Something that has been nagging at my brain.

[Crosine]

Hello again everyone and thanks for all the hard work you guys continue to do on the project. As I prepare to move into a new house I have had little time to work on my server, which hopefully I will be able to pick up again in a few weeks. So while thinking of different things about my server and pouring over the posts here in the forums I have noticed something that is nagging at my mind. I have been reading about all of these private servers that others have created, some with awesome perks and some are pretty standard. But this one question always jumps to the front and I was just kinda wondering what everyones thoughts and opinions were on the subject. Some of these servers, (I will not name any in particular) seem to have a good chunk of the game working. I would even dare to say upwards high 80%. So my question is are these developers giving back to the project by submitting thier working codes? And if it is the case that they are not, why would they not share to try and speed up completion of the project as a whole so everyone can enjoy this amazing game. Especially since one can pretty much customize every option to make the game more solo friendly or difficult. Just a thought that has been running through my head and wanted to get some opinions on it. Thanks everyone again for everything you do, I sure do appreciate what ya'll are accomplishing as I am sure so many others do as well.


P.S. If someone would be interested in assisting me I would like to start compiling all of the fixes that all the servers have managed to get going and get it all into one code to post for people to start playing and working on bug fixes and glitches etc while our amazing developers are hard at work with core mechanics. Anyone who is as new as I am to program could assist in this way at least and work on the minor not so difficult things so the lead developers don't have to worry about them.

[Delaide]

I can say part of the issue is that some of the working content on some servers are not working in the proper manner. DSP only accepts retail like behavior, and refuses to accept hacked together code. Some of the code used on custom servers will match one or both of these categories.

It will also depend on their server level/stage. For example, if you are talking about ZM cap 75 servers, most of the DSP code is already there and has been tested and working. But, if you are aiming for Soa content, that is much more hit and miss, and most stuff will not be there.

And, in some cases, you just get those who use the code but don't bother to contribute back. Since this is an open source project, there is no way to control that, regardless of how unsupportive they may be to the overall project scope.

I personally agree, I wish more people would contribute what they have working, and work more with devs to get what they have put together working in a way that is supported by retail behavior. I started learning programming for the same reason, to help all the people working on this wonderful project. However, I have not been able to do much for a while due to schedules and focus elsewhere. I will try to get back to it at some point going forward.

[kjLotus]

the main two reasons are most likely: they want their server to be unique and have something the others don't, or that they are scared/know that their code isn't good enough to be put in the main project. lots of the stuff that's working on servers but not in the main project is stuff that is "kind of works like retail" and stuff like that, and I don't typically find that to be good enough to be merged in to the main project