User:Enetheru/Dump

I'm so sick of these thoughts that repeatedly pop into my head.. so here is a place to dump them, so hopefully they will stop running around in there causing me strife.

At the moment i have been thinking about reasons spring sucks. not on the highly technical features but in general infra and state.

Why is there some weird dedicated IRC chat thingo.. really i just want to be able to load up my irc client and log in to ask questions and hang out.. i really don't want to use some shitty lobby.

Why are the formats so fucked up and difficult to use, and why are there so many. the primary texture for any object should be its diffuse+alpha, then everything else put in a secondary or more textures. it makes no sense to do it any other way.. it creates difficulty unnecessarily.

Why does the engine support so many formats, it may be slightly convenient for that one person who uses some obscure format.. but it fragments the art dev community. pick something that works and use it, everything else can be marked as unsuitable. then all assets will be the same.. if you need to change it, perform a system wide change.. also i cant imagine how much code maintenance that must be to support. this goes for 3d formats as well as 2d formats.. official documentation should pick one and stick to it.

Why is one of the core tools Mapconv separate from the engine, considering spring is supposed to be an engine which others use, the fact that mapconv isn't treated as an integral part of the whole is ludicrous.. currently its suffering bitrot and incompatibility due to lack of maintenance.

The tools are the most important part of an engine project, and yet they receive fuck all support. Abstracting away the difficult shit is how things get done. templatizing and documentation, pipeline integration, etc are far more important than a 0.01% optimization. As an engine project i have no idea why tools have been left out of the equation like they somehow are not as important.

Network infrastructure.. or infrastructure in general is also a tool.. if i want to create a game using the engine i don't necessarily want to integrate with the rest of the spring community, but i want it as an option.. when i download the package i want to have the tools to create me own game and release in multiple ways. a client, a server. and the server i want options for not just a host, but a chat host, file server for maps and mods, mumble server.. basically for a client i just want the lobby + engine.. but for the server i want Live CD/meta-package that auto installs all components and has shell scripts all made to run all services on the host. that way i can use the engine to make my game, and then run servers completely independently from the rest of the spring community. I also want the options to not run independently, if my game is small, or experimental.

IMHO the spring community has messed up priorities. and given that i successfully go to uni next year, resume my graphics programming degree i will think about pushing this community kicking and screaming if necessary, or just plain forking it, into a project worthy of its codebase.