Pre testers

[timakro]

Testers often complain about stupid bugs in maps that are easy to find but annoying to tell the mapper to fix. I recently got the idea to have pre testers who are very active and look often into the map testing section. There are a lot of players who are new, very active but don't have enough experience to get testers. They would pre-test maps very soon after mappers upload them. Testers would have to wait with testing a map until a pre tester looked over it. Pre testers would search for clearly defined rules wich you can check by only opening the map in editor. The list of rules would be a ddnet page called something like "basic_rules". Pre testers would only write to a new map post "no basic bugs, tester can take a look" or "there are basic bugs, see ddnet.org/basic_rules". I looked over the testing guide to find rules where you can clearly see if the mapper obeyed them. I suggest following rules, fell free to suggest improvements.

Basic Rules
* there are no unused tilesets
* there are only embed tilesets when needed
* there are no unnecessary huge layers
* HD decleration of layers makes sense
* there are no empty layers
* background is big enough
* totele is not directly above ground

[imp]

There already are kinda pre testers. They just don't have an orange name

[timakro]

It's nothing official so testers don't wait on pre testers. Also the pre testers you talk about are doing the same as normal testers do.

[Ama]

most maps that dont get tested fast have something bad in them for example journey man the map is 20 hours long and has entitie bugs

[imp]

If you consider long maps as bad than you probably dislike every 3rd brutal map?

[laxa]

The idea is not bad except :

- ddnet has trouble having testers so, how would they find pre-testers ?
- people don't generally know how to use map editor
- better to learn mappers how to avoid those mistake than have people fixing it.

[Ama]

imp i meant not map beeing bad but its hard to test when you join the map see its 3 hours long and see bugs everywhere you dont get motivated by that

[deen]

I added these suggestion to the Mapper Rules: http://ddnet.org/rules/

[timakro]

most maps that dont get tested fast have something bad in them for example journey man the map is 20 hours long and has entitie bugs

You don't understand the idea behind pre testers. Just look at the basic rules i suggested. You will see that none of them is related to the length of a map.

The idea is not bad except :

- ddnet has trouble having testers so, how would they find pre-testers ?
- people don't generally know how to use map editor
- better to learn mappers how to avoid those mistake than have people fixing it.

- Look at the call for testers. There are a lot of players who want to be testers but haven't enough experience.
- Everyone who wants to be tester should have a knowledge of the map editor. If not these things are easy to teach.
- If the testers would trust all mappers to obey these basic rules they wouldn't check if the rules were obeyed. The mappers would have to fix their mistakes themselves like it was in the past. By fixing their mistakes they would learn and probably avoid the bugs next time.

I added these suggestion to the Mapper Rules: http://ddnet.org/rules/

I like the formulation. It's easy to understand. Only 2. sounds a bit weired if you just read the last part:

all others must be embedded:
bg_cloud1, bg_cloud2, bg_cloud3, ....

You could misunderstand the formulation and think the listed images have to be embedded.

[imp]

all others must be embedded:
bg_cloud1, bg_cloud2, bg_cloud3, ....

You could misunderstand the formulation and think the listed images have to be embedded.

You need to be 12 years old to misunderstand that