ACE - Authorized Community Expansion Project

Stop everything, I’ll prioritize this

i thought your priority was sneaking in a snorlax titan :stuck_out_tongue: ?
(possibly out of smaller snorlaxes forming a megazord)*

*(for those not in the know, this is not actually serious, dont worry, no snorlaxes will be put into ACE)

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You’re right, Snorlax titan first

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I hate to lower the tone in light of all this positive energy, but Helm’s Deep is only the first of many battles. Sure it represents the first major turning point and a huge victory against Sauron; and ACE is right to celebrate the impact it’s already had in restoring hope for certain features just the same way that Helm’s Deep restored hope to the people of Middle Earth.

But we still have the rest of the second and third books ahead of us; particularly the Pelennor Fields, and the march on the Black Gate, both of which in this analogy represent costly undertakings. I would say that Pelennor represents the fight to maintain this positive energy through the coming months and years, and it’s by far the biggest undertaking this community will face since the Kickstarter. It’s not just a matter of doing the modding work, but also keeping the community looped in (I expect there will be a LOT of players who treat ACE the same way they treat the vanilla game, expecting it to work out of the box and not really doing their homework to understand why it’s not working), and keeping the volunteers happy so everyone can work well together.

And then there’s the Black Gate, if I may be so dramatic as to call the “bastion of negativity” that. If you question my choice of analogy though, I’d suggest taking a quick dip in Stonehearth’s Steam community forum – and bring a hazmat suit because it gets pretty toxic in there. I don’t know what the likes of Reddit, other gaming messageboards, and various peripheral arms of the community are like; but I’m guessing their less inclined towards the sort of friendliness which Team Radiant worked so hard to foster here. To be blunt (while trying not to be melodramatic), at some point we’re going to have to tackle that built-up negativity head on, because it’s going to come on our door too. There may well come a time when our efforts to spread the word of ACE’s improvements runs into direct opposition.

As I say all this, I don’t mean to put a negative spin on things – after all, the analogy still ends happily. We just have to be aware that there will be major sacrifices to get there. Whether that means time, stress, or dealing with more toxicity remains to be seen, I expect we’ll have to deal with all of the above and more though.

It’s good to see a sense of humour, that will only fuel the positive energy and keep the team strong. But ACE is now reaching that critical point where big promises need to be backed up with big deliveries – a LOT of people are counting on ACE to deliver on their hopes and dreams, and it’s worth pointing out that if Team Radiant couldn’t do that with backing from Riot and a staff of (mostly) professional game developers then we’re going to have our work cut out for us.

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We do have an ace in the whole though: the Internet usually frowns on bothering modders. Especially those doing good work. Expect a ghost army if someone tries :wink:

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Is this the humor I heard of? :smiley:

Well, tbh for me the active ACE-Community is reward enough. I don’t need no eagles to save me or any lembas to keep my energy up high.
I will continue counting my personal experiences during battle as long as there is someone who counts with me

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“and my axe!”
Edit: speaking of axes. I should volunteer my axes and chainmail from my nordlings to the dwarves. They might be able to use them

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You’re completely right, and I can assure you that us in the org have carefully thought this whole scenario through to make sure it goes the way we want it, and I want to make sure that everyone knows that we’re prepared.

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Here’s the thing though. ACE is a mod. A wrapper of sorts, to allow for community-driven core game improvement, on top of which other modders can continue building their own mods. ACE is not a one-and-done project to which we should pin all our hopes and dreams. Rather, it’s a volunteer corps of engineers assembled to keep the dream alive. To devote time and energy to problems where the dev team never could.

ACE will and should be an iterative, ever-changing and organic project with many small releases over time, with a tight scope on core game refinement.

In that way, I think our biggest nemesis here will be feature creep and over-assimilation. It will be important to maintain discipline and focus on what ACE is, but more importantly, what it isn’t.

We want ACE to be the wrapper that all other modders WANT to use as a dependency. If we fold in too many non-core features and functionalities from other mods (our build them ourselves), they may conflict with their mod’s desired features and functionality and cause the dev more work instead of less.

So it’s going to be a delicate balance between introducing sought-after functionality, bug fixes and improvements but do so in a way that doesn’t lock other modders down unnecessarily.

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first ACE Tuesday ACE Tuesday #01 "Foundation" real good stuff

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@DaniAngione Id like to join on Map making generator editing !!! if needed and id love to learn everything else

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This (and the rest of your post) is 100% accurate and I agree whole-heartedly. My perspective here is simply that I know this because I’ve been following the project; but many players will hear about ACE and just assume it’s a magic bullet solution. It’s an unfortunate trend that the success of some open-source/community driven projects has created a mythology around the concept, the same way that Kickstarter/Early Access, indie vs AAA development models, and other such abstract subjects have developed their own mythologies.

Those mythologies breed misconceptions, which is why I make the point about keeping the community looped into the development process. The ATs are an amazing tool for that, and @DaniAngione’s explanation notes in the first AT do a great job of laying out ACE’s goals. :merry: Hopefully that message spreads quickly enough to out-pace the, uh, “creative interpretations” of ACE’s mission which are starting to pop up in places like the Steam Community.

I love the optimism around ACE and I can’t wait to see the heights that it pushes the project to, because I think we’re right to be optimistic about Stonehearth’s future. I merely wanted to point out that the true challenges haven’t even been brought to light yet (e.g. feature creep as you mention, or long-term retention of community support when people start realising that ACE is at least as big as several alphas’ worth of content and will accordingly take time to get there.) Honestly I’m not really worried so much as I’m automatically pointing out potential pitfalls just so that we have the best chance to deal with them before we get to them :merry:

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Preperation & planning is key indeed!

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Hey Soldier!

weneedyou

You know what js is? You know what html is? AND you know what css is?

THEN WE NEED YOU! :smiley:

At the moment we search for an webdesigner which can help us with changing the UI :wink:

Join us at ACE

YOUR STONEHEARTH NEEDS YOU!

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Insert “weneedyou.jpg”

better? xD

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Perfect! You’ve earned a promotion.

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… im already Master Translator and Lead ^^ Whats the next lvl? xD

Awesometacular Master of Language

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… i like it :smiley: Now we need only an admin to change my title ^^

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