Nameless Warrior said:
Wendek said:
How can he afford paid people when he's also doing a mod about copyrighted content that he can't exactly monetize ? (Or maybe he has a patreon and it's enough ? ...
That may have been more feasible before the previous update but this time it was not just modellers but also gsanders who was absent for a long time and there are things on his coding side which need to be looked at too and he is as of yet unable to return to warsword. I have no illusions about our update strategy, is not ideal, but this time around I feel this is for the best, both for the state of the mod and the life/modding balance of team members. The good thing this time is that the mod should be better tested and better 'out of the box'. We missed quite a bit last time as we felt the pressure being past the designated date. That won't happen this time.
I saw my name used by an important person here and wanted to qualify something of minor importance:
I'm pretty busy over at another mod. That other mod happens to have some similarities in terms of factions needing prejudice to keep unnatural alliances doomed to fail, or diplomacy needing skewing, and unlike last years' fairly mild prejudice I feel its needed to ramp up prejudice to the point where cities close their doors when you show up with a mixed party full of their lifelong enemies and plan to parade down main street.
Diplomacy has a large number of quests and dialogs that ought to be exercised heavily before importing, and this process requires a test bed.
Although it may be a shock to some users, I don't really see mods the way a user does. I see layers where the troops, faction names, items list, and pretty much all the models are "data", and it matters to me quite little whether they're chaos, orks, spider riding goblins, or lizard men in one mod or spider riding drow and high elves and dwarves and orcs with a "c" in another mod. Those factions are just numbers. What MATTERS to me is the driving systems code underneath, how it impacts hiring recruits at villages, closes doors or opens them at towns and castles, how trade works, and how to turn off layers of the game and toggle them back on without needing a fresh save game. The two mods have mutually incompatible magic systems, but that suits me because I don't want to harm anyone else's look and feel for magic but I expect to drive much of the core outside-combat with similar code. My focus has generally been economy and optimizations. I did get bandit spawns working last year but it was fairly late in the release cycle, when we were burnt out and I was feeling sick - sick of modding, sick from my kidneys failing, tired and old, and more interested in doing something with my family than taking mental hits for failed code in a free game. Which agreed nobody MADE me work on.
So I took the year off to learn a useful trade, but that didnt really pan out either, so when Guspav needed help last August I offered to rescue a mod I liked much and reckoned I could bang it out in about 4 days (merging diplomacy and in the process scrubbing his code clean of whatever he had that was holding it down). So four MONTHS later its mostly working, but my chronic exhaustion are hard on users (Wendek is a refugee from my caustic remarks on unscripted detours). And yet, as even he pointed out, when I took a diplomacy I used a "beta" diplomacy that sometime later is found to have some egregious problems - a broken tutorial, possible dialog hangs, and I need to go through one by one each quest and dialog branch to find any places dialogs can hang. This process is open end. For there it is a fairly straightforward merge, again.
I think I have a more advanced model than the Warsword Rigale mashup of diplomacy + Warsword Conquest last year. If the dialogs were very clean this set of code would be vastly superior to my choices last year. I feel the list handling is MUCH stronger, by perhaps 5-15x less inefficient, allowing MUCH smoother map movement. There is NO stutter that I can discern even at time moving 6x normal. I have better tools for monitoring troop trees, faction status, even considering the need to break the Jrider faction viewer into 3 layers to fit all the factions columns correctly. Thats solved now.
Water combat is sidestepped for the moment; it just wont happen as before, even if the replacement seems cheesy (or not). I'd rather focus on what works and scrap trying to make sea battles all together for now. they can fight on an island or already boarded for all I care.
I did make flying work at the other mod but pulled it over concerns for needing to remake PBOD for 3D. Thats a next year problem.
As for Cozur et al having "professional" work, his Patreon page shows monthly income of 160 a month, so I suspect he started with deep pockets and burned a large amount over the last years, same as me. I blew hmmm $50K of my inheritance and now we're broke busted and with my wife daily demanding I stop "wasting time on coding free games and find something that pays" (unquote). I told her its my life long dream to do this, even once, and I would be happy to do this then die. There it sits. I don't expect to die anytime in the next 5 years, and ideally twice that. thats a hell of a lot of possible code.
Now, as for work on a mod -- I do one layer for myself. I then share it with Nameless Warrior. We're peers. I have my own goals, he has his. I never really sat down at a GW game; not once ever. i'm not a fan. But the CODE aspect was a different matter. He needed certain layers that _I_ felt needed writing ANYWAY, so it was a natural synergism. I'm not married to ANYONES IP. They're just clothes for a fashion industry. I'm interested in the deep system, sort of the body under the fashion/art. Thats my frontier. Thus I dabble from mod to mod and take great interest in optimizing Warsword Conquest and other mods. I can assure you, my current testbed is MUCH faster moving than last years Warsword Conquest. Part of this is controlling party count (1100 vs 1400-1600) and part is avoiding waste (my list driven icons over water was a huge bandwidth pig, and Nameless Warior has already removed them). The list system I used last year was very primitive and someone else's OSP; its been made much smoother with delayed garbage collection and some fairly low level optimization for Warband environment. I have, well had, I guess Wendek hates me now, around 50 people that have seen what I work with. But they see the surface layer. To me the difference between say Perisno and Warsword Conquest and some other mod is about a month of merges and porting. Deep underwater, most mods are fairly similar code - especially diplomacy centric mods. Nameless Warrior has already adapted aspects from Silverstag, and I'm focused on tooling some of the system mechanics. I did last years trade routes, and some things that failed. I did the skins, and set up virtual skins to change AI behavoir when we needed more than 16 skins to represent all the factions behavior.
So, thats why "my layers" seem to have no movement. They sort of are in parallel, and although its not obvious, the difference between one mod and the next is at the clothes layer. I'd like to think Warsword Conquest was avant guarde last year, trying things that some of which were a "bridge too far". This time it will be a little slower to roll out but I think different layers will have better construction. I know Nameless Warrior has never stopped working on the project, unlike me, so all of what the code shows in the latest updates he wrote. I'm cool with that. I'm working on a layer of common interest to many fantasy mods. I share the portion _I_ write. Nothing I write is GW IP specific; they don't own the concept of list handling, or garbage collection, or pretty much any layer I touch. Thats why I do synergisms with other modders - THEY do troops, factions, weapons/armor, spell names. I do SYSTEMS layers, abstracted and without contact with IP. I could care less what a Khorne flake looks like. Its not important to my code. But for example trade routes needed to be more clever - now THATS something for me. Its mechanics that are of interest, not the IP. Nameless does IP integration. I do systems that are abstracted, and neither GW nor D&D nor Tolkien. They're just my idea of magic fields in a E-field/B-field universe. I do physics, not GW. I want the mod to seem "real". I dont do lore. Others do. They do it well. I try to compartmentalize the layers that other people wrote, so each mod retains some distinct look and feel differences. I'm not at all interested in a GW fight over whether or not I can find patreon help for code done outside Warsword Conquest. If any of my work from outside is shared, its a gift to Nameless Warrior, not something the community "bought" or "sponsored". Maybe thats also why I havent done any direct integration this year; I make a pile of code that someone else has to dig through; but its of use to many mods. I don't expect anyone from here to help me. But neither am I in a bargain with the Devil for this; at least, I hope not. What comes, comes. And the price has been right so far. But Warsword Conquest brings a huge amount of volunteer modeling by professional grade modellers. Its not JUST coders that pitch in or share something to boost the project.
For the record, since I am legendary for my caustic statements -- I just am dead tired most of the time, and want the freedom to arrange my time, my priorities, my targets. Nobody micromanages me. I'm a peer with Nameless Warrior, not his understudy, not his boss either. Nameless writes clean code and its a delight to read. I respect that. He also does 85% of the TOTAL code work, if not more (and all of the stuff in previews is his code 100%). I did a little more last year. I expect some of what I am doing now will be of benefit in the future. its more a strategic union, between us. We have different goals, but the same middleware needed writing. I' cool with that too.
- GS
