Hello, Limelight!
In writing my first development blog, I’m happy to share details with you on our past, present, and future states of development. I’m hopeful that this will answer some of the (many) questions you have, and I’m interested to hear what feedback you have to give that might help us improve our development process further.
For those of you have don’t know me, I’m the technical lead at Limelight – essentially, I’m the development and security counterpart to Enzyme and Overlewd, our Human Resources Super Administrators. I’ve a lot of experience both administrating and developing, so I work closely with both teams. Most of my time, however, is spent with the developer and contributor teams; whilst also getting admins more involved in the development process. Unfortunately, I’m very busy right now with work and studies, so I don’t have much – if any – free time to really play the game itself, though I am still very active behind the scenes in both development and management. We’ve been making some changes lately that I really hope improve the development process at Limelight, and, ultimately, the gamemode.
Current direction of Development
Short-term planning
Over the next month or so we have a couple of updates we’re hoping to release – some small, some major. Whilst retaining a strong focus on optimisation and bug-fixing, we’re aiming to release a couple of updates within the next month or so – some major, some less so. The first releases are likely to be the new UI elements, but we have a major release upcoming – the skills and achievement system – that we hope will be the start of our long-term planning goals. We also have another major release which will remain secret for now (gives media something to do). We also have ongoing developer and contributor projects which focus on completing approved suggestions.
Our short-term plans and their stage of development are now visible on our public roadmap; explained in detail a little further down.
Long-term planning
Our long term-goals revolve around making the game more interesting for players, while providing more integration and connection between different gameplay systems. Furthermore, we also want to provide both reasons and the ability for players to develop their role-played characters over time. The upcoming skills and achievements system will be used to help us achieve this aim, along with a few other things we’re currently in the planning phase on. More details will come on those once they’ve passed initial planning. As usual, we’ll also be focusing on optimisation and implementing suggestions that have passed staff review.
Suggestions and Community Feedback
We’re focusing on suggestions now far more than we were in the past. Some of our long-term projects are still separate, but even for those we consider suggestions and general community feedback. Our suggestions go through a process called staff review, which I’ll explain in more detail in the next section.
We’re now considering staff cover more when we plan and release updates. If an update is likely to require additional staff cover to avoid causing problems, we hold it until the cover is there. I work quite closely with HR here – it’s a fine balance between ensuring updates are suitable, and not applying too much pressure on the HR and admin teams which might cause standards to lower. The recently implemented trial mod system partially resulted from a development project hold. Where possible, we’re looking into potential updates that might enable us to remove/simplify further rules or make server moderation easier; in-game mechanics or checks might possibly help.
Staff review
Doctor Internet has done great work in ensuring that suggestions are actively reviewed by the staff team; as such, community suggestions which receive enough support are pushed for staff review. If a suggestion then receives enough votes by the admin and developer teams, it is pushed for development. We have a large pile of suggestions here, so we go through, finding ones which either fit our long-term plans or are small enough that they don’t disrupt them. Of these, many suggestions then become contributor projects.
Developer and contributor teams
The developer team has changed significantly since its inception. It is no longer tied to the administration team; though some developers have multiple roles (e.g. Doctor Internet is both a developer and an admin) but the promotions are considered entirely separately. The development team oversees developer promotions; admins handle admin promotions. This separation has made it much easier to bring in talented developers without them having to jump through the extra hoops required to become a mod/admin. The development team will handle most large updates, optimisation, most bug-fixes, and a selection of smaller updates and suggestions.
Contributors can, perhaps, be considered as trial developers. This isn’t always the case as there are certain requirements to becoming a full developer that aren’t solely based on quality of work, but we aim to help contributors grow into full developers and better programmers/modelers/etc. Following feedback, we’ve made changes to better support the contributor team and ensure they’re learning as they work. Contributors primarily work on suggestions that have passed staff review, though we’ll sometimes throw priority work their way to assist in getting large updates out on time.
Doctor Internet currently manages most projects, training and promotions within the contributor team as their liaison. While I lead the development and security teams as the technical SA, I fully consider Doctor Internet to be second in charge of development and in charge of the contributor team; having done a fantastic job so far and demonstrating that he can handle all the responsibilities I throw at him.
Budget
We have a decent budget now, as most of our income tends to go straight back to development. The majority goes towards large updates and optimisation, with the remainder spent on suggestions and bug fixes.
Optimisation
We’ve made some very decent progress on the server. Networking overhead has been significantly reduced, mainly thanks to Doc’s new networking module, some of my changes to player networking, and work going through various entities and parts of code to reduce unnecessary networking, with the aim to reduce player ping.
Client-side optimisation is more difficult, especially regarding client framerate. There are still clearly many improvements to be made in this area, but no big obvious changes to be made. We’re currently spending a lot of time profiling and analysing client data to pinpoint the problems.
However, some things are obvious such as the F1 menu, which tends to be slower on certain hardware configurations. We have a good understanding of the issue is and will be trialing solutions for this after the HUD update.
Public roadmap - available here
Why now?
One complaint we receive often is that we don’t update the community enough on our current developments. Likewise, we also receive complaints when updates have not been made in a while. Sometimes we’re focusing on large updates (like now) that involve many developers, or a lot of the work is on optimisation, bug-fixing or small improvements. To a player who doesn’t see the team’s active work, it can seem as though we’re at a standstill when in reality we’re working on less visible or long-term projects.
By providing a roadmap we can keep everyone better up to date on the current state of development and provide more opportunity for early feedback.
What it comprises
The public roadmap will provide a brief description and the development status of short-term upcoming updates. We’ll try to keep the percentage bars accurate, though they may not be truly representative as some stages will take far longer than others.
What it won’t have
Details on our long-term plans – and any short-term projects that have not been fully planned – will be excluded. Some of these plans may change based on the success of previous updates and we don’t want to be constantly changing the roadmap. Furthermore, we may exclude some secret short-term updates, and those that the media team want to hype themselves. The media team will be consulted regarding what we place on the roadmap in future.
Private roadmap
What is it, and why is it private?
The public roadmap will include elements from our private roadmap, which is internal to the development team only. Admins and the media team will be made aware at times of what it comprises and will be included in the planning phase, but the full roadmap is likely to revolve around technical and business details. As such, it would not be appropriate to release it to the entire community. We would also like to avoid any incidents as have previously occurred, where the developers received flak from community members due to updates taking too long to arrive: some of the long-term planning may not be in active development for several months or longer.
What’s the plan?
Right now, it’s in the early planning phase and the largest phases won’t be in active development until the release of all elements on the current public roadmap. I can say that it will involve further expansion from the skills and achievements system, with a focus on large projects and overhaul; prioritising long-term RP and player development.
How do we choose the plan?
Long-term planning is led by the development team with initial feedback from HR, the business team, and the admins. We’ll likely go through a couple of phases of coming to the admins for feedback, then fleshing out the technical and business details within the development team only. This gives admins the opportunity to provide their feedback while ensuring that projects are kept within scope and are ready for active development.
Once active development begins, phases will be released on the public roadmap after consultation with the media team – some updates they may prefer to release details of in their own way, but most updates will go to the roadmap, I imagine.
What can you do?
Please, keep on writing suggestions and providing feedback through the forums. Constructive criticism is fantastic and really does help our development team to align itself to more appropriate projects. We’re still working through a huge amount of approved suggestions, but more are always welcome.
If you have any questions, please feel free to leave them here and I’ll do my best to answer. I’d also like to thank Cole for providing the initial code for the public roadmap; to Doctor Internet for making some improvements to better integrate it with our site; to Bambo for various styling improvements, and of course, thank you to everyone here for reading this (far too long) dev blog and for continuing to play Limelight’s CityRP!
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