{"metadata":{"title":"What do the [BB] Dev team even do anyways?","date":"2024-10-08","author":"Teddi"},"content":{"html":"

It’s an uncommon question we get but one I think that’s worth answering (mostly so I can point people here). What do you do all day? Why haven’t you done <x> yet?

The general short existential answer is: we try to exist. [BB] isn’t ran as a profitable enterprise so we don’t really have a motive from an income point of view to work on things and we do have lives (unfortunately) that exist outside of [BB]. Instead we generally try to work on things that interest us, or things that we think generally will interest a large subset of players.

In more depth however, our setup over the years has drastically changed and what seems like an almost seamless experience for players is actually a lot of systems at work behind the scenes. Over a decade ago the majority of servers in Garry’s Mod were just a single srcds instance running a gamemode. For the vast majority of communities that exist today that’s still likely to be the case but for [BB] we’ve got an incredible amount of subsystems at play. Sometimes you see us talking about these, like we might mention the “API” or something about FastDL, but as a player those are all just baked in right?

It turns out, we run a whole bunch of systems

And the below image is just a sample of them. Almost none of them actually even run on the gameservers themselves, even if they do talk back and forwards!\n $\"Image$

All of the above systems in some way shape or form, play or have played pivotal moments within [BB]’s lifespan and if they’re still in any sort of active use, usually receive some form of maintenance; be that a bug fix, a library update, a feature request, or just a general update to keep them in line with the rest of the systems.

Something that Admins often see but the average player doesn’t, is in Discord we have a channel which fires a message every time a commit is made to any of our repositories. I feel bad for our admins as it can get a bit noisy 🥲, though it does allow Admins to provide feedback if something catches their eye and they want to talk about it.

$\"Image$

Essentially the point that I’m trying to make is that even if things aren’t being changed in a very obvious or way that is noticable to a player, it doesn’t mean that things aren’t happening in the background somewhere. It may just mean that our focus or attention is on something which does help the community and playerbase - just not in a way that is immediately tangible.

Okay, but why can’t you give me a date for <x>? Why don’t you just work on it when I suggest these things?

Generally speaking, there’s usually a list of concerns in the pipeline of things that are being worked on. Sometimes certain features and ideas are planned out months in advance. Sometimes they’re time-limited and we need to pounce on them so we’re always shuffling and trying to re-prioritise where it makes sense. Some of you have great ideas or points, though often we circle back to them a few days or even weeks later when they become relevant or there’s room on the radar. I appreciate it can have the appearance of we forgot it and we’ve suddenly come back to it like a bad smell, but it’s usually just a case of timing and dealing with events as they come up.

On a related note, I always recommend people suggest ideas either on our forums or on the ideas / issues GitHub repository. Sometimes it can take a while for things to be actioned (or we may reject them) but it’s honestly the best place visibility-wise for us to see your gameplay suggestions / issues. It also allows us to tie them to internal tracking so we can manage them better.

Hopefully that gives people an idea just how many cogs are turning at [BB] to give you a smooth experience. We’re not always the fastest, but we hope that whatever we do, we do it well.

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And the blog is back!

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