RANT: What's wrong with CSQC
Posted: Tue Jul 01, 2014 10:26 pm
I didn't want to derail the original thread, so here's my rant/comment about gounc's answer to ceriux:
Besides (AFAIK - please correct me if I'm wrong!) IRC is a non-persistent, non-indexable medium, so any interesting information people may exchange eventually will be lost unless transported to a forum thread or wiki or whatever.
I know that many experienced people in our community finds easier to just drop a couple lines in a IRC channel (they're always on IRC since... well in some cases I believe forever), but this may actually be a important factor why after so many years CSQC stills an obscure niche in the (already tiny) Quake modding community.
Linux had the same problem in the begining: "oh you want to <anything> with Linux ? Yeah... you need to hang in the right IRC channels with the right guys so they can tell you how to do <anything>". And everyone who lived those times know how well this did to Linux adoption. Only when this "underground" mentality becomes past and all required knowlegde become easy to search for the beginners (read: a quick Google search should bring answers to 75% to 80% of the basic doubts), then MAYBE CSQC leaves the status of "high potential, incompatible and exotic feature a couple Quake engines (kinda) support" to something we may consider "standard out-of-the-box feature for any decent Quake/Quake2/Hexen engine", because: a) modders and mappers will know how to use CSQC in their projects; and b) players will want to play those mods and maps that require CSQC in their favorite engine; and c) engine coders will be forced to move their asses and agree around AT LEAST a bare-bone implementation.
I know this probably won't have any major effects beyond pissing off a couple people, so let me put a couple of lines to try to amend it:
@Spike (and I suppose @LordHavoc too): please, don't be mad at me. I really respect the ammount of work you and other guys beyond the FTE & DP projects have been pouring on over those years. And exactly because the maturity they reached I find unaceptable that after so many years people still needs to hang in an IRC channel to discover how to do XYZ in CSQC;
@gnounc: please dont be mad at me, too. Thanks to your solitary work compiling a bare bones csqc example I was able to create my first CSQC HUD, and I am very greateful for your help. BTW, I first found your updated example when I googled "csqc example" or something like that.
tl;dr; no more "underground": make all CSQC knowledge easily searchable by Google/Bing/DuckDuckGo. Your community says thanks.
Sorry, but sometimes idling in irc is not an option for people willing to learn about CSQC for a weekend hobby project. Or people who never heard about IRC before but just bought Quake for 5 bucks at steam and started to play around with it.gnounc wrote:https://gitorious.org/clean_csqc/cleanc ... 879d7ca263:
thats pretty much what you'll want to start with.
as for suggestions, i suggest idling in irc. I saw you jumped in, but you jumped back out too.
You've gotta rack up that uptime son!
Besides (AFAIK - please correct me if I'm wrong!) IRC is a non-persistent, non-indexable medium, so any interesting information people may exchange eventually will be lost unless transported to a forum thread or wiki or whatever.
I know that many experienced people in our community finds easier to just drop a couple lines in a IRC channel (they're always on IRC since... well in some cases I believe forever), but this may actually be a important factor why after so many years CSQC stills an obscure niche in the (already tiny) Quake modding community.
Linux had the same problem in the begining: "oh you want to <anything> with Linux ? Yeah... you need to hang in the right IRC channels with the right guys so they can tell you how to do <anything>". And everyone who lived those times know how well this did to Linux adoption. Only when this "underground" mentality becomes past and all required knowlegde become easy to search for the beginners (read: a quick Google search should bring answers to 75% to 80% of the basic doubts), then MAYBE CSQC leaves the status of "high potential, incompatible and exotic feature a couple Quake engines (kinda) support" to something we may consider "standard out-of-the-box feature for any decent Quake/Quake2/Hexen engine", because: a) modders and mappers will know how to use CSQC in their projects; and b) players will want to play those mods and maps that require CSQC in their favorite engine; and c) engine coders will be forced to move their asses and agree around AT LEAST a bare-bone implementation.
I know this probably won't have any major effects beyond pissing off a couple people, so let me put a couple of lines to try to amend it:
@Spike (and I suppose @LordHavoc too): please, don't be mad at me. I really respect the ammount of work you and other guys beyond the FTE & DP projects have been pouring on over those years. And exactly because the maturity they reached I find unaceptable that after so many years people still needs to hang in an IRC channel to discover how to do XYZ in CSQC;
@gnounc: please dont be mad at me, too. Thanks to your solitary work compiling a bare bones csqc example I was able to create my first CSQC HUD, and I am very greateful for your help. BTW, I first found your updated example when I googled "csqc example" or something like that.
tl;dr; no more "underground": make all CSQC knowledge easily searchable by Google/Bing/DuckDuckGo. Your community says thanks.