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Originally Posted by Drek
Just a note of caution though.  I wouldn't want anyone coming into this with unrealistic expectations. United Admins is a pretty big organization, and, if you had access to the Coordinators forums, etc. you would quickly come to realize that communication isn't always perfect, and sometimes things take alot longer to be done than they should. |
I know what you mean. I've already notified United Admins some time ago about Bots United and I've been invited by the Titan crew to discuss with them about the possible cooperation between bot coders and Titan so as to have Titan provide enough features to support bot plugins. What struck me immediately is that whether these guys are United, they are nonetheless Admins. And only this. They think in terms of administrative plugins ONLY, have an administrative style of coding, and they firmly believe all is needed for their Titan to work is just to hook EVENTS in the game (a player has connected. Player X killed player Y. The bomb has been planted.) I've been trying to make them open their eyes on what a real-time abstraction of the game data would make possible and WHY it was needed, but nobody didn't seem to be interested in what I was saying
I have the feeling they believe all a game is about and all they'll ever need is a succession of dates in time, like a HL server log. They seemed surprised when I asked them about more.
Also, they talk very much
They spend ages designing complex OO interfaces and APIs, writing reference documents and a lot of complicated hierarchical procedures, before getting any snippet of code to work. Luckily for them the coders for their main projects (anti-cheat and stats) don't wait for the discussions to finish and are not inactive. I understand the need to write drafts and have guidelines, but guidelines are what they are: guidelines ; not a minuted plan of what I gotta code in 3 hours 14 minutes and 53 seconds and how
(note: I exxagerate a lot, they're not at this point, but they talk a lot indeed).
Anyway, since while I was discussing with the Titan UA crew there has been no comment to the suggestions I made, I turned over to Bots United completely this time. I still believe we've got lots to learn by working together with them, but I wouldn't expect too much of their Titan: although their idea is brilliant, it lacks of audacity in the implementation. And I agree with botmeister, we must remain in full control no matter what happens.