Oh man.

Reading about all this makes me think MUD is just the appropriate name for anything going on in the Multi-User-Dungeon community.

You're literally throwing tons of mud at each other. It's hard to say who's the best mudder but I suppose it's still between Locke and Vryce. They have covered the whole community into mud and now others follow them, trying to make a nice painting out of it.

I'm new to this community (coming from text- and graphical adventures and classical, 2D top-down RPGs) but I'm dead sick already. Not to attack you guys in any ways (You're all cool. Except that some are heating up a bit too fast, for my understanding, but so is the human mind. It's complex) but is there actually a way to converse normally in this community (not just talking about this board, but the whole community)?

All I read is "This guy steals the code from that guy","Party A revokes all rights to Party B","I am genius, you are not","All your work belongs to me!", etc.

I was quite relaxed for the whole last week, but now it really gets to me. I've never seen something like this before. Normally, a community would gladly answer all – non stupid – questions, converse new theories/techniques, lay claim to only their very own work. You know. Those things that make a good society.

The Mudding community, on the other hand, seems more like a small, caged area, filled with rabid pitbulls, a small count of innocent rabbits and a larger count of guys with firearms, ready to shoot both, the pitbulls and the rabbits.

I only have two things to say in response to this. Most of us intentionally avoid threads involving flaming or controversy. Indeed, some of us spend a great deal of time with technical questions ranging from specific language syntax to general design and theory. The second comment in response is that there are often times when these so-called innocent rabbits are not so innocent at all. It's often more like 2 pit-bulls in a caged area.

This is exactly how I feel KaVir. And I'm absolutely shocked that no one who's contributed seriously to FUSS is standing up to this. But, then again, I guess they don't want to feel the wrath of insubordination.

I'm not sure what ammo he has left to throw. Or really, what ammo he was throwing in the first place. The guy has contacted and complained to Linode so much since he was sent packing, they just forward his emails to /dev/null. He can only really hurt the communities he's still leading. I think MudBytes is separated enough to only get a minor itch when he bitches.

I can't believe you are stealing my peace idea Blinx. You were obviously jealous because I am so much smarter than you, so you had to take credit for my work. I'm going to pull all of my work off of every site you participate in.

No really, you are right. It is a bit crazy…I do find a lot of it entertaining though =)

Hehe. Good one.

I was actually just doing my meditation (expanding my "A room by the fire" Inform 7 text-adventure. Quite relaxing until I stumbled across some Glulx errors) when the Samson talk began. So I felt double pissed.

Must've something to do with the lack of graphics that makes some of us so damn deluded. I bet Locke's napoleon complex would vanish pretty quickly, if he only had a mirror. :tongue:

I've been part of many internet communities over the years, and they all seem to follow the same general trend, with some being far more aggressive than here. I'd be curious to hear what internet communities you've frequently before - were they heavily moderated?

But if you think this is stressful, wait until you get some players. There's a good reason why "thick skin" is considered an important trait for running a mud ;)

The best way to avoid getting irked by discussions that irk you is to simply stay away, like Runter said. If you enter the fire pit, be prepared to be burned. If you see something turning sour, steer clear if you don't want to see ugly stuff. There's an awful lot of history here (as in any community, really) so sometimes things will heat up for reasons unclear to you. It's unfortunate that things are this way, but, well, they are. That said, it doesn't really help to paint the entire community with such a dark brush, for really, many questions are indeed answered, many people spend a lot of time helping others, and people do indeed discuss interesting techniques and so forth.


I don't think we need to continue airing dirty laundry. There's no need to rub salt on wounds. It's over and done with, let's do the mature thing and move on.

lolwtf.

I can't believe the Diku license is still an issue with all the unlicensed (or non-restrictive licensed) codebases out there these days. Masochists! :smile:

To be honest, I find it a little unreasonable too–But as they say, if you can't abide the license then don't use the software.

Well, I find it unreasonable that someone who wants to make money in the future would want to use diku in the first place. :)

Yeah! You tell 'em!



Oh.

There appears to be a problem with your high horse there. Hope you kept the receipt.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

Kayle has tried. While I'm not thrilled with the final results, he deserves credit for that. I don't really see what any of the other FUSS contributors could do about it anyway, besides get into a major license revokation war with one another, and I don't really see how that would help in any way.

How exactly does one stand up to the person who started the project, and has done most of the work in keeping it up to date for so long? The only reason I even have a say in the project is because he got tired of things that went on here and stepped back from the community to focus on Oblivion modding, and I wasn't about to let the project stagnate because of that.

Nothing to do with a high horse or anything.

All he's basically saying is "The sweat of your brow doesn't belong to you but to all members of society, no matter if they actually contributed anything to it." "You want Youtube? Sure, it's yours. You want unearned rewards while leaving others to unrewarded duties? Glad to help. Here's some cash I stole from the guy over there".

I don't really feel like conversing, but let's just say this: His whole being is based on a quite parasitic idea of altruism.

Indeed, when he had his little rant and mentioned "Equalization of Opportunity" and "The Greater Good", he sounded like a real life James Taggart to me.


And yea. I goddamn hate those attitudes. Got an idea stolen from me this college year. Basically an inexpensive attempt in building powerful workstations. Guy was in my project team and claimed my work to be his for the time I was hospitalized. He barely wrote two pages (filled with spelling mistakes and technical aspects I never intended, since they would make the whole architecture 1.000 bucks more than even the most expensive Sun workstations) and I've got all original work on my HDD. Still. It does nothing that I've even got an old prototype I designed while being in high-school. He fooled the people and now most believe him.

I think the point was that you don't like people throwing mud and yet you seem to be throwing mud. Anyhoo I think we'd all prefer to just move on already, so I'll take my own medicine on this issue… :thinking:

I know you explained that you also use a proprietary format for compression, but I just thought I'd ask to this - why? You could simply resize it on your computer and include that picture (in whatever format you like) with your game, which would also serve the purpose of making the download smaller by some degree. Even if you do it to support different resolutions (so that you're resizing to different degrees), you could make the download contain the largest size picture you intend to support and resize from there, still keeping the 720p original safe on your own computer.

Well. 720p actually is the max resolution, so I'll probably include that. Resizing the whole image before it even gets to the client, is a bad idea. That would basically mean that the picture is resized twice.

The proprietary format which I was talking about sat on my HDD for the last 5 years, so it's not as if I had to do it all from scratch.
The compression is quite good, as well. Compression being the main reason I created this format, back in my high-school days, when I still used the lowest of low-level languages and my apps suffered a memory leak all too often.

Yes, but you also avoid a song and dance and simplify your distribution. I'm not sure why you would need to resize it twice, though: just resize it once to the size it will be displayed at.


No offense but if compression is your goal, there are probably much better compression libraries out there.
And memory leaks are a separate problem from memory usage… are you using the term to really mean memory leaks?

I got used to calling it this way. Lack of memory would probably be the more appropriate term (I sucked at resource management, back then), though. I usually couldn't force memory allocation early enough to save my application from running out of memory (as I said "the lowest of low-level languages"). Those languages were merely usable for something like a stop watch or a timer, yet I tried to code a Point'n'Click Adventure Engine with it.

Compression isn't my main concern nowadays, though. As stated earlier, the protection of my IP is my main concern and the reason why I want to avoid unprotected standards like bmp or jpg.

Pretty much every game developer (from the smallest hobbyist to the largest game company) uses it's own formats, nowadays.

I don't know what you mean here either. This makes me think you were coding in assembly, but you probably mean "basic" not "low-level".

Anyhow I guess you have your reasons, it still just seems really weird to me to protect a picture that you'll be putting up on the screen for free screen capturing anyhow. And if screen-caps are fine with you, why not just distribute the appropriately sized version? If you distribute the large one, people can reverse engineer your "compression" and steal it anyway…


Are you sure that they do this to prevent theft?

I was programming in Fortran, Turbo Pascal, ASM (Assembly) and various Basic dialects, back then.

I was mainly referring to ASM (a low-level language, obviously) and Qbasic (which I consider a low-level language as in "Man. It's so Basic, it only needs a low-level of education"). I'm probably (most definitely) splitting hairs, but "low-level languages" just sounds better than "basic languages", especially in contrast to "high-level languages".


EDIT: And yea. I'm well aware that Turbo Pascal and Fortran aren't low-level languages.