Luka S.J.

You're not immune to having your posts cleaned up too, you know Bad language is bad language, after all.

Hmm, perhaps Essentials spoils people. It gives them so much already, it makes it easier for them to expect a little more and a little more. At least in the old days of bugs and incomplete features, people had to work themselves to make it playable.

Game development is much more than just making your own fangame. It's about the process, the skill and the mindset. I think that's what's missing from the section.

I've seen that thread. I most likely won't post in it, though, because I don't look at fangames and don't remember who people are, so I don't know anything about the politics and community outside of the Essentials section (which we've already talked about). Most of that thread went over my head, and it's only in the last couple of posts that it seems there's a purpose to it (i.e. the posts stating what could be improved).

I've had a chat with Gavin today about the thread, and what he posted in the thread was pretty much what I told him. There's nothing else to do here except become too attached to your game and turn it into Serious Business. The main section is practically dead, when it should be the liveliest area. I think people need to sit down (perhaps a Skype conference of the big names - so-called "community leaders") and come up with absolutely every idea they can think of to spark community involvement (various competitions, GDM, challenge threads, discussions on various topics, etc.).

I'll always have the belief that even a mediocre completed game will always be more than a match for the prettiest concept art, simply by virtue of it actually existing.

Ah! That makes complete sense. It would struggle to keep things in the same place when you move if there's a decimal value rather than a solid intger. Thanks for hating that with me, I'll probably be online properly tomorrow. Been on my phone for a few days due to travel.

Should work now, if not, Skype is working, I could use that

I'm on sir!

I agree with the automation. The case that springs to mind is the tile puzzle mini-game I made for v11 - its grid is centred for any size tile graphics, and for the Unown puzzles, the side trays are automatically split up. It would certainly be easier to throw a few coordinates in, but it's much nicer to have a system that works by itself and allows for some irregularities (e.g. different-sized/shaped tiles).

I've been rearranging some of the script sections recently and adding a few comments. I've also been working on a battle system for my TCG extension. I may eventually get brave enough to modify the core Essentials battle system and change how it works a bit. If I can figure out a better way, of course. The battle choice buttons are actually an adaptation of how they used to work before Poccil came up with a new method (which both the command and fight options could use; previously they used separate ways to display/choose their options).

I'm making Essentials in my spare time. That's no excuse. I just happen to have had a lot of it recently.

It can't be helped that many people don't have so-called common sense or lateral thinking skills. My approach to people asking how to implement new feature X is to point out existing feature Y which is similar to it (if applicable), and leave them to figure things out for themselves. Or tell them to read the error message (in which case they'll just lie and say they have).

It's interesting you say I have a different approach to poccil. In what sense?

Certainly there are a lot of basic questions. The really daft ones I just ignore and let someone else deal with, but mostly I just try to point people in the right direction and make them think for themselves. It's the only way they'll learn. It's just my helping nature, I suppose.

There are some interesting and genuine questions too, such as the recent one about adding extra lines into pokemon.txt, which I just outright answer. As you say, it's fun to think about how things work, and all questions make me do so, no matter how briefly.

I think it's a basic difference in mine and others' approaches to scripting. I look at scripts to learn how they work and see if they need improving and how they could be improved (because that's what I do in Essentials). Others just want to make things work for their game, and care only about getting something to happen in their way - they don't want to waste time learning about something because they just need it to work, rather than wanting to know how it could/does work. Maybe.

There's also the mindset of: "I downloaded this which someone else made, so someone else knows how it works, so someone else can help me." I'm the guy in charge, which means I don't have the luxury of falling back on someone else, so I just have to learn instead.

Ages back I decided to help out with a Duke Nukem wiki, and ended up designing most of it from scratch (I've since left it). This inspired me to make the Essentials wiki, as I really like the wiki format and Essentials really needed better documentation. Again, I made practically all of it myself, and still do.

I'd also been doing a few things towards making my own Pokémon game. A lot of it involved redesigning the GUIs, which naturally gave me a lot of experience with Essentials' scripts. I fixed a few broken things as I went along, and developed some ideas.

Around that time poccil stopped updating Essentials. Eventually I thought that perhaps he could hand it over to someone else who would continue his work, and the wiki seemed a decent owner. I asked, he agreed. In practice, that meant I had it. I made a release to get the ball rolling, and somehow just ended up doing it all myself since. Of course I've had some contributions (including your Vs animation which I tweaked a bit; I don't know if you've had a look at it), but Essentials has definitely become mine now rather than a community effort. It's a bit of a shame, because I'm bound to lose interest/free time at some point and there's no one to take over. Still, it's partly my fault for not being more active in finding others to work with.

I like helping out, and developing Essentials helps out everyone who uses it. I think I would prefer it to making my own fangame, because it benefits everyone rather than just my own project. That's also why the TCG extension I'm currently making will also be made available to anyone who wants to use it; and I won't bother making my own game out of it.

Thanks. Maybe it's just because I've actually produced something others can use; I'm sure there are people here who are better scripters than I am.