Zandronum

Good afternoon.

As I'm sure many people are aware, as of this writing, the beta versions of Zandronum are now officially on par with the latest official release of Zdoom, and more. The development team has been working diligently and patiently to ensure that the port has a good foundation of future developments, port stability, and so on. And it is this community that receives these expansions and addons through modding, playing the game, and creating a nice, engaged atmosphere. As a community, it is within all of our best interests to move the development of the port forward, to encourage and foster a satisfactory experience from the game itself.

For more than a year now, the testing team has been, for the most part, inactive due to various reasons. It is still active in the regard that it is mostly private, with little communication between the rest of the community. I would like to say that as the testing leader, it should've been my responsibility to uphold the activity of it's duties via engaging with the team as a whole, and not as cutting the line between the group and its socialization. I made the mistake of assuming that no one was interested in establishing a group activity, and I apologize for the resulting behavior of that thought.

But now, I am questioning the incentive behind a private testing team, as many people are more than willing to testing various things by themselves in an autonomous manner. It is my belief that everyone has an equally important part to play within a group, whether its seemingly minor contributions or major ones, as each hand that is involved brings us a step closer to a stable release.

Which brings us to this poll, should there still be a private testing team, or should it be disbanded? Anything that you would like to add in the thread would also be appreciated should you decide to vote.

Rustking is the testing team
i helped too :-)

I appreciate the loads of time and effort you fellas spent in the testing of Zandro so far. Keep it up!

Don't leave us! :'(

I think it's nice to have a group dedicated to testing in particular, although I assume it would be better to make it more public in some ways?

Too much thinking and too many questions ? ?? ?/, this is why this crap failed in the first place. Better to just get it done; test first, ask questions later.

make testing more attractive and easier to set up and you'll have a testing team

I wasn't even aware there was a testing team in existence. Honestly, there isn't a need for a testing team if it is going to be private, invisible or what have you. Currently things get tested by people browsing the tracker and reporting bugs they run into. However, there is a need for large testing sessions to catch any bugs that are more easily found in a real time game environment. There are some things on the tracker that benefit from larger groups of people testing such as named scripts or custom CVARS. The team should be focused on setting up session for people to play various mods and game modes. The team could benefit greatly from a retooling of its functionality but if there is no desire to do so, then it should cease to exist.

No need to dissolve. On the contrary, if there's an official testing team already, then the more reason to make a move and make it more public. As Rustking says, if there's not much left for it to do then dissolving it would be the best choice.

In short: Don't dissolve, make it public.

I thought the whole idea of the last time the conversation of the testing team was to do public things like public testing?

Soul wrote: I think it's nice to have a group dedicated to testing in particular, although I assume it would be better to make it more public in some ways?

I believe that is one of the issues that is more or less happening right now. Most of the things that have been done while the group was active was to try to intergate as many people as we could, but it soon became apparent that that wasn't working as it should've. I would agree that making things more public would help, but where can that publicity come from considering that the group was attempting to get more people from outside of it?

Combinebobnt wrote: Too much thinking and too many questions ? ?? ?/, this is why this crap failed in the first place. Better to just get it done; test first, ask questions later.

And that is supposed to be helpful because...?

Ru5tK1ng wrote: I wasn't even aware there was a testing team in existence. Honestly, there isn't a need for a testing team if it is going to be private, invisible or what have you. Currently things get tested by people browsing the tracker and reporting bugs they run into. However, there is a need for large testing sessions to catch any bugs that are more easily found in a real time game environment. There are some things on the tracker that benefit from larger groups of people testing such as named scripts or custom CVARS. The team should be focused on setting up session for people to play various mods and game modes. The team could benefit greatly from a retooling of its functionality but if there is no desire to do so, then it should cease to exist.

There is a desire to get people to play the game, I'm going to presume that it is the way that how it should be executed that is holding testing sessions back that is the problem. I suppose that the group itself can be reformed as an activity organizing group to plan and start large games, though, it is the people who would want to chip in into said games that ultimately decides whether or not if it is actually needed.

Last time I heard about this was here.
Let me highlight the important parts:

mifu wrote:
[...]

I am planning on resurrecting the Testing Team and promptly making it an official community group. This means I need a Leader to run this team.

The Leader of the Team would be responsible for (but not limited to):

• Organizing and running Testing Sessions
• Finding other community members to join the Testing Team
• Making sure all bugs found appear on the Tracker

[...]

And since what I said at that time is still valid, allow me to quote myself here:

Leonard wrote: I think everyone here is missing what the problem actually is.
The problem isn't that people became too lazy, the problem is that right now, the developers seem to expect the community to do and organize all the testing on its own, without any external help.
Making the whole testing process automatic wouldn't solve anything (even through it pretty much already is) since people still need to organize a testing session or do it on their own.

[...]

As you can see, there is absolutely no testing team.
I think that if a proper testing group was made, the problem would be solved.
I would gladly join such a testing group and participate to its associated testing sessions and I'm sure many other would.
It just needs to be made official and properly announced on the forums, with a real testing team for which people could apply and official testing sessions in which people could participate.
I'm not lazy, I do want to see this to happen but there is a significant difference between organizing (or do on its own) events and participate in such events.

So to sum it up, I wasn't even aware that the testing team still existed and I agree with what pretty much everyone said: make the testing team public and accessible.

Arco wrote:
[...]

Most of the things that have been done while the group was active was to try to intergate as many people as we could, but it soon became apparent that that wasn't working as it should've. I would agree that making things more public would help, but where can that publicity come from considering that the group was attempting to get more people from outside of it?

[...]

This contradicts with what I wrote above: I didn't even know the team existed because it was private and now you say you tried to recruit people?
Sorry, I don't mean to be harsh here but who did you even try to recruit?
I didn't see anything related to this in #zatesting.

Arco wrote:
[...]

There is a desire to get people to play the game, I'm going to presume that it is the way that how it should be executed that is holding testing sessions back that is the problem. I suppose that the group itself can be reformed as an activity organizing group to plan and start large games, though, it is the people who would want to chip in into said games that ultimately decides whether or not if it is actually needed.

Yes, actually organizing public testing sessions like FNF games is a great idea as I had already pointed out at the time (see my quoted post).

Leonard wrote:

Arco wrote:
[...]

Most of the things that have been done while the group was active was to try to integrate as many people as we could, but it soon became apparent that that wasn't working as it should've. I would agree that making things more public would help, but where can that publicity come from considering that the group was attempting to get more people from outside of it?

[...]

This contradicts with what I wrote above: I didn't even know the team existed because it was private and now you say you tried to recruit people?

This was several years ago, when I had did this: https://zandronum.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=2908, https://zandronum.com/forum/showthread. ... 0#pid36030

The outcome at the start was favorable until people simply stopped showing up for no reason whatsoever. It then went inactive over a long while when I realized that I was pretty much on my own.