Dev Blog #5 - Development Feedback

So, if you've been looking on that top scrolling notification bar, you'll have seen that we had a development feedback survey. It's time to get back in and analyse the results. Thank you to the over 200 people that responded.

Part 1 - Graphs

Graphs are nice and easy. Nibble sized chunks of data, for getting small overviews of large data sets.

So let's break this down nicely.

Numero uno. The roadmap. It's good, most people know about it.
Dos. REP Rewards. Less people knew, but still the vast majority.
Tres. Dev Blogs. Again, less people knew, but still a majority.
Four. Changelogs. People know. Not many read. :(

Now, the big hitter. Communication. Obviously, we need to do better here, and I can see why. It can seem like the only way to talk to dev is through suggestions. Whilst we are bound to suggestions, both myself and Faustie are willing to talk to people, take in viewpoints and explain why certain choices were made. If you have an idea about how to open up new channels of communication, please let us know.

Part 2 - Long Form

As well as graphs, we had some longer form questions, so it's time to look through some of the responses there.

2a - Are you satisfied with development blog content?

The developers can sometimes seem lazy, only releasing (to us) useless document updates in the changelogs, or meaningless blabbers of code. Limelight needs real updates and for the developers to be working on the game itself rather than making everything look pretty.

Whilst this isn't anything to do with dev blog content, it's interesting. Let's look into it a bit more.

As I've said before, the changelogs are there to record the work we do, and let the community know what we're doing. The added documentation is there to pay back some of the technical debt from over 10 years of amateur coding, repeated over-patching and lack of any standards. If that's what I'm doing, then that's what gets logged.

That being said, I can see why it would be annoying, seeing documentation updates instead of anything you can physically do. You can check the roadmap, see what's also being worked on (as it's not always worked on in public). We don't want to totally hide everything we do.

Not really, seems like another place LL can promise updates but never deliver, reminds me of Theresa May. What happened to the Evobank? - BREXIT

Nice meme.

Everything we've released a dev blog on has been released. I see no undelivered promises there?
And where's EvoBank? The developer who was working on it resigned. We can't really control resignations.

No, Its massive lack of updates even though the developer team is big. the suggestions being approved should be a priority for the develepors.

Again, not about dev blogs...
But still, we are working on approved suggestions. Nearly 37 pages of them.

No, lack of updates. That big development team but only 1 guy doing the work. What a shame

Again, this isn't to do with the dev blogs. Seems that people misunderstood the question, which is a shame.
To answer it anyway, lots of people code and do work. @Bambo works his ass off with the forums. Other people work behind the scenes, on larger projects. I tend to work on smaller ones. Different people doing different things is pretty fair, I think.

Fuck u

ur house or mine bb?

2b - Further Questions/Comments

More devblogs would be great.

Pushing out devblogs is hard. They have to be written, not just another place to "promise updates but never deliver", but also be on topics people are interested to learn about.

instead of making an useless Rep Tree and thins like that better improve the server or add atleast useful content on the Server which actually changes the Gameplay but better just Improve it so you have no ping lag and atleast 30-40FPS constantly, don't say "Oh no, that's impossible" Many other and BIGGER servers with more/same amount of content somehow can do it.

Woah Cowboy, hold up the rodeo.

Firstly, the REP tree was made by a pure web developer. Someone who doesn't code in lua, and doesn't have the access to make lua changes. The alternative is them sitting there, with their thumbs up their butt.

Secondly, ping lag was basically nullified at higher player-counts by our networking module, and we're working on optimisation through our optimisation project. Take a look at dev blog 2 for more info about that.

Why does it take so long to implement such a small suggestion that has been out there since 2016, like adding a few props or 1 swep.

It can be that it's just a low priority. For the vast majority of suggestions, this is the reality.
Some require changes to content, which take days to do.
Some don't fall within current planning.
Sometimes, we just miss them. There are a lot of suggestions.

There are many reasons, and those are just some of them.

No, instead its a statement. The Development Team work hard, and there hard work is greatly appreciated by the community. And I am 99% sure everyone else will agree with this, although there may not be a "public update" released we all know you are working on making the community better. Keep up the good work.

Thank you.

When a suggestion goes into staff review, would it be possible we see developer's thoughts about the suggestion?

It depends. If it gets denied, you see them anyway. If it gets approved, it doesn't really matter.

Over the past year it may seem like we have lost more features then we gained. Cruical elements like Atmos or Vcmod (understandibly) got removed. I do understand that there was pretty much no choice in doing so. But therefore we also lost imortant elements of rp imersion. Back in our early days Limelights selling point (so to speak) was its variety of imersive ingame content [atmos, photon, those "new" tdm cars, evo city radio etc. Its more then understandable that some of those things have been taken out but i am hoping there is some way to replace them in the nearer feature. Since we cant pump out cars endlessly other content will have to catch peoples attention. Therefore the ehnaced crafting system as well as the skill system will be a cruical step forward. Putting out a roadmap is also a well thought out decision as this way our people can get excited for whats to come.
What i personaly would love to see (also i dont deem it to be too nescessary), would be more instruments, a return of the rt screen, a cooking system (as a part of the crafting and skills system) and perhaps some more immersive misc content as this never stopped to amaze people. But i understand that we are pretty much going that direction already.

For sure, I agree with a lot of this.

That being said, it's a difficult balancing game, new content vs improving connectivity between content vs fixing issues in old content vs updating old content.
Really heavy systems that people want, ie Photon, VCMod, Stormfox vs Optimisation.
New flashy systems, vs having detailed systems with solid interconnections between them.

Doctor Internet Head of anything and everything fucking demote the twat

I think I've seen this before somewhere.
Though, let's be fair. I only run the contributor program, so I'm not really the "head of anything and everything". I report to Faustie for my contributor/development duties, to HR for my administration and to Enzyme/Faustie for Business and Data Protection. I don't run everything myself.
Nice that you think so though <3

From the outside LL appears as though it has very little updates, the little updates that are released are made to be Huge updates when really all that's been done is added a few Cars....

I hope this year has made a different for the updates released. We've done a lot of work, not just releasing a few cars.

Doctor seems to be the only person whom has been truly active in development, while the voting system when down the pot. I only remember seeing two votes being voted upon, I believe its a good way of finding out the opinion of the whole community, including those whom don't use the forums.

For myself being the only active one, that's not really true, plenty of developers are active, even if less so than myself. Some are active in other areas, such as Bambo, Burnett and Faustie.

For the voting system, it's a pain to set up, so is generally only used for larger votes. We could use it more, but it's a pain for us to use.

Get a tutorial of every updates. (ex. Meth cooking since we don't have a gravity gun)

Teachers and the guides sections.

Pollux > Doctor Internet at Development <3

gonna drop a big fat :doubt: on that one.

It would have been nice if Dr. Internet did not remove me from his friends list after I have reported many bugs and did my best to help the development in giving feedback and ideas.

I'm going to brutally honest. Anyone who sends me bug reports via steam or discord gets told the same thing. Post a bug report. If you kept doing that, that's most likely why you got removed.
If not, just drop me another invite. I clean out my steam friends every few months for people I don't talk to, I probs deleted you then.

Aside from that, I'm always up for more feedback and discussion. It's good for everyone.

The theme in-game (health bar etc) should be changed back to normal

What is "to normal"?

Yes, what happend to the GTA 4 and GTAv limelight props packs? Can gamers ever see those prop packs come back?

They're still there, in our content packs?

In the end, I hope this has answered some questions, and given some more insight into what we do, and why we do it.