Hi,

seeing the seeming lack of progress regarding the development of Uthgard (exhibit 1: patch notes from the past year), I have been thinking about ways that the community could help out.

The problem to me right now seems to be the rather lengthy process that is required to get into a position in which you can productively work on anything remotely sensitive (i.e. the code). For most people around here, even with good knowledge of C#, this is probably too much of a hassle. However, looking at other collaborative online projects, I found that making the code public and letting people work on it on their own time, can be quite fruitful at times. This assumes of course that there are still 'core' developers that take care of working in the patches and which focus on some of the more integral fixes, rather than the implementation of missing skills etc.

Having looked only very briefly at the DOL code base (which I assume is at least somewhat similar to Uthgard), I of course understand that this may not be entirely straight-forward to set-up. But I also think we can agree that the current situation (or rather the situation over the past year or so) is equal to stagnation. This project is currently stuck in a major transition between NF and OF settings and has been in a very unfinished and unsatisfying state for a long time now. So if getting more core developers on board is not working (for whatever reasons), maybe it is time to think about new ways of moving the Uthgard project forward? Setting up Uthgard as a git project (forking, patching etc) with a bare-bone database (therefore protecting much of work that went into it over the years) may therefore be worth considering.

/Lasa

Nice offer, but no need to discuss it.
Was discussed over and over and uthgard code won't become public in any way. They don't want neither public codeview nor public bugtracker view to prevent bugabuse and 'chaos' with unproofed bugreports and fixes like on some other freeshareds.

Actually Blue was in the DOL project in the past and uthgard and DOL project still communicate with each other but the code basis of both project isn't very similar nowadays.

deutsch bitte

There is really only two possibilities for people interested in improving the code.

A) They are SERIOUS about it.
B) They are not.


In the first case, which means spending a lot of time and energy, you could as well join Uthgard DEV team, get the insight of other staff members, team up, and help a large playerbase by doing so.
In the second case, you are of use to noone.

I agree with Gorim that the main "benefits" of open source code would be people ranting about parts of code they find inadequate, or people sneaking for possible bugs/security holes. Both cases are not really desired

Holsten +1

Bitte auf deutsch, oder verschieben.

Jeder weiss doch was kommt wenn man mal in englischsprachigen Forenteilen deutsch schreibt, da werden schon die Fackeln und Mistgabeln zur Hand genommen

a) yes, someone please move this to the english forum section - my bad

b) While I see where Gorim et al. are coming from, I am not sure I agree.
We have long-standing issues regarding how e.g. absorb factors into damage of 2H weapons, how block works, that amnesia doesn't drop speed or doesn't cancel quickcasts and whatnot. Right now, trying to discuss these issues with Blue requires endless debates, long tests etc, partly because noone knows how all these things look in code. And in the end, more often than not nothing happens for months on end. I think for some forum users, it would be very helpful if we could move discussions from vague descriptions into concrete suggestions regarding formulae. Likewise, as far as I understand DOL code (and while Uthgard has moved away from that, it should still bear some resemblance), it should be possible to accommodate smaller, freelance contributions without locking people into full-fledged developer position.

I honestly think that some people here underestimate the power of community.

Right now, having one person working on the code in secrecy is obviously not yielding results - no offense meant and we are all grateful for the work that went into Uthgard over the years. But it is a fact that Uthgard hasn't seen any real improvements in over a year, I would say. And don't get me wrong, i am not suggesting to put the code on the forums - but creating a separate online portal where users can sign up, look at the code and make suggestions may yet be useful to the server and to Blue. It may even get more people interested in contributing, in the long run.

shade wrote:In the first case, which means spending a lot of time and energy, you could as well join Uthgard DEV team, get the insight of other staff members, team up, and help a large playerbase by doing so.

There is a big difference between:
a) take a look at code, play around, fix something (or make something new) and submit the results to an committer, who will or will not use your code.
b) spend time to join a nearly closed group, become a member, get some code, be a member, work on something, be a member, and explain why something is not done yet, and ... huh ... be a member

You have no idea about a developers life

How many good developers have choosen to join the Uthgard-DEV-Team? -> maybe ... 2?
How many good developers have choosen to work on something and submit good work to open source projects? -> maybe ... more than 2?
And how many of these developers have joined the teams after a while? maybe ...



Bugabuse: Great ... you just have discovered a bug.
False Fixes: Organization fault
Chaos: Organization fault
Flame about bad code: Great ... now you know which parts are bad.


In my opinion, make some code segments or some interfaces available to work with. ... Test it.

Smooth wrote:a) take a look at code, play around, fix something (or make something new) and submit the results to an committer, who will or will not use your code.

From a DEV point of view, this would probably take me twice the work/time to double-check the send-in code compared to coding it myself.

BUT what would destroy even more of the developers "precious" time would be dealing with all the useless code snippets, suggestions, rants, accutions etc. concerning the public source code. People would spam the board here with what "they" consider the right impelentation, I can already imagine in what manner (that's the nature of boards), and as a DEV you would have the choice to either ignore that stuff entirely or spend a good amount of time reading it and separating the crap from the useful stuff. I bet by the time you would have found one useful submission, you would have fixed 3 bugs yourself.

Smooth wrote:Flame about bad code: Great ... now you know which parts are bad.

People would just flame about ANY part of the code.

And one more thing: Making sourcecode public is not a thing you can just "test" and see how it turns out. Once published, it will haunt you forever.