The Bus Factor, 0.4.3 and the 30 minutes

I love you for your dedication, matricks. It's really great that you take time for Teeworlds, even though you have much to do that's probably more important. Not many have the capacity or will to take that step. It's really, really great.

Thank you, and let's hope you won't get hit by a bus.

Well honestly I must say, this is the opensource project were development seems most distanced and remote than any other I've yet seen.

This is almost a 1-man project not only, because its only 1 man who is really capable and interested to do stuff, its also one becuase it seems to have problems to let others in. And No, "hey, start hanging around in IRC" does not cut it. There are people who really like just to code, and no hang around in IRC. See the forum structure for example. Is there are place called "Got a useful patch? Post it here for review." I can understand if you want a sourcecopy where a small group has ultimate control over, otherwise it can start to get very chaotic pretty fast, especially with low quality contributions. See the disucssion forum its called "Questions and discussions about upcoming features" not "Contribute to development here". You seem to some subconcious degree not wanting an open development model. So constrive suggestion. Do make an idea list as topics people could pick stuff from to do. Not in the docs, right in the forum as seperate topics, people can comment it, like when they start trying something. So you have less chance of doublework collisions. Create a place where people can send patches to, to be reviewed to be included into the standard source tree. And No, we don't need a stupid system to be designed. There are 1000ooo... opensource code management systems out there, one is sure good enough for teeworlds, it sufficides to have createn an own build system instead of a standard way. No need to create yet another management system. All you need is IF there is a patch there to take the 30 minutes to review that patch, and either take it, or comment it why it doesnt fit into the standard sourcetree, or give suggestions what the author should improve on it, but don't ever just ignore it. That would IMHO make far more senese than yet taking the 30 minutes to even grow deeper into the 1-man project thing. Thats BTW the way linux workeda long time, people send in patches, at first Linus reviews, later they had experts for various parts of the kernel.

Currently as I can see myself as coder, you feel the remoteness, and when you want to it, you start to do mods. Because there isn't much else, and again I know the standard answer here is go into IRC. IRC might have worked well in a small groupteam, where you might have known eachother very closely. But as also the coder audience grows, you really might want to use an asynchronous communication protocoll.

Just my 2 cents on how to spend the 30 minutes better, than "range from coding on 0.5.0, writing a journal entry, fixing something that is broken on the forum"

Dude.. stay away from buses, i like the game ^^

Seriously speaking i can't wait for that new version. It's a great achievement and major update. I just want to thank matricks,somerunce and especially datag for making this as soon as possible.Not to forget all the people who came up with the helpful improvements.(Of course thanking Landil too, for working his ass off for maps/tilesets )

And to comment on what catpaw said, i guess recruting skilled volunteer-coders is inevitable if you want to release 0.5 soon..

catpaw: I've started to write bam a long time ago before teeworlds because I wasn't satisfied with the existing solutions (and yeah, I looked at many of em). Teeworlds just happens to be the first more public source that uses it.

What in the source code do you feel that I could have used existing tools/libraries for? I tend to use them where I see them fit like portaudio, glfw, zlib, pnglite and wavpack.

We won't change SCM system now. Subversion gives us what we need and git have some problems with windows (could however be fixed now).

Here are some answers from me and matricks.

SDL is under GPL which matricks don't really like. Besides, it's very big for the little things Teeworlds uses.

Yes, we need another license. matricks have spent a LONG time (like 3 months) on choosing a license for Teeworlds, including talk with an Ubuntu license expert (if I don't remember wrong). There are reasons why he didn't choose GPL. What's the problem with the current license?

The TCP thing matricks has though of, but it would be better if everything went through the same socket. That makes it easier to configure the firewall.

The reason for mem_copy and such functions is that on specific platforms you'll want to implement an own. The io-functions exist to clean up and fix the crap that happens on some systems when you forget the b-flag.

The reason for implementing this is to do heap checking on platforms that don't have gcc/glibc, for example Windows.

Vector libraries often are too big for the little usage Teeworlds has. "It's stupid to kill flies with bazokas" to quote matricks.

The difference is that you can make a completely other game by changing the files in the game-dir and keeping the engine (simplified). The file prefix is really helpful when you for example read that it's the file gs_server.cpp you should look in. By using these letters anyone can find the file directly, and that makes working with multiple files much easier.

Documentation is on its way. Since Teeworlds is in alpha state right now, it would be a waste of time to document everything, especially the network part, since it changes a lot from version to version. There already are a documentation in the trunk (for 0.5), feel free to check it out.

The reason of the renaming is that Teeworlds use both C and C++ files and that's a simple way of separating them.

Thanks for suggesting stuff and such, but please don't expect too much this early in the game's developing.
/Somerunce

I know about the GPL "issue", but technically speaking SDL would be the better choice IMHO. I mean the GPL doesn't hurt you, if you have a compatible license (that is all "free as in beer without omnimous restrictions)

I didn't talk about GPL, I said X11/MIT, I don't see where the current (in SVN) "teeworlds license" is in effects any different than X11/MIT, except worded differently, and have to be rechecked with every other license out there if compatible or not. So why not use the standard license X11/MIT to keep the jungle a little smaller. Just because we were talking about using "standard tools".

Its not so difficult to enable TCP and UDP of the same port number. Other games/applicatios have this too, some since decades (speaking e.g. of DNS). And it works.

No, on what system I would ever want to implement an own mem_copy routine? There are standards out there. And memcpy is a pretty strong standard, which machine/OS hasn't got that? Its part of the C standard!

Well windows has gcc/glibc available for it. Google for "gnuwin32"

Honestly no, The linker will either just pick out the routines used. So why not use a standard bazoka, if it does the job pretty well already?

Yes, but at least as far as I've seen there are quite some teeworlds specific stuff in engine as well...

Well wherre would you read this. How about reading you should look into the file game/server/server.cpp. Path and prefix is IMHO unnecessary duplication of data.

As I've wrote, you don't need detailed documentations in every detail. But 1 little sentence per function is not thaaaat much a work, and would do wonders.

As I explained, if you keep the naminig convention of header files being named after the classes, and classes having the first letter a capital letter, you can easily destinguish c from c++ headers.

And again, there will be mechanics in place for that, not just until we can properly maintain that workflow. Nothing about collaboration is automatic, and the only thing worse than not accepting community patches is saying you do, but then not taking the time to review and implement them.

I believe we're more or less on the same page here.

I really respect u catpaw for ur technical knowledge and im almost sure u want to help but maybe criticizing the people who do all their best to code the game we all love is not the best thing u could do. I see u mentioned a lot of things that can be improved but u could have done the same in a lot calmer way :>. Those people are working hard for our entertainment and even if they do some things wrong instead of putting them down try to help and show them the right path ( incase u know it ).

Calm down, some re-organizing is being made, nothing to worry about, no explosions, I promise..

I see the new forums and the rename topic description of the general development, nice work

Nice to hear that! I hope you will make it easier to open up servers! That's bothering me for a while.