Recon9
Developer
Dev Team
Dev Leads
Los Santos Police Command
Los Santos NHS Command
Los Santos Police Trainer
Los Santos NHS Training
Los Santos Senior Firefighter
- Location
- Los Santos
So I recently read a suggestion for some sort of Developer Roadmap and there were a few comments on it which led me to writing this post.
First a disclaimer:
It is indeed true that we don’t really love giving people these massive roadmaps on everything to come and what we are working on. This isn’t because we want to be secretive or anything like that. The simple reason is that we want to avoid creating unmanageable expectations.
We have done this a few times in the past. In my personal opinion it has only led to bad / negative experiences. As far as I have personally experienced, The larger updates and suggestions have always built up a lot of hype and a lot of negativity around every update that did not bring the expected features. One developer will be working on a large feature (let’s use imports for an example) and any time an update comes around the corner people are disappointed when it does not come in. Anything cool that comes in that update is already seen as less interesting because it isn’t the big thing that everyone is waiting for and when the actual update comes in there was so much build up and such a long wait that people are no longer interested or lose interest within a few weeks. Above all that there is the chance of plans changing, things not working out development-wise, other projects taking priority and features that end up being but on the back burner or even fully scrapped. This again only leads to more disappointment and general REE which is something we would like to avoid as much as possible.
Similarly this is why we have not been responding so actively to suggestions. All suggestions are logged internally and categorized on our board. Just because you don’t see us respond to them as actively as we used to doesn’t mean we don’t read them and discuss them and consider implementing them.
The thing you must realize with suggestions is that most of the suggestions that are “good enough” to implement and will have a really good impact on the server are also the ones that will take a lot of time and effort to implement. Besides that, a big feature generally requires careful thought and a lot of discussion, discussions take time and require a lot of people to agree on how to implement something which is unfortunately not always that easy with our increasingly big development team.
But you said it was going to be a roadmap....
Though I don’t want to give a list of all the things to potentially come and what quarter to expect them in (for all the above reasons). I think it is definitely good for us to update the community on what direction we generally want to move towards with the server. So let’s give that a shot:
Those Pesky Bugs (+backend stability stuff)
The last month(and probably the next one or two weeks) has been all about fixing bugs, improving some vital areas of the codebase and cleaning up some of the old code. It’s a shit job that nobody likes doing and it doesn’t have the same wow factor when it appears on the changelog, but it is still a crucial part of the development process and we have been struggling to keep up with all the small little issues, bugs, dupes and other problems. Luckily the Game Testers and the Bug Reporters have been doing an amazing job documenting and reproducing as many of the bugs as possible, making our lives so much easier.
Halloween
After that we likely wanna spend some time preparing for the end of October. Last year’s event was very fun for some people, and very boring for others, we would like to make it a bit more interesting for everyone involved. If you were around last year and have any ideas on how to improve it, please give some feedback on your experience.
Balancing the Economy
It has not gone unnoticed that some of the more recent changes have made certain aspects of the server very expensive, especially for newer players or new characters. So we are looking into how we can best improve that whilst still keeping everything balanced. If you have any suggestions please keep them as constructive as possible, outline the solution not just the problem.
Balancing an economy is a very delicate task. If you want to contribute to that please make suggestions like X now costs 100 pounds but it would work better at 75 because A, B and C. Simply saying X is too expensive doesn’t give us much to work with.
Balancing Cars
A lot of changes came through to vehicles in the last few weeks, nothing is final, it’s all constantly being monitored and discussed, and adjustments will be made accordingly. Please keep giving constructive feedback on what vehicles you think need changing.
Legal Jobs
It is very apparent to us that people consider legal life on the server to be boring and mundane. The constant issue we are running into is the fact that we don’t want to add more runs where all you need to do is press e, drive somewhere and press e again and honestly I don’t think this is what you guys want either, we're actively looking into ways of making the jobs more interactive but a lot of it boils down on how you choose to RP it. We are, however, trying to add a few more legal ways to make money that could open up new avenues for roleplay.
Guns
A while ago we made the decision to quite heavily restrict the influx of weapons, at the time we all agreed this was a necessary change, but it does seem now like we have somewhat hit the other extreme. We are gonna be looking at some middle ground, one potential change for this is rebalancing the stats on weapons (specifically pistols) to make some of the other weapons more beneficial and significantly dropping the prices / cost of manufacturing on the lower tier weapons.
Crime
We are looking into some more ways to commit crimes on the server and allow players to create slightly longer lasting criminal stories that involve a few steps before actually getting the reward but allow for a lot more opportunities for roleplay. So not just a simple click of a button to rob a bank, but slightly more preparation and effort required.
VOIP
We will be doing some more testing with VOIP to try and improve stability during peak times, this might mean that we will occasionally need to do some stress testing on the live server which will cause short outages when switching servers. Unfortunately the problem we have only occur around max player count so the only way for us to effectively test changes is on the live server.
Clothing
The dreaded clothing update, which has ended up becoming an even bigger job than we considered (and that is without actually adding any clothing). It is likely that when it does finally come in, it will come in in batches. Essentially starting with the barebones framework for new clothing and adding custom clothing in small batches in future updates.
Crayon Club
We have expanded the Crayon Club, to include a discord channel in which certain people in the community who have proven they have got awesome graphics skills, can communicate with and assist the developers with some textures, MLO's, vehicle skins and various other assets. Hopefully this should help us with the increasing amount of graphics work.
Business Proposals
Though we are currently closed for any new proposals (anything requiring any development changes), we are going through all current business owners to see if they are still actively running their business, if not they will be replaced, plus we will soon be filling up some of the businesses that have recently been abandoned by people who have since left (or been removed) from the community. It will be announced everywhere you can possibly imagine when we do any type of auction or allow proposals for a specific shop, so there is no need to message anyone until that time.
All of that and many more
Besides all of this there are a ton of other things we are constantly working on and I'm sure I've forgotten things and more things will have been added to the list by the time I finish writing this post. There is a constant stream of ideas and tasks that float in and out of different priority levels and getting to the larger features that you all are waiting for is sometimes more difficult and time-consuming than you would expect. Especially with everyone coming off of their summer breaks and going back to uni or work we have to be very deliberate with the time we are able to spend on development. Large features generally require large chunks of time and are often a lot harder to work on if you only have an hour a day.
What can you do to help?
Keep reporting the bugs and the more urgent issues with as much detail as possible. Someone from the testing team or the development team will try and get as much information from you as possible for us to solve it as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Be constructive with your suggestions. Just saying X is shit, or Y is broken does not help and frankly it doesn’t make us want to work on the problem, it comes across as children moaning and complaining about a toy being broken and does not help us solve the potential issue. Please Tell us what you think we should do to fix it and be realistic with the solution.
Keep on creating cool unique stories, help out the new players, reward good roleplay and most importantly, have a bit of fun. In the end we (the devs as well) are all here to have fun and enjoy the game as much as we can.
Final Note:
Some people have the feeling that development has halted the past 2 months or so, and a small part of that is probably true and can be explained by everyone going back to work etc. But I can assure you the dev team has been extremely hard at work dealing with a variety of issues and improvements which might have not always made a changelog. Countless hours have gone into improving our core, and the backend. If you have paid attention the past few weeks you probably have a general idea what I am referring to.
There will be lot’s of good stuff to come in the near future so stay tuned and have fun in the mean time.
Cheers,
The GTA RP Development Team
First a disclaimer:
It is indeed true that we don’t really love giving people these massive roadmaps on everything to come and what we are working on. This isn’t because we want to be secretive or anything like that. The simple reason is that we want to avoid creating unmanageable expectations.
We have done this a few times in the past. In my personal opinion it has only led to bad / negative experiences. As far as I have personally experienced, The larger updates and suggestions have always built up a lot of hype and a lot of negativity around every update that did not bring the expected features. One developer will be working on a large feature (let’s use imports for an example) and any time an update comes around the corner people are disappointed when it does not come in. Anything cool that comes in that update is already seen as less interesting because it isn’t the big thing that everyone is waiting for and when the actual update comes in there was so much build up and such a long wait that people are no longer interested or lose interest within a few weeks. Above all that there is the chance of plans changing, things not working out development-wise, other projects taking priority and features that end up being but on the back burner or even fully scrapped. This again only leads to more disappointment and general REE which is something we would like to avoid as much as possible.
Similarly this is why we have not been responding so actively to suggestions. All suggestions are logged internally and categorized on our board. Just because you don’t see us respond to them as actively as we used to doesn’t mean we don’t read them and discuss them and consider implementing them.
The thing you must realize with suggestions is that most of the suggestions that are “good enough” to implement and will have a really good impact on the server are also the ones that will take a lot of time and effort to implement. Besides that, a big feature generally requires careful thought and a lot of discussion, discussions take time and require a lot of people to agree on how to implement something which is unfortunately not always that easy with our increasingly big development team.
But you said it was going to be a roadmap....
Though I don’t want to give a list of all the things to potentially come and what quarter to expect them in (for all the above reasons). I think it is definitely good for us to update the community on what direction we generally want to move towards with the server. So let’s give that a shot:
Those Pesky Bugs (+backend stability stuff)
The last month(and probably the next one or two weeks) has been all about fixing bugs, improving some vital areas of the codebase and cleaning up some of the old code. It’s a shit job that nobody likes doing and it doesn’t have the same wow factor when it appears on the changelog, but it is still a crucial part of the development process and we have been struggling to keep up with all the small little issues, bugs, dupes and other problems. Luckily the Game Testers and the Bug Reporters have been doing an amazing job documenting and reproducing as many of the bugs as possible, making our lives so much easier.
Halloween
After that we likely wanna spend some time preparing for the end of October. Last year’s event was very fun for some people, and very boring for others, we would like to make it a bit more interesting for everyone involved. If you were around last year and have any ideas on how to improve it, please give some feedback on your experience.
Balancing the Economy
It has not gone unnoticed that some of the more recent changes have made certain aspects of the server very expensive, especially for newer players or new characters. So we are looking into how we can best improve that whilst still keeping everything balanced. If you have any suggestions please keep them as constructive as possible, outline the solution not just the problem.
Balancing an economy is a very delicate task. If you want to contribute to that please make suggestions like X now costs 100 pounds but it would work better at 75 because A, B and C. Simply saying X is too expensive doesn’t give us much to work with.
Balancing Cars
A lot of changes came through to vehicles in the last few weeks, nothing is final, it’s all constantly being monitored and discussed, and adjustments will be made accordingly. Please keep giving constructive feedback on what vehicles you think need changing.
Legal Jobs
It is very apparent to us that people consider legal life on the server to be boring and mundane. The constant issue we are running into is the fact that we don’t want to add more runs where all you need to do is press e, drive somewhere and press e again and honestly I don’t think this is what you guys want either, we're actively looking into ways of making the jobs more interactive but a lot of it boils down on how you choose to RP it. We are, however, trying to add a few more legal ways to make money that could open up new avenues for roleplay.
Guns
A while ago we made the decision to quite heavily restrict the influx of weapons, at the time we all agreed this was a necessary change, but it does seem now like we have somewhat hit the other extreme. We are gonna be looking at some middle ground, one potential change for this is rebalancing the stats on weapons (specifically pistols) to make some of the other weapons more beneficial and significantly dropping the prices / cost of manufacturing on the lower tier weapons.
Crime
We are looking into some more ways to commit crimes on the server and allow players to create slightly longer lasting criminal stories that involve a few steps before actually getting the reward but allow for a lot more opportunities for roleplay. So not just a simple click of a button to rob a bank, but slightly more preparation and effort required.
VOIP
We will be doing some more testing with VOIP to try and improve stability during peak times, this might mean that we will occasionally need to do some stress testing on the live server which will cause short outages when switching servers. Unfortunately the problem we have only occur around max player count so the only way for us to effectively test changes is on the live server.
Clothing
The dreaded clothing update, which has ended up becoming an even bigger job than we considered (and that is without actually adding any clothing). It is likely that when it does finally come in, it will come in in batches. Essentially starting with the barebones framework for new clothing and adding custom clothing in small batches in future updates.
Crayon Club
We have expanded the Crayon Club, to include a discord channel in which certain people in the community who have proven they have got awesome graphics skills, can communicate with and assist the developers with some textures, MLO's, vehicle skins and various other assets. Hopefully this should help us with the increasing amount of graphics work.
Business Proposals
Though we are currently closed for any new proposals (anything requiring any development changes), we are going through all current business owners to see if they are still actively running their business, if not they will be replaced, plus we will soon be filling up some of the businesses that have recently been abandoned by people who have since left (or been removed) from the community. It will be announced everywhere you can possibly imagine when we do any type of auction or allow proposals for a specific shop, so there is no need to message anyone until that time.
All of that and many more
Besides all of this there are a ton of other things we are constantly working on and I'm sure I've forgotten things and more things will have been added to the list by the time I finish writing this post. There is a constant stream of ideas and tasks that float in and out of different priority levels and getting to the larger features that you all are waiting for is sometimes more difficult and time-consuming than you would expect. Especially with everyone coming off of their summer breaks and going back to uni or work we have to be very deliberate with the time we are able to spend on development. Large features generally require large chunks of time and are often a lot harder to work on if you only have an hour a day.
What can you do to help?
Keep reporting the bugs and the more urgent issues with as much detail as possible. Someone from the testing team or the development team will try and get as much information from you as possible for us to solve it as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Be constructive with your suggestions. Just saying X is shit, or Y is broken does not help and frankly it doesn’t make us want to work on the problem, it comes across as children moaning and complaining about a toy being broken and does not help us solve the potential issue. Please Tell us what you think we should do to fix it and be realistic with the solution.
Keep on creating cool unique stories, help out the new players, reward good roleplay and most importantly, have a bit of fun. In the end we (the devs as well) are all here to have fun and enjoy the game as much as we can.
Final Note:
Some people have the feeling that development has halted the past 2 months or so, and a small part of that is probably true and can be explained by everyone going back to work etc. But I can assure you the dev team has been extremely hard at work dealing with a variety of issues and improvements which might have not always made a changelog. Countless hours have gone into improving our core, and the backend. If you have paid attention the past few weeks you probably have a general idea what I am referring to.
There will be lot’s of good stuff to come in the near future so stay tuned and have fun in the mean time.
Cheers,
The GTA RP Development Team
