Developers
 

For starters : I have been learrning to script on the Testbed server, and I appreciate the chance for being allowed to be on that server. Next I have used forums a couple of times to get help scripting when I have needed it. When I have used the forums I have gotten help within a decent amount of time. I guess that my curiousity has gotten the better of me and I have decided to place this thread. I know some or maybe most of the developers have a home server that they work for. I also understand that most of us have lives (myself included) and cannot work on Graal for major amounts of tme. What i don't understand is how developers don't develop for a purpose? They make random odd and in things, which are very complicated and really cool, but the things created wouldn't really contribute to a server or help an existing one along. It just seems odd to me that when servers ask for help, rarely any truely talented developers respond. This isn't in response to my thread in the for hire section becuase (as I put in that thread) I really didn't expect the idea to pass from forums to fruition.

hurt my eyes to read your text, try styling it up a bit?
meanwhile, im going to watch this.

This is the main reason why I am the only developer for my server. I've noticed that other devs want to work on their own projects which may have nothing to do with my server and ones that do work on what I give them take many days to show any progress or work. I have just been believing developers are too loose in their thoughts and organization to work on a single project.

Here are some common reasons developers don't work on servers:

• They are already working on a project in Graal, so they can't pick up anything else major.
• They don't care about Graal enough to dedicate their time to it.
• They don't like Graal at all.

Making a fun little script or helping on the forums is miles and miles away from the amount of work it takes to get anything done on a server. Most people realize that, so they generally don't even bother making commitments and failing to meet them.

/thread

Learning development for most if not all players also breaks down some of the joy and mystery of the game so what do you have left? It can even amplify their enjoyment for the game knowing they can create but the first is more likely than the latter.

Maybe I'll go back to developing when someone integrates playerworlds into github and there is actually reference documentation so I do not have to ****ing guess what javascript feature/API are being badly imitated every other line

You must be mistaken...there is documentation! Why, sometimes Stefan posts about features no one has ever heard of...theres a wiki full of documentation thats been jumbled into hundreds of pages without descriptions of what anything does....

You just have to spend a few hours hopelessly searching for what your looking for. :)

Unfortunately, the few people i've seen who are amazingly dedicated, aren't amazingly talented.

The talented one's are.. well what WhiteDragon said.

tbh personally it's because I'm just bitter about the way that Graal is being handled from the top down.

Graal is a hobby. Servers tend to turn it into a chore.

Only to those uninspired.

If you are just working for someone else, you're rarely "inspired." The people who tend to be inspired are the ones heading the servers. Even if you're inspired, your that doesn't last forever, rarely long enough to finish a project... then commitment issues arise.

If there was money involved, people would be more commited.

But since there isn't money involved, people aren't commited.

So those who can say money is involved should be making the big servers, not the players. (except players doesn't really count as an applicable term since all the "players" who make Graal aren't quite "players")

And I may be something of a noob, but if I think this, I can imagine those who have played Graal for a long time and have developed Graal over the years think 500x more strongly than I do. Which isn't good.

Money... Inspiration... Bull****.


Throughout the years I've only developed on servers I've had amazing fun to play on (excluding my own projects and Zodiac, which I was simply asked by a friend to help with), so it felt natural for me to want to help develop the server further. I've never needed any other reason than that.

Lots of people write code for lots of non-graal-related projects without getting paid, though. :)

But I do kind of miss having a free lifetime subscription. I wonder whether that means I am dead to Graal now.

Money can help give someone an extra push, but money simply cannot motivate someone enough to be inspired. It is my experience that some of the best work has been done for free from people who are inspired by some "higher cause." That higher cause is usually the potential that they see in a project becoming successful, and the chance to create something high quality to be enjoyed by hundreds or thousands of people.

That's why any of us do any development in general, after all. It is this underlying desire to create something that will make people happy or impressed.

When I accept a paid project, it's rarely "how much money can you give me?" It's usually "am I going to feel like I'm wasting my time doing this?"

The answer to the original poster's question is contained herein.

Money adds a little incentive to get the work done.

On another note, developers on Graal need updated tools to work with, especially if the "players" are expected to develop all the great aspects of the game.

if developers want to make something players can enjoy then they have to step-down from their own projects, their own aspirations, and their own ideas to make something they probably won't have much fun participating in (because i've only met one developer who could actually spar worth a damn and i don't play zodiac or era enough to know what they deal with) and then they have to stick with it to the end product and beyond to fix anything that goes wrong with it

however, the developers who have stuck around are not (from a classic-graal perspective) actual players of the system, so they've typically created things that have no relation to the system of graal they are working within. UN is constantly compared to mario party because all there is to do is events or you can attempt to spar people (who have probably been sparring for years and only stick around for it, or there is no one sparring at all), with hardly anyone regularly PKing. this would be fine if everyone was the type of player that didn't try and get competitive with others, but that clearly is not the case

i never understood why no server of the classic-graal variety has created a system for players to be put on teams (or better-yet, guilds), warped to an enclosed level of mazes, and allowed to fight it out with each player given a specific number of lives to continue once they've run out of hearts. it's by far the most common and easily realizable system of war for a classic-graal server, yet i've never seen it implemented (aside from npulse where they did it wrong, because it was based on a "get to this number" system which isn't as fun as killing off each member of the opposing team until they've run out of lives)

but really, us players are the problem - we don't take the time to learn the scripts to make it all possible

There is no other programming environment that makes it as ass-backwards to get started with. This is hardly the players' faults.

selfhtml 4 graal