A Trio of 2.2 Tidbits

When I check the IRC, the game isn't being talked about.

You see, I know this might shock everyone, but the IRC chat is a place where people, including many of the developers of the game, hang out and talk about random shit. This means that sometimes, people who are developing the game talk about things they're actively doing while they're doing it, such as joking around about a bug they just fixed or posting amusing WIP stuff. Most of this stuff is the type of thing that isn't nearly polished enough to show on the front page or the forums because those have a more permanent record of what's displayed. In a chat room it's okay to post obviously unfinished stuff because it's a casual conversation and while it's entirely possible to save logs, it's not like we actively archive everything that goes on a web page for search engines to index for posterity.

If a casual conversation about random bullshit that may occasionally include SRB2 sounds interesting to you, then by all means, join IRC. You might get occasional tidbits about development from the dev team as they happen. However, if you just want those tidbits, you're way better off just waiting until we get far enough along on these various things to post the more polished stuff on the front page.

We really should have like a mibbit embedded page or something though, so that people without an IRC client can access the chat from the main site.

I don't think we really want to encourage use of Mibbit tbh, it's a really awful means of accessing IRC. I would know, I've had to use it once or twice in the past.

That said, Arcade Gamer, to get onto our IRC channel just download an IRC client like mIRC or HexChat, and check out this link here: irc://irc.esper.net/srb2fun

But I will survive somehow

Not only that.. I don't mean to be insulting, but the quality of the room would probably drop immensely if there was a mibbit link to it on the site. There'd be way too many new people at once and of course we're going to have some people that just don't get what kind of place IRC is and what's acceptable versus what's not.

On top of that the channel tends to be harsh against newcomers anyways. We'd need to be more welcoming if there was ever an webchat client on the forums.

Aside from the fact that people also tend to have a lot of other stuff to do than linger about the chat all day hoping they'll hit some news. :v (also the fact that people have different tastes in discussion as well, I'm not personally interested in most of the stuff there tbh)

I personally don't really care about the IRC, so having updates posted on the forum or main website would be heavily appreciated. Or some sort of IRC embed as previously suggested would probably get me to actually use it, and that would be just as appreciated.

Monster Iestyn said:

I don't think we really want to encourage use of Mibbit tbh, it's a really awful means of accessing IRC. I would know, I've had to use it once or twice in the past.

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TBH that's pretty subjective; I didn't mind using Mibbit that much, it's fine for anyone who's just casually dropping into the chatroom. Moreover it was just an example of a client, any sort of IRC embed would do.

Nekoishi said:

Not only that.. I don't mean to be insulting, but the quality of the room would probably drop immensely if there was a mibbit link to it on the site. There'd be way too many new people at once and of course we're going to have some people that just don't get what kind of place IRC is and what's acceptable versus what's not.

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> the quality of #srb2fun

I can't see new guys being any more obnoxious to the chatroom than when D00D64 is posting memes, so again with the subjectivity

IRC is a place where you talk about random shit and sometimes other people join in on the discussion. It's not hard to explain this to anyone waltzing into the chat for the first time. Literally there's no enforced ruleset beyond "don't post warez/porn/srb2dev spoilers", "don't ban evade" and "don't be annoying". And even the latter isn't always enforced.

On top of that the channel tends to be harsh against newcomers anyways. We'd need to be more welcoming if there was ever an webchat client on the forums.

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being inviting to newcomers is something we should be working on anyway. so that doesn't really work against my point

The issue is that we have had public availability of IRC before and historically, that's been a very bad experience. Usually along the lines of people joining the room who couldn't even pass our registration system, and multiple at a time.

It's also a lot harder to moderate an open IRC room like that than it is to moderate a Web forum like this. The live chat aspect of it is a very different beast.

I tend to be of the opinion that figuring out how to get into the channel is a decent metric for determining if people should be able to join new or not.

That is perfectly reasonable, but "casual" SRB2 fans (I would consider myself to be one) might not be inclined to join an IRC room for information.

Of course, elements that are heavily WIP shouldn't be posted on the main site anyway, but someone who just looks through the main site and maybe through some of the forum sometimes might not even know that there are slopes now, which are kind of a big deal.

But well, I'm not trying to tell you how to do things, these are just my two cents.

Just to be clear, the IRC room isn't a dumping ground for SRB2 information. A lot of the dev team have friends there and we all get along and are active there. Just as a natural matter of course, things the development team does gets mentioned (and occasionally shown) there, but it's typically never anything substantial. When it happens, it's pretty typically WIP stuff. I assure you, while you may be missing some things, you're not missing anything of major substance. There's a LOT going on in development that #'fun doesn't know about.

Basically, the dev information talked about in #srb2fun tends to be more of the "look at this silly glitch" variety than any proper information about features or content.

While we do need to get around to making another proper news post, I prefer to only put stuff that's really ready to be shown to the public at large on the front page. This means things that have been properly integrated into the game instead of just a test shot. When we've posted testing shots on the front page in the past, people tended to be really negative about the feature because it wasn't showing what the feature could really do. Hence, to take slopes as an example, I needed slopes properly integrated into a real stage instead of just a test map before they were ready to talk about on the front page.

Well, weren't slopes shown in that DSZ gif and Nev3r confirmed that the segment is most likely going to be included in the final level?

Yeah, but it might be considered a cop-out to effectively share the same content twice. None of the screenshots in the 2.2 Tidbits that started this topic were shared anywhere else before that point, as far as I'm aware.

Besides, I'd much rather wait to see more polished and complete things on a news post, instead of heavily WIP fragments on IRC.

It's not that hard to setup an IRC client, and at the same time, it's not as simple as a few clicks, so the average newbie wouldn't figure out something as ancient as IRC. I agree with Rob that it's a mild deterrent in some cases.

I would drop by more often there myself, but sometimes it's too noisy and distracting for me. (The good kind of noise, mind you; not Twitch chat trash.) It's difficult for me to stay active of a live group conversation while drawing or coding at the same time; being productive is a crapshoot.

CobaltBW said:

IRC is a place where you talk about random shit and sometimes other people join in on the discussion. It's not hard to explain this to anyone waltzing into the chat for the first time. Literally there's no enforced ruleset beyond "don't post warez/porn/srb2dev spoilers", "don't ban evade" and "don't be annoying". And even the latter isn't always enforced.

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Also, you can't type in all caps for too many characters either. I was auto-kicked by the installed IRC bots once for doing that.

The Sonic's new sprite is looking good for me. I can't wait for the release of 2.2 :3

I wonder how long it will be. Will it come out for Christmas? Anyways it looks great. Are the levels 3d models? The sprites aren't obviously.

2.2 as a Christmas present? Works for me. Tell Santa he won't have to stop at my house this year.

Sent from my XT1021 using ********

Don't get your hopes up.