Where Emulation is Heading
by
Published on 07-16-2010 06:46 AM
Emulation, regardless of personal opinion, is changing.
What varies from person to person is whether or not they feel this change is for the good, or the worse.
A couple days ago I received some feedback of personal opinions on this topic, and I'll address those here as well as provide my own take on the situation.
So, for my fourth blog post...
The State of Emulation
--
Out of most of the feedback I received, my own thinking is most along the lines of Kirth's.
It's been going down the hill for quite a while, that's for sure. Gaps between private projects keep increasing. Quite the trend has been that people attempted to fill that gap using drama as cement. Incidentally, it seems new patches seem to be supported faster and faster. We may well be heading back to the "new patch now, proper (feature) support later".
-KIRTH
Many people will argue that emulation is on an upswing, simply because patches are being supported faster and faster. However, with lack of proper feature support as well as some emulators being riddled with bugs every few revisions, is it really a step forward? Or a step backward?
Private projects within themselves can be an argument for, as well as against, the improvement of emulation.
While oftentimes private projects can create stellar levels of productivity as well as improvements, oftentimes these private projects are, well, private - no one else has access to these improvements. So if no one has access, are they really improvements to emulation at all? This is again, another variable that can be argued.
imo, 3.1.3 held my dearest memories of WoW private servers. I don't get any enjoyment out of the game anymore, retail or private.
-RUDYDIMACALI
In Rudydimacali's opinion, Patch 3.1.3 of WoW had the best emulation. However, I am more personally inclined towards Terrorblade's take on the 'golden era' of emulation; TBC.
I'm going to do this by emulator, Arcemu: ArcEmu is really being the drag down of WoW Emulation because it doesn't have very many contributors like other projects like mangos and trinitycore they both are way far ahead of them in feature support and they have less bugs so arcemu is bringing emulation down because people continue to use it only for there Lua engine and don't both contributing shit when they fix it. ManGOS: ManGOS hasn't always been as stable and bug free as it is now which shows that emulation is growing and people are contributing to it so it's a star for emulation. TrinityCore: A ManGOS branch originally has been a shining star since it's release in 08 which is bringing emulation up also. So overall if more people start contributing to projects emulation will stop being in the shithole and be great again like it was in tbc.
-TERRORBLADE
Terrorblade, while also providing his personal opinion on emulators on an individual basis, touched on the same point I mentioned above about private projects. "So overall if more people start contributing to projects emulation will stop being in the shithole"; A great majority of developers ARE contributing to projects - it's just the projects are not public. This could also be interpreted to the higher percentage of leechers that are around these days. This, however, is just my opinion - Kirth disagrees.
I myself don't think that leeching is a growing trend. What I do see is the increase in protection against leeching: think Lua encoding. This also brings me to the grow of Lua as the main scripting language. More and more can be done using the language (mainly because of HyperSniper's doings). What does make me a happy person is the decrease in repacks. I'm hoping that we'll, one day, be completely be rid of their putrid stench.
-KIRTH
Lua encoding is one of the newly inspired trends that is coming to emulation. Lua within itself is being seen as both a hindrance and an improvement to emulation. Many new up and coming developers have chosen to learn Lua over C++ - and while this allows them to grasp a coding language often sooner and easier than C++, it limits them in a variety of ways. For one, Antrix-spawned cores are still the only ones that REALLY support Lua (although some users have taken to adding somewhat shotty Lua support to other cores, such as Mangos); whereas learning C++ would be a cross-core, and truly multi-purpose coding language.
But then again, Lua has it's other benefits too; it supports easy reloading of scripts, which for casual emulator scripting can really speed up the process - no need to recompile the entire core just to fix a small minor error. As well, users like HyperSniper have been vastly improving the Lua engine over the recent while, which has again pushed for it's recent dominance as the first acquired scripting language.
Kirth also touches on the decreasing of repacks - this is something I have noticed as well. Now, Kirth has, an obvious resentment towards these "putrid" repacks, however for many, repacks can be the first easy and cautious step into emulation.
While personally I don't believe repacks should ever be COMPLETELY abolished, they shouldn't completely overtake emulation like they have in the past either.
--
Thanks for reading my blog,
More will be coming soon!
Leave any comments or feedback on this, or other topics, in the comments below!
-HG
This article was originally published in blog:
Where Emulation is Heading
started by
Hellgawd
Dombo- 07-16-2010vBulletin Message