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

@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.

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

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

We're already tried that with bug bounties. It didn't.

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.

You missed my point. As the user that experiences the bug you already have it ten times easier by virtue of being able to reproduce it. If you are a developer then you should be aware of that. Giving a good bug report and working with the developer is the way to get the bug fixed, especially when you have the know-how to help. Otherwise, other work takes priority as the effort-to-benefit ratio is just better.

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.

FAF code is on Github, we already have Github issues to keep us aware. I can understand Ftx's annoyance here, none of FAF's devs are stupid. We know that issues exist and telling us they exist is no grand revelation. It's about the amount of work required versus developer time, implying that it's all because FAF people are lazy/oblivious/arrogant is both naive and a bit insulting.

@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.

This was also mentioned in the FAF fund thread and why it doesn't work either. You should read it. Tl;dr paying pseudo-interns while core devs work for free does more harm than good.

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.

Again, the trade is just not there. Not with the small scale FAF is operating on.

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.

The best way to fix issues is to help us fix them. FAF is not a product that you buy and demand quality in return, it's a community with all of us as volunteers trying to build something. You're a developer and one that can reproduce bugs and one that's motivated enough to post multiple times on forums to complain about them. You have everything you need to help us fix them. All it takes is some good will.

I don't know who you are talking to that you think we deny the existence of bugs. I know of no developers here that would claim that we can deliver a bug-free experience. Yes, there is a lack of communication how we try to solve things like the connection problems, but I honestly can't see this "culture of denial" that you are speaking of

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

You missed my point. As the user that experiences the bug you already have it ten times easier by virtue of being able to reproduce it. If you are a developer then you should be aware of that. Giving a good bug report and working with the developer is the way to get the bug fixed, especially when you have the know-how to help. Otherwise, other work takes priority as the effort-to-benefit ratio is just better.

I thought that stating that I was not able to reliably reproduce it multiple times on the forum and to the relevant people would communicate that I am not able to easily reproduce most of the issues in a concise and repeatable way.

I can understand Ftx's annoyance here, none of FAF's devs are stupid.

I can understand how constructive adding his one liners is to the discussion. I'm not calling faf devs stupid, I have no idea where people get this idea. (Edit: /s since I know it will be needed) Neither am I implying that they are lazy/oblivious/arrogant. If I say in passing <this generic category of behaviour has gotten worse and its not isolated to my setup> and I get back in writing that its basically fake news thats suboptimal and the phenomenon that I'm point the finger at here. Just because it isnt isolated enough to file a bug report on whatever platform du jour is the correct one, doesnt mean there are no issues.

On the financial point, fine. I disagree with the assessment and there is no shortage of projects large and small that have gone both ways, and its hard to get right, especially to get it right the first time around. I personally prefer to give money to FAF to use constructively in whatever form than have to give it to something like sanctuary. The consensus seems to be we dont want money, just get DIYing everything yourself. Not feasible when you have 60+ weeks and have to travel internationally a lot but hey, I guess everyone else knows best.

You need to understand that topics were raised, I have given my POV and feedback on things and beating the horse until its dead wont retcon that fact.

@blackyps The number of times I have made fun of issues to have people jump into discord or VC to tell me in as colourful or heated a way as they want that its flat out untrue at this point is staggering. Even in game chat.

To the point where in weeks into the constant disconnect saga I had one person jump in and flat out ask us "what do you mean? We've have reconnect functionality in the ICE adapter for a while and it works great".

If youre not seeing that, then I'd love to swap my FAF experience for yours and I think I know a few people who would love nothing more than to be able to just queue normally and play the game until it finishes in a way that isnt an appcrash or a disconnect.

Literally posts like the one you just made are a good example of the kind of attitude that is pervasive since that side of the debate often runs to "its not open on <whatever tracker>" right now therefore fake news when a lot of these issues we have no idea how to reproduce because they seem random in when they happen and often don't happen the same way twice which makes it very hard to file a bug for any of them.

I'll quote a few of your posts from this thread:

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

Connection issues, client stability is trash and when it works its a laggy mess, communication from dev team to players is inexistent. Theres also a culture of denial when it comes to technical issues.

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

If people want to pretend there are no issues when there are dozens of client crashes, hangs and bugs experienced every day in VC, games not launching about 30% of the time thats fine.

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

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

In order, "there's a culture of denial", "people pretend there are no bugs", "you'd prefer people to be annoyed rather than fix issues" (I'm pretty sure BlackYps is a contributor). You can say that it's just you "saying the hard truth no matter how it makes people feel", but you certainly didn't come across that way. It's very easy and natural to interpret what you wrote as "the dev team is lazy, in denial and doesn't give a shit", even if you claim you didn't mean it.

There was actually a post from you about how the old client was better and more stable than the new one. I was the maintainer of the old Python client and the one who gave it a new lease of life by porting it from Python2/PyQt4 to Python3/PyQt5. I can tell you with 100% certainty, that hacked together shitheap that I tried to keep together was not the least bit more stable that what the java client is right now. Some major improvements like the ICE adapter that made connectivity not shit or random maps or team matchmaking were nigh impossible to do in the old client, too.

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

@blackyps The number of times I have made fun of issues to have people jump into discord or VC to tell me in as colourful or heated a way as they want that its flat out untrue at this point is staggering. Even in game chat.

To the point where in weeks into the constant disconnect saga I had one person jump in and flat out ask us "what do you mean? We've have reconnect functionality in the ICE adapter for a while and it works great".

You're a developer. You should be aware of the "lol it works on my machine" phenomenon. Random users telling you that does not mean the actual developers are like this.

Just to clarify some things:

@TheCodemander The way you have communicated and worded things can sometimes come off as caustic/derogatory/hostile, even if you didn't mean to come across that way. I would suggest using less inflamatory/crticial/insulting/controversial word choice if you don't want to come across that way. Many others communicate issues and disagreement without sounding like that.

@MazorNoob When he referred to the stability of the old client, I believe he was referring to prior versions of the current client, not the python client.

@mazornoob

There was actually a post from you about how the old client was better and more stable than the new one. I was the maintainer of the old Python client and the one who gave it a new lease of life by porting it from Python2/PyQt4 to Python3/PyQt5. I can tell you with 100% certainty, that hacked together shitheap that I tried to keep together was not the least bit more stable that what the java client is right now. Some major improvements like the ICE adapter that made connectivity not shit or random maps or team matchmaking were nigh impossible to do in the old client, too.

Your "shitheap" didnt frequently lockup, require a refaf per hour and had a working close button which didnt require me to pkill -9 the parent process. It also didnt swallow up more resources than the actual game uses.

Personally, I count those things are improvements.

If you think I misinterpreted the communication I've had over the last good while from FAF devs whenever I've run into these issues then I dont really see how you can fail to understand how the inverse might also work.

At the very beginning I tried to play the appeasement game and being ultra polite. That got nowhere. Evidence shows that flat out calling this out in plain language is working much, much better (if engagement in this thread is anything to go by).

You're a developer. You should be aware of the "lol it works on my machine" phenomenon. Random users telling you that does not mean the actual developers are like this.

As someone who has an SOC behind me that refuses to be abused in ways it was never intended for because we cant have devs who can write native code and therefore need docker or whatever the fuck container they currently have a hardon for I am acutely aware of the "it works on my machine" problem.

All I'm saying is that all the noises Ive made in random directions to all manner of people all over the place on various FAF teams were either ignored or were pretty much dismissed out of hand. In the meantime, its not just me with more and more serious issues happening more and more frequently. So before I do find the time to file however many bug reports and people get annoyed at the spam that will cause, I was told it might be a good idea to bring this up on the forum, which I have now done.

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

@MazorNoob When he referred to the stability of the old client, I believe he was referring to prior versions of the current client, not the python client.

I was referring to both. Old java client might have been a bit more stable than python when I ran it, hard to say. Windows 8.1 ESR in a VFIO KVM setup is not really the ideal target to develop for, but I was definitely hearing a lot less "its also broken for me". Point being I cant say if python was on top or level with old java client.

Recently though it is no contest that java client has gotten an order of magnitude worse and is now firmly below either old java in a whacked up VM setup or python.

Edit: On your language point, as I mentioned to mazor, it took being inflammatory to get the time of day on the issue. Its not like Ive just started mentioning this issue to people. The bait-language is more of a feature at this point because my patience ran out sometime last year after months of really trying and getting nowhere. Evidence here suggests that has worked.

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

Your "shitheap" didnt frequently lockup, require a refaf per hour and had a working close button which didnt require me to pkill -9 the parent process. It also didnt swallow up more resources than the actual game uses.

I know the code that I spent a year or so maintaining better than you do. We wouldn't have ICE adapter today if we were forced to hack it into the python client, and that alone made FAF work better on average.

Out of curiosity, what specs are you running the java client on?

At the very beginning I tried to play the appeasement game and being ultra polite. That got nowhere. Evidence shows that flat out calling this out in plain language is working much, much better (if engagement in this thread is anything to go by).

No, it's just dissuading anyone from fixing issues if all they get is flaming that they didn't fix ALL issues. These people are not your subordinates, they won't start working better if you crack the whip.

As someone who has an SOC behind me that refuses to be abused in ways it was never intended for because we cant have devs who can write native code and therefore need docker or whatever the fuck container they currently have a hardon for I am acutely aware of the "it works on my machine" problem.

Expand on this, please.

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

The bait-language is more of a feature at this point because my patience ran out sometime last year after months of really trying and getting nowhere. Evidence here suggests that has worked.

It didn't. Yes, you got "engagement" in this thread, but you didn't move anything closer to a solution. You didn't provide any useful info to investigate the bugs and I don't think you increased anyone's motivation to try to help you.

All I'm saying is that all the noises Ive made in random directions to all manner of people all over the place on various FAF teams were either ignored or were pretty much dismissed out of hand.

Can give us a concrete example of where you did this, or where you encountered it being dismissed*?

Im not claiming to know the code better than you, im observing its stability to an end user.

I tried a number of java environments. Based on whats installed and configured right now, I have tried on openJDK 7, 8, 11, 17, 20 as well as the oracle jdk/jre 8 environments with mixed results. Currently on 17 apparently since IIRC the last update refused to launch in 20. This I remember because I had to specifically pay attention to its launch options to get the damn thing launched.

If you want system specs its a first gen zen (170 or 1800?) chip with 32GB of ram which is often used for other things, graphics side its whatever the latest upstream MESA (23?) is on a GCN 5 gpu. Kernel is whatever is pretty close to upstream 6.3 if 6.4 isn't out yet.

No, it's just dissuading anyone from fixing issues if all they get is flaming that they didn't fix ALL issues. These people are not your subordinates, they won't start working better if you crack the whip.

I dont care if the issues are fixed at this point, as long as I dont have to listen to "mhhh yes, new release: there are no issues its great!" talk anymore whenever I make a meme about it. I was told it was unfair to call it out if I hadnt raised it here.

It has now been raised here. So the next person to jump in vc to say I'm being unfair to whoever because no one ever mentioned in writing on the forums that people are having issues is getting clowned on justifiably.

Expand on this, please.

If you want the work rant here it is;

I spend most of my time these days in kernel land because my company wants to deploy things and sell a platform so other people can deploy their things which means I have the glorious task of making things that are too cheap to officially support the kinds of things they want to do, work. When you have to meet certain safety critical applications, its like working with your hands tied behind you back which really eases things.

So when some clown goes "what do you mean I cant spin up 8 dockers in 512M of ram?! What do you mean I have to compile and statically link an application? or better yet, my node.js shit runs like dogshit on this, I really have a hard time taking them seriously.

The number of container platforms I have had pushed at me in the last 4 months touting them as curing anything and everything and how itll be so much easier when we dont have tickets of people not understanding that works on their machine and works on the target machine therefore we neeeeed containers, pretty please fix up these cgroups and fucking platform specific network drivers, pleeeeeeease really pisses me off. And then the ASIL and ISO26262 people show up... Its really fun. /s

@BlackYps

It didn't. Yes, you got "engagement" in this thread, but you didn't move anything closer to a solution. You didn't provide any useful info to investigate the bugs and I don't think you increased anyone's motivation to try to help you.

Well if someone wants to say Ive never said there are issues that are not currently concretely reproducible that are happening quite often when I point to this thread, it'll be pretty safe to assume they cant read.

Can give us a concrete example of where you did this, or where you encountered it being dismissed*?

Dude you left the discord at the number of times you were exposed to complaining about these issues. So thats a good example for you I guess?

Dude you left the discord at the number of times you were exposed to complaining about these issues. So thats a good example for you I guess?

I left the Discord because I perceived the discussions with people, including the server admin, to be excessively toxic.

But to make sure I understand, you reported issues on your server. But did you also report issues on the official server, using the indicated channels such as the client-bug-reporting or (game)-bug-reporting channels?

I left the Discord because I perceived the discussions with people, including the server admin, to be excessively toxic.

I guess the trash talk channel is the only place youd run into the server admin and it is pretty trash tier.

@jip I swear the list of places that are the correct place to report issues continues to get longer. The number of people that come and go in our discord being what it is that I wouldn't know where to begin with who wouldve been told about what. I've heard it needs to be on github. Then it was not github but zoolup. Then it was forum. Now its official discord.

If Im talking directly to someone inside the FAF organisation, either on VC, or in game, or in DMs or on another discord or via morse code shouldnt really matter.

The whole point of me posting in this thread is that I'm fed up of the runaround of "but you havent posted in place n+1, so youre not allowed to say there are issues". There are issues. Currently they are not in a state where a concise bug report can be filed.

Therefore going forward the attitude of "it doesnt exist" moving into "it wasnt reported" morphing into "it wasnt written in the right places" is not going to fly. I'm posting here because there is a serious problem with the process and communication here.

I'm posting here because the excuse of "we werent notified" is no longer going to fly and I'm fed up playing games with people about posting to the right people in the right place. I think this has had enough visibility at this point, I'm sorry it had to be baity and that people might've felt attacked or hurt but seriously, the fact it had to get to this point to get eyes on the issue is the problem.

Whether I can contribute or whether these issues are worth fixing and spending time on is a separate discussion.

I am still cautiously optimistic that the new community manager person will improve communication going forward because trying to raise a very simple point has been like pulling teeth. And in many cases it should even be necessary in the first place.

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

Im not claiming to know the code better than you, im observing its stability to an end user.

I tried a number of java environments. Based on whats installed and configured right now, I have tried on openJDK 7, 8, 11, 17, 20 as well as the oracle jdk/jre 8 environments with mixed results. Currently on 17 apparently since IIRC the last update refused to launch in 20. This I remember because I had to specifically pay attention to its launch options to get the damn thing launched.

This is interesting. What distro? I'm on Gentoo with jdk 17 and 32 GiB ram and had no stability or memory leak issues whatsoever. That does explain the kill -9 issue, that sounds like java leaking memory and Linux shitting itself the moment it runs low. For what it's worth, I had other programs that eat a lot of memory do it to my graphical environment. OOM killer just refuses to trigger before everything becomes unresponsive, that's a linux thing.

Therefore going forward the attitude of "it doesnt exist" moving into "it wasnt reported" morphing into "it wasnt written in the right places" is not going to fly. I'm posting here because there is a serious problem with the process and communication here.

You're putting words in my mouth, which is rude.

My intention is to understand what issues you're talking about. You keep mentioning you reported issues and got a lame response in return. But as far as I can see on the official channels that doesn't happen. And with the interactions I've had on your server (t3 clan?) I didn't quite remember myself responding to you or anyone there that the weather is picture perfect either.

If Im talking directly to someone inside the FAF organisation, either on VC, or in game, or in DMs or on another discord or via morse code shouldnt really matter.

Yes it does , I'm not going to write down every bug people send my way. There's too many communications on a single day to process all of that. And on top of that I'm also sometimes just chilling and enjoying the game. Or at work when I get pinged. Either get it somewhere on a tracker (like Github, the dedicated channels official Discord, even a damn forum post) or the communication will get lost. It is just how it works