Skullsnipe wrote:Fat goat wrote: Would you ever give a person developer status if he's not known for you in real life?
Kind of curious of this as well. There's a whole lot of power to being a developer or super. Would you be willing to hand over that power to someone who has simply coded for the game for a few months?
The developer rank is not a part of the staff hierarchy, therefore new developers will not receive any in-game powers.
To clarify:
- Rapsey and me are both co-owners (and ultimate users) and developers
- Donderstone2 is an advisor (and super user) and developer
- Vcom is a player and trial developer
- New developers will also be both a player and trial developer
On testservers, developers hold all the power they need for their work, but on the production server, they do not. New developers won't receive any kind of rank or crown on the live server until they have completed their trial and have been promoted to actual Developer, which will take several months - maybe even longer. However, even those who possess a developer crown will not have any powers on the production server, unless they are also a staff member in some way.
Apart from Rapsey and myself, Donderstone2 is the only developer who also has actual in-game (and forum) powers, simply because of his very long history as admin on PkHonor - he was already admin before I even joined PkHonor - and the fact that we fully trust him. That's also the reason he's currently the only developer who has access to the complete source code.
However, even Donderstone2 is not able to directly update the live PkHonor server. He can work on any part of the code - including everything new devs can't even see - and deploy updates on the testserver, but Rapsey and myself are the
only two people who can approve an update and deploy it on the production server.
It's not that we don't trust Donderstone2 to directly release updates on the production server, but this way of doing things ensures that every single update is reviewed by myself, which is an important step in any development process. It's always best for code to be peer reviewed before being released.
With new trial developer(s), I won't be working on new content as much as I used to. My main focus will be on educating and mentoring other developers, while reviewing, refactoring and testing every line of their code before release.
Other than that, my main task will be the fixing of bugs - some that have been there forever, some that were only recently introduced - and working out tasks that require certain in-depth knowledge of RSPS (or PkHonor specific) code. For example, I've just made and added the sprites necessary to introduce the venom hitsplats (and health orb), which will be necessary when we add Zulrah in the near future. It's one of those things most RSPS developers do not know how to do and would take a long time to learn properly. Adding a new interface for the looting bag and rune pouches is another such example (which I'm also working on at the moment), but there will definitely be many more such things I'll have to aid developers with. I won't be retiring from PkHonor anytime soon and my knowledge and expertise of the source code will forever remain a necessary part of ensuring a high quality server