URGENT: Future of Openkore - community opinion encouraged!

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Cozzie
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URGENT: Future of Openkore - community opinion encouraged!

#1 Post by Cozzie »

Openkore is currently facing a major issue of stagnantation. This issue started as far back as VCL's unofficial stepping down as project leader and the issue became critical with the inactivity of the admins (kali, isieo and bibian) which has go on for more than a year as they all are kept busy with their careers and life. That leaves us with a gap of leadership within openkore which is absent of direction and important design decisions.

What was discussed in IRC with kali and klab is it has reached a level of necessity of leadership. This problems has manifested many symptoms where the project and surrounding support system are breaking down such as _very_ old bugs not being fixed, lack of support for latest version (satan morroc) broken website, even a lack of a proper bug tracking system which through the years the project's condition more and more but slowly resembles skore(for those who remember it =]). However the real problem as I believe is a lack of a leader to delegate priorities and a definitive roadmap to ensure the sustainability of the project's future. It is also noted that with the new AI (and consequently Openkore 3.0) maturing, a project leader is essential to see the pieces fall together in the right places.

This is not 2004, this is 2009. Open source management have came a long way and has lots of mature management methods but we have stepped back. It is understood that although RO as of current is not what it was back in 2005 during it's heydays or that it's userbase makes it easy to acquire dedicated volunteers, developers and the like, history has proven us wrong as the code has went under the hands of many skilled developers. This is what makes the urgency for a project leader more important. To be able to source dedicated and skilled developers, retain and lead them.

I end this by asking the community to nominate possible project leaders.
Make Openkore Awesome. Join the team.

gex00
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Re: Future of Openkore

#2 Post by gex00 »

damn if I only know how to do fixing bugs and stuff I would volunteer myself cause I have no life and I spend most of my day sitting in front of my PC but dont worry Im gonna look for one asap

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Re: Future of Openkore

#3 Post by isieo »

gex00 wrote:damn if I only know how to do fixing bugs and stuff I would volunteer myself cause I have no life and I spend most of my day sitting in front of my PC but dont worry Im gonna look for one asap
learn some programming and commit fixes.
fixes doesn't even need to be in "perfect code" as long as it works, the official developers will review and refactor the code.

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Re: Future of Openkore

#4 Post by gex00 »

isieo wrote:
gex00 wrote:damn if I only know how to do fixing bugs and stuff I would volunteer myself cause I have no life and I spend most of my day sitting in front of my PC but dont worry Im gonna look for one asap
learn some programming and commit fixes.
fixes doesn't even need to be in "perfect code" as long as it works, the official developers will review and refactor the code.
....I see do you have any tutorial of some sort?

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Re: Future of Openkore

#5 Post by isieo »

gex00 wrote:
isieo wrote:
gex00 wrote:damn if I only know how to do fixing bugs and stuff I would volunteer myself cause I have no life and I spend most of my day sitting in front of my PC but dont worry Im gonna look for one asap
learn some programming and commit fixes.
fixes doesn't even need to be in "perfect code" as long as it works, the official developers will review and refactor the code.
....I see do you have any tutorial of some sort?
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programming
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Perl

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Re: Future of Openkore

#6 Post by sli »

Well, since there's been no nomination, I'm gonna nominate myself.

No, really, I'm an experienced project manager and I know how to get things done. I have high standards for coding, performance, data management, and overall quality. And I've been part of the Kore community since the release of the original.
cs : ee : realist

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Re: Future of Openkore

#7 Post by darkfate »

Sad to hear, but I thought this moment would come very soon. I remember talking to VCL about OpenKore and RO going down the hill very soon about a year ago.

I'm not sure how RO is doing since I quit playing 2-3 years ago. Sure as long as people still play the game, developers come and go, but I think more developers have left (or became inactive) then new ones joined in the last 2 years. I think it's a sign that RO is history..

If any volunteer thinks he can continue developing such an old piece of software like OpenKore, with a miserable design which is written in a scripting language suited as shell scripting replacement without a proper OO implementation, if anyone wants to honestly accept this role and also try to keep alive a community full of 12 year old complaining "omg plz help" idiots.. well then that person is rather retarded if you ask me..

I used to develop for OpenKore because I like the team (vcl, isieo, bibian, kali, heero, klab and all the others), hangin' in IRC and talking about crap, those other 1% at higher level than those "plz help" noobs and of course because I'm a computer scientist and love to develop.

Sadly there are several reasons why I went inactive (old developers left, the current ones are inactive too, vcl left, girlfriend eats a lot of my time, no time at all during study)

Doesn't anyone of you guys think that maybe the time has come to freeze this project? If anyone really likes to continue developing software used by 12 year old retards then he can just go ahead and create a new fork..
I mean, officially freezing the project wouldn't mean that you can't keep hangin' in some IRC chat.. (I'd love to do so if I wouldn't come home at 8-8 PM every day)

I hope at least someone has the same opinion as me..

darkfate
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Re: Future of Openkore

#8 Post by sli »

The point of a strong project manager is to fix all that. No one's taken the helm, no one listens to each other, and nothing gets done. We've had thread after thread about these problems and they fall off to the wayside. Someone needs to actually get a documentation team, someone needs to light a fire under the developers, and someone needs to move this project forward. Remember that stagnation is not correlation, OpenKore may be dying, but RO is still growing (oddly enough). Personally, I can't wait for Ep 13. Shit's gonna be so lioncash.

Aside from that, what you're saying about implementation is true. And a lot of people do complain about certain things, especially the servertype implementation. I'm addressing that on my own time, but when you get down to brass tacks, servertypes are correctly implemented. The problem arises from a cobbled together Send.pm and Receive.pm that need to be completely refactored. They should implement the default servertype and nothing more.

One other thing that needs to be rectified is the reliance on SCons. While SCons is nice, it's simply too much, and SCons build scripts are much too complicated. Not to mention they're horribly out of date and even I, with my mountains of Python knowledge, have no idea what to do with them. For this reason, I've stuck to makefiles with Erok, and it would be trivial to do the same with OpenKore. We would need to write a few makefiles and that's it. Done. No more touching them pretty much forever. Most of it would be a simple copy/paste/change job.

You know, as much as I hate kLab, I do admire him for being dedicated to this project. If the new AI is even a 1% improvement, it will be a huge step forward. The current AI lacks only in that it's too specialized. There should be no reason why autobuying Red Potions works, but autobuying Arrows does not when they use functionally identical configuration blocks. Hopefully once the new AI is complete, we'll no longer need macros to fix bugs.

And speaking of bugs, there's really no need to fix bugs at the moment if the entire AI is being rewritten. 2.0.6.1 should be put on complete freeze (not just feature freeze) until the new AI has been completed. I am not opposed to a complete rewrite of OpenKore under a new name. After all, Erok's going to need tougher competition. ;)
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Re: Future of Openkore

#9 Post by gex00 »

darkfate wrote:Sad to hear, but I thought this moment would come very soon. I remember talking to VCL about OpenKore and RO going down the hill very soon about a year ago.

I'm not sure how RO is doing since I quit playing 2-3 years ago. Sure as long as people still play the game, developers come and go, but I think more developers have left (or became inactive) then new ones joined in the last 2 years. I think it's a sign that RO is history..

If any volunteer thinks he can continue developing such an old piece of software like OpenKore, with a miserable design which is written in a scripting language suited as shell scripting replacement without a proper OO implementation, if anyone wants to honestly accept this role and also try to keep alive a community full of 12 year old complaining "omg plz help" idiots.. well then that person is rather retarded if you ask me..

I used to develop for OpenKore because I like the team (vcl, isieo, bibian, kali, heero, klab and all the others), hangin' in IRC and talking about crap, those other 1% at higher level than those "plz help" noobs and of course because I'm a computer scientist and love to develop.

Sadly there are several reasons why I went inactive (old developers left, the current ones are inactive too, vcl left, girlfriend eats a lot of my time, no time at all during study)

Doesn't anyone of you guys think that maybe the time has come to freeze this project? If anyone really likes to continue developing software used by 12 year old retards then he can just go ahead and create a new fork..
I mean, officially freezing the project wouldn't mean that you can't keep hangin' in some IRC chat.. (I'd love to do so if I wouldn't come home at 8-8 PM every day)

I hope at least someone has the same opinion as me..

darkfate
I feel your pain man this forum has 90% leechers and 10% who really tried doin the best they can to get the bot to work, some of the problems here are so simple that they just want you guys to spoon-feed the answer to them but anyways along those 12 yr old retards there are ones that wants this project to continue because think of this without openkore bot = RO bot is history almost all of the other bot programs are all....dead so darkfate pls be active again and do it for those 10% and Im gonna go read this whole tutorial so I may give some help in the future

edit: and what sli said RO is unfortunately not dying its still growing as lnog as ppl play them it wont die

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Re: Future of Openkore

#10 Post by kali »

Since sli has already volunteered, would there be anyone else to challenge?

I had been a leader myself, and I do know it is very important for followers to listen to what the leader has to say, even though he personally dislikes him. If sli does become project leader I still will give my support to OpenKore, if at least because of the shared vision sli will forge.

I'm glad sli identified a few requirements (assembly of the doc team, strict implementation of design, etc.) which the new project leader will have to tackle. The question is: will managing both OpenKore as well as Erok actually work? I am quite afraid that all that would happen is Erok will pirate OpenKore's developers. That is not to say that it's disadvantageous (I am now of the belief that perl may not have been the best language to write OpenKore in) but the point of getting a project leader is to move the project forward, not to liquidate it.

Also, the project leader is the emblem or image of the project. I had a small talk with VCL during the irc discussion (I invited him over, but he's busy with his own projects too, which I can completely understand) and he mentioned that leadership does not necessarily mean the best coder among us, rather it means the person with the best people skills among us. I would have to agree, being a (former) manager (of a real life company) myself. Project management is more of managing people rather than coding, which is why I'd even accept noncoders as long as they actually inspire people to action (kinda like what Cozzie is doing now).

In this case, I should also make my status clear: I doubt I can code for OpenKore for the foreseeable future. I actually have a different vision now: I'd like a client that is not necessarily a Ragnarok Online client - but rather a client that understands the RO protocol, and happens to be compatible with Gravity servers. However, I'm also envisioning a game that uses the RO protocol, but i not RO. Something like RuneScape or UltimaOnline.

That does not mean I will stop giving time for OpenKore. I will still share my resources as much as I can, and give whatever whatever useful advice I may have. I'm still not closing my doors though; if someone revives the project into what it was before, I might get truly interested enough to be active again.

BTW Cozzie, when will you be organizing the question and answer portion? :P
Got your topic trashed by a mod?

Trashing topics is one click, and moving a topic to its proper forum is a lot harder. You expend the least effort in deciding where to post, mods expend the least effort by trashing.

Have a nice day.

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