Quite a lot of work has been done in the “Orange” status items. Many of the “Red” status items are not major tasks, but may depend on the completion of other items first. A lot of remaining tasks involve porting code from existing mods. Stuff marked “Green” are items that have thoroughly been tested requiring little to no fixing/adjusting.
Yes there is still a good amount of work to do, but not as much as you are giving the impression of. While there remains a lot of items on the list, it is still a reasonable expectation for the current team to complete the list in a reasonable amount of time (I’m not going to specifically say how long that time would be currently). We just need to keep chipping away, and we will accomplish our objectives.
I haven’t been lying at all.
I can’t speak for everyone on the team, but I personally will be working on this at least until we are ready for the initial release. I have no intention to abandon this project, I’m in it to see this project to completion. This is neither a simple nor easy project, but the potential benefits that would be an actual revival of the game and community is worth the time and effort. Not to mention I enjoy the coding.
There would be very little additional help than what is available now before 1.3 is ready for its initial release, if we were to completely release the 1.3 code as is. I will explain the reason this is the case.
We planned this TODO list based on what we have determined would address significant amount of problems. When we release we want a complete good enough client available out of the box, a complete good enough server out of the box that has thoroughly been demonstrated in active community, and all the basics needed to support that to attract and retain a significant number of new and returning players which would attract a significant number of new and returning developers/mappers/modderlers/etc.
Such additional contributors are more inclined to contribute if there are a significant number of players interested in the game, and a good indication that there is a future for the game so that they don’t feel like their efforts would be lost. With additional contributions to the game, the game will further improve, attracting even more players, and the virtuous cycle would continue.
As the code is now, no one would be would be able to host a 1.3 server good enough to attract and retain new players. You might point to the current setup of GrangerPub/GrangerClub as something that works, but that is essentially the 1.1 slacker’s QVM with all the major 1.1 bugs and inadequacies that has some band-aids that don’t address the major problems, and the only major different feature it has that makes it stand out from most other servers is that it is multiprotocol.
Additionally, simply making existing QVMs multiprotocol would not be sufficient to reverse the decline in the playerbase that has been occuring for so many years, as neither modded GPP clients, nor modded 1.1 clients were successful in acheiving that so far.
Multiprotocol only addresses one of the many fundamental issues of the game and community, and that feature alone will not be enough to result in the regrowth of the community. Additionally that feature is only intended to be a temporary phase, as once the community has moved to using the new 1.3 clients, and all active servers become 1.3 servers, and all 1.3 clients would come with an updater, multiprotocol would no longer play any role, and support for old clients/servers could even be dropped at that point (although the complete migration of the community to the new client/servers is not expected to be instantaneous, and we would only consider dropping multiprtocol support after that migration is complete).
The primary reason we don’t want to completely release the code at this time is that we don’t want a this attempted revival to fall on its face out of the gate, but rather we want to build up to the initial release completing and publicly testing the game play, admin systems, etc on test7341, upgrade GrangerPub & GrangerClub when the 1.3 server is good enough for 24/7 active use (it doesn’t need to be complete for this milestone), publicly testing the updater/launcher with a pre-release client (that would be updated to the 1.3 client upon the initial release).
But another reason I am saying that there would be very little additional help from an early release is that most of the remaining work can be done on/with things that are already open source. The pre-release client that we will be including with the updater is blowFIsh’s fork of the latest tremulous repo on github, his fork is open source now, and any work done on that repo can easily be applied to the 1.3 CODEZ™. While blowFIsh’s repo does not include the multiprotocol feature, that would carry very little significance as the player base would be shifting over to using the pre-release client on GrangerHub’s updater, so that anyone setting up servers based on blowFish’s repo would have access to the players using those pre-release clients.
(As a side note, none of the launcher/updater/pre-release client tasks depend on any of the other 1.3 TODO categories, as soon as @blowFish is ready in that department, we will have his client and the updater/launcher available for public download from a download page on the main site).
My final point on this subject is that work on assets don’t require access to the unreleased 1.3 code, and already contributors (whose work we greatly appreciate) outside of our development team have contributed assets that 1.3 will be using (most notably some new maps and texture packs that take advantage of the new renderer), and it would be awesome if others were to contribute in the asset production as well, we would be more than happy to test their work on the test7341 server.
Two words: air resistance. Irl that would have an affect on lasers and plasma as well. But in any case we aren’t going to be coming close to simulating all of irl physics with the improvised custom Quake 3 physics built into the game engine. We can only hope to come close to achieving that with a proper modern physics engine, which to implement in Tremulous would require a huge amount of work and isn’t necessary for the initial release (perhaps in a much later subsequent release). What is important is good game play with what we have available to work with, and not so much maximal realism.
The main reason we want to try out the reduced damage over distance (which btw doesn’t necessarily have to be a linear reduction) is to some degree counter the over powered aspect ranged human weapons have over aliens at great distances (such as in long hallways in many maps).
