ProtoCiv: porting Freeciv to Python

[WTH]

You have the greatest inherent ability to insult the largest number of
people with the smallest amount of effort.
You are truly a legend in your own mind.

WTH

 

[Peter Ashford]

Brandon, don't be such an arsehole. OS developers do things their own
way and offer their labour for free. If you don't like it noone will
care - but don't denegrate people just because they don't do things your
way.

FYI, porting GPL'd Windows code to Linux can be painful as well as vice
versa.

Quit insulting people who have done nothing worse than offer you code
and tools for free.

 

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Brandon, don't be such an arsehole. OS developers do things their own
way and offer their labour for free. If you don't like it noone will
care - but don't denegrate people just because they don't do things your
way.

I'll denigrate them all I want. With rare exceptions, they aren't a value
add to what I want to get done. There's this huge cultural divide between
hobbyists and commercialists.

--
Cheers, www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every Seattle, WA

"We live in a world of very bright people building
crappy software with total shit for tools and process."
- Ed Mckenzie

 

[James Keasley]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

I'll denigrate them all I want. With rare exceptions, they aren't a value
add to what I want to get done. There's this huge cultural divide between
hobbyists and commercialists.

Yeah, one lot write software that works, the others write software that'll
make them money for fixing their own mistakes after the fact


- --
James jamesk[at]homeric[dot]co[dot]uk

'Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense'
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFABHIfqfSmHkD6LvoRAu4JAJ404it8nTW7VF1EkEHlDY+9Nf/ZvACfW+g8
AP8YbKAdFCrPDtF3lN9Lg98=
=i/F+
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

 

[G.I.L]

Here's a postmortem. Short version: I've canned the project. Many
of you will say "I told you so," but at least I almost have a VS .NET
2003 build to show for it.

Actually, it's you who said "told you so", since most of your stories
revolve around unfinished projects and utter failures.

Brandon, why the **** on Earth couldn't you spend that exact amount of time
doing what you did BEFORE posting and arguing with the entire newsgroup? It
was an unbelievable waste of time, since you've managed to convice (maybe
still wrongfully) all the people that you are completely clueless.

The single most problematic issue you have is the belief that one can rely
on failures to pave the "right new way"(tm). Wrong. It can also lead to
endless new shitty ones. Listen to a .02$ piece of advice: since your
pioneering ways have been completely fruitless (at least commercially-wise),
why not concentrate on succeeding where other people normally do, and THEN
prove there's another and better way to achieve success?

I see your point in many of the issues you raised. But the only reason I
don't compare myself to you, is that I have a shitload of games to prove my
point. I've never had a major failure, so I never needed to use one to
leverage my projects. All the things I learned from, were simply bad habits,
mostly coding habits. I constantly evolve, in small steps, from one success
to another. That's how it should be. You do the math.

g

 

[WTH]

the others write software that'll

make them money for fixing their own mistakes after the fact

Ixnay on the ecretsay...

WTH

 

[Erik Max Francis]

I'll denigrate them all I want. With rare exceptions, they aren't a
value
add to what I want to get done. There's this huge cultural divide
between
hobbyists and commercialists.

Right, they're all hobbyists and you're a commercialist. What's your
professional experience, again?

 

[Dan Olson]

As a person heavily involved in the pseudo-commercial Linux game industry
and a Linux user in general, I must say that I agree with your general
assessment that Linux users do far too little to make sure that their
applications run and run well on Windows.

That said, I disagree that Open Source projects have little to no value in
commercial projects. There are countless examples that could be pointed
out, but I'll just point out one of them: OpenAL.

Here is my future advice: get a month and a half into a project before
announcing it. Not only will you have people not saying "I told you so"
if you scrap it, but people will in general be more interested in your
project when you have something to show for it.

Are you planning to make your vs.net version of FreeCiv available? Others
might be interested in continuing the work. Cygwin is a horrible horrible
way to run things on Windows, and I'd like to take this time to insult the
mothers of everyone who has ever made their Linux application run on
Windows using only Cygwin.

 

[Nathan Mates]

I'm also starting to downright despise Linuxers. If I see another
project that's "cross-platform, so long as your platform is Linux,"
I'm going to cut someone's head off.

While I agree with that statement in the abstract (and can remember
when it was SunOS being the platform of choice), I would like to point
out that FreeBSD has reached over 10,000 ports. (See the counter at
http://www.freshports.org/categories.php ) For those that don't run
FreeBSD (or *BSD in general), a port is a piece of software designed
to be built completely from source on a local machine. Packages are
pre-built binaries. So, it the fine FreeBSD folks can manage to make
"Linux-only" apps build fine from source, maybe you can too.

The rest of your pissy "I can't CVS commit back" comments, well,
start your own darn project on http://sourceforge.net/ . Once it's
available for others, it's got a chance of being used widely. But, I
suspect your motive was to be a freeloader and not contribute back.

Nathan Mates

 

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Brandon, why the **** on Earth couldn't you spend that exact amount of time
doing what you did BEFORE posting and arguing with the entire newsgroup?

Hey GIL, you're here wasting time of your own free will. Don't look to me
to be the purveyor of your quality discourse. To me this is just hours
between implementing stuff.

Although actually, there's another agenda. I know *someone* out there is
going through the same shit I have / I am. The posts are for their benefit,
to give them warnings / inklings.

It
was an unbelievable waste of time, since you've managed to convice (maybe
still wrongfully) all the people that you are completely clueless.

Why, because I turned around a project in 3 weeks while having the flu half
the time?

I laugh, over and over again, at all the people who declare 3D spherical
icosahedral planetary display engines to be trivial, or VS .NET 2003 ports
of Freeciv to be trivial, or any other project I've sunk blood into and run
into difficulties. I know better. It's water off my back because I know
what an armchair peanut gallery sounds like.

You try to do something big, you put your money on the line to do it, you
fail or don't entirely succeed, you give postmortem, you lay all your cards
out for others to examine... *then* I will worry about your opinion.

I see your point in many of the issues you raised. But the only reason I
don't compare myself to you, is that I have a shitload of games to prove my
point. I've never had a major failure, so I never needed to use one to
leverage my projects. All the things I learned from, were simply bad habits,
mostly coding habits. I constantly evolve, in small steps, from one success
to another. That's how it should be. You do the math.

Those who never taste failure are haughty.

--
Cheers, www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every Seattle, WA

"The pioneer is the one with the arrows in his back."
- anonymous entrepreneur

 

[Erik Max Francis]

Why, because I turned around a project in 3 weeks while having the flu
half
the time?

Since this "turnaround" involved abandoning your project, it's hard to
see how having devoted 1.5 man-weeks to a project which it should have
only taken you a few man-hours to realize was not going to pay off is an
impressive achievement. (Why you thought the project was going to be
further any of your personal goals in the first place is completely
beyond my comprehension, as well, but that's another story.)

I laugh, over and over again, at all the people who declare 3D
spherical
icosahedral planetary display engines to be trivial, ...

There's a big difference between "trivial" and "not nearly as impressive
as you seem to think," particularly since your goal was to create a game
and you got nowhere on the actual game (which in frustrating you
abandoned at the time). And how many man-months did you seek into
_that_ project?

A "3D spherical icosahedral planetary display engine" may be darn neat,
but it's hardly an impressive commercial achivement on its own
(particularly considering how much effort you needed to put into it),
and as a resume-building project it doesn't exactly excite the blood.
Oh, and by the way, nobody's ever seen it in action except you -- so we
have no idea whether or not it even qualifies as an accomplishment!

... or VS .NET 2003
ports
of Freeciv to be trivial, ...

But by your own admission, you _haven't_ ported Freeciv to VS .NET 2003.
You got it building, but it doesn't work. That's hardly an
accomplishment.

... or any other project I've sunk blood into
and run
into difficulties. I know better. It's water off my back because I
know
what an armchair peanut gallery sounds like.

The problem is that from everybody else's perspective, you brag about
accomplishments which, from the point of view of everyone else, are not
accomplishments but failures; what projects are there that you have sunk
time into and have paid off, either in having something to show for it,
or having (gasp) made you money?

You're trying to put this weird spin on your public displays of
embarassment is not really working. Trying and failing is a part of
life. Trying and failing, over and over again, consistently, despite
insisting quite urgently on how important you are to a community, is
starting to get suspicious.

Those who never taste failure are haughty.

And those who never taste success should probably come to the
realization, eventually, that they are doing something wrong.

 

[Peter Ashford]

I'll denigrate them all I want. With rare exceptions, they aren't a value
add to what I want to get done. There's this huge cultural divide between
hobbyists and commercialists.

Why do you think OS developers owe you any kind of value at all?

 

[Brandon J. Van Every]

As a person heavily involved in the pseudo-commercial Linux game industry
and a Linux user in general, I must say that I agree with your general
assessment that Linux users do far too little to make sure that their
applications run and run well on Windows.

Yeeeeeeeey! agreement of some kind from some quarter.

That said, I disagree that Open Source projects have little to no value in
commercial projects. There are countless examples that could be pointed
out, but I'll just point out one of them: OpenAL.

I did mention there are exceptions, but they are few and far between.
OpenAL is once again not a game project. Generally speaking, there is no
critical mass of Open Source development in the Windows world. The vast
majority of Open Source developers are Linuxers, and carry with them Linux-y
baggage about how software "should" be developed. Their notions of
"should," both ideologically and practically, lead to Windows build
procedures being rather shoddy.

Here is my future advice: get a month and a half into a project before
announcing it.

I'm curious what sky is going to fall if I don't follow your advice?
Really, so many engineers have this "I want everybody to shut up" mentality.
It's not like when I first spoke, that I promised anyone anything, or was
particularly looking for help (unless someone with a very similar agenda had
happened along). Rather I offered up a set of ideas for people to kick at.
Thanks, one and all, for whatever small amount of intellectual labor you
performed for me at the time.

Not only will you have people not saying "I told you so"
if you scrap it, but people will in general be more interested in your
project when you have something to show for it.

Dude, when you "are interested" in Ocean Mars, I will be worth millions of
dollars. You are never going to be interested in it before then. So why
should I care if you are interested or not, right now? The only thing
people like you respect is money and success. I am different, I respect the
honest attempts. That's the "what it means to be an indie developer"
conversation I think is worth having. Your kind of conversation, that "you
are only allowed to publically demonstrate success," is a conversation I
think worth ignoring. It's bullshit: the vast majority of us do *not*
succeed all the time, or even a lot of the time. We fear to admit this
because we don't want to look stupid. But, at this point in my career I'm
quite beyond that fear.

Are you planning to make your vs.net version of FreeCiv available? Others
might be interested in continuing the work.

Yes, I do. The question is whether I can get the freeciv.org people to put
it in their source pool or not.

Cygwin is a horrible horrible
way to run things on Windows, and I'd like to take this time to insult the
mothers of everyone who has ever made their Linux application run on
Windows using only Cygwin.

I am not sure how I feel about it. I think it only bothers me when they
claim to be cross-platform in theory, and the Windows build simply does not
work in practice. A working Windows build should be easy to obtain all the
dependencies for, and it should just build. When it doesn't do that, when
you have to chase all over Hell's green acre to find the libraries, and then
the build simply coughs and gags and dies, I'm not even slightly amused at
how "cross-platform" some Linuxer is claiming things to be.

Linux == grungy OS for people who mostly don't care about good deployment
and ease-of-use practices.

 

[Dan Olson]

I'm curious what sky is going to fall if I don't follow your advice?

It's just advice. I think it would have been smoother for everyone if
you'd followed it, but apparently you prefer to piss on my advice so
that's cool too.

 

[WTH]

You try to do something big, you put your money on the line to do it, you

fail or don't entirely succeed, you give postmortem, you lay all your cards
out for others to examine... *then* I will worry about your opinion.

You are seriously delusional. You seem to be one of those people who is
constantly seeking persecution of some sort. The kind that feels the need
to bear a cross that no-one seems to think needs bearing (of course they're
all delusional and YOU'RE the sane one...) Occam's razor...?

WTH

 

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Why do you think OS developers owe you any kind of value at all?

I don't. But that's not going to stop me from denigrating them for being
incapable of fulfillng the kinds of projects I have in mind.

--
Cheers, www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every Seattle, WA

20% of the world is real.
80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.

 

[Brandon J. Van Every]

It's just advice. I think it would have been smoother for everyone if
you'd followed it, but apparently you prefer to piss on my advice so
that's cool too.

You have some deep-seated need for smootheness? I see no a priori value in
smoothness.

--
Cheers, www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every Seattle, WA

20% of the world is real.
80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.

 

[Erik Max Francis]

I don't. But that's not going to stop me from denigrating them for
being
incapable of fulfillng the kinds of projects I have in mind.

If you're saying that you've come to the realization that volunteer
programers on a project with which you only have a passing interest
won't follow your orders and do whatever you say, I'd say pointing that
out is less like "denigration" and more like "common goddamn sense."

There are plenty of things you can get out of starting, getting involved
with, and approaching open source projects. A legion of personal
servants is not going to be one of them, and only a crass idiot would
think otherwise.

 

[Paul Boddie]

There are plenty of things you can get out of starting, getting involved
with, and approaching open source projects. A legion of personal
servants is not going to be one of them, and only a crass idiot would
think otherwise.

As far as I've been able to discover, life is just one long cocktail
party in Brandon's honour. So it isn't exactly surprising that
everyone appears to him as just another waiter with a tray of drinks.

Paul

 

[G.I.L]

Hey GIL, you're here wasting time of your own free will. Don't look
to me to be the purveyor of your quality discourse. To me this is
just hours between implementing stuff.

Partially implementing stuff.

Although actually, there's another agenda. I know *someone* out
there is going through the same shit I have / I am. The posts are
for their benefit, to give them warnings / inklings.

Are you applying to be a martyr, St. Brandon?

Why, because I turned around a project in 3 weeks while having the
flu half the time?

No, because you dumped the project because it was boring. This may kill any
credit you may have had with people.

You try to do something big, you put your money on the line to do it,
you fail or don't entirely succeed, you give postmortem, you lay all
your cards out for others to examine... *then* I will worry about
your opinion.

You state that you will follow only those who fail after putting their own
money on projects? BTW, there seems to be a hint of contradiction, since you
normally don't look at success the way other people do ($$$), but whenever
you say "failure", it's exactly what other people mean.

Those who never taste failure are haughty.

...or just plain cautious.

g