Main > Software Forum
State of the FE devs?
<< < (16/25) > >>
swindus:
Sorry youki, don't want to derogate your or Angelscry's work. The plug and play stuff of AtomicFE is a great idea. But please put my statement back into the context of the discussion from above and you will see I'm right here.

Howard_Casto:

--- Quote from: MYX on September 13, 2006, 09:51:10 am ---If you want your FE to be the best (which secretly you do want) and you want people to say Dang, "This IS" the best dang piece uh of dang software I ever saw man!!!, then write the best and make it easy to use. There are probably more complaints about difficulty of use than about anything else in this hobby. You are busy humming along building this cab, then bam! You hit a wall when it comes time to make it work with the FE.

Aight I am done </rant>

--- End quote ---

I think this is a major misconception of users out there.  The cabinet part is supposed to be the easy part and the software should take you a lot more time to setup.  Let's put it this way.  When you buy a new pc which is harder, taking it out of the box and plugging in all the cables or spending the next 8 hours installing all the programs you need and getting the settings just the way you like it?  It's the same thing for mame cabs, just multiply the time by about a thousand.  Computers are complicated, computer software is compliacted, emulators are infinately more complicated than regular software and a program that is supposed to manage/launch an emulator... holy crap, that thing is complicated. 

None of use expect for everyone to bow at our feet at how great our stuff is, but what would be nice is if users would be appreciative of how easy we've made it for them instead of constantly complaining when they have trouble getting one thing or another configured the way they would like.  People get on my case a lot because I am negative, I'm realistic.  I would rather point out hurdles that devs are going to run into rather then tell them how great it is going to be.  I do this because the users that say "yeah that'd be cool you should do it" are the exact same ones to complain un-endingly when you are finished with it and it isn't exactly as they wanted it. 

You learn real quick that you should please yourself first and the user second or else you go crazy trying to make everyone happy.

I'm not talking about you in particular, you haven't really been guilty of this I'm just saying in general. 

I understand the bit about being willing to pay for a fe that just works.  The thing is that would take an incredible amount of time to do, so much so that I don't know if anyone of us could afford to spend the time building, even if we charged. 

People in this thread keep throwing words around like "just work" but if you truely want to give the user the freedom to set things up the way they want, this isn't easily possible.  Let me give you an example with the easiest one to deal with MAME:

Ok first off where is it?  You can ask the user, but it would require them to actually know where they put mame and probably the use of a mouse.  Well that probably  isn't going to work on the cab itself.  You could do it over the network, but what about the cabs without nics?  Parallel port connection?  Floppy?
Let's assume we figured that much out.  Now for mame itself.  Mame has around 60 options and they seem to change every week.  There is absolutely no way to set them up optimally for every pc in an automatic fashion.  You can write a fe that allows you to access these options internally but that in of itself could be a fulltime job.  Let's skip over that part and assume the user can figure out how to setup mame on their own.  Now for roms.  Some people have multiple rom directories, some just have one.  Some are one different drives, some are on network shares, some are on cd rom.  You can have the program search for roms across the whole computer but even with a super fast algorythm that could take hours on larger harddrives.  You can let users manually browse but if they have a lot of paths to add it could take forever.  Manually typing paths leaves it open to user error.  Now we have the artwork paths, the same issue applies.  Also the user has to actually find and download the artwork themselves.  Finally it's time to generate a gamelist.  You can do that automatically, but there are three distinct case scenarios you have to check for as depending upon the mame version, there are three different calls to choose from to generate the list.  Once you get that mess sorted out, you have to deal with catvers and how the fe is going to display the list.  Just a big list of all the games?  How about clones?  Lists by cats?  Different users are going to want it different ways, sometimes in very custom ways.  Those are a lof of questions to ask and a lot of places where things can go wrong.  Oh and before you get some grand idea like "what about a drop in module that has the emu, roms and artwork" I'm not even going to begin to explain how illegal that is and how that violates mame's useage agreement. 

I don't think anyone in their right mind would expect a developer to take care of all of this automatically, but the way some of you guys talk, we might think so. 

And remember, I listed the easy one, mame, which has built in tools to help us devs.  There are far more complicated ones like daphne and zinc, in which we can either write a slew of custom utilites, depend upon clrmamepro dats for data or other crazy means.  Then of course there's the custom launching. 

I'm not ranting back, or anything I just wanted to share the devs likely point of view. 
Havok:

--- Quote from: swindus on September 13, 2006, 01:53:14 pm ---Sorry youki, don't want to derogate your or Angelscry's work. The plug and play stuff of AtomicFE is a great idea. But please put my statement back into the context of the discussion from above and you will see I'm right here.



--- End quote ---

I think you are missing the point of his plug and play modules - they are for someone who wants to quickly and easily setup their system with minimal configuration time, or for someone with little understanding on how to do so. So, in that context - it is what the user wants.

I use Atomic - and I don't use plug and play modules. I setup everything manually - I have a fairly complicated tree structure, with filtered lists and multiple emulators - I can (and do) use multiple drives.

So, to put this all in perspective: Youki's FE has the best of both worlds: quick and easy "it just works" configuration, AND power user "I want it this way" configuration...
Havok:

--- Quote from: youki on September 12, 2006, 07:27:25 am ---You will see very soon  a demonstration the power of my engine in term of layout and speed.  ;)

--- End quote ---

And it is very cool!!!

 :notworthy:
screaming:

--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on September 13, 2006, 03:31:09 pm ---I'm not ranting back, or anything I just wanted to share the devs likely point of view. 

--- End quote ---

  I would like to state that while I agree with some of what you say, you do not speak for me.
 

--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on September 13, 2006, 03:31:09 pm ---None of use expect for everyone to bow at our feet at how great our stuff is, but what would be nice is if users would be appreciative of how easy we've made it for them instead of constantly complaining when they have trouble getting one thing or another configured the way they would like.

--- End quote ---

  The developer in me knows that it's very difficult to make customers happy. Not only that, but it's even harder to make customers of a software product happy because of all the variables we have to account for. When someone says something deceivingly simple like, "I want to draw a square on the screen right here.", any software program has to:

  - detect the mouse click
  - figure out where the mouse is
  - watch the mouse
  - detect when they let go of the mouse
  - figure out where the mouse is
  - what color is the square (need to allocate color(s))?
  - how thick is the border?
  - is it filled in or just outlined?
  - is it a perfect square or are they trying to build a rectangle?
  - What if they draw the square off the page?
  - what if they draw it backwards (i.e. bottom-right to top-left)? Everything is negative.
 
  That's a lot of stuff that I need to keep track of just for drawing a square, and that's not including all the initialization crap that you need to do.

  However, the user side of me doesn't care about this and just wants to draw a dang square. "Why can't it just be simple?", I ask.
 

--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on September 13, 2006, 03:31:09 pm ---I think this is a major misconception of users out there.  The cabinet part is supposed to be the easy part and the software should take you a lot more time to setup.

--- End quote ---

  If you're the only one who thinks this way then I don't think the misconception is "out there". I think it's with you.
 

--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on September 13, 2006, 03:31:09 pm ---I do this because the users that say "yeah that'd be cool you should do it" are the exact same ones to complain un-endingly when you are finished with it and it isn't exactly as they wanted it. 

--- End quote ---

  Personally I take that as motivation for expanding my programs, and transversly my knowledge, better. By "better", I mean more user friendly and automatic.
 
  So far no one has said that what i want to do is impossible, only difficult.
 

--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on September 13, 2006, 03:31:09 pm ---The thing is that would take an incredible amount of time to do, so much so that I don't know if anyone of us could afford to spend the time building, even if we charged. 

--- End quote ---

  You and Minwah keep proving my point about opening up your own FEs.

  As this hobby progresses, the user's demands are getting greater and greater (look at PowerMAME vs. regular MAME, or a keyboard hack vs a keyboard encoder! Yikes!).  As such, the demand for a more sophisticated FE grows and grows beyond what one can expect from a single hobbyist developer.  Open it up!  Look at the bigger picture and manage it like a project! YOUR dream of what you see DK being could be obtained so much faster....
 

--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on September 13, 2006, 03:31:09 pm ---People in this thread keep throwing words around like "just work" but if you truely want to give the user the freedom to set things up the way they want, this isn't easily possible.  Let me give you an example with the easiest one to deal with MAME:

--- End quote ---

  It CAN be done, and WILL be done, either by me or someone else (like youki has started to do) if the "old timer" FE devs don't step up to the plate.

Navigation
Message Index
Next page
Previous page

Go to full version