[Quake-devel] My retirement

[Joseph C. <kng...@de...>]

Well, I'm retiring.  This message isn't a subtle attempt to get people to
tell me how much they want me in the project.  That doesn't matter now.
Nor is it a message to make excuses such as how my job is leaving me with
too little free time.  While I haven't got much of that lately, I could
have spent more time the past couple of weeks working on QF than I have.
The desire to work on the project just isn't there.  I also won't insult
the intelligence of this group by blaming anyone for that.

Plain and simple, I just don't have much interest anymore.  Fixing bugs in
Quake is cool, but we're running into too many bugs which are actually
design flaws.  QuakeWorld wasn't designed really so much as it was an
experiment.  And the original Quake was designed within the constraints of
hardware that is now five years old!

We've done a lot to it.  A damned lot.  We've fixed bugs that Zoid thought
he'd never find.  We've done effects that saw their debut in gaming with
Quake3..  This game was never designed for the things we've done.  And the
seams are starting to show in ways that I can't help.

Plus on the other hand, people (just people..  With few exceptions, there
is nobody that comes to mind individually) want things done with the code
that we can't do without compromising somewhere.  A lot of the requests
are actually contradicting other requests or sometimes even come in as a
list of requests which can't all be met because they conflict and we're
left trying to figure out what to do and what not to.

That's all part of developing software which has gained a measure of
popularity though and I'd be worried about the future of QuakeForge if I
didn't see that kind of thing.  But I also see a lot of people who were
once very pleased and appreciative of the work we put into the project
become in a number of cases actually hostile toward us because their
feature or bug report hasn't been taken care of yet.

Essentially, I feel the backwards compatibility which was so paramount to
the project has been lost on some level whether we like it or not.  Sure
all of our features are optional and don't really affect game play much
(unless your hardware can't keep up) but we've gone back and fixed bugs
which has started causing a few things that depend on old and broken
behavior to fail.

And then there's the security issue.  Despite what anyone wants to say,
Quake was NEVER a secure game.  It has now and has always had cheats which
are totally detrimental to the game.  I have reason to believe certain
entire clans cheat every time they play.  Quake, by its very design, is
not secure.  It never was.  Turn on the developer Cvar in newtree if you
don't believe me - watch all the stuffcmds the game sends.  If the game is
sending them, you can type them and make aliases out of them.

We're beating a dead horse.  The only way to make this project interesting
again to either the coders or the majority of players is to do something
that would break QuakeForge as Quake forever.  But isn't that what a few
of us were planning to do with Thirdspace anyway?  Yeah, but we weren't
using any of the Quake foundation code so we don't have to rewrite as much
and can do what we want and do it the right way from the beginning.

It's time to move on - at least for me.  That's the real purpose of this
message.  My ego makes me seriously question whether or not this project
will thrive without me, but my pride leaves me with no doubt that it will.
So I leave the project in the best of hands with Deek, Mercury, and
taniwha.  Well, Deek and Mercury are insane, so the project's in good
hands with taniwha at least.  ;)

Hope to work with all of you again, maybe in Thirdspace, maybe in later
projects.

-- 
Joseph Carter <kng...@de...>               GnuPG key 1024D/DCF9DAB3
Debian GNU/Linux (http://www.debian.org/)         20F6 2261 F185 7A3E 79FC
The QuakeForge Project (http://quakeforge.net/)   44F9 8FF7 D7A3 DCF9 DAB3

<knghtbrd> Solver_: add users who should be messing with sound to group
           audio..  Make sure the devices are all group audio (ls -l
           /dev/dsp will give you the fastest indication if it's probably
	   set right) and build a kernel with sound support for your card
<knghtbrd> OR optionally install alsa source and build modules for that
           with make-kpkg
<knghtbrd> OR (not recommended) get and install evil OSS/Linux evil
           non-free evil binary only evil drivers---but those are evil.
	   And did I mention that it's not recommended?