13.12.2020, 13:10
I consider the project dead. No development whatsoever has happened since 2015.
I personally have moved on to bigger things (my todo list could span decades), and have lost any and all interest in TribalWars and thus TWLan as well.
I think Milu is right about this being done by "young and learning developers as fun side projects", and that's kind of the issue: you approach the codebase, see it's a hot mess and decide to do a proper rewrite. 6 months down the line you've learned a lot and realise there's a much better approach than your current one, so you start over. Rinse and repeat until you're capable of doing projects that interest you more than coding a browser game.
As for releasing the source: I wouldn't be opposed to it, but all developers on the team signed an NDA, so we're legally bound. If you're asking me, the proper way forward would be a clean cut from everything up to this point. New dev team, new codebase, new legal setup.
There's so much old cruft that needs to go away, starting with the infamous "agreement with InnoGames" that nobody seems to have a copy of. We were required to "prevent online servers", which by itself already required going closed-source and employing anti-tampering measures. But fact of the matter is that this check is trivial to bypass, even with no programming knowledge. Bypassing the user limit is a tad more challenging, but still very doable. From my current point of view, I'd say this was never really enforceable in the first place.
But say you wanted to go open-source, that would bring a new problem: legality. I'm really not sure to what extent it's legal to just clone TribalWars. There's lots of games that mimic the gameplay, but at the very least the graphics and JavaScript you couldn't distribute. You might get away with an "installer" that fetches them from Inno's servers, but... that's questionable at best.
I you figure out a way to deal with that and feel like attempting a rewrite, I'd be happy to provide the forum, GitHub org, and other infrastructure you may need. I'd also be available for technical questions if you have any, but I won't take active part in development.
I personally have moved on to bigger things (my todo list could span decades), and have lost any and all interest in TribalWars and thus TWLan as well.
I think Milu is right about this being done by "young and learning developers as fun side projects", and that's kind of the issue: you approach the codebase, see it's a hot mess and decide to do a proper rewrite. 6 months down the line you've learned a lot and realise there's a much better approach than your current one, so you start over. Rinse and repeat until you're capable of doing projects that interest you more than coding a browser game.
As for releasing the source: I wouldn't be opposed to it, but all developers on the team signed an NDA, so we're legally bound. If you're asking me, the proper way forward would be a clean cut from everything up to this point. New dev team, new codebase, new legal setup.
There's so much old cruft that needs to go away, starting with the infamous "agreement with InnoGames" that nobody seems to have a copy of. We were required to "prevent online servers", which by itself already required going closed-source and employing anti-tampering measures. But fact of the matter is that this check is trivial to bypass, even with no programming knowledge. Bypassing the user limit is a tad more challenging, but still very doable. From my current point of view, I'd say this was never really enforceable in the first place.
But say you wanted to go open-source, that would bring a new problem: legality. I'm really not sure to what extent it's legal to just clone TribalWars. There's lots of games that mimic the gameplay, but at the very least the graphics and JavaScript you couldn't distribute. You might get away with an "installer" that fetches them from Inno's servers, but... that's questionable at best.
I you figure out a way to deal with that and feel like attempting a rewrite, I'd be happy to provide the forum, GitHub org, and other infrastructure you may need. I'd also be available for technical questions if you have any, but I won't take active part in development.