epithumia on 5/5/2004 at 16:21

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Edit: This information is still very relevant. I just wanted to tweak a couple of things.

A plea to mission authors: please consider these points. These are opinions of mine, but I've participated in a whole lot of mission releases and have seen a couple of major problems. Note that this doesn't refer to any specific mission; these are old problems that keep reoccurring. There are three important factors that contribute to mission release problems:

1) You are human. People make mistakes, no big deal. The idea is to limit the impact of those mistakes.
2) I'm actually human as well, which means that I do things like go away for the weekend. I also don't have the time to do any final testing of missions.
3) Dromed is not human. It's a being of incarnate evil, and will mangle your missions out of spite.

*) Public betas are a bad idea.
If you do a "public beta", you're really just doing a release that you know is buggy. The FM players will all download it and will all complain about bugs. Do a private beta instead; there are always folks willing to do a little testing. This tends to generate buzz about your mission as the testers drop hints about how good it is.

*) Always let someone test the "release" version of your mission.
Yes, this delays it by a couple of days and you really want to be finished with it. But the zip program may have belched and left out a file or something, and it sure sucks to find that out after 400 people have downloaded your mission. Plus, I sure hate having to update the same mission five times in one day; the only folks who hate it more than me are the poor mission players who now don't know which version they have, don't know if they need to download it again and don't really relish another eight hour download.

Also important is that someone needs to test every single revision of your mission that you intend to push out to the FM-playing public. Do not make what you think is just a minor tweak and push a new version to the archive, as Dromed will happily corrupt everything in your mission. If you change anything, or if you even let Dromed touch the mission at all, it needs to go through a couple of testers.

*) Don't announce that your mission is done and that you've sent it to the archive.
People tend to get irate at me because they have to wait for missions to be added to the archive. But occasionally I actually leave the comfort of my computer room and on rare occasions I stay away from it for as many as eight hours at a time.

*) Don't be impatient if I don't respond to your email instantly. Really don't be impatient if I don't respond to your PMs. The PM system sucks hard compared to email, and I only check them a couple of times a day. But I occasionally don't check email for a while either. Or I do, but I don't have time to respond. I promise I'll get to you, but if I don't then ping me again in a day. Sometimes I'm that buried.

One important thing I'm trying to do is minimize the number of times people have to download missions and generally maximize the happiness of the FM playing public. Yes, you can say that they don't have to download the beta if they don't want to, but the bottom line is hundreds of them will. And if your mission is big, hundreds of users repeatedly downloading it will consume a load of bandwidth.

One final note, although it should be considered long before you get around to distributing your mission: if you use material (storylines, images, textures, pieces of other missions, movies, sounds, music, etc.) in the construction if your missions, you absolutely must do two things (in order):

1) Obtain permission. "I found it on the Internet" is not a valid excuse for stealing someone else's work. There are fair use provisions in any reasonable set of copyright laws, and historically nobody's had any problem with using short low-fidelity samples from music, but you really should get permission for all works that aren't yours.

2) Give credit where it is due. Passing someone else's work off as your own is a terrible affront to the entire Thief community. Don't do it.

SlyFoxx on 5/5/2004 at 17:51

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Sounds like you need a more comfortable chair. :p
:sly:

Yandros on 6/5/2004 at 12:06

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I propose this thread become locked and sticky so that future visitors to TEG will benefit from knowing it.

john9818a on 6/5/2004 at 23:10

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epithumia

I completely agree with you on all of your comments, but I must admit that I have just contributed to the problem. I sent Bronze Griffin instructions on how to fix the loot objective in his latest FM. I'm very sorry about this. In the future I will slow down and be more careful to avoid oversights.

John

Sharga on 7/5/2004 at 00:50

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Good points epithumia! Doing such will benefit both the fm authors and yourself. It's a real bummer for the author and the fans when a mission is released whose quality was compromized because of impatience.