Why not make L2J better?

[xban1x]

Doesn't justify breaking code in the SVN.

So now you are trying to say, that we are intentionally inserting bugged code into SVN? If bugs occur, cause we didn't notice them we fix them. There's nothing new about that. And nobody said we use the name BETA to justify inserting broken code.

[janiko]

So if beta branch is full of bugs then why someone will be interested to test beta_branch.
Developers require tests from public users but public user wont be interested in bugged branch, and also wont take. Outdated stable branch, he will think to go and find better pack and improve it own. L2j has many bugs and it is hard to find them all and make tempfix. Users need developers help to solve problems. All new updates give new and new bug in skill system, i prefer to wait for 4-5 month to see fully functionall skill system but im not sure that it will be done.
Everyone should try to help developers to solve/fix bugs, but if developer wont take any reaction on any bug this customer wont post any bug on forum. We all should work together and help each other to make l2j better(at this time l2j is too far from being better). It has too many missings from previous chronichles.



I know some of u have custom scripts in pack to add feauters to l2j. We can also help l2j developers to fill them if. We share it and if it is even custom developers will give us enough information to make it more retail like and at this time developers will finish skills rework which is main for pack! Withouth it l2j is nothing as it dont have enough feauters.

[Hyrelius]

Now now.. the thing is: the stable-branch is very outdated. I'm not sure whether and if so which features might be missing, but I don't really know anyone, who uses stable, because it is outdated and because one has to fix the bugs there on their own. While BETA has probably more bugs in it - there are fixes often provided within hours or a couple of days.

[JMD]

I said it before and i'll say it again. As a user i helped the project the most when i was working on my server with BETA, however when i went live there were a lot of bugs and the server failed after 2 weeks. I knew there was a chance for this to happen but i chose to ignore it at the time because i didnt know any better and i liked reporting stuff and helping the project.

Maybe this issue came up to such a level now because of the skill rework and the fact that a lot of skills are broken and is much more noticable. I think the old way before BETA and STABLE was better but thats just me.

[Zoey76]

I was hoping someone mentioned the "old way".

The "old way" was, one realse every month if you were lucky, zero day fixes, if you remeber whole freya was released in 2 revisions, impossible to keep customs or anything else.

The "old way" was: developer worked in private SVN and they tested the features in their own servers for months, that granted them a huge advantage against "regular" server owners, since they could increase player counts and income by advertising those missing features in all the other servers.

Thanks to the "old way" L2J was very close to go closed source (that will never happen, that's why most developers left or went inactive).

Thanks to the "old way" there are many features in dev svn that never reached the public svn, and probably you will have to wait for current team to implement them.

For those with doubts on the skill rework, I tested second alpha build last night so yeah I know I'll finish it very soon, unless I get pissed off with threads like this

[JMD]

The "old way" was: developer worked in private SVN and they tested the features in their own servers for months, that granted them a huge advantage against "regular" server owners, since they could increase player counts and income by advertising those missing features in all the other servers.

That can happen again anytime, but you guys are not like that.

[jurchiks]

I'm sorry, what "old way" are you talking about? The "1 release per month" schedule was introduced only for a brief period of time (~2 months) and was cancelled.
The REAL old way was that any fix, even if just a hotfix, was committed if it was proven to be working. It might not have been pretty, but if you mark it as a TODO for later improvement, that should never become a problem.

Current L2J team is still very "closed source" in terms of teamwork - everybody works in secret, TODO and WIP lists are hidden from normal users, teamwork is almost nonexistent (everybody fights over petty things so nobody really works together, everyone is for himself only except few random cases - not counting one person writing code and the other testing, that's not what teamwork is about).

Sure, the team had a private SVN with features that were delayed from public, but it was better than not having any features or broken ones.

[xban1x]

I'm sorry, what "old way" are you talking about? The "1 release per month" schedule was introduced only for a brief period of time (~2 months) and was cancelled.
The REAL old way was that any fix, even if just a hotfix, was committed if it was proven to be working. It might not have been pretty, but if you mark it as a TODO for later improvement, that should never become a problem.

Current L2J team is still very "closed source" in terms of teamwork - everybody works in secret, TODO and WIP lists are hidden from normal users, teamwork is almost nonexistent (everybody fights over petty things so nobody really works together, everyone is for himself only except few random cases - not counting one person writing code and the other testing, that's not what teamwork is about).

Sure, the team had a private SVN with features that were delayed from public, but it was better than not having any features or broken ones.

I was told not to confront you in public anymore, but you are pushing all the limits everywhere.

You have been invited to join the Advanced Users in hope that you would benefit to project and possibly work with the team. I have repeatedly tried to work with you, but it always ended in you pushing/wanting for something, without any room for compromise or negotiation. I have asked for your opinion, help, ideas and it resulted rarely in something good at all, and the cases where it did was the reason i eventually decided to agree with you.

You really do not understand point of teamwork do you? You can ask 5 devs to write a single function that takes 5 lines, but you can ask other devs to help you test it. So in what way 1 dev writing code, putting it for review and asking for tests isn't teamwork? If it ain't for you then this is another one of those things where we disagree.

"Closed source" team? In what a way? All of my code is visible at http://gist.github.com/xban1x and from a lot of other devs aswell. Of course don't expect us to post there patches that are not complete.

Petty fights? Want to know something? Petty fights started when you came to the team. You are the one who started votes and tons of democracy that was in all cases totally unnecessary since we follow lead of Zoey76 and until leader changes we will follow it. Why do we follow? Because Zoey has tons more experience then we do, both in coding and in projects of this size. I for one respect and follow Zoey because i know, he won't ask me to do something stupid or ridiciolus. You on the other hand only care about principles that SHOULD be followed, but you take them as MUST be followed.

[jurchiks]

You have been invited to join the Advanced Users in hope that you would benefit to project and possibly work with the team.

And, unfortunately, it has repeatedly been proven that that is not possible with the current team. Everybody takes their own ideas as the ONLY right choice and is not willing to discuss it or come to a compromise. I know I'm one that believes my choice is right, but sometimes it is not the ONLY good choice, however, in those cases I try to put forth arguments that validate my opinion and that's when everything goes haywire and everybody starts occusing me of stirring up conflict, even though all I want to prove is that my opinion is the better one. Others in the team either keep silent (which I fucking hate, tbh, I don't believe they don't have an opinion but I realise they simply don't want to be seen in the same way I am), tell their own ABSOLUTE opinion that everybody must accept or you become the social outcast, or keep spouting nonsense like "oh shut up, this is pointless/smileys/etc".
This team does not know how to discuss things (and by that I mean discuss with MANY people, not like Zoey and UnAfraid decide on something and everybody else must follow it or become the black sheep, that is monarchy, an outdated hierarchy system that has proven to be ineffective because it greatly limits a team's potential), how to come to a consensus, and how to do it peacefully and effectively.

You want everyone to check every team member's gist updates to see what's going on? Nobody's going to do that. Some of the members even make their gists secret, i.e. visible only by a direct link.

Having experience does not mean a person is always right. Never has meant that, never will. Not to mention that discussions also bring up alternative ideas, solutions to problems, which the mighty experienced person might not have imagined.

Back to the stable vs beta branch issue: fact is that even fixes/code that is known to be stable, for example, new tested quests, are also not merged into trunk. That would greatly increase the appeal of the stable branch and take away the issue to some degree.

[d!g0]

Hello, I just want to add my opnion here:

I have been using l2jserver since 2009 and I have no doubts that a lot of things were improved, but since the begining of this year we can't use l2jserver for a live server. There is a lot of problems like memory leaks and skills problems that were reported a lot of times but no one found the cause.

Nowdays I can't leave my server more than 24 hours without restart because the server lag's and then crash.

I had 1500+ players at january and now I have 400+ players online.

I did not update my server since June and because of that I stopped to report bugs.

The point is that I think some other users are in the same situation, they did not update their servers because if they do that, it will kill their servers for sure.

I know that I am not a big contributor to this project, but I always try to report the bugs that I found and possible fixes to them.

I hope you understand the situation and do not take my words as an offence. You guys are doing a great job with the reworks and I hope that I will can update my server again soon

P.S: sorry for my english.

[Zoey76]

Nowdays I can't leave my server more than 24 hours without restart because the server lag's and then crash.

I had a server running for over 2 weeks and a client at my home pc connected to it and it never lagged and there wasn't big memory leaks, after two weeks it reached 2gb + geodata memory usage.

[d!g0]

Maybe it was fixed after June then, wich is great.

I will update my server after you commit your skills rework.

It will allow me to contribute to this project a little more.

[UnAfraid]

nBd is running l2j unstable branch from 1-2 months he didn't had any memory leaks just one deadlock which was fixed as he discovered it.

[JMD]

The point is i think that you should figure out a way to make beta a bit more usable for live. As i mentioned before theres only so much someone can report by playing with himself. There wont always be an nBd to use his server as a guinea pig anyway...

[Zoey76]

The point is i think that you should figure out a way to make beta a bit more usable for live. As i mentioned before theres only so much someone can report by playing with himself. There wont always be an nBd to use his server as a guinea pig anyway...

Even when I agree with you a little here, we told everyone two things, one: we only commit to beta because it's too much work to commit to two branches when it will get synchronized anyway, two: I stopped synchronizing stable<->beta when I started the skill rework, I'm not the only one working with skills, and not all the issues has been caused by my work, yet we all are working to get it fixed properly.

I believe (and I think most at the team agree) that stuff so important as skill and effects engine should be properly fixed instead of temp patches after temp patches, there was a moment when you changed one line of code and something totally unrelated started to work faulty and none had any idea what the heck was going on...

We are making L2j better already, and eventually Beta will become usable on lives servers and synchronized to stable branch.