An apology

[Yukiko]

Austin,

I apologize if it looked like I was "ordering you around".

That was not my intent or my desire.

Look I know you guys give of your free time to a project that warrants being paid for your work. I'd donate if there was a way because you devs deserve it.

So please accept my apology for any offense. None was intended.

[Marilla]

I think, maybe, we just all need to keep a handful of things in mind as we go. Before I relate those things, I would like to comment that I am not attempting to convict any individual on any of these things; my replying to your post for example, Kiko, is not meant to suggest I think you have failed to keep these things in mind; This is simply meant as a general reminder, maybe, for anyone interested...

The first thing to keep in mind is that, of course, all these people working on POL are purely volunteering their time and expertise here. They are doing this essentially for nothing but to help us out. No matter what we might think they are doing wrong, or not doing right, it would serve us well to remember that they are doing anything at all.

The next thing to keep in mind is that, well, all these people working on POL are purely volunteering their time and expertise here. So we also need to understand that the pace of work on certain projects may or may not meet our particular 'standards' at any given moment. This is not a commercial product supported by a company that is paying developers and project managers; So while sometimes, progress may be slow overall, other times progress might be swift, but perhaps not 'balanced'.

For instance, right now work on the Cores is obviously progressing more quickly than work on the script distros. However, there's been some cool stuff going on in that department, too. 096 is a fairly sizeable upgrade core-wise, and so it's distro will require quite a bit of work. While some of the core devs also work on distro stuff, and certainly are capable of it, this is also one thing that anyone at all could help out with. I, myself, stand convicted on this point; but at minimum, you will never see me breathe a word of discontent on this, since the scripting is my responsibility as an admin and scripter; It's the core that we need the core devs for.

Of course, though, the distro is important for the future usability of POL. To this end, it's probably time that maybe I contribute at least something in that regard. I know others have contributed here or there, and that's great, too. Little things here or there all add up.

For those who are impatient; who want to upgrade to 096, but find there is no distro they can just drop in and use - don't forget there is still a richly functional 095. If you can't do an upgrade yourself from 095 to 096, then you would simply be better off for now sticking with 095, until you can do the upgrade yourself, and until the important parts you need are added to the distro. I don't want to minimize the vital importance of the distro, but in the end, we all play with this Emulator stuff to provide our own custom world for our players; and POL has never striked me as the Emulator for making an 'OSI Clone' anyway.


So, to close this before I go too much further into rambleland; If you are anxious about moving to 096, then just do it! Start upgrading what you have, and be glad that we have a great team working on the Core upon which you can build. If you are 'community minded', then maybe contribute some of what you do to the distro, to help those in the future have something to start from or work with. But at the very least, you have the 'Core', and the rest is all up to you - the person wanting to create/upgrade your own, custom world. So, hop to it! Help out if you can, and go with the flow if you can't.

[DevGIB]

Im in the same boat... in no way was i trying to have a go at you Austin and i appreciate the work you do, to the level that i look at it in awe.

I guess i was just abit stressed by some new people we have helping out at my shard wanted to learn how to escript, and i told them that the distro was very clean and a good base to start looking at. But they had troubles.

As for helping out with the distro i dont have a problem giving a hand but my methods of scripting are very odd and not as clean as the quality of scripts that i could see in the distro so far. thus i kinda shyed away from submitting anything.

If you want my help its there but like i said my understanding of scripting is very basic, enough to get my shard by and to upgrade our scriptbase to the core, but nothing as complete as what you have produced in the distro.

Sorry again Austin

[Austin]

Believe me, id rather there be an 096 than not... but as I reiterate so many times - I can't work on two distros at once, I don't want to finish 096 while working on the 097 core and then upgrade the code to 097, and that its better I work on scripts that match the core I am working on so we can try to find bugs before shard owners have to.

There is a lot of area people can help... without any real script knowledge.
I don't have an OSI account. I don't play there, so a lot of that finer tuned stuff for OSI, I am clueless about. My specialty is making robust systems that all shards can use and have smaller sub-components to snap in.

Analogy: I sell you a honda. You run off and decide which awesome stickers and spoiler will go on it to make it go faster.

Examples:
Configs
- In the doors package is support for setting up doors on the first run. So far only britannia is setup. Could use help getting doors setup on other realms.

- Teleporters. I was able to setup most of the britannia teleporter positions on POL's first run .. but I know I missed some or possibly got some wrong. Other realms besides britannia need to get setup too.

- Moongates... do they exist on other realms? Where?

- NPCs... The distro's NPC stat/skills are way different than OSI's, atleast what I can tell from reading uo.stratics.com. I just dont feel like spending time matching them up.


As far as scripts go for the distro, its mostly reading the file docs/styleguide.txt
Every script that goes in is supposed to meet the guidelines in it. Mostly just text commands carried over from 095 break the rules until discovered.


I know Kiko asked for better commenting.. to me this stuff is more easy to follow than carrying on a conversation with my ex-girlfriend...
What was useful was when Steiba/Lagoon asked me on MSN one day "Whats the purpose for attributecache.ecl ?" and I explained it to him and then went in and added a comment header explaining why it was there. I can't comment every single line of code I write... anyone who reads the docs should understand most everything that is going on in the distro, right?

The best way to really have an idea about what is going on in the distro is to get on the SVN mail list ( see the useful distro links post )... at the least, as a digested user. Its a good list to be on even if you dont use a single script from the distros.

I enjoy doing the distro. There is only so much that can be done in the core at a time. When 097 comes out, who knows how many bugs there will be that you guys find that I have missed. Mostly I am hoping to see many shards adopt systems like datafile, gumps, timedScripts, brainAI, spawnSystem and ICP.

There were some major changes that I made to how operators and methods are accessed which resulted in the core going from 2.15 megs in 096 to 2.07 in 097... Its either 0.08 megs of more or less crashing ¬_¬

[Austin]

I STILL WANT MY GODDAMN BEER

[DevGIB]

ok yeh i understand, can i ask a fav then, if anyone has a last known working copy of 096-distro to upload it to a svn somewhere so that the comunity can continue working on it? one thats seperate from the 097 upgrade

[tekproxy]

You can still get the 096 distro from the SVN. It sits there happily in my releases directory.

Austin is right, there is much that could be done with no knowledge of scripting. NPCs must be defined, and there are a lot of them. If everyone did a few, or a category, it would keep someone from doing them all and going a little crazy. Just grab a copy of the distro if you don't already have it, and head over to the brainAI package and look at how NPCs are defined. Then check out this link here to see all of the NPCs:
http://uo.stratics.com/hunters/index.shtml

And if there are any OSI experts out there that wouldn't mind me asking some hard questions, or perhaps someone that has an account with OSI and can check, I could use your help.

[DevGIB]

ok next question is if im now thinking about helping out with the distro... which one should i help with pol096 or pol097?? and also as for the 096 distro still working apparently the people from my shard downloaded the distro from the svn and when they ran starthere.bat it told them to jump on the 097 bandwagon... i havent checked it out for myself but is this true? im not sure thats all.

[Yukiko]

ICQ me an addy to have it shipped to Austin. And your prefferred brand from bevmo.com.

[Marilla]

Hey, Gib; Maybe others would disagree, but here's my thoughts on which to work on;

For now, I would say that it might be best to work on the 096 Distro, on the principle that 096 is here, and done feature-wise. Many things done for 096 will be able to be transferred over to 097, with just whatever changes are needing to be done for 097 core changes.

In fact, I'd say it'd be difficult to try to work too deeply on an 097 distro without intimate knowledge of how and what will be going into 097.

But, that's maybe just me

[tekproxy]

The 096 distro is not done. It was only partially complete and was simply renamed to 097 when work on the new core started. Since then, there have been many improvements and additions to 097. Working on 096 would be a waste of time.

[Shinigami]

[Marilla]

I'm not sure why the 096 would have been renamed, and 096 skipped. We're not expecting 097 to be out next month or something, are we? I mean, how can people work in depth on a distro when the features aren't even solidified, yet?


I really think that 096 needs a distro. I think just skipping it would be a big mistake. But again, that's my opinion.

[tekproxy]

I'd be willing to bet that the 097 core will be available before the 097 distro will be finished. This is because core releases (unless I totally missed something) will be more frequent but with less changes, but the distro on the other hand is completely new--quite a massive undertaking for just a few people. Well, mostly just Austin. Why not just help with the 097 distro as soon as a beta core becomes available and then when it's finished everyone can use the 097 core and the 097 distro and be happy and sing songs?

In the off chance that the 097 distro is finished before the core then the 097 distro could just be downgraded which could probably be done with a clever perl script and some minor tweaks.

As I said earlier, the 096 code is inferior to the 097 code--not just built for a different core. If you write something for the 096 distro then you are knowingly writing code for an inferior system. Isn't that hard for you to do? If you make a change or fix a bug in the 096 SVN, it may have already been fixed in 097 and possibly fixed better than you fixed it because Austin fixed it and a lot of the distro is his code.

It would probably be easier to finish the 097 distro and downgrade to 096 core or just use the 097 core if it's out by then--and it probably will be.

If you disagree with anything I've said, that's fine. Just work on the distro however you want and figure out the best way to spend your efforts on your own. I'd rather people help than talk about the best way to help on the forums.

[DeiviD]

gotta agree with tek in that