SWGEmu - 1.0 and the future of JTL

[nostyleguy]

A lot of this discussion has focused on the non-technical contributing factors (time, passion, etc) and impacts (faster to 1.0, community perception of devs, etc) of this decision. That is great for the community to hear and discuss.

However, I'm curious if there is room, now, to discuss the technical aspects of the problem? I think Thrax989 wasn't wrong when he said it's hard to contribute to JTL.
This announcement came as a bit of a shock to me, even though I read every post in the development forum and frequently read commits in gerrit. I even used to lurk in the opendev IRC channel all day while at work because the development of this project is so fascinating to me. As a full-time C++ developer of 3D simulations (albeit non-networked) for a DOD contractor, JTL is the area of the project I am most interested in, but I feel like it's a mysterious enigma of a problem that nobody wants talk about. In an ideal world, all the work that has been put into it already, even fruitlessly, would be publicly available (through public forks of the repository, more open forums, wiki, etc). This would allow prospective developers a chance to understand the real technical challenges being faced.


This list from the closed thread:

* JTL is a space game, the ground game is not really 3d, so we need different spatial indexing tech
* In space, projectiles "tick" (they move in a direction with a velocity) and they collide with another object, on the ground you can't dodge a rifle shot, in space you can dodge a missile.
* Since the game was written by different devs, some subtle things are different like the coordinate system is not the same as the ground game (i.e. x/z/y etc.)
* core3 was not designed for "ticks", we might be able to hack it in but it would be a nightmare

Makes any real hope of implementing JTL in the current engine seem technically infeasible. However, the devs in this thread have implied JTL is still possible in the current engine, given enough time/interest. What are the dev team's current ideas of how to solve these problems? What has been tried? Is Oru on board to update the engine? Or would the solutions work within the limitations of the engine?

None of what I wrote above is intended to insult or blame the current devs. I just want to offer the perspective of a capable outsider who would *love* to contribute to JTL, but doesn't know how.

[lordkator]

...I just want to offer the perspective of a capable outsider who would *love* to contribute to JTL, but doesn't know how.

Join the team!

See: Development Team is Recruiting