What is the biggest issue that plagues FAF in your opinion?

@j0hn I agree we're lucky to have FAF and keep playing the game.

When its "this is a hard technical problem, not much we can do, its hard" jank I'm down with that. The in game disconnects being every game a few weeks back was pretty lame but that was understandable.

The client chugging back gigabyte of ram, not launching games, crashing, hanging, needing to be relaunched 4 times a day because it just sort of bugged out etc. Thats not a hard technical problem, thats a client sucks problem.

And while I'd agree we should appreciate what we have, the current client deprecated a far more robust client for basically no reason. And even within the new client, older versions were more stable. Can we run older versions? No, because theres a "you must have version <x> or later lockout".

Thats not FAF running into hard problems, thats a "client sucks" problem and a "we require you to use this specific sucky client" problem which is a choice.

People keep complaining about the client crashing but when I ask specifically for logs or for people to post bug reports. I never get any back so there is very little I can do.

The client seems to be stable for most people. At least we haven't heard of frequent crashes. If you are just malding in your corner about the shit client without telling anyone, then the situation will not improve.
The old client got deprecated because literally nobody was working on it.
The mandatory version increments only happen when we do a breaking change. Then the old versions would not work correctly anymore, so it is better to deny even starting an incompatible client.

@sheikah If I sent you logs every time client malfunctions, I'm pretty sure I'd get banned for spamming.

Edit: The most repeatable screwup behaviour I have right now is it outright hanging. Especially when trying to close the thing. Only way to get it to go away is pkill -9 java

As I said above if you are not able to make reasonable bug reports from when something happened then there is very little I can do.

@sheikah The lack of reproducibility in the weird issues will likely continue to make that less than practicable.

So what is your solution? Continuing to bitch on the forum?

@blackyps Let me guess youd prefer people to what was it, quietly mald?

I'd prefer you to actually contribute to a solution by submitting proper bug reports

@blackyps Which when theres nothing interesting in the log because its locked itself up is going to take up someones time to type out "wtf you want me to do with this?" and the issue goes just as under the radar as it would if it wasnt reported.

And just how do you know that?

Debugging memory issues and race conditions is one of the hardest things to do in any application. Even more problematic if it's on end users machines outside of developers reach.

But yeah, obviously it's a "client sucks" problem that would be easy to solve and we all simply don't care.

@thecodemander said in What is the biggest issue that plagues FAF in your opinion?:

@sheikah If I sent you logs every time client malfunctions, I'm pretty sure I'd get banned for spamming.

Edit: The most repeatable screwup behaviour I have right now is it outright hanging. Especially when trying to close the thing. Only way to get it to go away is pkill -9 java

You don't have to do it every time or never. Even just making a bug report with a log once in a while is much more helpful than doing nothing.

Why are issues not fixed? I specifically requested it.

@TheCodemander Once again please be patient, nobody is getting paid to be here. We all do it on our free time. We do listen to complains and people do put in logs. If you think you can do it better please come contribute, complaining does nothing to help especially in this toxic manner.

@TheCodemander Once again please be patient, nobody is getting paid to be here.

Ah yes the old "be patient" as we sit here years on from when the issues started. As for being paid maybe they should, not like there's a thread about ideas for spending money and its not like any project ever managed to mix paid and unpaid work ever. /s because apparently everyone wants to read everything I write as being toxic.

If you think you can do it better please come contribute,

Where did I say I think I can (or want to) fix these client bugs? At the moment theyre barely reproducible, what is there to file other than a load of vague "this breaks sometimes in random ways?". When there is a reproducible bug I'll consider filing an official report. Until then I will call bullshit every time I get told "there are no issues".

If someone disagreeing with you is toxic then theres not much I can do to help you.

because apparently everyone wants to read everything I write as being toxic.

Have you ever wondered why that is? Because strangely it doesn't happen to everyone that disagrees with something.

@thecodemander said in What is the biggest issue that plagues FAF in your opinion?:

@TheCodemander Once again please be patient, nobody is getting paid to be here.

Ah yes the old "be patient" as we sit here years on from when the issues started. As for being paid maybe they should, not like there's a thread about ideas for spending money and its not like any project ever managed to mix paid and unpaid work ever.

Said thread explains pretty well why being paid is not a solution. Even just one full-time developer costs an order of magnitude more than what FAF gets in donations. Yes there are projects that have paid developers like emulators or big open source projects (KDE, LibreOffice etc.). Thing is, they actually do get one or two orders of magnitude more money since they work on widely popular things rather than a cool 15 year old RTS. There's just no way around it. Volunteer work is what you have and you need to adjust your expectations.

Where did I say I think I can (or want to) fix these client bugs? At the moment theyre barely reproducible, what is there to file other than a load of vague "this breaks sometimes in random ways?". When there is a reproducible bug I'll consider filing an official report. Until then I will call bullshit every time I get told "there are no issues".

I can tell you as a developer that fixing heisenbugs is N times harder when the person suffering from these bugs shows no interest in helping diagnose them. Again, it's just how things work. Difficult and rare bugs are ignored in favour of other necessary work. If you want to see them fixed, make them easier to fix by investigating them the best a user can.

And none of these funded projects are even close to being bug free.

@Mazornoob So having small monetary incentives that might incite additional eyes and time is never going to result in any improvement?

I can tell you as a developer that fixing heisenbugs is N times harder when the person suffering from these bugs shows no interest in helping diagnose them. Again, it's just how things work. Difficult and rare bugs are ignored in favour of other necessary work. If you want to see them fixed, make them easier to fix by investigating them the best a user can.

As a developer I can tell you that I am acutely aware of how much time and effort is needed to fix some of these issues. And that is precisely why Im not sitting here filing bug reports for every bit of jank I (or anyone on VC) runs into when it happens.

What I take issue with is when people like @FtXCommando come out of the woodwork with little gems like

Why are issues not fixed? I specifically requested it.

I'm not requesting issues be fixed. I'm drawing attention to the fact there are issues. I've drawn attention to there being issues for years now to various people in various media and the response has more often than not "hurdurr, there are no issues with the current release" or clownery to that effect.

@BlackYps

Have you ever wondered why that is? Because strangely it doesn't happen to everyone that disagrees with something.

Its not up to me how people respond to feedback. If people want to take it that way then fine, I cant stop people from feeling however they want to make themselves feel when they read things.

What I will say is that the level of attention this topic has gotten here when called out is interesting given the attitudes here.

@Brutus5000 I'm sure the current contributors have better paid work. I'm also pretty sure there are plenty of people who have the skills to contribute, who are working for a pittance and their time is tied with not starving. If something is an hour of time at their work for minimum wage or an hour of their time for a few bucks to fix an issue on FAF, that might be enough to get extra time and eyes on these issues.

Either way, I'm not saying faf must spend money or that its the right solution, but if the position is "there are more issues than we have time for" at the same time there's a thread inviting suggestions for what to spend money on, it seems off to not trade resources you have too much of for the kind you don't have enough of.

95% of why I brought the topic up is because A) I'm tired of hearing claims of no issues and B) being told, well if there are issues post about it on the forum if theres not enough for bug reports. I've fulfilled my end, so can we stop pretending things are perfect now? Because based on the level of hurt feeling on show here, I'm going to suspect that people making the "no issues" claims were doing so in bad faith, and the whole "theres nothing at all we could do to do better is also fictitious.