Plan for DOL

[IStandAloneToo]

My tentative plans for DOL over the next weeks, months, and possibly years. Grab a soda, grab some chips, and enjoy the read. Any opinions at all should be posted as long as they are constructive criticisms. Even if you have 1 or 2 posts, say your opinion! It matters to us!

Short term:
- DOL needs a face lift. Not physically, the site looks presentable and functions good. It needs more of a spiritual face lift. We can start this process by creating a positive environment on the forums. Any negativity, abuse, or anything considered "mean" will not be tolerated, especially if said by the developers! The posts will be edited, hopefully immediately. For this to happen, I need the complete support of all the moderators and developers to make this happen. We need DOL to be inviting to beginners! I know they ask stupid questions, but just ignore them if you can't say something nice. One of the more positive people can answer them!

- We need to some how control the source of the project. We want to remain open source, yet retain some control to force people to develop on DOL. How to do this? Well, we can release binaries, partial source, partial source (like server properties) with a binary, and possibly more. This will be a very touchy subject and hopefully the developers and I can bash our heads together to determine the right approach to this problem.

- Added: Fill current positions in the staff. We need more developers and especially a new DB team.

Medium term:
- Release more updated DOL! Let's get all the classes, all the spells, all the abilities, and attempt to get most of the drops into DOL and tested. This would be very nice to have as DOL would then be a complete replica of live DAoC. It will not be identical though and that is what we will do afterwards. We will tweak spells, melee styles, pet damage, all that internal work to get the game as close to DAoC as possible.

- Attempt to find and fix any lag/security issues. DOL is not terrible at the moment, but it could be a lot better. We can always make DOL better and we should strive to do so.

Long term:
- What's in DOL 2.0? We need to take a look at the older forum topics and see if we can find any huge flaws. When we find enough large problems, we will work through them and create something that performs better (in any aspect) like a major release should. I'm not positive on what some huge flaws are, but with your guy's help, I'm sure we can pull together a nice sized list!

- Use the new integer key database for 2.0 that alex devised. It is already in a few systems and once it is finished, we can put it in the official DOL 2.0. This should be at least one major thing we can fix!

- More on 2.0. Implement my changes to abstract attackable objects from being just GameLiving. This is quite a large task as it changes a large portion of code.

[Tolakram]

Excellent, good luck.

In my opinion, if you haven't read it before, keep everything extremely open and accessible, update often, create dependence.

I'm going to throw out ideas, bear with me.

Right now the fear of having people take stuff and hurt the project is hurting the project. The more things you make available the more dependence you build, the more fans you create. Both the official DB source and the code source should be available to anyone who wants it but only via source control.

Binary builds can be offered via download but if you want the DB you're going to have to figure out how to get it and how to build a database.

Stop obsessing over the kids who want to take, whine, and bitch all at the same time. Prune disrespectful posts and move on. It's amazing how an environment that looks respectful becomes respectful. I think you understand this based on what you said in your post.

Again, please don't fall into the trap of keeping things to yourself because you don't want others stealing your hard work. In my opinion this will destroy the project.

Oh, and hopefully you all are still getting good use from the allakazam account. I'm not sure when it runs out but I'll be glad to renew it whenever needed.

[kahala123]

While its one thing just to get all the items for a new zone created into a DB that gets released, it is another thing to actually have mobs populated in those zones that contain those items. This would be something very nice to see for Atlantis, Catacombs, and Labyrinth. I know dragonfire did a good job making Aurulite merchants, but with no mobs in the instance to kill, there isn't anything to do with the merchants. Same for Atlantis. There is no package already setup to use the drops/artifacts/ml systems that others have tried to create.

[Nocto]

We on Kheldron simply lack the amount of developers to contribute much to the source... (currently i'm the only one and i would never call me a developer *lol*). So we would be very sad to see the source moving to a "download this binary-thing" exe build of the "source"...

Main aspect:
When you only get a compiled exe you cannot read through the source to understand why your latest quest has got bugs / crashs the server or sth. because you never get any syntax which is behind the scenes.

So in my opinion it would be very sad to see this. But, I'm happy to see that there is someone who want to get the development running again

tia,
Nocto

[IStandAloneToo]

Yes, don't be afraid of my plan for DoL. Everything is in a discussion stage and may or may not happen. As for releasing binaries - my main point for that was like I said. People take the source and do not give back. I know that this is going to happen but I feel that it happens too much in DoL. I'm thinking more and more that to be on the Portal - we may require some sort of 'give back'.

We don't expect everyone to give everything back. We just want people to stick around the DoL community as they develop their servers. If they come up with something cool that also is found on Live DAoC servers, then you can share it and 'give back' to the community! I feel that the community is too spread out. I'd like to have the Official DoL as the main community and the shards as smaller subsets of DoL.

[Sumy]

Yes, don't be afraid of my plan for DoL. Everything is in a discussion stage and may or may not happen. As for releasing binaries - my main point for that was like I said. People take the source and do not give back. I know that this is going to happen but I feel that it happens too much in DoL. I'm thinking more and more that to be on the Portal - we may require some sort of 'give back'.

We don't expect everyone to give everything back. We just want people to stick around the DoL community as they develop their servers. If they come up with something cool that also is found on Live DAoC servers, then you can share it and 'give back' to the community! I feel that the community is too spread out. I'd like to have the Official DoL as the main community and the shards as smaller subsets of DoL.

The biggest problem is more that you can at the moment download the Serverlistupdate Script and you're on the Portal, there should be rules for it that things like making money with the Source disables.

[Supgee]

irregardless if DOL only released binaries, thousands of people hold copies fo the SVN, and this would solve nothing.

[ZioRed]

The biggest problem is more that you can at the moment download the Serverlistupdate Script and you're on the Portal, there should be rules for it that things like making money with the Source disables.

I'd like to see EVERY shard who is making (or only plans to make) money with DOL source (no matter if they use 1.0-1.8-1.9-2.0-X.X!) to be out of Portal and even denounced to Mythic

For all the other arguments: I think Ryan has a good point of view and could be a very good project leader since he seems to have a lot of energies and wishes to hard work.

[Xerses]

Even if my voice is not as important as others, I would like to say that Zio has right!

DOL is a freeshard, servers who are making money with DOL should give a percent to DOL or don't use it, even if the reason is to pay there own server.

[ZioRed]

DOL is a freeshard, servers who are making money with DOL should give a percent to DOL or don't use it, even if the reason is to pay there own server.

I don't want any money, I'm supporting and developing on DOL because it is an open source and pay-free project. NOBODY should make money with it (neither the official DOL team/shard).

[Akira]

Lol Mythic..... thats a whole nother story in itself.

[munchies]

All the ideas sound good. I know I have yet to give anything back to DOL yet except a lousy fix for a db. One of the things I like is the source code being I went to school to be a programmer. BUt sadly haven''t used it in it in a while last programming I did was for a mod in nwn. And that was mainly a cross of c and pascal.

For me going and looking at the source I can what the developers are doing I may not be able to fix it yet but I am learning C# at a slow rate. And after I do learn it I was hoping to work on a few scripts that I could post for all the DOL users. BUt my current job has me trying to use my programming skills towards VB at this time but its bring the knowlegde of my c++ skills back more then my VB. Which I think I could put forth toward learning c# at a fast rate then I expecting.

One of the main reason I setup my Server is one I love playing DAOC. The other is to try and help anyway I can so this project of community does not fade away. If that means me doing minor fixs on bugs I find in a db or posting them her I will.

[Batlas]

z0mg the gh0st of Akira past!

[dokks]

irregardless if DOL only released binaries, thousands of people hold copies fo the SVN, and this would solve nothing.

Not to mention that the source is protected by the GNU General Public License which means that you have to make the source code available along with any changes you make to that source, which you distribute, upon demand.

[Etaew]

We really should stop this crap being brought up back again and again, DOL was released under a flawed license, this is not what anyone who has released code to DOL thought it was.

I have no problem ignoring the license, legality is out of the window.

People use loopholes to not share any of the work they do, and instead it ties down the team who do develop DOL publicly, lol this isn't how it is intended. Anyone who thinks so can leave this project right now.