A good old community refresharoo discussion

[Duion]

Repository:

I tested the latest preview build and noticed that basically everything is broken now, menus are broken, GUIs are broken, graphics are broken, some newly added features are broken, like verve and all old templates are gone so I have no idea where to start, since there is no documentation for the new stuff.

This thing is far from being able to be released. It feels like things just get added, but never tested, while the testing part is essential. There is also nothing to test it with, since the default assets and levels are the same as since the beginning of our existence.

Development and Community Roles:

This is like one of the worst naming system one could come up with. I'm pretty sure that most people who read "DEVGRU" or "MODGRU" for the first time will have no idea what this is. If you had just named them "Developers" and "Moderators" everyone would instantly understand what it is about and there would be no explaining necessary by you whatsoever. I mean we already have "Administrators" and "Global Moderators" , so why not just stick with this 100% obvious and logical naming system?

The Documentation:

Yes, it would be nice to have a documentation, because since you threw the old engine/template design over board, new people have no idea how to do anything now.

A Community Project:

This has been tried for 8 years or so now and never did anything happen. And now it is harder to create anythign with the engine than ever before, which makes it even more unlikely to happen. Btw I have a fully working, fully released community project for like 6 years now, but nobody cares.

Conclusion:

If you go and aggressively re-design the engine, you need a major re-design on all fronts and you do not even have the manpower to do the engine part. I would like to do those things, but I barely have time to keep my game going. Usually I update my game to the latest stable version, then I give feedback, fix eventual bugs etc and then wait for the next release, but this is not possible at the moment, so I have no idea where to start, I feel left behind and there is nothing I can do.

[JeffR]

A thread to discuss the refresharoo announcement.

I went ahead and moved your post here, @Duion

I'd brainfarted and had forgotten to adjust the announcements subform itself to be read only. I want the announcements to be standalone like a bulletin board for news. Discussion about the announcements is obviously encouraged, just apart to prevent cluttering the announcement itself.

Per your points:

Repository:

Stuff is getting tested constantly. Which is why there are changes, updates and modifications. It's due to feedback and testing iteration. In fact, you're helping test it right now, so that's a good start. I'm gunna need more info than 'everything is broken' though. So screenshots, logs, platform info, etc are pretty important to make sure standing issues are fixed.

Roles:

If they prove to ACTUALLY be confusing, then sure we can look at changing them. But it adds a little bit of spice to a role and having the role names associate gives them more gravitas as a working collective.

Conclusion:

You providing testing data on issues you encounter is definitely something you can do. 4.0 was always going to have some pretty hefty changes. PBR, Asset pipeline, etc were always going to mean backwards compatibility would break to a degree. We've been working hard to make as few additional steps as possible for those that desire to port up their project to it, but some manual porting effort is going to be required even allowing that.

Still, if you can provide screenshots, logs, videos, platform info, or the like; any data about what's not working as expected, it can be used to fix issue and improve the useage experience.

[Duion]

I answered your post, since there was a lot of discussion going on in that subforum and there was no other subforum that would fit this, "general" is not really the right place either, but whatever.

Well to make it short my main point is, you cannot break backwards compatibility without having a working alternative first, if you do so, everything is broken, which is what we have now.

It is bad enough that I would have to redo all my art assets to make it PBR ready, but it seems I will have to update all my levels and all my postFX settings as well, as I did once before and since the old template is gone, I will have to update every single script file by hand as well, so I basically will have to upgrade almost every file by hand now and maybe even redo my whole game. To make things even worse, I do not even know if the effort is worth it, because even if I upgrade my game and convert everything by hand, things may change later and I will have to do it all gain. This is just too much.

That deferred shading or whatever it was called was already pretty bad, since it messed up with all the lighting, so I had to readjust every level to get it looking as it was supposed to be, now with PBR everything again looks much different, not only that, but it looks to be broken, since everything is dark now and no way to get it bright.

I think there should not even be the need to post any screenshots, since those things should be totally obvious. It feels like you are developing things that have never been tested by anyone on anything for real. We are not an engine in alpha or beta stage, we are a production ready engine, or at least have been since almost forever, which means it should always be possible to produce and release a game for real with any version of Torque3D, that should be the primary goal.

[Azaezel]

it looks to be broken, since everything is dark now and no way to get it bright.

 

This with directx, or opengl? As was stated multiple times in jeffs workblog, you need a minimum of a skylight to have ibl, and at time of writing, saving the files is dx only. (working on fixing that)

[Duion]

It is with DirectX, I already had a skylight and was playing with all the settings, but it is always dark and I mean always, even increasing the brightness by 10 times you still cannot get it as bright as you could get it in the past, increasing sun brightness 5 times, it is roughly similar to what it was before, but as said it will never get as bright as it was before.

I'm not an expert on PBR, but I'm pretty sure this is not how it should work and this is just an example, you cannot ship the engine like that, the previous update changed the lighting as well, but just by 10-30% so I had to manually adjust all my levels, was a few days of monotonous work, but now the lighting seems to be off by 500%.

It will take me some time to get into the new engine, then I can make some more serious tests, this was just my first impression.

[Duion]

@Azaezel

Well it is not all wrong, the PBR material test level with the skybox looks correct to me, but the regular levels with scattersky or just a sun never look right to me, no matter how I twist the settings. But I think we are offtopic again.