Before I get to Replying to whats been said, a brief introduction and statement...
Who the hell are you and why should I listen?
I'm a professional game programmer currently working in the industry. I've got a game shipping next month, actually. I've been programming for more years than I care to recall. I've been in the UO community for a decade. I've been using UO emulators for eight years. So with those and other qualifications I wont list (because bragging is only fun for so long), I am 100% against POL going open source.
What is popular is not always right, and what is right is not always popular.
As for the RUO vs POL, I'm going to pass on a lesson from my time at AskChopper... for those that dont know, AskChopper.com is the UltimaOnline Bug Site. Yes, we handle and publish bugs for player run shards too. As such, the AC community has spent MANY weekends terrorizing RUO shards due to the numerous heinous and gaping bugs in the RUO server. Not bugs like memory leaks, or core slowdowns, but fun bugs like placing houses in town, infinite money, breaking vendors, etc. In all the years I've been running that site, the very few POL bugs to be submitted were shard specific and thus a result of bad scripts, not a bad core, whereas the RUO bugs we publish are generally usable on every major RUO shard.
____________________________________________________________
Austin wrote:The starter originally came to me in a private message asking for POL to be open sourced. He said he has programmers who would like to do stuff with the core such as make it support multiple processors, fix remaining memory leaks and add many other features.
I told him that he should have his programmers talk to Adam, Shini, Muad and I to get them onboard to help the community.
Hey, thats how I got here.
ncrsn wrote:Would I contribute back to the community?
To be honest, I'm not sure. Right now forums are close to dead and developers rarely participate to discussions, giving signal that they don't really believe in this either. Is there anyone who would care if I DID do some incredible coremod? Would I take the shot and try to revive community spending my own oh-so-expensive time?
Would you?
I understand the fear that if POL's source were released, community would die. Is there anything else beside the core that keeps us (not counting newbies) checking forums every now and then? If so, what it might be?
...
While doing that, I don't really care if you turn POL open sourced or keep it closed. As long as someone is making it better.
Excellent points, really.
I figure the breakdown is something like this:
99% of people will never look at the source, and if they did, wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of it.
0.9% of the people will understand it, and fiddle around with it, but ultimately abandon the effort because people are lazy.
0.08% of the people will make a modification that affects something, but it'll be shard-specific.
0.01% of the people will make a modification that benefits everyone, but they'll keep it to themselves.
0.01% of the people will actually make modifications that benefit everyone. Hi, I'm the lastest one.
elenaran wrote:I would like to add in some things that I've mentioned to core devs before that they had no interest in adding to the core:
- XML/mysql support for data files
- Fixing UOG/connectUO packet support
- Better implementation for custom boats
Like I said, the devs have no desire to put this stuff in core, so "Just join the core team to help develop for the community" isn't really a solution here.
You speak against yourself. The devs, myself included, work on what we want to work on. Same as everyone else. If, as a dev, you wanted to work on SQL integration, guess what... you'd work on it! and your statement of "devs have no desire to put this stuff in" becomes invalid because, again, you'd be a dev.
I joined the dev team because I didn't feel like bitching about things that I wanted in the core, I felt like doing something about it. I fixed a couple bugs that'd been in for quite awhile, changed some improper procedure handling, and yes, even added brand new functionality. Wishing and whining doesn't do a whole lot....
chainsawcharlie wrote:Indeed - if the community is so noncontributing to development with scripts (and I can agree that it's not that active in that aspect), what harm could it cause to allow developer teams to add new content, fix bugs, add support for those things elenaran mentioned?
I'd be more than willing to contribute to the community. I've looked over some of my past escript work but unfortunately most of my relevant developments are inherent to specific major systems of the shard I develop in. Any utilities that can be widely used, I'll gladly post for public use, though, certainly. But I do believe that open sourced core development would greatly increase the contributions (in both quantity and quality) - hey, maybe I could put that C knowledge that I have in the backstore to some use after all!
Follow the comparison. No one works on Dev Scripts because everyone's doing their own thing, and most of it doesn't have anything to do with everyone else's project. THEREFORE, if (barring my earlier numbers) everyone were to start modding the core, everyone would be doing their own thing, and most of it wouldn't have anything to do with everyone else's project.
How many people do you really think would jump into core dev saying "OH oh oh! I cant WAIT to fix bugs!"? (okay, there was me, but even still I added something to POL specifically because I needed it in my shard [it just so happened that its useful to others, too, so Shinigami decided it was worth keeping].)