Miscellaneous: An Appeal to Improve Contributed Research & Development: A User Story

[DeathsSilkyMist]

You didn't prove anyone wrong, nor am I trying to troll you. You simply aren't listening.

I didn't say "You are wasting your time because P99 code is too custom to be worth trying to contribute changes."

I said the reason why the staff do not open source P99 for other people to work with is because keeping their custom code closed source is how they keep P99 popular. Once they share the code, P99 will die from other servers spinning up with the same code.

You have convinced yourself that almost all of the P99 code is the same as EQEMU, so what is the risk in giving it to people? The answer is in the history of P99 and EQEMU. If it was so easy to replicate, someone would have done it.

If you are really as talented a software engineer as you seem to claim, try making your own EQEMU server that is similar to P99, and see how that works out for you[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] You clearly know what you think is right.

[azxten]

Oh you're talking about open sourcing? I didn't know you came from that thread. I'm here talking about what is in this thread which has nothing to do with open source.

[DeathsSilkyMist]

Originally Posted by azxten [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Oh you're talking about open sourcing? I didn't know you came from that thread. I'm here talking about what is in this thread which has nothing to do with open source.

No, I didn't come from that thread, I am responding to this thread directly.

Open sourcing is related though. Your suggestion seems to be to try and give our community a more direct means to fix the bugs, so the core team doesn't have to bear the burden alone. This would speed up the process of getting bug fixes out, as well as changes you deem to be researched well enough.

Doing this would require parts of the P99 code base to become open sourced. As I mentioned earlier, P99 obviously has enough custom code in it between the server code, the database, their own custom tools, etc. to make it very difficult to replicate in a reasonable amount of time. Basic history of the EQEMU servers and P99 bears this out.

Unfortunately, open sourcing the custom components of P99 would kill the server, since that is the only thing P99 has to make it different from the other EQEMU servers. This means you must rely on the core team of programmers to do the majority of fixes.

And as I stated before, the client is a black box. Fixing many bugs will require client fixes that may not be doable. Your decompiled code from the mac version will help determine how the code should work, but the clients are still built differently, due to them being different platform and created in different years. I don't think anyone knows precisely how much the client code changed over the years, and what the differences are between Mac and PC. The decompiled function you have may not even exist in titanium, which means you would need to find where the equivalent function is.

I don't think you appreciate how difficult it is to backwards engineer a product simply from the binaries and packet sniffing. It is a slow and tedious process.