Greetings

[Tim Angus]

Tony J. White wrote:
>> Are the removed syscalls the only engine modification of tremulous?
>> I always thought it was more.
> 
> Aside from botlib removal, the other engine modifications are the same ones
> that everyone else makes (AFAIK anyway):
> 
> 1) remove all Quake 3 Arena pak/cd/auth checking stuff
> 2) change the BASEDIR 
> 3) change the Windows and Mac icons
> 4) change the Makefile / build scripts
> 5) change the Quake 3 Arena hardcoded strings and paths
> 
> Any new engine features or bugfixes go into straight into ioq3 and then
> get pulled into trem at a later date (e.g. GUID support, cURL support, 
> Mac OS X support, etc).

There are network protocol changes and some extra engine callbacks too. 
For me the extra flexibility garnered by running a separate tree 
outweighs any perceived benefit that results from keeping things 
modular. Providing you re-merge regularly and be mindful that this 
process occurs, it's not really a great deal of effort.

I should point out that the main reason for making Trem standalone was 
to improve its visibility. Before GPL Q3, Trem had at the most about 100 
players of which it was rare to get more than about 15 together at once. 
Of the handful of servers that did exist, the majority of them were idle 
all the time. Contrast this to now, where we have about 200 servers and 
5500 players *per day*. Alright, this is all rather empirical, but it 
would be ignorant to claim there is no link between its standalone 
status and its current popularity.

Of course, in an ideal world where everybody ran the same OS with a 
package manager and ioq3 could be extended without having to maintain 
legacy support, modularity would be great. Mods just don't get the same 
exposure they once did and for the majority of the world they're 
frustrating to install and maintain due to the lack of installation 
management tools. In other words it's just not practical, in my opinion.