Short term client goals

[Cicero]

Just wanted to get some other opinions on this. What do you guys care about more?

 

Efficiency:

At the moment, the client sucks up a very large amount of your processor power and memory. While EL isn't a simple game, it doesn't have nearly the amount of stuff to render as newer commercial games. There is a lot that can be done to clean up the client, but it's pretty time intensive to go through all the code and try to figure out how to make it do the exact same thing, only faster and using less memory.

 

Stability:

While there are few major outstanding problems with the client, there are still the occasional crashes for some people. I never get them except in a few circumstances when I've been trying out new code, so they're very hard for me to track down. More crashes seem to happen on windows client than linux clients, and windows doesn't make debugging easy. It's possible to spend hours trying to track down an elusive crash bug and not make any real progress.

 

Features:

There's still several significant things that are planned to be added to the client, and some that are in progress. While some people seem to appreciate them, most people either don't care, or complain that the game doesn't read their mind and do everything for them. Music is pretty much done, except for some reported problems on windows, and server work that needs to be done. There's an auto updater that we've considered starting on . Learner usually pulls some completely random command or option out from nowhere that everybody likes, when it works.

 

Basically, we can probably focus on maybe 2 of these, but to make progress, one of them usually gets neglected. Ent keeps declaring a "stability freeze", but we add new stuff anyway :roll:. What would you guys be looking forward to the most in the next release?

[rebootedrock]

I voted for stability, id rather have a solid base before you guys work on anything for p2p. I would have like to vote for features, but i feel that stability is more important in the long run.

[Grum]

I took a look at the TODO list, and none of the items that have not been worked on are of real importance to me, with possible exception of "Faster mouse icon switch without dropping FPS". I guess that'd fall under efficiency too. So, for the moment, I'd say go for efficiency and stability (Although I've had a crash only once, and I'm not even sure that was EL-realed).

[Snuit]

I voted features.. I want to see the economy improve first with the nexuses and all after that there might be done some bug hunting, though I dont really have any serious problems atm with it.

[Grum]

But economy and nexuses are all server side.

[Entropy]

I think that efficiency and stability should be the first 2 things to work at, in this order.

Actually, there isn't much to do on the efficiency side, besides using VBO for static objects. The polycount is very high in EL, maybe as high as modern games. Also, the textures are big, and there is only that much a video card can do...

[Cicero]

I think there really is a lot more that can be done efficiency wise than you think. Keep in mind that I'm an aspiring kernel hacker . There's a lot of things that can be changed to use less memory and be faster, it's just a matter of rewriting them all.

 

For me, the first thing on my priority list has to be sound and music, because apparently music still isn't working on windows boxes. I'd like to test server support, too :wink: .