Modding and Firaxis

[frekk]

A little melodramatic, don't you think?

You think? Youtube uses a flagging system and, as a result, you can find thousands of posts like the following:

"False Flagging!!! I'm getting tired of this! My gosh, I could not be anymore mad right now! My video was removed: "How to Win Stuff by Searching Google" ... I don't want to seem like a bad person, but instead of letting people flag it, why don't the staff of youtube take a look at some of them?"

"Hey, I'm kind of in a ditch because a group of youtubers are going to flag my videos for something that doesn't violate any of the Youtube Guidelines. They already flagged a few of my friends and hacked a few accounts. I don't want anything to happen to me or anyone else so is there anything I can do other then putting my videos in Private? They have 1000 accounts so they will do something."

"It has been my experience of late that YouTube seems to no longer actually review videos. They do not address user concerns. They will not respond to issues users have. I see we have a supposedly new help forum. Well let's put it to the test. I would like to have the issue of why my account was cited for a violation of community guidelines. I mirrored a parody copy of a Fred Phelps video made by user thetaomega. Both of us had the video removed and were given a strike against us. Meanwhile the original hate filled video is still around. Efforts to try and communicate with YouTube were an exercise in futility. I have time and time again watched users suspended for no apparent reason other than the statement it was a violation of community guidelines. In many cases these videos were educational in nature. I have seen this happen to such a poor extent that several of the users had to get together to form their own channel just to address the false dmca issue."

It's a terrible, failed system and certainly doesn't even vaguely resemble anything "democratic".

Do we really even *need* a flagging system? Mods distributed here at Civfanatics can't be flagged, and yet, the site isn't flooded with civ-porn (?) or whatever it is they're worried about. It seems absurd, to me. Pure "Ministry of Silly Walks".

 

[The_J]

If users can flag, it can be abused. Anything in the least bit controversial could suffer.

For instance, someone puts out a mod with Israel as a civ, a whole bunch of people who don't like Israel flag it. Someone puts out a mod with Hitler as a leader, a whole bunch of people flag it.

While Firaxis may not remove these mods, some people may avoid making certain mods because they don't want to be branded by vocal minorities.

You forget, that you still can distribute a mod in the "normal" way .
And we have mods with Israel and Hitler in, some modders get complainments about it, most don't.
And he also have a rating system here, sometime it get's abused, most times not.
I don't really see the difference.


I only fear, that we'll get more simple negative comments from people, who don't understand, how much work it is.

 

[lemmy101]

from the job posting for Civ Community Liason at 2K Games:

Experience with PC game mods, specifically with LUA script and/or C++ a plus

I assume this means Civ 5 will by C++ and Lua.

 

[deanej]

Great, yet another programming language to learn. Why not just stick with python? At least we already know that.

 

[Afforess]

Great, yet another programming language to learn. Why not just stick with python? At least we already know that.

Looking up Lua on wikipedia (Never heard of it before), it doesn't seem that far from C, nor that hard to learn.

 

[Dale]

Great, yet another programming language to learn. Why not just stick with python? At least we already know that.

Cuz it's slow and crappy.

 

[Afforess]

Cuz it's slow and crappy.

Amen!

I for one won't miss python. I hate it's syntax, commenting style, and it just felt... hacky.

 

[Dale]

Frekk I think you're assuming too much about the "flagging" system. Yes, there's "flagging" systems like YouTube where the flag is public. But then there's other file systems were the "flagging" system is private and only the moderators get "flagged". What do you think the little report button on this forum does, it "flags" the post to the mods. I could "flag" your post right now to a mod and you'd never know.

Let's be calm and not assume till we have much more info on how the mod system will work.

 

[Dale]

Looking up Lua on wikipedia (Never heard of it before), it doesn't seem that far from C, nor that hard to learn.

Yes, Lua does have a C feel to it. It's not that difficult to learn. I just hope Firaxis open a lot of triggers and hooks to lua so we can use it!

 

[PieceOfMind]

I hope the lua rumour-like deduction is right. I'd much rather work with it than python.

 

[Impaler[WrG]]

I should give my self a LUA crash course and get ready to do some modding. Perhaps I'll try to restart the CCCP, those DLL mods are going to face the same issues with merging/compiling that were such an issue in Civ4.

All the tools and support sounds really compelling but I particularly hope we get something like the Lopez Civilizeditor, though it was never finished that things was absolutely the most awesome modding tool made for Civ4.

P.S. Python's tab based flow control was by far the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in a programming language.

 

[lemmy101]

P.S. Python's tab based flow control was by far the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in a programming language.

Please tell me this is irony or sarcasm.

 

[LDiCesare]

lua is more like C than python is, but it's still got its own quirks. Lack of switch statement, 0 is true, and every variable being global by default are the most glaring differences.
It's a table language, not an OO language.
It's also very fast and lightweight, and there's a lot of documentation on the web in part thanks to WoW, which uses it as a scripting language.

 

[Afforess]

Perhaps I'll try to restart the CCCP, those DLL mods are going to face the same issues with merging/compiling that were such an issue in Civ4.

Please don't; I feel like you guys caused a lot of fallout when you abandoned your projects.

 

[deanej]

lua is more like C than python is, but it's still got its own quirks. Lack of switch statement, 0 is true, and every variable being global by default are the most glaring differences.
It's a table language, not an OO language.
It's also very fast and lightweight, and there's a lot of documentation on the web in part thanks to WoW, which uses it as a scripting language.

What does it mean to be a table language?

 

[Afforess]

What does it mean to be a table language?

This:

x= {y = { z = 8}}
print (x.y.z)
> 8

From memory, may be wrong.

 

[mjs0]

This:

x= {y = { z = 8}}
print (x.y.z)
> 8

From memory, may be wrong.

Which looks just like a shorthand for nested structures, which is kind of the point.
x has a member y which has a member z which is set to 8.

In fact tables in Lua can be used like structures, arrays and classes (very loosely).

So I could write for example write

x = { y = {"foo","bar"}}
print (x.y[1])
> foo
print (x.y[2])
> bar

and the table behaves like an array.

Also from memory and may be wrong.

 

[The_J]

I've heard of LUA before, but never seen any code of it.
Will maybe look at it.

Great, yet another programming language to learn. Why not just stick with python? At least we already know that.

Cuz it's slow and crappy.

"Crappy" depends on what sort of things you want to do.
People who do excessive string processing love python, because strings can be handled very easily with it.

 

[Impaler[WrG]]

Please don't; I feel like you guys caused a lot of fallout when you abandoned your projects.

Well, if you recall I wasn't the original leader of the project, I kind of picked it up after it's first demise. We got a usable DLL with a lot of features and while it never did see the usage I had hoped for all the code is still available on Source forge so I can't really see how this would cause a fallout for anyone else. It's not like I didn't have a good reason for leaving after all.

 

[Afforess]

statement redacted.