Nobody actually plays this game.

[iamgreaser]

This is the biggest issue blocking development. I have no motivation to work on this until people start playing, because for what it's worth, everything I do here is completely useless. For now, I'm working on seabase. Bye.

[alexdantas]

Noooooooooooooo, dude ;_;

[iamgreaser]

Well, this isn't the sort of problem one can fix on their own...

[alexdantas]

You've done a lot of work on this, the game's great!

Maybe it's lacking a bit on the marketing dept?

[iamgreaser]

[ NOTE 2014-01-30: Extinguished a few flames. ]

I think the moral of the story is "don't rely on a community where the admins are too scared to upset the status quo." Or maybe "don't rely on a community who doesn't do a fucking thing ever."

This was made as a response to Jagex taking Ace of Spades and listening to a voice in their heads mistakenly calling itself "mainstream opinion", and making something which was pretty much the opposite of what the community wanted.

Around that time, 0.75 was the current version, 0.76 was "just about to be released" but had a public beta version, and 1.0 was in development (plus we had some dev screenshots of it being pretty much "a logical continuation of 0.75/0.76")... then they released a video which showed that they pretty much just threw Ace of Spades out the window and decided to do their own thing.

I suspect this drastic turn happened around the point where they got one of their scrubs to take a huge shit on Ben Aksoy, making him "voluntarily" leave (someone physically broke his laptop's hard drive), and creative control was handed over to Arash Amini.

Oh, and they didn't release any server software for 1.0, and it took them nearly a year to decide to release a map editor, despite the fact that the 0.* series managed to stay alive due to the community producing new maps and Python scripts for a custom server mat^2 made (which is now the ONLY server software ANYONE uses).

I started development around 2012-11-01. Build and Shoot (the primary 0.75 community) was officially launched on 2012-11-05, and I posted a thread on 2012-11-12 on there. I did a playable pre-alpha release (iceballfornoobs-004) around the time AoS 1.0 was released (2012-12-12). Back then, iceball:// URL support wasn't in place (that came around 0.1.2), we didn't have an OpenGL renderer, and the server was incapable of sending the current state of the map to its clients, but I think we still managed to peak at 4v4 or maybe even 5v4 on Mesa.

It had an awful lot of promise, and up until jdrew's clan mistook their clan thread for a corporate conference call, it had the most posts on Build and Shoot. And then they decided to shove it to its own board on the forums ("Noteworthy Picks"), and call it a day. Oh, and very occasional mentions of it in the newsletter. We've had 3 official events and I'm pretty sure a whopping 0 of them got stickied on BnS.

Reading through the start of the thread is actually bringing back nostalgia, from a time when the community actually had people who still did things: http://buildandshoot.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=60

And the most players we have ever had was due to someone randomly posting about it on /v/ one day. Found an annoying server stability bug, too, which I had to quickly fix.

The whole point of making Iceball was actually because we didn't have any control over the client, and so we essentially needed our own client. I don't know how Iceball ended up being the most popular of the lot. It might be because it was the first to have a working software renderer. It might be because of the modding framework which people heard about. Whatever. We ended up having an awesome team doing awesome things.

I can admit that I probably alienated Triplefox off the project with some of my stances. Not the "no SMGs" stance, but the "RTFM" stance. I didn't want complacent "it would be good if you gave me and me only a stupidly powerful gun" people fouling up the game, but then again...

By the way, if you complain that Iceball is too hard to get running these days, and it's not because of your graphics card, you are a wimp. It was harder during Iceball Event 1 which required you to actually set "kick_on_join" to false, and it didn't even have the wimpmode hack to the JSON parser, so you had to ensure that you had the comma at the end. (To this date I still have no fucking clue who did the wimpmode hack.) Oh yeah, and you had to know how to use a command-line... wait, actually, you didn't - you just double-clicked on connect-rakiru.bat.

I don't know what irritates me most about BnS. I'm guessing there's the principle of "0.75 is the last version therefore it is perfect all hail 0.75". A lot of us have left because, well, nothing is happening. Everyone with any sort of power is too scared to shake up the status quo. (Congratulations on finally getting that launcher released, by the way. That was way overdue.)

The ultimate question is, who's left to care?

• The average BnS member is only willing to pay it lip service - "yeah, this looks great, let me know when it's presentable and not in beta anymore and I might try it". (By the way, if you're one of those guys: Stop waiting for stuff to get popular, and start helping it get to that state faster. And "presentable" is a myth. Wash your mouth out and stop being a puppet to whatever's "cool". New things only happen because people are willing to try new things.)
• /v/ might be interested once more things happen. Then again, maybe not. I'd like to see them fork it, though, and see what they come up with. (Please do this.)
• Pretty sure my friends from university would be more interested in seabase.
• Speaking of university, I've hosted a server at the university LAN parties. Not sure if the peak was 2v2 or 2v1. They were probably playing Dota 2 and making the stupid assumption that everyone has the bandwidth to download it - twice I've tried to pick it up on DC hub, both times failed because the only person sharing a Dota 2 folder either had it empty or was running that piece of shit known as StrongDC... yet I managed to get LoL off someone just fine.
• Brazil might care. Unfortunately, I don't want Iceball full of "ALGUEM BR???"s. We used to complain about "kto polak?"s but I kinda miss them these days.
• Lawliet showed interest fairly recently, despite the fact that I globally blacklisted him from AoS for not only hacking but also being a conceited liar about it and wasting everyone's time over the matter, and even pointed out that jdrew was just being a mainstreaming whore and hating on it because it was too "hard" to use.

I don't remember when we had a consistent playerbase, but we managed to somehow average about 2 on the server for a week, maybe two, maybe less than a week.

Hopefully that clears it up for you. By the way, feel free to fork this project and work on it. I'll put up some forking guidelines.

[iamgreaser]

Forking guidelines are on the wiki (I guess you could call it... a limited wiki B| ) : https://github.com/iamgreaser/iceball/wiki

[alexdantas]

Wow, big fucking wall of text! It cleared any doubts, thanks a lot.

From what I can see here, it's the right choice to make. No one can blame you - actually, it's the opposite, everyone should be grateful for what you did.

I'm not familiar with the people, those names you've quoted. I'm actually a random player from those times we only had the rifle. AoS was simply the game and I've been playing it weekly since then. It's funny how all the clichés of an online community happened - dark start, nice small group of people, sudden popularity, lots of kiddies, BRs up the ass, slow decline...

Seriously, Iceball is great, such a shame nobody ever plays it. I've saw like one, two people tops on all the times I've played. You're right about those lazy ass cunts and it really sucks that nothing's happening.

Good luck on seabase, keep up the good work. I'll be following the development.

[MajorLunaC]

What I'd like to know is why use iceball? Does it have any advantages over Build and Shoot, or Ace of Spades for that matter? Does it run smoother, faster, with fewer memory leaks? Can you actually mod it? Are there any interesting mods currently available that are better than Build and Shoot, or Ace of Spades?

These questions and the following currently stop me from trying this game:

• It's been 6 months since the last update, so the chance of support is minimal in case there's a problem.
• Reverting to SDL 1.2 for a single waning game that I don't know enough about the state of is discouraging.
• "Sackit - you should copy libsackit.a and sackit.h to xlibinc." I have to do this strange install thing!?

To get others to play the game, I suggest:

• Have advantages over other games at the ready, mods, etc. with an average-gamer type interface that's super easy to use.
• Have packages with generic 32-bit and 64-bit binaries that run in place, ideally with all pre-compiled libs included. Sadly, you probably should include windose executables as well, libs too.
• Advertise on gaming sites, especially Linux gaming sites (really desperate for games), with mods, features, advantages, etc.
• If possible, have a way to have iceball clients and servers work inter-compatibly with Build and Shoot. In essence, when you look on Build and Shoot servers, you can see and play on an iceball server with the Open-Spades client. This may require modification of the Open-Spades client source code that's available. Obviously, iceball servers should be clearly marked.
• If you really want a large player community, you may also have to sell your soul to Desura and Steam. They have few linux games, and they're pushing for more linux support. The launch of Steam Machines will likely boost the user base too.

As for developing:

• Don't develop for others. Develop what you want, and what you want to play. At the end of it, you must be able to honestly say "I want to play this game." If others really demand something, you can always give it a shot as an optional setting, not as the standard game mode. If they want an SMG, have a server option "enable_smg", and make sure the option is visible on server list or info, so that you never join it. Maybe have a filter for it.

[iamgreaser]

All my energy right now is focused on a completely different project. Don't expect me to do any more on this. Instead, what you should do, if you really want to improve it, is fork the code and go nuts with it. I suggest forking from 0.1.2-9 as while -10 adds garbage collection, it's a bit unstable at the moment.

What I'd like to know is why use iceball? Does it have any advantages over Build and Shoot, or Ace of Spades for that matter? Does it run smoother, faster, with fewer memory leaks? Can you actually mod it? Are there any interesting mods currently available that are better than Build and Shoot, or Ace of Spades?

For starters, you don't mean "Build and Shoot", you mean "Voxlap AoS". Calling AoS "Build and Shoot" was done as a forced meme, and frankly Build and Shoot now needs to die in a fire. Advantages? All the game code and assets are sent from the server and sandboxed for security, so technically you could send a completely different game. If you want to skin it, you can make the code fetch files from a clientside sandbox directory. If someone releases an aimbot, you can fiddle with the code on the server to break it. Smoother and faster? If you have a sufficient GPU, yes. The software renderer is notably slower than the AoS one though, so if you have to rely on that... eep. Less memory leaks? Well... no. There are a few leaks in places. Can you actually mod it? Of course. Any more interesting mods? Well, there's the snow mod, there's a few game modes (there's one which is kinda like arena except it doesn't throw the whole entire point of AoS out the window), and there's an AoS 0.35 skin pack.

These questions and the following currently stop me from trying this game: *It's been 6 months since the last update, so the chance of support is minimal in case there's a problem.

Take the plunge and just try the damn thing. Just, well, I'd suggest you do a checkout of 0.1.2-9 as I mentioned earlier.

*Reverting to SDL 1.2 for a single waning game that I don't know enough about the state of is discouraging.

If you'd like to port it to SDL 2, go ahead. It's not hard.

*"Sackit - you should copy libsackit.a and sackit.h to xlibinc." I have to do this strange install thing!?

Yes. If you have any complaints, try installing Mumble without resorting to apt or yum or any package manager. It's a weird dependency but it's needed.

To get others to play the game, I suggest: *Have advantages over other games at the ready, mods, etc. with an average-gamer type interface that's super easy to use.

I sorta tried that at some point but ran out of steam.

*Have packages with generic 32-bit and 64-bit binaries that run in place, ideally with all pre-compiled libs included. Sadly, you probably should include windose executables as well, libs too.

If you want a 64-bit Windows binary, you have to build it yourself as I don't have the tools to make those. I don't see the problem with using a 32-bit binary. After all, if you're complaining about the overhead, chances are you can't run Iceball well anyway.

*Advertise on gaming sites, especially Linux gaming sites (really desperate for games), with mods, features, advantages, etc.

I think Triplefox did a little bit of advertising. But really, I'm sick of this now.

*If possible, have a way to have iceball clients and servers work inter-compatibly with Build and Shoot. In essence, when you look on Build and Shoot servers, you can see and play on an iceball server with the Open-Spades client. This may require modification of the Open-Spades client source code that's available. Obviously, iceball servers should be clearly marked.

You're misunderstanding how Iceball works. While it does use ENet, the protocol is actually quite different. Still, it's possible to reimplement AoS in Lua and with a bit of pyspades hackery you can accept Iceball clients on AoS servers. I tried that for some time, but, well, I ran out of steam.

And cooperating with BnS? When I was still around, the admins basically shunned Iceball. Now, danhezee's basically suggesting the BnS guys make Iceball, and I'm not sure if he even realises it.

*If you really want a large player community, you may also have to sell your soul to Desura and Steam. They have few linux games, and they're pushing for more linux support. The launch of Steam Machines will likely boost the user base too.

I run FreeBSD these days, so I'll mention what I can do in those regards... Steam for Windows works here. Steam for Linux doesn't because they require a glibc version that's far too new. Desura for Linux works aside from the fact that I'm missing libgconf.so (can be fixed) so nothing actually displays in the browser. Desura for Windows just crashes on load.

As for developing: *Don't develop for others. Develop what you want, and what you want to play. At the end of it, you must be able to honestly say "I want to play this game." If others really demand something, you can always give it a shot as an optional setting, not as the standard game mode. If they want an SMG, have a server option "enable_smg", and make sure the option is visible on server list or info, so that you never join it. Maybe have a filter for it.

That's basically what I was doing and the BnS admins were all "no you're too hostile".

TL;DR I've lost interest, I'm working on something else, and BnS sucks.

[iamgreaser]

People actually gave a shit, and have been for the past few days, so I think we can safely say that people play this game now.

By the way, feel free to rope heaps of people in.

Closing this issue!