Quote Originally Posted by Syntax View Post
The code I obfuscate is the code that is very specific to how our system operates. Most of it can be of little use to it, and even more of it people wouldn't be able to understand. The people who could understand it would be able to make it anyway.
The code I release to the public are things that I feel the community could use, modify, and adapt to their own code. As you have already said the proverb, I don't have to repeat it.

Tutorials are great, but when learning you need to see real applications, and even better, a template to work off of.
When you teach something to a person, you show them example problems and give them the answers to them, but you don't hand them all the answers, they will never learn.

All that being said, I'm not a saint, this is a business. I give back to the community because I feel like I should, but I'm not obligated to. This is why there is a free and paid version of XenoMap.
Both benefit the community. Some people don't want to learn shit, they'd rather pay money for scripts, and that's just fine. Not everyone has time or the interest in scripting. I/We cater to both.


edit: Btw, no offense, but half your post said that obfuscated code is bad and the code would be useful, the other half you said you don't like to release bits of code when they could write it themselves. Wat?
Finally, someone I can debate with who has an actual argument. Too bad I'm a bit drained from the last few hours...

Well, the truth is, you know me, you know I'm no expert. I'm no expert at Lua, and it would take me a while to make anything of any real value to ship to people. For those reasons, I can't really see enough benefit in me writing anything more substantial than what I have already submitted to these forums. I mean, I've thought in the past about trying to make a system similar to yours, but I'd have gone the whole hog and made it so that in the setup you'd declare every part of (from the basic stuff like the mana potion types to buy, to the slightly less basic stuff like a list of items to deposit). The problem again comes down to my abilities with Lua. This would effectively provide the same thing that I'm looking to provide with the video tutorial situation, but a bit simpler as a user could simply declare a list of variables and the code behind it would handle the rest. The other issues I was faced with when I first attempted it were things like levers, doors, floor checking, amongst a few others. It didn't really seem feasible to write the code to be adaptable enough to validate the concept.

Beyond the issues I faced, I thought about it some more and it struck me that actually the other problem which would need to be considered is that the end goal of a user being able to simple download, implement, and run it. The user would still need to know a substantial amount of Lua, and they would not explicitly have benefited from using the system, instead they would have done what they do already, that is downloading a script, setting some variables, and running it. My goal is to teach people, and I can't do that if I'm just going to provide a download with which you'd just fill in the blanks, and run it as a script.

For those reasons I chose the route of making the video(s). The videos provide users with far more than I could hope to teach people how to do it for themselves. The actual intention initially was also to reduce the amount of people who came to the forums (and to my skype) asking for help with scripts, by teaching them how to debug and tinker.

Business is acceptable, I can't argue with that, hence why my previous post was meant with minimal amounts of offence to yourself. The main point of the comment is that I'm being instructed to "do something for the community" by someone who is doing something strictly for themselves (and of course for your benefit, and with the free scripts there is some benefit to the end users). In BugWT we were constantly fighting to get code encryption to hide some of our more advanced scripts like the rune shooters and spell casters. That's just the way the world works.