porphyre wrote:Orion - Oh, I get that you've done some coding. What I'm saying is that there doesn't seem to be a teamwork problem. Garagoz and Stassy and everybody else seem to be working smoothly together. It's simply that the team has decided to produce new features while fixing old bugs instead of focusing on one or the other.
You have to remember that, while we are the users, the product is also influenced by the real world. If Garagoz takes 2-3 months between releases to fix bugs, there will be 150-250 new cards out there, plus the 150-250 new cards that would've normally been included in the release. I realize the product doesn't have nearly all the cards anyway, but skipping a release immediately puts the team 500+ cards further in the hole.
The direction of the team should probably be voted on... dunno who would be the voters, but it's not really a decision that should be taken lightly.
The greater problem is we don't have anybody equally versed in C and ASM.
The link between the C parts of the game and those of the original ASM coding aren't fully understood - and much of the game is still a web of patches and hacks.
Even Mok said as much - he hacked the original game but since his ASM adaptations of the original coding the game has been hacked for C, which allowed access to the card coding as there are more people versed in C than ASM, but with the drawback of possibly less understanding of access to the ASM components.
Mok admitted his own understanding of C wasn't as good as that of his mastery of ASM, and suggested that it needed someone equally versed in C and ASM to translate the original ASM coding into C.
So without this we are left with working with what we have, or putting the whole project on hold until we can find someone who can do the coding translation. And as Mok also said - finding someone to take this on may never happen.
The current card coding team at the moment is Garagoz and myself - he does all the C coding (and a damn good job he does working on his own), I do the Manalink Excel grunt work - like adding new card sets to the database and implementing the recent Tournament Filters on Garagoz suggestion (ably nagged by Orion79 apparently
).
But without the all the guys doing the bug hunting work all this would be for nought - they are just as much responsible for keeping this thing going as anybody.
The game is what it is - and we all contribute because for all it's faults it's still a fun game. If it wasn't, it would have died long ago.