Development status

Relabsoluness · January 02, 2010, 21:02:09

Now that the year as well as the decade has changed, it's time for a little status report on OpenMPT development.

Year 2009:

In year 2009 the OpenMPT project in sourceforge became five years old and one can happily say that the project is live and kicking, and perhaps more so than ever. The long delayed new build(1.17.02.53) was finally released to replace the old 1.17.02.48 and a new member(Jojo) in the development team brought a tremendous boost in the code commit activity as well as to the amount of know-how. There were well over 4 times the number of commits made to code repository compared to previous year.

Concrete results of this highly increased development activity was first seen in test build 1.17.03.02, which brought several new features available and many were left to be seen in a later release. And of course the indirect parts of the development, such as the beta testers, bug reporters, forums admins and documentation writers also continued their valuable work. Worth mentioning is also the patch submitters and the helpful people in related software projects whose help has resulted at least to improvements in the OpenMPTs playback engine.

Wishes and prospects for 2010

A new build is to be released early this year but what comes after that, it remains to be seen. There certainly is much to be done and lots of great ideas can be seen in feature requests. But in addition to development matters, there are many things that could be improved what comes to the project as whole. For example OpenMPT doesn't really have a distinct website dedicated to it, although it can well be said that these forums have been and are the homepage. However, the combination of sourceforge, wiki, modplug.com and lpchip.com is quite confusing, the wiki as well as modplug.com has become more or less obsolete and these forums have advertised itself as being temporary forums for over fours years now.

There have been all kinds of plans to improve the situation and at least the developers have longed for a usable bug tracker system to be integrated to the the forums for quite some time now, but as always, it takes somebody to do things like this, but finding somebody who has the time, skills and motivation to do it without monetary compensation is another question. But in the big picture these are nevertheless less significant details and given open source projects such as OpenMPT which rely on volunteer work, it's good to keep the expectations in a realistic level.

Happy tracking and new year.

g · January 02, 2010, 21:51:57

Happy new year!

I'm actually taking C++ classes so maybe you should be worried for 2010

Really Weird Person · January 03, 2010, 01:04:40

Happy new year indeed! It would be great to see improvements made to Modplug Tracker. I do [still] wish it had more patterns though. I think that 10,000 of them is reasonable. That is primarily because the display would not need to change (as this would make the patterns go from 0 - 9,999). That would certainly make songs like one that I want to do (which will be 6,864 patterns long) not take nearly as long to create.

LPChip · January 03, 2010, 13:53:34

I'm still working behind the scenes to get us a better forum up and running.

The problem that I have been having is that I couldn't get a php generated css page to be working with SMF. I finally found out that somehow, SMF detected that the style.php.css was having the wrong rights and thus gave a message saying that I should change the permissions. Since the script itself is seeing that, it was getting a false css and thus no output. I tried millions of test cases and all were okay, but as soon as I got it into the SMF system, it was a no-go. I finally solved that issue, which means that I can now start to create a theme for modplug in an SMF environment. Once that's done, I'll be looking into getting the posts of these forums over to the SMF forum. From that moment on, the forum won't be temporary any more either.

With my limited time, I can't say how long that will take though...

Rakib · January 03, 2010, 16:20:26

Quote from: "Really Weird Person"Happy new year indeed! It would be great to see improvements made to Modplug Tracker. I do [still] wish it had more patterns though. I think that 10,000 of them is reasonable. That is primarily because the display would not need to change (as this would make the patterns go from 0 - 9,999). That would certainly make songs like one that I want to do (which will be 6,864 patterns long) not take nearly as long to create.

Please stop. Have you ever made a post without asking about that, maybe you should try a sequenser or something else if this is so nessesary for you.

But if the developer wants any help, please let us know.

Saga Musix · January 03, 2010, 16:31:40

Rakib: But in sequencers, you can't see 6,863 completely empty patterns scrolling by at tempo 125, speed 6! :gay:

Really Weird Person · January 06, 2010, 17:09:03

Quote from: "Rakib"maybe you should try a sequenser

1. Is Modplug Tracker not already a sequencer (at least in part)?
2. Assuming you mean one other than Modplug Tracker, that would do me no good because no other sequencers that I have found allow as much flexibility and certainly not as many patterns as Modplug Tracker does. Most sequencers stop at 255 patterns and 256 or 512 rows.

Quote from: "Jojo"6,863 completely empty patterns

Not quite

Saga Musix · January 06, 2010, 17:24:50

modplug is a tracker. sequencers don't use patterns.

Harbinger · February 03, 2010, 15:01:43

Ahem...

i beg to differ, Jojo.

They don't use them in the same way, true -- but sequencers do use patterns. They are used on more-or-less a per-instrument basis, rather than per-channel. I was an expert in sequencing before i found tracking.

You have an out, though: if you mean sequencers in the sense of hardware, then you may be correct. Sequencer software did use patterns however... :wink:

LPChip · February 03, 2010, 16:27:51

Sequencers (even hardware) do use patterns.

The difference between trackers and sequencers is not what they use (patterns vs channels), but how the approach is.

Trackers want to work on small portions of the song at once having complete overview of that portion. Sequencers want to focus on one sound (instrument) at a time, giving focus to that sound during the entire song. For that reason, a pattern in a sequencer looks different than one from a tracker, though in some cases they've grown a bit together.

And don't confuse yourself with a step sequencer in an instrument. Yes, it looks like it could be a tracker from my description, but its primary goal is still that single instrument.