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« on: May 13, 2007, 21:41:12 »
Today and yesterday I have gone deeper into the core of Odamex then I have ever gone before. I began hoping that I would be able to better understand what makes Odamex tick, but after tinkering with it for a few hours, I had realized that warm fuzzy feeling had been missing for a while.
A few of the community members have asked why Odamex development has been coming along so slow; The answer is simple: the internals of Odamex are a mess. Enough of a mess to scare away (possibly many) potential developers. The current state of the doom engine can only be described as an unstable jenga tower. As more work is done, it seems the tower is made more unstable and blocks are continually placed on top.
We are currently at the point where the tower is about to topple, The brave ones have stopped placing bricks on top. The average coders have stopped long ago. I think the only solution is to let it topple over and take all the bricks, one by one, and put it back together from the ground up.
The doom engine we have now is the result of 13 years worth of mistakes and oversights. It does not need patchwork, it needs a reworking. It needs to be torn apart and redesigned as a client-server engine which lends itself to code reusability and sanity.
Instead of running away, I would like to lend a hand in this. The only way for odamex to succeed is getting this done as soon as possible.