Engine fork and Ingame Community

Engine fork and Ingame Community

Various things about Spring that do not fit in any of the other forums listed below, including forum rules.

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abma
Spring Developer
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Joined: 01 Jun 2009, 00:08

Engine fork and Ingame Community

Post by abma »

Byar doesn't use the spring engine any more: i'm undecided if this post is offtopic.

Can you explain why this post fits into the "Ingame Community"?
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PtaQ
Posts: 186
Joined: 15 Sep 2009, 10:40

Re: The Great Pro-Am Showdown coming on January 14th!

Post by PtaQ »

Thanks for reaching out abma. My reasoning for putting it in this forum was based on the fact that while technically you are correct, in terms of the actual interests of people, in practice, the byar community and vanilla Spring community still have more mutual area on the Venn diagram than their individual areas as far as I'm concerned.

Feel free to move it around if you disagree.
sprunk
Posts: 100
Joined: 29 Jun 2015, 07:36

Re: The Great Pro-Am Showdown coming on January 14th!

Post by sprunk »

BAR is absolutely using the Spring engine (and so is ZK for that matter), don't be dense.
raaar
Metal Factions Developer
Posts: 1094
Joined: 20 Feb 2010, 12:17

Re: The Great Pro-Am Showdown coming on January 14th!

Post by raaar »

I think they still fit here as part of a "wider spring community" (same as ZK), because:

- they use a recent fork of the spring engine that's MORE backwards compatible with the official 105.0 (and most games) than the official 106.0

- many of the people involved are the same that have been involved in dev work for spring engine and related content (tools, maps, etc.) over the past decade

- other games may want to use BAR105 engine builds on games hosted on the official server, at least temporarily. I'll use one on Metal Factions, are you going to put any restrictions on it on the server/forum?

(I'd rather use a build from an official branch instead of a build from the fork, if available, but there isn't one)
abma
Spring Developer
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Re: The Great Pro-Am Showdown coming on January 14th!

Post by abma »

sprunk wrote: 12 Jan 2023, 22:30 BAR is absolutely using the Spring engine (and so is ZK for that matter), don't be dense.
https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/sp ... ame-engine
abma
Spring Developer
Posts: 3798
Joined: 01 Jun 2009, 00:08

Re: The Great Pro-Am Showdown coming on January 14th!

Post by abma »

PtaQ wrote: 12 Jan 2023, 22:10 Thanks for reaching out abma. My reasoning for putting it in this forum was based on the fact that while technically you are correct, in terms of the actual interests of people, in practice, the byar community and vanilla Spring community still have more mutual area on the Venn diagram than their individual areas as far as I'm concerned.

Feel free to move it around if you disagree.
thanks for explaining + ok, lets see where the path goes.
sprunk
Posts: 100
Joined: 29 Jun 2015, 07:36

Re: The Great Pro-Am Showdown coming on January 14th!

Post by sprunk »

abma wrote: 12 Jan 2023, 23:45
sprunk wrote: 12 Jan 2023, 22:30 BAR is absolutely using the Spring engine (and so is ZK for that matter), don't be dense.
https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/sp ... ame-engine
Yes, don't you recognize it? That's Spring in everything but the name (and even the name is still Spring almost everywhere except that readme file).
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Forboding Angel
Evolution RTS Developer
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Re: The Great Pro-Am Showdown coming on January 14th!

Post by Forboding Angel »

My $0.02 on this is that the original reasoning is Childish in the least. To my knowledge, Ivand has asked for a merge more than once, and as I recall, there was at one time a PR rejected that would have resulted in a merge. Am I incorrect here?

This shows that there is the desire to maintain parity with Official spring. I don't think any of us really like the idea of just forking off (pardon the pun) and splitting the party. In my personal opinion you, Abma, bear some of the responsibility for the state of things as they are. To illustrate my point, here are a few things that line up, in my mind, that lead us where we are today...

1. Question is posed in the forum of whether to drop old ogl, even though there would be some pain points.
To this I was in support, providing that it was done gradually enough and plenty of help were provided to move our old stuff into the new. What actually happened was spring was split in half. One half ended up as 105, aka the only one that most if not all projects could actually use, and 106 that, after a flurry, bwas barely worked on (maybe I'm incorrect here?). I hated to see kloot give up in frustration. Kloot is an amazing developer, but I'm guessing that there was probably a lot of resentment built up over time (like having to deal with ares & co, and then going back as far as the great pathfinding flamewars of yesteryear), so I get it.

To my knowledge, no support was ever provided in order to help us update things to new ogl. I know that I never received any support, at the very least. Perhaps larger projects did?


2. You have roundly rejected any of the attempts to broaden communication with the larger community. I'm guessing that to you, this community probably seems to be dead and buried, when in reality, on Discord, it is flourishing. Even the main spring discord sees a lot of conversation. I understand that you have based this rejection upon the basis of discord not being FOSS (although, that isn't entirely accurate). I'm not real sure what to tell you here. You are actively cutting off your nose to spite your face. It isn't realistic to expect everything infrastructure to be FOSS. This wasn't realistic in 2004 - 2006, and it isn't now. I don't know how many OG dogs there are still here, but I remember when this shit was TA Demo Recorder, and the demo released showing spring with ota units in a simulated battle. I suppose taking the hardline FOSS stance was ok back when this was all about OTA, but circa 2007 or so, spring became so much more than that. I understand that "history" "history" "history", I get it, I really do, but at the same time, by stifling communication, everything and everyone suffers.

"But, IRC..." "But, Matrix Bridge..."
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3. So now, here we are. We have the BAR engine soft "fork" (soft fork because it wasn't intended to break away from official, hence the requests to merge), and we have Spring Official, which basically no one can realistically use. I suppose you could argue that evo uses 105 official, but evo has been out of development for like 1.5 years at this point.

As I said, I don't think anyone really wants to split the party here, but if I'm being completely honest, I don't see where you are leaving much of a choice and given the just groundbreaking advances that have happened the moment that the old guarde spring devs were no longer in strict control, I have to say that personally I would support a fork. If a merge were ever granted, I have a fear that further innovation would be stifled by red tape and grown men throwing tantrums (myself included), which has been the history of this place since Tobi left.



Returning back to the original point. To draw some sort of line in the sand this way seems petty and childish. I do not wish to paint you in this light. I realize that this is all over a post on the official forums and front page spread, but your first reply makes it pretty clear what your feelings are/have been. Perhaps I'm wrong and have reached an incorrect conclusion?



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This is knorke level BS, pettiness, false justification, and you know it. You're better than this.
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Picassino
Posts: 3
Joined: 13 Jan 2023, 11:12

Re: The Great Pro-Am Showdown coming on January 14th!

Post by Picassino »

Well, im on the old spring engine, because i have trouble already keeping my game running, and fear porting. But then, thats usually it, once you are forced to port, its mostly done in a week or 2. The BAR Performance gains are very impressive.. and its visually on a total new level.
Porting is a mixed bag.
Its mostly opengl portery and chili needed to be ported to that.
BAR had no GUI Framework which results in ton of copy pasted boiler plate. Everything else is game individual. After that step you get synergy from bar though, all that vis progress could be zero-ks progress too.
MOSAIC could use that gfx update and speed too.

And honestly, those who contribute and move the source forward, rule by voting with there feets eh hands.
Im in favour of the merge.

PS: Im not a fan of discord though. Mostly because it will come back to bite us, when they run out of investor money and start to game-ifecate the whole thing to extract another round of investments. But again, network effects, maybe one day mastodon can just slurp discords brain out.
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Beherith
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Joined: 26 Oct 2007, 16:21

Re: Engine fork and Ingame Community

Post by Beherith »

Splitting this off from the tournament frontpage post.

Abma, I understand that renaming the fork to Coil saddens you, however it is only planned in preparation to ease the differentiation between 105, 106 and BAR105.

Please clarify your stance up front of how you expect games using such a fork of the Spring engine should be interacting with springrts.com, and its related services.
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Anarchid
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Joined: 30 Nov 2008, 04:31

Re: Engine fork and Ingame Community

Post by Anarchid »

After that step you get synergy from bar though, all that vis progress could be zero-ks progress too.
ZK is in fact using the BAR105 Coil engine.

The reasons for this should be obvious.
MaDDoX
Posts: 77
Joined: 08 Jan 2006, 17:45

Re: Engine fork and Ingame Community

Post by MaDDoX »

I believe renaming the BAR engine to anything without 105 will make it incompatible with the official server right?
Ivand had to take some tries to make it compatible, per my request.

Of course I can postpone updating the BAR engine for some time, until when I'm ready to add our own server, but it'd be nice if it keeps compatible (if you all agree to it).
ivand
Posts: 310
Joined: 27 Jun 2007, 17:05

Re: Engine fork and Ingame Community

Post by ivand »

Here are my obviously biased thoughts:

1) The rename was necessary such that people don't confuse vanilla spring versions and what we do with BAR105. Yet it's still spring in its guts and even in the loading title.

2) I don't think you own copyright for spring and in wider sense spring as an engine is defined by where the spring games are played. Right now if you collect the replays of all spring games played at any day or any recent month, you will find that 99% of these replays are played on one or another version of BAR105. In order to not open the otherwise fair discussion on who should own spring, we just renamed.

3) For the fact that spring mostly shifted BAR105 way the current wardens of vanilla spring have no one but themselves to blame: spring devs failed to review the proposed merge of the fork when it was still possible and released incomplete 106.0, which apparently couldn't even draw rectangles in a sane way. I spent hours writing posts here on forum explaining how incomplete/broken it was and I obviously knew what I was talking about, yet the decision was made by a person who had no relevant OpenGL knowledge. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

4) A few years after develop stagnated and one year after 106 is released, we are yet to see a game using 106+ engine. I know BA is being slowly migrated there, but running a bare bones game and running something that will not cause eye bleeding are two completely different matters. 106+ will need tons of improvements before becoming useful to support something that looks ok in 2023. When a game looking and performing like BAR does is going to be released on a new spring/vanilla engine, we can discuss again if going 106 route was the right decision.

5) I would like to second what Forb wrote regarding the communication. It's super important to get the feedback from the wider audience: players, game devs, peers. No one (in the sense of masses) is going to use Matrix or other unpopular communication means. Writing on forums fell out of fashion a decade ago too, so essentially hiding behind the limited communication means cuts you off from the majority of people. I don't see how the engine development can be done this way. The past history should have taught you that lesson, yet here we go again and discuss important matters on a dead forum.

I'm upset the feedback like in this thread has not been taken into account these last years. But whatever. Wish you nothing, but all the best.
Ares
Balanced Annihilation Developer
Posts: 555
Joined: 19 Mar 2011, 13:43

Re: Engine fork and Ingame Community

Post by Ares »

Release the 3do2s3o script, it was already given to ZK and is needed to migrate easily. It is being kept private on purpose to block other mods migrating.

You can't claim to care about the best interests of our community while simultaneously blocking people from using it.

BA was banned for using a different engine version. But when you change engine entirely, the same standards dont apply to you? hypocrites

User was warned for this post. Felony 11. (Beherith)
Last edited by Beherith on 17 Jan 2023, 10:54, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: warning.
raaar
Metal Factions Developer
Posts: 1094
Joined: 20 Feb 2010, 12:17

Re: Engine fork and Ingame Community

Post by raaar »

Yesterday I put out a new MF version and made the change to BAR105 build 1478.

I've also added a few records on the springfiles DB to allow it to be downloaded from springlobby (which most people who connect to the official server still use).
Ares wrote: 15 Jan 2023, 12:45 Release the 3do2s3o script, it was already given to ZK and is needed to migrate easily. It is being kept private on purpose to block other mods migrating.

You can't claim to care about the best interests of our community while simultaneously blocking people from using it.
You're being inflamatory again Ares. Releasing it would be nice, but it's not necessary to make the change (i migrated and my game is all 3do). Ivand even fixed a very old bug with white edges on 3do models when using MSAA !
Ares wrote: 15 Jan 2023, 12:45 BA was banned for using a different engine version. But when you change engine entirely, the same standards dont apply to you? hypocrites
- it was BA9* that needed 103, at the time there was BA10* compatible with 104+
- it was restricted to 4v4, not banned
(i agree that forcing the change was bad and the botflags should have been restored after the backlash since the 103 issues would only affect BA9/103 hosts anyway)
- pushing people to use the latest engines where most dev work is being put into works better as an argument for using BAR105 builds than the official 106 and subsequent dev builds
Ares
Balanced Annihilation Developer
Posts: 555
Joined: 19 Mar 2011, 13:43

Re: Engine fork and Ingame Community

Post by Ares »

On multiple occasions it was agreed the essential tools for migration would be available to the community. Now it is being used to gatekeep core engine functionality from some mods and not others. It was provided to ZK the next day, yet fake reasons of "it is spagetti code," are given to block BA. Like how the fake reason of "security update" was used to ban BA from its home.

https://github.com/ZeroK-RTS/Zero-K/com ... f2c59398ab

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The Yak
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Re: Engine fork and Ingame Community

Post by The Yak »

Long Live Coil

Ban me

banned by your wish (abma)
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The Yak
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Re: Engine fork and Ingame Community

Post by The Yak »

Ares wrote: 16 Jan 2023, 21:09 On multiple occasions it was agreed the essential tools for migration would be available to the community. Now it is being used to gatekeep core engine functionality from some mods and not others. It was provided to ZK the next day, yet fake reasons of "it is spagetti code," are given to block BA. Like how the fake reason of "security update" was used to ban BA from its home.

https://github.com/ZeroK-RTS/Zero-K/com ... f2c59398ab

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Clean your monitor screen and then learn how to take a screenshot. That big ass hair would make for a better "developer".
sprunk
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Joined: 29 Jun 2015, 07:36

Re: Engine fork and Ingame Community

Post by sprunk »

I can't tell whether Ares wants to migrate to BAR105/Coil (which would be a bad look for 106) or whether he wants to migrate to 106 and there are no official tools (which would be a bad look for 106).
ivand
Posts: 310
Joined: 27 Jun 2007, 17:05

Re: Engine fork and Ingame Community

Post by ivand »

Ah yes point #6.

It's a well known fact that the lenient moderation,inability to deal with BA drama and favoritism towards trolls like Ares, led to all engine devs of the last generation(gajop, hokomoko, Kloot) being gone. Doubt my words? Ask them.
So what we have got with spring is negative selection: best people quit, worst - stay and thrive.

Ban me too.

banned by your wish (abma)
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