As someone who doesn't know shit about OTC; Can anyone point out which are the main differences between classic OTC, Redemption/Mehah and OTCv8? Thanks!
You can check main differences in the description of the repositories, but in short:
1) Classic otclient (main dev - edubart): original one made by edubart, after many people started using it and improving without contributing he got discouraged to continue working on it.
2) Otland otclient: they forked classic and said they would maintain it, done few commits but not much different
3) OTCv8 (main dev - kondrah):
Kondrah appeared in the community with a different model. The demand for an usable otc was rising so he polished an "end version" with many features an otadmin would want in order to migrate from official client to otc. He was also partly responsible for popularizing it even more as his version had some exclusive features like android version fixed (it was on original but broke somewhere along the way), inbuilt bot and auto updater. His version was also way better than the two previous versions because he optimized several openGL calls and made quickfixes good enough to stop the project from being so gpu expensive and more likely the global client. Main problem and source of criticism was that while this was perfect for starters and end users, eventually while developing it you would hit a wall that is the closed source model, and he was charging an INCREDIBLY high amount besides selling several other features. After a few debattes here at otland and even the original creator speaking up about it Kondrah moved away the community.
4) OTC 1.0 / Redemption (main dev - Mehah):
Built on top of classic otc, it's the most developed and optimized version we have so far. The main developer is still actively working and updating the project. Mehah is a top notch developer that is very accessible and is always looking for new things to learn and improve so that's a huge plus.
It came a long way since it's page 1 version and many people joined to contribute (though there's always more work than contributors).
While Kondrah tried to focus too much in having an end product, Redemption do feel it's still lacking some polishment on its interface and it's still missing some most-wanted features like auto-updater, inbuilt bot and mobile as far as I know. However, it's no comparison in terms of performance, stability and acessibility (being 100% open src). There's even a quite cool analysis I did on the different battle module, in which - not surprisingly - is possibly the biggest fps problem across versions.
@Mehah, Thank you so much for your contributions earlier today. I have made a new issue for you. It seems that when you try to move forward after moving in a diagonal pattern, you almost "moonwalk" in place. I made a video here: OTClient Bug - Diagonal Pattern Moonwalk You can also see the...
otland.net
Best scenario would be more people contributting to Redemption and bringing things they bought/developed to it. This would save everyone's time or money (to do it themselves or to pay for something someone already paid/did). But community nowadays is locked inside
prisoner's dilemma. Most people will just be f***** if they don't share either way because eventually someone (or even Mehah himself) will do it - the proper way from scratch (where he could just take an existing code and optimize it) and those people will need to migrate to his version to keep the merge easier (or have to endure a harder and harder process of merging completely different codes).