Voting?

[Shaz]

Hey guys,


Dekita and I have been chatting about the voting process and I think it might be nice to get some input.


Ultimately the winner of each round will come down to a "which is your favourite script" question, which you can choose based on your perspective as a player, a developer, or a scripter. This means our voting mechanism could be as simple as a forum poll, and people will be able to give specific feedback in the thread itself.


But it also might be nice to have a small survey type of thing which will allow you to give something like a star rating to each script in terms of appearance and ease of use for the player, ease of use for a developer putting the script into a game, ease of maintenance, compatibility, readability for a scripter, and so on. These will not be used to choose the winner (there will still be a "which is your favourite script" question) but could be useful to provide feedback in a summary form to entrants. It would also give us the ability to list a favourite script as voted by players, by developers and by scripters. The goal there would be to keep it reasonably short so voters didn't have to spend a lot of time answering questions, in addition to the time they've already spent looking at the scripts and playing the (short) demos.


What sort of voting process would you prefer? Pros? Cons?

 

[??????]

Obviously, the more feedback the script writers can receive will ensure their growth is adequate

If we can provide more feedback on what we liked and why we liked it, ultimately, the scripters will get better and release better scripts.

Edit : Just my personal opinion

 

[Shaz]

And of course if we go with a survey, people can still post feedback in the thread anyway.


So it's really more a question of "would the extra breakdowns provided by a survey be worth making someone go through the list of questions?"

 

[C-C-C-Cashmere (old)]

But it also might be nice to have a small survey type of thing which will allow you to give something like a star rating to each script in terms of appearance and ease of use for the player, ease of use for a developer putting the script into a game, ease of maintenance, compatibility, readability for a scripter, and so on. These will not be used to choose the winner (there will still be a "which is your favourite script" question) but could be useful to provide feedback in a summary form to entrants. It would also give us the ability to list a favourite script as voted by players, by developers and by scripters. The goal there would be to keep it reasonably short so voters didn't have to spend a lot of time answering questions, in addition to the time they've already spent looking at the scripts and playing the (short) demos.

I really like this idea. I think feedback in general would be good, but having a framework that you can judge various aspects of the script by will be useful. Still, I think people should judge the script on an overall basis, not based on the average their scores for each category. That's basically just a guide to help them evaluate the script for themselves.

 

[Shaz]

Yes - the categories would simply be for feedback, and not used for voting at all.

 

[Shion Kreth]

I think most people would be happy to fill out a short survey, as better scripts are better for all three categories of voters.

 

[??????]

I would hope people would not mind filling a survey considering people have sat and wrote a script for them to use (if they want to use it)

Only made his post so I could re-ninja Shaz ^_^

 

[Shaz]

Not necessarily. You could have a script that's written really well, easy to follow/modify, but has a terrible user interface and is really clunky to actually use. On the other hand, you could have a script that works beautifully in the game, but turns any respectable scripter into a blubbering mess when they try to figure out what it's doing


Dekita, you nut!

 

[??????]

... turns any respectable scripter into a blubbering mess when they try to figure out what it's doing ...

I think though that peoples personal preference has alot to do with how easily they understand code.

For example, there are many ways to iterate over contents of an array. Depending on why you are reading the contents would obviously determine which methods you would consider first.

Now in my opinion, the most efficient way to iterate would be to compact / compact! and follow it with either .each or .inject()

For example...

[object A, object B, object C, nil, object E, nil, ...].compact.each {|ob| ob.method }[object A, object B, object C, nil, object E, nil, ...].compact.inject([]) {|r,ob| r << ob.data }
But personal preference may make you write your code differently...

for i in [object A, object B, object C, nil, object E, nil, ...]  next unless i  # ...end
Obviously there would be times where one method should be favored above others, but again, this comes down to personal preferences...

/Rant Over ^_^ 

 

[Sharm]

I think it would be better to have a small survey. It would have the added advantage of weeding out the people who don't actually try all of the scripts.

 

[Shelby]

Keep it simple! A click the box next to this item will do.

 

[cabfe]

I agree with the survey proposition.

Also:

I don't know it this was already suggested, but I think it would be better to not have names when testing the scripts.

So that the testing can be unbiased. Just have numbers to ID them and only an impartial external person knows who's who.

 

[??????]

@cabfe - that seems pretty fair; however, the script would have to be written with that in mind. For example, alot of people use their own name within their aliased methods or modules.

If there was no way, from looking at the code, that people could tell who wrote it, i think that would be a great addition ^_^

 

[Shaz]

I would actually argue against this one, for this reason: Once the scripts are made public, people will start taking them and using them in their projects. The scripters will want to, and SHOULD be, given credit, and they won't be.


Yes, they COULD redo their script and add the extra information, but the one without credits is already out there, and a lot of people will NOT wait until voting is finished, then replace their script with the new version.


I would actually like to know whose script I'm looking at. If I see something I don't understand, I want to know who the scripter is, which will help me decide whether I don't understand it because they're an advanced scripter and using a technique I'm unfamiliar with, or because they're a fairly green scripter and are doing it wrong.


There are several ways people could "cheat" if they wanted to, and we can't avoid them all, so my preference would be to just ask people to vote for the script that they feel best meets the brief, and assume they're going to be honest about it.

 

[??????]

There are several ways people could "cheat" if they wanted to, and we can't avoid them all...

Unfortunately, this is true in most situations in life :/

At least if we all know who wrote each script, we know who to shout at for cheating - not that anyone will, but you never know lol