Hi everyone,

I've been away from PS long enough that probably very few people active on this board even know me.  :-)  But anyway, despite my general rule of thumb on the Internet that anyone who makes a big announcement about how they are leaving is generally just trying to get attention and will be back sooner or later, I'm going to go ahead and make my announcement.

I have just emailed my written resignation to Talad from both PS and Atomic Blue.  It has been a great 8 years, but eventually creative differences and real-life concerns just end up causing even good runs to stop.  I have had a ball working with the dev team (revolving door though it may be), and I would put the core PS engine team up against any other volunteer team in the world.  What a talented, persistent and altruistic bunch of guys.  I have learned more about programming from doing PS than from any job or schooling I have ever had.

To the fans, I hope you continue to be loyal to PS.  As slow and as painful as the process often is, believe it or not the developers build it for you.

So long,
Vengeance

I agree it is fun to see these updates.  What's even funner though, is seeing snarky comments from ex-devs who would rather make passive-aggressive attacks on the team than just contribute to the efforts they like.

It doesn't matter whether I "like" erlang or not.  :-)

I am supportive and I think it is good for the PS team in general to be supportive of efforts like this to do research and learn by students.  In any case we couldn't stop you, because you can simply take our code and start modifying it to suit your needs no matter what we think.  That's the nature of the GPL.  Certainly it will be easier to do this project if we help you and show you around a little bit, and we'd be glad to do that with you.

I think if you decide to use our project that we would just give you an account for SF svn, make a branch dedicated to you and then you can play in your own sandbox for as long as you want.  Later if your results are good we'll consider merging your changes into the trunk.

Thanks,

I frankly don't care how you label the game, Mesmer.  Call it what you will.  If you don't like the term Open Source, don't use it.  If you have a moral problem with dual licensing then don't play it.

I'm also sorry that there has been so much arguing about this sort of thing surrounding PS.  Many fans and others trying to help PS have done 90% of that editing and censoring.  I have argued till I was blue in the face with several of them, trying to get them to stop.  Many have heard me do it.  The only good PR for the game is to make a good game.  Splitting hairs about what label goes on what piece doesn't prove anything and probably only hurts our reputation.

Having said all that, I've been contributing code under the GPL for 8 years to this game.  10's of 1000's of lines of code.  All open source.

What has been your contribution to the OSS movement?  From whence does your sense of moral righteousness come?  I'm not questioning it--I'm just wondering why people get so passionate about this when they really have no stake in it whatsoever.

Good luck with your next MMO.  I am very glad you spent time in ours and had a good time with it.  You never forget your first love... or your first MMO.  :-)

The current game chat tabs are Talad's design.

Talad doesn't want a separate OOC tab.

I guess you totally missed the point of the big irc discussion I posted.  I will try to summarize:

1) It is impossible to synchronize times across machines.  Even with the NTP and the drift compensation, etc., you cannot trust data from a client due to hacks and cheats.  So why bother.

2) You don't need the times synchronized anyway, so spending time addressing point #1 is a waste.

You are right that right now PVP combat is overly dependent on exact timing, so there could be some advantages or tactics that leverage a slow or a fast pingtime.  But that is a design issue in our combat setup which we will be addressing in a future release of combat, not something that makes us attempt the impossible problem of net-wide time sync.