Is the source code publicly available?

Make an actual case or quit bellyaching about it. If you've got a legitimate gripe, say what it is. I am an admin on HLP and I'm quite happy to go all smashy-smashy on anyone who is being a dick.


Most of the discussion on Hard-Light is nothing to do with the quality of the WCS source code and everything to do with whether or not the WCS changes will work with the SCP. The WCS team implemented their features only caring about whether they would work for your game. I don't have much issue with that, you'd already forked the code for pretty much that reason. But the SCP have to make sure anything we port over will work for all the games that work on the SCP. That means we have very different priorities. We might be able to use your code as is, or we might have to write code that can do the same thing in a different or more accessible way. Whatever you did that broke multiplayer is a great example of something that will have to be rewritten.

In many ways this code release is similar to the old -wcs flag that used to exist. The flag made it easy to turn on all the new WCS features but it only gave a user two options, either they were all on, or they were all off. In retrospect it's obvious why this isn't the best way to implement things. In the end the solution was to unbundle everything from the flag and make them into table settings that could be turned on and off individually.

The same must be done for anything we take from the code release. It has to be implemented in a way that allows the greatest freedom for all SCP modders. Not simply used to port WCS to FS2_Open 7.x

Luke wrote: Now i have done several changes and additions for our translation project: 1) additional languages variables (more than 300) for strings.tbl. 2) all texts in the cockpit help screens are now linked to the language variables. 3) all keyboard and joystick scancodes have now their own language variables in strings.tbl. And other things.

I'd be very interested in seeing your changes as I'm busy working on translation issues in the codebase right now. Do you have SNV/Git?

EDIT:

X3N0-Life-Form wrote: For the record I am a bit bummed that the release got as little attention as it did.

It got quite a bit from me (I'm always interested in new SEXPs) but I've been very busy these last couple of weeks so I've simply not had the time to start porting stuff over (which will get even more attention).

How much programming effort is actually needed to port this to linux/mac? I have both Linux/Macintosh systems and I know howto program in C.

I don't think it would take that much effort really. Before the fork the code ran quite happily on Linux and Mac OS X. The problem is that if the code was never checked for Linux compatibility during development it's had at least a couple of years to rot away.

I personally think that time would be better spent porting it to the SCP fork of the code. There are other coders already interested in doing that. In addition it probably would be much less of a quagmire to port all the new WCS features to SCP than to try to unbundle all the new Linux/Mac OS X fixes from the new features and port them to WCS.

I probably posted this in the wrong place previously, I am very interested in working on wcsaga during the holidays, a bit of non-java will do me some good. I would like to know if I could post the code on a github or something so I could track my changes and collaborate with friends? I do not want to fork the project, I just want to make it easier to track changes.

Yup, you can post the code wherever you want. In fact, there's already a cou ple of github repos of WCS' source code out there.

I know Luke is working on the German translation project (more details here ), while the folks at HLP plan on porting some features back to Freespace Open in order to be able to run the game on standard builds (more details here ).

Thanks, I was going to experiment with Linux compatibility.

I would suggest trying to get the game to run on Linux but not spending too much time on it. If it doesn't seem to work after a few hours of tinkering, I'd suggest that you should help the effort to get WCS working on SCP rather than trying to make the WCS code run on Linux.

AFAIK the Linux code for WCS is largely untouched since the fork from the SCP. It's possible it might work, but if no one was maintaining Linux, there's a chance it's badly broken. Either way you're missing several years worth of Linux fixes that the SCP has added over the years.