Community Edition Feedback

[Gilberreke]

We just finished migrating the issues from the private to the public tracker over on Github:
https://github.com/BTW-Community/BTW-Public/issues

What does this mean for the forum?

Anything discussed on Discord is generally just talk. Nothing that any contributor says should be taken as anything but banter, unless they specifically say they will add/fix something. The forum is still an important place to discuss ideas, this was asked by multiple people in the community. Any post by one of the contributors still shouldn't be taken as an intent to change anything though, I think all of them would like to retain the right to just be members and talk shop without having to carefully weigh their words all the time.

What does this mean for the mod?

Any open and labeled issue on the Github tracker is an intent to change something about the mod. For the important tickets, they will likely be discussed here (or on Discord) first, but if there are issues on the Github that do not have a thread here and you think it should be discussed, feel free to open a topic.

Who is working on CE?

Community Edition is a fork of BTW mainly spearheaded by Dawnraider as an extension of her great work over the years on Deco and other mods. I help out a lot with the organizational aspect and I implemented a bunch of the early grunt work (like setting up the source code and porting MCPatcher over).

There is a changing list of active contributors that I'll try to keep up to date here (feel free to ask who is who in this thread, nicknames aren't always the same):
https://github.com/orgs/BTW-Community/teams

Do I need a Github account?

No, you don't. The issue tracker is a public record of intent, but posting here or on Discord is just fine and a contributor will move your issue over to the tracker if needed. We will try to put a link to the issue in a thread if it is being tracked.

Where do I post feature suggestions?

Community Edition is a fork of the mod, it is open source, anyone can fork it to make their own edition. After debate with the community, it was decided that the first few versions will try not to change anything about the balance, but the plan was always to keep balance changes extremely mild in CE and relegate anything that heavily affects balance to addons. This was done so that once the project is healthy, the CE contributors can get some amount of creative control, just like FC had. We all know games can't be designed by committee. Obviously the intent is to make something that everyone in this community enjoys, but it's important to point out that we will probably hit that limit every now and then and some decisions will be made you don't agree with, otherwise we will end up with an over-designed bikeshed instead of a mod. This does not mean any contributor thinks they know better than you, it's just a massive effort to try and undertake and we're trying to stumble our way into the best way of working.

If you disagree with this methodology, this is the thread to voice that concern and it will be taken into account (as it already has several times now).

I really want to thank the contributors for putting this work in

Every time a contributor sees a message saying thank you, another line of code gets written, that's just how these things work. If you are enjoying the mod, it doesn't mean you can never criticize it, but I know the entire team would appreciate it if you come here (or release threads) and say you enjoy the work being done.

Sorry for the long thread, but I know people were dying to get answers to these questions. Thank you for the patience and here's to a great sequel to our community :)

[dawnraider]

By the way I am making categories for animageddon and vegehenna. Both are significant gameplay systems introduced by FC late into the BTW cycle which were never finished and are lacking the polish that much of the rest of BTW has. Due to the extensive attention these feature sets need I decided to group all the individual issues together on github.

Animageddon
Vegehenna

Individual threads discussing aspects of these are still perfectly welcome here, these categories are simply to help with organization for development, and to keep the ideas together on github.