There are positives to the migration of scripts towards one central InnoGames storage location, however it also creates a number of challenges and I'm wondering if InnoGames thought ahead to adress those issues.
Private scripts are a big motivator for scripters to create scripts for the tribe they are playing on a specific world, often such scripts later become public.
Given private scripts will no longer exist post migration, will InnoGames provide any quality of life changes, or new features to as incentive for new scripts to be created in the future as well?
Think of such as:
- Functional testing environment
- Public documentation for easy to reuse attributes
- Better guidelines on script rules
- Version control for scripts hosted at InnoGames
There are also a number of questions raised by having to externally host scripts and ultimately not having direct control over it.
- How will bugfixes to scripts be handled, now one can be deployed instantly. Will this be a multi-week process like regular script approvals?
- Currently certain scripts make use to external databases for information, think the vault for example.
I'm assuming InnoGames will not be hosting a database for scripting purposed, but will I be able to host one myself and have a script interact with this data through an API for example?
Thank you for the feedback.
All of these seem like valid points worth discussing and I can answer at least the technical parts of those questions.
In regards to private scripts, we
aren't approving any new private scripts for quite some time now. However yes, there were private scripts approved, which can be resent later on to be approved as public if their authors wish so. Without divulging much information, regarding how many private scripts there are and their nature, I can say that the majority of them are pretty much same as public scripts, meaning they can be easily replaced by currently approved public scripts.
I definitely can not answer if InnoGames will do anything or not, to incentivize script authors to keep writing scripts. I can not answer this, because I have no information in relation to this.
In relation to:
- Functional testing environment
- Public documentation for easy to reuse attributes
- Better guidelines on script rules
- Version control for scripts hosted at InnoGames
What I can say that will happen for sure is that we will focus more while testing scripts. We will have to. Both scripters and script moderators because we have to make sure that a script uploaded on the media server is ready to be used and contains no bugs, otherwise it will come back at us and we will have to keep doing constant updates. That of course is a down side. Probably the only one I can think off.
So hopefully, in that regard, I can't definitely promise anything, hopefully, we can have a better testing environment. But please do not take my word for it. I am not the one who decides in regards to this. Just saying that I do agree that it is needed.
Regarding documentation for reuse of attributes, we kind of have some small documentations and even made guidelines of "script templates". It has been adopted very little. So I don't know if the scripters even support that because everyone kind of likes to do their own thing.
In regards to script rules, we have updated our script rules less than 2 months ago. The only expected script rule updates, will be the ones in relation to this change of hosting of scripts. We will update our rules to reference this new reality when it comes to scripts.
In regards to version control for scripts hosted at InnoGames, that is not something that I can answer, have no information in regards to that but you have raised it as a point so we can discuss what can be done or not.
In relation to:
- How will bug-fixes to scripts be handled, now one can be deployed instantly. Will this be a multi-week process like regular script approvals?
- Currently certain scripts make use to external databases for information, think the vault for example.
I'm assuming InnoGames will not be hosting a database for scripting purposed, but will I be able to host one myself and have a script interact with this data through an API for example?
Bug fixes or script updates will work kind of as they currently work.
Script updates, even now have to be approved. That's what our rules say. Most of the time, script evaluation goes very smoothly and is usually done in far fewer time than a week, that's the majority of script evaluations actually.
In regards to scripts like the vault or vault like, we do not currently approve anymore scripts which send
private data to external sites. So scripts such as the vault are not approvable anymore.
