POL open source

[Demostenes]

Is there ANY reason, why not put POL open source?

If you look for example at run UO, it overrun every emulator project in few years. Now run UO is the best emulator. Few years ago it was not usable at all. Open source development is very fast in theese cases.

You can say ok, go for run UO then. But we have shards on POL many years and we have quite complicated systems there already. Switching to run UO will be work for one, or more years. And it is not possible to stop development of new features for players and make such migration without loosing them. Even if we can find someone, who is able to rewrite 25MB of scripts to c#. So we are quite dependent on POL.

As i read this forum, i very often see answers from development team like "when we have time", "not enough time" and so on. Whats the point of such development? POL is free project, nebody has anything from it. So why not go open source? POL team can still maintain and develop "official" distribution and use only fine modifications/upgrades. There is lot of things on POL, which should be rewritten or upgraded, but there is not enough human capacity in POL team for such changes. I understand that, it is hobby project, so work is done only if somebody has mood for it.

I beelive, if POL goes open source, it can catch run UO very fast. Now, if anybody wants to start new shard, run UO is the best option by far. And POL team cannot catch up with open source run UO, it is not possible. Now POL is few years behind run UO (with current speed of progress). And that abyss is growing bigger and bigger. It is said, because few years ago POL was the best.

Other possibility is to sell pol code. If there is any chance to buy POL code for some reasonable price (-+$100), i am quite sure, that there will be lots of people interessed in. Such sollution would lack advantages of opensource community, but at least enable shard development teams to make their own unique modifications they need.

[Austin]

Its been considered but the point of open source is for a larger group of people to contribute to a project....

This has never been demonstrated by users of POL.
We started with the 096 distro to test the waters - almost no one contributed to it in anyway. If the POL core source were released, we can with almost complete certainty assume that people will grab it and drift even further apart.

There is still active work being done on the core.

[Demostenes]

[Demostenes]

RunUO status: Currently Active Users: 423 (147 members and 276 guests)

POL status: In total there are 2 users online :: 1 Registered, 0 Hidden and 1 Guest

This doest really look like that closed code attracts people to forum, or holds the community. Such thing can work only if all emulators are closed, or if the open ones are shitty. Not in current state of things. Good open emulator on the scene, POL has no chance to attract new users and the old ones are disappearing too. If there is no radical change, like 50x faster development, or openining the code, pol is dead in some time. Forum is already almost dead. Even reply of developers/other users take usually days. Not mentioning bug fixes, if i post something now, maybe in few months i will see fix.

Pol now holds only the shards, which are too big and too complicated for fast migration to run UO. No new shard will pick POL. If you want something simple and easy to learn you pick Sphere (even if it is shitty), if you know some programming and plan to build serious shard, you pick run UO. Run UO has even better default distro, which is advantage for admins who wants osi like shards.


I think everybody with some simple/beginning shard migrated long time ago. I know about many features, i want to modify on POL, but since there is problem with fixing important and more general problems like at least catching up with the current uo client development, i can never hope to have implemented some shard-releated features.

Once you run shard for some years, the system is quite tuned and you want to start adding some unique features, no one else have. A this is sometimes problem due to core. On one side i want to keep improving our shard, on the other side there is more and more limitations of core. And migration to run UO would be work for at least one year and that will mean stop caring of game, try to migrate and hope to not loose to much players? And than tune the system again for new emulator? It will send the project to hell. I ve seen many shards who tried to migrate in later phase and it was always their end.

I think opened pol can be competition to the run UO, because it would provide quite good scripting language + opened core for further modifications. Which would be good and unique combination. I think there is nothing to loose, POL is dying anyway.

[MontuZ]

Demo, how long have you been around POL?

[Sadahar]

I think pol works fine with closed source... BUT needs a good default distro...

Maybe if you help instead of crying Pol will improve?

[*Edwards]

Personnally, I would be glad to see Pol source but unfortunately I'm sure a lot of people will simply grab the features and just forgive the community for their own success. But if PenultimaO plan a futur major change as a new "background" that could help to discover new ideas from everyone who share them and eventually they could simply release a big update closed source. Kinda like RunUo did in the past and said above. Personnally, I'm waiting the new updates given by the community and waiting the opportunity to help... Thank you Pol for all this fun.

My goal is to provide an unique world with a lot of features, fun and great time for our players while Pol is doing the same to us.

[Demostenes]

[Sadahar]

New people... can I ask from where?

[Demostenes]

[Pierce]

@Demostenes:
You can surely ask somebody to make his/their perhaps more than 1000 or more hours of work public, but you can't demand it.
It's the same if i ask you to make your server scripts public. Perhaps you have 10 new competitors shards in your country with exact your scripts. And they done no work on it. You can surely not compare that directly but its nearly the same. I can understand Austin when he says that the distro dev shows that it's not a good idea.

What pol currently misses is a startup distro for in my opinion 97 that at least gives everyone new to pol an easy setup for the important systems.
The test core 97 i use is very stable. No crash at all yet.

If pol is open source it's perhaps an advantage for you and for sure me also, but it's not an advantage for new users or a more populated pol community.
If you want your special changes in the core and won't wait like we all do, perhaps you ask them to join the dev team

[MontuZ]

He's just suggesting strongly. I dunno why I prefer POL closed, just do. Might be because most of us are already behind on client features scriptwise and if POL suddenly accelerated at the speed of light and enabled a whole bundle of features, our heads would probably explode from all the goddamn updating we would have to do to our scriptbases.

Updates bug fixes and feature additions may be slow, but they're always worth the wait. And in my case it's easier on me, they upgrade the core, give us plenty of time to catch up or at least do it the right way and not speed through core conversions. If they came out with 098 tomorrow I'd die. I don't care if I don't see 098 for another year or two, I need a break damnit and I bet they need one too!

Demo, you want open source, go to RunUO.

RunUO is the hare and POL is the tortoise. Who always wins? =)

[Demostenes]

[qrak]

POL community is larger than you think but most of people doesn't contribute anything or they don't speak english. Second thing, it's better to learn and write in C language than some unusable eScript. In my opinion closed source it's not the main reason of lack of people in community.

[Demostenes]