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The Maddest My Code Made Anyone
- atoav 3y agoProgrammers sometimes have that experience, as do musicians, hardware designers, film directors, novelists, painters, game designers and all other professions that create things regular people interact with casually. Consumers (specifically the sub-genre of critics) often have no real imagination what making a thing means and under which constraints it happens. They often see publishing a imperfect work to the public as an affront to their sophisticated intellect and taste, even (or especially?) if it is free. In German there is the saying: Wer macht, hat recht which translates to who makes is right. Complaining is simple, just shut up and do it better. Of course complaining is totally okay if we e.g. talk about social or political conditions, or some mandatory process you have to subject yourself to by law. But even there I hate people who just complain and leave it at that without even trying to change a thing.
- prennert 3y agoMaybe the solution is to brand yourself as an "auteur programmer".
- School-Cotton 3y agoProgrammauteur
- scns 3y agoApologies in advance for my choice of words. I used to be a person that criticized a lot. One day i realized what an cheap ass i was. Talking is easy. Now i say silently to myself: "Shut up or do it better yourself." It is very healthy to remove narcissistic micromanagers (driven by subconcious anxiety) from your life if you can.
- lynx23 3y agoThere is one counter example to your position that immediately comes to mind: architects! If you create something, the primary driver should be its users, and not your ego. I believe there should be a law which mandates that architects need to stay at least 5 years in every building they "design" so that they actually see and feel the consequences of their work. Art might be a different issue, but just because someone is creative does not free them from the responsibility to build something useful! If the user experience is no fun, the user has every right to complain.
- nextlevelwizard 3y ago>If you create something, the primary driver should be its users, and not your ego. Again, it depends on why you are designing something. If your goal is to just stroke your ego then you probably aren't going to care about the end user.
- lynx23 3y agoWhich is fine as long as your end users are not implicitly forced to use your creation. So an artist creating a controversial sculpture is totally fine, nobody forces the recipient to consume their art. But buildings are different, they should be user-centric, not vanity-projects to boost your career.
- mejutoco 3y agoThey should, but they do not. Whenever I see "should" in a sentence I think: why is this not how things are? What are the incentives? In this case: who is the person deciding what gets built? What are the consequences for being over budget? (Calatrava I am looking at you).
- algorias 3y agoThe special thing about architecture is that it imposes on others. You can't not see a building. So I agree with the conclusion but not the reasoning. It's not users vs creators, it's the public who are not the users that get harmed by ugly buildings, even if those buildings are private and desired by those who pay for them. (The government commissioning ugly public buildings is a problem with the government, not the architects) Meanwhile, anything on the internet you're reading/watching/listening to is by your choice.
- nextlevelwizard 3y ago>Complaining is simple, just shut up and do it better. This is a good rule to go by. It is always way easier to critique a thing for whatever reason and critique can be good, but only to a point. When you start writing articles about how thing X is bad because of Y, you aren't doing any favors for anyone. You should instead try to channel that into something positive.
- capitol_ 3y agoBut people who write criticisms provide a valuable service to me as an consumer. I have limited amount of time and before I spend 20 hours on a book or game I would like some indication that it's not a waste of time. One could argue that both the good and the bad should be highlighted, but my experience is that I'm get most value from knowing about the bad parts.
- WastingMyTime89 3y agoDifferent people interact with things and have different reactions. Some are moved enough to develop strong feelings. Some share them nicely. Some write hyperbolic forum posts full of hate. That’s just the reality of having an impact. My main take away from the post is that anything worth making will receive its share of critics. As a creator you should be aware of that and be ready to focus on the people you actually bring joy to and who appreciate what you do rather than the haters and take pride in actually moving the needle enough to be reacted on.
- mattacular 3y ago> In German there is the saying: Wer macht, hat recht which translates to who makes is right. Closest thing in English that I could think of: history is written by the winners. Similar concept.
- ncarroll 3y agoI'm not sure that it is really similar. I would translate "Wer macht hat recht" to something more like "the creator knows best" or "the creator gets to choose". "History is written by the winners." has, I think a less creative context. Perhaps because history is what is written after wars, conquests and other applications of violence. The word "winners" requires and implies losers. Creation requires neither.
- avgcorrection 3y agoNot similar at all, and an absurd comparison. The former is a value/moral judgement while the latter is an empirical observation about how history is written, and not at all an embrace of such a supposed fact (which would effectively translate to “might makes right”).
- mattacular 3y agoHrmm ok... since mine is so absurd, what's an English equivalent in your mind?
- Karellen 3y ago"Put up or shut up"? Or maybe "patches or GTFO" :-)
- sgtnoodle 3y ago"The customer is always right"?
- ethbr0 3y agoThat's the opposite! :) Which I guess speaks to how consumerist the US as a society is (said as an American). The closest I can come up with is "Those who can, do." (Usually seen with "... Those who can't, teach.")
- account42 3y ago> Complaining is simple, just shut up and do it better. This is an absurd position. We can't all be masters of anything but that doesn't mean we can't recognize flaws. Sure, sometimes there is a good reason for something a novice would perceive as a flaw but just throwing the concept of criticims away entirely and demand that people accept whatever you crap out is ridiculous. Building echo chambers where no one dares to criticize does not help the art at all - that way lies mediocrity. All creators should learn to find value in criticism, especially negative. That doesn't mean that you need to always follow laymen opinions but even things wrongly perceived as faults are perceived as such and you should at least think about why that is and if that means you can do something better rather than ignoring the ignorant plebes. It's also pretty arrogant of you to assume that "consumers" (what a dehumanizing term that is) should care about your constraints at all - especially constraints that are self-imposed. If you are selling something (either for money or for the expectation of time/resouces put in by the user) then your struggles are and imho should be irrelevant - all that matters is how well you fill the need that the user is trying to fill. > In German there is the saying: Wer macht, hat recht which translates to who makes is right. Jeder hat so viel Recht, wie er Macht hat. If people have the means to complain, they have the right to. You can ignore them (unless you depend on them) but others might not.
- Retric 3y agoCriticism has zero inherent value. It’s easy to assume that stuff people like is inherently better, but anything with widespread appeal ends up really bland. You can’t do better than simply ok while making everyone happy. This obviously gives rise to picking an audience, but this idea goes beyond just demographics. There is no greatest book of all time for 12 year old boys only individual preference which doesn’t result in an absolute rank. Commercial art is at best a compromise. No artist is going to inherently prefer exactly what the market wants directly, they only want the indirect things associated with that. Aka money, fame etc.
- account42 3y ago[dead]
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- avgcorrection 3y agoHN superiority complex summarized in one comment. Of course we know nothing about that inflamed moderator. Oh well.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nsplayer 3y agoWas für eine Überraschung, ein arroganter Deutscher, der nie Natural-Selection gespielt hat, hält einen Vortrag. Hier geht es um die Gemeinschaft des Spiels, nicht um das Spiel selbst. Dieser Mann hat das Spiel nicht programmiert, nur eine kleine Ergänzung zu einer Ergänzung.
- thrdbndndn 3y agoI'm at the opposite: I think people have the right to complain about anything, especially when they're the target audience (in this case, the game player). This doesn't change even if the product is free. I do think they should stay polite and if the author isn't willing to change (for either objective or subjective reasons), move on.
- onion2k 3y agoI think people have the right to complain about anything, especially when they're the target audience (in this case, the game player). What people do not have any right, or entitlement, to is agreement from the person they're complaining to. People are allowed to dismiss a complaint and not do anything about it, no matter how unhappy the complainant might be about it. You have no right to demand someone does something; you can only inform them that you're not happy about the status quo.
- moi2388 3y agoYea I do have the right to demand that, but you have the right to ignore my demands.
- brookst 3y agoI think it's the semantics of "demand." To me, that connotes a claim of control or power or moral authority. I have a right to complain that it's raining. And I have the free speech right to say "I demand it stop raining". But I have no right to come to you and demand that you make the rain stop, because that implies a claim on you that I do not have.
- _whiteCaps_ 3y agoOh boy, that reminded me of a flame war that started when someone wrote in English, "I demand ..." when they were really just _asking_ for further details about something. They woke up the next morning to find a thread dozens of messages long of people arguing back and forth about whether this person was rude or not. Once they explained that French was their native language and how they would write that sentence in French, things eventually calmed down.
- geoffbp 3y agoSometimes a good way to get feedback is to listen to who is complaining
- roenxi 3y agoThere are other things at play here. It is important to understand that the average human is unbelievably limited and delicate (in the modern era, they don't understand any of the systems that sustain their lifestyle and have skills of only marginal use). There are multiple systems in place to take all these delicate humans and set them up to live comfortable lives. The first layer is the makers, but after that there are a couple of layers of assessors and distributors before ideas and products hit the masses. For someone in a community that makes things, criticism isn't so useful. In the other layers that are there to work out what ordinary people should do armchair criticism is a lot more useful. Still not very impressive, but more useful. The armchair critics aren't at all interested in making things. Their self-appointed role isn't to make things. They are part of a community that generates chatter to help guide the conversation of the people who actually decide what should happen at the mass-market level.
- expertentipp 3y ago> Wer macht, hat recht which translates to who makes is right. Complaining is simple, just shut up and do it better. Ain't dealing with an avalanche of Abmahnung, and ain't going to shut up either.
- mbwgh 3y ago> In German there is the saying: Wer macht, hat recht which translates to who makes is right. Complaining is simple, just shut up and do it better. There's unfortunately also the saying "Nicht geschimpft ist genug gelobt", i.e. something like "Not being scolded is enough compliments". If things work, they are taken for granted and some people only speak up if they are irritated. Which of course leads to a biased perception of how satisfied the people on average really are with your work. Last week I wrote an email to an author to a blog I have been following for a year or so. Just wanted to let him know his work was appreciated and I hope he continues writing. He replied and told me this little gesture made his day. So I guess I should do more of that.
- sbierwagen 3y agoBecause of course /buildmenu took users away from regular Natural Selection servers, resulting in a holy war dynamic: https://gwern.net/holy-war https://gwern.net/holy-war >The enduring phenomenon of ‘holy wars’ in computing, such as the bitterness around the prolonged Python 2 to Python 3 migration, is not due to mere pettiness or love of conflict, but because they are a coordination problem: dominant platforms enjoy strong network effects, such as reduced ‘bitrot’ as it is regularly used & maintained by many users, and can inflict a mirror-image ‘bitcreep’ on other platforms which gradually are neglected and begin to bitrot because of the dominant platform. >The outright negative effect of bitcreep mean that holdouts do not just cost early adopters the possible network effects, they also greatly reduce the value of a given thing, and may cause the early adopters to be actually worse off and more miserable on a daily basis. Given the extent to which holdouts have benefited from the community, holdout behavior is perceived as parasitic and immoral behavior by adopters, while holdouts in turn deny any moral obligation and resent the methods that adopters use to increase adoption (such as, in the absence of formal controls, informal ones like bullying).
- tourgen 3y ago[dead]
- mschuster91 3y agoThe trouble with the Python 2 => 3 transition is just how much work it imposed on everyone in the ecosystem, and the general lack of care for backwards / forwards compatibility in the ecosystem - the fact you need something like "virtualenv" at all is damning in itself, out of the major stacks only NodeJS requires similar hacks (e.g. nvm). The PHP world, for example, is very famous for its focus on compatibility: breaking changes are generally announced far before they are released, and the amount of actually breaking changes is very very small - out of my mind, the only thing that really bit a lot of very old code was the removal of implicitly provided global variables and the mysql legacy functions, which by that point were deprecated for like a decade and in many cases could be resolved by more-or-less simple search and replace runs. Other than that, a lot of legacy code works fine or with similarly minor modifications in PHP 8 - while the runtime itself is capable of running code with syntax features of the modern world.
- ptdn 3y agoThe golden age of moddable games ended a long time ago, and it's a major shame. Mods for Starcraft, Warcraft III, Half Life, etc. spawned thousands of sophisticated game modes that turned into dozens of independent games.
- hutattedonmyarm 3y agoThere's plenty of moddable games still available though. Factorio, Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Beat Saber. Even Dota 2 has what they call "custom games". Sure, maybe not a golden age, but they're doing alright
- ptdn 3y agoThe mods for modern games involve making those games better for a specific audience. I've played a bunch of Stardew Valley and Minecraft mods. High-end Minecraft graphics and massive content packs make for an interesting (if buggy) experience. On the other hand, it's completely different from the Use Map Settings games I grew up playing in Brood War, which were radically different games using Starcraft assets. DotA was literally the same thing in WC3. The game became a game engine. There's nothing like that now. (Garry's Mod?)
- justinpombrio 3y agoRoblox, I think, though it's targeted to kids and I don't know much about it.
- porkbeer 3y agoRoblox is a scam. The biggest games in the world like csgo still allow and cekebrate modding, itself originally being a halflife mod.
- justinpombrio 3y agoIn what way is Roblox a scam? Remember that most people here know very little about it.
- Super_Jambo 3y ago“the most ridiculous concept I have ever seen on these fora”. for some context I suspect this forum was the same place that gave us: "Natural Selection needs a new alien, like a Scorpian that hovars without flapping."
- chris-orgmenta 3y agoAhhh, NS & Day of Defeat. Wow that takes me back. Interestingly, I have little-to-no memory of this 'combat' mode, I think nostalgia cemented just the original playmode into my head.
- robertlagrant 3y agoFrom a vague memory, I think a chap I went to uni with made the Warcraft3 mod for HL2.
- drekipus 3y agoThis is a great write up. I'm so envious of those days. I was around and got a taste of it, but my mum perpetually banned the computer from me, and limited my internet usage to 1 hour for brief time I did get. "To keep viruses out of the power supply and to stop me from talking to pedophiles"
- komali2 3y agoWow, I really really wish I was a little older during the Half Life / Flash era of game development. Will we ever get anything like that again? Nowadays this kind of creativity always seems to exist in walled gardens like Roblox. I feel like the concept of software freedom as the gnu folks pitch is the environment that that half life / flash area of modding and game dev existed in. Ugh now even if you formally make a game you can't even publish it to anything other than PCs without getting permission from console companies or google / apple! Well I guess f-droid is an exception, or, if you make your game a browser game.
- dj_mc_merlin 3y agoMinecraft is comparable. I think the general trend is right though, there was a lot more creativity in random Warcraft/Half Life mods. Shit, DOTA was a Warcraft mod first. Arma also comes to mind as a moddable multiplayer game. Crossfire as well, not super popular in the West nowadays though. I miss Flash games!
- xwdv 3y agoThere is nothing stopping you from making a web browser based JavaScript game right now that you can throw up on a basic webpage and share a link for people to go play instantly. You just don’t want to!
- xwdv 3y agoI don’t understand the downvoted, you really can just make a pure JavaScript game. Pick up an easy rendering library like PixiJS and just start making a game loop, etc.
- tuvan 3y agoWasnt the modding scene a result of game dev from scratch being inaccessible? Downloading UE/Unity/Godot and making your dream game is probably easier nowadays than trying to make it as a HL mod then.
- WastingMyTime89 3y ago
- mrkeen 3y agoThese days you can sometimes still find a combat map with a few players in NS2. I don't know how modded it is on the server-side, but you can still drop a few buildings as aliens, and a sentry turret as marines. Good fun! (ORB forever!)
- c0nfused 3y agoOne of the neatest part about ns2 development is that the source is the product you are just distributing lua files that the engine runs. The uwe implementation of combat for ns2 was last stand and the source is here https://github.com/unknownworlds/ns2_laststand https://github.com/unknownworlds/ns2_laststand Looks like the combat mod is there too https://github.com/AlexHayton/NS2Combat https://github.com/AlexHayton/NS2Combat
- bakugo 3y agoI still write plugins like this for source engine games using sourcemod/sourcepawn (the successors to amx and pawn respectively) occasionally, and it's still fun. Much harder to get people to play your mods since the games aren't as popular as they once were, but there's something about the engine that makes it really satisfying to mess with and bend to your will despite it being a massive pile of spaghetti. Helps that the entire source code tree has been leaked multiple times before, too.
- nsplayer 3y agoI used to play NS a ton, even was in a clan for a while. It was one of the most original and novel video games i've ever played, only planetside comes close. Combat played a sizeable role in killing the original game and turning it into something i'd expect from a CS mod. An entry level, bland generic version of the original that gutted all the strategy and coordination and teamwork that you required to win on ns_ maps. (A good commander alone was worth gold) You built upon what many people considered cancer (combat to some extent, but definitely xmenu combat) - tumors get serious when they hit the lymph nodes, and they probably saw it as that. I quit before this era happened but I probably would have hated you if i hadn't - even if you aren't technically the one to blame.
- _jackdk_ 3y agoI'm the author, and I agree with pretty much everything you wrote - NS was special and trying to preserve that specialness was why I put the buildings into Combat in the first place. I miss that era of experimentation both in mods and commercial releases. I would've loved to be online during the heyday of Tribes 2 or Planetside. Ironically, I don't think I ever consciously built in xmenu<->buildmenu support (though I don't have the .amxx file to hand to check); that was a surprise to me. IIRC, both ExtraLevels and Combat Buildings used the NS module for AMXX to read write the "unspent level points" for the player. Placing buildings was a lot less crazy when you had to spend one of your nine precious levelups on a welder or a gorge morph, and then spend another on each building. Combat Buildings made Combat pretty stupid, ExtraLevels made Combat really stupid, but the combination was way stupider than the sum of its parts.
- nsplayer 3y agoFate was probably determined at the point that combat came out, xmenu just accelerated it with absurd upgrades that let one person steamroll the server (though it was sometimes fun to be that one person, it wasn't for the other half of the server...) At least your mod brought back the building aspect, cheers for that.
- throw9away6 3y agoBoth of planetside and tribes were amazing. This was really before the age of competitive gaming so it was actually fun to play and not just another day job
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago> But as absolutely terrible as /xmenu is, /buildmenu is the god damned devil. Buildmenu is an abomination upon the lord that is causing the universe to unravel and all heretics who follow the terribleness that is buildmenu shall perish in hell. I’d like to give a big thanks to whoever created /buildmenu for making THE WORST COMBAT PLUGIN EVER. This reads more like sarcasm and tongue-in-cheek hyperbole than an actual really mad person.
- nsplayer 3y agoIt unironically helped accelerate the death of the game. This wasn't counter-strike with millions of players and a huge esports scene, this was a tiny mod with maybe a few thousand players that required ~5v5 or higher for a good experience
- h2odragon 3y agoNowadays, you can get SWAT called on you for upsetting the wrong people with a game mod.
- egeozcan 3y agoWhy would you make a junior developer develop an entire shopping/order module to a CMS? Because f that particular developer who happened to be me in the beginning of my 20s, in my first real job as a programmer. I used JS, C# with NHibernate and lots of weird HTML and CSS to create something which satisfied all the requirements I've been given. But guess how good the code was? We had zero review process except someone looking over your shoulder by chance and quickly distancing themselves as what I then thought to be the "any code I didn't write is bad code" attitude. I did the "just ship it" thing before it was cool. Views accessing database? Lots of those. Classes skipping dependency injection and instantiating random god classes to achieve all the things? Plenty! Using extremely complicated and dog-slow JS when a couple lines of CSS could do? Sure! Converting numbers to floats to decimals then back to floats then to string then again to god knows what only to store integers in the database? Got you covered! Then the customers wanted more and more features, and when I was doing ERP integration (really!) I finally thought I needed some guidance. Oh the humble me! I went to the lead developer in our department because those other inexperienced (!) developers wouldn't have understood the challenges I was facing. He took the time to listen to me, and as I was having my first "rubber duck" moment, his face started to change. We later sat at my station and the horror in his eyes when I was passionately explaining the "intelligent code" I've written was remarkable. He ended up creating a task force and rewriting the whole thing later. A year or two later, he was doing a presentation of the state-of-the-art review process "he designed" (pull requests), and used my code to the same effect as those WAT moments in the "The Birth & Death of JavaScript" speech by Gary Bernhardt[0]. Funnily enough, I never took offense. To be honest I didn't know how to feel. What I knew was that a lot of customers were complaining that it took way more time/budget to develop features for the order module and nobody understood why we had to take a few steps back out of nowhere when everything was going so smoothly. Now being a technical lead myself, I know the importance of not just reviewing code, but reviewing the circumstances and trade-offs that lead to that code being written. Actually, reviewing those is much more important than reviewing the code itself. More important is to have linters and other tooling review code, not people. I know this post is more about what you create being hated rather than how you created it, but I just wanted to get this off my chest, and thought it could still be relevant :) [0]: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
- vrglvrglvrgl 3y ago[dead]
- pkasting 3y agoAh, angry Internet people. I have my own collection of responses, from someone who argued that my choice of a default value for a setting was tantamount to forcing someone to have an abortion against their will, to the time when restricting comments on a bug another team had WontFixed led to a change.org petition to get me fired. People feel like they have very little control, and that no one is listening. In that environment they sometimes scream into the void. It's counterproductive, but understandable.
- physicles 3y agoNatural Selection was a fantastic mod. For a couple golden years we played it at LAN parties with 8-12 people in a single basement. It was like FPS StarCraft: the two races were entirely different but also totally balanced. I also wrote a super simple half-life mod back then. It was like Juggernaut mode for Halo, which came out later: one person was nearly invisible, with an insta-kill crowbar, and whoever killed them took their powers. I miss those days.
- moi2388 3y agoYou added building to CS? That sounds a lot like Fortnite.
- speps 3y agoNot CS (Counter Strike), NS (Natural Selection).
- bionhoward 3y agoI love Natural Selection! Hope it survives or folks pay more attention to how great that game is because a new take on the same concept could absolutely be a hit
- ohwellhere 3y agoOver a decade ago I rebuilt a small business's web application. By small I mean it was a one person company, the app was used by maybe a dozen clients, and the rewrite took me 10 hours. Imagine my surprise when one day I'm browsing Hacker News and I see a comment on some unrelated article absolutely lambasting how I built the core feature of the web app. It was referenced by direct URL, no mistaken identity or projection. (Their critique was correct in many important ways, but also: the client loved it.)
- revskill 3y agoTHe fact that human love games proved that human is always God's child.
- adityaathalye 3y agoFun story! I think I would be happy if I found myself in the author's place. Someone getting mad at creative code I wrote would mean it got used in ways I didn't imagine and/or by people I didn't know of. Prompts for more creativity. (edit: typos)
- jeffwask 3y agoGamer rage is the most incandescent of the rages.
- ever1337 3y agoThis reminds me a lot of my experience programming for the open source game Space Station 13. We simulate basically everything we can in that game, and it fills me with so much satisfaction to think about how my code is responsible for the operation of the organs inside every player's body, ticking away silently but allowing for really complex and nuanced interactions when necessary. Most people will never know where that code came from or what the game was like before, but that's fine. It just existing is enough, in a sea of code made by hundreds or thousands of other people.
- WalterBright 3y agoI've had a couple complaints about Empire: 1. I was threatened once with fisticuffs because the person spent too much time playing Empire 2. I was blamed for causing one person's divorce 3. I was blamed for a student flunking out 4. Empire was blamed for consuming all the resources of Caltech's PDP-10, and was banned during daytime and during finals week
- imp0cat 3y agoI much preferred Gloom, the Quake 2 mod. Apparently, some servers are still alive: http://www.planetgloom.com/servers.cgi http://www.planetgloom.com/servers.cgi Here is a quick comparison of NS, Gloom, Tremulous and Unvanquished. https://www.reddit.com/r/ns2/comments/4bsws2/the_ultimate_comparison_between_natural_selection/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ns2/comments/4bsws2/the_ultimate_co...
- wgjordan 3y ago> I was very taken aback when I first saw this comment, but these days I cherish it. It reminds me one of the first times my code had a big impact on a community. This is a great perspective. When I was a highschooler I worked on a fan translation project that, 20 years later, someone called a "god awful piece of festering sewage that should never have existed to begin with" [1]. I'm quite proud to have done something in my youth that generated so much online rage for decades. https://legendsoflocalization.com/which-final-fantasy-iv-translation-should-you-play/#comment-670424 https://legendsoflocalization.com/which-final-fantasy-iv-tra...
- avgcorrection 3y ago> I was very taken aback when I first saw this comment, but these days I cherish it. Maybe that’s how trolls feel.
- tpoacher 3y agoI do miss the "golden days of CS mods". Some of my favourite games and moments were with mods. Afraid of Monsters, The Specialists, The Hidden, a 3rd person soccergame whose name I forget now ... the main challenge was convincing friends to try it with you.