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As a matter of fact, I am. Not that your lack of knowledge about me and my contributions to this and other branches of this project should be considered relevant to any factual impersonal claims about the quality of the project as a whole. Listen, the way I see it, we can approach this in two ways. One way is the way things seem to be going now. Aside from unsubstantiated ad hominem, it all basically comes down to saying "if you don't like the way we do things in our project, go away" — or, depending on the sophistication of the speaker, "go shoot yourself". Naturally, if you want to be childish, vindictive, and suppressive of criticism, this whole discussion is already pointless. The second way is to discuss these things using a more objective and reality-based approach. And we can argue all we want, but the indisputable fact of the matter is simple: the official version of the server evolves significantly much faster than its open-source counterpart. If this project wants to persist, it seems that you don't have much choice here but to take a good critical look at your policies and development pipeline and concede that you need a better and faster way of doing things and that maintaining status quo may not be such a great idea after all. Now, I've seen some of your silly sounding posts that claim that Cataclysm is "just stupid", "now it's all about the money", "They totally forgot about the Lore", "They RUINED WoW! THANK GOD I HAVE MaNGOS to rely on!!!!!!", etc. If that's what you choose to believe, fine. As I said, if you find that type of self-aggrandizing, self-deceptive reasoning comforting, it's probably better to stop discussing these things altogether. If not, then you have to stand before the fact that the latest expansion not only added a thousands of additional components like zones, mobs, quests, spells, events, and encounters, but it made thousands of changes and improvements to the previously existing content as well. And when it comes to the server mechanics, that "more of the same" claim is also not right. The new content is ridden with unique elements. As one example, instead of previously nearly ubiquitous "classic" quests like "go to zone X, kill 20 mindlessly roaming mobs", nearly every single quest chain now has at least one quest that features unique or advanced quest mechanics like vehicles, scripted NPCs, phasing, cinematics, or unrepeatable spells. That's quite a lot. In contrast, the holy trinity of Mangos, SD2, and UDB is still missing most of the advanced stuff from the original game and its first two expansions. Features like vehicles, phasing, pathfinding, object interactivity, outdoor PvP, advanced NPC interactions (formation movement, dialogues, etc), and even some of most basic encounters in such ancient zones as ZF or AQ20 need to either be improved or written from scratch. After 5 years in development, the main repository still doesn't have full script and spell support for some of the most well-known vanilla encounters. Cataclysm shipped with 6 new dungeons and 4 new raids. While the key Mangos developers are still figuring out a way to update to 4.0, the upcoming 4.1 patch will add yet another raid and another dungeon to this ever growing list. When and if Mangos finally switches to 4.x.x, it will probably take the developers years to implement one half of Cataclysm's content. By that time Blizz will release another 5 or 6 major patches, possibly even another expansion or two. Should then the developers afford to examine a gift horse's mouth with a microscope? Not in my view. I have experience in programming and I have a general idea of the overall quality of the project's code. It's nowhere near as perfect and "hack-free" as at least some of you seem to believe it is. As someone mentioned earlier, this entire project itself can be seen as nothing but one big hack. Both in that it cannot possibly hope to emulate each of the mechanics of the official servers in theory and in that it often fails to emulate even some of the most basic and well-understood of these mechanics in actual practice. Qsa, without mmaps, the complete inadequacy (not to mention, "non-Blizz-likeness") of the exiting pathfinding code is a very good example of the quality of entire project. You of all people should know that. You also seem to forget that mmaps began as an improvement to the already existing classes and functions of Mangos. If the main repository hadn't contained any movement-related code at all (according to the puristic approach enforced by the devs), I doubt that this ambitious and spectacular project would ever have been started at all. So, to an outsider, it seems that up to a very recent point the developers were perfectly happy to include crappy, inadequate and incomplete code of their own. In which case, why should the rest of us suddenly be nothing but infallible perfectionists whose coding skills can satisfy the most stringent standards of a major English bank? Think what you will of me, but I'm probably one of the biggest supporters of the project there is. And as a supporter, I'd say that unless you remove most of your all of your own half-assed code from the main branch, you should stop acting so surprised when some of your most hypocritical proclamations sometimes get met with expressions of incredulous sarcasm. To sum this verbal diarrheal discharge up, I can definitely see Vladimir's point that Mangos is different from normal open source projects. One can rarely find a popular open source project where any of his potential contributions will seem preemptively unwelcome. Is it no one out there who wants to help you, period, or could it possibly be the case that some of your most unreasonable practices scared most of potential help away? In an SD2 discussion, someone (not me) once said that he would submit 90% of his scripts for the SVN if he knew that at least 40% of them would be accepted. I think that expresses my own view very neatly. Patches like AHBot are hugely popular and mostly harmless. Why on earth would you not incorporate them into the main branch? Perhaps even less Blizz-like submissions like Playerbot (invaluable for small population servers) could get in, disabled by default and manageable through the ini file. Maintaining an "all-popular-patches-in" branch of the project with fewer restrictions on the quality of submitted content could not only appease most of the critics and turn some of us "lazy trolls with oversize egos" to more active contributing, but be used as a testing ground for any submitted content for the official branch. Are you really that certain that all of its potential benefits wouldn't outweigh its costs?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems hard to be excited about being an active contributor when you see something like that vellum patch that was submitted for review back in May of 2009, with nearly each of the posts that date back to November 2009 saying that the patch works fine and questioning why it is being ignored by the development team. That place is a programmer's version of limbo, and one can only wonder how many contributors didn't even bother submitting their second patch after seeing what happened (or rather didn't happen) to their first one. Whatever project's goal and standards are, I think that by allowing the patch submissions to rot there nearly indefinitely, the developers are only shooting themselves in the foot. You can't expect any serious cooperation with this kind of indifferent approach.

Thank you for speaking your mind and finally having the guts to compare inexperienced volunteer patch writers to insidious poisoners. These malevolent a-holes gotta be shot in sight, if you ask me.

On my job (I work for HUGE English bank), before you commit into the main repo, you have to pass Core Review, then the Test Team have to verify that our patches pass regression tests and do not cause ANY sorts of troubles. Only then you have the right to submit your code and wait for Production Release to prove you wrong - if bugs are uncovered at this stage, your changes are rolled back and you start scratching your head again. This is how BIG business needs things to be done. And that's exactly what semi-legal volunteer hobby project with zero budget needs to emulate, the development cycle and project management techniques of something like Lloyds Banking Group, a major security-obsessed financial institution with more than £1 trillion in total assets and more than £40 billion in annual revenues. Good point. Now if you excuse me, I'm off to conduct Phase I of a double-blind, randomized, multi-million-dollar clinical trial of my Saturday breakfast. This is how BIG Pharma gets things done, and I'll be damned if I'll ever be forced to adopt a lesser standard.

Try doing it with MMaps, Playerbot, AHbot, Vehicles, A-H Grouping, Vellums, OutdoorPvP, and at least half a dozen of other similarly "unworthy" modifications, and see how much time it'll take you to sort through merging conflicts alone.

Good news and thanks for the warning.

It gets updated now and then. The last update was in September. The SVN: http://trinityadmin.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ EDIT: You may want to roll back to revision 20. Rev.21+ seems to use a different format for groupgo, goname, namego, etc.

I can't speak for every Mangos player, but I can speak for every Mangos person I personally know. All of them, including myself, have active subscriptions to the official servers most of the time. It's when they get tired of the enforced grinding, time sinks, gold sinks, and god knows how many other official server limitations, they turn to Mangos and all its customizable pleasures. Not to experience a fairly incomplete simulation of the already existing product they already have full access to, but to have pure unadulterated fun. And again, mangosd.conf has dozens of entries that has nothing to do with that so-called Prime Goal. MaxPlayerLevel, DisableWaterBreath, AllFlightPaths, Quests.IgnoreRaid, AllowTwoSide.Interaction, Rate.Creature.Damage, Visibility.Distance, Rate.Skill.Discovery, Rate.Drop.Item, Rate.Talent...and so on and so forth. Claiming that these unofficial features have more right to belong there than this rather good simulation of the official AH seems like some perverse sort of cognitive dissonance to me. I'm not trying to be a smart ass. I honestly don't get it.

What, you mean its goal is to start using the official IP ranges, charge $25.00 for single character transfers, disallow any type of player command input, get rid of "hacky" mangos.conf, implement hundreds of existing official server limitations, and end up imposing hefty monthly subscription fees? Illogicality of this dubious mission statement aside (Mangos' code and server dynamics will never look anything like the existing product), the official servers do have fully loaded and operational auction houses. Clean Mangos servers don't.

I agree, make this manageable through the .conf file. One thing that makes Mangos great is the level of customization that allows players to overcome tens of thousands of restrictions set by the official servers. Restrictions that often have little to do with quality of gameplay and everything to do with making customers play longer and thus making them pay more. The fact is, internally or externally, Mangos will never be fully Blizz-like. Limiting functionality of 10-player servers in order to make them more similar to 10,000-player ones will only result in poorer quality gameplay.

I've been loosely following this thread for a while now but I'm still not sure what it was about the patch that prevented including it into the main branch. Was it the coding style or its level of (in)completeness? Since it it seems that most of the developers' efforts go into keeping the patch compatible with the main branch, the new development by zergtmn/rsa should really try and concentrate on these problems. Merging most of the working features into the main branch will give more casual contributors much better access and understanding of the code and the mod's developers more time and possibility to work on more important issues than compatibility rewrites.