This story is several months old, so apologies if this has been posted already. I thought about posting this in the Go discussion from last month but decided against necro'ing old threads.
A game called Haunts that raised $28,000 on Kickstarter is dead in the water. Here's the second-to-last kickstarter update:
I’ve owed you all an update for a while, but frustratingly there hasn’t been much news to report. We got off to a roaring good start with community involvement in the open source Haunts effort, but we pretty quickly ran into a software roadblock that stymied all our efforts. Resolving has proved quite a challenge. Almost as challenging was actually understanding why we were having so much trouble. As a non-programmer, I could grasp the issue in theory but I didn’t think I could explain it well. So, I asked Michael, who’s an old friend and project backer who has been working on Haunts a lot, to explain it:
“Haunts is written in Go, a new and quickly evolving programming language developed at Google to address certain programming challenges that are important to the kind of work they do. There is nothing special in Go that makes it particularly well suited to video games, but on the other hand there is nothing inherent in the language that makes it a bad choice, except for the fact that it's new and not well supported. Anyway, one of the neat features of Go is that it is designed to take advantage of distributed code development and reuse of code developed by other people. It's a slightly hacky feature, IMO, but it works.
Basically, there is no master "script" that tells the compiler how all the bits of code relate to each other. Instead, that information is embedded directly in the files themselves. So rather than, for example, specifying a folder that contains your "headers", you actually embed in your program an absolute path to github, google, or some other file-sharing repository, and the Go compiler will find the code and build it into your program. If you want to use OpenGL for rendering graphics, you can search the internet for someone who has already built a version of OpenGL for Go, and put import ("github.com/go-gl/opengl/gl") directly into your code. Viola! Thus hilarity ensues.
Because of course that's not how it really works. Instead, it makes a local copy of that external library. And if you have a local copy, you can edit it. And meanwhile, that person you copied the OpenGL code from? They are also changing their version (fixing bugs, adding features, adding bugs). Therefore there is no guarantee that your version and their version remain compatible: it takes work to maintain compatibility. So when you decide to share development of your project with other people, while "in theory" Go lets you just share the main code, which tells you where to get the imported code, in practice it takes more work than that, because we have to ensure we get the same versions. And that's where Go's feature is kinda hacky. Because it doesn't have a mechanism for doing that.
Why does this matter? Well, when the original programmer on Haunts handed off the code to the community for development, the first problem we ran into is that the code seemed to be.... wrong. We know that there is "working" version of the game, albeit buggy and incomplete. However, we can't use the source code that we have to recreate that game. Firstly, the source simply doesn't compile. It has syntax errors, so there is literally no output- nothing to "run". But the community jumped right in, fixed the problems, and got the game to compile. Now it "runs", but it's not really a game at this point. First, it's horribly slow. Second, it crashes as soon as you try to play the actual "game" (as opposed to navigating the startup menus). Now, this is the kind of thing one expects when developing a game (or any program). There is a bug (or several) that can be found and fixed, and get us back to the same point as the "original". But this is the part the community is struggling with: why? We know it once worked. So now we're in a kind of no-mans land of the original programmer not being unable to help during his transition to a new job and a new city, but none of the new volunteers with enough time to jump into the potentially very hairy problem of figuring out what is wrong in a program they didn't write, in a language they probably don't know, and with the problems potentially being in one or more of a dozen "sub-programs" that are developed by yet other people that we have no connection with.
Can it be done? Yes. The original programmer has now dug up all the original code his build was using and the community has it. Preliminary inspection reveals potentially significant differences, so we’re hopeful that we can make some real progress in the coming weeks.”
And that’s where we’re at. Not what we’d hoped, not even close, but not dead yet. Once we get this conundrum finally solved (which we will), then we’ll put out the call again and try and get things rolling forward at a good speed in the new year. Until then, Happy Holidays! Rick
So basically, the way Go handles dependencies like headers is to hardcode a path to a github repo that has the header you want then download a local copy of that header so you can edit it independently of the repo author because all Go programmers are enlightened perfect angels and this could never cause dependency problems ever.
Here's part of the most recent update, which was posted in March, 3 months after the above one:
Things are not going well. There has been no forward progress on the game, although there has been hard work put in trying to get the project back on track. Michael, a backer and friend and programmer, has been volunteering his time to dig into the code and try and see why no one has been able to get a version of the game to compile that even matches the unfinished state it was in when Jonathan (the original programmer) left.
Michael has been unable to get a working version of the game to compile. He reached out directly to Jonathan for help. When Jonathan tried to get the game working from the current code, he also failed. He could not get a version of the game to work either, even using his own computer and expertise. He has not responded to additional requests for aid or insight into solving this very huge problem.
I don’t have the technical expertise to understand exactly how that could be. Michael, who does have the technical expertise, is also at a bit of a loss, other than the fact that the shifting code base of the Go programming language combined with either changes in Lua or OpenGL libraries created some crippling incompatibility that Michael can’t track down and which apparently foiled even Jonathan’s attempt to create a working version.
Yes. Not even the original programmer, with the original files on his original dev machine, can compile the source anymore. Woohoo!