I found a trick to avoid alot of your launch problems

Honestly... can we get the code public if the dev team calls it quit?

 

i agree.
if you give up why not get it for public.
its also makes my things i do useless... though im kind of having fun doing it right now

 

The implicit assumption there is that I'd ever be one to give up, especially when it comes to programming.

For the record, that's a terrible assumption.

 

well im glad you said that cause i was sure YOU were the one who said "i give up".
even if thats been said half symbolicly, it still imply that they give up.
good to now theres atleast ONE strong spirit.
if only i could helped with the fix.

 

I called it a night in that wall of text, because it was something like 11 PM and I had to get to bed eventually. Gotta' be all spic and span for the school day.

 

eeehh, that's a bit of a double edged sword. If everyone had access, they could find out a lot of exploits that we currently don't know about. Even worse is that people can build their own client executables that send malicious data to the server. I can imagine that some client->server inputs aren't handled terribly well, considering the rest of the state of the code. There's also the added problem of having to remove everything Steamworks related, as that falls under an NDA. Stuff like stats are being worked on with Steamworks, and you can kiss achievements goodbye as well. If the dev team quits and releases the codebase, that will be the nail in the coffin for Empires as we know it. New devs will have to clean up the code base a lot and harden the server code before it will become playable again, because if they don't players could exploit without anyone knowing, because if the server doesn't complain, there's no problem.

 

Is it just me or has this been explained countless times before?

 

Doesn't hurt to explain it once more :p

 

It has been explained before and I think its a terrible excuse.
When code gets release publicly, sure people will take it and go make there own thing... sure bad things can happen when the server code is crappy and doesn't scrub input so people can send malicious code to it... sure a lot of things happen.

However code progress goes up significantly, other people(good people) find bugs and patch them much faster then the current team(who are mostly too busy with there RL) ever could. Indeed it is a double edge blade... however the rewards outweigh the risks in my opinion. Not all good sword designs are single edged.

 

You have a very rose-tinted view, my friend. What people would be interested in taking up support for a free mod they have no interest in? Do you think that, just because we'd release sources for code, models, etc, that people are going to magically form a well-defined unified vision for Empires mod and implement it well? Because that's what needs to happen. Sure, models need to be redone. Sure, we could use new textures and animations and whatnot! But contributors should cooperate to work towards a common goal.

This is what failed to occur under MOOtant's reign. There was a single vision, that of MOOtant's, and people who wished to contribute whose work he did not like could take a hike. There were countless modelers, animators and texturers who made assets that either other devs requested or were of such high quality and well thought out that they could be included immediately. Too bad, his veto was all it took. Adding it in under the radar resulted in the code and assets removed and rolled back.

Now, we finally have a team that has a unified vision of where to go and what to do. That means that we know very well what we could use and what is wasted effort, because it doesn't fit in our framework. It took several years to both get such a roadplan together and a team that is willing to work together on it. You simply will not get such a team or roadplan again on short notice, especially if your developer pool comes from outside the mod.

We (that is, the current dev team) have never refused anyone willing to contribute as long as they were willing to cooperate.

 

Haha yeah the ZM codebase was probably just as bad as Empires one, I know the original devs, they raged for ages when porting it from stock HL2 to the Source SDK.

 

It's because the space in program files to fix write:
-game "D:\program files\steam\SteamApps\common\empires\empires"

 

http://www.empiresmod.com/drupal/node/388

 

Strange, source sdk base 2007 and 2006 just got updated for me and nearly all the gcf files for them are gone now and both source sdk bases got moved into the common folder as loose files instead.
Further more, my install of empires that used to run just fine now shows a similar message to the one on this page: http://www.empiresmod.com/drupal/node/388
The only difference being the app id at the end:

And that highlighted app id in the steam database comes up with "Base Source Shared Materials"
All this probably means that empires can't even find source sdk base 2007 any more so it's doubly broken now lol.

EDIT: However the workaround as posted on the main page works for me but I thought the devs might find this interesting anyway.
Also I think it might be a good idea to add a link on empires' steam store page to the workaround required to get the game running.

EDIT 2: Also the steam community hub button for empires doesn't work any more, It just takes you the the Half-Life 2 hub instead now.
It's like valve is erasing empires bit by bit.

The empires hub still exists by visiting http://steamcommunity.com/app/17740 in your browser, you just can't get to it through the steam client anymore....

 

I would like to add that right clicking on empires and clicking view forum is the only working way to get to empires' community hub in steam.

 

Shouldn't view forum link here to this great place?