epictaco

I don't know if I just come off as angry when typing or something but I actually do want to read all the replies, not just the ones that agree with me! Not everything online has to be memes and agreements!

(1) Leo does work on the Homecoming team and they are currently working on advancing i25, I don't know what you consider "made up" in that claim... (2) Complaining about the direction of the project is hardly "shaming", I'm just saying that it's a bit backwards that the people most qualified to take on the most difficult and arguably most essential task is caught up on the details instead of working toward the big picture. No, but when the direction of the two projects in question conflict then it makes it very difficult. Whew, and you're accusing me of spreading drama? Once again, disagreement is not a form of harassment, shaming, hate speech, demands, threat, etc that you seem to be interpreting it as. I'm just trying to get some clarification on where the direction of the game is going and if it has a viable future as an open platform. I think it's fair to want to at least want to know if a project/community is worth the time investment if it's just going to be taken down/fragmented into nothingness in a few months anyway. I'm not implying anyone on the team is obligated to do anything, but since they are doing things I would like to at least know what the general plan is before I get disappointed again... I think anyone considering investing in this community at least deserves that. Much more well funded and popular projects have been killed by a lack of direction, I'd hate to see the same thing happen here simply because there seems to be a lack of communication or agreement in the community.

Just tested-- no limit of any kind as far as I can tell. I was able to rename the same character 3 times without leaving the character selector screen.

...which would be much easier if Leo and the Homecoming team would lend assistance on that front instead of continuing adding stuff to i25. My main complaint right now is that not enough of the devs seem to be willing to establish a baseline before working on relatively minute tweaks to make their server slightly more appealing. Right now Ouroboros hasn't even started working on the Client architecture, only Server, and although that is continuing at a pretty good rate I feel like the priorities are all mixed up here and as a result there is a very real risk of a baseline never being established... The Homecoming team seems to have all the technical skills and the most intimate knowledge of the game's backend to make it happen in a reasonable timeframe but almost none of them are working on this AFAIK.

Haven't personally tried it either but I'm like 99.99% sure you have infinite renames. I get home for lunch in a few minutes-- I'll try it then and report back here

That's not what I'm arguing for, though, I'm just saying we need have everyone currently working on the project to agree to certain foundational standards to establish a "base game" that can be added to and tweaked by the server admin using modular packs so instead of 25 full game clients with slight differences everywhere for 25 servers, we have 1 full game client that still receives baseline updates for core/backend features while allowing for modularity on the server end. This allows for the end users to only download the full client once and then only downloads additional assets/DLLs as needed, with the additional benefit of everyone receiving bugfix and optimization updates regardless of server/group affiliation. Once again I'm not arguing for a central group of people to decide the development of the game, I'm arguing for a system that allows the servers to continue to work together easily as well as allowing crossover-development between the servers so the community doesn't continue to shatter further *and* so the next big server can be set up with ease if one is taken down by NCSoft. The way things are looking right now every major server has separate development priorities and teams with very little coordination between them, which is perfectly fine if the game is modular but in its current state I fear we'll end up just fragmenting the community again into a select few groups that have the technical skills and *underground know-how* to run a large public server, which is a very real threat if NCSoft decides to take action. EDIT: so it looks like my idea is very very similar to what Ouroboros is planning to do-- release i24 as the "base game" and continue working on the backend/engine in the meantime, while letting individual servers add their own content and tweaks on top. Hopefully Homecoming comes to their senses and warms up to that idea so we don't end up with 2 entirely different game clients. I'm not saying they should dump all i25 stuff and jump on board with the Ouroboros team, but I hope they at least keep the clients mostly interchangeable.

As far as running multiple clients on the same computer, it is pretty trivial to check for other instances of the game on the same system but at the same time it is also easy to bypass.

That's precisely what Spigot, a third-party Minecraft server software with a plugins interface, does to get past the licensing issues with both the original Minecraft Server software as well as an old project that got DMCA'd some years ago. You can check it out by running their BuildTools java utility, it literally just downloads the server software from Minecraft's website (legal) and applied git patches containing the plugin framework and interfaces from Spigot's repositories onto the original server executable, resulting in a final executable that is not illegal to make or have, but is illegal to redistribute. Technically in this case none of it would be legal but this way would certainly keep the maintainers as removed from the original code as possible, legally speaking.

Funny stuff

Yeah it looks like someone else on here just took over the development since the original devs aren't touching it anymore. That seems to be a theme with this community. Agreed, especially since the search function did nothing to bring that up when I tried looking.

I guess I'm just worries about the game becoming so deviated on each server that it essentially just becomes another "spiritual successor" type situation compared to the "continuation of the game" situation I think a lot of us were hoping for (me included). We'll just have to agree to disagree on that one because we probably have different definitions of "working together". I'm not talking about making one single, linear system of updating that would depend on a bunch of devs agreeing on the same changes, I'm talking about establishing a "baseline" update system that allows for easy modification so that forks can be made easily, and any bugfixes written by one server can be applied to other servers when the patch is applied upstream. Re-reading my posts it does sound like I'm hoping for a single team of developers to continue development for us, but really I'm just hoping that this clusterf*** of information going on right now doesn't only worsen by having every server be running a completely different system. Right now we're at a crucial point where everyone is running one of two versions of the game, and the newer version is already directly evolved from the other version being used to patches can already be shared between them for the most part, but that can quickly change to the point where starting a new private server with updates becomes too cumbersome and convoluted for almost anyone to do, thus threatening the further existence of the game as a whole (as it reduces the number of targets for NCSoft). Basically I just want to be able to start a "basic" server with the core game content and applied bugfixes/patches/optimizations, modify it to my liking (*ideally* using only config files), then release it on a launcher without the need for everyone to re-download the game for each server they want to join. At that point new content (missions, zones, ATs) could be loaded modularly so admins can pick and choose the content they like, thus allowing for multiple "flavors" of the game to exist without the need for major client-side changes or extensive coding to add server customizations.

I wasn't even aware of a newer version-- can't seem to find anything about it on Titan Forums or Google. All the links to the program's "website" or "home page" leads to http://www.cohplanner.com so I don't know what to tell ya. Maybe someone just updated the background database in the meantime, but like I said I couldn't find anything about it.

That supports my server-scaling theory then since the servers are not very congested at the moment...

My main complaint with that system is if your server gets taken down then the transition to another becomes all the more painful. Speaking of Linux though, I wouldn't complain about an update system with one centralized group writing updates to fix bugs or major mechanics who can then push their fixes downstream to all the servers who have their own "branch" of the game. Either way git is almost certainly going to be utilized at some point to keep these builds loosely together and to make community contributions actually manageable, that is unless all the servers decide that they want to "compete" with each other instead of helping each other keep the community alive and interested which isn't impossible at this point... Tequila already has the ability to keep multiple versions of the client and it knows which servers to associate which version with so that's a start. All Leo would need to do with my idea is essentially just make the launcher a server browser/git GUI client. I know I'm preaching to the choir here but I would really love to see this community working together more on this development, the more like the open source community the better IMO.

Maybe it's a result of the servers trying to scale with the load? I'd imagine the server software was meant to be run on a (couple) beefy dedicated server box(es) and not on a scalable cloud/VM system like it is now, maybe reallocating the resources causes the server to skip a tick or two. That's the only explanation I can come up with that would explain why a bunch of people across various zones and in different parts of NA would be experiencing lag without dropping packets, overloading servers, or being caused by high latency. Hopefully as the server software becomes more monolithic and various components are modernized it will be less of an issue, but short of throwing more hardware toward the server (which they already have a ton) there isn't much that can be done for the moment. I know combining and modernizing the server software is a priority for some devs at least, as Leo's current strategy seems to be to make the software as reasonably available to the common "home server operator" so that even if one major server gets shut down another can take its place pretty much instantly, similar to the strategy Pirate Bay has been using the past decade. The main problem with these efforts, though, is of course the million unforeseen consequences of "modernizing" any component of a complex system such as an MMO. I can see more issues with missions and entities popping up in the next few months while everything gets sorted out. Of course this should go without say but all of this is purely speculation since I can't see server logs or stats and I am not involved in the development process.