Tfs 1.1 and 0.3.6 differences and other questions

[wilbury]

Hi,

I've been 'outside' ^^ for some years and I would appreciate a brief about current servers info. Sorry if some of this is obvious, I'm not a coder just a designer, not even a player for a few years.

1. Distributions
Why there are so few attemps at compiling tibia over 8.6? I see tfs 0.3.6 is still the most popular. Is it still the most stable version? Did many things change over 3 years? Is it worth to setup server on tfs 1.1? What are the most important new features?
2. Scripts and client
I see a lot nice scripts like 'dialogue tree' or 'skill system' (by zbizu) with popup windows - is this not possible in the previous relases? It's not for the flash client but the c++ one, right? Generally what's with the flash version, people don't like it? Is OTClient finally a stable and well usable alternative for the client?
3. Gamepaly
Do 'cooldown system' with icons change a lot in tibia gameplay? It seems like a great idea but does it work? What about new pvp? Is Tibia really getting worse with time or people are just too stuborn to accept changes?

Sorry if it's too much in one post, I just want a short brief to decide whenev use old server or reorganise it for the newer realese of tfs. I've done my research but it would be nice to confirm some things by another person who's on top with the topic. Thanks!

 

[Damc]

1. I'm going to be annoying and point out that compiling is the process of translating source code into a target representation (usually machine or byte code, but not always). A more fitting word here would probably be 'to develop'. Grammar nazi stuff aside, the reason is fairly simple. The community shrank over the years. Fewer and fewer people in the community seem to be able to do any serious C++ programming and, let's face it, most of these custom distros back in the 7.x and 8.x days were utter crap. I've had the unfortunate "privilege" of doing some programming for TFS 0.4/0.3.6 and it was just horrible - code littered with ifdefs and sprinkled over with a shit-ton of features, sometimes even causing unexpected compilation errors if a certain combination of compile-time flags was chosen. So putting TFS 0.3.x and the word 'stable' in the same sentence just doesn't make sense. I also have a hard time understanding what do you mean by asking for "attempts"... do you mean servers written completely from scratch? Do you mean servers based on OTServ? OTServ has a lot of the problems that 0.3.6 has. There were some attempts at writing the server completely from scratch in a different language, but some of these suffer from the problem of authors copying inefficient C++ patterns into the other language where these patterns sometimes make even less sense and these projects are unlikely to take off - it takes a lot of effort to write an OT server application - last time I checked, TFS 1.2 is at around 80k lines of C++ (to be honest, around 10-15k lines could be removed by removing a lot the cruft that has accumulated over the years), so it really isn't a one-evening project. TFS 1.x is your best choice ATM. It has somewhat active development, while TFS 0.3.x are basically frozen in time and no one's going to be doing maintenance unless you pay them to do it.
TL;DR forget 0.3.x/0.4 and use 1.1 (1.2 when it's released)

2. Modal windows are not supported by the 8.6 protocol. The reason the flash client isn't very popular is that it takes a non-trivial amount of effort to integrate the flash client into your server and ,unfortunately, the community is running out of people that want to do that.

 

[wilbury]

Thanks a lot, this is very informative and straightforward. Updating scripts in my server may be time consuming but at the same time it's a good a occasion to clean them up and keep only essentials.