Are player ghosts on the way out?

[RoGGa]

After a very long and good thread (viewtopic.php?f=8&t=14180),
I get a feeling a lot of crawlers don't like Player Ghosts and those who play locally/offline usually delete the bones files.
I'm wondering if there's any talk of changes to come relating to Player Ghosts from the devs for either v.16 or v.17

[Brannock]

None at all.

[nicolae]

After a very long and good thread (viewtopic.php?f=8&t=14180),
I get a feeling a lot of crawlers don't like Player Ghosts and those who play locally/offline usually delete the bones files.
I'm wondering if there's any talk of changes to come relating to Player Ghosts from the devs for either v.16 or v.17

I suspect you may be overestimating how much credence the devs give Tavern threads.

[Sar]

inb4 Do Devs Give Not Enough Credence To Tavern Threads thread

[and into]

Moved this thread to CYC.

There's already a thread in GDD (linked in OP) that has evolved into a discussion of player ghosts.

There is no limit for how often one can post in GDD but please do (re)read the stickied thread, You Must Read This Before Posting. It is very likely that quick questions, polls (unless conducted by a dev or something), and similar posts would be more appropriate in Dungeon Crawling Advice or here. Thank you!

[RoGGa]

I don't see how my Q was not a "Game Design Discussion"!
... especially considering how outdated the dev wiki is on this topic:

https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php? ... ayer_ghost
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dcss/brainstorm/monster/uniques/player_ghost.txt · Last modified: 2013-07-25 15:41 by MyOtheHedgeFox

FYI, I'm starting to find it quite challenging to find a place where I can contribute as a non-dev.

[Arrhythmia]

OP, to answer your question, as one of the people who posted in favour of removing ghosts in the last thread, I do not think they're going to be removed any time soon, mostly because I imagine it'd be a shit-ton of effort for something that not a lot of people feel passionate about.

[RoGGa]

I'm still feeling a bit triggered by this post being moved from "Game Design Discussion".
(I don't mean for this to be a rant but it might end up being one.)

FYI, I am working on a proposal but since this is my 1st one, I find it challenging to figure out if it goes against current and future development.
Therefore, I tried to familiarize myself with the dev wiki only to get the impression that it is mostly of a hodge-podge collection of old discussions that are no longer to take place on the Dev Wiki

This wiki is for topic proposals and to maintain / manipulate those proposals and ideas into working forms. Discussion and chatter about topics from new contributors is best conducted in The Tavern Forum.

As for the release plans ( https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php? ... ease_plans )
- The page "0.15 Development Plan" hasn't been archived; and
- the top of the page "0.16 Development Planning" gives the impression that it hasn't been updated in a while!

So what's the point of sending new contributors to the Dev Wiki?!?
It should be THE place for people to make formal proposals on how to improve not just the game but also:
- the primary website;
- the secondary website: Sourceforge (...which has v0.4 screen captures and is the only game in the top 30 to lack an icon!!!);
- Mantis;
- possibly the Tavern; and
- the Dev Wiki itself!!!

As for my subject post, I understand that it is possible to ask Qs to Devs in ##crawl-dev but that doesn't provide an archive in the Tavern for others in a similar situation to learn from. Maybe the Game Design Discussion should be renamed to Game Design Ideas and Initial Proposals, and a new sibling sub-group created for Game Design Q&A and debates.
For me, Crazy Yiuf's Corner is for topics related to playing the game; not about Game Design!
Therefore, having a game design question kicked out "Game Design Discussion" to "Gameplay Discussions" (which CYC is part of) is just wrong.

Honestly, it feels like you have to take the coding route to be able to contribute without dealing so much with the frustrations of trying to find a niche somewhere.

I guess this counts as a rant! I'm done for now. lol

[KoboldLord]

I'm sorry to tell you that there isn't really a place where you can submit ideas to the devteam and expect them to jump on it. Here or anywhere. The devteam does what they do for free, and there are actually quite a lot of players out there with ideas that they'd love to convince the devteam to implement for free. I imagine it gets very tiresome at times. Almost all actual dev work gets done in private correspondence between members of the devteam. They do talk to the playerbase here and on other forums, but these places are not where decisions are made or code written.

The Tavern is a place to sit down and have a beer. I wouldn't expect much work to get done here. Sometimes they do see our idle chatter and get inspired, but it's important to remember that the commit that shows up afterward is the result of their hard work behind the scenes, and basically no credit at all should be given to us, who mostly only talk. Sometimes there are many months between a discussion and that inspiration, and sometimes nothing ever gets done with a discussion at all. If you aren't okay with that, you're probably not going to be happy here.

[RoGGa]

Thanks KoboldLord

For clarification, I'm not expecting at all for my potential proposal to get implemented. But I also don't want to spend time putting together a formal proposal that will be ignored because I happened not to be aware about current and future development trends.

I just find it ironic that the primary website can state:

Everything you find on this website will get you started playing or even actively helping development of the game.

http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/about
and yet there doesn't seem much for non-coders to do except minor stuff as stated in the Tavern's "Contributions":

If you are interested in helping with tiles, vaults, patches or documentation, this is the place for that.

From my experience thus far, the primary website should read:

... even actively helping development of the game (for those who can code in C++)

[damiac]

I'm still feeling a bit triggered...

Really? This is the same guy talking about an 'anglo superiority complex' on these boards...

If you want people to take you seriously, stop saying stuff like this, and stop spamming the board with every single thought that pops into your head. You make a lot of suggestions for the game, for the tavern, yet your ideas are poorly fleshed out, and it doesn't seem like you even have much experience with the game.

Try to come up with one good, fleshed out idea, rather than the shotgun approach you seem to be going with now. And don't make a big rant if other people don't go for it.

[duvessa]

I just find it ironic that the primary website can state:

Everything you find on this website will get you started playing or even actively helping development of the game.

http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/about
and yet there doesn't seem much for non-coders to do except minor stuff as stated in the Tavern's "Contributions":

If you are interested in helping with tiles, vaults, patches or documentation, this is the place for that.

Can you think of anything else that non-coders could do?

[TeshiAlair]

Now I'm tempted to go through Crawl's source* and try to make a guide for people who aren't straight up programmers to at least begin understanding the source. 99% of stuff might not be high quality enough to make it in, but it would introduce more people to programming and help them understand how the game works better.

*Not that I haven't actually worked on Crawl's source yet due to lack of ideas worth doing, though I've dug through it a few times.

[Siegurt]

As for my subject post, I understand that it is possible to ask Qs to Devs in ##crawl-dev but that doesn't provide an archive in the Tavern for others in a similar situation to learn from. Maybe the Game Design Discussion should be renamed to Game Design Ideas and Initial Proposals, and a new sibling sub-group created for Game Design Q&A and debates.

For an archive of ##crawl-dev, one can go here:
http://s-z.org/crawl-dev/

It's even searchable.

Generally the way it goes is:
1. You have a vague idea, you post about it in CYC, you get feedback you refine the idea and get a sense of what need it addresses in game (if any) and how it can be implemented that falls within the crawl development philosophy.
2. Once you have a clear and comprehensive idea, you post it in GDD, being sure to explicitly state both what need the proposal fills, and how to implement it. Then players and a small minority of devs will look at it, and critique it, and it may be refined more.
3. After some discussion, sometimes the game devs who might be inspired will take it to the rest of the developers and /or code it themselves, sometimes someone who isn't a developer, but who is a competent crawl coder with an interest will go off and write a patch and submit it (and from there it may get approved and included or not, I've submitted a small number of patches myself, and some of them have gone in, and some have not, and some have been revamped into something entirely different)

Something to keep in mind is that for most ideas coming up with the idea is 0.1% of the work, coming up with a fleshed out balanced idea that makes sense and would contribute to the game is still only about 3% of the work, even full-on writing a patch to add something to the game is only about 50% of the work (There's still documentation, testing, integrating with other parts of the code, sometimes artwork, and maintaining it down the road when other updates interact with it)

So when you make a proposal that's not-well-formed, you're asking others to do 99.9% of the work for you, so don't be surprised that only a tiny proportion of even the most well-thought out ideas ever are coded, it requires someone with time and talent to be passionate about an idea that you created, rather than their own, that's going to be rare. Note that it's not non-existent, but rare.

[dpeg]

I don't see how my Q was not a "Game Design Discussion"!
... especially considering how outdated the dev wiki is on this topic:

https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php? ... ayer_ghost
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dcss/brainstorm/monster/uniques/player_ghost.txt · Last modified: 2013-07-25 15:41 by MyOtheHedgeFox

FYI, I'm starting to find it quite challenging to find a place where I can contribute as a non-dev.

I think there are several misunderstandings.

1. The dev wiki does not represent the goals of the dev team or anything like that. Everyone can add to or modify dev wiki pages. Most of it will never be implemented. The dev wiki is good for (a) preserving ideas, especially (b) more complex ones.

2. I have never heard developers talk about ghost removal. We hear players complain about ghosts all the time, but what does it matter? In particular, people collecting ideas about ghosts is alright, but there is *nothing* that makes the page outdated. I just had a look it: some ideas are nifty, some are outlandish, none are urgent. That's the status of the vast majority of proposals, by the way. To close this topic: ghosts will stay.

3. Siegurt and some others have already nicely laid out how Crawl development works. (Thanks!) Basically, it is a random walk determined by resources: manpower (shortage), skills. A lot of time goes into bug fixes. What is not scarce are ideas. You can bet that every single developer, active or not, carries his/her own long TODO list.

4. If you want to help and cannot code (or don't want to deal with Crawl's source), there are some ways. You can read them in-game with ?Qt even! In short, making vaults, drawing tiles or starting screens, coming up with speech or descriptions are all fine ways to help. What also always helps is going through old bugs (checking if they're still around in recent trunk, and reporting in the bug tracker about this) or sifting through the documentation, reporting dated bits.

That is not to say that ideas are worthless. You just have to realise that there are very, very many ideas out there: you are competing with ideas of over hundred people over the course of many years. Some of these ideas were brilliant and didn't make it. Some cool features were conceived as plain player suggestions (among them the slime god, the stealth god, several species and a number of spells). In almost all of these cases, the path from mentioning the idea to a trunk feature was long: an idea has to be understood, baked, detailed (numbers/mechanics), then implemented, tested, documented. It is okay to be strictly an idea person this forum: always hope but never expect your ideas to go in! Don't complain about ideas being disassembled (this has bad repercussions for anything else you'll say on the forum).

[and into]

Some other folks fielded this already (with dpeg, Siegurt, and KL being the most thorough), but I'll weigh in from a mod's perspective.

The Tavern is a fan site, in which some developers also participate with varying degrees of activity, which makes sense given that devs are also fans of the game. Some of the devs with accounts here are also mods, but at the moment I am the most active moderator, followed by njvack, and neither of us is a developer.

I think at least four or five devs read GDD semi-regularly, and I'd like to think that this is one thing among many others that helps them get a sense of how changes to the game are being experienced by the player base. However, it isn't the case that they come here looking for ideas, specifically. Nonetheless, as others have pointed out, every now and then something thought up here inspires a change in the game itself. When this does happen, it is usually a small change. A lot of bigger changes are discussed by the devs through other channels while also being discussed here, and eventually they might be implemented. (e.g. removing item destruction.) In these cases it would be inaccurate to say that the idea was "proposed" in GDD, but rather that GDD reflected an ongoing discussion amongst the devs, amongst the players, and between the players and devs. This is basically what GDD does, it is a place to have a serious but non-technical—and sometimes agonistic—conversation about Crawl's design.


Now, a few other things. If a thread is really bad and people report it I will lock or delete it, and while I don't delete threads lightly, even this more heavy-handed measure isn't a big deal and isn't anything that I take personally, and I don't think whoever tried to post it should take it personally, either. If a thread should be in another forum, I move it, and this should be considered "not a big deal" divided by, like, 1000.

I moved this thread because there is no reason to think that player ghosts are on the way out, and there is already an active thread on GDD (that you posted, RoGGa, and which you helpfully linked in the OP of this thread) in which people can talk about player ghosts. It seemed redundant for this thread to appear in GDD as well, and it is in the best interest of everyone (people with ideas to discuss, potential peanut gallery commentators, and devs who might occasionally glimpse a spark of inspiration through all the smoke) that we keep GDD lean. Or, you know, at least leaner than YASD/YAVP and CYC. Thus GDD is held to a somewhat higher standard.

[Hirsch I]

Now I'm tempted to go through Crawl's source* and try to make a guide for people who aren't straight up programmers to at least begin understanding the source. 99% of stuff might not be high quality enough to make it in, but it would introduce more people to programming and help them understand how the game works better.

*Not that I haven't actually worked on Crawl's source yet due to lack of ideas worth doing, though I've dug through it a few times.

I would love you if you do so. I'm learning C++, slowly, and messing around with crawl's source is a good way to do so.

[RoGGa]

Thank you all for your feedback.
I am especially grateful to all those who wrote more than 6 sentences.

Cheers!

[TeshiAlair]

Here ya go Hirsch: viewtopic.php?f=22&t=14266

[Lasty]

I'm still feeling a bit triggered...

Really? This is the same guy talking about an 'anglo superiority complex' on these boards...

If you want people to take you seriously, stop saying stuff like this

I don't at all agree with the premise that using the phrases "I'm feeling triggered" or "anglo superiority complex" should automatically prevent others from taking you seriously. This is really another discussion (and if it's going to be had, may need to be split out), but these phrases have meanings and are not at all inherently illegitimate concepts to use. Obviously, that's not to say that every use of these phrases is useful or legitimate.

I don't think you've done a good job of calling out misuse in this case: whether RoGGa should feel "triggered" is a legitimate topic (since RoGGa raised it), but whether or not he can feel triggered is not.

"Anglo superiority complex" was definitely an abrasive way to convey the idea that we should be more welcoming to non-English speakers, but I think the point that the name of the forum was somewhat alienating was a good contribution.