by *Splork* » Fri Apr 17, 2015 9:07 am
This was actually discussed a bit the other day, right after he corpsed and got looted and I expressed my views then but will share them again.
There are plenty of avenues to take to contribute to the game such as area building, wiki articles, writing MUDL code for better quests and game content, running quests, coding for the website or the game itself, and on and on.
For some of these, players don't ever have to become an Immortal. However, if one wants to become an Immortal, the process is easier than ever. Play the game, come up with an idea, and we normally give you an Immortal. Simple as that( unless you are a problem player ). There is no long wait. Players no longer have to achieve certain levels or play time. Of course we want you to know the game. A level 10 newbie with 2 days playing experience will not be allowed to become an Immortal.
Ten or Fifteen years ago if an Immortal wanted to code they were forced to build an area. I changed that when I brought in Isabo and Breeze. Both started out helping with the website and moved on to our code. Teker, our newest programmer, helped out with the wiki and coding( we gave him access to only the MUDL files ) additional MUDL procs on the builder's port. Within a couple of months, he was given an account on our coding port and away he went. Honestly, it only takes someone to show a bit of dedication and desire and it should be quite obvious we will create room for that person. On that point, we just brought back Toxis again! Enough said.
We will not be going open source any time soon. We may eventually, who knows. Claiming that because we are closed source stunts development or labels us "archaic" is simply ignorant. Our methods have changed as the times have and we will continue to do so. We have opened up plenty of avenues to allow players to contribute and to be quite honest, for the most part, they have chosen not to. Its good enough for me that the players are playing and I applaud those who step up and help...
In terms of our stability or lack there of, we experienced a two month blip of being unstable due to upgrading our server ( we had to, all linux environments had a major security flaw ). We fought through that, fixed the issues, and came out on the other side. For years before that, and up until yesterday, we have been extremely stable. In the past 1 1/2 months we fixed over 1300 compiler warnings, fixed quite a few memory leaks, redid a great deal of the backbone regarding our game procs/engine and yesterday's reboot prompted two crashes which were both fixed within hours. Honestly, for making the mass amount of changes we did, that is pretty incredible.
One of the comments is that open source brings a more stable environment and in some rare cases this may be true, in a case like ours, that would not be remotely close to the truth. We have hundreds of thousands of lines of code and probably close to the same amount in in-game procs. Take for example the changes Teker just made in regards to giving us the ability to add room procs and the ability to use MUDL in rooms: no amount of testing with our code and 3-4 areas worth of objects and mobs would of prevented the crash from yesterday. Matter of fact, quite possible that even with a full world of mobiles and objects that all testing would of been fine. We have thousands of events triggering every few seconds, its impossible to test for everything, even for those of us who know our code inside and out.
Anyone who thinks that allowing dozens of untrained programmers access to make changes is helping stability really needs to step back and rethink the situation. Arguing that more testing would be done and people walking each other's code would prevent that simply has not been in this type of environment. When I first began coding, all of my code was walked and tested by Frobisher ( wintin developer ) and we still had crashes and bugs. While comments like that read great in text its simply not the reality.
Either way, feel free to contact any of us if you have a desire to contribute. As mentioned, there are plenty of ways to help out.