Swaygin wrote:
I found EcoManagerV7 and have downloaded it and replaced V3, but it is still forcibly blocked. When launching a regular FAF custom game, it is grayed and says "Missing Dependency."
This means another mod upon which this one depends is not installed.
Due to the slightly strange way the mod system works, it's not currently possible to find the name of a mod which is not installed, and printing out the UID wouldn't really do you much good. (this is a limitation that's been around since the GPG days, though there is work going on to solve this particular problem, as "missing dependency" by itself isn't vastly useful).
Swaygin wrote:
When launching a FAF (beta) game, EcoManagerV7 is now unclickable (unlike EcoManagerV3, which still functioned) yet there is popup, error message after the name, or color change. Note that this new code blacklisting mods itself appears to be buggy, and has created a new way to disable parts of the game from functioning.
I'm not actually sure what you mean here: unclickable in the sense that it's greyed out with "missing dependency"? That's expected behaviour if you haven't installed the other mods this one needs to work.
There was a bug in the mod manager prior to this update where it would actually let you turn on a mod when you didn't have its dependencies installed: this would allow you to have lots of fun crashing.
Swaygin wrote:
I have yet again removed and reinstalled FAF.
That is very unlikely to help.
Swaygin wrote:
Ckitching, the only part of your initial response that tried to address what I'd written said that this was done to save the developers' time. I don't think anyone's time has been or will be saved, and instead users' time will have been wasted and their freedom to play the game how they'd like unnecessarily restricted.
This isn't really true: my last post exhaustively explained why every blacklisted mod has been blacklisted. This feature saves player time by preventing you from playing with mods that we know are broken (very nearly all of which have never versions that aren't broken, so there's no point). With the exception of rks_explosions, we haven't blacklisted any of the known-broken mods that don't have new and working versions released.
Swaygin wrote:
First, there are less restrictive and intrusive ways to save developers' time from false error reports. Here's a possibility:
Yes, I know about the way the logfile contains the list of active mods, but the logfile is rarely the first thing we see. The flow is usually "Angry forum post" -> "Request for logs" -> "Failed attempt to acquire logs" -> "Days pass" -> "Logs appear" -> "You should turn of $BROKEN_MOD".
In cases where $BROKEN_MOD has a newer version that works, it is absurd to claim we are "unnecessarily restricting" users by compelling them to update to it. Nobody likes running in circles like that (and most players just won't bother, they'll just stop playing and have less fun).
Swaygin wrote:
Should a user encounter an error in the game, they will be less likely to blindly post in tech support after having repeatedly been shown this message at the start of their games.
This claim is wildly optimistic.
Swaygin wrote:
I still don't know what mod update you've even been referring to, as at every mentioning you've avoided the actual filename
This is due to a combination of the way the mod system doesn't allow you to figure out names of not-installed mods (without asking the server, something we're going to implement at some point, but until very recently it wasn't possible to send data in to the ingame lobby), and the way the mod vault's search function is kinda stupid.
As was pointed out earlier, it's sufficient to do a server search on the mod vault for "eco" (and we now have a GitHub ticket for the stupid UI problem that caused you to miss that first time round).
Swaygin wrote:
ckitching wrote:"Ally overflow"/"Ecomanager": All except the very latest version have been blacklisted. Spoke to Crotalus about them at the time: he's got a new version out of both of these that works just fine, I hear.
where the emphasis at the end is mine.
I hear from the guy who wrote the mod, who is surely the world authority on determining which versions of it work and should continue to be supported.
Swaygin wrote:
(1) Did you even know the name of the newest/very newest/very latest/new version you refer to?
It seems to be EcoManagerV7: you found it with a common-sense search earlier on.
Swaygin wrote:
(2) Did you look in the vault? If so, did you find it? If so, have you considered mentioning how to find it when you force people to try to upgrade?
I looked at the database while talking with Crotalus about which versions of his various mods he wanted blacklisted. For each one I observed the existence of at least one remaining non-blacklisted version, and confirmed with him that was the one he wanted to keep (and that he claims works).
Swaygin wrote:
(3) Did you try to play a game with the mod enabled in regular FAF?
(4) Did you try to play a game with the mod enabled in FAF (beta)?
It is the responsibility of mod authors to ensure their mods work. Crotalus is a particularly diligent mod author (who also sometimes contributes code to FAF), so I'm more than happy to take him at his word about which of the things he's maintaining aren't broken. This also puts him in a particularly good place to see what changes are occurring in FAF which may require changes to some of his mods.
I certainly don't have time to verify every mod in the vault (which is also part of why the blacklisting of broken mods has been so conservative: it's not really worth the effort to do more), and trusting the rest of the team to do their jobs right (as he seems to have done in this case) is necessary if I'm going to not go insane.
ckitching wrote:
So I somehow doubt the mod fails in both game modes for me yet works flawlessly in both for you (assuming you ever indeed got past step (1)).
You've not installed the dependencies of the mod yet, of course it doesn't work.
I am slightly surprised to learn the client doesn't recursively install dependencies when you ask it to download a mod from the vault. That's pretty stupid and would have solved you this problem: I'll make a ticket for that one, too.
Swaygin wrote:
If you can't spend 90 seconds to test a change that affects everyone playing the game, even after someone protests about a problem with its implementation, then there's a desperate need for some standard of quality control. If there aren't enough manhours for this then do everyone a favor and stop touching it until there are.
Well, it's a little more than 90 seconds to test if a mod works, and quite a lot more than 90 seconds to test if every mod works. It seems pretty reasonable to trust what mod authors say about the working-ness of their mods, and, indeed, in this case, it does work. You've just got a missing dependency. (I think this dependency for this mod is new since the old version, but you'll have to ask the author to be sure).
All the developers on this project (all 3-ish of us) are contributing their time, for free, to try and maximise the amount of fun people can have with our favourite computer game.
We do this as a hobby, because it's fun. While we are of course thrilled to help users, and to co-operate in the solution of any and all problems as part of our ongoing mission to improve the game, to waltz in here and demand "some standard of quality control" is pretty absurd.
We have automated tests (though not as many as I'd like), we have a beta phase now to help detect bugs we miss during our testing, and if you give me around £50,000 a year I can probably hire a professional QC team to make sure every release is completely flawless.
In the meantime, we're trying our best. If you, like I, don't like the current state of affairs, I'd be delighted to see some pull requests. It is a sad fact that "Wait until more manpower is available" is almost certainly non-terminating, so it's not really an option.
So, yes, mod vault is a bit fucked, and apparently the client doesn't resolve dependencies for some insane reason: we'll get to it as soon as we can, along with the zillions of other things that are currently broken and/or on fire.
On the bright side, the quantity of such things is going down. Just read (for want of a random example) the 3641 changelog.
Statistics: Posted by ckitching — Today, 11:59