About continuity of custom NPCs on Hercules Repository.

[jaBote 438]

Hello community.

 

The dev team has been recently revisiting the npc/custom folder and we've found some serious issues with them. In summary:

• As their folder name says: they're custom. This means they're not official and that as a server package that emulates official Ragnarök they shouldn't be present there anyways, being purists.
• Most of them are years old and were never updated or maintained to conform any current scripting convention or reccommended scripting practices usage, except these that made the scripts to pass the parser.
• Last point yields a lot of scripts with deficient quality we cannot allow to keep as they are on the current repository (full with deprecated gotos and old set methods, and even a good amount of them have plain horrible variable naming conventions that severely damages readability) since these NPCs could be used by newbie scripters to learning.
• The lack of maintenance for the scripts over the years (the majority of them are even from eAthena ages and haven't been maintained ever since) could have left them on a state that we can't currently guarantee they are correctly working today, with some exceptions for popular ones.
• Pretty much all of them would need extensive changes or even full rescripts to adapt to a new, much more reccomendable state, which is traduced on time we can't devote to other more important endeavours here on Hercules.
  

For these reasons, we're thinking on taking the decision of leave them out of official repositories since most of them don't get any use, anyways. Naturally, all of these scripts will be offered either on the forums or by another means of distribution, since you may eventually need to make use of them and there you'll have them available.

 

Since that measure may be quite harsh, we can reach to a compromise solution in which we can leave the ones we deem more useful and common for a wide range of servers (which curiously with exceptions, are among the ones that need the least maintenance), such as:

• Healer
• Warper
• Card Remover
• Breeder
• Item Mall
• Job Master (automatically gives Platinum Skills if needed)
• Reset NPC
• Stylist
• WoE Controller
• Bank
• Maybe a couple events?
• Maybe a couple quests?
  

Any suggestion for keeping other custom NPCs on the repository will be taken into account, but are not guaranteed to keep them safe from the "purge".

 

All of the other NPCs will be, as told before, removed from the repository and placed as optional downloads on the forum so as to anyone who wants to still use them can of course use them, with the warning they'll be using NPCs with deprecated behaviors and may not work as expected.

 

Please don't just think on your own benefit, think on the developers as well, since the result of this poll can cause a lot more of work for the scripting dev team for reaconditioning some rarely used NPC.

 

Thank you for your attention and your opinions.

[evilpuncker 503]

I vote for the complete removal and let the user chose from community the ones he should/want to have

[Snaehild 0]

Keep just the most used ones, to the dev team's discretion - for me 

[GmOcean 92]

I agree! Begin the purge !! My Disguise Event has lived in that dusty old folder amongst the revisions for long enough lol. It's time to let it die, and give breed to a new era of innovation!

( Besides, I recently updated that script for myself using new standard techniques and replaced the black list with a dynamic function which does the same thing, but never needs to be updated, unless mob_ids go past 32k ).

 

Not to mention, every time I decide to make a new test server, I always head over to script release forums to find a Warper, Healer(+ Buffer), Jobchanger, Stylist,, etc.. that I like. The ones in the revision work, but they don't have that pazazz that newer scripts have since they have just the bare minimum. It's like comparing comparing a 2d game to it's re-mastered 3d version. Just not living up to the expectations.

 

Edit:

Except Card Remover. That script is just perfect as it is lol. I say just update this one to the new standard and let it live. Because players just do not make this script at all lol. It's practically 1 of a kind.

Edited October 25, 2014 by GmOcean

[Zephyr 2]

Remove them all. If an adm can't make this basic scripts by themselves, they don't deserve a successful RO server.

 

@edit

Keep just the warper, job master and card remover. Because they are a very long NPC to build, but don't keep them at the git, instead, make some pinned topic at the scripts area here in the forum to put them.

Edited October 25, 2014 by Zephyr

[Zopokx 7]

For me, those custom script are only good/used as a quick function reference when doing my own scripts, so... purge all

[Nebraskka 4]

How about transfer them to another repo?

Most of them are quite useful as example for development, but in most cases not needed in production folder.

If somebody wants, they could Pull Request this repo with their fixes.

 

I'm also not sure about need in maintaining basic ones (Healer, Bank etc).

Current versions being modified on most popular servers anyway, because they are not enough technically advanced, and direction of this improvement being determined by server's policy (which couldn't be unified for everyone).

 

If beginner would need some NPCs from customs, he could find appropriate topic at Scripts board (matching all his needs), or to develop himself on the codebase of customs-repo.

[milk 8]

How about transfer them to another repo?

Most of them are quite useful as example for development, but in most cases not needed in production folder.

If somebody wants, they could Pull Request this repo with their fixes.

 

I'm also not sure about need in maintaining basic ones (Healer, Bank etc).

Current versions being modified on most popular servers anyway, because they are not enough technically advanced, and direction of this improvement being determined by server's policy (which couldn't be unified for everyone).

 

If beginner would need some NPCs from customs, he could find appropriate topic at Scripts board (matching all his needs), or to develop himself on the codebase of customs-repo.

Yeah.

I think, it would be better to add custom scripts to another repo.

[kisuka 178]

We wanted to deleted this folder at eAthena during the old days. Let's please make that dream come true

 

What we could do is instead of deleting the entire folder, we just delete the scripts in it, then drop a .gitkeep inside. That way there's still a structure for people to drop custom scripts in without messing about with the official folder structure.

[GmOcean 92]

Agree with kisuka, however I thought this was implied lol. But if it wasn't then yes, scripts can go, folder must stay, so that I have a place to put my scripts.

[Mystery 594]

I vote for my script to stay in the events folder!!

[GmOcean 92]

@Mysterious lol.

[Alexandria 53]

I believe that you should not worry about custom npcs when there are a lot of bugs to fix.

[Mystery 594]

My real personal opinion on this matter is: I suggest we keep those 'custom' scripts that can be kept updated by the Author. If the author is able to update his/her script that is in our repo, I think those should stay. Get rid of the scripts that belong to authors that aren't around anymore. No point in keeping those scripts updated if the author isn't around anymore.

[Nameless2you 97]

Remove them all. If an adm can't make this basic scripts by themselves, they don't deserve a successful RO server.

 

@edit

Keep just the warper, job master and card remover. Because they are a very long NPC to build, but don't keep them at the git, instead, make some pinned topic at the scripts area here in the forum to put them.

I agree and disagree.

If we remove it cool and all but we'll get 2x or 3x as many "give me healer script that make buff" or "make job changer that take jellopy to change"

[Dastgir 1246]

 

Remove them all. If an adm can't make this basic scripts by themselves, they don't deserve a successful RO server.

 

@edit

Keep just the warper, job master and card remover. Because they are a very long NPC to build, but don't keep them at the git, instead, make some pinned topic at the scripts area here in the forum to put them.

I agree and disagree.

If we remove it cool and all but we'll get 2x or 3x as many "give me healer script that make buff" or "make job changer that take jellopy to change"

^ Agree

Keep some useful ones and remove all others.