The Once Very Promising Unvanquished Game Hasn't Seen A New Release In Two Years

[illwieckz]

So when you have complex technical projects to complete, you don't think the […]

You're just paving a way for an straw man argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man ;-)

I say the one skilled on a task is not necessarily the one skilled on another task. You can't buy your voice with code, more is needed. Merit is just a way to tell your ideas can be very interesting and have to be heard, it does not mean they are the best one everytime or they follow the project strategy. Merit is good but it's not enough. The danger of meritocracy is making merit enough. The main idea is that: you can't buy your voice with code, you earn it by confidence. You can't buy your voice with your power, you earn it by confidence from others. Code and merit is just a way among many to say to other people they can trust you.

[makam]

So when you have complex technical projects to complete, you don't think the responsible organization should seek out the best and brightest talent? They should use any old bum who raises his hand? Sorry, this is not how the world works. The fact is, most endeavors that have any value at all, require skilled people, and skilled people are a scarce commodity. Merit is king.

No, but 90% of people are neither bums nor geniuses(not even at their profession). Most people are something in between. The 'meat' of society.

[AJenbo]

I do think this article is a way for Michael to inform the larger public that the project could use some more skilled hands and as such is a contribution. Michael did his job well and I'm thankful for that. I was myself hoping for such an article and I'm happy to see Michael focused on the lack of manpower, which is exactly what Unvanquished needs. I myself shared this phoronix Article everywhere I was able to share it. That is constructive.

Fair enough, best of luck to you and your project

[Vanir]

So when you have complex technical projects to complete, you don't think the responsible organization should seek out the best and brightest talent? They should use any old bum who raises his hand? Sorry, this is not how the world works. The fact is, most endeavors that have any value at all, require skilled people, and skilled people are a scarce commodity. Merit is king.

No, organisations do not seek out the best and brightest, they seek to employ people who are judged to meet their requirements at the lowest possible cost with the greatest return on that cost - over a possible defined period of time. That's the business theory they may follow.
And it's the organisations' people who do this judging: how skilled are they at this?
This does not consider the question of whether a potential employee / contractor is a 'good fit' in the social sense.
Perceived merit is king.

Skilled people are a scarce commodity at a price point. Organisations will find required skillsets - aka wishlists - scarce if the price they are offering is manifestly too low.
So they hire any new bum; cheap bums apparently.

I raise my hand.

[Guest]

Well, realistically it's a bit hard to get excited for or even motivated to contribute to a game that looks like Quake 3 or something else from 15-20 years ago. Speaking for myself at least.

[willmore]

So where are you? In this article Michael focused on the lack of manpower, feedback is useful but can't substitute manpower. Perhaps your feedback just lacked some proofs of concept and implementations, but those require a contributor.

Where am I? How is that even remotely relevant?

As I said, I was a player. I did play testing. I wasn't on the coding side of the project. When changes were made to the game which altered the playability, playtesters explore and analyze that and provide that feedback to the designers--not all of whom are coders, either.

Play testing is an important part of game development. Not all of game development is coding.

Here's a depiction of what happened:
Players: "The changes to the game make it less fun."
Developers: "Hang on, we're chaning the balance and pacing and we're not quite done."
Players: "The game is no longer enjoyable to play."
Developers: "We've almost got all the changes made."
Players: "The game is completely broken and unplayable."
Developers: "Okay, changes done, it's perfect now."
Players: "FFS...."

I don't like the concept of meritocraty (it's just another name for the law of the strongest), but obviously to get ideas implemented they have to be implemented and someone has to jump from talker to contributor status. It's not about merit, it's about things having to be done to be done.

"jump from talker to contributor"? WTF? I don't know how more clearly you could demonstrate what's wrong with this project. Let me make this clear so that you can maybe start to understand it. Making a game is more than just coding. It's more than just coding and art assets.

[TheLexMachine]

I'm fine with the way the game looks and it's at a level that is appropriate for the majority of Linux enthusiasts, few of whom are running high-end hardware. The average Linux desktop is simply not advanced enough to function as a "Steam Machine" or Linux gaming desktop. As far as updates go, I just want stability and performance fixes, with a few new features or tweaks introduced when it makes sense to do so. FFS, I don't need a CryTek game!

[illwieckz]

"jump from talker to contributor"? WTF? I don't know how more clearly you could demonstrate what's wrong with this project.

You probably missed that part:

to get a thing changed, people needs to change it or to find someone to change it

I was a player. I did play testing. I wasn't on the coding side of the project too. The man getting warm tribute in first paragraphs of the blogpost was not a coder at all, and this fact was one of the best thing of this project.

So, now let's ask the real questions: how many years have you lived with the sadness you express today? Was you able to change the cause of your sadness? If not, why are you sad about something you can't fix and why keeping this sadness for years? Was you able to change the sadness itself? If not, why? Sadness usually just disappear with time when you don't focus on the cause. Do you have any interest in being sad? Keeping oneself able to rant after years have passed is having interest in being sad.

Other people's experience demonstrate your rant tells more about your sadness than the project itself. I can't fix your sadness. The project can't fix your sadness.

[illwieckz]

Well, realistically it's a bit hard to get excited for or even motivated to contribute to a game that looks like Quake 3 or something else from 15-20 years ago. Speaking for myself at least.

That's a good point, and that's an issue with such big projects lasting for years. XreaL looked awesome then Doom3 engine source code was released (and XreaL former developer shifted to RBDOOM3BFG). It does not mean games does not look bad: Xonotic maps based on Quake3 technologies still looks better than Quake4 maps, because even if q3map2 is painful to use, precomputed lights still looks better than the ugly id Tech 4 realtime lights.

The screenshot in Phoronix news is very old, there is an alpha 26 mention on it but it's probably older than 4 years old, the model shown is a now-replaced placeholder, I even don't remember that hud and it's full of tremulous thing, the render is not colorgraded etc. So this screenshot is not representative. By the way, yes, technology moves faster, sometime faster than us.

When the project started, physical based rendering was not common at all, and PBR is now a today's expectation. Switching to PBR requires redoing all the textures so it's not even for tomorrow. That said, I would really like to see Dæmon/Unvanquished having sRGB lightmaps, even without PBR that's the thing that makes Xonotic maps looking more more natural. It would be very cool to get someone implementing it in Dæmon (the engine).

When the project shifted from QVM (the old Quake Virtual Machine from Quake3 based on C language compiled by the non-free LCC compiler) to NaCL and C++, it was very forward thinking, but time has passed and Google itself does not ship NaCl anymore in their products, it's not a problem for Unvanquished and there is really no urge, it works well and does the job, but we are not anymore in that side of the trend. A port to WASM is doable, and jumping from NaCl to WASM requires far far less work to do than the jump from QVM to NaCL we did. We did the biggest part of the job for NaCl and the C++ port, but switching the toolchain and the runtime needs manpower. There is skills to do it, we just lack manpower. Again, it's not blocking at all, it just means we are not in trends.

Six years ago, Vulkan was not a thing. Our OpenGL 3 renderer fits all our needs, but we can say the same: it's not as trendy as before.

By the way the game still looks good. Things I would like to see in short term are sRGB lightmap like Xonotic and a nice water shader like the one Xonotic has. In my opinion our current water shader even look worst than the Quake3 one, so we would really appreciate a contribution for a better one. :-)

That said, it's still one of the best looking open source game around, among Xonotic and some. :-)

[willmore]

I was a player. I did play testing. I wasn't on the coding side of the project too. The man getting warm tribute in first paragraphs of the blogpost was not a coder at all, and this fact was one of the best thing of this projet.

So, now let's ask the real questions: how many years have you lived with the sadness you express today? Was you able to change the cause of your sadness? If not, why are you sad about something you can't fix and why keeping this sadness for years? Was you able to change the sadness itself? If not, why? Sadness usually just disappear with time when you don't focus on the cause. Do you have any interest in being sad? Keeping oneself able to rant after years have passed is having interest in being sad.

Other people's experience demonstrate your rant tells more about your sadness than the project itself. I can't fix your sadness. The project can't fix your sadness.

I have no idea what the hell you are talking about now.