Engine fork and Ingame Community

[ThinkSome]

What are the barriers to giving Ivand (and/or whoever works on coil) rights over a branch in the official repo? Then coil would just be Spring branch like develop and maintenance.

Thats a question that mostly goes to the coil fork: "spring" (springrts.com) avoids using commercial services / closed source and tries to protect privacy.

Everything being on ProprietaryHub was part of the reason why I quit working on SpringLobby. Basically, I couldn't improve anything in Spring ecosystem without using proprietary software or bugging you and others to pull my changes from notabug (hence, indirectly boosting activity on ProprietaryHub).




Why not have Discord AND free software? https://revolt.chat/

[abma]

Why not have Discord AND free software? https://revolt.chat/

We already use https://springrts.com/matrix/

[ThinkSome]

you haven't answered the branch question.

[galileo]

We already use https://springrts.com/matrix/

At first look, Riot/element seem very similar to Discord. Is it really related to Matrix network?

Is that complicated to host a forum like this one? Or an extended one?

[sprunk]

What are the barriers to giving Ivand (and/or whoever works on coil) rights over a branch in the official repo? Then coil would just be Spring branch like develop and maintenance.

Why would the fork developers accept being 2nd class citizens? Why would Spring endorse having two branches being worked on, already diverged past the point of incompatibility?

[ThinkSome]

At first look, Riot/element seem very similar to Discord. Is it really related to Matrix network?

Is that complicated to host a forum like this one? Or an extended one?

Riot/Element is the official client of the Matrix network. Why another forum, is Spring not fractured enough already...

Why would the fork developers accept being 2nd class citizens? Why would Spring endorse having two branches being worked on, already diverged past the point of incompatibility?

I see the current situation as much worse. If it were a branch, then issues/development could still be kept in a central place. Why wouldn't the BAR branch be endorsed? From what I've read, it's simply a continuation of maintenance.

[sprunk]

Why wouldn't the BAR branch be endorsed? From what I've read, it's simply a continuation of maintenance.

Yes and no. It is a continuation of that branch in the git sense, and also in the sense that it offers what game devs want.

But from engine devs' point of view the maintenance branch was just for backporting non-GL4 fixes from the develop branch. No new development happened there, and it existed to make transition to GL4 smoother when the time came, so that games would only need to catch up with the rendering changes and not also the simulation, general Lua etc. From this PoV (which as far as I can tell Abma still holds) the fork is not a continuation of that branch, because it does more than just backporting, it has completely new features so is actively diverging away from develop.

I see the current situation as much worse. If it were a branch, then issues/development could still be kept in a central place.

Bluntly, mainline Spring is not really being developed anymore. Check out the activity on Mantis - the number of issues with last activity in 2022 and 2023 combined is in the low teens, with most of those being just cleaning up tickets from 2021 and/or infrastructure woes. The Github commit log looks somewhat more active but the last "real" commit seems to be from January 18th, the more recent ones are just solving random build issues. Compare with the fork's issue tracker and commit log. If issues/development only really happen in one place then it's centralized by default. The fork is also not rolling out its own competing solutions where mainline offers one and works well enough, for example it doesn't have a forum/website like this one, so despite tension the whole wider community can still just come around here.

[raaar]

What are the barriers to giving Ivand (and/or whoever works on coil) rights over a branch in the official repo? Then coil would just be Spring branch like develop and maintenance.

Why would the fork developers accept being 2nd class citizens? Why would Spring endorse having two branches being worked on, already diverged past the point of incompatibility?

Spring would acknowledge the de-facto state of things, put the "develop" branch on hold and use the recoil one.

About discord, spring discord server was rebranded as recoil, but it should still keep references to spring somewhere. The bridged channel (discord + official server lobby + matrix) should also be available on that server. Atm it's only accessible from the BA discord server.

Meanwhile games using recoil should be referenced as if they were using spring engine on the wiki and it should also link to recoil-related info pages, wikis, etc. From the official infra it'd be treated as another version of spring. For example, there's a wiki page about springsettings that has a section that's auto-generated (apparently). It should be updated to include recoil settings to avoid confusion with some warning about availability.

The animosity between a few people (unfortunately including lead devs) on both sides can be disentangled unilaterally to some degree, even if slowly.

[ThinkSome]

That's a fair point about maintenance. However, if develop is not being developed any more, then what's the hold up to just recognise recoil as the new spring maintenance(and develop)?

Spring would acknowledge the de-facto state of things, put the "develop" branch on hold and use the recoil one.

The animosity between a few people (unfortunately including lead devs) on both sides can be disentangled unilaterally to some degree, even if slowly.

Yes.

[Google_Frog]

what's the hold up to just recognise recoil as the new spring maintenance(and develop)?

abma

[sprunk]

That's a fair point about maintenance. However, if develop is not being developed any more, then what's the hold up to just recognise recoil as the new spring maintenance(and develop)?

"Not being developed" is just my personal assessment. Abma seems to be trickling in some commits, so presumably he thinks otherwise.

But they seem to be about solving compilation woes. Perhaps it's cleaning up the consequences of a hasty 106 release? Regardless, I consider them irrelevant because they don't touch the actual engine. There doesn't seem to be any clear vision on where to go next, either, even if somebody (CommanderSpice?) were active.

[ThinkSome]

no updates to maintenance in over two years, develop looks to be on life support. Seems to be an accurate assesment.

[Soul]

To be honest it might be alot of work but we should try to find a way forward where the Recoil fork is published here alongside the Spring Engine.
There is no reason why we can't have more then one version of the Engine, just as we have more then 1 game mod and more then 1 map.

After that we should also look at the possibility for "crossplay" between the spring lobby servers and BAR lobby servers, letting either lobby connect to eachothers servers.

Alternativly talk with the BAR devs and see if they are intrested in opening up their lobby for different mods and engines, and then make it the official lobby.

Installing BAR and its included lobby is much easier then trying to get Spring and Springlobby to work.
I have always been of the opinion that installing and settin up springlobby and spring is not a user friendly experience, and i think its one of the main reasons that we haven't gotten many new players over the years.
This was the case even long before BAR.
Even as an old player i have problem setting up springlobby to work when i try a fresh install after having been way for some time.

Springlobby is not sacred and can be replaced, just like TASclient before it.

To get going it should be enough to have one installer and a play button, something that the BAR client does well.

[Ares]

talk with the BAR devs and see if they are intrested in opening up their lobby for different mods and engines, and then make it the official lobby.

Great idea Soul. You are correct that for many years mods shared a lobby and everyone helped one another so everyone benefitted from the shared ecosystem. However, that seemed to change after BA was banned.

However, when I previously asked your question to Beherith he said no and then blocked me.

Even if only zero-k, techa, metal factions & other mods were allowed to begin with, your idea is still a good start.

[raaar]

There's no generic lobby client that works reliably with the BAR server : Skylobby was able to connect to both it and springrts.com's lobby server but the BAR server dropped compatibility with it as they kept experimenting with the protocol and such (some people seem to still be able to play through it).

Since the ZK split many years ago the trend is each game running its own server, which is probably what's going to happen if the official one dies. Skylobby can stay connected to multiple servers simultaneously.

The only generic lobby server we have atm is springrts.com and it's a shame to let it go to waste. Most play time on the official server atm is already using the Recoil fork (mostly techA with some MF).

To start, we need Abma to retract the "Recoil is not Spring" attitude and openly endorse it.

We also need Ares to shut up with his "everything was good..... BA banned ...... BAR devs bad" slandering crap or (at this point should be "and" -_-) get banned.

It feels stupid to go into BAR/Recoil channels and advocate for better partnership or whatever in these conditions..

[Ares]

The recoil dev requested to be banned on page 1 of this thread.

Recoil dev asked to be banned and Abma banned him, so the situation is clear.

Ban me too.
banned by your wish (abma)