On Sat, Nov 01, 2008 at 01:32:22PM +0100, Nicolas Weeger <[email protected]> wrote: > So, anyone working on something? Anyone having plans for working on CF? Or can > we close the shop down?
I know, it's a bit late for a reply, but I found it rather satisfying and funny. The crossfire/metalforge folks are *actively* driving away everybody who is willing to do work, and you still seem to wonder about it. Now that's weird. Contrast this to Deliantra. Content: - deliantra has had vastly improved 64x64 graphics with *working* smoothing for over a year. - almost all textures have been redone, many items and buildings are now actually 3d models. known proprietary material has been removed. - a myriad of map bugs have been fixed. - npc dialogs have been vastly improved in the server, and most content has been updated, starting from mere rewriting of many of the existing (but wrong) texts in maps to adding completely new quests, cities and even whole new contintents! - many areas have been bigworldised (this is technically very easy in deliantra). - there is a multi-stage tutorial and many areas of the world (including scorn) have been redone almost completely to work more logically and give beginners a more logical introduction to the game. of course, the server can give (optional) hints - I probably forgot a lot here, because I wasn't involved in all of these changes, sorry to our content designes if I forgot something especially important :) - Rebalancing: we worked for years on rebalancing the game play, with huge successes (you have to see it to understand it), there are no known cheats or exploits left, and players actually feel that the gaem continues after level 20. - We also almost completely eradicated the frustration of the high death penalty, keeping players from leaving (I am sure you know what I am talking about), without endangering the game balance (via nimbus and other techniques). - (oh yes, don't let me mention the region-specific monsters, server-provided music, 2d sound effects for monsters and spells, interactive in-game world map and many other improvements). many of these things have only been made possible by advances in the server, of course. Client: - deliantra distributes native OS X/Windows/Linux binaries and naturally, very portable source code going along with it. - the client is very easy to install, in most cases, you simply download and start it, no installation or uninstallation required, and certainly no obscure libraries. - the client takes advantage of opengl hardware and works even on very old hardware, is full screen, has a minimap, and greatly improves user interaction by delivering something that looks and feels like a game, not something that looks like some administration console. - (well, just look at the screenshots at http://www.deliantra.net/screenshots.html). Server: Naturally, since we have two strong programmers, Deliantra also "suffers" from the server being improved the most. - the server takes advantage of C++ features wherever it can: as a simple example, shared strings and objects are transparently refcounted and garbage collected, which alone fixed a lot of bugs (especially where crossfire accessed freed objects). of course, this also simplifies string handling a lot and, in most cases, both speeds it up AND fixes a lot of buffer overflows. - the server is fully asynchronous: map loading/saving, player loading/saving and many other tasks are done in the background, so the server is able to handle more than 10 players without starting to freeze shortly every time a player changes maps. - the server can load treasures, archetypes, the world map (which is actually a png file), faces, music, configuration, extension modules, books, regions etc. etc. at runtime and of course asynchronously, without disturbing the running game. - stability: the server doesn't crash. well, we fixed over a hundred crash bugs. not only that: the server doesn't lose data on crashes, at least it didn't in the last years. To get an impression of what that means: our "unique 1" mascot in scorn had to be recreated on every restart (not crash!) because crossfire loses data even on clean restarts, while in deliantra, despite having had hundreds of crashes (mostly when rewriting the map handling parts a year (or two?) ago), the server was simply back up 20 seconds later without having lost a single second of playing time, no duplicated items and so on. Or to put it differently, a restart in deliantra means a downtime of 10 seconds, while in crossfire, it means a major map reset, crashes mean item loss of duplication etc. etc. - most of the server has been modernised: the skill/slot usage has been rationalised, the map handling has been completely redone, as well as the object and plug-in system. apart from the many crash bugs that have been fixed, a lot of content bugs have been fixed as well, such as a rewritten spell strength system, or a lighting system that actually works (you will understand if you run around in new scorn at night on deliantra vs. crossfire). - speed: I don't quite understand why crossfire people are even wondering about distributed implementations for speed: deliantra uses about 2.5% of cpu time with 10 active players, mostly due to obvious bugfixes. It has >100ms *less* latency when reacting to user input and can handle a lot more players then crossfire has seen in the last year or so (crossfire on the same hardware was somewhere between 25% to freezing with 10 active players, even without the hanuk bug (has that one been addressed yet in cf?)). - protocol: with the deliantra client, the server can actually deliver more than 8 faces/s (without crashing, yay :). whats more, it can deliver objects of any size (long books, music etc.), asynchronously, so the player can move freely even though content has not been loaded (as opposed to freezing and likely dieing in crossfire). the server even monitors packet loss of available bandwidth, with automatic bandwidth scaling so people can play unhindred even if large (megabytes) data faces are being delivered. and all that without dirty hacks such as bumping up the packet size, which just makes the game less playable. - there are about 500 summarised changes for the server alone. Heck, most of the things that have been planned or mentioned as nice ideas on this list *have* been implemented for a long time in deliantra. So why is Deliantra separate? - leaf made up ever new rules for the metaserver, and in the end, just removed us silently by making up *lies* (and of course new rules), despite deliantra following *all* rules we had agreed to on IRC before. what really happened, of course, is that deliantra was vastly more successful, so leaf just wanted to get rid of those other annoying servers in the worst possible way. of course, he alos did that to *all* other servers with a nonzero amount of players. get the idea? metalforge is the most successful server for crossfire because other, possibly more innovative and user-friendly servers simply get censored... - the deliantra devs grew very tired of the constant "you cannot do this and that becasue of <stupid reason>". To those who remember having told us "we cannot do xxx": we actually implemented *all* of what you thought couldn't be done. I especially remember the many nights I wasted to discuss with some crossfire dev idiot who came up with ever more reasons why 64x64 graphics (and scaling) cannot be done. I wasn't happy about kicking him from the channel, but without these annoying disucssions, we had it implemented within about a week. Yes folks, you *are* responsible for the bad state of affairs. All you do is make up idiotic regulations, force alternative crossfire servers into stupid name changes (or just silently block them), and keep telling each other why so and so is impossible or too hard and why you are soo cool. I might sound a bit big-nosed, but remember that Deliantra is the living proof of all this. Have a look at it, be amazed at what very few people can actually do if they are not constantly hindred by you. Oh, and yes, I am convinced that deliantra is very close to the philosophy of crossfire. Many long-term crossfire players describe deliantra as "crossfire as it should be nowadays". (I am actually thankful for getting expelled from the metaserver, it didn't hurt our userbase, and freed a lot of time to actually *do* stuff). > I admit I'm not motivated at all lately. The code is a real mess, maps are > pretty boring usually, and the game is going nowhere. Well, that's your fault, too, so deal with it and quit whining... Yours Sincerely, schmorp (with the consent of other deliantra hackers) -- The choice of a Deliantra, the free code+content MORPG -----==- _GNU_ http://www.deliantra.net ----==-- _ generation ---==---(_)__ __ ____ __ Marc Lehmann --==---/ / _ \/ // /\ \/ / [email protected] -=====/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\ _______________________________________________ crossfire mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.metalforge.org/mailman/listinfo/crossfire
