The ManFisher public alpha has been released on itch.io

[Nils]

Hi there fellow devs,

After several years working has the alpha build of the game been released on itch. It's running on a custom fork of T3D 3.6. I would like you to invite to read the details on the itch game page and try it out. I'm curious about your findings as a dev and gladly receive your feedback. The theme of this game may not be something you'd prefer, I understand, you are able to DL it for free though and perhaps look at from a Torque Dev's POV  

Here is the link to the itch.io page: https://themanfisher.itch.io/the-manfisher

If you are able to rate it there that would be awesome!

Please do mind it's still in alpha so it's also a WIP!

Cheers, Nils

[Nils]

@Duion?

[Duion]

Yes I will check it out, don't worry, screenshots already look gorgeous.

[Nils]

4 hours ago, Duion said:

Yes I will check it out, don't worry, screenshots already look gorgeous.

Awesome, there's still someone on this server 

[Duion]

They are all on Discord, but I refuse to use proprietary software.

[Duion]

I played it and as said the graphics are great, looks realistic and aesthetically pleasing, almost like GTA or so in some areas.

So graphics are excellent and there is not much to complain, but if you still want to improve on graphics there are a few tricks I know that you probably did not use:

1. Manipulate vertex normals of the plants, normally the normals of each polygon point outwards of the face and the shading is calculated based on it, which is fine normally, but with plants you are trying to simulate something that is more round. In Blender you can manipulate the vertex normals of a tree to point outwards I usually use an object at the origin of the tree and have all vertex normals radiate outwards/upwards from that.

I used that method here: https://www.moddb.com/games/uebergame/images/tg-fields-new-graphics

As you can see the first image is default normals aka normals pointing away from the face, in this cases up and they do not get lit from the side and in the next image the normals face upwards and outwards so they get lit from outsid and the tree gets darker inside, looks much more realistic.

2. Manipulating the Terrain base texture. Normally the base terrain texture is automatically generated when you paint the terrain, which is fine, but for the final result you may want to tweak it to make the terrain look better from the far distance.

What I often like to do is bake the lightmap into the terrain base texture, but this only works in non dynamic levels with no day/night cycle. How I do it is when I'm done with creating the level I export the heightmap from Torque3D, then load it into L3DT terrain generator, set the sun where it is in my level in Torque, have the program calculate the lightmap then export it, then open the basetexture Torque3D put out and overlay the lightmap with an image manipulation program and save it again, so inside Torque the terrain will now have baked lighting.

To avoid Torque overwriting the basetexture I added a flag into my version of Torque to prevent updating the basetexture which would delete my improvements to it.

I did it here: https://www.moddb.com/games/uebergame/images/bg-rockyhighlands-preview-04

This is how it looked before: https://www.moddb.com/games/uebergame/images/bg-rockyhighlands-preview-03

The screenshots are not exactly identical but I think you can get the main change, additionally to adding a lightmap you can also slightly tweak the colors to have more variation, I saw on your level from the distance most was kind of grey only, so you could add some more slight variations there, but not too much, the plants need to roughly match the terrain color so they blend in nicely in the distance as they pop in and out of the LOD stages.

3. Add some PostFX like HDR and color shift.

Torque renderer by default looks very flat and everything is kind of bright. To simulate a more modern look I use HDR postFX with some slight colorshift into the blue, which makes the scene look more realistic and the HDR will add some more contrast between light and dark. Too much HDR can make it look gloomy, but I try to ramp it up as much as possible without it becoming obvious. Check out my postFX preset for it. Regarding SSAO it can help also but I often disable it in lush outdoor areas as it can kill performance. What SSAO does is a bit similar to manipulating vertex normals it adds darker areas where the geometry is more dense, simulating shadows.

 

Those fixes are not too much work so you can try them out and see if they improve things, it depends a bit on the individual scenario and visual taste to determine, if it is a real improvement, it was part of my routine of fine tuning at the end.

So this was it regarding the graphics I will make another post for the bugs and gameplay.

[Duion]

Now to the game.

Installation:

I do not like those installers, but that depends on taste. At the end I was suprised to see this DirectX installer, it has been a long time that I saw one of those, I clicked yes because I thought it was needed, then it tried to install some Bing search bar malware which I declined, then the install failed with a runtime error, but the game still ran fine, so no idea if that DirectX installer is even necessary. I prefer zipped archvies instead of exe installers.

Also consider making a Linux version, but I don't know how easy that is in your case, the engine now works good on Linux and it is not too much work to compile for Linux, I keep the Windows and Linux executables in the same install so my game runs on any system with just one download.

Launch:

Main menu looks nice and nice music.

Options menu is slightly confusing, you probably derived it from the complicated menu they now use in the new Version of Torque with all those sliders. It looks like an attempt to make it more console friendly, but I do not like it that much.

Controls:

"Controls" and "Hotkeys" should be one menu entry, I first looked "Controls" and saw just a few buttons so I thought the game controls are only like 5 functions, but I learned later there is a lot more.

Graphics:

Graphics are also a bit confusing as there are "low", "medium", "high" and "ultra" but also a lot of individual options, again with those sliders with no numbers so you have no idea what you are even setting. I started the game with all max just to find out it is lagging, so I returned to "high" and it ran fine. I have it a bit similar in my game I invented an extra setting called "Ueber" in which I ramped the graphics up a bit more than normal "high", which is not resource efficient, but gives people with a good PC a little extra, however it turns out most people routinely set it to that max setting and may be frustrated because of bad performance, like I did with your game.

Audio:

The game has some nice audio and nice music, but by default I think the music is too loud and some effects almost silent, maybe spend some time to find good default settings like speech the loudest, effects second loudest, environment third loudest and music at last.

Overall:

Try to find good default values as most people will not bother looking into the options, then make the options as simple as possible, but still keep the "advanced" tab for fine tuning.

Ingame the options menu does not work, ingame options is only "Graphics" and to change the controls you need to exit the game, which is annoying because the save and load function also does not work.

Later I found the ingame tablet with the map and option menus, so I figured you were supposed to use that for ingame options, but it was also broken and added more to the confusion as you also had it in the main menu.

Either make the ingame tablet handle everything or keep the game options to the main menu and out of the tablet PC ingame.

Simplify the hotkeys for hiding all the elements, sometimes GUI items vanished while I played and I had no idea how to bring them back, sometimes even after I looked up the hotkey it was still broken, for example one time playing the chat window was gone.

Btw you should disable the chat function, it is still enabled, even "say team" exists.

For example I use a Mega Menu in my game, when pressing ESC the menu will open where you can access all options at once and when pressing ESC again it will close everything, so no need to find the "X" button or "Done" button to get rid of the Popups and also as a bonus the game remembers what windows you had open and will open them again the next time pressing ESC also in case one menu fucks up you can always reset them pressing the main menu buttons.

I will write one more post for gameplay.

 

 

 

[Duion]

First things last, the Gameplay:

Loading time was slightly high, but ok. Intro sequence was good, crawling to land and passing out added well to the immersion. I was not sure yet what kind of game to expect, but I figured it could be some kind of survival game. After following the instructions I was a bit annoyed by the forced tutorial like "go there, do that" etc. It works good as tutorial, but the game should not force you to it. The game should at first explain you what to do, teach you the basic functions and then leave you alone as good as possible. Most annoying thing was the game forcing you to walk and only enable sprint much later. Maybe allow sprinting etc after you have eaten and drink and your health is good and disable it again when your health is bad.

Btw I managed to break out of the forced crawl animation at the start by pressing ctrl it would switch to sneak mode. The toggle between crawl, sneak/duck, walk and sprint is a bit complicated, just have walk by default have the ability to toggle it to sprint, one button for duck and one for prone. Like walk by default, shift = sprint, ctrl = duck and c = prone.

Also all the switching between first person and third person was annoying in the intro, I only later found out there is a button to change it.

It felt quite immersive at first, but later I realized your health does not really matter that much. You get hurt really easy through falling down, maybe make the fall damage a bit less, it is not realistic to eat a bread every time you fell down a few steps. On the other hand you cannot really die.

However closest I manage to come to dying is getting stuck in some backyard with no way out, so I had to quit the game and the next time I entered the game seemed to be broken as the storyline was gone, the survival aspects etc. I pressed "save game" a few time, but noticed it does not seem to do anything, the menus also remained grayed out.

NPC dialogue was okay, though you have the typical "silent hero" syndrome. Many games have the main character not speak, probably because you play as yourself and a customized character, but in your case you play as Jonas and in that case it would add greatly to the immersion if the main character would also have audio speech.

Some dialogue options are obvious, others not, but in the end it does not matter, because you can just try the dialogue again which makes the game very casual as there is no consequence other than your "faith" dropping, but that also has no consequence.

The first "quest" actually had me excited just to find out some guy saying it is just the alpha.

So overall I'm not sure yet what kind of gameplay you are aiming for, it seemd to be a survival game to me, with the addition of "faith" which is quite an original concept, but no idea yet what it is good for. First I was very careful, but later it vanished as I figured out all the survival aspects meaan nothing and you cannot die. Only gameplay remaining to me was exploring the big beautiful island, collecting the verses and eating a bread every time I fell down a few steps.

Visually the game looks excellent also the game world is quite large, but there is little functionality, the functions are there but not fully implemented or working yet. You need to focus now on giving the player something to do, even if it is just picking and selling flowers, does not have to be much, but something.

I would like an open world survival game with also a storyline, some time ago I played Subnautica and liked it a lot. You were stranded on an alien planet left to figure out how to survive and the game consisted on exploring the world, collecting items and eventually figuring out there being a storyline.

A lot of games consist of grinding now and the goal of the game is to grind so you no longer have to grind. Look at some games and try to break down the game mechanics as simple as possible to get an idea for what you have to develop, Ignore the graphics etc for a while otherwise you will not see the forest full of trees. At the moment it is running around, exploring, finding food, drink, medpacks, books etc which is quite boring as there is no real pressure as you do not die and the books have no connection to the game, to sum it up there is not much of a game. To make the game more interesting compared to a regular survival game there should be always too little items to survive in the world and you have to act wiseley and rely on your faith to survive. I know this all sounds a lot, maybe too much for one person to develop, but this is why I say focus on the core and ignore the rest for a while and then have a lot of people playtest it otherwise it will be hard to improve. I learned a lot from thousands of people playing my game, but in case you plan to make a more linear story based game it will be hard to have an alpha access as the alpha access will spoil a lot of the content and it will be frustrating when the player reaches the end of the alpha, like I experienced.

[Nils]

@Duion Thank you s o much for all the time and effort you have put into texting and writing these posts. I'm grateful for this input and it's most certainly of use.  Some things may surprise you, these things are there:

• HDR is enabled by default (can't be turned off) But is has a different purpose than usual, which one example is to work with the basic clouds layers etc. There's bloom and such but these effects are tuned in a way it's not becoming obvious that those are enabled. 
• fiNormals are tuned but for example on ground cover 3d objects these are purposely made flat so that the transition with their imposters are less noticeable. Dark areas in certain directions pop out as dark spots and look unnatural because these can't blend in with the terrain at a further distance.
• SSAO is by default enabled because there are many objects not drawing shadows. With maps of these scale does run quickly into drawcall issues. Reducing shadows was the key thing to make this old T3D engine perform a little. That's why when you set everything to max in the options panel your fps go down rapidly. The SSAO is there to replace the shadows and give the who look depth. It's truly all flat when turned off. Also do 3d ground cover shapes don't draw shadows so the SSAO is truly welcome in that area to give depth.
• Next to the sprint/run toggle (x) and crouch/prone toggle (c) keys are there the default sprint (left shift) and crouch (left ctrl) keys. It looks like it's not clear enough so there's need for clarification. Both the keys are general really, but really depends on what type of games one plays. Toggle keys are Arma/DayZ style and the other common in many games. It's offering both really

Player experience is very important but as you write also certainly no absolute. Whether something is there/true is also not important when players don't find/see or experience them; so all the input is valuable to me and will do my best to improve where possible. This is an alpha release and the development is ongoing. The graphics panel for example has been updated last Thursday and the "High" and "Ultra" settings were downscaled after some reported issues. There's much room for improvement regarding defaults but on the other hand has a hardware these days also a lot variety. This old engine is not suitable for the high resolutions of the day; you can play with ultra settings on 1080p but it's likely to crash on 4K (I can't even test 4K my self)

Regarding the theme and narrative of the game (which dialogues etc are of course made for) I can fully understand it's not clear. It makes sense for the target group to which this game is especially developed. If you don't have affinities with that, surely you don't get much of the play experience the target group (Christians) has.

Lastly, you certainly can die. I had more complaints about the early deaths then the other way around, mainly because loading a saved game hasn't been enabled yet.  The save game mechanics do work but aren't complete; It's because the quest/mission is still in development, and therefore not properly saved. Things that don't work properly are mostly disabled until these become fully functional and reliable. There's much work that's almost finished and will be introduced at later times. 

Again, many thanks for your inclusive report, I truly apricate it!!!

Warm regards from China!

[Nils]

These things are mentioned on the itch.io page or in the game itself:

• Type of game: Adventure (with survival elements)
• Major quest: Delivering 7 letters (with storyline/ narrative - to be provided as DLC's/updates)
• Minor quest: Find & collect 66 books (already implement and can be played out)
• Downloads: offered as zip archive (can also be used with itch.io app) and as setup (wizard)
• Default keys: https://themanfisher.itch.io/the-manfisher/devlog/389795/-how2play-1-keys
• Health mechanics: https://themanfisher.itch.io/the-manfisher/devlog/390175/-how2play-2-health

The health mechanics are fully functional and are much more than simple health/stamina you'd find in most games. Have a look at the link above, so you may get a better understanding what is working underneath. Survival is not the main theme of this game, so one does not die quickly/soon, nor is finding food a major task (that would break an adventure game for sure).

Hope that clarifies a bit, some statements made aren't in line with the actual facts. The narrative/story line is mostly not clear because not all is revealed at the beginning (that will break any narrative) and a large part is in development. Writing and testing gameplay scripts take a lot of time, especially considering this is a solo project (until now).

Cheers!

[Nils]

@Duion

Quote

Options menu is slightly confusing, you probably derived it from the complicated menu they now use in the new Version of Torque with all those sliders. It looks like an attempt to make it more console friendly, but I do not like it that much.

No not at all. This menu has been developed long before T3D 4.0. There's almost nothing of 4.0 new code/features in this custom 3.6 fork. The core of it comes from the DeadlyMatter project (2015) and has been developed further in recent times (like with several other mechanics in this game)

[Nils]

Quote

However closest I manage to come to dying is getting stuck in some backyard with no way out, so I had to quit the game and the next time I entered the game seemed to be broken as the storyline was gone

I have managed to replicate this issues, I can confirm it may appear. It's a glitch that appears after you encounter the robbers. If you delete the prefs you'll notice that you are able to restart the mission as it should. Going to be fixed with the next update soon.

[Nils]

The ManFisher Alpha Update 0.1.8 just went live. You should be able to update your installation with the itch.io app; else (if you don’t use their app) download the setup file and do a fresh installation.

Changes/fixes in this build:

• "high" and "ultra" graphics settings have been downscaled. Due to performance issues and the fact that this alpha release hasn't been fully optimized yet, should the new defaults be less sluggish. Though one still cannot set all the slides to 100% and expect nothing bad will happen!!!
• The pause screen has now an options submenu which enables you to alter "graphics", "audio", "keys" and "controllers".
• "Save game" buttons have been greyed out to avoid confusion whether saving is enabled or not. While still in alpha, saving a game is tricky and the chance of your save files being broken is too high; That's why it's disabled for now until stable enough for you not to get mad when things don't turn out we want to.
• Sprinting is now much enabled earlier in the game, right after the player is fully restored.
• Stamina goes down less quickly now, which will let you run longer times (depending on other health mechanics)
• You can use the right mouse button (beside "enter") to switch the first person and third person view mode. This will make it easier to pick up items when you like to play in the 3rd person mode.
• Multiple triggers that change the view mode have been removed. Those that are necessary (like tiny spaces) are still there and remain. It's not a bug, but there on purpose. I understand not everyone is used to play a game with mixed view modes but this is just the design
• Jumping when in prone position is disabled.
• Crouching speed has been downscaled so it matches better with the walking speed.
• The bread at Maria's home is now respawned after time (as it should)
• Some radar/waypoint markers are now visible (as they should)
• The [U] key will restore all GUIs to default settings
• The issue of becoming "invincible" and unable to restart the game properly has been fixed. Sorry if some got used to it already: not able to die
• Many little tweaks & fixes are too little to mention here.

Cheers, Nils

Edited June 13, 2022 by Nils

[Duion]

I really thought you were invincible, because I was invincible all the time, later I even intentionally jumped down cliffs multiple times and was still alive, btw there is a minor glitch when you take fall damage as it will untoggle sprint mode and you have to enable sprint mode every time again you take fall damage, which happens quite often.

The thing is, it does not matter if a feature is there is the user is not able to figure it out quickly and other people have even less of an attention span than me on average. For example I was trying out all the keys to see which key does what, but I ended up pressing some hide button and it hid away some of the GUI elements and even after looking it up I could not bring them all back, so having a hotkey button to hide each GUI element may be confusing and even if not, you can at any time accidentally hit one of those buttons with your sausage fingers and then you get angry, because something is missing on the screen and you have no idea why and how to fix it.

Also I could not really figure out how to interact with items or how to use them and I would just smash all buttons, one factor that adds to the confusion is that the character will not eat or drink if he has full health, which made me think I pressed the wrong button to use the item.

The controls are already relatively simple, but then you have a bunch of complicated or semi useless features in there, like turn right or turn left or zoom, you cannot zoom in real life, so reserve that feature for guns or items like goggles.

I just read the controls and it says one click left mouse button for item info and double click for using it, this is a dangerous combination, as you will accidentally use items if you misclick, I would avoid button combinations, just show the info on hover and use on right click or so, I think many RPGs handle it that way, left mouse for picking up or removing items and right click to use.

So optimize the controls a bit, remove some unnecessary features and then place the list of hotkeys right into the "controls" options so everyone opening that dialogue even once will know how to control the game, no need for a "hotkeys" section in the menu or long complicated manuals somewhere on a website. Those Alt + hotkeys are also unneccesary and too complicated, I would remove them all and bind screenshot function to a direct hotkey like an F key.

You may be right that Arma does have a toggle for duck, crawl, walk, but you are not Arma, your target group are not hardcore gamers, simply make ctrl for duck and x for prone position toggle, any additional button or feature adds confusion.

 

I will test out the new version where you hopefully can die or run out of stamina,  but I still think you need to add some kind of grinding feature, because you already have survival elements, so you need grinding as well, for example one thing that motivated me was to see if you could gather enough money to buy the hooker, but turned out the hooker was way too expensive and I could gather like 70 cash and the hooker wanted 1000. One mistake I made with my game was that I removed the pickup items distributed over the map and I replaced it with a loadout menu where you can chose the weapons you want to have, while this is an added feature, it also removed another feature, the grind of finding items on the map to get an advantage over other players. You already have items to pick up, but they do not play such a great role. One of the main motivators in video games  is the ability to upgrade yourself like collect better gear, more supplies to increase your strength, efficiency, range of action etc. GTA works like this, you do jobs to earn money, but better cars, guns etc and your  game felt a bit like GTA, except vehicles do not work yet.

[Duion]

Also forget about your target group, what you think your target group is may not be your real target group. My target group was already the more technically experienced people, but probably the most common response I get from people is "Oh I cannot play your game, it does not run on my "computer" " and it turns out people no longer have computers, they only have old laptops and later they complain why they require a dedicated GPU to play my game and blame it on me, even though it is physically impossible to make a 3D game run properly on 15 year old laptops.

If you have been living under a rock for the last decade like me you will probably wonder how retarded people have gotten in the meantime, people from your target group will probably ask you "What is a video game?" or "What is a desktop PC?" so only a marginally small group within your marginally small group of a target group will be your real target group and because that small part of that small group is so small it is basically nonexistent you should think about rethinking your target group.

The problem is that today most groups are in their own filter bubble and they will not touch anything outside of it, for example most open source games are technologically behind like 20 years and the people in the open source scene never bothered to get a gaming PC so my target group cannot play my game, because nobody has a computer with a GPU, religious people in your case may not even touch a computer or have one at all and ultimatively people who are already spiritual in some way do not need media that makes them more spiritual, but the others need it, so your target group is probably more like the opposite of what you thought your target group is.

So why not just make something like an indie GTA, but reward people for acting moral instead of immoral, you already have the gameworld and the features.

[Nils]

@Duion

I'm sorry, but I don't see the point in further discussing things that have been already announced being updated/fixed etc. Neither am I interested in fulfilling everyone's detailed whishes or preferences, since that is an endless list. One has to see the value of a product that is freely offered (or give what one think it's worth to support it). It's truly irrelevant for example to go all that deep about a certain key being bound twice to serve a greater audience. Certainly I'm interested in current bugs/issues, obviously.*

A target group is not the same as a market. This is not a commercial product that needs to be sold for revenue. A thoroughly study has been made a year for the development even began. The statements you make above are completely off, and frankly its a bit of an insult and does not add something positive to your image either.

I  did not make a game for the secular market, nor am I planning to do so. The are many Christian gamers very active today, mostly born in this century, and much into popular secular games. The amount of decent Christian games titles that are being published every year, can be counted on one hand, and none are receiving attention and are just forgotten year after year. There is complete awareness on my side and I knew exactly what kind of result to expect.

This product is not being developed with the purpose of making a game (nor to become rich or whatever dream blah...) but to deliver something of a spiritual nature.  In this case the game is just a medium, the carrier for something else than a game. So I'm certainly not interested in spending too much time, effort and money in perfecting the carrier while the true purpose needs that first and foremost.

Lastly, it's being developed in a game engine know one knows these days and nobody wants; It matches exactly with this game. I'm already having issues on multiple platforms and partly are due to exclusion because the religious theme. I foresaw issues (this forum is not really the place to write about that though) and have chosen for an engine with an MIT license and the original company not being active - and certainly not in the secular cultural affairs of the day; trying to limit or stop the release because of some license details and conflicting "values". Frankly I don't see any other kinds of reasons to use this engine these days.

I truly hope we can discuss the engine itself here; I thank you for remarks and gestures, but as you just may have read, I'm not that interested in long discussions about features, the market etc.

Thanks & cheers, Nils

https://www.themanfisher.com

* NB. The sprint toggle after impact has been noted and is already on the todo list. It involves some changes in player.cpp (triggers) that need decent testing.

[Nils]

Edited June 16, 2022 by Nils

[Duion]

Don't get offended, my comments are not that bad, you have to be aware that when you release a product to the world the comments will be 100 times more and 100 times worse, you won't believe the stupidity of people sometimes.

Also you do not need to discuss the engine here or why you chose to use an "unpopular" or "bad" engine, fact is Torque3D is probably the best engine you can use in the world right now, sure there are downsides, but the open source nature, simplicity and having been used in the real industry make it the overall best choice.

I constantly see projects in Unity failing because people realize they have to pay extra for additional features, for example Unity does not come with networking by default and because they are too greedy to pay for addons, they end up coding their own netcode and then end up failing. Unreal engine is overkill for indie developers I playtested a game of a few friends that had very good demo material visually, good trailers and even got staff picked on kickstarter,  but what I played was very primitive and bugged, making a game requires effort, no matter what engine. The next good option would be Cry Engine, but they have a history of being very proprietary, going bankrupt and beind sold off that it is not worth touching also their support is very bad due to that. Godot engine still struggles to implement the most basic features like LOD and is only good to develop small mobile games. Godot is also secretly funded by corrupt corporations that shill microtransactions and cryptocurrencies to rip off people even better, it is pretty evil.

So you do not have to justify yourself for using the "unpopular" Torque engine, it is already the best choice, the others would rather have to justify their stupid decissions, but they are in delusion.

And lastly all those arguments like "Oh I'm not commercial I do not have to follow the laws of the market" etc are all delusions, you do have to treat your product like a commercial product, there is no difference really, like open source software competes with proprietary software the same way on the real market, open source software does not get a special treatment, it is rather the opposite, they get a harder treatment often. I don't know where you made your research, but even without research I can instantly tell you that at least in my country there are almost no religious people at all, the only Christians in my country are either very old people or are migrants from eastern europe, otherwise people are almost 100% Atheist here.

Your game is already one of the best looking indie games I know, you have a good chance on the real market as a real paid game, the only things that can stop you are mostly confirmation bias against religious stuff or "unpopular" game engines or you having a loser mindset. You even improved those stupid ugly rotating groundcover billboards and used shapes including wind animations, not even BeamNG or LifeisFeudal had that, I still wanted to ask you how you did that and if you could contribute wind animations for groundcover shapes into the engine, I really want that feature.

[JeffR]

@Duion

I believe he's already made his point that he's not interested in discussing stuff outside the engine itself. He already answered you pertaining to the hows and whys of the release and asked to move on from the topic, so we're going to move on from the topic. Remember, advice and suggestions are certainly well and good, but asserting your perspectives, goals or thoughts as the one true absolute way to do things isn't helpful and - especially if you ignore requests to drop the topic - only frustrates everyone and derails valid discussions.

Your last part about the improvements to the grass and clutter is a good point and adheres to Nils' request for a topic shift, so we'll go with that and other similar improvements/additions he's worked on with the engine. Improvements to features like that are certainly welcome to see.

[Duion]

@JeffR

Whats the problem now? I do not need a moderator to tell me what I'm supposed to say and what not. He even explicitely asked me for my opinion and so I replied. We are both grown adults I hope and able to make our own decissions, we do not need someone playing daddy like you. Why you even think it is your job to tell me what I'm allowed to say and what is productive and what not? I spend a lot of time actually testing his game and writing pages of review, suggestions and my opinion, you did nothing productive, you probably did not even read my posts.

[Nils]

Quote

"Don't get offended"

I am not at all offended . I made an expression that context of the things written were a bit insulting; yet I'm not even insulted. It was an expression to make one think about about how the message may be received. Of course what one does with it is up to him/her.

Duion, I thank you again for all the work you put into this; as I said before it's valuable and you see that I am grateful. There are things though that you don't understand and while trying to write about it, you started to break down what you did beforehand. This forum is not the place to go into detail about what this game is about; I would happily do that but I do need to take in account for what purpose this platform is created. I can tell you though that it is futile trying to convince me to start making games for the secular world. It's not going to happen. I did not spent 3 years of hardship to just entertain people for naught. One may think I'm crazy, that's fine, but if someone distorts the truth about the matters then I will respond and shed a light on it. Hope that makes it clear enough.

Thank you all for your time and interest, and Jeff, yes, I'm certainly willing to share anything about what I did  with and in the engine; if that's a helpful contribution to the community. 

Edit:  Mark up messed up on mobile devices

Edited June 17, 2022 by Nils

[JeffR]

Quote

Why you even think it is your job to tell me what I'm allowed to say and what is productive and what not

"In threads, under normal circumstances if the OP of a thread requests a post to be removed because they feel it is inflammatory, or off topic or the like, the mods will review it and in most cases, remove it per OP's request. It's their thread, so they get nearly final say in how the thread's topic should flow."

Pulled straight from the community Code of Conduct. It is Nils' thread, and he can - and has - set the topic point for it. It is my job because I'm part of the moderation and it is my job because failing to adhere to the CoC, which has been in place for years now, is obviously by definition against the rules. I've deleted your other post because, again, you are not listening and went on a tirade rather than accepting what moderation has told you about staying on topic.

Move on.

[Caleb]

25 minutes ago, Duion said:

@JeffR

Did Nils demand my post to be removed?

If that is the case I will from now on stop reading anything he writes, will never reply to him again, will never test, review or support him or his game in any way.

If that is not the case get my deleted post back, if not I will also do what I just stated and in case you deleted it even though he did not request it I will also ignore you from now on for being a liar, manipulator and hypocrite.

You argue about Code of Conduct, but you did not even say what was wrong, he just asked me for me opinion, then I said my opinion, then he did not like it and it was removed using violence against me forcefully removing my long post I put a lot of effort into writing. I have freedom of speech and I can say whatever I want, if someone does not like it he can tell me and I will stop replying, but if you treat him like a little child that cannot speak for his own it is probably not worth talking to him anyway as he is not a grown adult being able to deal with reality and I will gladly watch him hit rock bottom in the real world as he fully deserved it now.

I gave him like the nicest compliments anyone could ever get from me and as thanks I get my posts deleted for not being nice enough, that is like one of the most detestable behavior I have ever experienced, so from now on you both are cursed, goodbye and see you never again.

 

Enough.

[Duion]

Did Nils demand it or not? Is he happy about you destroying his thread? If he did not want my advice he could simply stop answering and I would stop as well, it would be that easy, now you made a huge deal out of nothing, just because you assume you need to play babysitter for him.

[JeffR]

I haven't made a 'huge deal' out of anything. I merely removed a post that was continuing to violate CoC and moderator advisement on a settled topic.

There is no assumptions or "playing babysitter". I am applying moderation consistent with the rules that have been in play for years and will continue to do so. The topic is settled, move on. Either onto the valid, relevent topic or onto a different thread. You will not be warned again.