range

I believe nozmajner is investigating a ship re-balance.

fuel runs out after a 1 leg journey, unless you have a starbase at your destination you will be stuck doing 10-20au journeys at 200km/s instead of 2800...

If you have ideas, please pitch them. We are open for discussion.

I dont know if walterar would be more open to changes or if I should fork my own project and go at it alone.

I surely want to see as much improvement as possible in upstream pioneer source, but not at the cost of bickering, fighting and attacks on people. During my time in pioneer, everyone have been very kind and helpful, and not a single bad word has ever been thrown. Personally that is what matters the most to me.

Oh, and your contributions are welcome!

YES!

@joonicks we are thankful for your contributions, and I know carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders can be a heavy burden, so it's a good thing to sometimes take a step back and take a deep breath and think through if things really are as bad as you say they are.

I hope you decide to stay with us, but please be patient with us.

right now I think the devs needs to make one thing clear; is Pioneer a space sim or a space game?

will you sacrifice gameplay elements on the altar of realism?

or

will you sacrifice realism on the altar of gameplay?

some elements can combine the two, but right now the fuel situation cant do both. someones obsession with realism in regards to delta-v has killed gameplay. youre capping speeds because you think they are "unrealistic"

in scout+ walterar is either using an old version of pioneer or has modified the fuel values to eliminate the problem in favor of gameplay. so scout+ is clearly meant to be a game.

in pioneer however, you have one of your main guys (noz) arguing in favor of nerfing speeds further, which might make pioneer more realistinc in current-day terms, but will inhibit gameplay even further by making space-travel agonizingly slow.

as for balancing, there has been an open topic regarding balancing on the dev forum for a couple of weeks now with barely any discussion. but noone on the dev forum seems interested in discussing balancing. they would rather talk about adding a feature like "money transfer in space for missions"

I have time, I want to do balancing, but since there is no consensus on anything, I know that anything I do will be rejected or met with scepticism and demands for explanations and justifications.

if I do it now, Id more rather think hat if I present what I think is a solution, it should be accepted no-contest because the discussion is there, if you dont take part in it, then you need to stfu and suck it.

as for constructive critisism, I havent seen much of that. what I see more is "well, I dont know but... why? justify, explain, argue, make a 20-page essay explaining it"

and I dont think it helps pioneer any having maintainers who explicitly say "dont submit bugs or issues, it makes pioneer look bad"

Ive actually read comments about pioneer and it seems Im not alone in my complaints about some of these things, like fuel and trading.

and in the discussion about the trade analyzer, fluffy comes out saying "eh, maybe just remove the module and give all ships the full functionality", essentially going towards a one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter version that is the exact opposite of what Id like to accomplish with my changes.

I want:

Pioneer to be a GAME, not a sim

Immersion, depth, variation, diversification, choice

A Game where after playing a week or a month you can still stumble on something that surprises you, intrigues you, fascinates you

/A

 

 

and in the discussion about the trade analyzer, fluffy comes out saying "eh, maybe just remove the module and give all ships the full functionality", essentially going towards a one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter version that is the exact opposite of what Id like to accomplish with my changes.

Well yeah, because you haven't said anything about why you want to do it so I don't know what you're reasons are.

All I can do is look at what immediate effect the change will have, make everyone have the trade analyzer regardless of whether they want it or not, and then ask questions based on that.

I'm not on IRC often and so can't know what other discussions you have had about it with others. I'm not asking for an essay per post just a couple of lines saying something like

> "I'm doing this so we can support removable software modules for the ships computer in the future"

Then I'd have some information to asses the PR with.

 

I have time, I want to do balancing, but since there is no consensus on anything, I know that anything I do will be rejected or met with scepticism and demands for explanations and justifications.

if I do it now, Id more rather think hat if I present what I think is a solution, it should be accepted no-contest because the discussion is there, if you dont take part in it, then you need to stfu and suck it.

That's not that approach we take with this, usually if someone comes along with a bunch of code to do something we'll take a look at it but yes we will discuss it, at length, because we are trying to get the balance right.

"STFU and suck it" is however not something anyone has to do - that's the collaboration bit - and if you want to make sweeping changes without any discussion with people who have spent years working on this then that's ... very rude.

 

in pioneer however, you have one of your main guys (noz) arguing in favor of nerfing speeds further, which might make pioneer more realistinc in current-day terms, but will inhibit gameplay even further by making space-travel agonizingly slow.

 

as for balancing, there has been an open topic regarding balancing on the dev forum for a couple of weeks now with barely any discussion. but noone on the dev forum seems interested in discussing balancing. they would rather talk about adding a feature like "money transfer in space for missions"

I know about "money transfer in space for missions" because over the last few years it's come up a few times and we've discussed it, there's even two outstanding issues in GitHub about it.

So I don't have to think too deeply about that and can just comment away with implications and what needs doing.

The rebalance thread however is really complicated with a lot of consequences so I need to think seriously before I reply.

Partially it seems you've chosen to take issue with Noz saying the nerfing the DeltaV (Dv) would be good, but the truth is that with high Dv the combat turns the shit... sorry, even shittier, and yet it's good fun with a very-low-Dv.

So how do we get a very-low-Dv combat experience without making cross system journey times excruciatingly slow?

Not everyone wants to trade so a higher-Dv would ruin the game for them.

You see why it's tricky? And since I have been working like a dog and dealing with RL I will get around to replying to that thread when I get the chance and I won't be "shutting-the-fuck-up" and "sucking-it" at any point before then.

Andy

If you're looking for unfettered commit access then perhaps a fork, your own or an existing one might be a good idea?

We do backport code from forks of the project, and the code is open source under a clutch of licenses and so the code has to stay that way if you release a build of it anywhere/when.

Walterar has been doing great stuff with Scout+ and might be looking for a coder, or there's Paragon which forked our code a year (two years?) ago and has been working on releasing a commercial game based on it.

I'd hate to see you go but it does seem that you're very angry with us.

Well yeah, because you haven't said anything about why you want to do it so I don't know what you're reasons are.
All I can do is look at what immediate effect the change will have, make everyone have the trade analyzer regardless of whether they want it or not, and then ask questions based on that.
I'm not on IRC often and so can't know what other discussions you have had about it with others. I'm not asking for an essay per post just a couple of lines saying something like
> "I'm doing this so we can support removable software modules for the ships computer in the future"
 
Then I'd have some information to asses the PR with.

As a trader I have no issues with a module being permanent. I see it as a cost for making business. I also have a mod of the commodity market which utilizes the trade analyzer, giving it another use beyond what it currently has. I also wrote in the PR that step 2 would be to alter the ship mechanic pane to allow for service and removal of individual modules. I also have a beginning of that change on my drive. But that change is also tied to the durability change, which makes it more complex, complicated and has to be well thought out before implemented and finally submitted.
 

That's not that approach we take with this, usually if someone comes along with a bunch of code to do something we'll take a look at it but yes we will discuss it, at length, because we are trying to get the balance right.
"STFU and suck it" is however not something anyone has to do - that's the collaboration bit - and if you want to make sweeping changes without any discussion with people who have spent years working on this then that's ... very rude.

If I come along, posting on the forum "hey guys, this issue needs some urgent attention" followed by silence. Then I spend 1, 2, 10 hours doing my own thing trying to fix it, and submitting it only to hear "oh, thats.. um.. why cant you do _this_ instead? oh I dont like this, do _that_ instead" that'd put me in a kind of murderous rage mood. ok maybe not murderous rage but rather suicidal depression. How would you feel? You ask for input, get none, try to solve it how you think it should be solved, then after your hard work, you get tons of opinions about what you should have done instead of what you did. Would you like that?

After I had "completed" the new commodityMarket I was bloody exhausted, worn out mentally after having spent 2 days dealing in depth with lua for the first time ever, having come up with something I though was reasonably useful and in line or better code quality than current implementation. Submitting it only to face questions and comments like.. "oh, hmm.. cant you try _this_ instead? wouldnt _that_ look better?" And then because I know Pioneer is a community project I went on to add dozens of lines of comments to explain the details of the code so that in the future someone might be able to make changes they thought necessary. Comments which are otherwise almost completely absent in almost all the code Ive seen. Maybe you should add "comments" to your source code guidelines.
 

I know about "money transfer in space for missions" because over the last few years it's come up a few times and we've discussed it, there's even two outstanding issues in GitHub about it.
So I don't have to think too deeply about that and can just comment away with implications and what needs doing.
 
The rebalance thread however is really complicated with a lot of consequences so I need to think seriously before I reply.
Partially it seems you've chosen to take issue with Noz saying the nerfing the DeltaV (Dv) would be good, but the truth is that with high Dv the combat turns the shit... sorry, even shittier, and yet it's good fun with a very-low-Dv.
So how do we get a very-low-Dv combat experience without making cross system journey times excruciatingly slow?
Not everyone wants to trade so a higher-Dv would ruin the game for them.

Module. "Inertial Vampire" or something, could even have variations efficient to -50, -75, -85, -95% of original delta-v. range 50km, lock on time 10s. pirates would fit a high performance one, traders might fit a low performance small module for self-defence. or might risk it without just for a few more tones of cargo.
And neither noz, nor anyone, ever mentioned that delta-v is a combat problem.
 

You see why it's tricky? And since I have been working like a dog and dealing with RL I will get around to replying to that thread when I get the chance and I won't be "shutting-the-fuck-up" and "sucking-it" at any point before then.
 
Andy

I have 12 hours a day of free time nothing to do bored shitless misery. Id love to pour my heart and soul into Pioneer but right now I feel goddamn unappreciated, hostility at every PR, questions about the motive for changing anything, demands for explanations. I feel bogged down by beuraucracy, suffocated by opinions.

I know I can be a pain in the ass some times, Im too blunt, too stubborn. But I also believe that my ideas are sound and my work is solid. If you think Im wrong just tell me. Dont be subtle. Its nearly impossible to offend me.

/A

 

 

If I come along, posting on the forum "hey guys, this issue needs some urgent attention" followed by silence. Then I spend 1, 2, 10 hours doing my own thing trying to fix it, and submitting it only to hear "oh, thats.. um.. why cant you do _this_ instead? oh I dont like this, do _that_ instead" that'd put me in a kind of murderous rage mood. ok maybe not murderous rage but rather suicidal depression. How would you feel? You ask for input, get none, try to solve it how you think it should be solved, then after your hard work, you get tons of opinions about what you should have done instead of what you did. Would you like that?

You're time frame is all out sync with everyone else's, not everyone is sat in front of their PC/Mac/Linux/whatever for 12 hours everyday.

Because we have lives, jobs and holidays/trips we're not going to just respond immediately, after you've done N-hours of work and created your PR is often going to be the first time that we encounter it.

Working code talks loudest, but when you're hammering on game design or usability issues then it will attract comment because there are contentious topics that need discussion with others.

If you ruin the game for a contributor who loves it and has been adding content for the last 5 years then they're going to get pissed off and walk away from the project and you're ideas or desired direction for the game is not necessarily better than another persons.

Some of us like Pioneer for it's sim-like nature, spending time travelling across the system, plotting a course and flying between planets manually to save fuel is it's own kind of fun.

The feeling of being in a very small, flawed ship, in a very big Universe, struggling is part of why some of us like Pioneer - it's twisted enough to be game like that's it not impractical or boring.

It might be that Pioneer isn't what you want.

Andy

"hostility at every PR"

I'm asking anyone reading this, please check the links to joonicks pull request in my previous post, and please point out to me where anyone is being rude, attacking, condescending, hostile, coming with unreasonable questions, or in any way being unfair or unpleasant, so that we can stop doing this, because I am at a loss here.

"Its nearly impossible to offend me."

Seems we are offending you to a "murderous mood / suicidal depression", as you put it, by simply not merging code until we understand it.

Seeing comments from you like in #3489 massively reduces my motivation to help you.

walt, if you want help with the english in scout+ anytime i'll try to help you

Fascinating, I like to suggest that all continues this thread here http://pioneerspacesim.net/forum/index.php and leave me in peace.

THREAD LOCKED.