Facing a new Era.

[Caarrie]

So instead of reinventing those features, shouldn't the PS team work towards migrating compatibility to the newest version of Crystal Space?

it is not as easy as it looks to update to a new version of CS, it has taken us over 6 months to get to a semi stable client with CS 1.9 and we have a bit longer to go before we get a client that is stable enough for a release. The release version of PS will always use a pretty stable version of CS to make sure we dont get major bugs into the release client that we dont have time to test and try to get fixed, We also have several ps devs that are on the CS team so the devs are well aware of the progress the CS team is making.

[enderandrew]

But migrating compatibility to future CS releases will be even more difficult as PS diverges.  If PS uses their own rendering techniques for shaders, then any code in future releases of CS that depends on their internal shader code won't work with PS.  If 1.9 is unstable and difficult to work with at the moment, perhaps the prudent course of action is to wait until 1.9 is more stable.

That being said, I willingly accept that I'm somewhat ignorant here as a non-dev.

I haven't even been able to get into the game yet.  The server appears to be down.  And I can't speak for everyone, but I'd prefer to see the PS devs work on PS features, like adding more skills, and more crafting types and let the CS team worry about CS issues such as rendering.

Either way, I am grateful that volunteers have provided a free game for me.  Assuming I get into the game, I'd be willing to volunteer some time and effort myself, but I'd likely only be able to do voice acting or writing.

[Caarrie]

all the shaders PS users are CS shaders, they are copied from the CS tree into the proper PS location. Also a FEW PS devs work on CS so that features PS needs gets in CS and gives them a better understanding of some of the features/functions that ps has to offer. Also PS has no issues with updating its code base each time a CS version bump is done, this would be required either way as we have to keep up with CS changes, and most of the time there is atleast one dev working on this change for months before it gets merged into trunk and the testing team and other devs start using it. Trust the devs they know what they are doing and are not reinventing the wheel in this project.

[enderandrew]

Good to know.  I'll go back to reading the website and wiki.

[LigH]

We don't reinvent the wheel.

We are changing the axes and wheel cases so they are able to take the new wheels with the wide base tyres.

It takes more than pulling just one switch to migrate from CS 1.4 to CS 1.9; it is not just exchanging the engine, it is also exchanging the resources to match the features of the new engine.

Imagine: You were used to drive the good old Diesel AT car you got from daddy. Now you are about to get a brand new sports car ... don't you expect some amount of training time to get used to the new engine power, to the new accelleration level - and don't you wish to learn how to handle the manual gear shift, after you were used to the automatic transmission and never learned gear shifting? And remember that you will need unleaded gas now, not Diesel fuel anymore.

The switch of a 3D engine generation is just as complicated. All the engine features and tricks you learned for a specific level of graphic features may now be partially obsolete. There has been Lambert and Gouraud shading on vertex and triangle level before - there will be Phong and Normal map shading on a pixel level now. There will suddenly be normal (bump) and shininess and reflectivity maps ... new art content has to be made. That means, the shadows are no longer painted brightness changes in the textures, but calculated brightness changes related to lighting and surface directions. The good old textures are now wrong and useless! You need artists, lot of artists, to change all textures - and you need to explain to them how they can do that correctly. And that is just one example...