pchote

Grenadier





Joined: 06 Feb 2015





Posted: Tue Sep 22, 2015 8:11 pm Post subject: QUICK_EDIT

Attach signature (signatures can be changed in profile) close Blade wrote: I have to ask then, why do some people seem to be pushing for modders to adopt OpenRA as the platform for their mods now. As you say, the engine is under heavy development which will only increase the development overhead on a mod team even if it will lead to greater flexibilty in the directions the mods can go in down the road. Surely it is better for them to stick with the existing engines that have known limitations for now and then look at porting when the TS like mod features have stablised?



I can't explain or justify other people's motivations, but I can give my own opinion (which is often controversial): I agree completely. I think that big total-conversion style mods with teams that don't want to become actively involved in OpenRA development should steer clear of it for the immediate future.



We have utility rules that automate many of the rules changes as we adapt traits, and these are mostly adequate for smaller scale mods (i.e. those that build off one of our main mods, and add new units, factions, missions, etc). These mods are still going to need to invest a few hours each new release (every few months) to adapt to the new changes, however. There have been several mods like this that have survived for a couple of releases before dying off due to lack of time or enthusiasm.



We can say all we want about flexibility and yada yada, but the fact is that if the engine doesn't yet offer them what they need, and if they aren't willing to adapt or able to contribute towards making those features happen, then it is a waste of everybody's time for them to convert to OpenRA now. There is no telling how long they might need to wait and keep maintaining their non-releasable mod. That's just silly.



The benefits of converting to OpenRA come when you're either willing to adapt to the new engine (which means giving up some things you might be used to from the original engines, but gaining a giant bunch of new possibilities in return) or able to help implement the missing feature that you need. "help" doesn't even need to be code: A well written feature request that precisely defines the expected behaviour would be fantastic and greatly improves the chances of someone else implementing it.



As an example (from the I can't explain or justify other people's motivations, but I can give my own opinion (which is often controversial): I agree completely. I think that big total-conversion style mods with teams that don't want to become actively involved in OpenRA development should steer clear of it for the immediate future.We have utility rules that automate many of the rules changes as we adapt traits, and these are mostly adequate for smaller scale mods (i.e. those that build off one of our main mods, and add new units, factions, missions, etc). These mods are still going to need to invest a few hours each new release (every few months) to adapt to the new changes, however. There have been several mods like this that have survived for a couple of releases before dying off due to lack of time or enthusiasm.We can say all we want about flexibility and yada yada, but the fact is that if the engine doesn't yet offer them what they need, and if they aren't willing to adapt or able to contribute towards making those features happen, then it is a waste of everybody's time for them to convert to OpenRA now. There is no telling how long they might need to wait and keep maintaining their non-releasable mod. That's just silly.The benefits of converting to OpenRA come when you're either willing to adapt to the new engine (which means giving up some things you might be used to from the original engines, but gaining a giant bunch of new possibilities in return) or able to help implement the missing feature that you need. "help" doesn't even need to be code: A well written feature request that precisely defines the expected behaviour would be fantastic and greatly improves the chances of someone else implementing it.As an example (from the DTA thread ) "Add meteors" is not a well written feature request. We don't know the implementation details of the original meteor code, and it usually takes significantly more effort to research details like that than it does to implement the actual code. If somebody can describe exactly what they want from a feature, then we can implement it or explain how they no longer need to abuse that feature to do something completely different (all too common in C&C mods) which we can support in a better way.

QUICK_EDIT