Please Help Clarify the Current Situation with Arma and Tr2n

[Sinn]

No I did not create anything, isn't that obvious?

[scene]

Tr2n plays quite different than AA. It definitely feels more user friendly and I think that was the aim of the developers. For those of you who say that it will never gain up a player base, it's impossible to make that type of assumption. I mean AA has been out for what, 7 or 8 years? With the right advertising it WILL get a new player base.

I find tr2n more friendly because the developers are more present. I mean, I don't know any of the developers here nor do I see them actually playing...I've played with all the developers of tr2n (with exception to manta) and I think that is why they have made it so much better and easier for people to play around with.

It's NOT a revolutionary game. I mean the actual game is the same as AA for now. It just has those tweaks and fixes that apparently haven't been added/changed by AA.

I actually LOL'd when I heard destiny should be banished or whatever. I mean really, the developers of tr2n simply wanted to make a better game that wasn't being addressed here. They made use of Open Source to change the game a bit and make it a little friendlier. Eventually I think they will be in opposite directions.

As I see it, the more games and advancement of tron the better!

[gawdzilla]

No I did not create anything, isn't that obvious?

you implied you thought of the idea

[Sinn]

That's because I did, same for CTF. That doesn't mean others didn't have the idea either. Although I talked about it before half the players of this game ever set foot ont he grid. I also talked about tron haveing multiple levels and ramps. Maybe someday someone can implament this and say it was all them also. Basically many older tronners had ideas and spoke about them with others. Others that had the "know how" made those ideas real, and then said "hey look what we did" and made it out like it was their idea also, when it really wasn't. It was the normal tronners ideas that others did something with.

But alas, that is not what this topic is about. Destiny's crew here took some ideas people had and problems armagetron had, and fixed them. People have been asking the developers on tron to fix for ages. No one did anything about it unless your in their lil click. So someone did something about it.

Hell, how much do you want to bet that soon Arma developers will start fixin shit, spicein tron up. Implementing some ideas, come out with a new, cooler and better version of tron. I bet it won't be long now.

Maybe they will even make tron run smoother with Vista. OH SHIT, probably not because there is a WHOLE new version of windows out now.

[Concord]

As I see it, the more games and advancement of tron the better!

Kind of. If we each played our own version of Armagetron and deliberately broke compatibility with each other's versions, we would not be able to play with each other. There certainly is a place for different types of light cycle games. Armagetron is the most multiplayer-focused of the ones out there, and perhaps the deepest. I've heard marvelous things about GL Tron's graphics and am a fan of Jangaron as well. The roadmap that the Tr2n people have looks like a good one, and they've already made some improvements to parts of Armagetron. Fortunately the player base hasn't split over these enhancements and we all continue to play together.

[kyle]

Straight to the point Destiny cares. Armagetron creators, shall I say DON'T.

It's just a differnt Focus, armagetronad is more focused on stability, bugs fixed and whatnot while tr2n is all about hacking in new features at any cost. might i add arma is still trying to keep comparability with older clients where tr2n ends up breaking stuff with updates.

[Phytotron]

Sinn, what do you expect, that every little idea that gets taken up by the devs should be given credit in the authors file? You were not the first person to come up with those ideas. Several people did, and several people collaboratively worked on them.

And by the way, the word is clique.

[Sinn]

Who the hell are you people? Did you just start playing like this year or last year? I find it amazing how so many people on here don't even know what the hell they are talking about yet they post like they do. I've played this game for about 10 years. I think I know what i'm talking about.

Arma concentrates on fixing bugs? I guess they should concentrate a little harder. Refer to previous posts and try actually reading them.

Do not ignore the facts right in your face. Many people know what i'm talking about and the lack of time the devs have put into arma in the past couple years. Many of you have only been here a year or 2 so don't know shit anyway.

Maybe it's not all their fault. They do have seperate lives. Regardless you cannot deny the fact that "normal" players voices in this game have been ignored by these devs.

Here are their options. They can change, start careing more, stop being so stuck up and "better then everyone" OR they can possibly lose many of the better and longest playing players in this game.

All of you calling me "Sinn" obviously don't know who I am anyway, so obviously half of you don't really play armagetron anyway. I only used Sinn because someone many years ago took my name.

[sinewav]

the lol!

[Tank Program]

I've no idea what destiny and manta do, but I treat Armagetron now with more of an engineering mindset. I think that many of the other devs do as well.

[Z-Man]

And yes, we're not implementing everything users wish for. This has several reasons:
- Time. It's our time, we choose how to spend it.
- Future. We need to be concerned about the health of the codebase, it is horrible enough already, and while there are many things that can be quickly hacked in (see below), the long term effects need to be considered.
- And well, some ideas just plain suck.
And no, we can't give people credit for every single idea they may have had, especially if they never brought it up here or on the suggestion trackers on sourceforge or anywhere else where they are actually documented. Ideas are easy. Implementing them, and implementing them in a sane way, is the difficult bit.

Anyway, back to the topic of differences to tr2n. The difference in the perceived activity, tr2n's willingness to adopt new crazy features, comes from one simple fact:
They don't care about the future health of the codebase.

Now, hear me out. I know this sounds like an insult. It's not meant to be. It's a simple statement of priorities and goals. They explicitly don't want to go on with Arma's codebase, they want to restart from scratch. Therefore, they don't have to infinitely support their additions to the arma codebase in their future coding. That means they can do a lot of things we can't. Take the compatibility breaking. We can't do that for every version, because every time you break compatibility, you split the community, unless you force all your players and server admins to upgrade, which they do, but we can't, because then we wouldn't be able to have 0.3.x versions out there for meaningful testing. Take the multi-moviepack support. Moviepacks are a horribly limited data format, they just slapped some more metadata into the included settings.cfg to identify moviepacks and called it a day. This is fine for the current feature set, but: how would you implement server-selected moviepacks? How would you implement different cycles for different teams? How would you implement a server picking the graphics of walls and floor only? How can you implement graphics that are automatically downloaded by the client if the server says so? You can't, but those are problems we have to think about before taking over that feature, because they are problems we'll have to deal with in the future. They don't, therefore they can implement any hack they want. We're constantly evaluating which of their improvements we want and can 'steal back'. The moviepack stuff is high on my personal list, as is the more readable font rendering and some more of the menu restructuring. If they have code in there somewhere that make the game run better on Vista, then please point to that, we'll gladly take it over.

In short: what makes sense for them and their goals does not automatically make sense for us and the long term health of the game and the community.

[2020]

main difference for me
tr2n provided a school safe version
while arma is definitely open to everyone

turns out it doesn't matter
because i haven't got any traction with schools in the real world...

[Z-Man]

<snip,some post deleted>

Please try to keep remotely civilized, don't rub things in with sandpaper. It's a touchy enough topic for a lot of people.

[noob_saibot]

I remember back in the day when I was saying. Wouldn't it be awsome if we had like, these zones and you had to stay inside them and fight, and if you get knocked out of it or stay out of it so long you die? Well i'm not smart enough for any kind of computer programing, but lo and behold half a year down the road out comes Sumo and all these other servers. Well , I gues someone smart listened, but they took it as all their own idea.

You should have had your idea patented.

Who the hell are you people? Did you just start playing like this year or last year? I find it amazing how so many people on here don't even know what the hell they are talking about yet they post like they do. I've played this game for about 10 years. I think I know what i'm talking about.

All of you calling me "Sinn" obviously don't know who I am anyway, so obviously half of you don't really play armagetron anyway. I only used Sinn because someone many years ago took my name.

Are you ID Sin, sinn? And were you referring to when someone used the name s!n and you had a hissyfit?

main difference for me
tr2n provided a school safe version
while arma is definitely open to everyone

turns out it doesn't matter
because i haven't got any traction with schools in the real world...

Yeah, well schools should stick to educating kiddies about science, math, engineering, technology, medicine, history, art etc., not promoting video game use while in class.

[gawdzilla]

oh come on this guy is asking for it with his "how long have u n00bs been playin? I THOT OF EVERYTHANG IN TR0N!"

anyways its stupid to assume the arma devs have to take every idea and put it in there, so I don't think tr2n origins devs putting every idea in the project is neccesarily a good thing, I would HATE ramps etc

arma 0.4 ftw