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Re: Don't release the code yet

#107
BFett wrote:
Sun Nov 11, 2018 1:58 pm
What's the point of posting something so disrespectful? Just don't post if you feel this way. Let people have a look at the game code if it's released. It's not up to you to decide if Josh should or shouldn't release the code. You don't speak for all backers, or all supporters here on these forums.
No disrespect intended. Though I am well past the point in caring either way.

I have been sadly correct as of the progress and fate of this project.

It would be easier and faster to use some pre-existing engine and make a feature cut version of LT rather than try to unravel what ever mess Josh decides to hand out.

I of course would love to be proven wrong by you guys. Best of luck to you all.
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Re: Don't release the code yet

#108
Zanteogo wrote:
Thu Nov 15, 2018 5:25 pm
BFett wrote:
Sun Nov 11, 2018 1:58 pm
What's the point of posting something so disrespectful? Just don't post if you feel this way. Let people have a look at the game code if it's released. It's not up to you to decide if Josh should or shouldn't release the code. You don't speak for all backers, or all supporters here on these forums.
No disrespect intended. Though I am well past the point in caring either way.

I have been sadly correct as of the progress and fate of this project.

It would be easier and faster to use some pre-existing engine and make a feature cut version of LT rather than try to unravel what ever mess Josh decides to hand out.

I of course would love to be proven wrong by you guys. Best of luck to you all.
Do you have anything other than a thinly-veiled "I toldja so" to contribute to the conversation? This kind of naysaying was old hat while the project was failing, and now that it's failed, it's just in poor taste.
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Re: Don't release the code yet

#109
Grumblesaur wrote:
Sun Nov 25, 2018 11:56 am
Zanteogo wrote:
Thu Nov 15, 2018 5:25 pm
BFett wrote:
Sun Nov 11, 2018 1:58 pm
What's the point of posting something so disrespectful? Just don't post if you feel this way. Let people have a look at the game code if it's released. It's not up to you to decide if Josh should or shouldn't release the code. You don't speak for all backers, or all supporters here on these forums.
No disrespect intended. Though I am well past the point in caring either way.

I have been sadly correct as of the progress and fate of this project.

It would be easier and faster to use some pre-existing engine and make a feature cut version of LT rather than try to unravel what ever mess Josh decides to hand out.

I of course would love to be proven wrong by you guys. Best of luck to you all.
Do you have anything other than a thinly-veiled "I toldja so" to contribute to the conversation? This kind of naysaying was old hat while the project was failing, and now that it's failed, it's just in poor taste.
Sorry, Grumblesaur, I could honestly care less now.

People like myself were told to shut up by people like yourself when this project still had a chance to turn around. We were told that everything was fine (by people who couldn't possibly know this), when everything we saw showed that this project needed to be handed differently.

Perhaps if enough people would have said;
"You know Josh, things don't seem to be going so well, maybe it's time to do some feature cuts? They can always be added down the road."
"With all due respect Josh, programming off your lucid dreams, though interesting, doesn't seem like a good way to actually make a project like this come to completion."
"Hey Josh, just a suggestion, maybe instead of playing with the same menu and shader, for the hundredth time, maybe that time could be used to make the base game actually work to a degree? Thanks!"

If more people treated Josh like someone who took several thousand dollars to make a game, and not like their old collage room mate, things would have been different, maybe, I guess we will never know.
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Re: Don't release the code yet

#110
TL;DR: you're mostly right, but I don't concur entirely.
Zanteogo wrote:
Mon Dec 24, 2018 10:12 am
Sorry, Grumblesaur, I could honestly care less now.
It's a wonder you're still here then.
Zanteogo wrote:
Mon Dec 24, 2018 10:12 am
People like myself were told to shut up by people like yourself when this project still had a chance to turn around. We were told that everything was fine (by people who couldn't possibly know this), when everything we saw showed that this project needed to be handed differently.
What were any of us to do, really? Reach into Josh's office and rearrange his kanban board?

I realize I was one of many telling you to shut up (in perhaps different words), but seeing as Josh's workload and mental health eclipsed his ability to stay in contact on the forums (you might argue he was still viewing them in the interim, but you might also argue that he'd've posted a heads-up in the same case), I doubt a whole chorus of forum members screeching management advice toward his IP address would scarcely have been more productive than the shitstorm come-and-gone that is so distantly a memory now. Maybe I was wrong to try to quell the unrest that arose, and if my distaste for dissent was the final nail in Limit Theory's coffin then you have my sincerest apologies. We're all a little older and a little more disenchanted now, and I freely admit I've been a hothead here in years past.

But to say that we here on this forum, perhaps only a fraction of the Kickstarter backers, should have the requisite gravitas given to our suggestions to swing the pendulum of the whole project presents us with a trouble spot. We did fund the thing, yeah, but that doesn't make us the board of directors. To this I imagine you'd respond that Josh isn't freed from criticism just for having the dream in the first place, and you'd be right. But it's an unanswerable question, whether we had the authority to demand, to advise, or something else. Perhaps at the time, because I did not see myself as having the expertise or authority to advise Josh, I discouraged others from doing so, even if they knew better than I did.

Still, I feel to pin the blame on the community for letting LT fall through the cracks bears some acknowledgement to how unusually close we were with our developer to begin with. We used to get daily updates. Josh had some drive to show off. We got a performance, and people began to realize that they wanted substance instead. Maybe it would've been different if I (and others like me) had encouraged more criticism, but perhaps it would've been different if our magician had not felt some (self-imposed) pressure to showcase his tricks.
Zanteogo wrote:
Mon Dec 24, 2018 10:12 am
Perhaps if enough people would have said;
"You know Josh, things don't seem to be going so well, maybe it's time to do some feature cuts? They can always be added down the road."
"With all due respect Josh, programming off your lucid dreams, though interesting, doesn't seem like a good way to actually make a project like this come to completion."
"Hey Josh, just a suggestion, maybe instead of playing with the same menu and shader, for the hundredth time, maybe that time could be used to make the base game actually work to a degree? Thanks!"
And doesn't that depend on whether Josh was really listening to us? For all the times that so many of us here said we wanted to see snippets of code, that we wanted to see fighters dueling, miners extracting, freighters docking, stations launching ships? For all the times that so many of the career programmers here did say that Josh wasn't really making progress? We got graphics. We got C++. We got C. We got LTSL, then Python, then Lua, then Lua with a JIT compiler. We got engine after engine. Maybe he thought it was all doom and gloom and drama up until it was too late, or maybe he knew all along that his programming prowess couldn't cash the checks his devlogs and video updates were writing, and was just biding his time, hoping that he could bridge the canyon between what he had and what we were promised with just a little more experience or a little more time.

Even as the old General Unhappiness Thread had been, in my mind, a toxic waste containment zone, it's not like we ever prevented Josh from looking at it, or any of the responses to devlogs or other development updates. Unless Josh was totally deluded, he knew he had his critics as well as his devotees. Even supposing that the extent we influenced Josh (irrespective of our views) was nonzero, Josh still had final responsibility for the implementation of not just the game itself but the process to create the game.

Maybe if we had said more of those things it would've happened, I'll agree with you there. But was it our responsibility? No, I feel that we gave Josh the responsibility when we gave him our money. Josh made the call to do it all himself up until we saw those brief starbursts of Adam, Lin, and Sean, and it seems that it was too-little-too-late by the time the first of them was given tasking.
Zanteogo wrote:
Mon Dec 24, 2018 10:12 am
If more people treated Josh like someone who took several thousand dollars to make a game, and not like their old collage room mate, things would have been different, maybe, I guess we will never know.
I suppose that would depend on whether Josh was as capable as any of us believed in the first place. Brilliant as he is, he did leave school to do this. Even the best computer science education is lacking if only half-complete, and drowning during your first few years in any field isn't a great way to build good work habits.

Maybe someday Josh will poke his head back in and do his own postmortem, but I'll call this mine for now, and say that I'm sorry for quieting your opinions, and that to some extent I agree with you here. Despite not being a developer, I have learned much from the defeat of LT.
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Re: Don't release the code yet

#111
As one of the more critically-inclined, I think Grumblesaur is quite right. I reject the "silenced critics" theory -- I've had the honor of personally frustrating Josh with some of my criticisms, but in the end, it didn't amount to anything. Grumblesaur is only wrong in saying that a computer science education would have helped Josh. That's mostly irrelevant for a born programmer such as Josh. Nothing short of a wise taskmaster, a proper project manager, would have sufficed to contain and direct Josh's unbounded talent and make LT a reality. You can't obtain that sort of experience (and thus the required foreknowledge) in school.

The great thing with Josh is that he's very smart. The problem is that he's so smart he's literally out of this world. And that's where I agree with Zanteogo. Irrespective of the existence of the critical posters, and even discounting the possibility that critical thinking was shot down, the community has more or less failed to keep him grounded, to take him to task. But it is no one person's fault, but a tragedy of the commons. We let Josh's optimism infect us, especially in the early years, and as the happiness bug spread, it ultimately prevented him from facing up to reality.
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Re: Don't release the code yet

#112
I disagree somewhat with the tenor of the last few posts, which seem to suggest that we more-or-less frequent commenters bear some responsibility for Josh's choices that led to where LT is today.

There's a certain sense in which I'd agree that we're responsible for our individual comments, and that it's possible some of those comments may have moved Josh slightly in one direction or another.

But to the notion that this forum bears some collective responsibility for not making Josh do this or that, I disagree with that entirely. In the first place, I don't think we ever had any such responsibility for Josh's choices, nor would it have been right for us to assert such command over a free adult human being. And in the second place, I don't think Josh ever did anything other than what Josh thought was best at the time, regardless of what we thought he "should" do.

In short, for better or worse, Josh's choices were his responsibility, not ours, and I reject the suggestion that we as a community failed in some way to force Josh to do something that would have saved this project.

That's not entirely a bad thing. Had LT succeeded, Josh would have (for the most part) owned that success; because he (mostly) chose to do everything himself, he owns its failure. That is not the end of the world! Good grief; I wish I had accomplished as much at 26 as Josh has. The only real failure in a human sense would be if he doesn't take the improved knowledge of himself gained from this experience and build on that knowledge in his future efforts. If on the other hand he learns the lessons I think should be pretty clear now, his future accomplishments could be every bit as awesome as the more optimistic commenters here (in which camp I include myself) always hoped.

That would be the right conclusion to this single early chapter in a life that should enjoy many more chapters.

No matter what, though, look at all the comments there've been from the people whom Josh inspired to go make a thing. Succeed or fail, he sincerely tried. And you'd better believe that matters.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
-- Theodore Roosevelt, April 23, 1910
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Re: Don't release the code yet

#113
Flatfingers wrote:
Wed Dec 26, 2018 12:25 am
In short, for better or worse, Josh's choices were his responsibility, not ours, and I reject the suggestion that we as a community failed in some way to force Josh to do something that would have saved this project.
That's also my view, and certainly the community cannot force Josh to do anything at all. As you say, the successes and the failures are Josh's and we're here for the support.

But Josh is by nature closed to the possibility of tragedy. He quite honestly believed that he could not fail. That's not healthy, and it also wasn't healthy back in 2012. Can you honestly say that we (and obviously I include myself) didn't play along and encourage him in thinking like that, especially in the early years?
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Re: Don't release the code yet

#115
alpan wrote:
Thu Dec 27, 2018 12:00 am
Josh is by nature closed to the possibility of tragedy. He quite honestly believed that he could not fail. That's not healthy, and it also wasn't healthy back in 2012. Can you honestly say that we (and obviously I include myself) didn't play along and encourage him in thinking like that, especially in the early years?

Certainly we encouraged him, but I don't accept the premise that failure was inevitable. Certain computing problems are hard, but code is just code; a lot can be accomplished with skill and perseverance.

For that matter, even if Josh was too ambitious, that's not the worst possible way to fail. (This is basically the point of the Roosevelt quote.) How many failures did Edison's team push through before finding a successful light bulb filament? Most "overnight successes" are actually people who've failed repeatedly until one crazy idea actually works, which is all anyone remembers (and then, of course, they all say it was obvious).

I'm not going to get into a psychoanalysis of the guy, but if you wanted to guess that the central problem was a refusal to rescope the project so that something, even if imperfect, could be achieved and delivered, I wouldn't argue with you. Again, though, that is not something for which the LT community bears any responsibility.
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Re: Don't release the code yet

#116
alpan wrote:
Thu Dec 27, 2018 12:00 am
But Josh is by nature closed to the possibility of tragedy. He quite honestly believed that he could not fail. That's not healthy, and it also wasn't healthy back in 2012. Can you honestly say that we (and obviously I include myself) didn't play along and encourage him in thinking like that, especially in the early years?
This

I have to disagree that this community had no influence over Josh. Particularly in the first half of this project. He was here interacting almost daily, responding and he seemed to be taking everything in. It was only after Josh's first great disappearance that he built a large wall between us and himself. I find it very unlikely that all that interaction did nothing at all.

There was a large portion of the community that treated him like he was some sort of super god. It's probably why this project lingered well past it's expiry date. Hopefully some of us learned a valuable life lesson here.

Josh raised some massive warning flags of issues and only a hand full of people actually tried to warn him. Perhaps in the "post wall" days the community had no real shaping ability, but not before.

Maybe in the end it would have made zero difference. Maybe it would have. I know treating him like the community god king who couldn't possibly fail didn't work.
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Re: Don't release the code yet

#119
Which post? The one where he says he will clean up the code MONTHS ago? As if he is unable to do that in a commit after releasing whatever he has now? You're giving this guy a lot of freeway because of the mental issues, and as most fanbases for space/nerdy games, you probably feel his pain. I also have severe anxiety issues but I would never use that as any type of excuse and I've never done so in both academic or professional life. You have all been so led on...

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