petition for zerver to stay

[Manoa]

to my unfortunate surprise it has come to my attention that a long time spring developer and a significant contributor to the community decided to quit, and remove all of his code from the development branches, I don't know the full story and I was not involved, and I call to all who disagree with this decision to step up and express your opinion.

I will start: in my opinion, no matter how inappropriate zerver's opinion might have been regarding the future of the engine's multi-threading system, I see many benefits from keeping him part of the development circle and allow his work to continue, players have benefited from his work. it should be noted, that the spring project is in a great lack of engine developers, and for that reason alone, we need him

[PepeAmpere]

He has not left us forever. Hes with us in a bunker, with all members of Underground Liberation Army (ULA), and working on notAspring!

[Silentwings]

I don't know the full story and I was not involved, and I call to all who disagree with this decision to step up and express your opinion.

Why don't you just do what everyone else did and read the forum threads?

[Forboding Angel]

Manoa, you don't know shit. He was restricted for very good reasons.

God you *A people are so completely clueless.

[AntiAllez]

@ ForebodingAngel

if you're such a walking oracle then enlighten us about

your imagery seems rather helpless

[Forboding Angel]

Or you could just read, how 'bout that?

[dansan]

http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=30162
http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=30192

[Forboding Angel]

I should clarify that I do not dislike zerver, however, his actions of late have been detrimental to spring, and his ongoing conflict with every other spring developer must be addressed sooner rather than later.

[PicassoCT]

Love makes blind, love for your own project can have the same effect. He loves mt-sim, thus a meeting in the middle is impossible.
There is only divorce or enternal fighting.

[Forboding Angel]

We all love mt-sim, just his idea of implementation is not ideal.

[albator]

I would rather vote for MT to be the main branch, rather than voting for something else.
I am not sure I followed the full story but even if zerver did not did all he was supposed to in order to make MT easily mergable, or even if everything should be restarted from scratch, i just think it should be done.

Since zerver has lot of knowledge about it, he should stay (even if MT is not plan at short term)

And the reason why spring should go MT is kinda obvious for me since I play ffa and that MT or not is like day and night for some of those kind of game: I can see the difference right now with my 4 yo i5. Of course most of us don't

I somehow cannot see why other dev disagree about it: CPU power frequency is not supposed to increase anymore by order of magnitude and it is all about MT scaling now. Their argument is (as far as i understood, please correct me if I am wrong) to keep it simple. It makes sense ofc. But at a point they will just have to go for it. If spring get more complex, it will then be even more of a mess. So, does not it look like saving time on the long term ?

[Jools]

What's the difference in time usage if the one alternative is 3 devs working on normal spring and zerver working on mt branch, and the other alternative is just 3 devs working on normal spring and none working on mt?

With only 4 (or 3 devs) I think you should do anything you can to keep him. We need all the manpower that we can have.

[malric]

Without making an in-depth analysis myself, what I think is reasonable to do is to trust the current developers they are making the correct choices.

People "asking" other developers to work on mt-sim seems a bit rude to me. You can ask of course to have more performance, but performance can be achieved in many ways. You can also argue that you checked the code and mt-sim is good. And, finally, you can compile zerver fork and play that version...

[smoth]

why bother summarizing? just go read threads before you start a petition. God this community is such a waste of time, so many of you would rather hamstring everything just because it gives some performance increase in BA.

BA isn't going to stay a dinosaur for much longer, and when it evolves, you knuckledraggers will understand why it is important for spring to be done correctly. The engine is no longer at a point where these sort of things can just be freely ignored, when it comes to performance all the low hanging shit is done. There is an alternative MT being worked on, I say give it time. geeze, almost got me going into an explanation. No, I am not doing that because you won't read it anyway or I'll just repeat it for the next player who hasn't a clue and doesn't bother to read up.

It is better in the long run, I was unaware that zerver was pulling all his code. I will be asking around about this because I see zerver as a bigger man than that. I think you are spreading unsubstantiated rumors or perhaps generalizing important details which comes out in a negative way AGAINST zerver. Perhaps you should edit your post to be more clear? Anyway, it's done, time will tell.

*edit* just checked, all of his code was NOT removed.

[zerver]

a significant contributor to the community decided to quit, and remove all of his code from the development branches

Two things wrong:

• I did not quit, I was banned - two times in fact. First by kloot (came as a complete surprise), then by abma.
• I did not remove any code, and would never do that. It was the other devs that removed my code.

The first ban was definitely not based on a democratic voting among the devs, and I think the same applies to the second ban, because no one said anything to me except abma.

He was restricted for very good reasons

In short:

• I have more MT experience and skill than all other active devs in this project combined
• The other devs did not like the current spring-multithreaded implementation for a very long time and wanted to remove it. They are annoyed because they accidentally create crashbugs due to lack of understanding of the inner workings.
• I recently made Spring MT which has multithreaded simulation and totally outperforms the official release, and I mentioned it a couple of times when people complained about the low performance of the Spring 94 pathfinder, but was then accused of "propaganda".
• I have accepted that the other developers don't like the complexity of the MT code, but given the extreme performance gains found during benchmarking, and because I know there is more to come, I cannot let it go.
• I therefore suggested that we keep MT in a branch, maintained by me, and either include two separate builds in the release (server decides which build clients use), or apply an MT "patch" before every release so that users can enjoy MT. In other words, I am doing MT, the other devs are doing develop, and we release develop patched with MT.
• I thought this was a generous offer, because it implies lots of extra work for me, but it appears it was not accepted, because I was instead banned and MT was deleted.
• I made it clear that I can only contribute to this project if we can somehow include MT in the official releases.

I let you decide if these are good reasons for a ban. If you don't think so, you can always come play an MT game.

[Manoa]

I understand that some of the developers have no problem at all with letting you continue your work as it was until now

[Peet]

this constructive image directed at noeverybody

[jK]

The first ban was definitely not based on a democratic voting among the devs, and I think the same applies to the second ban, because no one said anything to me except abma.

It is.
Kloot discussed a lot, abma was the executive and others were informed too. I gave my okay, but was too lazy to discuss it further, cause everything was said.

edit: won't respond any further, cause everything has said and you are looping. It's too severe to get down to a fanboi discussion level ...

[knorke]

for technical discussion there is:
http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=30162
for random blabla on mt there is:
http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=30192

does not really need third thread, so closed.