Thread: [Stellarlegacy-developer] Anyone out there?

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Anyone out there? Is this project still alive?

-- 
Satya. http://www.thesatya.com/
Standards are wonderful!  So many to pick from!

On Tue, May 10, 2005 at 10:16:31AM -0400, Satya wrote:
> Anyone out there? Is this project still alive?

Well, I'm still here, but the project is languishing, it appears.

Jeremy
-- 
Jeremy Anderson		jeremy (at) angelar.com	
http://www.angelar.com/~jeremy    

On Tue, 10 May 2005 at 10:01:17AM -0500, Jeremy Anderson wrote:
>
>Well, I'm still here, but the project is languishing, it appears.

I'd say "coma", hopefully not too irreversible... ;)
I'm still alive, anyway :)

Bye,
Alberto
-- 
Alberto BARSELLA
** Beliefs are dangerous. Beliefs allow the mind to stop functioning.
A non-functioning mind is clinically dead.  Believe in nothing... **

>On Tue, May 10, 2005 at 10:16:31AM -0400, Satya wrote:
>> Anyone out there? Is this project still alive?

Okay, so people are there but project is languishing. I wanted to do a
web-based Stars! clone. What do y'all think?

(Replying to a random message.)

-- 
Satya. http://www.thesatya.com/
*** EVENT HORIZON * DO NOT CROSS *** EVENT HORIZON * DO NOT CROSS ***

Satya wrote:
>>On Tue, May 10, 2005 at 10:16:31AM -0400, Satya wrote:
>>
>>>Anyone out there? Is this project still alive?
> 
> 
> Okay, so people are there but project is languishing. I wanted to do a
> web-based Stars! clone. What do y'all think?
> 
> 
> (Replying to a random message.)

Stellarlegacy is currently being designed more as a framework for 
stars-like games rather than a clone.

You might want to have a look at the freestars project which is more of 
a direct clone
irc:starlink #freestars

I also had a side project of my own, a battle engine simulator for 
stars, written in Java. Its not complete yet, but alot of core backend 
work is done:
www.sf.net/projects/mars4stars

-- 
Rules are written for those who lack the ability to truly reason,
But for those who can, rules become nothing more than guidelines,
And live their lives governed not by rules but by reason.
      - James McGuigan

Earth Emergency - A Call to Action (www.earthemergency.org)
Sustainable Society Directory (www.sustainable-society.co.uk)
World Future Council Initiative (www.worldfuturecouncil.org)
Open co-op (http://open.coop)

Satya wrote:
> Anyone out there? Is this project still alive?

I'm still here.

I've now switched to linux as my primary OS, and I've got far more 
programming experience that I used to, those where big stumbling blocks 
for me in the past. However now my biggest problem is time.

I still think its an interesting project though, and if it gets up 
again,  you never know, I might just be able to spare some time.

-- 
Rules are written for those who lack the ability to truly reason,
But for those who can, rules become nothing more than guidelines,
And live their lives governed not by rules but by reason.
      - James McGuigan

Earth Emergency - A Call to Action (www.earthemergency.org)
Sustainable Society Directory (www.sustainable-society.co.uk)
World Future Council Initiative (www.worldfuturecouncil.org)
Open co-op (http://open.coop)

I'm still here too!

Satya wrote:

>Anyone out there? Is this project still alive?
>
>  
>

On Tue, May 10, 2005 at 05:06:30PM -0400, as...@be... wrote:
>I'm still here too!
>
>Satya wrote:
>
>>Anyone out there? Is this project still alive?

Dr. A? Thought you died a few years ago?

-- 
Satya. http://www.thesatya.com/
*** EVENT HORIZON * DO NOT CROSS *** EVENT HORIZON * DO NOT CROSS ***

Satya wrote:

>Anyone out there? Is this project still alive?
>  
>
I guess I'm still around.  (Check the mail archives for more info.  It's
been years since I last contributed.  But I'm still half-interested.)  I
have some ideas.

I'm also busy with a new job while I moonlight at my old job.  (There's
nothing more satisfying than working a 9-hour Saturday importing donor
records for a non-profit.  Woo hoo!)

I think the project suffered from poor management and questionable
software engineering.  (Don't get me wrong.  I think that in a few
years, this project could become like FreeCiv.)  The main thing is that
you all need to come together and come up with good, collective goals. 
This may or may not require a "leader" to manifest.

It looks like each of you have different goals and expectations for the
project.  How "Stars!-like" is it?  What are the rules?  Which
technologies does the client use?  What about the server?  Your answers
to these questions are sometimes fundamentally incompatible.

What I think this project needs is:

(1a) An opinionated, motivated leader who can impose his will on the
project and make things happen;
or
(1b) For you to collectively conduct a meeting where you come up with
core goals and answers to fundamental questions (see above);
(2) One or more people with enough time to actually write code.  :)

I'm curious whether the group perceives my analysis as correct or not. 
Go ahead and let me know.

--Brent

P.S.  Satya, I'm not sure whether I can post alright.  If you don't see
my post on the list, would you kindly forward it to
ste...@li... ?  Thanks.

--- http://USFamily.Net/dialup.html - $8.25/mo! -- http://www.usfamily.net/dsl.html - $19.99/mo! ---

On Wed, May 11, 2005 at 01:32:54PM +0100, Darren Winsper wrote:
>Regarding code, there should be some serious consideration as to whether
>sticking with C++ is the right move.  Back in 1999, going with C++ was a
>bold and daring move, guaranteed to make the KDE folks love you and the
>GNOME folk sneer.  Things have changed a lot since then.  Computers are
>much more powerful, higher-level languages have come into their own and,
>let's face it, 4X games hardly require supercomputers to run them.

I'd say Python or Perl... perl because I want to make it web-based.
Python because it's got decent gamer graphics support and you can
produce Windows binaries, too.

-- 
Satya. http://www.thesatya.com/
ASCII Ribbon campaign against HTML Usenet posts and e-mail

On Wed, 2005-05-11 at 08:45 -0400, Satya wrote:

> I'd say Python or Perl... perl because I want to make it web-based.

Perl's a good text manipulation language, but I'd argue that Perl too
actively encourages you to make your code look like an explosion at the
ASCII factory to be suitable for writing an entire game ;)

-- 
Darren Winsper <da...@wi...>

On Wed, May 11, 2005 at 02:52:38PM +0100, Darren Winsper wrote:
>1) Perl is reasonably popular still, but mostly amongst hard-core types.
>It's not very accessible to newcomers and is rapidly being replaced by
>other high-level languages as "the scripting language to know."  I think
>it would be a really, really bad choice.

Why is accessibility to newcomers an issue? *No* language is accessible
to newcomers.

>2) Python is indeed getting quite popular.  I don't use it much myself,
>but I can understand why people do.

I don't think popularity should be the primary condition. The
capabilities and the core developers' familiarity should be the primary
conditions.

>3) Java was, IIRC, originally considered before we chose C++.  The
>concerns back then were the arguments that it's too slow, Swing is icky
>and a number of the coders wanted to use C++ anyway.  Well, it's not
>really that slow any more and there are other toolkits or binding to
>toolkits available.  However, Sun are gits.

I consider Java itself icky, but it seems to me that a lot of OO
languages are icky -- simply due to syntax and namespace issues.

>4) I'm going to get called all-sorts for this, but has anyone considered
>going with .Net/Mono?  .Net is the future of Windows and Mono is picking

Yup, you're going to get called all-sorts :-P

>up a lot of steam on non-Windows platforms.  Making client applications
>in .Net is quite a pleasant experience and it'll give us greater
>flexibility over what languages we choose to use for various things.
>For example, we could use IronPython as a scripting engine, satisfying
>your Python needs :)

You can pretty much count me out by going with .NET/Mono. I know that
doesn't anything much since no one here knows me (and so has no reason to
want me) anyway.

-- 
Satya. http://www.thesatya.com/
BREAKFAST.COM halted... cereal port not responding.

On Wed, 2005-05-11 at 16:17 -0400, Satya wrote:
> On Wed, May 11, 2005 at 02:52:38PM +0100, Darren Winsper wrote:
[Perl]
> Why is accessibility to newcomers an issue?

Well, I meant to refer to the fact that projects written in Perl tend to
descend into big heaps of regex-filled, overly complex code that's very
difficult to understand.  There's a reason the joke "Perl is a
write-only language" exists.

> *No* language is accessible
> to newcomers.

That's not true.  Try to teach someone Brainfuck then try to teach them
BASIC.  Some languages are just easier to pick up than others.

> >2) Python is indeed getting quite popular.  I don't use it much myself,
> >but I can understand why people do.
> 
> I don't think popularity should be the primary condition.

I'm not saying it should, but it should be a consideration.

> The capabilities and the core developers' familiarity should be the primary
> conditions.

Possibly, but our remaining numbers are few and in order to attract more
developers, we need to make things accessible to them.

[Java]
> I consider Java itself icky, but it seems to me that a lot of OO
> languages are icky -- simply due to syntax and namespace issues.

A lot of people find the syntax of Perl somewhat terrible, so I think
we'll just have to chalk it up to personal opinion.

[.Net/Mono]
> You can pretty much count me out by going with .NET/Mono. I know that
> doesn't anything much since no one here knows me (and so has no reason to
> want me) anyway.

But why?  A lot of people have an irrational hatred of anything
associated with .Net simply because it came from Microsoft.  When Mono
is mentioned, they seem to waffle about patent issues, yet can't
actually name a patent that's a problem.

-- 
Darren Winsper <da...@wi...>

Hi,

On Wed, 11 May 2005 at 07:04:35PM -0500, Brent Blalock wrote:

>I'm also busy with a new job while I moonlight at my old job.  (There's
>nothing more satisfying than working a 9-hour Saturday importing donor
>records for a non-profit.  Woo hoo!)

Live by the DBMS, die by the DBMS :)

>I think the project suffered from poor management and questionable
>software engineering.  (Don't get me wrong.  I think that in a few
>years, this project could become like FreeCiv.)  The main thing is that
>you all need to come together and come up with good, collective goals. 
>This may or may not require a "leader" to manifest.

If you compare with other OSS projects, we were definitely above a lot 
of them.  The problem with game developement is that as soon as you 
lose interest in the game, you lose interest in the developement.

>It looks like each of you have different goals and expectations for the
>project.  How "Stars!-like" is it?  What are the rules?  Which
>technologies does the client use?  What about the server?  Your answers
>to these questions are sometimes fundamentally incompatible.

Not really.  The aim has always been a general framwork with an initial 
specialization to being a Stars! clone.  What is actually absurd is that 
all the core functionality is there and already was there when we 
stopped.

>(1a) An opinionated, motivated leader who can impose his will on the
>project and make things happen;

Yes, and have 3/4 of the people flee :)

>or
>(1b) For you to collectively conduct a meeting where you come up with
>core goals and answers to fundamental questions (see above);

Much better :)  This is not very far from what was happening at the end.

>(2) One or more people with enough time to actually write code.  :)

This is the real problem.  It's not a matter of what language you use, 
if only a small minority codes the project is dead.
Personally, if you need help taking over the old codebase, I'm willing 
to help, but I don't think I'll contribute much, since (as I wrote 
above), I'm not interested in the game now.

Bye,
Alberto
-- 
Alberto BARSELLA
** Beliefs are dangerous. Beliefs allow the mind to stop functioning.
A non-functioning mind is clinically dead.  Believe in nothing... **

On Thu, May 12, 2005 at 06:45:59PM +0200, Alberto BARSELLA wrote:
> 
> This is the real problem.  It's not a matter of what language you use, 
> if only a small minority codes the project is dead.
> Personally, if you need help taking over the old codebase, I'm willing 
> to help, but I don't think I'll contribute much, since (as I wrote 
> above), I'm not interested in the game now.

Sadly, this has happened to me, too.

I found I could work up mods for Space Empires IV that did much of what I wanted to do.
When I wanted to see cool 3-d space battles, I could play Homeworld (and now, Homeworld 2).

I haven't had Stars! installed on a machine for years :(
-- 
Jeremy Anderson		jeremy (at) angelar.com	
http://www.angelar.com/~jeremy    

On Wed, 2005-05-11 at 19:04 -0500, Brent Blalock wrote:

> I think the project suffered from poor management and questionable
> software engineering.

As the original founder of Stellar Legacy (originally called OpenStars!
due to my lack of creativity :) ), I suppose I should pipe up.  As the
founder, I kind of became the de-facto manager and, well, didn't so much
manage as let people get on with it :)  So, yeah, my management sucked,
what little I did.  My excuse is that I was 17 at the time it was
founded and I didn't know any better ;)

> The main thing is that
> you all need to come together and come up with good, collective goals. 
> This may or may not require a "leader" to manifest.

I'd be inclined to agree.

> It looks like each of you have different goals and expectations for the
> project.  How "Stars!-like" is it?  What are the rules?  Which
> technologies does the client use?  What about the server?  Your answers
> to these questions are sometimes fundamentally incompatible.

Indeed.  The original idea was to come up with an open source Stars!
clone.  Back then, Stars! was languishing and Stars! Supernova Genesis
doo-lally silly-long-collection-of-words-to-form-a-name was missing
deadlines in much the same manner as the late Douglas Adams was famous
for.  From there, people suggested fixing some of the issues with
Stars!, which then evolved into wanting to allow people to change the
rules easily.  It doesn't take a great leap from there to move to the
idea of basically having a framework around which Stars!-like games
could be made.

> What I think this project needs is:
> 
> (1a) An opinionated, motivated leader who can impose his will on the
> project and make things happen;

Personally, I'd agree with this assessment, see below for my reasoning.

> (1b) For you to collectively conduct a meeting where you come up with
> core goals and answers to fundamental questions (see above);

The problem with this is who's going to be the one to say "no" when
someone comes along with "here's a patch to solve world hunger"?
Feature creep is very hard to avoid with a committee.

> (2) One or more people with enough time to actually write code.  :)

Regarding code, there should be some serious consideration as to whether
sticking with C++ is the right move.  Back in 1999, going with C++ was a
bold and daring move, guaranteed to make the KDE folks love you and the
GNOME folk sneer.  Things have changed a lot since then.  Computers are
much more powerful, higher-level languages have come into their own and,
let's face it, 4X games hardly require supercomputers to run them.

When you have limited developer time, you really don't want it wasted
arguing/debating over when to free this pointer, or to spend ages just
trying to concatenate a string.

Anyhow, I should wrap this up, so I'll just say this: Stellar Legacy
started out as "let's make an open source Stars!" and quickly ballooned
into "let's make the best 4X framework ever that can do everything!"  We
should re-evaluate, get back to basics (not necessarily "clone Stars!")
and get something that's simple but fun to play.  That is, if people are
up for it.

-- 
Darren Winsper <da...@wi...>

On Wed, May 11, 2005 at 01:32:54PM +0100, Darren Winsper wrote:
> 
> Regarding code, there should be some serious consideration as to whether
> sticking with C++ is the right move.  Back in 1999, going with C++ was a
> bold and daring move, guaranteed to make the KDE folks love you and the
> GNOME folk sneer.  Things have changed a lot since then.  Computers are
> much more powerful, higher-level languages have come into their own and,
> let's face it, 4X games hardly require supercomputers to run them.

I've thought about that myself, and wondered if perl or python would be a good choice for the main language, with the expectation that bottlenecks can later be optimized into C or C++.  Python has the advantage of being inherently object-oriented, and is increasingly being taught at University.

> When you have limited developer time, you really don't want it wasted
> arguing/debating over when to free this pointer, or to spend ages just
> trying to concatenate a string.

Exactly.
-- 
Jeremy Anderson		jeremy (at) angelar.com	
http://www.angelar.com/~jeremy    

On Wed, 2005-05-11 at 08:16 -0500, Jeremy Anderson wrote:

[ Language Discussion ]

Excuse me if I sound opinionated, but I'm going to throw my language
thoughts in the pot;
1) Perl is reasonably popular still, but mostly amongst hard-core types.
It's not very accessible to newcomers and is rapidly being replaced by
other high-level languages as "the scripting language to know."  I think
it would be a really, really bad choice.

2) Python is indeed getting quite popular.  I don't use it much myself,
but I can understand why people do.

3) Java was, IIRC, originally considered before we chose C++.  The
concerns back then were the arguments that it's too slow, Swing is icky
and a number of the coders wanted to use C++ anyway.  Well, it's not
really that slow any more and there are other toolkits or binding to
toolkits available.  However, Sun are gits.

4) I'm going to get called all-sorts for this, but has anyone considered
going with .Net/Mono?  .Net is the future of Windows and Mono is picking
up a lot of steam on non-Windows platforms.  Making client applications
in .Net is quite a pleasant experience and it'll give us greater
flexibility over what languages we choose to use for various things.
For example, we could use IronPython as a scripting engine, satisfying
your Python needs :)

Anyhow, food for thought.

-- 
Darren Winsper <da...@wi...>

On Wed, 11 May 2005, Darren Winsper wrote:

> Regarding code, there should be some serious consideration as to whether
> sticking with C++ is the right move.  Back in 1999, going with C++ was a
> bold and daring move, guaranteed to make the KDE folks love you and the
> GNOME folk sneer.  Things have changed a lot since then.  Computers are
> much more powerful, higher-level languages have come into their own and,
> let's face it, 4X games hardly require supercomputers to run them.
>
> When you have limited developer time, you really don't want it wasted
> arguing/debating over when to free this pointer, or to spend ages just
> trying to concatenate a string.

IIRC in 1999 there was not a single programming language (besides C) that
as many interested persons had experience with as C++. Thus choosing C++
was the only sane choice at this time and I think it is still a good
choice. However, I agree with Darren that C# probably would be a better
from todays perspective.

Python is a nice language for smaller project, but from an OOP perspective
it is incomplete IMHO (e.g. information capsuling). Using such a language
for scripting would be ideal nevertheless (this is the approach that Boson
http://boson.eu.org uses btw).

> Anyhow, I should wrap this up, so I'll just say this: Stellar Legacy
> started out as "let's make an open source Stars!" and quickly ballooned
> into "let's make the best 4X framework ever that can do everything!"  We
> should re-evaluate, get back to basics (not necessarily "clone Stars!")
> and get something that's simple but fun to play.  That is, if people are
> up for it.

I agree.

best regards,
  Marco

=2D----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Wednesday 11 May 2005 20:06, Marco Krohn wrote:
> Python is a nice language for smaller project, but from an OOP perspective
> it is incomplete IMHO (e.g. information capsuling). Using such a language
> for scripting would be ideal nevertheless (this is the approach that Boson
> http://boson.eu.org uses btw).

A lot of people would disagree with you here. Python is very suited for big=
 OO=20
projects judging with the big OO projects available out there.

Nobody said data encapsuling has to be enforced at the language level.

if you plan the Python route, you can always have a look at Twisted Matrix =
for=20
the network part of the game. With it, it should be easy to create a comple=
te=20
server with a lot of features like irc/IM connectivity, mail and newsgroup=
=20
handling etc...
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On Wed, May 11, 2005 at 08:42:30PM +0200, Cavalaria Christophe wrote:
>if you plan the Python route, you can always have a look at Twisted Matrix for 
>the network part of the game. With it, it should be easy to create a complete 
>server with a lot of features like irc/IM connectivity, mail and newsgroup 
>handling etc...

And I was just ranting about this at work. Why does every other game
feel compelled to include IRC/IM, email, etc inside itself? People (me)
are used to and prefer to use their own apps, whatever they would
otherwise use.

But yeah, I've heard good things about Twisted. And bad things. Nothing
in particular. Look, a wasp!

-- 
Satya. http://www.thesatya.com/
Damn it Jim, I'm a doctor, not a SysOp.

On Wed, 11 May 2005, Brent Blalock wrote:

Hi,

still around too :-)

I'm still very interested, but having my final PhD exam in June there is
nothing I can do at the moment.

Partially I agree with Brent's analysis:

* we had a poor management
* a tendency to over-engineering
* not enough motivated developers (with free time)
* and neglected the "release early release often" open-source paradigm

Nevertheless, I still would say that the code base that Alberto, Ralf,
others and me have build is good. As I said it is sometimes a bit
overengineered though ;-)

> It looks like each of you have different goals and expectations for the
> project.  How "Stars!-like" is it?  What are the rules?  Which
> technologies does the client use?  What about the server?  Your answers
> to these questions are sometimes fundamentally incompatible.

I think the rules are not that important for the beginning. AFAIR we
decided to go with very simple rules for the beginning and introduce more
complex ones later.

What indeed is needed is a leader which moves the project forward and who
motivates others to join.

best regards,
  Marco

Hello all.

I have the stellarlegacy wiki still running, but
Since it has been a long time since there have been
any CVS commits, and we all have many irons in the
fire...I'd like to suggest a bit of heresy:

Let's let stellarlegacy go.  I think we'd be better
off to start clean next time, perhaps with some working
small-scale code.  Make it into a visible project
later.  

I've got two little boys now, and I'm back teaching,
which means I won't have spare time anytime soon.

If there is consensus that we retire the project, I will
shut down the stellarlegacy wiki.  If, however, some would
still like to continue/begin plugging away at stellar
legacy, I will leave the wiki active for as long as you 
wish.  I'd love to see some code commits, but as I have
stated on the list before, I think that Space Empires V,
despite being commercial, despite having many, many 
shortcomings, is already there, for the most part.

What does everyone else think?

Jeremy
-- 
Jeremy Anderson		jeremy (at) angelar.com	
http://www.angelar.com/~jeremy    
What a sad world it is where money is spent on 
weapons instead of books, on war instead of 
health, corporations instead of human beings.

On Thursday 06 October 2005 04:32, Jeremy Anderson wrote:
> Hello all.
>
> I have the stellarlegacy wiki still running, but
> Since it has been a long time since there have been
> any CVS commits, and we all have many irons in the
> fire...I'd like to suggest a bit of heresy:
>
> Let's let stellarlegacy go.  I think we'd be better
> off to start clean next time, perhaps with some working
> small-scale code.  Make it into a visible project
> later.
>
> I've got two little boys now, and I'm back teaching,
> which means I won't have spare time anytime soon.
>
> If there is consensus that we retire the project, I will
> shut down the stellarlegacy wiki.  If, however, some would
> still like to continue/begin plugging away at stellar
> legacy, I will leave the wiki active for as long as you
> wish.  I'd love to see some code commits, but as I have
> stated on the list before, I think that Space Empires V,
> despite being commercial, despite having many, many
> shortcomings, is already there, for the most part.
>
> What does everyone else think?

The sourceforge project will probably stay alive for many years to come. It=
=20
might be interesting for all to put the wiki there so that the information =
in=20
it isn't lost for those who would try to create a similar project on the=20
future.

On Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 07:45:35PM +0200, Cavalaria Christophe wrote:
> The sourceforge project will probably stay alive for many years to come. It 
> might be interesting for all to put the wiki there so that the information in 
> it isn't lost for those who would try to create a similar project on the 
> future.

Great.  How do I put it on sourceforge?

Jeremy 
-- 
Jeremy Anderson		jeremy (at) angelar.com	
http://www.angelar.com/~jeremy    
What a sad world it is where money is spent on 
weapons instead of books, on war instead of 
health, corporations instead of human beings.

Thread: [Stellarlegacy-developer] Anyone out there?

stellarlegacy-developer