Let's be honest, how is development going along?

Sky The Destroyer said:

Put an auto updater in SRB2?

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SRB2 won't connect to the MS if you have an outdated version.

Unfortunately, I haven't re-created the updater to work properly yet.

And yeah, we can't just bring anyone in based on their skill, if they don't work well in a team (and I can name a few that are great at what they do but wouldn't work well with the rest of the dev team, but I won't) then there's no point in bringing them on board.

As Spazzo said, a lot of us have just lost the energy to work on it in large amounts any more, when you first start you think "HOLY SHIT I'M PART OF THE DEV TEAM *WORKWORKWORKWORK*" then slowly you realise it's not all its cracked up to be, coding for long hours and very little return on it other than "Yeah, I added that feature nobody gives a damn about...".

Oh, also, JTE doesn't really roam these halls any more, you sometimes see him in #srb2fun, but he was smart enough to jump the boat and start doing projects with a better return quite some time ago. The rest of us are just crazy.

Cue said:

Oh, also, JTE doesn't really roam these halls any more, you sometimes see him in #srb2fun, but he was smart enough to jump the boat and start doing projects with a better return quite some time ago. The rest of us are just crazy.

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I talk to him a lot, but you're right about him not being on here a lot. However, he was here last year with SRB2MFE, however when he released the source all the fixes were put in minus any of the colors :P

@ crazy, well I guess I can agree with that :P

Cue said:

coding for long hours and very little return on it other than "Yeah, I added that feature nobody gives a damn about...".

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Or in my case, "Yeah, I added that feature that everyone wants to kill me for."

For what it's worth, I am basically the sole "active" programmer for SRB2 at the moment. Jazz is off who-knows-where, AJ's gone, Alam/Logan exclusively do low-end stuff, et cetera. Consider how hard this makes things on me.

Must not be fun or easy to make coding? What do you do type random numbers and stuff? Does it look like this 04 3e jh d3 or something? I know it must be hard.

WEREHOG said:

Must not be fun or easy to make coding? What do you do type random numbers and stuff? Does it look like this 04 3e jh d3 or something? I know it must be hard.

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Yeah, this is basically the current procedure for developing SRB2's program. You sit in front of the computer and hammer random keys before attempting to run it through a compiler. It takes a few hundred thousand tries before something like the scatter ring is accidentally implemented, which is why SRB2 has taken so much time to get where it is.

SSNTails used to have to do it all by himself, but a bunch of new programmers in more recent years collectively hammering away at random have sped up the process quite significantly.

I strongly believe Nev3r employed a similar process in order to develop ERZ2, because as you can verify in a map editor, it makes absolutely no sense, but the game apparently interprets it as being an awesome level, and forwards this sense of general awe and jawdrop to the player.

WEREHOG: Extract SRB2src.exe from within your SRB2 directory and try opening a few of the files in notepad. We wrote, tested, rewrote, retested, and tweaked the vast majority of that.

It's not random letters and words now (we aren't coding in assembly!), but it isn't something that you can pick up and grasp like WAD editing.

And even if you were coding in assembly, it wouldn't be random!

Spazzo said:

WEREHOG: Extract SRB2src.exe from within your SRB2 directory and try opening a few of the files in notepad. We wrote, tested, rewrote, retested, and tweaked the vast majority of that.

It's not random letters and words now (we aren't coding in assembly!), but it isn't something that you can pick up and grasp like WAD editing.

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Most of what you see in the SRB2 source code is either from original DOOM or from Legacy, or in a few cases stuff imported from other source ports. 'Vast Majority' is a vast overstatement. Still, a fair percentage is original or rewritten.

Also, assembly language isn't random letters and words, and is actually more logical than C/C++/(insert high-level language here). One instruction per line.

What...? You mean the rest of you didn't code your parts of SRB2 in hexadecimal...?

What kind of hexadecimal is 0xJH?

Hexadecimal written by someone who has no idea what hexadecimal actually is, of course.

5x10=50 4x10=40 3x10=30 2x10=20 1x10=10 0x10=16
Gotta love hex.
10000

Anyway, to get back on topic, What can you really expect from a fan-made/done in free time/free video game based off of DOOM Legacy? It's a wonder the dev team has gotten this far.

At least the game is better than any 3D sonic game sonic team ever made/will ever make.

Kind of like, how C code is written by someone who doesn't know anything about C?

funny how that works. When I was over at the SFGHQ years ago, we usually had to refrain from saying that any thing made by a fan was on par or better than anything by Sega, but look at things now. Official Sonic has gone down in quality and unofficial Sonic has gone up. Why we even have fan game engines that make the official stuff look like fan work.

Personally the current rythm is good enough.

I remember how long the wait was for playing Techno Hill Zone 2 and how awesome it was having that level and an extra boss (you know, until then all bosses were the Greenflower one). I even thought back then that Castle Eggman was good enough at the state it was. What I didn´t know is how good later levels would be. Seriously, Egg Rock is one of the best gameplay levels in the entire collection of Sonic games and fangames IMO. Arid Canyon was a really nice surprise too.

If all the other levels are going to be as good, and are going to give me surprises like that, then I don´t care if it takes a year, two, three or whatever. Personally I´m happy enough if there´s another version after the current one each time. I can´t imagine how many hours have been put on the current SRB2. And I´m talking only about Single Player, but Multiplayer is much solid than many official games out there. In fact, there aren´t many Sonic games with great multiplayer besides this one.

So just be patient and someday you will be surprised by a yet better version of SRB2 with yet better levels, enemies, bosses and everything. These things take lots of time and effort. If you like coding, you can always took the source code and try some things, or just use the many possibilities SRB2 provides with wads and everything. If you are lazy to do that, think that making the core of the game is much more exhausting than that. I personally can´t make any kind of fangame for more than a month, so the work done on this one really amazes me.

Why would you not like your latest work to be leaked? Do you actually have a good reason?

Here's my version of how things should happen.

Stable releases should stay as they are, happening only every once in a while.
Move all development to the public SVN, possibly even set up nightly builds.
Allow users to submit code patches to somewhere, like a new subforum? Don't use the old excuse about idiots submitting junk. There are idiots everywhere, just delete those topics.


How do you think other open source projects move along so fast? The answer is public development. This would solve all your problems, including the slow recruiting process, slow and unmotivated team, everyone's yearning for a new release, and even dealing with tons of versions. If you want to play a netgame, download stable. If you want to experiment with the cool new feature, download the nightly build.

I don't see why this hasn't been adopted yet.

I'll let you in on a little secret. I've been working on SRB2 a lot lately. I have been using the public 2.0.6 to do said development. While there is a slightly more updated version of the game, we just don't have very many coders doing work right now, and more to the point, we don't NEED many coders to get the main things we want to see for 2.1 (new stages). Since I'm not using any new features right now, I don't need to use an updated copy of the game and can just use the public EXE, which makes testing a breeze.

It's not like 2.0's development where we had a vastly different EXE and resources than the public version. The Sky Sanctuary team isn't really for hiding the EXE anymore, it's for hiding the resources being created. I don't think you would have liked it if you had gotten to see all sorts of beta copies of ERZ before you got to play it for real. Playing 2.0 for the first time was likely all the more awesome because you got to play all sorts of new content at once. We don't want to change that for 2.1.

Well Mystic, considering an EXE source code doesn't include the WAD files themselves, I'm pretty sure it'd be okay to go with Conic's plan to have code submissions from other people to attempt them to go into the next release. All that would do would probably fix some bugs nobody fixed yet that everybody was whining about, make a fix a bunch of people thought should have been done (like seperating multiability and nojumpspin), add just a slight cool feature, the list could probably go on. New playable content wouldn't matter, because they wouldn't be added to the SVN. :P

The only problem I'd see with that would be the removal of some code, but I fail to see who in their right mind would remove anything (except a bug, but that's a dofferent story :P).

Well, the problem comes in as the file gets modified to include new code-based content, such as new bosses. Also, for internal versions we generally have to turn off a lot of the security, like the checksum protections. Beta versions aren't intended to be used for anything but testing, after all.