Open sauce

[King!]

Dear Erik and Karl

First there was cave and grasslands, then the matchmaker went down and there was no more Biplanes.

A long time passed, and you guys revived Biplanes and called it Altitude.

Next came ball, this was widely regarded as a bad move.

With ball came football. Now the most popular game mode and arguably the only thing keeping the game alive besides ladder.

Is this the peak of altitude evolution? Ball_football?!

[Oyster]

Have you not tried any of biell's new game modes?

[King!]

You mean the stuff on the test server? They are alright I guess. It doesn't matter, we need control of the source to make it based again. We love you Lamster and Karl, but our love requires the source.

[Oyster]

He has non-test servers too.

Game modes supported on his server: Ball, TBD, Capture the Flag, Destroy, Race, Halfcourt Ball, Dodgeball, King of the Hill (I may be forgetting some)

[biell]

A description of the different Alti+ game types and associated servers can be found on my Alti+ wiki:

http://altiplus.glaciated.org/

A good feel for some of them would be my original Alti+ Games thread. Since then, I have added maps, Stam's 1LH game type, the new TAG game type, and created a scripting interface to support dodgeball, half_court, and whl.

Hey, let's all move over to the new forum:
https://forum.planeball.com/

[King!]

That's awesome beill, don't you think it would great be great to get it merged into the mainline? It's hard to get the community to fork onto a wrapper because most people find the vanilla-game through steam or whatever. We really could use a fully-featured updated mainline branch IMO.

At this point this a community run game. The source should be community managed.

[CmdrNoval]

You can't help but agree with King's assessment.

There must be a point, sooner or later, when the game has to be opened up to the community.

It is the next logical step, if Alti is to survive.

[King!]

So I talked with Karl, and the basic problem seems to be that the source code is a bit of a beast and it would be a lot of work to open source. Issues include but are in no way limited to: they need to clean the source of accounts/passwords, compiling the sprites depend on an old version of photoshop and weird scripts. There's a lot of predictive logic in the gameplay/net code that the understanding of only seems to exist or used to exist in Erik's head. Not to mention the understanding of many other systems that only exists in Karl's head. Karl used the metaphor of giving us an aircraft carrier (and we presumably are lay mechanics xD).

Even what I thought would be a simple change to tbd to make turret destruction required before base destruction seems not so simple because of the predictive netcode ingrained in all parts of the gameplay code.

The question may not be, are they willing to give up the source. But are we willing to receive it xD

[CmdrNoval]

Comes down to this...

At some point, Alti has to change hands.

I believe that the group of people we have within the community now is capable of refining Alti's code, and continuing the journey Karl & Erik set out on.

There will bumps along the road, no doubt...

But, as a community, we cannot allow Alti to fade into the shadows. There is awesome potential here. It just needs to be harnessed by those willing to take on the responsibility of furthering their efforts.

Karl & Erik have provided us with functional code, that ended up becoming a community all it's own... Are any of you willing to sit aside and allow what brought us together to fade away into obscurity...?

We have now a team of people, good upstanding members of the community, willing to take Alti to the next level...

"Aircraft carrier" or not, Alti had been apart of our lives for many years. I am unwilling to allow it to be lost.

Those still visiting these forums should speak up, for the future of Alti.

(@King!... There is more than one map out there, where the turrets block the majority of the access to the base. Destroying the turrets is needed to have a 'useable' opening to the base... Just a matter of map design... There is a map out there where everyone spawns on the same team with Bots cornered. Destroying the high HP turrets is required to access the base and, at the same time, frees the Bots to defend it. I would be happy to create several more maps, of this style, and host them for anyone interested.)