#FreeAllegiance

KGJV · Post by **KGJV** » Sat Aug 28, 2010 12:49 am

Although this is kinda offtopic but related:

Just stop using IRC for dev stuff. It's bad very bad. No history, no sharing, no editing and no structuring, no 3rd party inputs... no wonder you have all those misunderstandings..

Use the dev forum and stop be so in a hurry.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Sat Aug 28, 2010 1:36 am

With a bot recording everything you can have a history.

And actually, allegiance only needs one IRC channel (as an organization), #alleg or #freeallegiance. There isn't enough activity in either of these channels to justify 3 or 4 channels all containing the exact same (15 or so) people.

Makida · Post by **Makida** » Sat Aug 28, 2010 1:45 am

phoenix1 wrote:QUOTE (phoenix1 @ Aug 27 2010, 07:04 PM) I didn't realize that those features were in the game! Can you show me the "miners stay docked" button? Or how about you explain why I just got finished telling my players where miners were by watching He3 drop? Am I just psychic? I must be psychic.

the.ynik wrote:QUOTE (the.ynik @ Aug 27 2010, 07:39 PM) He's talking about R6. Go play beta.

Or even just start noticing which sub-forum it is that you're reading and posting in...

Post by **zombywoof** » Sat Aug 28, 2010 4:45 am

girlyboy wrote:QUOTE (girlyboy @ Aug 27 2010, 06:45 PM) Or even just start noticing which sub-forum it is that you're reading and posting in...

Yes. It's in BETA. Just because it's in BETA doesn't mean it will be in R6. I didn't realize that we needed to give the dev team permission to try new things out? IIRC, alliances weren't voted on until after Kage or whomever had done the code and tested it. IIRC, the voting thing is "We can do this option here, would you like to do that?" rather than "Would you like us to look into figuring out how to change this?"

Bard · Post by **Bard** » Sat Aug 28, 2010 10:19 pm

Jimen wrote:QUOTE (Jimen @ Aug 27 2010, 02:25 PM) I don't recall an ASGS poll on removing global He3 visibility, or adding riptimers to cons, or giving commanders the ability to force drones to stay docked - they may all be much-demanded features, sure, but there's never been any formal polling.

Yet.

They're not live.

Before they can go from beta testing to production on the normal servers, there will be polls for all of them and many more things because they alter basic fundamental gameplay.

KGJV wrote:QUOTE (KGJV @ Aug 27 2010, 07:49 PM) Although this is kinda offtopic but related:

Just stop using IRC for dev stuff. It's bad very bad. No history, no sharing, no editing and no structuring, no 3rd party inputs... no wonder you have all those misunderstandings..

Use the dev forum and stop be so in a hurry.

^This.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Sat Aug 28, 2010 10:32 pm

Orion wrote:QUOTE (Orion @ Aug 27 2010, 08:36 PM) With a bot recording everything you can have a history.

And actually, allegiance only needs one IRC channel (as an organization), #alleg or #freeallegiance. There isn't enough activity in either of these channels to justify 3 or 4 channels all containing the exact same (15 or so) people.

^ this more

the.ynik · Post by **the.ynik** » Sun Aug 29, 2010 2:25 pm

KGJV, Bard: forums don't work for open-source development. I had to experience that myself on another open-source project.
Chats are just WAY better for communication between developers. On my project with forum but without IRC, 95% of the communication ended up in private IMs, and noone knew what others were doing.
Stuff is running there much better since we started using an IRC channel for the devs, keeping the forum only for communication with the users.

But yes, an IRC dev channel must have publically accessible logs.

notjarvis · Post by **notjarvis** » Sun Aug 29, 2010 3:29 pm

I dunno. At lot of the issues we've had recently have been because of information being missed or forgotten. It would be much much improved if they created a thread when a dev. wants something from Bard or TE even, then we could have had (perhaps) a more sensible decision taken over a number of days, rather than it devolving into a series of arguments.

There have been much cries of "Obstruction" from the admins to the dev's when there has been no evidence of the dev's asking for anything in the developer's lounge. A permanent trail of things is much better.

onion. Reading several pages of chat logs when someone is trying to remember what someone else wanted from him is far too cumbersome.

IRC provides a way of fast feedback on stuff, direct conversations about things, quick access to people. It does not provide a structured way to organise requests or work outside of the permanent IRC lurkers. Even if chat logs were available - finding useful information from them would be difficult.

A mix of the two would make sense IMO. IRC is providing us with a poor paper trail as to why certain decisions were made.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Sun Aug 29, 2010 4:56 pm

This forum is better to search through? its search feature is worse than useless.

finnbryant · Post by **finnbryant** » Mon Aug 30, 2010 1:23 pm

IRC is almost mandatory for long distance development, when someone is testing a bug for a dev (something I've done 2 or 3 times), they *cannot* do this via the forums, some bugs take 4-5 hours and maybe 100-200 replies to each other to resolve, doing this on a forum is an insane idea (a week? 2?).

I work for a company who have devs in other countries, unsurprisingly, they have an IM system. You simply cannot replace direct face to face communication with a forum alone.

Also, removing dev from #freeallegiance to improve it as a helpline could backfire, if people stop going there because nothing interesting happens on it, it will be a pretty crappy helpline (this is debatable of course).

As to the paper trail, at least if you want to see whats going on, you can. with a closed dev forum, there is absolutely no paper trail whatsoever, for anyone who doesn't have access.
Anyway, if you want IRC to have a better paper trail, it's easy, just make a bot to log the channel and stick it into a webpage.