Hi guys,

With the caveat that I have not followed EECH development closely, I'll chime in on this thread, per messyhead's request for a review.

I will observe that it is generally considered bad form to post Private Message content without the consent of the other party/parties. There can be exceptions to that, but I don't think I see one of those in this case.

Moving along, FireBird_[WINE]'s PM / PMs can certainly be viewed as brusque, but one should keep in mind that he is entitled to react as he chooses, for whatever his reasons may be. The community is not entitled to demand anything from any of you as far as advancing any of these projects go. Some of the attitude that seems to be there may be attributable to the language difference. Or it may just be a natural result of past experiences related to the project(s) community. I don't know, but again... nobody can really demand anything from someone else in here as far as working on a project goes.

Each of you has to decide for yourselves what you are willing to do. While I applaud messyhead attempting to get things moving again/faster, I can also understand backing off from it, if it doesn't appear promising. Everybody has to decide what they are willing to do, and under what circumstances. It may simply be that various folks can not see going at it in a similar way. Stuff like that happens in the real world.

While I do not have a stake in it, I would encourage any of you that have common ground to try again to find a way to work together if that is feasible.

As for this thread, since the PM traffic has been visible for awhile now, it probably would not do much good for me to make it go away. I would say that if any of the affected parties request the PM text to be deleted, then it should be edited out of the thread. I'm going to unlock this thread so that discussion can resume. Please keep it respectful of one another. You guys have done some pretty cool stuff with EECH, and I think that is admirable. It would be great if that could continue to progress.

Best regards,

CyBerkut

Ah, yes, it may really look "brusque". "Noone is boss" did not mean "messyhead, please don't be bossy". It was just a simple fact.

I lead to me those time when I created EE releases and wanted people to fix this or that. Or improve something. Sometimes they did that. But more often - they did not.
As for "features list", I had my own TODO, I added tasks inspired by both me and community there.
Those "task list does not work for COMMUNITY" is totally my experience. I saw that behavior ten years ago and once again.

I warmly remember times when I was able to work in close contact on some features with some community representatives.
Unfortunately my lack of communication skills didn't allow me to continue working with many good people. I had less and less understanding what they said to me and I could not express my thoughts clear enough as well.

If it was a commercial development it would be much easier to communicate, because people would be forced to TRY to understand each other (otherwise - wages decrease or fire away). Open source has its own features.

Well, I say again, we did much in our time, I liked a lot both people we worked together and the results of jobs we did. It does not matter if the project is dead or not. We had great time in development and I'm proud of it.

A dozen of years in EE development of course improved me. Both EE code and people of community influenced me all of that time.
Being very young I was awed by computer games, and specially - combat flight simulators. EE was a jewel when I first read about it.
My work always was very far from games, and EE development gave me both practical knowledge and fun. Being a programmer makes me happy when a dumb silicon box becomes to do what I expect it to do, having some kind of life I put into that box.
It's twice as good if the result looks great.

I want to thank all of the people who improved both the game and me during all those long dozen of years. Breaking the limits and exploring the world beyond my experience made me what I am.

I don't know if I can add significant amount of Ogre support. Real life problems increase in numbers each year.
But the memory of project, people, contribution, new knowledge and skills will always warm me.

FireBird

Hello,

I had no idea about what is EECH less than one month ago, so I know nothing about the past of Allmods, who did what abd so on.
But what I can see now is that:
- we all like EECH and want it to get it even better!
- we all have contributed to it (from a very humble bat launcher to large code rewritings)
- there is such a comprehensive knowledge of the intricacies of the game among you and published in the wiki
- you (we?) have so many skills and know-hows in coding, modelling, texturing etc

So let's face it : this lot of people is the best one could dream of to bring EECH further!

I understand Firebird when he writes that modding is for fun, and one can not expect that someone would work on something one doesn't like.
I understand Messyhead when he writes that a minimum of coordination (not directing) is needed to know who works on what (the worst being two guys working on the same thing without knowing it).
Firebird's and messyhead's points are not contradictary, but highlight two aspects that are both true!

Written communication is very complicated indeed. At first I took Firebird's remark about "coding can be done by mid-school pupil" as a plain insult, but on second thought, it came to me that the intented meaning could be more like "hey, give coding a try, you'll see it is that hard in the end". What totally changes the meaning of the whole comment.

We are all EECH well-wishers here, so let's be positive in out comments and in our reading of said comments.
This thread started pretty lively, but I hope it has been an opportunity for everyone to speak their mind, and share their thoughts about EECH's future.

I wouldn't want to feel like someone who comes late to a party, just as the music is turned off and everybody is going to sleep.
I am sure I won't.

> "coding can be done by mid-school pupil"
Yup. One of greats said once something like. "Programming is easy. It's hard to write good programs."
Anyway result would not be good without experience, experience won't come up without doing.

I really appreciated when ten years ago we publicly discussed bugs found in the code (original and created by community). It was both educational and made EE better. I remember when there were huge stability issues and I had to implement autosave feature just not to loose to much campaign progress because of those. Does anyone use that feature now?


But you quoted me a little incorrectly. I said that "C language is easy". Language knowledge and programming are not the same.
If someone knows English it does not mean he can write novels and poetry. But he can write a letter or at least a note.
Also, if one both knows German and good in novel writing he can write good English novels after a little studying English.

When I started to work with 3D code in EE, I knew nothing about Lightwave. I succeeded to learn basics of it, and was able to provide that knowledge to many others. I did nothing in 3d modeling, but many others did a lot. I was able to understand where provided 3d models had problems but I did no changes to them.
So even that basic knowledge I gathered helped both me and other people a lot. Of course I'm not saying that everybody got all Lightwave knowledge just from me.

Cyberkut, thanks for intervening, and I take your comments on board.

FireBird, I apologise for publicly posting the PM that we had. It was in no way meant as an attack on you. I thought it was the best way for me to illustrate the attitudes that made me decide to give up on modding EE. Having read it again, and your comments above, I now see that what you wrote, and your intention were not the same. It was all just lost in communication. Thank you for clarifying what you meant.

My intention was not to dictate what should be done, or try to have some control. But everyone will know the phrase "Divide and Conquer". I think that getting EE working in Ogre, which is really what's needed for the future of EE, is too big a task for one person. So I hoped that by working on parts of the same problem, we'd get results quicker.

I also think there's some quick fixes that could be done in the short term to make small improvements to EE, and then spend a longer time working on things like Ogre, and other bigger improvements.

I think that if we continue working as individuals, then progress will be slow, and the playerbase that is there, however big it is, will drift away.


I've been a player of EE since Apache/Havoc was first released, and I've always liked it. I would love to see it continue to be improved, and I genuinely felt sad when I posted this thread as I was walking away from helping improve it. There are things I'd like to see added personally, like my Blackhawk cockpit, but I would need help in getting those finished. I don't have enough knowledge of the codebase to instantly know where to look to fix or improve things. However, that doesn't mean I'm not willing to try. I learned C when I studied Mechanical Engineering at university, more than 20 years ago, and I've worked as a tester/developer for almost 15 years using other languages other than C. So programming concepts and how to write code is not alien to me.


I understand how your opinion of working together in the past has left you feeling like it doesn't work. But I'm genuinely offering to try working that way now. It might mean you need to put up with my questions as I learn how the 3D code works, but you currently have the most knowledge in that area. I understand that people will want to work on their own thing, but if all of the modders have the goal of improving EE, then it might be that sometimes you need to park your own work, and do some other tasks. For example, I've left my Blackhawk cockpit for now to try and work on getting the Havoc needles working and a couple of other things.


I'd be grateful if you would be willing to help and support myself and the other modders whilst we get to work on things, and if there's some way we could work collectively on some of the bigger problems, than that would be great as well.

For all my time in this community I always helped people with any direct question they addressed me with.
Unfortunately from some point in time I just stopped to understand most of them. I don't know what the reason of it was. It's just a fact.

You have my e-mail, we had talks previously via it.
I doubt I can give wide answers but I'm able to point somewhere and give a couple "how it should be made" advices. Most of them are "look like it's done in other places yet".

FireBird

O.k. I see it was really a misunderstanding. I was very disappointed because I want that this awesome simulation gets a little bit more finished. I hate if good things left unfinished and Allmods is such a great work, in my opinion really the best attack helicopter simulator ever built. I said this not only to to kiss up to this community, its my real conviction. I have also played this sim since the original EEAH came out in 1998 here in Germany and I'm a rotorhead since LHX Attack Chopper and Gunship2000 in the good old DOS-times.

I apologize my indignant behavior, but my real life problems also increase every new month and this is why I'm a bit nervous at the moment. My hobby is and was the only pleasant thing in my life I had, because many other things get totally wrong.

I really don't want to push someone to make things I would like to see in a direction, but I think that content which is already in Allmods has to work of course. If I would like to push, I would urge to get an AH-1F Cobra to Allmods too, because this is really my all time favorite attack helicopter. If I would be able to fix the things that not working on my own, I would do so and of course share this with the community too, but I couldn't because I have not all the knowledge needed. For this reason I tried to help with those things I could already do like texture-work or learn things I'm really able to learn like 3D modeling.

I've been sitting here for hours every night to get some improvements for the russian helicopter cockpits done, which was a really hard work if you have to learn it from scratch, but I know from the beginning that I need the help of some other guys to get all the instrument stuff working. At the moment I'm working on the MI-28N and the KA-52, to make the modernized versions of their cockpits, because so much had changed since the early days of those helicopters.

Since so much had changed, many instruments must be moved or totally new builded and of course also get working again, but this last point is what I'm not able to do completely on my own at the moment. So I need the help of more experienced guys here. There are also some questions I was not able to get answers on my own, because not much is available at the web. For example things like what happend to the periscope in the modernized version of the KA-52 Alligator? Is this avionics part still there and if where is the image of the camera displayed on (at one of the MFD's ?) or is it completely removed or replaced by anything else?

I also advised to make a some new improved versions of the original cockpit textures for the MI-28A which are compatible to the fix messyhead makes at the moment of course.
The MI-28 black cockpit I made may look a bit nicer as the blue one, but it isn't realistic because such a version never exists. As said before I'm working on the real black MI-28N cockpit in paralell to the KA-52 at the moment and also will try to make a gunner pit for it. Maybe I will convert my KA-50 pit to a blue version (which was also existing in RL) and make some improvements to the old KA-52 Alligator cockpit too, so everyone can decide which one he prefers, old or new.

But all this will take time, because sadly I'm a bit a perfectionist and will try do get the things as realistic as possible. Here comes also the first question I have to the community. Is it really needed to make all gauges 3D? As said I'm a perfectionist but I really couldn't see much difference in the game itself if a gauge is only made 2D. At least at the front panel it's not really noticeable and the 3D effect could also be done by good textures. For other panels like e.g. overhead it makes a clear difference because of the viewing angle, but I'm not able to test it with a head tracking system at the moment, so I need your advice. If all should be done with 3D, I will take much more time but I will try to do if favored.

So this is what I want to bring to the project in future, isn't as much as others made, but the only thing I can do with my knowledge. At first I think the cockpits should only have a small upgrade to make them a bit more functional e.g. like MI-28 gauges (messyhead maybe will work further on this) and the KA-50 missing instruments have to be integrated and somethings also fixed (HUD, MFD). Some other bugs like collision problems have also to be quick fixed and we have something players can use in the meantime.

Other things could be integrated in a complete overhaul (I will also need some time to make all this work come true, cause there is my homepit also). Don't know what you all think of my suggestion (I'm not trying to push here to any direction), so please give a comment on this. Would be also nice to hear some opinions of some new guys, not allways the same people which discuss here or sometimes argue

And I'm no lone warrior so any help at my project is welcome and we can make all decisions together. If needed I'm willing to share my results at anytime so others can help to improve it, only restriction is that it should look like the real thing as far as possible no fantasy parts or something else.

Now I get confused by all these sudden retirements. As I am not going anywhere, I have several questions for you, messyhead:
1. are you planning, and able to finish Havoc instruments?
2. are you planning to finish Blackhawk cockpit in near future? it's not just a curiosity. I have Soczkien's cockpit ready to be released, so now I have to add new aircraft to not cause problems for you, or just include this cockpit to master branch as-is.

Ha ha, yeah it did get a bit crazy. As I've said above, I realise now it was all just a bit of a misunderstanding, and got blown out of proportion. As FireBird has clarified things, I think my hasty retirement was unnecessary.

So to answer your questions...



Yes. I'm still working on this. Although in light of some things that Firebird mentioned, I'm going to take another look at how I'm doing it, as I might be doing it from the wrong approach.



Yes, I am also planning on going back to this once the Havoc gauges are working. Although I'm not sure if I can say it will be done in near future. There's still quite a bit to add. The texturing as well all needed properly done. However, if I can get the engine gauges in the Havoc working, then I think that will help me with getting the engine displays in the Blackhawk working, as they'll likely use similar methods to display the coloured bars.

What is Sockziens cockpit that you have? Is that the one that had multiple MFDs, and was more like the UH-60M cockpit, and was in 1.15.4?

By near future I meant next 5 years, so I will plan to duplicate cockpit and instruments code.

Yes, UH-60M that was included in 1.15.4.

Hopefully it'll be done in less than 5!