What do you do if a member's work is not what you expected? Do you tell them to do it better? Isn't that awkward?
Depends what you mean by not "what you expected". If the work doesn't fit the design criteria, you tell the designer what's off and how to improve it. This is why I advocate asking for rough drafts first, as you can steer the developer in the right direction as they refine their work. If the work is just underpar/low quality, you might have to replace them or assign them easier tasks. Everyone has their own level of competence.
Mephs that is not entirely true. Almost every great indie or open source application we have has been developed by a team. It's true that people dip out half-way through, but that's just the fluid nature of design. Even in industry, not everyone is bound to a contract to stay until the project is finished. You just need to look for replacements to pick up the slack.
You have to be a smart leader and advance the project in small steps. Many times there's no structure in a team effort and people get confused or overwhelmed by the amount of work they've been assignment. Give developers small concrete jobs with soft deadlines and you will quickly see if they are competent. If they aren't look for a replacement. As a leader you have to judge the skills of your teammates and tell them exactly what you want done and by when.
For instance I find it helps to tell someone to complete 2-3 heroes with certain spells by the end of the week, rather than tell them to finish 20 heroes. I also finds it's helpful to tell someone to complete a rough draft quickly first and then give a critique so the next more refined draft fits in better with the design. It's a continuous cycle of moving in small steps, giving feedback and moving on. This is what the leaders job is: to continuously keep the pace going in little increments. What I see a lot of is "here's my vision, here is your general role, get it done!"... a long time goes by and we get "dude, this sucks! This is not at all what I wanted!".
Learning to work with a team is one of the most important skills in this industry that you can learn. You have nothing to lose trying, so I would recommend everyone to start getting used to it, because you won't learn this anywhere else (ie. you'd get fired in the real world, so try it out here).
It's a good question about how team-based development actually works.
I guess there's roughly 3 types of team-based work I can identify.
The first is if you know the exact requirements of your map, but are unable to fulful one or more requirements yourself. For instance, I am very poor at terrain, so I would likely generate a draft of my requirements and commission someone else to do it. Once I receive my resource and am satisfied with it, I would proceed to finish the project and credit the terrainer.
I would say this form of team-work is the most likely to be successful and I've had many good partnerships following this model.
The second type is where you have a large project and many persons working on different aspects and someone is delegated as the leader to oversee its completion. These I would say are the most common type of team-based efforts and they fail more often than they succeed in my experiences (not trying to discourage you. These have the largest potential to develop truly great works). In these types of projects, you have to be ready to sacrifice your original vision for the work, as the other developers will have their own ways of developing the map (they often surpass your goals). These projects rely on having a good leader, clear goals and a dedicated team working on disjoint parts (it's really bad if two or more developers are working on resources that overlap as this requires a lot of communication to resolve conflicts).
The third type is where there is a lack of a clear leader and all members have equal input. I have rarely seen these types of project bear any fruit. There just becomes too much internal conflict and a lack of flow. Theoretically they work, but are too unpredictable in practice.
I will send details later with an example terrain. For now, the map is a top down shooter 30 mins in length with lots of walking involved, so I assume it will be a large map. The setting is dark forest. Think log cabin, not much technology around. I want it to be spooky, but not stone cold dead like in those Stalker games.
Field of view is a cone (well actually a rectangle) that extends from the camera outward. Anything inside it is displayed on the screen. By increasing the field of view angle, you fit more stuff onto the screen. It has a sort of zooming effect.
The position of the camera eye is relative only to the target; it has no bearing on what kind of terrain is inbetween the camera. That being said, the camera target changes its height relative to the terrain it's on. If it's near a cliff, the camera target will move its height and as a result your whole camera z changes. You can toggle the effect using some fuctions, but it still it will still bug out (especially near hard cliffs).
I already thought about something like forcing all players to type each players' names, hoping they don't lie ... would be
great.... if it wasn't totally stupid xD
It's not totally stupid. My StarFriend protocol is based on this kind of mentality (albeit the implementation is completely different).
I would like to see some big improvements in the galaxy script. Many of us only use GUI because the scripting features are bare bones and we get cryptic error msgs for simple mistakes
1. Script Autocompletion
- autoindentation would be really nice (with the option to specify your own indent size)
2. Organization of all functions into namespaces (so you could call functions like Unit.Create() )
- additionally it would be nice if when you type Unit. a dropdown list appear with the list of all functions under that namespace
3. Treat structs like any other object: allow us to pass them off to functions (ie. fix the 'bulk copy' error)
4. Function pointers (something like the delegate function in c#). And I guess pointers in general (sort of doubting they'll implement that).
5. Useful error messages It is a nightmare to debug galaxy code
Looking for someone to design dark foresty terrain for an exceptionally arousing zombie survival map. Please do not hesitate to answer; I promise to keep our parternship superficial!
not to mention most players ... that would join a game requiring this online... would have no idea they need the tool...
how would you handle players not runnign the tool
This is why I proposed the World of Starcraft project to implement it. If a big popular mod incorporates, then players will adopt it and the rest of the lesser known maps will then be able to utilize all the features that StarFriend provides. Initially the app would be optional, but as its adoption rate goes up, it should become required. OR, saving could be disabled until the player installs the app, providing a strong incentive for all players to install it.
It is also possible to implement this protocol without third party tools, but it would require the player to manually upload their bank signatures to the server for signing (pretty much a dead end).
Additionally since there's no way to change maps ingame yet, a mod like World of Starcraft might have to upload their maps separately to battle.net if they want to have a large mmo. This poses a problem, since you can't share banks across maps from ingame, you have to copy them manually. No one is going to be copying banks manually after each game... Thus, players might want to have a third party app to do this seamlessly and it may as well also incorporate StarFriend.
Even dota used used apps to ban players and they were widely adopted. I know it's not kosher to use a third party program, but you must be able to communicate with a trusted third party for a security scheme to work.
You also get much more functionality besides security by using the app. For instance, you can send player's scores or Elo to the server and have it update stats. It can also be used to collect statistics about gameplay. It's a lot of functionality for a small price that many mods can benefit from.
secondly you say you havent even implemented the process for this yet so a couple things
Is it possible to modify the bank file while its in use by the game
It is possible to modify bank files at any time. The game simply loads them during map init into the cache and never accesses them after that except to save data. I highly doubt Warden will look for programs modifying bank files since this does not affect gameplay. Once they are loaded, no alterations from the bank file can be communicated to the game. StarFriend does not rely on any communciations to the external server during gameplay, only after a game has finished.
this would basically require deditcated servers for signing "keys" for the thrid party tool ( i think that right there = fail for most people)
It would require one master server yes. It does not have to be a dedicated socks connection though. Even Mapster can host this server (provided it can handle the volume of inflowing data), since it would require at most an SQL database and some php.
Cheating in UMS maps does not = cheating... only in ladder.
This implementation is not foolproof, if there's 5 hackers and StarFriend only requires 5 players for signing on your map, then they can generate any stats they want and send them to the server. However, this requires you have 5 friends who are willing to give out their keys. To prevent people from doing this, you can threaten them with a ban. If the server stores all banks in its archives, then you can review potential cheating cases and ban the offenders. Thus the moderaters of the StarFriend server can deny gameplay for any player that abuses the system in any map that uses the protocol.
What happens when i make a my own third party tool, that overwrites the local key you generate (so that I would intentionally corrupt other players keys) =)
Your secret key can be signed by the server before you receive it so there's a way to determine if they are real. However, for the session keys I have not yet devised an algorithm to ensure their authenticity (however it is not possible to alter someone elses key that is not your own), but perhaps signed session keys could be requested from the server instead of generating them from secret keys stored locally. There's also still some ambiguity on how to handle/detect malicious players and mapmakers (who do intentional alterations to the implementation of the algorithm) who only wish to corrupt other players data or try to get them intentionally flagged.
what happens when I make my own tool that floods your dedicated server with bad requests
This is a denial of service attack. Every server in the world is prone to this. You could try to write an application right now that floods the forum with bad requests, but I doubt that will bring it down.
from what your saying here (is it required that each players 3rd party tool needs to communicate between each player... will it be writing all the players IP's locally)... this is even more of a security issue if you ask me....for the players anyways
The app does not communicate between players, only between the players and the server. Only the map communicates data between players, which is saved to their bank, which in turn is read by the app.
Hope that clarifies it. The real issue though is secret key distribution. There's no way yet to authenticate that the person communicating with the external server is indeed the owner of the battle.net acc through which they are playing with.
I would like to offer my services on bank compression and protection. If the mod is expected to be popular online, a protection scheme I drafted in another thread might become feasible.
I wish to use the ancientProtector model in SC2. I used the wow model viewer to export it as .m3 and I import it into 3DS. I can see the model fine, but every animation has a bug. The model will slowely tilt backwards by 90 degrees on every animation. I'm not sure how to fix this; I've tried tinkering with the bones to no avail. I've seen WoW models in other maps animated properly, so I assume this is no issue for most. On that happy note, would someone be so kind as to help me out (ie: provide me the model of interest problem free as .m3)?
EDIT: I can't import any model at all problem free if I use the latest wow model viewer with its own m3 exporter. How are other people doing it? There's an m2 importer as part of the m3 exporter package, but it wants some .skin file that I don't have (the model viewer exports them as .tga).
also I do not want to use minerals as the outcome of the harvesting. I have already placed MANY trees in my map and I do not want to simply change the model of minerals to trees.
Funny you should say that.... Get to work!
But seriously, those trees are just models, not living, breathing resources. You can't do anything with them and there's no macro you can use to replace them all: no 'pick every model/doodad' trigger exists unfortunantely (for you). ㅈㅈ mate.
Check out the second page of this http:forums.sc2mapster.com/general/general-chat/16731-a-word-on-bank-encryption/ According to MotiveMe signatures are not very secure and you should not really on them to protect your bank.
What should he rely on then? No good alternative exists.
At the moment, bank signature are just as secure as any other existing method of security (ie. anyone competent can break it in a day or less). The only downsides is it seems they are prone to corruption/reseting, so the other methods might have a small edge.
0
Depends what you mean by not "what you expected". If the work doesn't fit the design criteria, you tell the designer what's off and how to improve it. This is why I advocate asking for rough drafts first, as you can steer the developer in the right direction as they refine their work. If the work is just underpar/low quality, you might have to replace them or assign them easier tasks. Everyone has their own level of competence.
0
@Mephs: Go
Mephs that is not entirely true. Almost every great indie or open source application we have has been developed by a team. It's true that people dip out half-way through, but that's just the fluid nature of design. Even in industry, not everyone is bound to a contract to stay until the project is finished. You just need to look for replacements to pick up the slack.
You have to be a smart leader and advance the project in small steps. Many times there's no structure in a team effort and people get confused or overwhelmed by the amount of work they've been assignment. Give developers small concrete jobs with soft deadlines and you will quickly see if they are competent. If they aren't look for a replacement. As a leader you have to judge the skills of your teammates and tell them exactly what you want done and by when.
For instance I find it helps to tell someone to complete 2-3 heroes with certain spells by the end of the week, rather than tell them to finish 20 heroes. I also finds it's helpful to tell someone to complete a rough draft quickly first and then give a critique so the next more refined draft fits in better with the design. It's a continuous cycle of moving in small steps, giving feedback and moving on. This is what the leaders job is: to continuously keep the pace going in little increments. What I see a lot of is "here's my vision, here is your general role, get it done!"... a long time goes by and we get "dude, this sucks! This is not at all what I wanted!".
Learning to work with a team is one of the most important skills in this industry that you can learn. You have nothing to lose trying, so I would recommend everyone to start getting used to it, because you won't learn this anywhere else (ie. you'd get fired in the real world, so try it out here).
0
It's a good question about how team-based development actually works.
I guess there's roughly 3 types of team-based work I can identify.
The first is if you know the exact requirements of your map, but are unable to fulful one or more requirements yourself. For instance, I am very poor at terrain, so I would likely generate a draft of my requirements and commission someone else to do it. Once I receive my resource and am satisfied with it, I would proceed to finish the project and credit the terrainer.
I would say this form of team-work is the most likely to be successful and I've had many good partnerships following this model.
The second type is where you have a large project and many persons working on different aspects and someone is delegated as the leader to oversee its completion. These I would say are the most common type of team-based efforts and they fail more often than they succeed in my experiences (not trying to discourage you. These have the largest potential to develop truly great works). In these types of projects, you have to be ready to sacrifice your original vision for the work, as the other developers will have their own ways of developing the map (they often surpass your goals). These projects rely on having a good leader, clear goals and a dedicated team working on disjoint parts (it's really bad if two or more developers are working on resources that overlap as this requires a lot of communication to resolve conflicts).
The third type is where there is a lack of a clear leader and all members have equal input. I have rarely seen these types of project bear any fruit. There just becomes too much internal conflict and a lack of flow. Theoretically they work, but are too unpredictable in practice.
0
Nice! People are interested.
I will send details later with an example terrain. For now, the map is a top down shooter 30 mins in length with lots of walking involved, so I assume it will be a large map. The setting is dark forest. Think log cabin, not much technology around. I want it to be spooky, but not stone cold dead like in those Stalker games.
0
Field of view is a cone (well actually a rectangle) that extends from the camera outward. Anything inside it is displayed on the screen. By increasing the field of view angle, you fit more stuff onto the screen. It has a sort of zooming effect.
The position of the camera eye is relative only to the target; it has no bearing on what kind of terrain is inbetween the camera. That being said, the camera target changes its height relative to the terrain it's on. If it's near a cliff, the camera target will move its height and as a result your whole camera z changes. You can toggle the effect using some fuctions, but it still it will still bug out (especially near hard cliffs).
0
It's not totally stupid. My StarFriend protocol is based on this kind of mentality (albeit the implementation is completely different).
0
I would like to see some big improvements in the galaxy script. Many of us only use GUI because the scripting features are bare bones and we get cryptic error msgs for simple mistakes
1. Script Autocompletion
- autoindentation would be really nice (with the option to specify your own indent size)
2. Organization of all functions into namespaces (so you could call functions like Unit.Create() )
- additionally it would be nice if when you type Unit. a dropdown list appear with the list of all functions under that namespace
3. Treat structs like any other object: allow us to pass them off to functions (ie. fix the 'bulk copy' error)
4. Function pointers (something like the delegate function in c#). And I guess pointers in general (sort of doubting they'll implement that).
5. Useful error messages It is a nightmare to debug galaxy code
0
Don't ask... it'll be fun.
Looking for someone to design dark foresty terrain for an exceptionally arousing zombie survival map. Please do not hesitate to answer; I promise to keep our parternship superficial!
0
This is why I proposed the World of Starcraft project to implement it. If a big popular mod incorporates, then players will adopt it and the rest of the lesser known maps will then be able to utilize all the features that StarFriend provides. Initially the app would be optional, but as its adoption rate goes up, it should become required. OR, saving could be disabled until the player installs the app, providing a strong incentive for all players to install it.
It is also possible to implement this protocol without third party tools, but it would require the player to manually upload their bank signatures to the server for signing (pretty much a dead end).
Additionally since there's no way to change maps ingame yet, a mod like World of Starcraft might have to upload their maps separately to battle.net if they want to have a large mmo. This poses a problem, since you can't share banks across maps from ingame, you have to copy them manually. No one is going to be copying banks manually after each game... Thus, players might want to have a third party app to do this seamlessly and it may as well also incorporate StarFriend.
Even dota used used apps to ban players and they were widely adopted. I know it's not kosher to use a third party program, but you must be able to communicate with a trusted third party for a security scheme to work.
You also get much more functionality besides security by using the app. For instance, you can send player's scores or Elo to the server and have it update stats. It can also be used to collect statistics about gameplay. It's a lot of functionality for a small price that many mods can benefit from.
It is possible to modify bank files at any time. The game simply loads them during map init into the cache and never accesses them after that except to save data. I highly doubt Warden will look for programs modifying bank files since this does not affect gameplay. Once they are loaded, no alterations from the bank file can be communicated to the game. StarFriend does not rely on any communciations to the external server during gameplay, only after a game has finished.
It would require one master server yes. It does not have to be a dedicated socks connection though. Even Mapster can host this server (provided it can handle the volume of inflowing data), since it would require at most an SQL database and some php.
This implementation is not foolproof, if there's 5 hackers and StarFriend only requires 5 players for signing on your map, then they can generate any stats they want and send them to the server. However, this requires you have 5 friends who are willing to give out their keys. To prevent people from doing this, you can threaten them with a ban. If the server stores all banks in its archives, then you can review potential cheating cases and ban the offenders. Thus the moderaters of the StarFriend server can deny gameplay for any player that abuses the system in any map that uses the protocol.
Your secret key can be signed by the server before you receive it so there's a way to determine if they are real. However, for the session keys I have not yet devised an algorithm to ensure their authenticity (however it is not possible to alter someone elses key that is not your own), but perhaps signed session keys could be requested from the server instead of generating them from secret keys stored locally. There's also still some ambiguity on how to handle/detect malicious players and mapmakers (who do intentional alterations to the implementation of the algorithm) who only wish to corrupt other players data or try to get them intentionally flagged.
This is a denial of service attack. Every server in the world is prone to this. You could try to write an application right now that floods the forum with bad requests, but I doubt that will bring it down.
The app does not communicate between players, only between the players and the server. Only the map communicates data between players, which is saved to their bank, which in turn is read by the app.
Hope that clarifies it. The real issue though is secret key distribution. There's no way yet to authenticate that the person communicating with the external server is indeed the owner of the battle.net acc through which they are playing with.
0
@Creation25: Go
I would like to offer my services on bank compression and protection. If the mod is expected to be popular online, a protection scheme I drafted in another thread might become feasible.
0
@syxar: Go I've had troubles with mip maps recently that's been causing freezing/crashing (albeit in game). This seems to resolve it
0
@JakeCake26: Go
Try UI - Create Alert and set the custom icon to your favourite square.
0
Hello
I wish to use the ancientProtector model in SC2. I used the wow model viewer to export it as .m3 and I import it into 3DS. I can see the model fine, but every animation has a bug. The model will slowely tilt backwards by 90 degrees on every animation. I'm not sure how to fix this; I've tried tinkering with the bones to no avail. I've seen WoW models in other maps animated properly, so I assume this is no issue for most. On that happy note, would someone be so kind as to help me out (ie: provide me the model of interest problem free as .m3)?
EDIT: I can't import any model at all problem free if I use the latest wow model viewer with its own m3 exporter. How are other people doing it? There's an m2 importer as part of the m3 exporter package, but it wants some .skin file that I don't have (the model viewer exports them as .tga).
0
Funny you should say that.... Get to work!
But seriously, those trees are just models, not living, breathing resources. You can't do anything with them and there's no macro you can use to replace them all: no 'pick every model/doodad' trigger exists unfortunantely (for you). ㅈㅈ mate.
0
What should he rely on then? No good alternative exists.
@PsychoMC: Go
At the moment, bank signature are just as secure as any other existing method of security (ie. anyone competent can break it in a day or less). The only downsides is it seems they are prone to corruption/reseting, so the other methods might have a small edge.