PrBoom Project Dead?

[ultdoomer]

Is PrBoom no longer being worked on by Florian Schulze and Colin Phipps? 2.3.1 has been experimental for a while, and the recent bugs listed on the bugs tracker have not even been acknowledged by either admin.

[SyntherAugustus]

I thought Eternity was an extension to PrBoom and MBF.

[myk]

Eternity is a project of its own stemming from the discontinued Eternity TC, they just shared code, coming from more or less the same development tree (Boom.)

Not sure what Proff and cph are up to, but they were planning an overhaul for the 2.3.x versions; perhaps to ambitiously?

[RTC_Marine]

from what I've heard, proff is assigning someone else the task of maintaining prboom.

[RjY]

They still occasionally check stuff into their subversion repository. The actual release schedule seems to be "once a year around summer/autumn time" or at least has been since 2001.

But I'm sure if they did drop it someone would take it up. I mean, I would certainly like to give it a go :)

Not to mention entryway's fork, which he is actively working on in that other thread

So in summary no I don't think it's dead :)

[Grazza]

Things are a little quiet, but that's nothing new, and not really surprising for a mature project. A new release (of both stable and experimental versions) has appeared around September the last couple of years.

Proff's last post was just over a week ago. Don't know about cph - if anyone's got his address, I'll go round and knock on his door. :p

Subversion repositories are here:
http://www.crowproductions.de/repos/prboom/trunk/prboom2/
http://www.crowproductions.de/repos/prboom/branches/prboom_stable_2_2/prboom2
...if that makes any sense to you. I notice that versions 2.3.2, 2.4.0 and 2.2.7 are referred to (see the NEWS and README files).

Andrey Budko is actively developing his version* of PrBoom, and he has fixed a few bugs in addition to adding new (optional) features. So even if the development of the official project does dry up, then there is still this branch of development. I presume (albeit based only on what he did when 2.2.6 came out) that he'll continue to base it on the latest version of the 2.2.x branch.

You could also view Kaiser's svstrife as another branch of PrBoom development, though in a very different direction. It would be great if someone could do PrHeretic. :)

Hmm, I seem to have duplicated some of the things in RjY's post. Never mind, at least I've said it differently. :)

<small>* BTW, has anyone else been finding Budko's site temperamental recently? It is there, and I can get to the files easily enough, but the page often refuses to appear. Could be my security settings, but I haven't found this happened until recently.</small>

[Opulent]

His site has always worked for me, but I'm not there everyday.
I got *17 without a problem.

[entryway]

https://www.crowproductions.de/repos/prboom/branches/prboom_stable_2_2/prboom2/NEWS

[proff_fs]

Hey guys!

I wanted to comment on the state of PrBoom. Yes it is currently not being worked on by me or cph. I don't know about cph reasons, I didn't try to directly contact him yet. I have currently almost no time to work on PrBoom, but I'm willing to help others contributing to PrBoom. I have two people now who showed interest in helping on the coding side. The problem is the quality of the releases especially in regard to compatibility. cph knows how to test a new release for compatibility, I don't and that's where I need your help. I'm planning on adding a feature to PrBoom which outputs some infos of the state of the game after playing a demo, like player stats (health etc) and general level stats like used time and monster/secret etc count. That way *you* can send me those stats for demos which work fine in the current releases with links to get them and *I* can automate the testing by rerunning them with the latest development version and see wether they still work, if not then the changes broke compatibility. That's the only reasonable way to get quality releases without wasting time. I can just let those tests run on a seperate computer before doing a release.
So to summarize it, PrBoom needs *your* help. If you fixed anything in the sourcecode then please add it to the patch tracker on sourceforge. Anyone who is able to compile PrBoom themself should then test those patches and put comments to them in the tracker, that way I can judge on the quality and include them to the code. I'm ready to spend some time on the weekends for PrBoom if the community supports me, I can't take it on my own.
I will also look into the changes by e6y and add some of them to PrBoom.

Comments and thoughts on this are very welcome.

Regards,
Florian Schulze