Kogut wrote:
ChillCore wrote:
Unfortunately my OpenTTD time is consumed like this -> 10% reading forum, changelog, FlySpray and posting, 4% updating patches , 85% checking things and tracing bugs, 1% actual playing.
I do that from time to time but if I were to do that for all patches I would need days that lasted 72 hours and financial support to turn my hobby into my job.
I am a bit worried that in situation like this keeping to date heap of patches may turn into tedious job (see history of MiniIN). So use your own build, and improve that statistics.
Yeah, I should improve those statistics.
I do get to play from time to time, but everytime I do I see something new I want to change/add ...
Luckily I have backwards savegame compatibility now so I can continue my game instead of having to start a new one each time I have a new version.
MiniIn has/had a lot more patches in it ... and yes, some day I will get tired of maintaining mine also but not yet.
Most of the time it is good fun though because i enjoy coding just as much as playing, if not more.
I also enjoy looking at other peoples savegames to see how they do things and almost everytime I look at the code I find/learn something new.
Also by searching for all those missing grfs I find some small jewels from time to time.
Even as a kid I enjoyed messing with code and looking at how things work.
I once have drawn a porsche on a commodore Vic 20, fullscreen, using nothing but "data 1234 5678 9abc def1 ...." <- once for each row of pixels.
Later my dad had a cardridge , red with a white button, that plugged in his commodore 64 that you could use to pause and hack gamecode to cheat. I even used to have an Exploder(tm) for my playstation that did the same thing.
On my first pc real pc, a 486, I created a website about JavaScript and HTML using nothing but notepad, a few books and a few programs to create background images, buttons and flash objects. I still have it but I never finished it and was never published, by now most of the content is outdated but it was good fun.
To end the "ChillCore: Computer history", my first encounter with a computer that had a keyboard was while copying the game called "Marsmannetjes" out of the manual of a Spectrum ZX81, written in basic and all you had to do was slalom between characters, falling from the top of the screen, avoiding them as speed increased over time. I could not save the code and had to write it again each time I wanted to play ... without my father knowing as he would have been mad for me touching his precious.
Good times it were indeed. How things have changed since then ... luckily.
The only thing I regret is that I made some wrong choices when I was young and did not continue studying when I had the chance to do so ... My hobby could have been my job ...
What I am doing now is nothing more than what I have been doing for as long as I can remember ... only on a larger scale and focussed on one project ...
When I get frustrated I play a shooter and imagine the adversary to be unsolved bugs, not that shooting them solves them though
.
Also I have been thinking about letting people join to help and giving a bit of the control out of my hands but I am afraid that the one will not now what the other has done at some point while merging or bumping ... checking up on each other is no fun or might be difficult at times. I should have used HG or Git from the beginning for that to be easier but I like svn better ...
That being said if someone really wants to add or has added a patch that he would like to see in the patchpack he can always send me an extended version and by simply comparing the patches I can add the changes to my official version.
ps:
Sorry for the wall of text, I got carried away down on memory lane a bit.
