Skill System Is Absolute Garbage For New Hackers

[Soronexle]

I think the word has already been passed around, but it should be said that the skill system wasn’t made with FE builder in mind. It predated it so there was always going to be some issues. But the people working on the skill system as well as the other stuff have been working hard on making it work as well as fixing any issues that pop up.

Sure, there are over 255 skills, but you don’t need to use THAT many of them. That is unless you’re going overboard with the skills. You don’t need to trash on 7743 and co. who are not only making this stuff possible and fixing up whatever issues spring up, but also take any feedback from posts that find these issues, make a note of them, and fix them up for the newer versions.

TL;DR, if you’re having a problem with the 255 skill limit in the skill system, don’t just stay that it’s “Absolute Garbage for New Hackers”. I’m a new hacker and I don’t mind the limit at all. Maybe try asking if there’s a way to make it a two bit integer instead of a one bit integer. That comes off a lot better than what you’re saying here.

[Levin64]

Seems Duff was already satisfied with the answer.
I’ll close this thread.

[CT075]

Really, the thread should have ended with “we accept pull requests”.

I don’t begrudge people at all for piling on a bit (hell, I joined in). The title includes the phrase “Skill System is Absolute Garbage”, and there’s really no way you’re going to convince me that this isn’t inflammatory. Comments like these:

@DuffOnTheRun

Coding is supposed to be elegant, easy to understand, and decently modifiable. It’s literally the first thing any python course teaches you. If you are lucky, they’ll explain how Perl fell out of fashion because there was a million and 1 ways to do anything thanks to the focus on regular expressions.

are both insulting and unproductive. At best, this is tantamount to calling the maintainers incompetent (because of course, if you’d learned from python 101 that all your code should be elegant, it’s that easy, just design your code to be more elegant!).

Then there are comments addressing the polite technical explanations, like this one:

@DuffOnTheRun

However, the 4 bytes for win loss ratio makes sense. I, personally, think I would only need the 2 slots if I was to use SHORTs instead of BYTEs. But to each his own.

If it’s that easy, then fix it yourself. Both the skill system itself and FEbuilder are open source. I don’t think the skill system maintainers would object at all to having more skill slots.

tl;dr, Fix your attitude, fix your communication, or get off my website. The maintainers who produced this product are volunteers, and I won’t stand for veiled assertions that they don’t know what they’re doing.