Godcraft's Open Video to the IndustrialCraft Development Team!

You are very well spoken good sir.

(Full well written response to come tomorrow)

edit: I've actually changed my mind, i'm going to keep my nose out of this shit storm.

If he choses the right words... I don't want to debate that, he however has one big point that I'd like to point out: there are people playing and enjoying the mod a lot (including myself), and the recent update wasn't really in a state where could call it done from just the technical/stability point of view. Now you can just say "Well it's beta" or "I don't have the time/motivation right now to fix that", everyone would accept that, but you didn't say anything at all, and that actually is an issue.

I think we can agree that writing a one-line explaining what will happen or not is within your available time, so the question is why didn't you do that? Now you already explained that this is a hobby for you and I can very well understand your situation, and although it is all your choice to decide to "abandon" the project at any time, doing that at a time where an update is definitely needed, is kind of spitting into the face of the users. I understand that IC is your baby and you don't want to give it into other peoples hands, but on the other hand please understand that there are a lot of people having fun playing it, and "taking it away" from them is about the same as taking it away from you.

Now to be constructive, what are you options that do not "spit in someones face" ?
Beside the obvious to give that project to someone else - which I understand you don't want to - there are lesser methods of opening the project. I think what fits your situation best would be to open the code for bug-fixes only. In short that means everyone can fix bugs/optimize the code, the community has to manage that on its own (and that usually works well), but no one but you implements new features unless you agree on them or define them on your own. All other changes need to be put into the mod section.

The steps are rather easy: just open the GIT to everyone and define the rules. People will eventually setup a build server, arrange the development in the forum and control each other's commits through a community driven process. Work for you: almost zero, benefit for the mod: you will receive a well tested, well written and properly working version of the code. And you don't have to worry about controlling that, as usually whenever there is a position to fill, someone accepted by the community will stand up and do that. That is about the way Linux development works, and that one works fine for ages already.

Will someone steal the code?
As I already mentioned in another thread: if someone wants to, it takes minimal effort already to do so, and so far no one did that.

Will someone take over the project from you?
I think no one will every deny that you are the one and only "father" of IC, therefore as long as you decide to stay that, people will in the end follow your decisions regarding the development. And if tomorrow someone decides to pretend he is the inventor, community will usually shit-storm these people till they are quiet.

Can I tentatively say that IC2 is a great Mod, and the Devs are doing as good as they can? I agree with the whole needs-more-active testers and a sort of Jenkins/GitHub (Which lets you download different versions, right?), and a community-bugfix use policy, because the community of this Mod is very dedicated, and there are some excellent coders out there that would probably love fixing bugs in the code (And adding API-Hooks for their own Addons, of course) And, while Kane may have said it a little too strongly, I do see where he is coming from. (Oh, and I appreciate the fact that Alblaka is responding to this thread, when I first saw it I half-expected it to be ignored. Thank you.)

Oh, and don't think I don't like Industrial Craft. I do. And I'm guessing that Alblaka will keep his promise and not ban me. (No release date, right?)

Obviously you have your reasons for keeping it closed source but what about exposing an RSS feed or something from your SCM or build system? That way, we'd at least see that stuff's happening and it wouldn't be dependent on you having to pull yourself away from what you want to be doing to assemble a status post.

Another idea might be to assemble a closed beta community with access to an issue tracker. They could get earlier access to the builds to file issues and you wouldn't have to worry about the forums being flooded with complaints.

I haven't written anything on this forum for a very long time actually and while you may have some points you shoot yourself in the knee by making some stupid assumptions "forge is an excuse" "this is an excuse" "that is an excuse". The part where you start to tell Ablaka that he "wants to kill industrial craft if he keeps the dev team". These are BOLD claims that need sensible reasoning. You are criticizing abla and his whole team yet you cannot reason why the team and not him (can't replace him, can you, no abla, no IC) and then your most valid point just gets swallowed by that insult: That they dont communicate. This is a widespread problem for ALOT of the big mods in minecraft. Another one that was ridicoulosly popular was Flan's Mod and he is for some reason not fucking able to communicate anything and he's generating quite some hate with it.

I know (in the context of following this mod since the start) abla a little bit on how he reacts to criticism and unless he has changed in a substantial way: there is a certain point where you can push him and before that everything is fine but afterwards he's getting majorly pissed off and blocks off completely that is partly because he is (rightfully i might add) very protective about his work and IC in particular.

I just want to STATE that, i'm not saying its good or bad. The reason why i point that out is, by knowing that it is that way, and it is pretty obvious that it IS that way, it demands a certain tone which should be a respectful tone without any stupid assumptions or dramatizing. You're not talking about a product you bought here, lets be clear on this, while you CAN demand a certain quality to work, while you can field your concerns about anything, there is no, Absolutely NO justification for anger or worked up attitude to say anything. People in help centers for paid software get PAID to listen to people that are raging because they spent money on something that doesnt work. Guess what:

No Helpdesk.

No Money spent.

Talking about being professional:

00:53 "What i get to view is a storybook[...], but it may be a good point to restructure the development team"

That doesnt even make any sense. Don't bring his writing in, when it has NOTHING to do with the problem. Absolutely nothing. No. That reasoning is just bad. You pretty much ignited abla in the first minute and you pissed him off at 1:20 i bet on it without even bringing a sensible reason in yet. Insult people at least AFTER your rant.

08:00 "Your testing is disgusting"

Oh boy, i would LOVE to work on a project that i do voluntarily if someone approaches me with that kind of carefully formulated critics. Gosh, that would motivate me so much. What exactly are you trying to achieve with a comment like this ? Wouldnt "I'm under the impression that testing does not deliver the needed quality because of example a), b), c)" suffice ? What do you think provokes a constructive answer ? Thats a childs insult to dramatize and make a show, achieves nothing.

11:25 -.-




11:55 "I use you guys as an insult"

Lol. Wow. Time for the rethorics trainer. The shady justifying "i feel bad for it" doesnt help. You MADE your point already after a minute that you're not happy, what does THAT add ?

14:25 "You're not communicating enough, there's more talk about books [...] and thats fine [...] I'm just telling you what my personal experience is"


No, its NOT fine according to your 15 minute rant. And i understand also that it is your personal experience. But you lack a proper reason still. Stop to attack him on stuff you can't back up. You're very sleezy and glitchy. Your sentences seem to make sense on first glance but hey... they dont, they just provoke.

15:08 "I don't know why you don't put it (energy grid code) open source [...] I'm not trying to be an asshole [...] because you guys can't even figure it (the energygrid code) out yourselfes. *laughs*"


If you would talk about my work, in that way about me, with that lack of respect that would have been the point where i would have switched off the video. You ARE an asshole right at that point. And you ARE entitled to your opinion. There's a pattern to this, you usually notice yourself when you're saying something you shouldnt and you try to confront it with adding in a sentence that you're not doing what you're doing. It's like throwing a stone in a persons face while yelling "i'm not throwing a stone here! i'm not throwing a stone here! TROLOLOLO"

This is a bad video and you should be ashamed of it because somewhere buried in there, there WAS some valuable feedback in it, but you manage to increase the chance of it being ignored by being a major dick.

TL,DR: I agree, people should communicate more. You're a dick.

Quote from Fallen_dead

You are very well spoken good sir.

You want to stay out of it, i know. But that claim demands reasoning, because he's probably on the lower end of rethorical skillrange if anything in my opinion.

Quote from Kane Hart

Did you actually come here to add anything worthwhile to the discussion or did you feel this was a good time to brown nose?

Thats a very good point! And it should be something you should ask yourself about your video, the valid claims you make in your video could be easily cut down to 2/3 Minutes the rest is useless sidesentences that don't add to anything you mentioned in the video whatsoever. Except for creating drama maybe.

I even made a TLDR: I agree they should communicate more. Thats the point where i agree with you. The rest i can't comment, i was usually satisfied with the delivered quality of IC.

Quote from Kane Hart

I noticed your whole thread was just a wall of text that said insult this insult that. Did you actually come here to add anything worthwhile to the discussion or did you feel this was a good time to brown nose? This not a thread of what you like to rate out a video but talking about you feelings about IC and its current state and hell if you like to suggest improvements and etc go ahead.

Sadly your title and the content of the first post means this is a thread specifically for talking about your video. (That i have no intention to watch, i fucking hate watching those time wasters, specially when i know its gonna be a shitty time waster)

Long time lurker etc, etc, first time I actually have the feeling it would be worth to post something so I made an account.
As a private server owner for a few friends of mine I run 3 servers 2 of which contain IC2, (one vanilla) and Ic2 is basicly the core of all the mods together.
As a core of most mods you kind of expect it to be well updated and kept up, but if you only want to code whenever you want to, you should think about getting other people in on the job aswell, and not be as selfish to be like well its my mod and I am the only one who can take credit on this etc etc, since from the point that I see it, your just doing this for the amazing fanboys you are getting which well, is amazing since they'll back you up in everything you do, even in this thread that is noticeble, people who are reasonable and the people that are fanboys.

For the greater good of the mod, I think you either need to get going with it, or hire/let in some other mod developer since Im sure ALOT of great mod developers would like to help/get going with an already well established mod, giving you less work, and make the community happier.

Also, you shouldn't work on new stuff when your old stuff is broken like the new reactor changes it's just not nessecary, I'd rather have a bugfree version then have a new nuclear reactor system with 100's of other bugs.

I just signed up to the forum to give my two cents, since the ongoing issues regarding the development of IndustrialCraft², one of the largest and most influential Minecraft mods that currently exists, are of a major concern for me and I would like to see them addressed.

There have been a large number of duplicate bug reports in the bugs forum over the past few weeks (I'm utterly appalled at the number of morons who don't and/or can't use the search function to check for already reported bugs -_-). An important example is the EnergyNet bug first introduced with 1.103 that's been reported a few zillion times already. The presence of this bug currently makes running a large IC2 multiplayer server nearly impossible (I'm running a strictly small-scale test server for my staff at the moment and I'm having to babysit restarting the server when people meddle with cables; I can only imagine the nightmare if there were 50+ people on at once!). What irritates me the most about this bug is the fact that I understand it's already been fixed on your end. This is a game breaking bug - pretty much every player is going to notice this bug within an hour of installing IC2, and it makes playing the mod seriously extremely difficult. Because this bug is so huge and in-your-face, you end up with a stack of duplicate bug reports from the morons who don't scour the bug list before complaining. It is my belief (and probably the belief of a lot of other players, although I obviously can't vouch for them) that if you released official hotfixes which fixed bugs while trying not to break other things in the process, then these duplicate bug reports would be posted less often. It would also help to relieve the stress of both you (the developers) and us (the server administrators), who are being continually pestered with "whens the fix coming whens the fix coming whens the fix coming" by all the 8-year-old kiddo-noobs.

The best long-term solution that I can see is to get IC2 a public Jenkins. The builds you normally push out can be marked as RB, and then if you don't want to support hotfixes or dev builds then just shove a disclaimer on saying "using anything but recommended build is at your own risk and is unsupported" when people go to the Jenkins for the first time (that kind of stuff can be done pretty easily with cookies).

You also really need a better way of cataloguing and tracking bugs. A forum just doesn't cut it, because there is no filtering system in place for users (you can't easily ask the forum software to show you all of the bugs in 1.106 that are already fixed, for instance). If you moved your bug tracking to a bug tracker, then both users and the developers would be able to track bugs more efficiently. Get yourself a copy of JIRA, FoxBugz, MantisBT, or some other decent tracker. If you aren't willing to set something up then I have a public JIRA instance and you're welcome to use that. Just get the bugs off the forum and into something more sensible please

TLDR:
- Please set up a public Jenkins for the sake of server admins - if you want, you can flag the normal releases as RB and make it clear that dev builds aren't supported
- Please get a proper bug tracker rather than using the forum for bugs, so that we can filter the bug list

Between the huge nerf to reactors ('fun' nerf... computer-controlled CASUCs were fun, the new system is just 'meh'), and the rampant bugs since 103, I haven't been very happy with the direction IC2 is going.

Then again, its a mod, someone else's hobby, free, etc. The two statements aren't mutually exclusive - I can express my opinion without saying that the IC2 dev team has an obligation to cater to it.