VEM griping

[Thalassicus]

Well, I tried.

Due to that vanilla bug, and the problems pointed out by Kael in ModCast #44, it's not feasible to maintain parallel versions of the project with only 1 developer working on it. I'm going to continue the usual sequential-versions system to save time.

 

[Txurce]

It occurred to me recently that if you ever wanted to test something relatively radical that may not work or be everyone's cup of tea at first, you could release it under a different name, and then we could test it separately from the sequential VEM path.

 

[glider1]

Yeah that occurred to me too Txurce. It might save Thal some of that really hard testing work, by releasing R&D versions. To make it a positive experience, the development versions could be broken down by categories that suit the interest and play style of beta testers where the work in doing that is offset by having to do less testing work.

For example:
[stable release 114 that everyone basically likes]
114RD01-AIOffense for people that only would want to test radical AI changes to offense
114RD01-AIDefense for people that only would want to test radical changes to AI's defensive builds
114RD01-AIBarbarian for people that only would want to test radical changes to the barbarian AI
114RD01-AIBuild for people that only would want to test radical changes to the build AI
etc

It would create a mountain more work for Thal though even just in the bureaucracy side, and that I would not wish on anyone . Maybe it might be a bit simpler if forum topics were started for each particular R&D release perhaps. However there are interrelationship issues where changes in one R&D version might seem good but not work well with others. There is also a mountain of work remembering all the different changes to each stream and then recombining them all back up again!

Whatever works for Thal works for us! The idea is to take work of Thal's shoulders where-ever possible.
Cheers

EDIT: One possible way to make it a bit less of a headache would be to release R&D versions that contain only the R&D code changes, which are then installed in parallel with the stable VEM release. Thus the R&D mod would be small, concise and easy to trace back the changes relative to comments in the forums. Probably too much overhead!? This mechanic was not available previously until CIV5 added the ability to add mods together. An issue is that modders have to know what they are doing, otherwise they could break things and disturb the R&D information coming in (for example by installing two R&D versions simultaneously)

Once again:
The idea is to try and lesson Thal's workload not increase it!