I can not understand why still in 2018 year still the engine and stuff related to that are not well maintaned.
There's nobody but cvet to maintain it, or so i think. I don't know details about deal with Last Frontier publisher back then, but one of points i know about was to cut any third party from accessing engine source. What happened next is just a wild guess, but some of us still checked public sdk commitlog from time to time, and it still was looking like cvet is working on source alone - or there are new people but old source policies are still in place, making progress slower than it could be (at least in theory).
I think open source fork would be good idea to make some progress
I don't believe that's ever gonna happen, as long Last Frontier (or its corpse
) is around.
What
could work, at least from perspective of someone who worked with engine in past, is...
- Source snaphshot handed to single person/team, which from that point is completly on its own
- No commits history/further updates/support from cvet
- Source have to stay closed source, only binaries can be released
- Protocol must be incompatibile with FOnline (different versioning, modified login sequence, different UID calculations, changed default seeds, etc.)
- Server state files (worldsave, characters, compiled maps, scripts) must be incompatile with FOnline
- Let's pray to gods it's glorious r412 which is
best only sane option for both:
- Long-running servers
Amount of changes in newer revisions is overwhelming even for experience devs, and would require looong crunchtime just to make it work as it is now, without any gameplay changes - New servers
Messy or not, r412 still being bundled with TLA content is goddamn useful for making your own vision alive, as you have ton of utils and examples with ready-to-tune implementation. It's unholy mess, sure, but quite few servers was born thanks to that
...as starting point. And yeah, it's a rough draft for
community edition, not
fork. There was a chance for open source long time ago, but it didn't happen then, and with it won't happen now; i'd love to see cvet proving me wrong, but that's simply unreal in my eyes.
Now you "only" need to know if cvet can/want to give away source from before Last Frontier deal, find person(s) who are able and willing to deal with engine and just wait for glorious patches and updates. Shouldn't be hard, right?