Ryandor.com

Well, I have lots more reasons for disliking, but they're mainly opinion and/or personal and can only (probably) come out as a flame if I try to explain them.

Oh my god... Who cares if you flame, explain it!

Flames go in the whatever forum. That's all I'll say.
http://www.ryandor.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=343
-Ryandor

Just to add some comments on POL (I'm a member of the distro team) -

POL 095 is a *TEST CORE*. It's only available from the POL *CORE TEST* forum, with the disclaimer that it is not suitable to run a public shard on...hence the name *TEST CORE*. Aside from that, it is pretty solid for a test core...but the purpose of a test core is to find bugs, not to run a shard on. The POL Devs don't release cores until they are solid and as bug free as possible. And it's been in testing since July 15th, not all that long a time really. For me, quality of releases is more important than quality, and obviously it is for the Dev Team too. 'Nuff said.

On the topic of the POL Distro (the scriptbase that handles all the skills, systems, and actions in the game), the 094 distro is actually fairly solid. There are some minor bugs that the community is more than welcome to submit bug fixes for. When you're dealing with a couple thousand scripts, the help is more than welcome, believe me! The Distro team consists of about 3 guys who do what they can to bug fix and maintain over 2,000 scripts and config files (not to mention that due to some major changes in the way skills work with 094, most of them had to be rewritten to allow POL to break the 49 skill barrier). Before you start calling anyone a moron, try developing your shard from scratch with no scripts and see how far you get! The distro is intended as an OSI compliant starting base, its anticipated that users will want to change and customize it.

The POL scripting language is powerful, but its not rocket science. Anyone with knowledge of lower level languages like BASIC (or the ability to learn them) can write in Escript. Escript functions very much like BASIC, Pascal, Rexx, etc. There is a huge "introduction to Escript" guide written by one of the devs that is not only a great tutorial to Escript, but a good intro to programming in general. But if you want power, then you have to work at it, regardless of what EMU you run. None of the emulators can be heavily customized if you're not willing to invest some time and effort.

Anyways - all the EMU projects are great, and I never understood a lot of this bickering that goes on... if you like UOX better, go with UOX... if you like Sphere, use it... or RunUO, use it... obviously there are choices and people will have different reasons for choosing one EMU over another. They all have advantages and disadvantages, what's better for one person won't be better for another. Let's not forget the programmers of these projects have dedicated a lot of time and effort into them, and they have passed on their hard work to us out of the goodness of their hearts, sometimes only to hear a lot of crap about how much their EMU sux and some other one rox. Can't we all just get along?

HellRazor

I should probably try 0.94 before spouting off about fixing bugs in it to use it My experience was with 0.92 and 0.93 which were buggy (but aren't they all ). POL does have a pretty steep learning curve for anyone starting new or coming from another emulator, but you're right.. it's not rocket science. Looking at the scripts, they made sense to me. It's writing them myself I'd have problems with hehe.

2hellrazor: I was speaking about POL 0.94 distro. My proggrammes spent two moths by rewriting it into usable form. Yes, the distro works. But there are used stupid and slow algorithms, TONS of redundand code, and so on.....
I spoke to my scripter and he said, that he will public something from our code.

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Jeez lol what did i do? how did a map planning takes forever turninto a war

It's true there are still some older "legacy scripts" in POL remaining. This is partially because for a long time, the core developers were also doing all the script development, but the core evolved faster than the scripts did. There wasn't any real official script release for a long time, and no one was really keeping them updated.

Then, about a year and a half or two years ago, a "distro" team was formed, consisting of POL users, to help maintain the script base and free the devs up to work on the core. The distro team improved on the scriptbase quite a bit and the majority of old code has been optimized and/or rewritten at some point.

Then POL 094 came out about a year ago - POL 094 completely changed the way skills and stats work, they are no longer tied in to the client files (making it possible to have more than 49 skills and more than 3 stats). Unfortunately this required about a 75% rewrite of all the scripts (every script that involved skills and stats had to be rewritten). That was an enormous job to start from scratch, and it was done entirely by users and the distro team (one guy did about 90% of all the coding!).

So yes, there are still bugs that need to be addressed, but most of them are minor. To say it's not in a "usable form" isn't accurate, it is very useable out of the box, but there are some bugs that need fixing. Yes, there is some redundant code and some algorithms that could be improved, but problems like that are inherent when you're talking about an open source scriptbase where dozens of people have built on it over the years.

The upcoming Service Pack 4 of the distro fixes quite a few things, it should be out in a week or so. And the really cool thing is, with POL, most of the bugs are fixable BY THE USER. You don't have to wait for the next core release to fix a bug in a script!

Anyone who finds bugs in the POL distro is encouraged to post your fix to the pol-distro forum at www.yahoogroups.com so we can integrate them into the official script release. About 10% of all the fixes come from regular users who are just helping out, our goal is to make the scriptbase as solid as possible.

As for the core? I know right now they are adding unicode support and some other things for POL 095. I'm really trying to get them to focus more on supporting the newer clients and multiple maps, I want access to Illshenar!

HellRazor

P.S. POL 093 was only intended as a "stepping stone" shard to help people convert their shards from the 092 skill/stat scripting to the new 094 skill/stat scripting (both types work in 093)...it is definitely buggy and not really intended for permanent use. You should use 092 or 094 if you choose POL.

P.P.S. Although the scripting isn't "rocket science", there IS a learning curve to overcome, as there is with ANY programming or scripting. You do have to learn the language to code in it. But once you learn it, there isn't a whole lot in a POL server you can't customize or modify. And the server core itself is very stable, one of the best for sure!

Okay i am going to try runuo then if it dont work out i will try pol then if that dont work for me then i'll go to ......whatever...

As for the map planning i have lots of ideas floating around my head on that.

And now i have lots to do especially now starting warhammer well i got a 6day weekend to get a lot done!

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Woot New Sig!!

Yeah it's funny how a little guestion about worldbuilding can turn into this.

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People ask me why I do this. Why I write such gross stuff. I tell them I have the heart of a small boy... and I keep it in a jar on my desk.
~Stephen King

2hellrazor: I dindnt talk about bugs. Bugs are OK, it happens. But about organization of whole distro. Almost everything is outstretched between tons of files (poisoning, titles of heroes, almost everything(!!) - it loos like the person who made it dont know pkgs a includes), which makes all horribly uneficient. Amost 1/3 of whole distro is redundant code (copy and paste), becase the person who made it was lazy to make it as function. Distro works. And i agree with that. But it is MESS. Our cleaning which took plenty of time made it MUCH faster and in particular it made it tabular and very easy modificable. And it makes POL even more powerfull......

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Can you upload it to the pol-distro over at the yahoogroups? We are all for improving the distro in any way we can.

(Sorry the thread got so far off topic! )

HellRazor

Of course, we will public some parts of our code.

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http://www.endor.cz/index-en.php

One *huge* problem with RunUO is that it is entirely non-portable; being that it uses a programming language which can only be compiled, and only has runtime libraries for, Microsoft Windows. Being a long time UNIX (I regularly use Linux, various flavours of BSD and Solaris) user I have no hope of ever using RunUO. For most people this means nothing, but it irks me. ;)

Keeping in mind that I know very little about programming, I've seen posts regarding Mono (I think that's what it's called) which from what I gather is an open source equivilent to C# except for *nix.
I'm not sure on the detials, but there's a few posts regarding it at the RunUO forums. I'll be willing to put money on the fact that eventually RunUO will work in some way on *nix.

-Ryandor

Yep, that's about the size of it. RunUO won't work on Linux *right now*, but it will once Mono is sufficiently further along.

the POL95 core has been in testing for how long now? and how stable is it?



Its as stable as u can script it to be.....the POL95 core is awesome if u have the talent to script it correctly

BTW: It will never work for *nix until they create .NET emulation