Come together

[Mark Sir Link]

I was originally going to post this in Galdor's thread but think the scope of this deserves its own thread.

I think Graal can still fit a 2D niche pretty well but at this point it would probably require all the best developers coming together to first work on an infrastructure that could be unified across all servers and then taking that and implementing it on one brand new server

I always found it really jarring to go from server to server and wind up seeing a different GUI, different controls, commands, hotkeys, and everything else on each server. It'd be really nice to see a lot of these things become more customizable in terms of how information is conveyed to the player and where, and being able to set consistent keybinds and chat commands across all servers. One thing I had Switch work on on UN Dev was a rescripted HUD to allow players to move the location of any of the given things to wherever they wanted and resize them.

It'd be nice to see all the scripters get together and decide by committee the best approach to do certain things that arise in systems all the time and then actually create the framework for doing them. Fowlplay had a good thing going with his GUI creation functions that could have been made better with either the addition of a tool or anchors so that visually consistent GUIs are made.

I also really liked Chris Vime's GUI Explorer having Windows Explorer qualities, namely sorting and expandable/retractable fields to a given column in each row. The approach he took is really nice and could be abstracted out to make even more useful GUIs with similar functionality.

I'm not saying development of every other server should be halted but I think I can safely say no one is fully satisfied with where their server is at, and a group effort to unify a well though out infrastructure across servers seems massively beneficial in the short and long terms. In the short term, each of the current Classic servers would wind up closer to each other in terms of quality, and switching from one server to another wouldn't be quite the jarring experience that it is today. Long term, it would allow for the creation of higher quality playerworlds in significantly shorter time periods since it seems like scripting is always a really big hang up for a lot of servers.

To simultaneously go alongside the development of a new infrastructure, a new server could be created that would ultimately be a proof of concept, and hopefully become a really good server as well. That's where levels and graphic artists would come into play on such a project, along with coming up with a creative director to actually have a high quality story/project on Graal for the first time.

Sooner or later it's likely every server is going to fall off and die, and this seems like the best way to stave that from ever happening.

In terms of setting up the project from the coding standpoint, everyone interested in participating would have to come together and agree on a few things, namely how to evaluate how useful someone would be to the project. There are plenty of low-mid caliber developers who ultimately could still be useful in such a project. A project leader would also need to be determined who has a solid track record of getting things done and making effective decisions about assignments for parts of the code base. I think either fowlplay4 or Chris Vimes are the obvious fit for this role, because even if neither of them were technically the best, they've certainly proven their ability to complete and contribute major works.

The project director would ultimately not be making all decisions about what should actually be included in the project, as that would probably best be decided by committee, along with the approach for doing it.

The end result would hopefully be a very abstracted framework that allows for the easy integration of new code, granted a functionality doesn't exist