Glest forks to join forces?

[Hagekura]

I would like to express to both teams my deepest gratitude for you make such a courageous decision!
I can't imagine how great the merged engine would be!

[Zoythrus]

Woah! i cant believe it! my prayers have been answered! the two forks are going to merge!

i am so happy that this is happening! finally we can have a game with MG's multiplayer and GAE's features! i congratulate silnarm and softcoder on their brave decision! thank you for unifying the community again!

 

[titi]

I also want to try a merge!
As I will be in hospital from monday to tuesday and I don't have much time until then , just some statements on this:

- lets make a meeting in irc and discuss! ( after tuesday! )
- before we merge GAE/Megaglest must reach a pretty stable state before we start to merge. Best is a release for both of them very soon.
  And beside of the fact that this will help us merge , it will shorten the waiting time for players for MegaGAE.

There are 3 things which are very important for softcoder and me:
- multiplayer must work(crossplatform)!
- SVN/Git should be playable/stable all the time, (at least we should try to keep that) and not broken for half a year
- the megapack should really be included as its the most fun/complete data we have.

In my opinion the (somehow)stability of SVN/Git is VERY important for such a project! Only by always try to offer a pretty stable state you get all the testers which are willing to play/test with svn and report bugs. If they always crash you will kill their fun doing so and they are lost. Only testers will give us the stability we need to offer something fun to play for all! Beside of this this is MY personal motivation to work for glest, I like to play it!

update: I forgot one VERY important thing!
Code and data must be open/available all the time! So !!NEVER!! a hidden Git or anything like this! ( Data should be cc-by-sa v3 )

[-Archmage-]

Crap, I can't remember how I get into blogspot.

Titi, you want to call it MegaGAE? Most of us here think we should just call it Glest 4.0!

[ultifd]

What? Hospital? Another Hockey accident?  :'(

Eh, MegaGAE is kinda too long. Lets just try asking the Glest Team if we could call it Glest...4.0

Also, wouldn't the pathfinder have problems once everything is merged?

[-Archmage-]

What? Hospital? Another Hockey accident?  Cry

Whatever it is, it sounds like he'll live.

Eh, MegaGAE is kinda too long. Lets just try asking the Glest Team if we could call it Glest...4.0

Also, wouldn't the pathfinder have problems once everything is merged?

I think the GAE pathfinder was perfect, I don't remember having any problems, I think that one should be used.

[ultifd]

I think the GAE pathfinder was perfect, I don't remember having any problems, I think that one should be used.

It's not perfect, but it is a bit better than the MG one. Also, we've been trying to implement the pathfinder to MG for months; for some reason it always got out of synch. (Now the work on that is even delayed more, because we have our own problem for now...or maybe its fixed. (morph feature was buggy)  
That's why I asked this question  
I suppose since some people hate the megapack/don't think it is good enougth/has slow/bad internet/want "future glest" to be more of an engine and less of a game, there will be 2 versions of future glest, one with it, one with out?

[hailstone]

I agree to a merge but I think both projects should still exist. By name GAE is an engine so why not have the target audience be modders and the MG project can focus on players. The teams would combine and we work together on both projects or GAE team creates a project for FPM as a total conversion. From an outsider's view not much would have changed but we still get the benefits of a merge.

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This is what I see as the benefits of this setup:
- All the work setting up projects, promotion (and buying domain for MG?) is not wasted
- Everybody is working on the same codebase and engine documentation
- Less problems with conflicting gameplay decisions
- Focus on a single audience - modders for GAE and players for MG. Although I want to note that the player will still need to be thought of with GAE in terms of features but it won't have a pretty website, player manual, the best GUI layout/appearence or tweaked gameplay, etc.
- Distribution of interests (ie if someone is more interested in gameplay they can create a total conversion or work on MG and vice versa).
- Better code reuse. With the game part separate the engine can be linked with tools.

The difficulty would be in determining common features vs game (total conversion) specific features but it would still be something to sort out if the projects were combined, although maybe to a lessor extent (think game and shared_lib).

I agree with everything in Titi's post. Although I want to add that the GAE coding conventions is important to me.

[titi]

For the coding conventions:

- Code formatting: I will use whatever the eclipse cdt code formatter can do  .  I am not really willing to format code manually!

- ( maybe I missed this in the GAE coding convention but: Line endings should always be unix style, never windows style! )

- about all the #define/preprocessor usage in GAE we will have to discuss and you will need some work to convince me that this is good and useful.   Typically debuggers/development GUIs don't like this stuff a lot ....

[Omega]

I agree to a merge but I think both projects should still exist. By name GAE is an engine so why not have the target audience be modders and the MG project can focus on players. The teams would combine and we work together on both projects or GAE team creates a project for FPM as a total conversion. From an outsider's view not much would have changed but we still get the benefits of a merge.

I disagree with this. I want one unified project, and the two separate old ideas to be completely scrapped to ensure we have only one engine. This means no experimental branch either, as mods would certainly try to take advantage of new, experimental features, causing the community to once more become split between different branches, even if of the same type.

[John.d.h]

I'm not really sure what's going on here.  Is the current suggestion to have the new merged engine stand alone as GAE, and then have Megaglest (including the megapack, server, IRC channel, etc.) bundled as a complete game using that engine?  If so, I think that works quite well.

[tomreyn]

I think there is no single current suggestion at this point.

Before details of the merge are discussed, it may be a good idea to define the process of how an agreement will be reached.

I think the current modus of open discussion will do more harm than good in the long run, and make the whole process much more time intensive and a much more frustrating experience than it needs to be. With so many voices speaking out directly this process is less likely to become constructive, reaching compromises (which will be neccessary) will not be easy, and thus coming into agreement will be, too.

So a different approach may be better. I think an approach which is based on representatives makes most sense.

I therefore suggest that both projects name 2 or 3 people who will act as project liaisons, gathering and representing a condensed point of view of the projects' core developers and contributors. The next step would be to setup a place/utility where only these people can meet and discuss, taking into account input provided by each projects' communities.

The most suitable liaisons for MegaGlest are surely titi_linux and softcoder. I think it would be helpful if GAE could also name two or three people who will directly take part in future talks regarding the merge. Everyone else can use the influence they already have within the projects to have their opinions represented within the talks.

Softcoder already suggested an IRC meeting. I am happy to set this up for you if all liaisons agree. If the liaisons of the GAE project think another way of having the discussion is more suitable, please say so, too.

If the core developers of both projects consider my suggestion to be flawed and you have constructive criticism, please also let it be heard.

[Zoythrus]

I think there is no single current suggestion at this point.

Before details of the merge are discussed, it may be a good idea to define the process of how an agreement will be reached.

I think the current modus of open discussion will do more harm than good in the long run, and make the whole process much more time intensive and a much more frustrating experience than it needs to be. With so many voices speaking out directly this process is less likely to become constructive, reaching compromises (which will be neccessary) will not be easy, and thus coming into agreement will be, too.

So a different approach may be better. I think an approach which is based on representatives makes most sense.

I therefore suggest that both projects name 2 or 3 people who will act as project liaisons, gathering and representing a condensed point of view of the projects' core developers and contributors. The next step would be to setup a place/utility where only these people can meet and discuss, taking into account input provided by each projects' communities.

The most suitable liaisons for MegaGlest are surely titi_linux and softcoder. I think it would be helpful if GAE could also name two or three people who will directly take part in future talks regarding the merge. Everyone else can use the influence they already have within the projects to have their opinions represented within the talks.

Softcoder already suggested an IRC meeting. I am happy to set this up for you if all liaisons agree. If the liaisons of the GAE project think another way of having the discussion is more suitable, please say so, too.

If the core developers of both projects consider my suggestion to be flawed and you have constructive criticism, please also let it be heard.

i agree with Tom here.

would it be ok with the rest of the GAE people if i took up one of these positions?

[ultifd]

If we're going with this "censored" discussion, and that it's going to be softcoder and titi; I think it would be best for it to be the GAE developers themselves. Silnarm, Hailstone, and Yggdrasil. Or perhaps just 2 of them, to be fair.

I'm not really sure what's going on here.  Is the current suggestion to have the new merged engine stand alone as GAE, and then have Megaglest (including the megapack, server, IRC channel, etc.) bundled as a complete game using that engine?  If so, I think that works quite well.

I suppose the future discussion will determine that.

[John.d.h]

I don't know how I feel about this.  Obviously it should be the developers who make the final decisions since they're the ones who make it all happen, but the ultimate goal of any game is to suit its publics -- in this case players and modders -- so I think the community should have a sizable amount of input on non-technical issues.  If you were programming a web browser, you'd want to know what the end user community wants, right?

[ultifd]

Yeah, that would be the best... but I don't think part of the community can really handle it though. If people try their best to, sure I guess. But recently, and not so recently, they haven't really showed that they could handle it. And even the people who seem that they could handle it, it might turn into something bad...

[Zoythrus]

well, on these representative teams, we should have a person or two who is not a programmer, to represent the general public. maybe one person who is MG and the other who is GAE?

[ultifd]

well, on these representative teams, we should have a person or two who is not a programmer, to represent the general public. maybe one person who is MG and the other who is GAE?

But just one person isn't enough. If we're going have people that are not programmers, then everyone might as well be included... After all, I guess it's not that hard to be considerate. Hopefully, if so.

[Yggdrasil]

Oh, man. Don't make it more complicated than it is already. I'm with good old open source rule: Who codes, decides. The discussion is mostly technically and i don't think modders have enough knowledge about the code.

I suggest all devs gather on one mailing list and discuss things there. I prefer mailing list because we're scattered around the world in different timezones and i expect more than one discussion popping up on the road. It keeps things more organized.

My proposal: Get on the sf.net mailing list of GAE (temporary, till we decide where to host the merged project) till wednesday! So the MG devs have time to subscribe and titi is also back. Opinions?

[softcoder]

Agreed, I've made a subscribe to glestae-devel

*Suggestion:

As a sign of working together, I suggest for all newcomers to this community we point them to GAE for single player and MG for multi-player depending on what they are looking for.

Thanks

[Conzar]

How do we subscribe to the mailing list?

[softcoder]

Goto this url and enter your email address and pick a password.

https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/glestae-devel

Thanks

[tomreyn]

You can also follow the discussion without subscribing, though, since there are public mailing list archives for every mailing list hosted on sourceforge (at least with a default setup).

Here's the list archive of glestae-dev:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=glestae-devel

[Mr War]

I think this is great. The only thing I'm qualified to add to this techie convo is my encouragement though. Good luck. 

[Trappin]

Who codes, decides

This is the only way the job can be finished properly. Looking forward to a unified Glest game client and community.

The rest will work itself out.