A suggestion from the MaNGOS founder

[Winterflaw]

What I'm driving at in general here is that C is a really nice language which I think people should use a lot more often especially for, say, you know picking a topic out of nowhere WoW server implementations

[theluda]

Go??!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Actually works quite well for these tasks, e.g. handling of data packets is truly wonderful in Go. Tried it with authentication server for vanilla WoW, and enjoyed the possibility to marshal / unmarshal Go structs right into WoW compatible packets. Though I really wished WoW back then already had used protobuf for this.

[Winterflaw]

It would be great to see a derivative work honoring the GPL.

Is that possible?

I mean, if you take someone else's work, add your own to it, can you then release the whole lot under GPL?

Aren't you in effect changing the original author license for the code which is theirs?

I'm not arguing for or against this, just wondering if this particular thing is something which can be done.

[Winterflaw]

Actually works quite well for these tasks, e.g. handling of data packets is truly wonderful in Go. Tried it with authentication server for vanilla WoW, and enjoyed the possibility to marshal / unmarshal Go structs right into WoW compatible packets. Though I really wished WoW back then already had used protobuf for this.

I basically don't like languages with garbage collection.

Also, I can't read code where the opening brace is on the same line as the statement. I actually have to re-arrange the code. Bleargh.

[theluda]

I mean, if you take someone else's work, add your own to it, can you then release the whole lot under GPL?

Of course, GPL can never be changed, so any code based on MaNGOS by default is GPL and has to be.
Changing the authors in Nostalrius code and deleting MaNGOS authors would be a license violation just like running vanilla servers is.

So if Nostalrius does not release their changes, they are effectively doing the same license shit as Blizzard is doing by not licensing vanilla to the community.

My five cents... ignoring years of work by the MaNGOS team and our projects license is nothing a honest project would do. But then again, in the last eleven years, there never was an honest private server.

[Roadbl0ck]

@Winterflaw

To add to what theluda said.
If Nostalrius server code is indeed based on MaNGOS or CManGOS (I guess?) the original work is already GPL, so there's no issue of taking someone else's work adding bits and changing the license.
It should already be under the GPL.

[Winterflaw]

I mean, if you take someone else's work, add your own to it, can you then release the whole lot under GPL?

Of course, GPL can never be changed, so any code based on MaNGOS by default is GPL and has to be.
Changing the authors in Nostalrius code and deleting MaNGOS authors would be a license violation just like running vanilla servers is.

I had the impresson from the OP the original license was not GPL.

[Gemt]

This exact thing has been bugging me ever since i took a first look at MaNGOS back in 2007. It's incredible that no big projects are sharing their improvements on the core.

But as for "honoring the license", is it required to make the code obtainable? I'm no expert at licenses, especially not GPLv2, but from my understanding it is only required to make the code obtainable if you distribute the software as an executable, which I guess no private server is doing as the "executable", strictly speaking, is not distributed to the players? Or is making the server accessible to players through the client enough to validate the clause of the license?

But either way, the private server community would have advanced so much further if projects did contribute to the core repository. Depending on what the team here are working out the next days/weeks, it could be great to see their improvements patched to the actual MaNGOS core. Especially if I'm wrong about GPLv2, and Nostalrius are trying to operate within the "law" as far as possible.

[theluda]

I had the impresson from the OP the original license was not GPL.

MaNGOS was GPL from day one and is to this day. Changing is hardly possible, as that would require written consent from all contributors, and some by now are even not alive anymore.

So it will always be GPL.

[Winterflaw]

luda, while you're on the blower, maybe you could help me find an answer to a very old problem/question I have.

Back in 2009 I became interested in head tracking. I tried it first with a Wii controller, but then bought a specialized IR camera. As such, I could know the position of the viewers eyes and the direction of his gaze.

What I wanted to do was make the screen like a windows (you know - a window with glass in, like you have in the wall) onto the WoW world. So as you moved your head, it would be like you were moving your head to see more through a window in front of you - you could look round the corners, etc. You'd have real persecptive - as you do when you look out the window, as opposed to what you get when you look at a painting on the wall (or a screen).

I wrote an OpenGL wrapper DLL, intercepted the lot, the wrapper received the head co-ordinates from the camera and I was all set to modify the viewer position emitted by WoW to OpenGL.

Only...

So in OpenGL there's a function call which set the position of the eye and the direction of the gaze.

I expected to modify that.

I did.

It make ZERO difference.

In fact, if I actually *blocked* that function - didn't pass it down into OpenGL - IT STILL MADE NO DIFFERENCE. Why the hell was WoW emitting it in the first place if it did nothing??

I never did figure out how WoW was drawing the world.

Do you know anything about this?