PsychoBoB wrote:I know that there is a patreon campain for the devs. But i am not very happy with the actual projects they are working on.
I only would pay for the work on the clients and servers basic functions to get them stable. All the other things are nice to have.
I think I explained that, though: people are working for free, in their spare time, as a hobby. They therefore do things they find fun, not necessarily what's important.
Yes, some of us do pick our projects based on what's "important", but there will always be random people doing random "unimportant" things for fun. That's just how it goes, and that work is (usually) at least somewhat useful.
Certainly, the main focus of what Sheeo/I are currently working on is exactly what you say: stability and sanity. From a stability point of view, the server has never been better. It's missing the support it needs for the vaults, although sheeo tells me he'll be working on that tomorrow, so hopefully that'll yield some progress.
The main "stability" problems we have right now are roughly:
- The single-threaded nature of the client, combined with its horribly inefficient approach to doing UI, means startup lag caused by large amounts of games or players being active can make the connection to the server time out. This is the cause of that "you need to reboot FAF lots of times to get a connection" thing someone whinged about earlier. (this is my current focus)
- Lots of users seem to have network equipment that is completely incapable of doing UDP, so the recentish server changes that increase performance for most people by allowing them to avoid using the proxy cause significant problems for an unfortunate minority. Using a not-insane TCP proxy for such people will probably do the trick, but there's currently nobody available to work on this (I don't know of anyone aside from myself or sheeo with the expertise to do it). The proxy server ZeP wrote is not fit for purpose any more, as our user count has grown. It forwarded messages in a slow, CPU-intensive way. It could only process one message at a time, no matter how may hundreds or thousands of people are connected to it. This meant that as you added more people to the proxy server, the games of
everyone using it were slowed down linearly. It got to the point where if you were connected to the proxy, you were fucked. We can probably make it all be okay again by using one of the many off-the-shelf high performance proxy programs that exist (plus a bit of plumbing to make it do what we want), but as I said: time.
People are not in this for the money. There's hardly enough money to buy beer, let alone pay wages. That's okay, though: people do this because they enjoy it. But that does mean things don't always happen as fast as we would like. If you want to donate, it'll be a nice gesture. If donations increase an enormous amount it might actually impact development, but for the time being it's just a notional thank-you and maybe half a beer per month for each developer.
