Here's a couple new admin mods that have recently popped up:
CAT - Cat's Administration ToolsModeratorEDIT: Oh look, I found another one-
ServerBase - A simple but effective server tools addonOf course, this has spurred many "Which admin mod is best?" threads:
Garry's mod 13 - Best Working Administration Mod?What's a good Adminstration Tool for CW:HL2RP?And, quite frankly, the several vocal people who post in these threads who think they know everything and think they have authority in all things lua really piss me off. (JamminR, you're more than welcome to take a break from the forums- I wouldn't blame you
)
Anyways- that aside, there are some valid complaints about performance issues (not as bad as they're suggesting) and the slightly messy codebase (comes from years of maintaining the code). As you all are aware, Me and Megiddo are both getting married, and our free time is dwindling into nothingness. I may have some time once I get settled down in a couple months, but I cant say for Megiddo. We're both still interested in the Ulysses project, but time and dwindling motivation due to an annoying community is making it extremely difficult.
I'm on the fence here- half of me is "Meh", and the other half of me goes "Oooh shiny code want to work!
". So, I have three proposals for the future of ULX:
The obvious one is to let it slowly die off while still maintaining bugfixes for major things. Maybe an occasional new feature here and there, but unlikely. I think we're heading in this direction if we don't address it soon.
The next proposal is to continue focusing on trying to improve what we have- adding SQL support, better ban interface, etc., and hope for the best. Perhaps we can get a few more hands on deck to help out, too. (I'm looking at you, Mr. President
)
Proposal #3 is the big one- a complete overhaul of ULX (and ULib?). I'm on the fence about this one (As in, I'd love to do it, not sure if time will permit). I would like to sit down and have meetings with all of the Ulysses developers and create design documents and specifications for the entirety of the project. This would help to reduce spaghetti/confusing code and give us good documentation that can be easily updated/maintained for people to use. This would be really good experience for software engineering in general! (For some reason at my current job, we don't do a lot of engineering, just a lot of jumping into it
). Additionally, planning this out would give us a good idea of how much work is involved, and give us an opportunity to back out if we can't make it. Also, this way we can better divy up tasks, and even bring on some new coders (outsourcing!) to contribute to the project, and the core team can focus most on management. I think it would be a fun experiment, or at least good experience with project management, anyhow.
For proposals 2 and 3, I'd like to find some of the more helpful members of the community to bring together ideas and talent. I'm liking the pair behind OpenSteam <
Ulysses|
Facepunch>, and their GitHub activity looks fairly impressive. (Disclaimer: I really should see how their module works before saying anything.) They would probably be good to help implement banning system with global DB support, and of course, their web interface could be vastly improved and become an official module for ULX.
iSnipeu has been a good contributor and community member as well, not sure if he's still active. I'd be welcome to bringing him on.
Anyways, sorry- this is a pretty big thought dump on my part. As you can tell, I still want to be active and involved with a project like this, more for the experience rather than the appreciation from the userbase. I welcome any input or feedback from all of you- brainstorm away!
