The current state of Xonotic development

Dear fellow Xonotic players!

First of all, in the name of Team Xonotic, I would like reassure everybody:

XONOTIC IS NOT DEAD.
THE DEVELOPMENT DID NOT STOP.

It's uncommon for a game developer team to stand before their playerbase and be honest and transparent, but the nature of Xonotic and our longtime mutual respect and good relationship with the community (it's almost the same, afterall) allows us to do this, and in some cases, forces too.

The structure of Team Xonotic aka the devs

In the past couple of weeks we noticed some negative tension building up in the community towards the developer team, and to be fully honest, there were some problems in the organisation of Team Xonotic too. For an open project like Xonotic, one could say this is inevitable; everybody would like to shape the game to his or her own taste, contributing either with ideas or deeds of different skill levels on their own respective fields. Unfortunately, this might lead into some disagreement now and then, and in some cases, antagonism and heated discussions. However, we can all agree on one thing: we'd just like to make the game better, to be the most possible enjoyable for the casual and the more competitive players too. Sometimes however this might force us to significantly change some aspects of the game, and by that in the end, make some decisions that might proove to be not so popular. These decisions are not made by one person, but as a team. Let me explain how it works.
The structure of the developer team is divided into two groups: the core and the extended team.

Members of the current core team are:
divVerent, Antibody, merlijn, Morphed, Samual, -z-, CuBe0wL, Mirio

The extended team consists of long time contributors who are also generally trusted by the community:

Gatts, sev, IDWMaster, packer, s1lence, Sydes, Nitroxis, JH0nny, theShadow, Soelen, kuniu the frogg, Debugger, FruitieX, zykure, MrBougo, matthiaskrgr, Mario, bitbomb, unfa, Archer, terencehill, Halogene.

Decision making: xonvote

Now, let me tell you about how decision making works: the team has an invite-only IRC channel, which has a bot coded by zykure, that allows every team member to start polls about topics that might cause some controversy. A poll runs for 2 weeks - during this time, every team member can vote either yes, no, or they can abstain. Any core team member has veto rights too, that stops the poll in question. The stopped poll can be challenged by another core team member by reopening it and also escalating it into a core team only poll. There is no supreme power over either the core team or the extended team by anybody. There's an agreement in the team that everybody has to accept the results of Xonvote, like it or not.
We'll provide more details on voting rules and such later, as I think this is just slightly offtopic here.

Who to blame?

For being accountable on the Team's decisions, we've decided to publish the results and all details of ended polls with names, decisions and comments. This way you'll all know all the details behind a decision, and also the names who you should blame in case it's not for your liking. I hope in the end you'll realise those decisions were not made by an all above supreme dictator alone, but the simple majority of different minds in Team Xonotic.
Note: there might be some polls, that'll still be invisible like release date discussions and other such private matters.
I cannot post a link where to find this information, simply because it's still under construction by zykure, but it's just minor technical problem. It'll most likely be a public RSS feed. When the feed or the equivalent is done, I'll update this post here (and maybe I'll publish news about it too).

UPDATE 11th Nov. 2013.
As I promised, the RSS feed is now alive here:
http://46.4.83.5:27500/feed
http://xonpickbot.designxenon.com:27500/feed (updated Nov 22 2014, Mr. Bougo)

Conclusions

Now that you've carefully read through this huge wall of text, I hope I could answer your told and untold questions, and release some of the pressure.

To sum it up:

- All decisions on minor and major changes are made as a TEAM, not by individuals
- The outcome of polls have to be accepted
- Team Xonotic will be 100% transparent about these decisions

- XONOTIC IS NOT DEAD
- THE DEVELOPMENT DID NOT STOP

Thank you for your attention.

I fully approve CuBe0wL's membership in the core team, thank you for this decision!

It's a nice move to increase transparency, I hope decisions of the Team Xonotic will be recieved better by the community now. Will you be publishing selected polls before voting has been completed, too? That way arguments from forum discussions could help evaluate the decisionmakers' options in the poll, and the community would have a channel to indirectly influence such votes.

Will you be publishing selected polls before voting has been completed, too?

I'm not sure about that one. Personally, I'd like to push towards a more "approved by the community by testing", for example we set up official testing servers now and then where ppl can actually test stuff online and give feedback. Also, I'd personally push the attitude "test it, give proper feedback or STFU" very hardly.

Problem is that people don't care that much. At least that's my personal experience, based on numerous failed efforts.

Great write-up CubeOwl! Now we won't get more "why is it 'dead'?" threads.

I fully approve CuBe0wL's membership in the core team, thank you for this decision!

It's a nice move to increase transparency, I hope decisions of the Team Xonotic will be recieved better by the community now. Will you be publishing selected polls before voting has been completed, too? That way arguments from forum discussions could help evaluate the decisionmakers' options in the poll, and the community would have a channel to indirectly influence such votes.

Thanks to me hue.

Anyway, I have a problem with publishing polls that are currently running for one main reason: I'm pretty sure people would pester team members a lot "please please vote yes there blalbla, no you have to vote against it blabla".

Grats core, best move in a long time.

Fine post CuBe0wL, just one thing (would not be me if i did not pick on sth, right? ; )

Also, I'd personally push the attitude "test it, give proper feedback or STFU" very hardly.

That's a dangerous path to take. I certainly see where the idea comes from; but putting it to extremes - would you like everyone to test genocide before condemning it? Obviously a highly exaggerated example related to the topic at hand; still it does get the point across i think.

If you feel it in your bones, deduce it by logic, draw from previous experience or try it does not matter. The critical point is formulating the feedback in a useful way. Screaming FUUUUU or lolnope / hellyeh and similar does no one any good regardless what that statement is based on.

What I wanted to Say with that is when we introduce a change or new major feature, it'd be a good idea to let ppl. test it. But if they don't test in that time, and we accept it, I don't think we should listen to the complains AFTER.

What I wanted to Say with that is when we introduce a change or new major feature, it'd be a good idea to let ppl. test it. But if they don't test in that time, and we accept it, I don't think we should listen to the complains AFTER.

Yet we complain about the current foundations and aim to change them. I don't think it's ever too late to criticize a project that's still alive.

Good post. You all should be admired for persistently moving forward with the project. As with any open project, the feedback needs to be seen in light of the passion that drives such ventures.

XONOTIC LIVES! PEACE THROUGH POWER!

I'm not sure about that one. Personally, I'd like to push towards a more "approved by the community by testing", for example we set up official testing servers now and then where ppl can actually test stuff online and give feedback. Also, I'd personally push the attitude "test it, give proper feedback or STFU" very hardly.

I'm not sure about that one. Personally, I'd like to push towards a more "approved by the community by testing", for example we set up official testing servers now and then where ppl can actually test stuff online and give feedback. Also, I'd personally push the attitude "test it, give proper feedback or STFU" very hardly.

divVerent used to run some testing servers for experiments, which resulted in quite nice things. It was one of the most popular servers in CTF for quite some time, but at one point that stopped.

Nowadays the testing can be decentralized: we have some servers run by the community that run on the current git master branch. I don't know how much popularity they enjoy. We also have a bunch of players using nightly builds as clients, which is nice. Feedback can be left in the form of bug reports on https://gitlab.com/groups/xonotic in the appropriate subrepository, or in the form of opinions regarding features in this forum.

I think we have everything in place for proper community testing, but you can't command people to use git servers.

Nice to see things are still trucking along (although I would suggest updating the website's news page periodically because it doesn't look like anything has happened since 0.7 from an outsider's view)



As for why I dropped from involvement recently ... its a combination of things
- amd stopped updating the linux drivers for my amd mobility radeon 4500 I am now stranded on windows 8.0 .... ... i know xonotic can run on windows ... but ... it just threw everything off balance

- the playing community seems to be completely competitive right now ... which isn't really a bad thing ... but what drew me into nexuiz was the "big" 12v12 ctf battles ... im hoping this will change in time

- I discovered tf2 ... http://imgur.com/zFrzfQh .___. ... so my mapping time has been spent there recently

- and in general looking back i was probably kinda annoying at times, im pretty sure all my reaction images are dead links cause the ubuntu one cloud crashed ...

- some of the stuff I tried to push for in the game (like preserving the existence of the HLAC) was not really based on real game design, and more a fear of loosing existing mechanics (that were quite redundant) ...

- and my maps were kinda sucky

- and I still cant find a way to edit flupping mip maps manually

- and I could never finish anything ... I even had quake c code for grenade bounce sparks that samual had requested ... but I didn't know how to submit it to git ... so it sat in a kde stickynote widget till i reformatted my os .__.

- there was also that mysterious bug where some textures would crash the map compiler on my system while they worked fine for other people ... that really put a damper on things when I couldn't use the green lava

- and stuff

- ...

- ill probably stay back for a while till the non-instagib us servers kick in ... won't make any promises though ... seeing as ive built up a reputation for not keeping them

edit :: just noticed my description ... I completely forgot I was in charge of a clan ... ... ... .__.

10 vs 10 ctf, and tdm do happen, just not that often as on nexuiz, buy yeah, that is the things i also do love to play, this is a 14vs14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W15Mi9C7Jpk from some months ago, i usually do not have the demo recorder on, but there have been some awesome messy matches more recently

I don't know about green lava but I'm glad you are back, HUTTY. Kind of sucky maps? Where?

Wb hutty, hope to see you around.

Welcome back, hutty! Hope you feel inspired to create more interesting maps for this game in the near future.


Development is very active lately, but there is not much to show for it on the website, indeed. This may change soon, but for now, you can follow development activity at https://gitlab.com/xonotic.

Hey hutty! I still have the one I had modified: