ATTN: A note of appreciation
 

I just want to say id like to thank all the hard work that has gone into devolping this emulator and to the community that makes new servers go online everyday. What could be greater than your own free EQ game. Although it may be buggy I want to encourage all of us to contribute our knowledge so we can make the emu better as soon as possible. This is just a note of encouraging gratitue towards the designers. THanks and I hope eqemu lives for a very long time and only gets better with time despite Verant's constatnt attempts to bring us down with new patches. :)

If you agree with me, then i encourage you to reply to this post to say "thank you"

ok, i thought more ppl would agree with me and reply just to say yea, i appreciate the hard work. I thought about posing it in one of the bug forums but thought it wouldnt attract the best attention from frustrated sysadmins :p

Im sure the coders would apprectiate a reply that says yea, me too, or i agree, or thanks.

Well, I appreciate the work they've put in so far, they've done things that no other emu project has come close to(ethernalquest). But I don't think the project is really ready for the publicity it has, and the amount of people that actually play on the emu. I guess it helps them work out bugs and things easier with so many beta testers, but most beta projects that i've been involved with had more documentation available about what they are doing, what they're currently working on etc etc. But that can't be expected from such a small team. Yes, they've done an amazing job, but they've grown too fast and put no attention to keeping us, the beta testers, informed about progress. I think that this whole attitude about not being bugged about release dates from their perspective is valid, but from our perspective, it's pretty frustrating. It's coming on a month from their last release. I'm not saying that they're being lazy about things, they're people like all of us with real jobs, they don't have 8 hours a day 5 days a week to sit and code. But maybe they should stop and see where this project is as far as public relations goes. I'm sure half of the people signed up on the forums come here at least 2x a week seeing if there's any word at all about a release coming out.

If the team doesn't care about this, then they should say, hey look people, we don't care if tons of you people are waiting anxiously for a new version, we're doing this for ourselves, and our own growth as programmers. That's fine, a project like this i'm sure is really pushing the talent of the coders involved. But this feels too much like a secret CIA mission, and if word gets to SOE, they'll disavow all knowledge of such events.

The way this project is set up, this forum should be alot more active, with posts about things they are working on, things they are having difficult with, and things they just finished. Who knows, they might even get ideas about solutions from the wanna be programmers out there going to school or whatnot. Open sourcing the project is great, but where is the code now? It's been almost a month since the source available on the site has been updated, and only the dev team knows where things are now. How does that advance things to someone coming here now?

Thanks for the time you guys put into this project, and i really enjoy playing all the servers people release. You have a real chance to make this community, but you're undoing the confidence you may or may not be trying to build. Just think about that. Just try being a little more upfront about things with all of us faithful EQEmu users.

I agree.. Not having an open CVS system is a big downfall of this project, and the lack of a public task/patch system like the way other sourceforge based opensource projects do slows things down. Overall, this project has been very successful as far as OS projects go, but it's only opensource in that you see the code after they finish with it. I think it's a part of the reason the project has slowed down alot. Personally, Im not planning on working on any code that I don't know isn't already being worked on, waste of my time, and I have better things to do than reinvent the wheel. If thats the way they want to do it, that's up to them, I know sourceforge is a bitch to manage at the code level, so can't say I blame them for using a private repository..

Yes, there is not alot of communication about the status of the project outside private channels. I've always wondered about the lack of developer activity on the boards outside of Image and Lyn occasionly. It's seems more like a ship without anyone at the helm as of late, but, these things happen. Projects experience periods of high and low activity. ShowEQ has been like that for a long time, Ive noticed that influxes of new developers typically revitatlize the project. It's at a very active stage right now, while this one seems in an ebb. Once again, thats just how it goes in the opensource world. Especially very small ones, it's not like eqemu has a developer base the size of the linux kernels, php, or mysql's.

I don't think any project grows to fast, I just think projects get exposure too early before a good software development life cycle methodology is worked out. Good planning and a good framework can make a big difference in the success of a project, but this is a 'For fun' project, and putting that much rigor into the process would probably suck the fun out of it for most people. This project started out of some guys playing around though, not from a rigid requirements document. About being bugged, it's frustrating, yes, but it's understandable on both sides. Public Relations? Whats that? LOL . Once again, if the end result was to produce a marketable product, I would understand, but it's not. The EMU project could pretty much flop on it's face at anytime, and the world would go on. No one has lost their job, thats just the way it is..

Could things be done better? Undoubtly... But then again, everything could be done better. It's still a much better system than the old emulator had. The source wasn't opened, there was ALOT less communication, and release dates happened once a year...

You guys want more progress updates? Fine then I'll create a place you guys can go to see whats been done, keep a current change log, etc. Anyways look for that soon I guess, I'll work on it tomorrow.

Do I have to put some people in timeout? :(

What I'd really like to see is a world readable task/todo list, that way those of us who know how to code and want to make a difference can without fear of working on something thats already fixed. I've seen way too many people post 'Here
s a fix' followed by a note , 'It's already fixed in ....' from the dev team. Thats the type of thing that keeps coders from wanting to volunteer to help out.

As far as a changelog, some people might like this to see whats
'been' fixed, but Im more interested in knowing what 'needs to be'
fixed. I've never used ST, but is there anyway to export those parts to html and make it readable? CVS has CVSWeb that allows you web access certain defined parts of the project tree, does ST have anything similar? I just think that would be a step in the right direction for getting outside coder interest, and better managing tasks and responsibilites..

Just my 2cents worth...

Lyenu I love you, as long as you're a girl lol. If you're a guy you only get a pat on the back, sorry ;)

Lon

I think they have a vaild point, on wanting CVS, but /shrug, I am not involved anymore, and I may have kept helping develop after I left the official devteam had there been one, but before I got in the dev team, I was always bugging quag about what WASN'T done =p