The future of the AGS engine: STALEMATE!

Started by monkey0506, Sat 23/07/2011 11:10:40

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monkey0506

I understand that the post could have been misconstrued, but there was a big movement in favor of organizing a forum-based team that largely just fell apart. That is what I was talking about.

It is great that we have those who are willing to devote their own time to pushing things forward like portability, but ultimately portability alone is not going to push AGS forward into making it a better engine as such, just a more widely available one.

I think that it would not be a bad idea to start collecting and maintaining an updated bug and feature/request tracker. The existing one is in very, very poor shape at the moment, and just simply seeing what issues are currently outstanding could indeed be a great motivator for when someone does have the time to look at it.

It would be nice to see JJS' repo actually merged with the official dev branch so we could continue building from there with some level of synchronicity. His primary goal has been porting and reaching into the existing backwards compatibility of the code, but it would be good for those efforts to be maintained in the refactoring in so far as they don't inhibit the proposed AGS 4.0.

Snarky

#201
The situation is really just kind of unfortunate at the moment. For a while it seemed like CJ had pretty much left, and that was difficult, but we were getting ready to find a new way forward. Then he kind of came back, which is awesome, but it took some of the wind out of the sails of the whole community organization thing. Now we seem to be stuck somewhere in between, where CJ is around occasionally but doesn't have the time to deal with a lot of the day-to-day things, but no one else has the authority or in fact the necessary permissions to step up.

There are still a number of things that need to be done in order to make real progress on an open-source version, like setting up a dedicated sub-forum (so that people who are interested can get some idea of what the hell is going on), having someone actively manage the official code tree, releasing those final bits of code that are missing, and getting the forums to run more reliably than they have over the last few months. And we need to have some clarity about who's doing what, and open lines of communication with them. (That's part of what we were talking about having a "community lead" for: to let people know what's going on and listen to their concerns.)

I really think it would be best if CJ would delegate some tasks, along with the necessary access to servers, repos or whatever. In fact, unless he gets a lot more free time in the near future, it's a necessity, because things aren't working the way they are now (in the case of the forums, pretty much literally: at least I get timeouts about 30% of the time, and on pretty much every search).

Given the results of the straw poll, I think any or all of the highest-polled candidates would have the trust of the community, so just pick any of them. Or someone else. But AGS needs someone to take care of it if it's not going to wither, and the attention it's getting right now is not enough. (Actually, that's not really accurate, since CJ has been taking care of a couple of issues over the last week or so. So let's say the level of attention seen for most of this year.)

monkey0506

I think a collaborative effort between Mark, Dave, and myself (based on the results of that straw poll, not just drawing three random names :P) could produce some good results. We all have different experiences and expectations for AGS of course, but I've worked with them both before and we seem to get on well enough. Also, it would be nice to have more than just one person in case one of us wasn't around for a little while. It would help alleviate the effects we are now feeling due to CJ's absence.

You're right that as far as the official community goes, CJ is still holding a lot of keys that are at the very least delaying progress into certain areas. I know he doesn't want to lose too much control, but I wonder how he'd feel about giving provisional interim priviledges to a small group in that regard.

Some things though I think we can definitely take a proactive effort in, even in the meantime.

Wyz

I've been working on a plan for a while now under the hood so I could fine tune it as much as possible but it seems to be the right time to publish it. Do know it is only a plan, nowhere in it will I select people for certain tasks. It is just as to give future AGS development a possible sense of direction. I'll open a separate topic to keep the discussion uncluttered.

There is happening more then you think is happening monkey, things are a bit slow though. I wish I could help out but I currenly don't even have time to play adventures.  :'(
So, this is the best I could do.
Life is like an adventure without the pixel hunts.

sonneveld

#204
Hi,

I'm interested in helping out! I have a bit of spare time at the moment and have started looking into refactoring and possibly porting the AGS engine to macosx.  I need to properly read the forums threads but it looks like:

- there are a few different forks.
- the scummvm team is porting ags over to their platform to run current and older games (scummvm is gpl, which is totally cool but prevents possible future ios ports? at least commercially <-- wrong about that, I was confused with recent VLC kerfuffle. eg, recent wolf3d ios release is gpl)
- however there is still interest in maintaining current ags and adding new features.

Right now I've just forked the svn copy of ags and started splitting ac.cpp.  My macport stalled when I realised that allegro4 doesn't even compile on macos lion.  There may need to be discussion about porting to allegro5/sdl/etc.

- Nick

edit: re gpl

Sslaxx

Sounds good. Your sources available on a site like GitHub or Gitorious?
Stuart "Sslaxx" Moore.

fuzzie

#206
Quote from: sonneveld on Mon 19/03/2012 12:16:42
- the scummvm team is porting ags over to their platform to run current and older games (scummvm is gpl, which is totally cool but prevents possible future ios ports? at least commercially)

It's more of a rewrite than a port. The code could be made available under the Artistic License, but obviously anyone wanting to use it would have to port it away from the ScummVM framework again.

The license is no problem for iOS: there are commercial ports of various games (for example, Gobliiins and Beneath a Steel Sky: Remastered) which are using ScummVM. It's apparently an issue for games that wish to integrate with Steam, though, as well as games wanting to use other proprietary plugins, so apparently the GPL is indeed not an option.

Quote from: sonneveld on Mon 19/03/2012 12:16:42
Right now I've just forked the svn copy of ags and started splitting ac.cpp.  My macport stalled when I realised that allegro4 doesn't even compile on macos lion.  There may need to be discussion about porting to allegro5/sdl/etc.

I would suggest starting with JJS's repository rather than the svn version. And you might find it simpler to just fix Allegro 4 to build properly for you, given how intermingled the graphics code is..

Edit: I'm pretty familiar with the AGS code now, so: I'm usually around as 'fuzzie' on freenode if anyone needs any help understanding bits of the code (I don't know anything about how to build it etc though).

sonneveld

Quote from: Sslaxx on Mon 19/03/2012 12:48:16
Sounds good. Your sources available on a site like GitHub or Gitorious?

It wasn't, but is now: https://github.com/sonneveld/ags

It's mainly just me shuffling things around at the moment.

sonneveld

Quote from: fuzzie on Mon 19/03/2012 12:49:31
I would suggest starting with JJS's repository rather than the svn version. And you might find it simpler to just fix Allegro 4 to build properly for you, given how intermingled the graphics code is..

Edit: I'm pretty familiar with the AGS code now, so: I'm usually around as 'fuzzie' on freenode if anyone needs any help understanding bits of the code (I don't know anything about how to build it etc though).

ah whoops, I started with a fresh checkout.  I think Allegro4 is a dead end as most of the new releases are for v5, but it might be worth it if it's not too much hassle.

fuzzie

Quote from: sonneveld on Tue 20/03/2012 08:22:13
It's mainly just me shuffling things around at the moment.

Shuffling things around like that looks like the best approach. :) I autogenerated comments for the script functions using the editor data from Editor/AGS.Editor/Resources/agsdefns.sh, which might be helpful for you to do too, if you're going to be autogenerating comments.

(Note that you've linked to an old version of my tree in the README - you probably meant https://github.com/fuzzie/scummvm/tree/ags/engines/ags, not the one linking directly to a hash.)

m0ds


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