Status of project as 2019?

[Pizza90]

After a couple (or more?  ) years without 'playing MG I came back and saw many changes. Thus I opened this thread. I saw the thread 'MegaGlest 3.13.0 released： Is this the final version?' but it does not exactly answer to my question(s) so here you go:

I saw that on github the latest commit was by titiger committed Mar 11, 2019, however it looks like the activity of development ended way before, as the previous commit was  committed Jul 7, 2018. Did MG development just stopped or changed platform?

I saw a project called ZetaGlest (and say that andy committed there too but now seems not anymore), which now is confusingly called 'Glest'. Do you have any relationship with that project? I ask because there is not trace about it on the forum (unlik GAE and other forks).

Any chance to implement recent modifications they added?

Is there a roadmap to look at for undrstanding what will be implemented in the future?

Apologies for the many questions but I hav been away for too long, hope everyone is good.
Pizza.

[andy_5995]

Hi Pizza90

You have a lot of good questions, and I see you've done your homework.

I started playing MG in December of 2015 and became a contributor of maps and bug reports, and a little $, and some very minor patches. The developers of MegaGlest have no affiliation with ZetaGlest or the new Glest project. ZetaGlest was a project me and Jammy founded as an experiment basically, to see what we would be able to do with the code (there were some features we were interested in implementing that aren't part of MegaGlest).

While maintaining ZetaGlest, a dev named Mathusummut joined and became the primary developer and Windows expert. After a year of working on ZG, I turned it over to him, as I didn't have a strong desire to continue leading a project of that type and scope for an indefinite period of time (most likely years, lol).

He recently changed the project name to Glest. I have no idea why that name was chosen but I agree with you about it being confusing.

After that change, I noticed that most ZetaGlest pages were leading to 404 errors, so I recreated the org on GitHub, and re-added some related repos to archive them and added a blog post trying to explain the current status.

I went to back to playing and enjoying MG on a semi-regular basis, and am in regular contact with titi so I can probably answer the rest of your questions until you hear from the MG team directly.

As for MegaGlest, there have been many many commits since the release of 3.13.0, although there hasn't much activity lately. As you noted, a commit a few days ago, but before that there were several around July of last year.  There is no date scheduled for the next release but afaik they have no plans at the moment to deprecate the project.

Any chance to implement recent modifications they added?

We can't expect the MG devs to have the time to stay completely informed about new features of Glest, so that's too vague a question (though a good one!). Individual features and requests are still discussed on the forum here at https://forum.megaglest.org/index.php?board=21.0 Though obviously sometimes the discussions aren't engaged in at a swift pace.

Is there a roadmap to look at for undrstanding what will be implemented in the future?

None that I'm aware of.

If there's any other details about ZetaGlest you'd like, feel free to contact me directly, forum PM, or use the Off-topic section of the MG forum.

[Pizza90]

Thank you very much Andy!

Is there any chance you will commit some code to MG? It is really a great project so it deserves to continue, that's the greatness of FLOSS.

About my "Any chance to implement recent modifications they added?" you are right and I will definitively keep an eye on MG and report features i like from ZG and the new Glest.

One more question, I am assuming that such forks don't use the same masterserver as MG. This unfortunately disperse the already not so big userbase. Do you have any idea of how many players play ZG or the new Glest? At the least do you think the numbers are simila to MG or bigger or lesser?Thanks again for answering and if I hav more question I will do as you suggested!

[andy_5995]

Thank you very much Andy!

You're welcome.

Is there any chance you will commit some code to MG? It is really a great project so it deserves to continue, that's the greatness of FLOSS.

Nothing planned, atm. There are a few pull requests open on the data and source repo. I'm primarily a C developer (and only as a hobby) and MG is CPP. While working on ZetaGlest, I never really did learn the codebase very well. most of what I did was related to the build system, documentation, and the data repo.

I know a lot of people agree with you that MG is great, love it, and want it to continue +1

Alket has recently completely re-did the stats section and it's really super-cool, but I don't think there's a live link to it yet, and I've lost the link. I'll find that out for you.

One more question, I am assuming that such forks don't use the same masterserver as MG. This unfortunately disperse the already not so big userbase. Thanks again for answering and if I hav more question I will do as you suggested!

You'd be correct to assume that, and for a while there were separate master servers for ZetaGlest and MegaGlest; however, Right now the new Glest web site links to the MG master server page. I don't know much about the Glest project since I left and have been focusing on other things. You may want to join their Discord server or check out the Glest web site for extra info about it's current state. The ZG project is basically dead (since Matt converted it to Glest), though I still plan to maintain the ZetaPack mod.

Do you have any idea of how many players play ZG or the new Glest? At the least do you think the numbers are simila to MG or bigger or lesser?

More people playing MG, some days are slower than others but it's not uncommon to see around 20 games on play.mg

I don't remember every playing with you. Do you play MG multi-player? If you have any trouble finding a game, let me know and we'll organize a time to play a CO-OP game vs the AI. Peak playing times are between 19:00 to 0:00 UTC but some days other times work better for me.

Oh, btw, you may have noticed MG is on Steam now.

[andy_5995]

Alket has recently completely re-did the stats section and it's really super-cool, but I don't think there's a live link to it yet, and I've lost the link. I'll find that out for you.

http://master.staging.megaglest.org/next/games.php

[mathusummut]

Andy, if you want you can "unarchive" the ZetaGlest repo and make the repos not read-only, but I'm guessing that you did it to reduce confusion for contributors, correct?