Conquer Standardization Project

[Spirited]

Concept Introduction
Recently, I asked a wise friend a question about the state of the Conquer Online development community. He gave me insight to a major shortfall in the community: our ability to cleanly share code snippets and debug code. With the current source variations, code cannot be shared between projects. Debugging and programming new features for Conquer Online servers are difficult, as the bases of most sources are different and poorly designed. There is a strong need for standardization: one open-source library that consists of interfaces and reusable modules, designed by a skilled team of programmers and designers. Once established, all servers must implement the standardization library. Although I cannot enforce this rule in this community, I can in another and would like to invite Elitepvpers in the standardization effort. By doing so, programmers will be able to share code that "can be seamlessly integrated between different projects". Bugs would be easier to isolate and fix, and sources would scale a lot faster and more effectively.

How does Standardization Work?
Standardization doesn't just include the rules and standards for software development; it includes the people and the process of creating and using the standards. Standards must be approved of by the community implementing the standards; therefore, in order for this project to succeed, the community must work together towards the standardization effort. We need both designers and programmers: people working in source control on the standardization library, and people working on sources that implement the library and provide feedback.

Project Roles
This project is very much a software engineering project. It's a large project by a team of programmers; therefore, we need to give ourselves roles and responsibilities to managing the project. As an experienced project manager and project owner, I would like to offer my services in managing the project roles and contributing to the design of the library. Below is a list of the roles I would like to see filled (multiple people per role).

Project Owner: manages the requirements of the entire project, the communication between teams, and release through source control.
Project Managers: manages modules in the project, the requirements and timeline of developing those modules, and communication between team members.
Software Engineers: works with the managers to develop modules that meet the need of the community.
Test Engineers: works with the managers and programmers to specify the needs of the community and test modules in development.

Getting Involved
Interested in supporting the project? Let me know below. The more support we have and more roles we have filled, the better we can make this community and turn it around. If I see enough support for a project like this, I'll create the project and forums for standardization, and start bringing the developers together. Also, if you could fill out the poll above, I would love to see your feedback. Thank you for your interest and support.

[foeandfear]

I support this

[donn]

Good luck with this. Even if I doubt it will actually materialize into something.

Long story now. There's no need to reinvent the wheel. Basically, you need 1 very good server source, put it on GitHub and manage pull requests (by accepting those that qualify through quality). And make it so one can add his own modules compiled as libraries, so each can customize his own server without changing the core source.

But this community proved that it's more leaned towards leeching instead of contributing. Valuable developers started to loose interest into spending time for CO2 development, while tons of ****** servers are launched everyday, splitting the already thin customer base.

[Spirited]

Originally Posted by donn

Good luck with this. Even if I doubt it will actually materialize into something.

Long story now. There's no need to reinvent the wheel. Basically, you need 1 very good server source, put it on GitHub and manage pull requests (by accepting those that qualify through quality). And make it so one can add his own modules compiled as libraries, so each can customize his own server without changing the core source.

Well, the point of a standardization library is freedom in implementation. Target different patches, implement different cipher algorithms and hooks, switch out socket system designs quickly with one-line changes, etc.

Originally Posted by donn

But this community proved that it's more leaned towards leeching instead of contributing. Valuable developers started to loose interest into spending time for CO2 development, while tons of shitty servers are launched everyday, splitting the already thin customer base.

It's not really targeted at this community. Developers in this community are welcome to help and use it (that's why I'm posting here), but I know how lost of a cause this community is. It's for another community that actually takes an interest in development; I mean, I already have two test engineers and two hybrid test and software engineers from the other board. I'd like to see some interest taken here, but I doubt I'm going to see that. The other board is new and can enforce standardization. This community is past that point, and could only encourage it at best, which won't happen. We're already talking about design and source control on the other board. It's like the difference between night and day. I can only hope for the best but plan for the worst in this community.

Edit: What benefit I could offer this community (that doesn't directly depend on the community) is the chance to work with a team of developers in a software engineering type project. It looks good to have open source team project work on your resume.

[Deathmist]

Definitely supporting this. And yeah vouching for Gareth.

[InfamousNoone]

too late to do something like this for it to actually be useful

[Spirited]

Originally Posted by InfamousNoone

too late to do something like this for it to actually be useful

Even if it doesn't become a standard here, I have a community saying they'd like to use it. If I can make their lives easier with the library, that's just fine with me.

[Best Coder 2014]

No thanks.

Sincerely,
an actual Software Engineer™.

[Spirited]

Well, let's analyze the feedback I've gotten so far. I have only no's in the comments from non-Chained members, a one star rating from "Best Coder 2014", and the poll shows silent supporters who don't want to comment for obvious reasons. Nothing new in the epvp community.

It's a great thing epvp's not the only community anymore - people don't have to tolerate this **** to develop or ask questions about Conquer Online in Chained. I see this is no longer worth my time here, so cheers mates. PM me on Chained2PVP if you take an interest. People no longer can say I didn't invite you.

[KraHen]

TBH even though as I would really love to see this happen, I wouldn't like to be a part of it. CO development for me, and I'm sure for a lot of people, is recreational, meaning that when I want to escape the corporate bullshit and the bullshit in general with large software (i.e. actually filling these roles in), I come to CO and fiddle, experiment, things I couldn't do in a real environment, especially not for a software in production. Now don't misunderstand me, I realize how important this is on actual software being made, but as a hobbyist 1-2 man team, I love the freedom associated with it.

So, yes, please, go ahead, it would be amazing to actually see this happen, but I won't take part of it.

[CptSky]

I've done something similar with my CO2_CORE_DLL project, and I've seen little to no use of it in the community. People keep redoing the things, or take them from other sources. Also, I've seen nobody interested in contributing to the project (would have been happy to do a good refact at this time, but never felt the necessity).

Personally, I think that it's too late in CO2's life-cycle to introduce something like that. Most resources are already available. People will either use public sources or keep reusing the stuff they did over and over (basically what I do).

Finally, the days where I was interested in doing serious development for CO2 are gone. COPS v7 was an experiment to do a base source in C++, which is nice. After that I've done few implementations of the TQ cipher using SSE2 and AVX2, to experiment with SIMD intrinsics. I've done a small DLL to experiment with hooking. I'm updating my COPS v6 source to do some more large scale tests and designs, but have no interest in doing it like I would in an enterprise. For me, no projects related to CO2 are serious. CO2 only offers me a platform where I can prototype things rapidly because I know the protocol, the formats and the required technologies to do it. Brief, as KraHen said, it's an interesting project, but I won't be in. (Feel free to ask / use any code I could have done, private or public).

[Deathmist]

Originally Posted by Best Coder 2014

No thanks.

Sincerely,
an actual Software Engineer™.

The fact that you name yourself Best Coder 2014 should prove how pathetic you are.

Sincerly,
someone who doesn't find your autistic jokes funny

[{ Angelius }]

Originally Posted by Spirited

Concept Introduction

Although I cannot enforce this rule in this community, I can in another and would like to invite Elitepvpers in the standardization effort
.

Originally Posted by Spirited

It's a great thing epvp's not the only community anymore

Didn't you say all kinds of **** about this community and its members right before you leave it a few months ago to join your "Other Board" as you called it in your lame cry baby angry signature message?

What brought you back? is it dead already? or are you here just to advertise it?

[Spirited]

What the **** ever. Project canceled. There's no way in hell I'm doing this without help from my friends at the minimum. I'm so done with this ****.

[InfamousNoone]

If this was 5 years ago people would've considered it