Author Topic: Question for Jitspoe (Read 6267 times)

SoftCoder · « **on:** January 09, 2009, 11:20:57 PM »

Hello Jitspoe. My family and I have enjoyed playing DP2 for a few years now (we play locally on our LAN). My children took it upon themselves to learn BSP and making models, scripting etc. They have made many interesting maps and we enjoy the gaming experience. I know this question has been asked in different ways by different people, but I want to try again:

Is there any way to get more people access to the closed source code so that more people can work on the ever growing feature list? I am a professional C++ developer with over 15+ years experience willing to put some time into this project, only if I have the assurance that this project isn't solely a one man show. I don't care about credit, just to add to the enjoyment of the experience my children would get from enhancing the game.

I have contacted you in the past about other updates I made to the code that is open source to add plugin support but it was ignored. Since then not much has changed in the game and in the community. I believe this community could thrive if more people were allowed to be part of the coding effort. A full open sourcing of the code would help to accomplish that. Worries about cheat detection could be discussed and dealt with but it would all start with a willingness to open up the project to others.

I think that getting people involved is key to the future of this community, new content and new development ideas together would take DP2 to the next level.

What do you say Jitspoe?

Garrett · « **Reply #1 on:** January 10, 2009, 12:19:03 AM »

http://dplogin.com/dplogin/featurevote/feature.php?id=10076

This will help accomplish what you are looking for. There are a handful of community members who are working on some of the feature requests.

What exactly did your plug-in support code make possible? Obviously, plug-ins, but what type of plug-ins?

SoftCoder · « **Reply #2 on:** January 10, 2009, 01:47:32 PM »

My plugin system was fairly simplistic, but was attempting to expose simple parts of paintball to accomplish a simple goal.

I play DP2 with my 5 of my 6 children on our LAN. Obviously chatting while playing makes it a lot more fun, so I wanted to integrate an open source program called voicechatter so that ever time one of us connects to another game server on our LAN the voicechatter would auto connect us. A simple feature with lots of value for us.

The point of plugins is that you allow others to "plugin" what they feel is of value, and not force it on everyone. Most open source projects similar to DP2 are fully open source and support plugins and don't have any greater problem with cheats than dp2. You cannot stop cheats... a simple "codecave" on dp2 would easily bypass the existing security in place, same techniques used to bypass commercial games etc.

All I am trying to do is give one final attempt to see if this project will open up to the greater community. If not I'll likely work with my family (and others) to do some kind of Paintball clone using the OGRE graphics engine and the likes. My children already have the talent to do the artwork and models, and I'll code.

Anyways, what do you say jitspoe?

Zorchenhimer · « **Reply #3 on:** January 10, 2009, 08:22:30 PM »

I would love to see the development team expand. This game has so much potential. I think Jitspoe is getting a little more willing to allow others on board the project.

e4g1e · « **Reply #4 on:** January 10, 2009, 10:48:02 PM »

i would <3 to see what you can do with the game (not that jitspoe hasnt done the best job imaginable) expecially the orge engine

BiBi now ~e4g1e

mewa · « **Reply #5 on:** January 11, 2009, 01:59:31 AM »

Here is a very willing outsider, who has nothing to do with the "internet community" will to put his skilled labor to use. This type of thing is a great opportunity and is essential for the games existence. Without the utilization of folks like this the game will be squandered away and perish into archiveville. Please take care of this happening.

Although I have been around this community for a relatively short amount of time, it's pretty clear to me that there is a stifling of ideas (http://dplogin.com/forums/index.php?topic=15690.0). Fear is the root of many of these issues, as Softcoder has touched upon. Without being a programmer, fear seems to oppose the fundamentals of opensource software. Lets remove any fear aspect, personal or impersonal, from the work of this game and with it remove the hierarchy restraining the evolution. If it's an improvement, or a decent addition with negligible trade-off's, implement it. It's that simple. Fix the details later.

Softcoder, thanks for your willingness to branch out into creating what you enjoy. I hope you are accepted with open arms as a contributer of this community. Good Luck.

This naziish type behavior has got to stop or this game will.

Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. I sense much fear in you.

Eiii · « **Reply #6 on:** January 11, 2009, 03:39:10 AM »

I don't think any perceived over-administration has anything to do with the lack of developers on this game. The only new ideas that really get stuck in here are 'MAKE MORE GUNZ!!1!' or 'EXP SYSTEM PLZ', or some other crap like that... Any other big planned changes just get pushed to the first page of the todo list and sit there. To be honest, I think that the GLS is the last big change that DPBall is going to see. We'll probably get some stats integration or something, but really I can't see a new map format or anything else big. Just bugfixes, changes to make the game a bit more playable, etc.
It'd be fantastic for nearly everyone if the dev team could grow, but I think this game is more or less Jit's personal project. If the source code were completely opened up, then everyone could at least see what they were dealing with and make meaningful patches, but for the time being I think getting a new developer to work on this is a long shot.

SoftCoder · « **Reply #7 on:** January 16, 2009, 02:29:11 PM »

It has been nearly one week since I posted this message, carefully choosing the subject line and contents of the posting so as to get the attention of Jitspoe. I have even emailed jitspoe's email account (the one he responded to me from earlier) and as of yet I have had absolutely no reply. I have noticed he is replying to other threads but not this one, therefore he is not away on a trip or something like that.

This makes me think I won't even get a response. To me that is childish, but I do hope there is a good reason for not getting any reply as of yet. At this point it looks highly likely I will have to proceed with plan B (make some kind of Paintball clone using a more modern open source project as a reference).

For anyone interested, you will be able to monitor progress on my blog at: http://www.soft-haus.com/blog

So far I am in favour of using the Cube2 engine since it has decent graphics, and allows for SUPER EASY map-editing.. even to the point that multiple users can edit co-operatively at the same time (actually check out bloodfrontier.com as it is a newer/better version of cube2). I am not totally firm on Cube2 yet.. I am evaluating Cube2, CyrstalSpace and OGRE. There are piles of free contents (like models etc..) at worldforge.org so this project may not take as long I had thought it might.

Anyways, I hope to hear back from Jitspoe shortly, and if not I'll take that as a hint he he plans on hoarding the current codebase (and pretending that somehow its free by posting irrelavant parts of the code on sourceforge.net but not the core DLL). The irony is that if you change the free part of the code.. the non-free part of the code disables features as if you were trying to cheat (a side effect of cheat detection stops anyone from doing anything with this project).

Anyways, I do hope as a last effort to not abandon this great community, but that depends on Jitspoe.

Thanks for hearing me out.

Eiii · « **Reply #8 on:** January 16, 2009, 05:16:14 PM »

Contacting him on IRC is a pretty reliable way to get a reply, but again, I don't think he wants to shatter the idea that this is a community-driven piece of software by openly turning down your offer for help. I obviously can't be sure of the situation either way, but that's what it looks like to me.

b00nlander · « **Reply #9 on:** January 16, 2009, 05:28:54 PM »

he probably just has some 20 pages of unread topics.

Eiii · « **Reply #10 on:** January 16, 2009, 05:57:18 PM »

Eeh, I'm pretty sure he's replied to significantly more recent map threads and such. But again, I'm not him. Just speculating.

Playah · « **Reply #11 on:** January 17, 2009, 10:06:44 AM »

Maybe he just dislikes the uppercase j you wrote in the title.

Srsly, he's the person that would respond if he read this.

SoftCoder · « **Reply #12 on:** January 17, 2009, 12:39:30 PM »

Ok Jitspoe has not responded to any of my attempts to request access to be part of this project. I tried:

1. Posting in this forum clearly marking his name in the subject (not to mention many who replied in here are close to jitspoe)
2. I emailed him
3. I sent feedback from his website's 'contact me' page.

It seems to me that this project doesn't want to move forward and it all lies in the hands of one man.

Since I have had no response, I am starting a new clone of the concepts of dp2. I'll post updates on my blog (mentioned above) and have already been welcomed with open arms to another open source gaming community (who thinks the dp2 concepts are a great idea). My hopes for all of you is that you don't allow the lack of updates to hinder your interest in the camaraderie.

Thanks for all of you who gave kind words or encouragement, I'll try hard to make a nice alternative that is truly "open" and "free".

Spook · « **Reply #13 on:** January 17, 2009, 12:45:14 PM »

It takes jitspoe a long time to respond to threads, it takes him over 2 weeks to respond to my mapping threads, so just give it more time.

vLaD · « **Reply #14 on:** January 17, 2009, 06:34:00 PM »

well he responds fast to hackers. but to a totally free offer to make dp2 a better game he rejects. jitspoe W.T.F. thanks for the offer softcoder hope jitspoe replies.

y dont u just give him a open source copy. its not like hes going to go torrent it or anything.

sk89q · « **Reply #15 on:** January 17, 2009, 09:14:03 PM »

I think the problem is that jitspoe would have to spend considerable work to split the anti-cheating protection from the main codebase. If he were to implement the feature request to modularize the codebase, it would consume even more time. All of this has no guarantee that once he finishes that, enough people will contribute to have made it a worthwhile effort. If not many people do, the gain is minimal and he wasted a lot of time that he could have spent implementing the features himself.

jitspoe · « **Reply #16 on:** January 17, 2009, 11:54:37 PM »

Sorry, I'm not trying to blow you off (somebody pm'd me this thread saying you felt this way). I've got like a 10 page long list of unread forum threads that never seems to go down, so sometimes it takes a while before I get around to replying to posts. Unfortunately it's almost 1:00AM and we're in a crunch at work, so I have to go in tomorrow (Sunday), and I don't have time to fully read your posts and give an appropriate reply right now. It's cool that you're willing to help. Perhaps you could take a look at some of the client-side/engine feature requests in the meantime. There are plenty of improvements that can be made in all areas of the code. I'll try to get back to this in more detail later.

SoftCoder · « **Reply #17 on:** January 19, 2009, 11:42:04 PM »

Thanks but as you can see I have moved on to another project already. Your offer does nothing to fix my original request. Every change to the client code results in the custom protected DLL thinking I'm hacking DP2. I cannot even properly test such changes, cause the DLL turns off too many features as soon as I compile my changes. No-one will ever help Jitspoe on this project until he opens up that close source dll.

Cya

Zorchenhimer · « **Reply #18 on:** January 19, 2009, 11:48:19 PM »

Actually, as long as you host the server locally and set it to private, the cheat detection is turned off.

wafflez205 · « **Reply #19 on:** January 20, 2009, 12:02:26 AM »

It's great that we have someone offering to contribute to this game. Maybe I'll take a programming class at school next year and I'll see what I can do