GREAT READ:Making developers more productive — the Dolphin development infrastructure

[Blyss Sarania]

I wouldn't mind continuing the discussion about pcsx2 and its detractors and such, but it'd have to be outside the forum (i.e. Steam or via PM). It's best we stop it now since if we continue, it'd open the floodgates for another invasion.

I agree here, but well I'm not gonna close it. Because reasons.

Firstly, thank you G-force for the links, glad to see that there is at least something considered for the future.

Secondly, Let's not take criticism for the project as insults shall we. Criticism is a healthy thing to have if we really wanted to improve the project. Of course that is not extended to complaining about the developers who donate their time to the project and it is not anyone's place to criticize them for the stall of the development, but asking and arguing about the stall itself is completely reasonable I don't get why anyone is offended by that or taking it personally.

It's hard to accept criticism at face value when it's mixed in with trash talking. Even if PersonA says only worthwhile things, and PersonB only trash talks, it's difficult to separate the attacks from actual worthwhile comments both in terms of knowledge and in terms of feelings. It only takes one person to spoil the whole discussion - one single person bent on causing havoc.

Anyone willing to unearth them? I'd love to read some of it.

On-topic: Bositman & Blyss Sarania, any thoughts on possible content that can be put up on the main site? I still like the idea of a features spotlight, even if it's features that were covered previously.

I really don't know. It's not been long since I wrote this which basically brings everything up to date.

[Bositman]

It's amazing that each time a thread pops up about PCSX2 development some Dolphin devs appear out of nowhere, take it to reddit/other social media crap and start their usual work. Really amazing, I mean don't you guys have anything better to do?

On topic, IMO progress reports, or news posts are a second/third priority. Our first priority is (imo again) to document our code and make it easier for new devs to join. Our second priority would be to get our forum members to help with proper issue documenting and reporting, which I'm working in atm. I'd love to help with #1 and would put all my energy to it if I could, but unfortunately I don't have the necessary background.

What people have to understand is that we are running a project with 2-3 active members, so these people have to moderate the forum (with other mod help but still some administration required), keep the site and server updated, test regressions, check github and code stuff. If people think that with this manpower we can afford to make monthly reports or anything like that, they really don't know what it's like to be a 3 people team

[neobrain]

Hi,
I agree there's no point for any drama here. Regardless, there seem to be some misconceptions about my post on reddit, both with regards to its message as well as with my motivation to write it. I tried to only address statements related to my reddit post in order to keep this thing mostly on-topic.

First of all, let me emphasize that the primary intention of my post wasn't to complain about PCSX2. The situation was that someone posted a link to Play! for the sake of raising awareness of the project, but that individual then got flamed because "What do we need Play! for, we already have PCSX2? Keep your flamewarshit for yourself!". I find that to be sad because I'm personally happy to see an alternative PS2 emulator project show up, and (as I then explained) I also think that there enough things wrong with PCSX2 to justify that alternative emulator. I hence properly backed up my claims, as you can see.
As explained at the end of my post, I think it doesn't need an emulator rewritten from scratch to move forward though. Truth be told it seems like the remaining PCSX2 developers have driven themselves into a corner where there's no other thing than maintainence mode. I hence tried to raise awareness of the idea that trying to fork the project with different management might be worth a try.
Anyway: This is just FYI to show you why I wrote the thing in the first place. If you don't agree with anything written in the last two paragraphs, I'm asking you not too derail this thread by discussing about that disagreement too much.

That said, if you haven't done so already, please read my reddit post (linked some posts above) before accusing me of anything. And please *actually* read it instead of looking at it and crying "gosh what an idiot" just because you don't like its contents.

But it's silly how they lurked this thread and deliberately took posts out of context to try to talk negatively about PCSX2.

It's amazing that each time a thread pops up about PCSX2 development some Dolphin devs appear out of nowhere, take it to reddit/other social media crap and start their usual work. Really amazing, I mean don't you guys have anything better to do?

I didn't "lurk" in this thread or take any posts out of context. The original reddit post that I replied to wasn't made by a Dolphin developer. In fact, I hadn't visited the PCSX2 forums for months until this thread was brought to my attention (which was after I had written my post).

I don't see them or anyone else contributing to the project. Hell, PCSX2 is literally open f***ing source -- anyone who wanted to could've worked on various parts of the emu. We got raided that one time and no one that did so helped out in any way, and now people are slagging on the project again on reddit? Just lol.

Sorry, but can you please read my post more carefully?
My point is exactly that IMO there's a lot which can be done to make more people interesting in contributing. In other words: The issue is not about allowing other people to contribute. It's about being inviting and attractive enough for them to do so.
My post also explained why I think criticism is a constructive way of contributing without code. Since you play my whole post down as "slagging on the project", I have to assume you either did not read my post properly or you were too biased to objectively reason about it.

I don't see what's so hard to understand about why it's pointless to have a monthly progress report when there's not much happening.

I understand it's impossible to blog about progress without progress, but it's not what I'm suggesting, either. As previous posts in this thread have shown, there is lots of stuff to blog about even without any bigger development progress, for instance explaining how the PS2 architecture is designed and what kind of odd features the different hardware pieces support. This is exactly the kind of stuff which gets developers interested in the project to begin with.
You don't even need to waste developer time too much with that: Most of the Dolphin blogs aren't written by developers; those just give the basic information and proofread everything. Yes, you'll first need to find someone like that too, but arguably that's a lot easier than finding new developers. Indeed I know that someone was open to the idea of doing this work, but apparently a particular PCSX2 developer has made such a negative impression on him that he now stopped caring.

My issue is they talk a big game and can't back it up. If they could at least show they could do better, I'd be ok with their attitude. But they have nothing to show and talk down on PCSX2, the only actual PS2 emulator out there.

I don't really like drawing comparisons between PCSX2 and Dolphin, but posts like this basically leave me no other choice. If you want to have my criticism backed up, look at Dolphin. Unless you're just looking for ways to complain about me, you don't really have much choice but admit that it's a more welcoming and developer-attracting project. You also might want to consider why Citra is more active than any of the other 3DS emulation attempts to date. Maybe I do have a clue about what I'm talking about after all.

The more of I read of this Neobrains fellow, it seems like he's starting ***** to start *****. I don't understand. What's SO wrong with PCSX2?

As it was pointed out before, I wasn't criticizing the software, but the project.

What people have to understand is that we are running a project with 2-3 active members, so these people have to moderate the forum (with other mod help but still some administration required), keep the site and server updated, test regressions, check github and code stuff. If people think that with this manpower we can afford to make monthly reports or anything like that, they really don't know what it's like to be a 3 people team

Do you realize that Dolphin was in a probably even worse position few years ago? Dolphin development had a boost when it was open-sourced indeed, but a while after that thing became similarly stagnant as it's currently in PCSX2. We had no actively maintained website, our forums where a mess, a subgroup of developers added random crap into the main branch without any review or discussion, there was literally no one giving any sort of direction to the project.

I mean, I see the point that out of the 2-3 active members that you mention, no one might actually interested in doing the boring work - but that doesn't change that what a lot of what I pointed out on reddit is true. In other words: I understand why PCSX2 is in this situation, but that doesn't prevent me from saying what's wrong with the current situation. And from suggesting ways to improve.

[Bositman]

I won't reply to any of the other stuff because it will just be a repeat of that crap that happened last time.

Please if you want to post your ideas or suggestions on how to improve PCSX2's situation, do it. We are all open for suggestions and help. If you could do that without bringing Dolphin into the discussion it would be great.

Stating for the one hundredth billionth time what's wrong will not fix anything, will demoralize the scarce remaining devs since it looks like flaming at this point and will help no one, since if I wasn't clear enough we already know what's wrong with the situation.

You can start here: http://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread-New-bug-r...r-thoughts

[neobrain]

If you could do that without bringing Dolphin into the discussion it would be great.

I agree that comparing the two projects against each other all the time is annoying, but please understand that whenever I'm not mentioning Dolphin, I get contra-arguments like "Do you even know what you're talking about" and "Why would this crap even work?", to which the logical answer simply is that I've experienced all of it in Dolphin already. People want the proof apparently, and if there was another project that I have as much experience with I'd use that as a reference instead, but I don't.

You can start here: http://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread-New-bug-r...r-thoughts

As I'll explain more thoroughly in a minute, I don't think explicit bug reports like "Don't scare away new community members"[1] are a sensible way to use bug trackers.
[1] which is not to say everyone involved with PCSX2 does that. But some people do, and those people seem to be a rather vocal part of the community.

Please if you want to post your ideas or suggestions on how to improve PCSX2's situation, do it. We are all open for suggestions and help.

I know I've used the phrase "point out what's wrong", but it's really no rocket scientist to figure out what to do against a community being hostile against new people. Similar arguments hold for the other points in my post. Also note that (as explained above) my post was essentially promoting a fork of PCSX2 with different maintainership and/or shift of active development to Play!. I can't help that my post was roped into this thread.
In any case, I'm not sure how you can say I'm not suggesting ways to improve when that's what all of my post is basically about. If you want me to point it out explicitly for each of the points I listed:
a) Discourage people from being assholes. If you can't make them stop, exclude them from your community. One good coder is worth nothing if he scares away 10 potential developers.
b) Ignore stupid arguments against modernizing the codebase and run clang-modernize over things if you haven't already. It's a no-brainer to do and is an easy first step.
c) Admit mistakes when you make them, instead of playing them down and borderline insulting people who get upset about it. People are happier to join a honest developer team than one which seems like it doesn't listen to its community. There's probably a strong connection to point (a) in this, too.
d) Be more positive about your work. It's awesome and it deserves getting more attention. Don't think people are not interested just because they aren't aware of what interesting challenges PCSX2 addresses, but instead make them more aware about those!

[Bositman]

I see what you mean about mentioning Dolphin, but you could just answer those people simply by saying I'm a Dolphin dev and that's the end of it. Or don't answer them at all, the people who matter do know if you're in the scene or not.

I sincerely do NOT think these forums are scaring away members. On the contrary, our forum has flourished over the years and we now have a peak daily posting record with people sharing opinions and hanging out. Sure, most of it is not emulation related but it does give you an idea about what kind of community we run here. The only hostile thing would be the piracy closure stuff which I don't like either, but accept it as a necessary evil of better safe than sorry.

I can't really tell developers to leave because they're rude to others, although I doubt any of our developers scared off 10 other potential developers (or 1 for that matter). We are always civilized and polite when treated the same way. If you expect people to be cool when some new dev starts bashing their years work, it won't happen. (note I said bashing, not criticizing, suggesting solutions, discussing coding)

I don't take coding decisions for the team (and rightly so since I'm not a coder) but calling other people's arguments stupid doesn't sound very constructive

I won't comment about any of the AVG stuff since I've said all I will for the matter. Some of our coders even lost interest for the project after that thread, so if you want to keep bringing it up till the end of time, I won't.

I've made all I could to communicate my work on the website, forum, youtube channel and wiki. It didn't really have any huge following but it was all I could do in my power to draw interest in PCSX2. I'm sure if some of the devs did something similar it could raise some interest, but for that you need active devs And I can't help there

[neobrain]

Welp, first off thanks for the factual reply

I think lots of things remain to disagree on, but ultimately it's up to you guys whether you consider my arguments and suggestions to be valid or not. In any case I think after your last post all which had to be said has been said now, so I'll go back to lurking around

[Blyss Sarania]

FWIW I can say the forum has seen an explosion of popularity since I joined a little over a year ago. Generally the only animosity here is what Bosit mentioned - piracy related.

[neobrain]

FWIW I can say the forum has seen an explosion of popularity since I joined a little over a year ago. Generally the only animosity here is what Bosit mentioned - piracy related.

To be honest my main impression comes from the two(-ish) IRC channels and GitHub, since I don't really check these forums more than a few times per year.

[K.F]

Our first priority is (imo again) to document our code and make it easier for new devs to join.

for instance explaining how the PS2 architecture is designed and what kind of odd features the different hardware pieces support.

So you two agreed on something? Sweet, let's keep this constructive spirit shall we. (Not sure to put the tongue smiley or not)