My opinion about LVP

[Beaner]

Hi,

I had been thinking of posting a topic to share some of my opinions about LVP and make some suggestions for quite some time now; and I think this is the right time to do so.
I didn't want this to be public and that's why I'm posting it here.

I don't mean to criticize, judge or disrespect any of the developers or managers and their work. I know everyone's working hard despite being busy with work, studies or personal lives.
I'll be pointing out a few things. Please don't take it in a wrong way. This topic is more about what I personally feel about LVP, and obviously, some of you might disagree with me.
I don't have much knowledge about programming, so I don't understand the technical aspects of the server or the problems you face. But I'm sure I can speak for every player when I say that there's really no fun in spending time on LVP right now.

First off, let's talk about the current state of the server.

Ever since major features like the account system, gang system and ammunation were started to be re-written, several bugs have occured. Simple things that used to work smoothly just don't work anymore. Quite frankly, it's difficult for old players or regulars to adjust to the conditions of the server - let alone newly registered ones (which we don't get to see much these days, unfortunately).

I know that there are big plans which will benefit the server a lot in the long run. Yes, I understand that re-writing everything from a scratch is better than fixing every small bug, since some developers have mentioned that LVP's code is a mess. I can understand the idea or intention behind it, but it's just not possible to have a good time on LVP as of now.

Let me point out a few examples.

• A simple derby can't be started without having all players teleported to a single location, causing complete chaos.*
  
• A game of robbery, rivershell, briefcase and LYSE can't be played. These are some really fun team games which used to work perfectly in the past.*
  
• Races are bugged.*
  
• Most kills don't even get registered these days. They appear to be as suicides on the killboard.
  
• The new weapons menu in Ammunation is highly annoying and I'm pretty sure most of our old players dislike it. The old menu was simple and time-saving.
  
• Many players actually look forward to playing for 10 to 200 hours to get bank upgrades. Now, upgrades don't work and they're just left disappointed. Plus points and bank limits are always confusing as they keep changing randomly.
  
• ATMs are missing from many places and new players don't have a clue on how to save money.
  
• Saveinfo doesn't work at all. It's one of the most important features we used to have.

[* These issues have existed for over 7-8 months]

VIPs:

• These players can't enter RC vehicles.
  
• /my tp has been removed. This is one of the main features that motivated players to donate.

I'm sure these are on the to-do list, but why would players want to donate now?

Gangs:

Before everything started being re-written, we had a decent gang system which players enjoyed. There was an occasional bug where a player would randomly be a part of another gang, but that could be fixed with the help of an administrator. At least they had gang banks, gang colors, gang turfs, gang base, etc.

• Useful administration commands like /my maptp and /p stfu were removed even though they worked perfectly. /p spawnweapon and /p spawninfo are missing for now.
  
• Administrators can't use any /my commands which makes things quite difficult.
  
• The exports stats of all players have been lost. I don't know why, but it's quite disappointing.
  

Personally, I miss the custom race builder a lot (/raceb). VIPs and administrators could create temporary races and they were quite fun. I tried this command a couple of weeks ago and it was gone.

I'm sure all these things will be fixed and brought back in the near future. I understand these things are bound to happen if everything's being done from a scratch. But, it's difficult to play when most basic and fun features don't work. 

My question is, why don't we switch to an older version of the game mode (from about 6 months ago) where basic features worked? Only minor bugs existed and players could put up with that. Maybe the new or re-written features should be released after everything is ready. I'm only asking this question from a player's point of view. I don't know how complicated it might be to do that.

The server crashes very frequently. I don't know how long the few regulars we've got will stick around. It's disappointing to see most of our DM crowd playing on servers like LCS these days. What hurts me more is that former administrators, who had been a part of the crew for more than 4 years, are recommending LCS to some players and have quit LVP themselves. Our player count hardly ever goes above 10.

This might sound harsh; but I really don't see why players would want to register and play regularly on the server at this point. I wouldn't.

Once again, I don't mean any of this in a wrong way. I just hope this ends soon.

Thanks.

[cake]

As a regular player for the last year and a half, I've been able seeing things change from a pretty close distance. That said, as a player, I completely agree with Beaner.

Being a developer for only a week however has changed my view on this, that quickly. As a player I wish nothing more but then the stable days with gangs etc. As a developer, I wish nothing more but a completely rewritten gamemode, amazing features, hundreds of players and an active forum.

I myself am head of an IT committee at our university study association. Compared to that there are a few things I miss here overall, not really focussing on the gamemode itself: open meetings with all managers and developers, to exchange ideas, current server information, things to focus on, stuff players have been reporting, and most importantly: who is gonna do what to fix this and make it even better. I just miss the communication here, it feels like it's just a bunch of IRC channels you need to be on in order to have a say in something or to figure out what's gonna be next. There is no real roadmap we are following, no real small milestones we live up to. I've been wasting a lot of time on stuff because I was thinking in big milestones, and only for a short time of my life I have figured out small milestones are much more effective and satisfying.

We have this awesome trac system, and we have only been using the tickets function since two days, after using a few different Google Sheets. Trac has much more awesome options! Why don't we have public meetings with each other, setting small milestones, share ideas, append devs to issues, and have like one idea worked out each server increment? That way everyone knows where we stand, how we are gonna do this and what's gonna be next. That, I truly miss.

That said, I also think the LVP status needs an upgrade. Introduce new site features, change some lay-outs, put up some polls or something. Spread the word, post banners of LVP somewhere, start advertising again. Clean up the dev forums, start recruiting testers and developers. Have a once per month test night were we test awesome features, while others work on a rewritten system.

We have A LOT of people willing to do something for LVP. What we need is the organized system behind it to use these people and their skills to the maximum. My 2 cents!

[Russell]

Please allow me to start off by saying that posting topics such as this one is nothing but appreciated. You have nothing to worry about, and honestly, I think you’re being much too nice. There is absolutely nothing wrong with sharing your opinion, especially when backed up through thorough arguments as you did here.

I’m personally responsible for modifying and removing many of the features which you have mentioned in your post. It’s part of a large-scale cleanup of the gamemode which we have been working on for over half a year already.

The thing to realize here is that there is a trade-off between technical debt and feature support in the shorter term. Las Venturas Playground’s code is an accumulation of changes by about twenty people over the course of roughly seven years or operation. Six months ago, the compiled gamemode had over 135 thousand lines of code, was over 20 megabytes in size, depended on at least five outdated plugins and had no active developer at all, let alone anyone who actually knew what the code did or where it was. People who tried to touch the gamemode quickly found that it was impractical to do so. The few new developers we did find left after a bare week, simply because fixing a bug was considered to be a huge amount of hassle for a relatively small gain.

We had two options: start rewriting the gamemode from scratch, or taking a temporary hit in which features we support as core functionality was being rewritten. Actually rewriting everything was attempted twice before. Both attempts failed. Miserably. So we focused on identifying the biggest pain points in the gamemode, developer environment and general hackability of Las Venturas Playground, and decided to focus on these. To give you a brief idea of what has happened over the past months:

• We developed the LVP Pawn Editor, a customized editor optimized for working with Las Venturas Playground’s code. It features project-wide searches, auto completion of function names and a much nicer interface than other editors out there.
  
• We severely improved capabilities and performance of the LVP PreCompiler, which enhances our ability to write structured code. We can now use classes in Pawn, have removed a number of limitations and have tooling available for more accurate performance measuring.
  
• We have thorough documentation available of large parts of the gamemode. Available online, for anyone to see and use. Critical parts of the code have been documented and were completely restructured to improve usability.
  
• We have rewritten the Nuwani IRC system. This was a burden which had been bothering LVP for many years already. Did you know that our bots were based on Delvor rather than the open source Nuwani code?
  
• We have written our own MySQL plugin, completely and safely multi-threaded, to replace the system which previously was in place. It’s completely asynchronous. We also wrote our own Zone Manager plugin which will enable a better working cash-point system, as well as a future gang system. We also moved to JSON data files for a lot of semi-dynamic data storing.
  
• We completely rewrote player account handling, both in the gamemode itself, in the databases and on the website. This has yielded very significant security improvements.
  
• We improved performance of the entire gamemode by over 45%.
  

You will be absolutely correct for making the observation that none of these projects are player facing. It’s true, we focused on the developers for a few months, and I believe that will start paying off shortly. For the first time in years it’s becoming fun and possible to work on Las Venturas Playground again. Recall the numbers I mentioned earlier about the gamemode; today, we have 90 thousand lines of code (-45 thousand), a compiled gamemode of 10 megabytes (-50, no outdated plugins, much better performance and various developers who know what they’re doing.

As part of a new account system, 45 thousand removed lines of code and many more related clean-ups, we indeed removed a large number of features. Settings such as blocking teleports and the gang system are part of this. I have to admit that I originally expected these features to be back in the gamemode after a week or two, but got distracted with other things and thus have not been able to re-implement them.

An area in which Las Venturas Playground development hasn’t been doing well is keeping track of bugs. Trac is often considered to be too technical for many people to report bugs in, whereas the forums and spreadsheets are very accessible solutions, while very messy as well. We have been cleaning up Trac over the past few weeks and are ramping up to using that as the bug tracker.

Looking forward, we’d like to make much more features open source. On the short term planning are releasing the MySQL and Zone Manager plugins, which will be useful to many more communities. The LVP Pawn Editor already is available to the public (although we cannot make this open public due to licenses), and we have plans to release the LVP PreCompiler on the slightly longer term. This will, hopefully, create a healthy developer climate around our community.

And that community is exactly where the critical point lies in the situation LVP is in. Yes, I agree with cake that we need new features on the website. We need to fix all the bugs. We need to implement many new features, and create a great, unique experience for players to play in. However, right now there are only three people who are consistently writing code for the community, and all have only a limited amount of time available. What we need is a stronger, larger group of developers, and that’s very hard to gain.

Without diving into the individual features you’re describing, I think we can agree on critical functionality for players on Las Venturas Playground being broken. We should, must make steps towards fixing this, and I’d like to propose the following steps in order to get there.

• We open up Trac issues for the world to see. The account system will be linked to Las Venturas Playground’s user databases (i.e. people are already registered), and anyone is able to report bugs and see whether progress on them is being made.
  
• The most important bugs need to be filed in the bug tracker as soon as possible, and marked with a high priority. We will spend time on fixing these as soon as possible.
  
• Incidentally, we introduced an instrumentation system in the gamemode yesterday to keep track of which features players are actually using, which will give us significantly more insight in where to focus our time on.
  
• Going forth, we should start prioritizing player experience above developer convenience, given that the latter has reached an enjoyable point.
  

Does that sound reasonable to you?

Russell

[Beaner]

Thanks for the explanation, Russell.

Going forth, we should start prioritizing player experience above developer convenience, given that the latter has reached an enjoyable point.

Does that sound reasonable to you?

Definitely.

[Russell]

I see that you've started to file issues.  Please file issues for anything you think is important, and set priorities as you see fit.  I think we could try to make Trac public on Sunday.

[striker]

Maybe you can start thinking on new features for VIP, beaner. Me and Matrix can help you and when it's finished you share it with the developers. He's already helping with the cmd document, but it'd be good to work on something else too. 


That export problem is really going to make players mad..

[Russell]

Why is the export problem going to make players mad, striker?  We will restore all lost statistics.  In fact, there is a bug for that:
http://trac.sa-mp.nl/lvp/ticket/666

In other news, there now is a public page which lists the 25 most recent commits to Las Venturas Playground.  This may be fun to keep an eye out on if you're interested in what we're working on.
http://development.sa-mp.nl/console/

[striker]

ok^^

[Russell]

Hi Beaner, others,

My earlier post in this topic, in which I promised that changes were going to come, was made a little over 15 weeks ago today. Please allow me to reply to the promises I made.

We open up Trac issues for the world to see. The account system will be linked to Las Venturas Playground’s user databases (i.e. people are already registered), and anyone is able to report bugs and see whether progress on them is being made.

Trac has been opened and linked to our account system. Over 500 issues were filed, some by people who aren't part of the LVP crew. We have been actively advertising the existance of Trac, and have encouraged other people to participate on the platform.

http://trac.sa-mp.nl/lvp

Trac features a timeline which allows you to see which bugs got created, received updates or were closed. The same information is also being shared with #LVP.dev on IRC.

While LVP is not open source yet, the latest commits are visible on the website itself, which also gives you quite some insight in what has been happening:

http://development.sa-mp.nl/console/

The most important bugs need to be filed in the bug tracker as soon as possible, and marked with a high priority. We will spend time on fixing these as soon as possible.

I believe that the gamemode's quality has been improved by massive amounts over the past three months. The tickets in Trac are prioritized, and often more than five bugs per day get fixed. Many high-visibility features have been rewritten as well, with a new Property System, Vehicle System (including support for RC vehicles!) and a new ban system queued up for LVP 10.0.

Incidentally, we introduced an instrumentation system in the gamemode yesterday to keep track of which features players are actually using, which will give us significantly more insight in where to focus our time on.

We gather a very significant amount of statistics nowadays and can make valuable decisions of those. All statistics are publicly available on the following page:

http://development.sa-mp.nl/instrumentation/

To give some examples: we had 284 players on the 13th of August, 7.49% of them were VIP members and 170 deposits were made to bank accounts.

We continue to increase coverage, and the Vehicle Imports feature has been removed because statistics showed that, on average, 0.83 vehicles were imported per week.

Going forth, we should start prioritizing player experience above developer convenience, given that the latter has reached an enjoyable point.

While there have been some improvements on developer experience, our main focus has been the gamemode itself, and making it possible for us to implement new features more quickly. The VIP experience has been greatly enhanced, many high-visibility bugs have been removed and many new features have been implemented, with much more to come.

We are now finishing up some remaining big features, and are then going to start working on revamping minigames and creating an awesome experience for gangs (online control panel, gang rankings, shared settings, access levels, and so on).

I would be very happy to hear about your opinion on these changes, and whether you have advice on how we could further improve.

Thanks,
Russell

[Beaner]

Hello Russell,

I'm very happy with the progress that's being made. The new features are great and it's nice to see that most of the critical bugs have been fixed.
I highly appreciate all the hard work being done by the developers.

Thanks!