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General Discussion / Re: The Lie That Never Lived: Shionbi Life Online
« on: July 18, 2020, 13:35:20 »
I'm going to SOMEWHAT defend Vreg here, -gasp- I know! Most of the newer people don't know me and probably wont know why that's so shocking.
Now that we've gotten that out of the way I did say "somewhat" there's a lot to be mad at Vreg over. Especially those who donated their time and effort to the project only for the client to say "by Vreg" and not "By the SLO team" all the while not being compensated for their work while the project lead takes every penny. Which is the real tragedy here, because at the end of the day, the word is "donated" people donated their money to the project which means you should not have been expecting any return on that investment Vreg didn't sign a contact with you that says he'd update the project if you donated. You were donating money based on the current state of development it's no different than steam green light. You want to make sure the money you put in is what you think the game is worth in it's current state. I'm sorry that you feel cheated but at the end of the day you have to be your own advocate in this situation and donate (or not) based on your means and how much the current state of the game is worth to you.
Now let's debunk this ridiculous theory that Vreg is making bank off this site.
Google Adense CTR or "Click Through Rate" for Belgium where he is located is 0.1% or about $0.024 the most people ever online at once was 4232 people. Which if every one of them clicked an ad, would be $101, do you really believe 4232 people REALLY clicked the ad's? C'mon, on the other hand the rate for just "seeing" an ad is much worse and as I saw, previously with 4232 just seeing the ad (which most used ad blocker I'm willing to bet). Vreg was making about $5 a day AT MOST when the site was at it's peak from advertisements. And if you're smart, which most people I know have enough javascript coding experience to do, if you use tamper monkey and in one singe short line of code can disable the "please turn off adblocker" message incredibly easy. I'm not advocating for this as you make so little off adsense anyway that literally turning off the message is just salting a wound. Please do not contact me and ask me for the code to do this, I won't be supplying it.
Now, for the final part, it's likely that what's going on is a mix of three things
1. A lack of experience, making a networked game is not easy and unless you have a lot of experience, either from designing your own networking systems, or working on a networked game and learning from someone. Then it tends to be buggy and EVERYTHING you need to add to the system needs to be networked and taken into account. Let alone trying to make things server-authoritative, there's systems out there that are open source that make this easier. From what I remember talking to Vreg, he's using the base Unity networking system, which is trash for a server authoritative system.( Unity literally abandoned it: https://support.unity3d.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001252086-UNet-Deprecation-FAQ)
Basic movement and hit detection isn't too hard but when you need to sync advanced systems like melee combat, the moving hitbox of the melee weapon can be very difficult to get networked properly. The basic Jutsu in the game already are rather simple to get working, most of them are basic "press a button and the server checks to see if a player is in a hitbox at this location at this time". The earth-dome Jutsu is nearly laughably easy to get working, which hey, if a cool ability is easy to get working then great! The more value you can add to a game the better, especially if that value was rather easy to implement and gives the players more options. Especially since other things are incredibly difficult. This is probably why the updates are taking so long. Networked Melee combat isn't easy.
2. Doing Dev while having a day-job is hard, trust me, I have my own projects and when you're working 50+ hours a week, trying to find time for your projects can be difficult. Especially when you have a family like I do.
3. Boredom, when you're working solo-programmer on a project, especially if your responsible for the entire system is BOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGG. And letting another coder in to help is risky, because either they do good work and you need to learn how they did things because even if you're a pro-coder looking into code you've never seen before takes time to dissect. Or you get a coder who comes in and flubbs everything up and now you're doing twice the work because you need to rip their garbage out and replace it. Which wastes time and money, source control helps a little with this, but still can be a pain. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't bring in another coder because it's much easier, faster and more pleasant to be able to hand off "You work on the server, I work on the client and we meet in the middle" instead of having to do both. Which feels like your doubling up work like "I already did this on the client... now I have to replicate it on the server.... UUUUUUUGHH!!!......."
Now that we've gotten that out of the way I did say "somewhat" there's a lot to be mad at Vreg over. Especially those who donated their time and effort to the project only for the client to say "by Vreg" and not "By the SLO team" all the while not being compensated for their work while the project lead takes every penny. Which is the real tragedy here, because at the end of the day, the word is "donated" people donated their money to the project which means you should not have been expecting any return on that investment Vreg didn't sign a contact with you that says he'd update the project if you donated. You were donating money based on the current state of development it's no different than steam green light. You want to make sure the money you put in is what you think the game is worth in it's current state. I'm sorry that you feel cheated but at the end of the day you have to be your own advocate in this situation and donate (or not) based on your means and how much the current state of the game is worth to you.
Now let's debunk this ridiculous theory that Vreg is making bank off this site.
Google Adense CTR or "Click Through Rate" for Belgium where he is located is 0.1% or about $0.024 the most people ever online at once was 4232 people. Which if every one of them clicked an ad, would be $101, do you really believe 4232 people REALLY clicked the ad's? C'mon, on the other hand the rate for just "seeing" an ad is much worse and as I saw, previously with 4232 just seeing the ad (which most used ad blocker I'm willing to bet). Vreg was making about $5 a day AT MOST when the site was at it's peak from advertisements. And if you're smart, which most people I know have enough javascript coding experience to do, if you use tamper monkey and in one singe short line of code can disable the "please turn off adblocker" message incredibly easy. I'm not advocating for this as you make so little off adsense anyway that literally turning off the message is just salting a wound. Please do not contact me and ask me for the code to do this, I won't be supplying it.
Now, for the final part, it's likely that what's going on is a mix of three things
1. A lack of experience, making a networked game is not easy and unless you have a lot of experience, either from designing your own networking systems, or working on a networked game and learning from someone. Then it tends to be buggy and EVERYTHING you need to add to the system needs to be networked and taken into account. Let alone trying to make things server-authoritative, there's systems out there that are open source that make this easier. From what I remember talking to Vreg, he's using the base Unity networking system, which is trash for a server authoritative system.( Unity literally abandoned it: https://support.unity3d.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001252086-UNet-Deprecation-FAQ)
Basic movement and hit detection isn't too hard but when you need to sync advanced systems like melee combat, the moving hitbox of the melee weapon can be very difficult to get networked properly. The basic Jutsu in the game already are rather simple to get working, most of them are basic "press a button and the server checks to see if a player is in a hitbox at this location at this time". The earth-dome Jutsu is nearly laughably easy to get working, which hey, if a cool ability is easy to get working then great! The more value you can add to a game the better, especially if that value was rather easy to implement and gives the players more options. Especially since other things are incredibly difficult. This is probably why the updates are taking so long. Networked Melee combat isn't easy.
2. Doing Dev while having a day-job is hard, trust me, I have my own projects and when you're working 50+ hours a week, trying to find time for your projects can be difficult. Especially when you have a family like I do.
3. Boredom, when you're working solo-programmer on a project, especially if your responsible for the entire system is BOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGG. And letting another coder in to help is risky, because either they do good work and you need to learn how they did things because even if you're a pro-coder looking into code you've never seen before takes time to dissect. Or you get a coder who comes in and flubbs everything up and now you're doing twice the work because you need to rip their garbage out and replace it. Which wastes time and money, source control helps a little with this, but still can be a pain. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't bring in another coder because it's much easier, faster and more pleasant to be able to hand off "You work on the server, I work on the client and we meet in the middle" instead of having to do both. Which feels like your doubling up work like "I already did this on the client... now I have to replicate it on the server.... UUUUUUUGHH!!!......."
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