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It wasn't clear to me, but it sounded like the community might be able to contribute back to the core of the game, by improving tools/finding (unintentional) bu

by Cogito 11y ago

It wasn't clear to me, but it sounded like the community might be able to contribute back to the core of the game, by improving tools/finding (unintentional) bugs etc. Is that an intended aspect of the game, and how do you see it fitting in with the game's ecosystem? Perhaps by corollary, will there be a significant open-source community built around the game; will there be open-source assets, but also the ability to contribute to those assets?

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- Cogito 11y ago
  > We'd like that to happen. We have ideas on ways to provide "hooks" for people to publish and collaborate on projects. We'd be thrilled if, even before that happened, people just threw random code they wrote for us on Github. From previous coding games, it does seem common for people to publish solutions to github, but this is often tempered by a reluctance to allow 'script-kiddies' to solve the same problems without doing the work. Hopefully the design of the games will make this kind of 'cheating' pointless, so sharing and collaborating on solutions is desirable. If there is an on-line code editor involved at any point, I'm much more likely to publish to somewhere like github if that feature is baked in :) (also easy offline IDE integration is a bit simpler if git is baked in...) I guess I my question was more targeted at this line: "We’re giving players the dev kit for the handheld trading device. You can program it in AVR assembly. But the vendor also offers support for a very limited dialect of C, compiled to bytecode IR or to AVR. Emphasis on “limited”. You know, because we did less of the fun stuff for you." This seems very much like a situation where the community can work together to improve their ability to play the game. > At this point though we're just running (or in Erin's case skating) as fast as we can to launch the damn thing. Please do :)
patio11 11y ago
It is absolutely intended that people will build things on top of Starfighter. People built things on top of Microcorruption, too -- there are actual professional-grade reversing tools which have a command-line "microcorruption quirks mode" to better emulate the behavior of the game's emulator. We will also, naturally, take bug reports -- and sometimes even fix them. I don't see us shipping much OSS at launch, but that's something I'd be willing to try in the future.
- Intermernet 11y ago
  One recommendation which may be really obvious: don't release any source unless you want to simulate that the source has been released in the "game" world. If you want to release any source code for any segment of the challenge, while the challenge is ongoing, it will be torn apart by the competitors for bugs. Because, as Erin said: "...pretending all our bugs were intentional, to make things more like the real world!"

by Cogito 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

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Cogito 11y ago
> We'd like that to happen. We have ideas on ways to provide "hooks" for people to publish and collaborate on projects. We'd be thrilled if, even before that happened, people just threw random code they wrote for us on Github. From previous coding games, it does seem common for people to publish solutions to github, but this is often tempered by a reluctance to allow 'script-kiddies' to solve the same problems without doing the work. Hopefully the design of the games will make this kind of 'cheating' pointless, so sharing and collaborating on solutions is desirable. If there is an on-line code editor involved at any point, I'm much more likely to publish to somewhere like github if that feature is baked in :) (also easy offline IDE integration is a bit simpler if git is baked in...) I guess I my question was more targeted at this line: "We’re giving players the dev kit for the handheld trading device. You can program it in AVR assembly. But the vendor also offers support for a very limited dialect of C, compiled to bytecode IR or to AVR. Emphasis on “limited”. You know, because we did less of the fun stuff for you." This seems very much like a situation where the community can work together to improve their ability to play the game. > At this point though we're just running (or in Erin's case skating) as fast as we can to launch the damn thing. Please do :)

patio11 11y ago

It is absolutely intended that people will build things on top of Starfighter. People built things on top of Microcorruption, too -- there are actual professional-grade reversing tools which have a command-line "microcorruption quirks mode" to better emulate the behavior of the game's emulator. We will also, naturally, take bug reports -- and sometimes even fix them. I don't see us shipping much OSS at launch, but that's something I'd be willing to try in the future.

Intermernet 11y ago
One recommendation which may be really obvious: don't release any source unless you want to simulate that the source has been released in the "game" world. If you want to release any source code for any segment of the challenge, while the challenge is ongoing, it will be torn apart by the competitors for bugs. Because, as Erin said: "...pretending all our bugs were intentional, to make things more like the real world!"