well in short, we dont have time. We redesign things as needed, but rarely do we rewrite things purely to achieve better code design. On the other hand, Doodman and I have prolly rewritten at least a quarter of the code in the last 18 months for various reasons. Unfortunately, our time is much better spent applying bandaids than sewing on a new arm.
Overall, the archetecture of the emulator isnt bad, the design is so-so, and the implementation of that design is where it gets messy. As such, there are lots of subsystems which should be redesigned and prolly 1/2 the code should be refactored. However, the benefits of doing these redesigns and refactoring are quite small considering that I would say half of the bugs on the known issue list could prolly be solved in the same amount of time by a dedicated individual.
The only really "pending" archetecture change right now is to get rid of a bunch of the global variables in order to support zone instancing. I have started on this, but am not even close to finishing (mainly because the database work involved became more work than I wanted to put into it).
I have toyed with the idea of rewriting the AI code to be more modular, but I just couldent justify the huge amount of work involved against the few benefits. Further, the fact that Mob and Client have like 1000 methods each is just incredible... and is bad... but at the end of the day, it isnt hurting anything.
I guess my oppinion is that the overall codebase of eqemu is not all that bad... sure it could be done a lot better, but the code is relatively stable and working, and honestly it is a little late in the game to try to make it beautiful. With over 170000 lines of code, its more than a daunting task. Further, I really dont think that a completely redone emulator would help solve very many of the outstanding issues.
That said, if somebody capible of redesigning the emulator showed up and started working on it, I would encourage them to talk to me about how their efforts might be otherwise spent to greater benefit to the community.
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