This gist of it is I lost interesting in doing the last bit of work to make Voxlap bug free. I know this sounds infuriating: "Jeeze, if it's so close, just finish the damn thing." Well, the closer I get, the harder it is to find bugs. A few months ago, lensman did a bunch of stuff really fast. Things I couldn't find and had no idea how to find. On the other hand, his git history is incomplete, and the big refactor he did, while a good idea, combined with the missing history means if he (inadvertently) introduced new bugs, it will be hard to track them done. Also I haven't heard from lensman since.
The thing to do for Voxlap is probably email Ken Silverman to see if he has any backups of the code, ideally ones pre-inline assembly (lensman reported he got it faster with compiler intrinics, which Ken might not have had access to when he originally made the engine.) Then port the older versions based on what we have, and rebase the changes he and lensman made in later versions. Another thing is the build system. Ever change it would have to be basically manually redone. That is bullshit, and C should be ashamed of itself. I should probably switch it to cmake or premake or something that can automatically deal with refactors.
That would be cool, and nice bragging rights, but honestly it doesn't interest me as much as it used to, especially compared to the amount of work it would take. Ken is a gifted optimizer, but many of his optimizations no longer make sense on more modern computers (though they naturally help with old computers). This post eloquently describes how to optimize these days (it's an excellent read):
https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook ... 1643253920 It also introduces the VERY important concept that newer low end computers are very different from older high end computers, even when the specs broadly look the same. (Notice I said different not better, everybody needs to watch
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGw-cy0ylCc ASAP.)
I decided that if the point of this is to help BnS, it would be better to make a new network-compatable client, hense my HaSnip thread (go find it in the software mods sub forum). Also Greaser is making pysnip work with iceball, making even that redundant. For now, I have no plans to work on Voxlap.
Perhaps I might end up using Voxlap with HaSnip for max nostalgia. Maybe I'll just finish this project for bragging rights and resume padding. Maybe I'll do a line-by-line conversion to Rust, an excellent language that really ought to entirely replace C and C++. It's syntax is IMO a big bloated in an effort to be more C-like, but syntax doesn't matter, and it's semantics don't fall into the same "ease the transition" trap. This is the third time I've implored y'all to check something out, but (seriously :), check out Rust too. So yeah, I am out for the time being.
If anybody reading this wants to take over the project, go for it! I'll still be around, and can offer advice or take on a secondary role, I just don't want to lead it. Vlad and Cajun (if he sees this), you two seem to be the most interested. I'm going to be frank and say when you guys worked on stuff, the git work seemed a bit sloppy for the museum-curator-perfectionist approach I think this sort of project needed, so I recommend you both get real good with git (and use and abuse `gitk --all`, it's makes everything SO MUCH easier!). But feel free to prove me wrong and show that I was being too uptight and slow moving to get this done.