Fork(); VS?

[2asueekim]

I think VS needs to be forked because it has gone nowhere in 4 years (other than nice art updates) do to luddites pooh-poohing the most desired features for the game (planetary flight, 3d Bases).

For instance you have a programmer RIGHT NOW implementing planetary flight in the mod section and you have a VS dev blowing him and his efforts off because it doesn't fit in his idea of some fucking campaign that may some day be created.

Some see new features as unfortunate new amounts of "work" they'll be required to do. I suggest getting a real job instead since coding for OSS games isn't enjoyable for those devs anymore.

Auto-generate cities on some of the surfaces of the planets (oh and yea and OSS programmer offered to do this since he allready had city generating code... was blown off by one of the luddite devs then too (same guy?) and allow people to leave their ship and you'll have a use for planets.

The problem with a fork would be keeping momentum.

How bout:
Vegastrike-Extended as a forks name

The current devs don't give a damn about what the users want, they see themselves as God, and reject contributions that implement planetary flight, autogenerated cities, and 3d bases.

They reject everything we want and are a millstone on this project.

[2asueekim]

When the orge backend is done can you hit this man up for his code: http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... c&start=25
(He said he'd OSS it)

It needs a bigger scale but it will work.

For further out just sample the top-level LOD (least detaled) into a texture and project it on a sphere, then when getting close to the atmosphere of the planet switch on the planet generation code.

As for helping out, I dunno I'm a perl and python scripter, don't know if that's any use in VS.

[ace123]

I see no reason that a fork would make any difference at all. There's nothing stopping you from writing code for VS.
Feel free to do whatever you feel is necessary to the engine, and if you have something usable then it will be committed. And then you will get developer access, and if you keep writing code and helping out the engine then you would basically be the main developer of the project.

The developers are simply busy. I'm working at a company this summer and I'm sure a lot of the other developers also have day jobs.

I think you're referring to Tarzan02's planetary flight code, and I have a copy of that on my machine but I haven't really taken a look at it yet (It doesn't look like it would be trivial to add). Planetary flight isn't my personal interest, and I would prefer to spend time working on other things.

Yes, python is useful and some of our python code (especially Missions) is in need of a good rewrite. It would be cool if you could get smarter AI at a higher level and use the dynamic universe to do some cool things with economy, borders between territories, and stuff like that.

I see your comment:

The current devs don't give a damn about what the users want, they see themselves as God, and reject contributions that implement planetary flight, autogenerated cities, and 3d bases.

I do take a bit of offense at such comments. However, I haven't been able to communicate with tarzan02 about the code (he has only made a few posts on the forum AFAIK), but what he wrote wasn't something that you could just plug into VS and have it work. True, there is no reason that it can't happen, but none of the developers have spent the time to get it working.
As to autogenerated cities and 3d bases, I don't have a memory of contributions to either of those. Feature requests, yet, but we can all dream. VS is a volunteer project.
The fact that we as a community cannot implement the vast majority of things people ask for just shows that we are not gods by any means. And the messy code left to grow cobwebs over ten years doesn't help.

Anyway I can see how it might give an impression that the 'rulers' of this project are simply lazy. And it may be so. But that doesn't change the fact that this is a volunteer project, and thus by definition there are no 'rulers', except for the fact that a limited number of people are listed as 'Project Admins' on sourceforge--that can be changed if more people develop, rewrite code or do whatever.

So do you have any ideas on what we should do? I think a lot of people agree that we need better content development tools (but those take time to make, and to make them usable enough that people won't just revert to hand-editing XML or CSV files anyway). 10 years of code needs to be rewritten--you can't expect that to be simple to clean up. yes, it would be done piece by piece, but it's still not trivial in a project of this magnitude.

I think I should stop rambling and get some sleep.

[Breakable]

2asueekim i think the problem with speed of Vega Strike development is not the team, but its huge source base. When you have a lot of code which has a huge amount of legacy, its hard to work on it.

I salute the developers efforts to refactor and improve it. Someday it might get better.

I would love to see you do a fork for this project and try to work on it, but you will see if you try thats not very easy thing to do because of the previous reason.

Instead I would propose to try an contribute. I expect that any changes are welcome. And there is really no need to demotivate the developers.

[safemode]

He's pissed at me. But I just would like to ask where all the devs are that would work on a fork, but seem to be absent from contributing anything currently? If nobody has done anything for as long as you say, then it only stands to reason a fork would get even less work. You gotta have code that is being refused to get in to fork, not ideas and isolated examples of code.

If everyone but klauss said screw Ogre, then he could fork because he's got the code to make the game work with what he wants to do, and that would be a valid reason to fork. You cant fork and not have any code that is being rejected.

[charlieg]

Guys, guys, listen to the man. Don't jump on him.

Yes, fork VS. Go ahead. You go and set up a project and develop for it and we look forward to your improvements!

[People who rant irrationally are only noisy if they get listened to]

[bgaskey]

I like charlie's plan. Everyone just chill. If you have ideas to contribute that are coded and ready to go, and there is resistance from a large portion of the community, by all means fork the project.

I've been watching the SVN and it averages more than a commit a day recently. If you relax and think rationally, nothing will be gained by a fork that cannot be gained through contributions to the main source.