Possibility of continuation or release of source code?

[dgraymandude]

Hey all, I'm sorry to be a bother but I'm once again wondering where the project is.
I'm disappointed to see that progress has almost entirely halted and the project seems to be completely dead.
I know it's silly but I was genuinely hopeful to one day see this project finished so you can understand my frustrations seeing the project get as far as it did before it eventually died.

So I've got a few questions:
A) Is there any confirmation the project is or isn't dead? I'm assuming it is dead because no update has been made since roughly 2015/17, but it could be continuing behind the scenes and it's just making slow progress. I don't know. I know the devs have lives outside of this project so managing this may be damn near impossible. 
If it IS dead, is there any possibility of a continuation of the project down the line?

B) If the project is dead for good, will the project ever go open-source so we can continue the work? Or at the very least, will you release the source code so we can continue it in our own time? I understand this one may be a bit difficult (or flat out impossible) due to distribution regulations by Inno games, though.


C) Were there any bots or addons made for Version 2.A3? I'd love to see bots added to this version, though I don't know if they've been posted here. 


I apologize if this is sounding rather impatient, I'm just very enthusiastic about this project as I've been following it for years now so I want to see it succeed.

[Patron Di Zona]

Dear TWLan Admins,
First and foremost, thank you for keeping up twlan all these years while i stopped playing.

Would it be possible to update some basic things, in order to get twlan working better?
I'm aware of the obstacles and was perhaps wondering if there was a way to get innogames to pay for this.

Thank you very much for the attention.

Best Regards,
Zona

[Milu2K]

TWLan is sadly dead and will most likely never be finished.

This project was started over 12 years ago by young and learning developers as fun side projects and coding a game like this requires a lot of time. Most or all of them are working software engineers by now and dont have the time and/or intrest in finshing this project.

I still visit this forum from time to time as it was a really good time of my childhood being active in this forum since almost the beginning. I learned a lot in this time and I'm also really sad that this project came to such an abrupt end when the final v2.0 attempt really looked to be promising. Sadly, 2.0 was re-coded many times with different frameworks which lead to the developers losing a lot of interest in this project. (I think)

[Molt]

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.

[TayCel]

I'd be willing to join the dev-team (or even a fresh started one).

[TayCel]

would still be up to help dev-team in case anyone reads.

[TayCel]

would still be up to help dev-team in case anyone reads.

I'd be available if anyone is up to breathing fresh air into the project.

[TayCel]

push !

[0xEAB]

Well, I guess "step 1" would be to get explicit (ideally) written permission from InnoGames.

We'd likely need a carefully thought through concept that presents no competition to their official offerings.
Neither to the original free-to-play public rounds nor to usually paid Rent-a-Round offerings available at various localized versions.

Otherwise we risk spending everyone's time all in vain, should Inno decide that they have no interest in a publicly available fan remake.
The old infamous "agreement with InnoGames" that nobody seems to have a copy of (quote by Molt) is way too shaky ground to build a new TWLan on - in my humble opinion.