Commando Nukem, on 28 November 2018 - 02:51 AM, said:
OldMP is a hack job, Striker. That was not, and never was intended as a slight against you. It is a literal hack. That's a certifiably fact.
You seem to misunderstand what a "hack" is. A hack is a gross ugly workaround to achieve something, slapped together with poor code/poor implementation. OldMP's netcode currently isn't that. Is it still the sync-based netcode? Yes. Hack? No. A mess? Not really, it's pretty straightforward once you know how it works, and is about the only thing that is compatible with how Duke3D does things internally without re-writing and refactoring a good 75% of the codebase if I had to estimate.
Also, about user-friendliness... *cough*DiscordLauncher.exe*cough* Simple as running Discord desktop and then the launcher. Can invite people in Discord chat into matches from there, the program handles everything.
Commando Nukem, on 28 November 2018 - 02:51 AM, said:
The fact of the matter is the glitches, the desync, the crashes, the horrible lag, and the sometimes absolutely unpredictable behavior turned hundreds of people away over the course of many years.
None of which happen in the current EDuke32-OldMP_Maintenance build. I've patched every crash I came across, the desync basically never happens unless someone does something fucking retarded like using different GRPs or CONs than everyone else. (I'm Canadian, and I'm able to play with a Russian, and like 6 chilean players in one game and it holds up for hours, even during massive lagspikes.) As for the latency, it's manageable now. Mind you, it'll never be as good as a proper C/S implementation with dedicated servers and in-game joining, but it's the closest you'll get for now.
Commando Nukem, on 28 November 2018 - 02:51 AM, said:
Doom, Quake, Quake II, etc... port finagling...
Every single one of those games you mentioned absolutely requires "port finagling"... aka, opening your ports. If your ports aren't open, you can't host games. You can join, but you can't host. Same situation with OldMP, in master/slave, you need to open your ports to host, but you don't need to do so if you're joining someone else.
Commando Nukem, on 28 November 2018 - 02:51 AM, said:
My core point was that if anyone has responsibility to it now, it's the people here and now. Those who are still actively working on Eduke32. Because they are all that is left. That's not me saying "Fuck you for not doing better." That is me saying "This is it, guys. Us. Here. In whatever way we can, contribute."
Then hop to it. Download the source code from the SVN, along with Visual Studio 2017 if you don't have it, and get crackin'. This goes for anyone with C++ experience, who wants to see things get done faster. Need all the help we can get, but there's more complaining than doing something about it from what I've seen so far. If those who play Zan or GZDoom want something done, they make a patch/pull request. Here? It's usually bitching, or someone makes an experimental fork that'll never get finished (like PolymerNG), or falls outside of the scope of what EDuke32 is and what it needs or is a complete mess and rightfully gets rejected.
Everyone seems to forget, EDuke32 doesn't have nearly as much manpower behind it as the likes of GZDoom. (It's like 9 devs and occasional contributors combined vs the 20 or more that GZDoom has, thanks to all of those aforementioned patches.)
Either way, polymost performance improvements (makes use of shaders similar to polymer's artmapping for tile shades now, for example), refactors to various pieces of the game logic, and whatnot are the main focus of EDuke32 as far as I'm aware at the moment. Ie. Getting things cleaned up/lined up so things run smoothly and stuff like proper C/S netcode may actually be possible to approach in the near future.