Dev Perspective VS. End User Perspective

[twinkieman93]

I feel like recent changes to the source port, and the kerfluffle they caused, really highlighted an issue that's kind of been plaguing communication between the devs/moderators and the general public.

To begin, a lot of these changes are being explained as good for the development process in some way, and there's a lot of technical language being used to describe how this all is very useful to them. I appreciate the honesty; the devs are stating their reasoning for doing what they did, with no real filter. They're just putting their thoughts straight to the page. That's good.

The trouble is two-fold, though. One, their explanations, like I said, are full of lots of technical language that really only makes sense to other coders, or people who work with the systems they're talking about. They're coming straight out of a coder's head, so they're using coder's jargon. To a layman like me, you might as well be speaking Klingon, because most of the resolution discussions just went over my head. It feels a lot like a politician using big fancy words to obfuscate what they're really saying. I know that's absolutely not what they're trying to do, mind you, that's just how it feels at first blush. In the moment, though, when people are already on-tilt because a big change has been announced with no prior warning(another issue entirely tbh), they might not realize that. And even if they do, they're still just reading a bunch of gobbledygook.

Now, as for the other problem, even when the reasons are laid out in a way that even a layman can understand(dpJudas in particular is very good about this and y'all should probably just have him make the announcements, but I digress), they still beggar the question "but what good does this do for me, the end user?". Ultimately, even once I understood all of the reasons behind the recent changes, I couldn't see how any of that benefited me as a person who uses GZDoom just to play the gosh darn video game. When you provide a project to the public, the public is looking at the project in terms of what it offers to them. How efficient the project's code is, how hard it is to maintain, or whatever else is at play in decisions like this don't really mean much to them. And when you look at things such as the removal of resolution options, they'll only see negatives no matter how much it might benefit the dev team.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, the devs should probably keep in mind that their perspective on things like this are very, very, different from the end user's. In the future, they should try to make it clear what the things they're saying mean for us as the people who use their product, rather than what it means to them and theirs. You can say "this change increases efficiency of the such-and-such system by this-many percentiles", but be sure to add "you should enjoy increased performance as a result of this in certain situations", or whatever it means from a guy-just-playing-the-video-game perspective. Of course, if a change seems to only make things worse for the end user, maybe you should reconsider it before shipping it, but that's a whole different kettle of fish and not really what I wanted to talk about(but if someone else wants to in the thread I guess I can't really stop them).

TL;DR - The dev team and general public are effectively speaking two entirely different languages and that's not exactly conducive to getting along, so maybe the dev team should become mildly bilingual to better get their points across and avoid some abrasion in the future.

[Gez]

One thing to keep in mind about the temporary loss of the resolution selector is that it wasn't a design decision like some passive-aggressively implied. It was a casualty of a different design change, but not the aim. It's just that a new menu selector couldn't be added in time for the update and the developers didn't want to hold things up too long.

The real problem here I think is that someone who has a developer tag because they did make several contributions made a thread pointing out some third-party program as a workaround and so it could be perceived as being the official position of the GZDoom dev team. This way, a well-intentioned thread caused a pointless kerfuffle and a lot of stress everyone could have done without.

I don't have a perfect solution here. Certainly the devs could have explained the situation better if they knew in advance what would happen, but unfortunately this wasn't in the horoscope. Perhaps equinox precession made them not as reliable as advertised.

One thing I want to say though is that people should remember that this is a volunteer project, nobody is getting paid for it (pretty much the opposite in fact, since hosting zdoom.org isn't free), and so continued work depends on dev motivation. When a change happens and you don't like it, don't try to insult and shame the devs into undoing it. Instead, respectfully express your concerns and you will have a much higher chance of seeing your situation catered to than if you make the devs think you're a never-satisfied asshole and a troll.

[MartinHowe]

In B4 anyone else (And I both write stuff and use it)

[Rachael]

One thing to keep in mind about the temporary loss of the resolution selector is that it wasn't a design decision like some passive-aggressively implied. It was a casualty of a different deshiign change, but not the aim. It's just that a new menu selector couldn't be added in time for the update and the developers didn't want to hold things up too long.

The real problem here I think is that someone who has a developer tag because they did make several contributions made a thread pointing out some third-party program as a workaround and so it could be perceived as being the official position of the GZDoom dev team. This way, a well-intentioned thread caused a pointless kerfuffle and a lot of stress everyone could have done without.

I don't have a perfect solution here. Certainly the devs could have explained the situation better if they knew in advance what would happen, but unfortunately this wasn't in the horoscope. Perhaps equinox precession made them not as reliable as advertised.

One thing I want to say though is that people should remember that this is a volunteer project, nobody is getting paid for it (pretty much the opposite in fact, since hosting zdoom.org isn't free), and so continued work depends on dev motivation. When a change happens and you don't like it, don't try to insult and shame the devs into undoing it. Instead, respectfully express your concerns and you will have a much higher chance of seeing your situation catered to than if you make the devs think you're a never-satisfied asshole and a troll.

I agree with pretty much every word in this post.

[Graf Zahl]

Another thing people need to remember is that the Git repo only represents the current state of development, not the state of the upcoming release. It can and will frequently happen that it contains unfinished features so that they can see some external testing to get feedback. Developers are not mind readers, they also need to get feedback for work in progress.

But like Gez said, the entire thing was totally blown out of proportion by some well intentioned but ultimately horribly misguided recommendation to use a third party program. It is not surprising that some people read something into that post that never was said.

[twinkieman93]

Jumping off of what Gez said, a way this could have been all avoided in its entirety is if the release had been delayed until the replacement had been put together. I don't know how long that sort of thing would have taken(I think I remember hearing it wouldn't be hard? Doesn't necessarily translate to time taken but still), but I think a slower release to have a fully-implemented feature(or a redux of an existing one, I guess) would have been a fair trade-off. I certainly wouldn't complain. I use Zandronum, I'm used to way, way longer spans of time between releases.

That said, we can try to point to any one singular occurrence and say "this is where it all went wrong", but almost every single potential point of failure can be summed up as a miscommunication of some sort. I think we all just need to work on our communication skills is all, both devs communicating things clearly to non-devs, and some of the less well-behaved among us cooling our jets a little and trying to rein our emotions in. Which is hard, we're all passionate about Doom or we wouldn't be here, but we all gotta try, right?

[Rachael]

One thing people are forgetting is that the devs and administrators owe them NOTHING, least of all explanations about anything. That doesn't mean we won't do anything for you guys (because that'd be insane, and we might as well just leave if that's the case)

Everything we do is out of the kindness of our hearts, and trust me we WILL make mistakes along the way but no one who has a purple or pink name has any malice in their hearts whatsoever.

We don't hate you guys. We know, on the all and whole, you don't hate us, at least most of you don't. We need to establish a base line understanding here: If you want better communication from us, you guys need to give us a LOT more faith and patience. You have to let us make mistakes - because we will make a few. We CAN'T avoid that, and trust me in a perfect world we would. And you have to realize it's OKAY TO BE WRONG. What matters most is what we try to do to correct it in the future. And we WILL try, because we're not insane idiots.

[phantombeta]

Jumping off of what Gez said, a way this could have been all avoided in its entirety is if the release had been delayed until the replacement had been put together. I don't know how long that sort of thing would have taken(I think I remember hearing it wouldn't be hard? Doesn't necessarily translate to time taken but still), but I think a slower release to have a fully-implemented feature(or a redux of an existing one, I guess) would have been a fair trade-off. I certainly wouldn't complain. I use Zandronum, I'm used to way, way longer spans of time between releases. :lol:

You seem to be getting one thing wrong here - the complaints about it happened long before the release. People started complaining about it when it was only a thing in the dev builds. (Hence why Graf said what he just did)

[Graf Zahl]

In case people ask why no menu solution was done before the release, have a look at a European weather chart. We are currently suffering from one of the worst heat waves in history, it has become so hot inside the house that there's simply no way to do real work. And it's not going to change for the next two weeks based on current data. The release would have had to be delayed for all that time.
And what for? A menu that doesn't really offer anything of substantial value? The main problem here is not that the options do not exist but that they work differently now (as in: more suitable to how modern displays operate.)

[dpJudas]

Jumping off of what Gez said, a way this could have been all avoided in its entirety is if the release had been delayed until the replacement had been put together.

I think one of the mistakes unhappy users make is to believe everyone has exactly the same needs and desires as themselves. Clearly if that was the case we wouldn't have found the current solution acceptable ourselves. How many unhappy vs happy is difficult to say for sure. We don't have any real numbers of that, nor do forums generally paint a realistic picture as the majority is always silent.

Before someone mentions there are video selection in most other games, that still doesn't give any answer to how many ever use a resolution different from their native monitor resolution, which this is essentially all about. All we have are big fat guesses here, all of us.

[twinkieman93]

Maybe I'm just unusually patient but I would have been fine with waiting those two weeks, especially with such a good reason.

I'd still argue the scaling options, as they currently exist, are not too user friendly since they transition from a multiplier on a slider straight into several XxY options with no indicator that this is a thing that happens. I figured it out by accident when I pressed an arrow key one too many times. Sure, they accomplish the same end result as the(admittedly messy) big block list of resolutions, but I for one like seeing all my options at once.

I think a better UI for the scaling would have the multiplier slider, a list of common predetermined resolutions, and then maybe some text boxes to plug in your own preference for X and Y f you want even finer control. And then an option to choose which of these options you prefer.

[Rachael]

Kind of like this? https://github.com/coelckers/gzdoom/pull/527/files

Prebuilt testing executable: (64-bit only)
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/ ... estest2.7z

Most of the credit goes to Caligari87 for this, but I did do some tweaks to make it better.

Mostly I am just waiting to see if I get a lot of complaints about the way it was done before I merge it in. If I don't, I'll commit it into the mainline, hopefully before the next release.

[Kinsie]

Maybe I'm just unusually patient but I would have been fine with waiting those two weeks, especially with such a good reason.

Agreed, to be honest. Like Rachael said, this is a volunteer project. There's no need to rush things out to hit quarterly deadlines or whatever, especially when extreme weather stands in the way.

[Graf Zahl]

I still have to say: With the tiny number of people actually complaining here, this looks to me like a clear cut case of a very small number of users totally overestimating the demand for their personal needs of configurability.

[Gez]

There are people who would like the resolution selector back (in an updated form, of course) and who didn't complain because they felt there was too much noise already. I know there's at least me.