Z-Man wrote:Lucifer wrote:Z-man and I both have kids with disabilities. That takes a SHIT TON OF OUR TIME. I can settle in and think I've got a leisurely few hours to spend with my family, and then I'm DIRECTLY INTERVENING IN A SUICIDE ATTEMPT by my oldest kid.
It's not so bad here. Mostly stable. Still:
you can read his post
My kid's a bit more needy in some ways. She takes her meds on her own, for the most part (what they call in the mental health field "med compliant"), and she doesn't resist treatment, although she often fails to participate.
What I get, more often than not, is finding her manic and needing to monitor her or actively engage her attention for awhile. That can take anywhere from 5 minutes to 6 hours for a given episode, and there can be more than one in a day (not all time in a manic phase requires intervention, just the ones where she's obsessing about stuff, even good stuff, because that shit can go south quickly). There's a fair amount of time involved in the other three of us that live here keeping each other updated, but the daily load is small. What kills me in terms of free time is the hospital checkins and the time I spend talking to doctors and all sorts of other people. Since her insurance lapsed a month earlier than expected, I was unable to get her some ObamaCare coverage, and we're now depending on a county-level system that's 50% bureaucracy, 40% nobody knows what everybody else does, and 10% convenience. What used to be a trip to Walgreens has turned into running around town after taking the day off, and that's another 4-8 hours of my life.
I don't mind doing it, I love my kid and I want her to get better, and that's just what it takes.
Still, she got a job (flipping hamburgers
), and that pushes her to use her DBT skills, which, if she doesn't, she'll lose the independence that the job gives her. When school starts, she'll be so busy, she won't have time to spend obsessing over things, so it'll be the instant triggers we have to watch for (she had a hospital visit recently because of something that came up in Cards Against Humanity that triggered her so hard, she went back and tried to kill herself, going from happy(10) to killmyself(10) in like five minutes).
I don't think we ever rejected small patches that do useful things and integrated cleanly if they were posted here. Forgotten about... maybe. Overlooked if it was published elsewhere, certainly. If it'd be easier to extract things, we probably would have merged more from the sty based branches.
Or didn't know the patches existed in the first place, like when /dev/null was whining about the SDL2 patch.
Regarding the state of the playerbase, I'd appreciate if ya all could stop pointing out the obvious so smugly, as if it's somehow a win for you. Influx and active player count have fallen below critical levels. New players seeing 100+ empty servers rightfully do not stick around. Our "business model" is a dinosaur; we're under pressure from microtransaction financed, seemingly free high quality games on one side and better and better games that just run in a browser from the other side. Nobody installs a client just to play a no-budget game these days. There really is nothing sensible that can be done in the long term with this project to improve its market position, you'd be better off starting anew with an engine that supports browser based play and mobile. In the sort of short term, the only thing I can do is work on 0.4 (what you can do has been discussed elsewhere). Hopefully, its release will generate a bit of buzz and the new player herding in the server browser (yes, I know that in the current landscape, it only recommends empty servers, that is going to be tweaked or otherwise looked at again) will stabilize the player ecosystem. For maybe another two or three years. Everything must die at one point, it's fine by me if it ends with 0.4. How many other online games have lasted 15 years?
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I would be willing to be involved, with what little time I have, in a from-scratch rewrite of the game using Panda3d. It has a web browser plugin, and is for Python (you can use C++ if you want). We've often talked about how starting from scratch using lessons learned might be the best thing to do if there's a game engine that gives us a playable release quickly, and I believe Panda 3d can, but I'm still struggling to figure out how to implement a basic pattern in it (main gui, game, game gui, basically switching between them). I just registered for their forums to ask about it, so we'll see. Anyway, we'd be able to reuse all the assets that already exist for arma, and a lot of the code (particularly the simulation) can be copied and pasted and changed to Python syntax, since it's mostly just math anyway. Z-man could probably throw together a Hello, World! light cycle game fairly quickly with it, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if he could have a local 2 player game that plays like Armagetron in a few days (assuming he had the time to put into it for a few days).
I second Z-man's opinion that Armagetron is far behind technologically to be able to compete against games right now. I've never really cared about competition, though, and I don't believe he has either.
You could say "Armagetron had it's 15 minutes".
Hence still no full merge.
