Godcraft's Open Video to the IndustrialCraft Development Team!

I came here because I saw your call for opinions in the RSS feed.

Yeah, the [video's] delivery was abrasive and inconducive to constructive dialog, but let's put that aside for the time being and focus on the salient points. It seems the main complaints raised are about transparency and development pace, so I'll put in my two cents on those topics.

The communication issue I agree with. Frankly, I doubt anyone will respond to this thread saying they'd have a problem hearing MORE about the current state of development. One solution already proposed is to open up an RSS of your git. Another idea is to expand your team to appoint someone to handle public relations. You could also make your development goals, priorities, and timeline a public document.

Alblaka makes a very valid but concerning point that this is just a hobby. As a hobby, it will receive attention from developers when the whim grabs them. We, the users, cannot expect anything more than that. However, I believe that is a strong argument for moving to an open source model. That way, when the whim isn't catching anyone, or the right combination of people simultaneously, or if interest starts to wane altogether, other developers can pick up the slack and drive the project forward. You can still choose a license that offers some protection (although I doubt you'd want to expend any resources defending that license if someone did violate it.) If you had a public bug tracker and public git, anyone could read the bugs, grab a branch, hack on it, and submit their fixes for approval.

Alblaka also makes a good point about the forums blowing up with 'bug reports'. I see a simple fix. Public bug tracker and a new forum policy, and promote some long-time / trustworthy forum members as forum moderators to delete the offending posts and ban as appropriate.

At the end of the day, the only reward for working on any Minecraft mod is ego (fame, notoriety, 'credit', feel-good, etc.) or profit. That isn't a value judgement, it just is. There's no way the revenue from ad-sponsored downloads and/or donations offset the man-hours put in, so that leaves ego. Ego can be just as fulfilled with an open source model, possibly even more-so than a closed model. At the end of the day, nobody can take away that Alblaka was the father of IndustrialCraft, no matter how many devs hack on it.

A selfish (for Alblaka and team) motive for opening up development is that you don't need to feel any pressure from the community anymore. If you decide you want to take three months off to write a novel or tour southern Africa, you don't even need to tell anyone or fret about coming back to hate-mail. If the concern is maintaining the scope and balance of the mod, you can still maintain a steering committee--you could be the Linus Torvalds of IC. How cushy would it be to not have to code at all and just field people's commits?

Anyway, you asked for it, so there's my opinion. Love your mod and thanks for all you do (and put up with)... it's a pretty thankless task sometimes, huh?

Quote from enneract

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.

I really wish more people would understand this, it would cut out a huge portion of bickering that gets nothing done. Someone saying that they don't like something, and then being shot down with the entitlement thing helps no one. The issue isn't resolved, if lots of people feel the same way, they are less likely to try and help fix it, and so on. This is the internet, things can work differently here. Everyone can help the devs somehow, if they are willing to accept the help.

Quote from Tinytimrob

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).

They may not be supported, but hopefully anyone can still report bugs, and hopefully somewhere besides the forums.

Quote from Tinytimrob

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

Yay, bug reports on the forums really don't work, especially when you have some of the people that you do reporting bugs. A lot of the people here know enough about the mod and about how to use it that they just need a place to post how they got the bug to happen, and any crash log. Forums are made for big posts with discussion, not short bug reports.

Quote from imer

First off you have to keep in mind that IC - even IC² - is relatively old compared to newer (i am so funny!) mods that were created in the past months (or half year whatever).
IC² already had that done for quite some time and at that time it was quite the awesome mod, because you couldn't do as much as easily as you are able to now.
...
Edit: one thing:
I complained about ghosts in the beta release thread a few times and was kinda ignored after a while, because apparently nobody else could reproduce those.
Even after asking again, nobody cared
Not blaming anyone, just saying.
I may be stupid sometimes, but if i can't fix it even after trying multiple times, a lot of the other users may get the same issue too.

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Well, what you are saying about the community is probably because the mod is so well established now. if you look at forum use by user, I bet there are a couple of accounts that are responsible for nearly all of the posts here. It seems like some of the older users drive new accounts away with the expectation that they have no idea what they are talking about, and their thoughts and opinions are automatically worth less because of being a new user.

Quote from FenixR

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)

So you came into a thread you claim is about this video, to express your opinion that the video is a waste of time, without watching the video? Why even bother responding, really.

After this update, I found a bunch of bugs first hand, and I was going to do this to try and help however I could to get the bugs fixed. Just looking at the bug report forums though... I saw reports for the bugs I saw, but even if I had found a new one, I probably wouldn't have posted. The people getting mad at people for not searching have a point, but when it gets to arguing like this, you have to realize that there is a problem, and ignoring it is not helping. Looking on those forums, I see almost none of the "It doesn't work, help" attitude. Instead I see people who report a bug, are ready to give info if needed, and then get yelled at about it, and never get acknowledged that it has been seen. How is this helpful to anyone?

PS: and no, I'm not going to do the standard ass-kissing before I criticize. There are problems, up until possibly now they haven't been addressed, people are getting frustrated. I will say this though, the only reason I bothered making an account and posting was because I enjoy this mod. If I was only putting this mod on my server for some of the users, I probably would have gotten rid of it by now, just because of how much is broken in the current release. Probably going to think of 50 other things to say after I post this.

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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.

Whole-heartedly agreed. I'm currently trying to find an old version which does actually work well.

I recently spent a day setting up a new MC server off the world file a bunch of friends and I used, which was pretty heavily dependent on IC2. It was really frustrating when we got it all working, only to find out IC2 is broken as hell, rendering our world pretty unplayable due to dependence on jetpacks or quantum boots.
It's equally frustrating that for the last three weeks, the only hint of fixes we've seen is the occasional "fixed" comment by a dev in any given bug report thread, despite the fact we aren't going to be seeing any fixes for an indefinite period of time.

I love this mod; minecraft is pretty unplayable without it for me. It's frustrating and pretty souring that not only is obviously broken code released, no hint of fixed releases are in sight. It's like the devs don't care their stuff is broken, or that their users' experiences are being trashed by these bugs. And that, is the worst part of all.

Quote from Veoulux

Everyone can help the devs somehow, if they willing to accept the help.

This, a thousand times this.

Quote from imer

In addition to that it's been getting quiet around here.
I don't know the devs opinion on this, but in my opinion an active community is a very important motivation-booster.
I mean back in IC1 days everyone would have spammed a thread with "leaked blueprints" for a new reactor system (bad example here ).
And don't get me wrong: we don't have a bad community here, but it's getting quieter and (i assume) most people are only here to look for stuff and then go away again.
Pageviews have been decreasing too, we once had 300-350k on one day, now it's always around 100-150k (on weekends ~200k)
The bounce rate has been going up, too (user leaves website after one visit)
Dont hate me for this, but modpacks proably are the biggest reason for this: why would you need to visit ic.net?
They have their own (mostly copied) wikis, that include hidden recipies, and a larger community in their forums.

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Actually I would say the view count has been dropping due to the pace of development. Here we are over two months later with no 1.3.2 compatible build and 1.4 probably only a couple weeks away. Shortly after 1.3.0 dropped I was checking the site and forums multiple times per day for updates, then once per day, then only when my RSS feed of the main site updated, now only when something interesting pops up in the RSS feed.

I think a lot of people are used to mods just being abandoned in MC and so have become more apt to just move on once it appears evident that the mod is no longer going to be updated. For example, most of my players are in favor of moving on without EE3 because it's obvious that that mod is probably not ever going anywhere. I wrote up a little forge mod to replace the easy bits and we're moving on without EE3. IC2 would be harder to move on from but not impossible, eventually the features from the game updates are going to be compelling enough.

Quote from selurgniman

Actually I would say the view count has been dropping due to the pace of development. Here we are over two months later with no 1.3.2 compatible build and 1.4 probably only a couple weeks away. Shortly after 1.3.0 dropped I was checking the site and forums multiple times per day for updates, then once per day, then only when my RSS feed of the main site updated, now only when something interesting pops up in the RSS feed.

My participation is about the same. I used to visit the forums almost daily, then weekly, and now I don't visit the forums at all looking for an update--I just have the blog RSS set up in my reader and I eagerly await posts regarding new versions. I see that as a reason that site visit numbers aren't necessarily a good metric with which to gauge interest in IndustrialCraft. I don't tweet or follow Jeb et. al. but that doesn't mean I don't love the crap out of Minecraft and want to see it continue and thrive.

First off I love IC, I love the work you guys do and I'd likely still be using this if you didn't change anything.

That said the last ~45 seconds of Kane's rant (Yes its a rant) is about the only useful section. It is quite flaming to the IC devs, but unfortunately is is a symptom of a problem between the dev team and the users. I think the base points that are trying to be made are:

1. Release more fixes
2. Be more open (not necessarly source)
3. Communicate more to the users.
4. Accept help
5. Test better

Now to my 2 cents.

A. Please do nightly regular builds
B. Get a bug tracker
C. Communicate to the users
D. Open up a little and relax

A. The build thing is a common problem I see around here "its fixed in..." "its fixed already..." If we had access to more incremental or "hot-fix" builds then we would be able to help find new bugs or stop crying all-together. This also leads into B.

B. Get a bug tracker. From what I've been able to discern (maybe I'm wrong) is that the only area to post bugs is the form. Which is nearly the worst way to track issues other than maybe PM's. Please get a tracker, they are easy to monitor, easy to see if a problem was already reported and easy to see if the problem was already fixed. It should reduce the time you guys spend yelling talking at people about duplicate reports. This also leads to C.

C. Communicate. The information we can (easily) find related to updates, progress, and known issues is difficult to find to non-existent. Formalized bug tracking will help (See B). Please stop taking a lot of the users "stupidity" or otherwise lack of following your directions as an insult. At times the dev team can be very hostile to users simply because they ask a dumb question, or didn't read through a couple hundred posts.

D. You have openly flamed rawcode for his 1.106 bugfix mod. Yes he should have asked for permission per your directions, but it also shows that there are issues here. If your user feels that it's necessary to post fixes because you have failed to publish them, don't flame them over it. First relax, then see what you can do to pull this back into IC. Maybe they could be a contirbutor, there are other sub-mod contributors that might be helpfull to IC in general as bug hunters. We all do these kinds of things because we a passionate about them, but at times we need to step back, relax and let someone else help if they can and/or are willing to.

Thanks

I dont want to come across as an ass but here are my thoughts.(Ban me if you feel like it) I feel as if Kane came across more aggressive than he meant to, due to frustration. As a player, I understand where Kane is coming from where he would like some communication between devs and the community but he did it in the wrong way. I do agree that the communication is an important aspect of creating such a poplar mod. But YOU, Kane, must understand like alblaka said programmers do things because they want to. Many of them receive no income from modding minecraft it is for fun and to enhance what "THEY WANT TO DO" not to please a massive amounts of gamers. It would be nice for the dev to allow people to access their beta so more bugs are found in a quicker time period is helpful but the excessive amount complaints and non-bugs being report can cause annoyance among the devs. But as this helps the devs recognizes bugs it doesnt help with the time it takes to fix certain bugs. The solution I believe that will help with part of this is to copy xcompwiz's example by extending the ability to beta test through the reporting of legitimate bugs and having many of them. Thank you to the devs for their work but some interaction with the community on the forums will up with such things. Interactions like the creation of a thread that has a complied list of bugs that have been tested thoroughly and don't work and update the status if fixed on next update. I do see richardG around saying if it is fixed but you typically have to search the bugs forum to find what is fixed or not. Kane does have a point about opening up IC2 to git or a similar website due to the fact that it allows for pulls that could help richardG and player catch bugs and add good additions/ideas to help ic2. But our opinions really mean nothing. It is what albaka decides to do with IC2. He has the final decision on anything. 1.3 broke many old codes so in theory we could still be waiting on a release for ic2. I could rant for longer(this long than my essay atm for English lols) than this but wont. Please don't hesitate to criticize me.

Quote from selurgniman

I think a lot of people are used to mods just being abandoned in MC and so have become more apt to just move on once it appears evident that the mod is no longer going to be updated. For example, most of my players are in favor of moving on without EE3 because it's obvious that that mod is probably not ever going anywhere. I wrote up a little forge mod to replace the easy bits and we're moving on without EE3. IC2 would be harder to move on from but not impossible, eventually the features from the game updates are going to be compelling enough.

Hm... you might have inadvertently raised another interesting point. As far as I know, Pahimar live-streams development, he tweets progress reports (if you can count <=140 chars as a progress report), [EDIT: and EE3 is on GitHub (https://github.com/pahimar/Equ…Exchange-3/commits/master)] but apparently that is insufficient since some people evidently feel that EE3 is vaporware.

So what's the lesson-learned there that can be applied to IndustrialCraft? How many communication channels is enough, and what would be the preferred channel(s) keeping in mind that time spent communicating is time not spent developing? E-mail subscription list? Tweets? Live-streaming development? Blog post? Git RSS? Chat to YouTube about how the week went? Facebook? G+?

IMO, an occasional blog post is fine if coupled with access to the commit logs in git and a public bug tracker with actual notes in the tickets (not just "fixed in build #9999.")

I will admit, perhaps there could have been a lot better testing on this, however I would like to make a suggestion. Why not make a sticky thread in the bug and support sections specifically for having a compilation of what bugs there are and what bugs have been fixed, acting as a community bug list? One additional suggestion, if this thread is created, you could possibly post a hotfix in it every few bugs that are fixed.

Richard Stallman has the answer, but the world doesn't like what he has to say.

To me, this whole issue stems from people not having free access to the program they enjoy. If you don't like something fix it. If you can't fix it yourself pay someone else to fix it. Finding pitfalls in a developer's process is only a problem because the law says you have to rely on them and can't go and fix issues yourself.

Quote from n1ght5talker

Richard Stallman has the answer, but the world doesn't like what he has to say.

To me, this whole issue stems from people not having free access to the program they enjoy. If you don't like something fix it. If you can't fix it yourself pay someone else to fix it. Finding pitfalls in a developer's process is only a problem because the law says you have to rely on them and can't go and fix issues yourself.

You mean kind of like what Rawcode already did?

Quote from CrafterOfMines57

You mean kind of like what Rawcode already did?

My bad, I thought IC was covered by the same kind of copyright most others mods have. I kind of expected to have issues if I released a mod that was 99% IC code with a few changes of my own. Maybe I should look into IC and see if I want to create my own industrial craft type of mod, as much as I love IC I share many of the concerns the OP has.

Quote from n1ght5talker

My bad, I thought IC was covered by the same kind of copyright most others mods have. I kind of expected to have issues if I released a mod that was 99% IC code with a few changes of my own. Maybe I should look into IC and see if I want to create my own industrial craft type of mod, as much as I love IC I share many of the concerns the OP has.

IC2 still have the kind of copyright most other mods have, Bugfixes where considered an exception so they are considered or categorized as an Addon (In that particular thread)

Quote from Xarses

First off I love IC, I love the work you guys do and I'd likely still be using this if you didn't change anything.

That said the last ~45 seconds of Kane's rant (Yes its a rant) is about the only useful section. It is quite flaming to the IC devs, but unfortunately is is a symptom of a problem between the dev team and the users. I think the base points that are trying to be made are:

1. Release more fixes
2. Be more open (not necessarly source)
3. Communicate more to the users.
4. Accept help
5. Test better

Now to my 2 cents.

A. Please do nightly regular builds
B. Get a bug tracker
C. Communicate to the users
D. Open up a little and relax

A. The build thing is a common problem I see around here "its fixed in..." "its fixed already..." If we had access to more incremental or "hot-fix" builds then we would be able to help find new bugs or stop crying all-together. This also leads into B.

B. Get a bug tracker. From what I've been able to discern (maybe I'm wrong) is that the only area to post bugs is the form. Which is nearly the worst way to track issues other than maybe PM's. Please get a tracker, they are easy to monitor, easy to see if a problem was already reported and easy to see if the problem was already fixed. It should reduce the time you guys spend yelling talking at people about duplicate reports. This also leads to C.

C. Communicate. The information we can (easily) find related to updates, progress, and known issues is difficult to find to non-existent. Formalized bug tracking will help (See B). Please stop taking a lot of the users "stupidity" or otherwise lack of following your directions as an insult. At times the dev team can be very hostile to users simply because they ask a dumb question, or didn't read through a couple hundred posts.

D. You have openly flamed rawcode for his 1.106 bugfix mod. Yes he should have asked for permission per your directions, but it also shows that there are issues here. If your user feels that it's necessary to post fixes because you have failed to publish them, don't flame them over it. First relax, then see what you can do to pull this back into IC. Maybe they could be a contirbutor, there are other sub-mod contributors that might be helpfull to IC in general as bug hunters. We all do these kinds of things because we a passionate about them, but at times we need to step back, relax and let someone else help if they can and/or are willing to.

Thanks

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Perfect sum of my thoughts when listening to the video.
Please do the regular builds, and accept help from the users, the bug tracker is one of the most coolest ideas, but if the dev-team is not going to make hotfixes (or regular builds, w/e) it will not be useful, i mean, what he says on the video is true, we' been waiting almost 3 weeks to get a bugfix, and got no answer until this.
Please, take advantage of this situation and reconsider some things =)

if IC2 goes open source, I eagerly await the ability to contribute.

Quote from enneract

if IC2 goes open source, I eagerly await the ability to contribute.

Agreed.

Quote from Drizak

Thanks
Perfect sum of my thoughts when listening to the video.
Please do the regular builds, and accept help from the users, the bug tracker is one of the most coolest ideas, but if the dev-team is not going to make hotfixes (or regular builds, w/e) it will not be useful, i mean, what he says on the video is true, we' been waiting almost 3 weeks to get a bugfix, and got no answer until this.
Please, take advantage of this situation and reconsider some things =)

Completely disagree. Even if he doesn't change anything else about the IC2 development process; at least you could see known issues as well as possible workarounds and acknowledgements by the devs.

Personally, I think the community is asking too much. IC2, in a sense, is a GIFT to all, yet IC2 is humble enough to allowed alterations, add-ons, even opinions to help this mod out.

Let's keep in mind that it's a far cry from what Flowerchild had for Better Than Wolves, with his tyrannical sense of control of his mod. IC2 is not like that. Hell, even Eloraam is guilty of the same behavior when it comes to cross compatibility and the ability to create power converters (Spoiler Alert: She hates the shit out of them..)

Industrial Craft is nothing like that. It has the greatness of being receptive to the community, but at the same time is reasonable to the people who help develop this mod with their time, talents, and life issues. I think alot of you kids forget the factor that bills, jobs, and obligations have on normal adults, and the fact that all those things take a MUCH GREATER priority over this hobby (Yes, Minecraft modding is a hobby... nothing more...). While mods like Buildcraft and Forestry offer live beta updates via github and jenkins sharing systems, this does NOT make such things a requirement for developing a mod. I do not believe that Industrialcraft should be required to follow with doing this service for this mod, and such obligation limits the freedom and creative power of developers, as now their hobby 'requires something extra out of them...

I think the community is being terribly unfair to IC atm because of the bugs and unsolved issues currently withing the 1.3.2 version of Minecraft, and possibly other forces at working trying to push development faster so that they can get back to 'business as usual'. I think you people need to be reminded that this work is completely volunteer, and that simply Open sourcing the code of IC2 won't make your time schedules run any faster...

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But as well I've to admit it was probably a hit necessary to pull me from my generic lethargy I'm often occupied with. Let's hope this will be one of the rare times where over-dramatized ranting actually leads to a positive effect.

The only thing I hope you improve upon is faster bugfix delivery. It's a pain to hear that bugs 'are fixed in an unreleased version'. Beyond that, I think IC2 is doing the best it can do considering the limitations of both time, Minecraft, Java, and plenty of other factors...

Beyond that, I think the community has enough tools to work with as far as implementing their own content and changes. Any remarks claiming that these tools are not in place is purely negligence of said users. If you are that diehard about your idea, fucking write a damn add-on for it...