Worth To Get Back Into The Game?

[Raklodder]

So if you really want to solve the Project Reality community dying... probably start there. I gave up about a year ago though, and now I'm just waiting for what's left of the PR team to hopefully disband/die... so I can possibly come pick up the ashes, after what's left of the original project quietly burns down. Maybe then we can start properly working on the game/community again, without all the lame duck interference.

Trying to commercialize (or capitalize) PR would definitely put me off from playing it.

[Bluedrake42]

Trying to commercialize (or capitalize) PR would definitely put me off from playing it.

No one is suggesting that PR become commercialized.

Mapping tools isn't just bfeditor neither. F.e. pretty much all of mappers doing their terrain&textures in external programs. Obviously we're not going to bundle something like Geocontrol\Worldmachine\Photoshop with the launcher

You're getting tunnel vision. The core principle isn't that this needs to be done a certain way... the core principle is that there is a huge variety of unused channels and mediums here that could be mobilized to help train and weaponize your content creation community.

Even having a section on the launcher itself that simply linked to a tutorial would be better practice. There is an art, entirely revolving around the incorporation of community development, in increasing the accessibility of development in general... to increase content creator conversions.

Just in the same way that implementing a new feature or gamemode into Project Reality takes conjecture and testing, so does best practice for community content creation integration. Finding the best ways to incorporate content creators into the workflow or pipeline (whatever your pipeline is) can be accomplished in a variety of ways.

Let me put it this way. Yes... of course you wouldn't bundle Worldmachine into your launcher. However... how many people in this community do you even think know what Worldmachine is? Spending time promoting or informing the community of what Worldmachine even is would probably be better than nothing.

It doesn't always revolve around distributing files... sometimes it just revolves around publishing your workflow, pipeline, or even promoting and suggesting development environments for new content creators to start experimenting with... tools that they know is compatible with their end goal, which is developing content for PR.

You don't want people to get started in... idk, paint... just to get frustrated down the line when they realize they've been working in the wrong developer environment this entire time.

One of the reasons I have such an easy time weaponizing developers around me, isn't because I just happen to have more talented developers in my community compared to others... its because we focus more on weaponization, and enablement, which takes more full advantage of anyone who happens to be around within our community.

We have our developer commits automatically push to Discord. We have our issue system public... and allow our community to create moderated issues within our primary developer environment. We literally have days where we have open meetups, where anyone can join a channel and get help setting up their developer environment to plug into our workflow. We offer software bundles, or a list of work platforms to our community, to help them get quickstarted for whatever specific interest they have (making terrain, making models, etc)

There is more than one way to skin a cat. You just have to actually start skinning it.

The way we have it setup now is you find the tools, with download links, in the tutorials which teach you how to use them and require them as you need them and tbh, still convinced that is the best approach myself, although the tutorials themselves I agree could be improved and updated a lot, they do their job and people using them aren't complaining, other than some really old tuts missing pics etc

Its not that the tutorials aren't capable, its more of how many people read them... and how promoted/prioritized they are to push traffic through. Its not just a matter of making the training platform, but also getting people to use it. The more traffic you push through your training filter, the more converted content creators you'll have on the other side.

[HOLLYWOODY]

Preach!

[lakinen]

In some things bluedrake42 you're right. I started to make a big map two months ago. I asked for some help about some things. First, they closed the topic.next then they wrote to me to do everything myself. Only one of the DEV helped me. And when I proposed some new things, they laughed. So I do everything for myself (while I have free time).I wanted to help with the game, and I turned out to be a fool. So i am to old for , to trying help someone who does not need help.
-I fight for new players to stop kicking them from servers(and drink caffee,play game)
-because no one is unreasonable if there are no people in the game, no game (simple).

[Stark38]

Holy **** I am glad I didn't read all that.

Just play the game guys, populate the servers and keep being passionate about the best game in the world.

This is answer #1. R-Dev is fairly hands-off in terms of community, its up to those who run the servers to do community management.

If you want PR to grow, consider the "First Hour" a new player might experience when playing PR. Its a tad obfuscated how to start. There's no good tutorials or walkthroughs for the first ten minutes. But say the player makes it onto the high-pop server because that's where players gravitate, then: Find squad, hope the SL is friendly to newbie players. If so, that new player is in luck. But more likely than not, is kicked from squad, ends up in a free kit squad, gets bored after half an hour running around and dying with Rifleman kit not knowing what to do before quitting and uninstalling. If there's no guidance there, its a quick path to the uninstall wizard.

Sure R-Dev can do stuff, but they are volunteers working for negative amounts of money (the donation amount meter wasn't anywhere close to filled for last month.) Community management is better left to the actual community and server leaders/admins should be better in-tune with what is going on. If server admins want to keep their servers filled, it is imperative that they ensure an environment where people have fun is fostered. Nothing empties a server faster than players getting raped at first flag by massively unbalanced teams for multiple rounds.

At the end of the day, be the example of the kind of player you want to play with.

[Bluedrake42]

I agree that the community leaders and server administrators are currently doing the largest portion of heavy lifting for maintaining the population, and working on incorporating/onboarding new players and contributors. That only goes so far though... as we are now starting to see.

lakinen is a good example of the people you don't even realize are slipping through the community's fingers. For every person like him who speaks up that they felt there was a problem, there are 20 others who simply left without a word.

Onboarding best practice isn't just about making the material available, its also about getting people involved into using it... and pro-actively working to train/onboard the community. This is one of the reasons Youtuber communities in general are taking off, because they specialize more in onboarding than product development. Right now the scales are tipping, and it is becoming more important to have better onboarding and community integration than a highly skilled, and highly curated smaller concentrated team.

You don't lose anything by training and weaponizing every last person you can find who is willing to hold a rifle/development SDK.

[Heavy Death]

PR maps are such a big undertaking that if you give up shortly after somebody tells you to work it out yourself, you will leave anyway after 2 months of "work". You know how many maps were not put in simply because lack of detail? If a guys whines about getting told in the starting stage, imagine after a year or two of development, when his map isn't included?

Where there is a will, there is a way.

And most of all, I like my quality over quantity, and the least of all I want some lower grade maps/weapons/whatever ingame that would trigger OCD and just make me rage.

Same shit applied to music, in the olden days, playing music was something you had to learn, but nowadays every second person plays a guitar, is a DJ or has a band. All cool and well, power to the people I say, but it doesn't matter because everything is mediocre anyway and it just makes some good music harder to find amongst all the stuff thats out there.

[lakinen]

This has nothing to do with maps, details ... that's just an example.Please read all messages.

[Rhino]

PR maps are such a big undertaking that if you give up shortly after somebody tells you to work it out yourself, you will leave anyway after 2 months of "work". You know how many maps were not put in simply because lack of detail? If a guys whines about getting told in the starting stage, imagine after a year or two of development, when his map isn't included?

Where there is a will, there is a way.

And most of all, I like my quality over quantity, and the least of all I want some lower grade maps/weapons/whatever ingame that would trigger OCD and just make me rage.

Indeed.

You also have to consider the fact to help someone is a huge undertaking and takes you away from your own personal work, where you can often find that you can spend more time helping someone do something, than if you did it yourself.

To take a recent example of the Super Etendard, if you read through the topic you will see just how much time I've had to put into it, and frankly, the project probably wouldn't have taken that much more of my time than if I had made it all myself from scratch tbh, since, in the end, I've had to fix up and even remodel quite a lot of it.

I suggest you guys read the Super Etendard development topic in community modding to see just how much time we put into helping some community projects and even if we wanted to, there isn't enough time to help every single person out there, especially when they ask us to make them things for their maps like "2 new transport planes planes (C-130,Antonov AH-26)"....

You don't lose anything by training and weaponizing every last person you can find who is willing to hold a rifle/development SDK.

Says the person who only posted on the last page of this topic:

Unfortunately I really need to work on actual work now. I am neglecting my own people writing these posts.

Even just replying to someone's problem can take a huge amount of time when you add it all up, let alone all the time it takes to do the things your saying we should, on the hope that in doing so, the community will step up more than they already are in developing more content, where instead of taking a gamble on that paying off, we could instead spend the time actually making things ourselves which tbh, is what I'm mainly going to be focusing on in the future.

[X1 Spriggan]

I don't think PR is "dying" because PR DEVs are in anyway restricting or dampening their efforts in teaching the community how to contribute to game. Through their own hard work and commitment, each developer had their own ideas and talents and successfully executed them to contribute to the community made game.

However, as PR as matured and quality of content continues to rise, so do expectations and knowledge ceilings. This is why many community members feel like they want to create a new map for example fail to pass the scrutiny of the initial quality pass when publicizing the progress of their maps. It is very difficult to quickly match the current quality of current versions of PR and new contributors end up not getting new content into the game, ultimately slowing new updates for PR.

Perhaps it is as simple as pointing community members in the right direction and saying "here is my workflow, copy it and make new content please". But the incentive is that their content will be added to the game and people will enjoy it and the community will grow, and the fear is that their quality won't be good enough and will do virtually nothing in making PR more popular or played.

As said by many others, PR DEVs do what they can to continue working on PR helping it to stay alive, but I don't believe that turning all efforts into making the PR community a content generating machine is a sustainable answer.

My current belief is that it isn't the lack of new content that stunts the continued growth of PR, but problems with the core gameplay mechanics that the PR community has become accustomed to over many years of playing, but that would be an entirely different discussion. Players play a game if its fun, not necessarily because it has new things. There is already an enormous amount of content in PR. The current discussions and frustrations should be focused on how to quickly make PR more fun for a wider audience, not how to off load work onto the community because the resources basically already exist.

[Bluedrake42]

Even just replying to someone's problem can take a huge amount of time when you add it all up, let alone all the time it takes to do the things your saying we should, on the hope that in doing so, the community will step up more than they already are in developing more content, where instead of taking a gamble on that paying off, we could instead spend the time actually making things ourselves which tbh, is what I'm mainly going to be focusing on in the future.

I'm not RDEV.

As someone who isn't on the PR team, I've already done more than my part. I spearheaded many content creation projects and otherwise, running servers, promoting the game, etc... and now I'm here giving you feedback on all the problems we saw during that time, that kept us from doing more.

If the development team made community contribution more structured, less biased, and more easily facilitated by the people running the show... maybe we would put effort in again. Or more importantly... maybe a lot more groups (more than just us) would put effort in again.

However this isn't my show. You all do what you do. If it looks attractive enough, maybe the people who left will return and put effort into your community again. If not, then obviously I'm not waiting around on PR to change. We have our own things I have to worry about now... but I still like to hope PR takes the chance to change that, until its too late of course.

Obviously we have our own opportunities, and company projects to work on now. I would have liked those things to be related to PR, but because of the reasons previously mentioned... that didn't happen.

Like I said, I've given you all my two cents. Up to you all what you want to do with it. Obviously I'm not going to beat my head against a brick wall trying to keep PR alive if the people running the show don't want it to happen, but I'll still give my piece every few weeks until there isn't anyone left on this forum to care. By that time it won't be possible to turn things around anymore.

If you all want to quietly fade out... and do your own things outside of PR... not giving up enough control to let the community start taking over... then yeah, I'm not here to force you to do anything. Up to you.

Nothing will ever be as personal to me as PR though obviously, which is why I still come here trying to take a stab at seeing if you all are ready to change something... but I've made peace with the likelyhood that that won't happen.

I would have liked to see PR become something greater, and it absolutely had the potential to do that. Possibly still does... not sure... but not forever. Opportunity is fading quickly... and if that's what the RDEV's holding the reigns want... then so be it.

Not what I would have wanted though. Not that you all care about that of course though, and I'm not asking you to... but it still isn't what I wanted.

[HOLLYWOODY]

[AfterDune]

I'm not really getting the "let the community take over" part. Ever since PR was founded, it was members of the community that stepped up, made new things and became PR developers. The team has been changing ever since the early days and it's still changing. So essentially, the community has already taken over .

We may not like everything the community is creating, but to be honest, nobody in their right mind would accept anything and everything that's offered. Of course we're picky, not just everything fits into the PR world.

We can only do so much with PR on its current engine. We can put more content in, but we're always stuck with Refractor - which to be honest is quite a decent engine, if you just look at what the BF2 modding community has been able to do with it over the years.

Most developers love to mod on this engine, which is the reason why they're sticking around and not really looking at something new. Of course everybody sees how awesome the next-gen engines are, but many of us have fulltime jobs or studies, leaving little to no room to deep dive into new territories. Some do of course, just look at Squad, Post Scriptum, ArmA/VBS, ...

If you want to keep PR alive for many more years to come, you kinda have to move on to a new engine at some point, but that's not really happening anytime soon, because of reasons I stated above.

However, what I could potentially see happening is a PR HD mod, possibly even on the 2142 engine (because 2142 offers some really cool stuff that's not possible in BF2). That obviously brings new challenges, but would at least allow everyone with Refractor knowledge to participate and get up-and-running quickly. The PR team most likely won't kickstart this, but I can imagine that some developers/contributors will certainly participate.

A PR HD mod would have to focus on pretty graphics, well optimized models and at the same time keep the PR gameplay and overall PR feel. And it should run reaaaal smooth as well - which I think should be possible, if you look at BF2 HD and 2142 HD mods.

This would be quite the undertaking and of course you'd have to ask yourself if the amount of effort is worth it. If it is, go for it (btw, I wouldn't advise to completely remake everything PR has).

[HOLLYWOODY]

How do we get the Refractor 2 engine source code?

[AfterDune]

You don't.

[Rhino]

Well, that is unless Hollywoody here is happy to hand out some favours to the guys at EA? You may want to consider this useful guide:

[HOLLYWOODY]

[Bluedrake42]

However, what I could potentially see happening is a PR HD mod, possibly even on the 2142 engine (because 2142 offers some really cool stuff that's not possible in BF2). That obviously brings new challenges, but would at least allow everyone with Refractor knowledge to participate and get up-and-running quickly. The PR team most likely won't kickstart this, but I can imagine that some developers/contributors will certainly participate.

But why would you even do that. If you're going to do a migration... to a whole new platform... why would you force yourself to stay on the Refractor engine... that you don't even have ownership of, and has hard limits to what you can do.

Rebuilding Project Reality in yet another unlicensed engine, as a medication... is short sighted planning. Yeah maybe it'll be more plug-and-play for your current team, but you will always hit a glass ceiling.

Of course everybody sees how awesome the next-gen engines are, but many of us have fulltime jobs or studies, leaving little to no room to deep dive into new territories. Some do of course, just look at Squad, Post Scriptum, ArmA/VBS, ...

I mean yeah of course we do. We all do. I do too. But furthermore I would say many of us owe the jobs we have to the work that has been done in Project Reality. So I'm not saying everyone has infinite free time to work on PR... we don't. However to act like its purely some frivolous side-hobby is somewhat disingenuous.

The vast majority of us, if we hold any jobs at all in the industry what-so-ever... PR has been a huge proponent of that. I'm not just saying that it has done that for us in the past... but there is no reason to believe working on it further wouldn't do that for more people even further. As much as you may not want to recognize it, Project Reality is tightly woven into the industry.

This community serves as a huge catalyst for career opportunities, and industry research, for more people than just ourselves. Additionally... I see no reason why Project Reality couldn't further be used as exactly that... in new fields, and for new ideas.

Project Reality has always been one of the biggest pioneers in the field, as ridiculous as that might seem to some people. However it simply has been. And that is entirely owed to the fact that it is the one neutral ground that everyone can come together to work on... regardless of their political/corporate/private affiliation.

That is the reason PR has been one of the most innovative creative forces in the past... and why I see no reason why it can't be again.



I will literally license you our work, to help build a platform that PR can start growing from again. I built Harsh Doorstop 1.0 previously, but then we sold that system to an interested party before it was released.

Then using those funds we started rebuilding our class library in raw C++ instead of messy blueprints, to rebuild a more solid platform learning from the mistakes we made from our previous run.

The only thing that frustrates me is that why no one else is doing this. Of all the people to be doing this, I should have been the last one. However raw perseverance over the past three years has been starting to get us further than more talented people... who are just not trying at all.

I would like this project to have some form of future. For a variety of reasons. Both because having a centralized free neutral platform helps even the playing field for everyone, and also gives everyone a bias-free place to collaborate and build business connections... that I very much like to have existing to keep my life more stress-free.

You could have full control of this, with no hard-coded glass ceilings. You would have full distribution control, including Steam... and everywhere else. You would be able to have literally infinite future potential, without having to worry about any legal BS or grey areas (like you have with EA.)

I do not see the reasons why no one is doing this. How is BF:2142 even a remotely attractive option comparatively? I do not see any way that it is... and you have an opportunity to do this right now, right in front of you.

[B2P1]

Do a kickstarter if that shit still works. Make PR your full jobs, bathe in pussay and dollars 4ever.

[Acemantura]

To OP: HELL YES!


To the rest of you:

I think the game is beautiful as it is. I honestly think its better than the current or previous iteration(s) of Squad. That being said if it would only take 6 months to a year of work to spit-shine the game into a new engine, I think it would be worth it. But to reiterate, this game is beautiful as it is, so the engine and the development limitations we have aren't the real challenges.

The number one reason why I find server popping is a chore: Players not using mics, and everything that precipitates from that; from new players not being able to inquire about how to play the game, to not being able to coordinate a squad, to piss-poor game quality server-wide.

If I haven't said it before, I believe in this game so much that I ponied up the cash to start up a server, even as I am underemployed. But I regret it more and more each day that I can't enjoy this game because the player population doesn't have a microphone, doesn't speak English (Which is cool within a squad), and even worse, has a microphone but doesn't care about the gameplay ethos of PR.

To put it simply, the only challenge there has ever been with PR is a fundamental lack of understanding of gameplay.

Possible solutions:

1. A < 5 minute Youtube bootcamp video alongside the first launch of PR
2. Monthly learning weekend events for new players
3. a server-side check for mumble use?

1. Frankly, people will be more likely to watch than read. I will gladly re-voice the US Commander and help to make a bootcamp video. BD, I'd love to make something with you.

2. My server team is already thinking of ways to do this, but community-wide would be awesome.

3. FFS can we please get some FREAKIN MICS!!! (maybe some hot-links to duolingo...)



And Rhino, thank you for that MJT vid. I needed that.