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Frozen development


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On 11/1/2018 at 11:15 AM, fatherbushido said:

U+1F648 U+1F649 U+1F64A

If you don't express what you mean, readers can only guess what you may want to say and that may lead to conflicting interpretations. Do you want to express that there is evil we are not allowed to talk about or not allowed to witness? If so, I agree.

Otherwise,I don't know the purpose of this thread? If thread participants want to see a specific task being done, how about performing it if noone else does it? In that case the question that people should ask is what is needed for the next step and translate that into actions. To me it seems like can give up on releasing mac OS and go on with development for windows and linux, since every mac OS developer left the team long ago.

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There is no game breaking issue present right now, but it wont take long to introduce yet another mac specific bug. I remember map generation being broken for like a week or so. Which was only found by chance. And the multiplayer gamesetup bug which unfortunately was not found.

Its not like someone can even test something unless they own a mac. It would be a bit better if Apple allowed to install the os on a VM (running on non apple hardware) after buying it. But, profits I guess.

And to be honest, its not implausible that macOS be abandoned. Like OpenAge did.

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20 minutes ago, av93 said:

Mac issues aren't solved, or the thing that needs to be done is the GPDR thing?

Mac issues are unresolved, existing solutions to mac issues from previous releases aren't committed because they can't be verified, noone can bundle the thing on a macintosh because none of us have one (or rather the only one who still is online sometimes has too few disk space to compile it). (The same thing will most likely repeat itself in the future development cycles and the holy grail of macOS being broken will probably be that they dropped openGL). The codebase is finished with regards to GDPR since Oct 16.

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54 minutes ago, elexis said:

Otherwise,I don't know the purpose of this thread?

Communication, like this:

1 minute ago, elexis said:

Mac issues are unresolved, existing solutions to mac issues from previous releases aren't committed because they can't be verified, noone can bundle the thing on a macintosh because none of us have one (or rather the only one who still is online sometimes has too few disk space to compile it). (The same thing will most likely repeat itself in the future development cycles and the holy grail of macOS being broken will probably be that they dropped openGL). The codebase is finished with regards to GDPR since Oct 16.

 

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3 minutes ago, stanislas69 said:

I can't tell @elexis and @tobbi are working together to make it work

WFG members can't do the testing of bugfixes because we have noone with a platform to test, Tobbi is not doing the testing of bugfixes. So this is a deadlock with the remaining choices to ask other people who are not available or not interested, abandon macOS or bundling on an illegal virtual machine and running into the abence of macOS devs problem the next release bundling where noone run the application even once on macOS before everyting is in feature/string/translation/commit frozen again.

The technical issues aside, what really bothers me is the attitude of people who accuse others of preventing them to commit game features, directly or indirectly, whether here or in other threads, without ever having lifted a single finger to go beyond ones own scope of interest in feature development and performing whatever is needed to have the next release (and a final release sometime). The ones going beyond their own scope of interest to accomplish a release are the stupid and exploited ones as they pay with their own time and energy to fix what ought to be shared obligations and then get the blame from the ones who feel too noble to substitute missing development occupation if it isn't fast enough according to their liking. cudos to stiefkampf and av93 who asked answerable questions rather than unactable statements that are not or not well distinguished from blame.

At least on my side there has never been a lack of development either, just a lack of published development with more than hundred committs in git branches waiting to be committed, waiting to be rewritten because they coudln't be committed and patches not distributed as I'm not making myself a slave for the project in every instance. Have a nice day.

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@elexis, I think anyone with any sense is eternally grateful (and amazed) for all the work you, the development team are doing and have done! Really! Maybe it's not said enough, but some of the coding guys are quasi-anonimous on the forum. A lot of the important work goes almost unnoticed by the greater community, but I can guarantee that tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of people are enjoying the sweet fruits of your labour, and are very thankful for it. 

I think people (including myself) were getting worried because what we first thought were "simple" bug-fixes, with a quick re-release, are turning out to be quite a serious problem. It's the uncertainty about what was happening that was getting people nervous.

I'm sad that macOS turned out to be the problem. I use mac, but I'm completely useless with code, and don't think I can do much to help (I've never compiled anything), (maybe just testing release candidates, but I didn't even notice bugs in the last one). I really hope a competent mac developer answers the call. I have been trying to develop other skills to help in future development (not coding though), but if support for mac would be dropped, I'd be deeply saddened and probably unable to continue. The cross-platform part of 0AD is one of the big selling points (for mac and linux users at least).  

Edited by Sundiata
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31 minutes ago, vladislavbelov said:

I hope we'll find a way to fix the macOS build. Also you always can run older versions :)

Yes I hope so too, yes I can still use older versions or maybe try to run linux on a vm.

I won't be able to run new mods though or the final 0 ad game when it comes out.

Edited by Rolf Dew
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Sad that I just bought my new Mac for purpose of playing 0ad. I don’t even mind if there is always a sound issue in either MP or SP but it’s fine as long as it’s playable.

Well what can we do it’s a volunteer dev team....

I still have my windows laptop but there are too many issues with windows aside from the fact that imo the best comfortable experience to play game is using somewhere around 21” monitor and Mac is cheaper than good gaming laptop in this size.

Maybe just relaunch it and fgod takes care of Mac issue :mellow:  

 

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The icon issue was fixed, fgod is using the said fix. The bad news is that such issues would likely come up again and no one would be aware before its too late.

Right now, the more pressing thing is that anything Mac related can't be tested, reviewed or committed. And when it comes to releasing there is none here who can do the building and bundling. Not sure about 22 but 23 was done by Tobbi.

Edit: apparently there is a mac. But the last point still holds true unfortunately.

Edited by Guest
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There is an issue in the near future that vlad mentioned Apple in their wisdom have decided to drop support for OpenGL completely not sure exactly when but it has been announced officially. As OpenGL is what we use for rendering it's a complete break down in that there is no way to replace that code just for OSX.  

Enjoy the Choice :)

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Don't run games in a VM it's not worth it. We will support Mac as long as we find a way to make the game compatible on it. OpenGL deprecation doesn't mean it will be removed just yet.

So here are the current reason why Mac Support is complicated right now that we can do something about. Im planning to buy the most recent mac 500€ can get so that might be a 2012 version. I can't really afford a more expensive Mac as I'm going to buy a new laptop to do art stuff and mac won't do ...

  • No one building the game on mac
  • No one testing the SVN version often
  • No one testing the Multiplayer of SVN often

Here are the reasons that might make Mac really hard to develop on in the future.

  • OpenGL suppression. If they delete OpenGL libraries from MacOs, new macs and new version of MacOs won't allow you to run the game without huge graphic engine changes on our side.
  • Mac ditching Intel for ARM, if they do that, it will be way harder to compile the game for Mac. Because 0 A D code + All the libraries + All the external libraries will have to be tested on a complete different platform where things might be really different.

Here are the things we can do to to fix the three first bullet points.

  • Gather as much Mac Players in the community as we can, how many are you guys ? 5 ?
  • Explain how to compile the game / make it more straightforward. (It's really about opening the terminal, and typing a few commands there getting in touch with us and helping us debug stuff out)

Here are the things we can do for the rest

  • Find two motivated devs that want to work together review each others patches, and switch from OpenGL to Vulkan, and Molten VK on Mac.
  • That will mean anyone with a Graphics card older than 5 or 6 years won't be able to play the game anymore.
  • Find someone on an ARM platform that's willing to go through the process of making our code compatible. It's not starting from scratch as stuff as been done for Android (though not finished) but it's gonna be tough, and currently we simply don't have the man power.
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41 minutes ago, stanislas69 said:

Find two motivated devs that want to work together review each others patches, and switch from OpenGL to Vulkan, and Molten VK on Mac.

Probably we'll find an open-source library that converts  OpenGL calls into Metal calls.

41 minutes ago, stanislas69 said:

Gather as much Mac Players in the community as we can

That'd be really helpful for the developing.

43 minutes ago, stanislas69 said:

That will mean anyone with a Graphics card older than 5 or 6 years won't be able to play the game anymore.

It also may limit some old versions of Windows, because of no drivers with VK.

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Just now, stanislas69 said:

@Sundiata He can't him fixing the Mac was me fixing a dumb mistake I made and him making a mod with that fix. :)

 

49 minutes ago, vladislavbelov said:

Probably we'll find an open-source library that converts  OpenGL calls into Metal calls.

That would work, but won't it result into spaghetti code ?

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