Is DOL kinda dead now ?

[Aftertaste]

I see like 1 popular server, did all the programmers find other projects ?

[Graveen]

still in mind to contribute. no sure if i'll find the time to spend on this honestly

[Blue]

I think DOL has a rather stable feature set. What is done now is more of academic type cleanup like reorganizing or refactoring. Thats still good for excercise and learning and provides good maintenance capabilities. What is DOL missing which would require more coding?

[Leodagan]

Pathfinding ? (At least for Water Geometry so fish-like mobs stop following player on ground...)

Somewhat more Live-Like Mob Brains ? (Bring-A-Friend, Social Inc, Yelling for help, Balanced Aggro Build-up for support class)

Encryption Support to enable UDP or prevent easy radar-hack listening to network packets...

Translation for "Instantiated" Objects (NPC Name / Items Name / Skill translation based on client language not on server language)

These are the main "Features" that comes to mind that would require new code


There are other tweaks or optimizations that could be easily implemented, like processor affinity instead of random Region Timer distributions (Having Albion/Hibernia/Midgard Regions or Capital Cities Regions being on the same RegionTimer as Frontiers Region is not ideal), Keep Manager don't save Component Health so Keep Doors and Wall are back to 100% health after restart, Database Table partitioning for Inventory...

These would make heavy populated server easier to run, but it's not really a priority as there are few heavy populated shard, and hardware is getting cheap...

And finally academic cleanup like you said, this could fix a lot of unexpected behavior from undocumented flows

[Eyebalze]

hey all,

i am complete with Leodagan!
There are several points that urgently need a revision atm. especially the old code that is still implented as an essential part of the core, often bypassed sporadically with unreasonable units.
Blue, to be honest, Uthgard is atm. the only valueable, stable and standalone project available even in its actual beta-phase! This can be explained by the fact that you guys, have the required experience and of course, the rare data. and systems/resources (ja ich weiss woher Ihr eure Ressourcen und Client/Server-Daten herbekommen habt )
Unfortunately, this opportunity, is/was a "premium" gift for you guys, caused by personal acquaintances.

I personally, have my own impression about the so called "DOL Community" - there are several guys that are really endeavor to push the DOL Project onwards (i wont tell any names for now - you guys know who i am talking about).
But its a fact, like you know from real-life situations, that without any rewards or commends, the motivation will get lost faster as it came along! Therefor my big respect for the oldschool programmers, who are still willing to put some energy into this old and flabby bastard of a project - please do not get me wrong, look at my joining date - i am really in love with DAoC and DOL, but i won't sugarcoat this whole thing anymore!

Its a fact, that all the server managers and so called project administrators are holding back important informations, decent code, working databases, sources, scripts etc. to become established and able to show that they are the "only" ones available on the freeshard market! In addition, and thats the second point, the most of them, are (or at least trying to) programming their own "Server Portals" just to stand out from the rest of the lame-ass (DaocPortal) crowd. You dont believe me?! -
Player Statistics are the best evidence



Since late-end 2013 with the shutdown of the Uthgard Servers, as you can see, there was a fatal loss to players in general, leading into a unprecedented depth that is still holding on! The only appreciable peak was on March this year, where the Uthgard Beta was first announced and released.

In my actual opinion, and i hope that i am wrong, the whole DOL Scene is like a sinking titanic, with an orchestra playing till the very, very end and several captains who had already left a long time ago.

still waiting for that unpredictable DOL-turn,
best regards,

Eyebalze

[Aftertaste]

Good sum up there eyebalze,

I recently downloaded the new git repo, and database.

you cannot import the new DOL database 'DOLPub' with the git repo code and have a working server, i had tons of errors and server crashes, i had to build my database out of a mixture DOLPub/sniper/wira and then there are many areas that are not populated, so just off the bat i know the database needs alot of work.

Also a question, seeing as how DOL is written in a way to allow customization without modifying the core, why are such classes like DOL.GS.GameNPC, or DOL.GS.GamePet not partial ?

I have to modify the core, change them to partial so i can write my script that adds my own customization.

Just curious and trying to catch up on the state of DOL, i am in no way putting down anyone who worked on the code.

[Blue]

I agree with you Eyebalze. The "DOL community" in general has a problem. We discovered that long ago but found no solution for that. I remember some discussion with Etaew back in that time. The attempts to make the community around DOL work never really worked out.

After all its a competition around the potential remaining playerbase of DAoC enthusiasts in a harsh environment where hundreds of other good games and time sucking things are out there. That we even keep such a high interest in the freeshard scene is most propably contributed to the fact that DAoC is the game which mastered competitive trirealm RvR the best and ofcourse all that nostalgia attached to it.

Fragmenting the playerbase into smaller chunks by offering several servers like we do does not work since, as every MMO, you need a critical mass of players to make it work. Especially if multiple servers target the same goal they cannibalize themself. Unfortunately it seems we can't offer a one-for-all server where all are happy and all devs are happily working on that server and submit code which is public available. That is just an illusion as I have learned over the last 12 years. The goal of each server is slightly different in parts and if no compromise can be found it will happen that a new server will be created that tries to implement the slightly different concept which in turn fragments the player base again or even kills the previous server. For the player community in general thats not really a good thing as you have to start over and over so the community will dry out over time.

Until 2005 I worked on DOL in a way that Uth was used as a demo server for DOL and all stuff implemented for that server was submitted into the public repo. What happened was that others took the newest code, improved it, implemented new stuff but never contributed back to keep an edge over other servers. The devs who did submit where mostly devs who did not own a server. That ofcourse was and is unfair to the ones who submitted every piece of code they used on their own server. I can speak for myself that it frustrated me to the point that I branched away.

My 2 cents

[Graveen]

In a FLOSS point of view, i deplorate the miss of Uthgard/Eden/<insert here server with big audience and skilled team> code contributions. But i easily understand this can't work in the race servers are doing against each others. This is effectively a very long time problem, at first i though the community would be able to understand the best thing for a server is its team, but i quickly ending up realizing this is a problem. A typical dumb server spits on DOL, while using its codebase, and of course never contribute.

I'm personally maintaining the project in a working state, with all attached resources (forumn, portal, website, github, model viewer...), but i rarely contribute in code base again. If somebody wants to claim the project lead, this is open

Aftertaste, your PR are welcome - if you fixed / improved things, that would be interesting. Same for a working database - i decided to never focus again on the database, but a working one is welcome !

[Graveen]

(...)
Its a fact, that all the server managers and so called project administrators are holding back important informations, decent code, working databases, sources, scripts etc. to become established and able to show that they are the "only" ones available on the freeshard market! In addition, and thats the second point, the most of them, are (or at least trying to) programming their own "Server Portals" just to stand out from the rest of the lame-ass (DaocPortal) crowd. You dont believe me?! -
Player Statistics are the best evidence (...)

Dunno if it is targetted to me, but DOL is always opensource and the GIT repo is our main work item.
There are some scripts in Storm that have been given to us - and this is the choice of their coders to free them or not.
The database was released 2 years ago.

Not sure i see your points, but we can discuss if you want ^^

[Vadox]

I’ve been following the forum for many years now and up to this point I might not be a big contributor to the project and discussions here, never less I am a big fan of DAOC and enjoyed time on live as well as many free shards in recent years.

So here are my thoughts: when it comes to server teams – there are no bad or good guys here. Every team is to blame for not sharing code and every team is to thank for keeping the project alive and pushing the limits. Uthgard 2.0 has many bugs that it’s staff is trying to fix and spending hundreds of hours fixing them whether its DOL code or DB related. Why would Uthgard staff release the final product, the polished product when they know that there are potential servers/teams out there that can take the code, add/modify it and release Gengard that will take a chunk of Uthgard player base away thus making community even more spread out. On the other hand, releasing code and DB that will allow other teams to spend time on adding more content instead of spending same hundreds of hours just to get to the same point of project stability. We all know that this will never happen. We are all different, we have different views on the world, on development process, on sharing and the goals server’s staff sets for itself.

The ONLY staff that is 100% “guilty-free” is Dawn of Light members that designed, developed, and are supporting DOL for so many years. They truly had the best intentions. No one could foresee the outcome. And “outcome” is not bad. We had years and years of free servers where people played and enjoyed themselves.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, just like in real life, this is more of a process of natural selection. The game is old, the demographics of players have changed drastically, the player base itself is fragmented, some want the feeling of original DAOC, some want faster paced similar to later MMOs, both camps have their reasons, been discussed millions of times. There might be one or two at most servers that will survive, that will have staff that is committed to keep the project going, that will be able to evolve based on community’s needs.

Is there other way to make everyone happy? To have all players under one roof and have utopia of developers sharing code and holding hands and singing Kumbaya? No. Don’t think so. The only suggestion/idea I have is for United Servers of Camelot (USC) – where all servers will fund the campaign that will (maybe) raise global DAOC community awareness that there is such thing as DOL, that there are servers out there that are free with their own rules and objectives and that people can join them and enjoy playing this game.

Vadox (Merlin, Uthgard, Genesis, who knows what’s next)

[Aftertaste]

Aftertaste, your PR are welcome - if you fixed / improved things, that would be interesting. Same for a working database - i decided to never focus again on the database, but a working one is welcome !

Well, here are a few things i would like to fix, but i no longer play live so i would have to do it from memory.

Some of the core classes changed to partial, that way we can make changes to them with scripts in the script directory, and not have to modify the core class, Such as GameNPC, GamePet, there are quite a few more, mainly i discovered this when i was interesting in adding the ability to speak to your pets like on live, to set taunt or change weapon etc.

In order to do this with the way DOL currently is requires core modifications, i feel it should be script-able, and by changing GamePet to a partial class, it would be.

Now the Database, haha what a headache.

All of the currently public databases are for a different version of the emulator code, i think i found sniper's to be the most recently updated, however with the table changes the new emu code forces it doesn't work.

Now if you patch a few tables in from the DOLPub, and edit a few tables by importing them into another database, removing the problem area, then exporting them again so you can import it with no errors, lol yeah what a headache.

But i am still missing housing zone NPC's, Merchants, Horse routes etc.

The database i am currently using is messed up right now, i am writing a town capture system, and it clears out all other NPC's when the lord takes over the town, so i can build a live like database if you guys could use it, but i would need to start again.

[Leodagan]

Partial class can hardly be extended through GameServerScripts...

From stackoverflow :

All partial-type definitions meant to be parts of the same type must be defined in the same assembly and the same module (.exe or .dll file). Partial definitions cannot span multiple modules.

So you still need to compile your own modified Core !


Speaking about mashing up Data has nothing to do with DOL...

There aren't any "official" database because we can't decide what is official or not !

The same reason is why gameplay mechanics that are "hardcoded" in DOL source are just a mess, some parts of the game can be configured through database records, other parts can just handle a few ServerProperties to change some ratio or timer, when we move out hardcoded mechanics to database mechanics even if there is some "official" data patch to mimic the previous behavior it all ends up buried in forum and more or less merged with public/community DBs...


The current state of DOL code needs Core custom changes for every Admins out there that would like to customize some non trivial values, or even want to work around completely stupid default behavior or auto-randomizing behaviors !

So there is no accusation to make that Shard owners not participating or not giving in their sources, or even database assets that can only run with their custom flavor of DOL...

Most of shards admins want to make the game reflect what they expect to be "fun", they can do a lot of changes to the database or core, just to find some switch to enable the mechanics they are looking for, then they go forward to completely change some other part !

Once this is done, there is no real motivation to extract a patch out of their heavily customized DOL, or export some DB records to match their updated code, it costs a lot of time, it's really hard to merge with any running shards and if it's just thrown to the community to merge with a more up to date code base it will not be taken because most of the time it's a new bloated code just changing some values around an old shitty code...


I don't think the current target of DOL is to change some mechanics or hardcoded values to "better" one or "live like" one !

If you read the latest 1.120~1.121 Live Patch notes you will find a lot of change that most shard owner would not want, if they were committed to use latest version of DOL they will likely not follow the community anymore if we enforced the update that happen on Live (well if we could dream to have enough contributor to keep up with Live anyway...)

For me the target is to make DOL like an Empty Shell, and try to allow for easier Scripted Customizations and Database package imports, this way we can make sure DOL can answer most Admins needs, and they can keep their Data to make the game happen with their own taste without having to fork their Code as soon as they start working on a project !


TL;DR : No one is using the same code base or the same database records because there is different views to maintain an old game server emulator and different expectations on game experience that can be provided using DAOC Client, so there is no way to provide a ready-to-use software that could match everybody's needs !