Re: Questions, comments, suggestions, praise, etc.


Subject: Re: Questions, comments, suggestions, praise, etc.
From: Tommi Leino (namhas@taikatech.com)
Date: Sat Feb 24 2001 - 10:05:44 EET


On Fri, 23 Feb 2001, Cliff Hill wrote:

> Let's get the bad things out first:  Your website's broken, won't let me
> sign onto your mailing lists, not see 1/2 of your screen shots.  Using
> Moz 0.8, Linux 2.4.2.  Thought you might want to know.  get a "Zope
> Error" message upon attempting to sign up.

Speaking to you and Majik Developers,

Many people blame that our new web site design is broken. First of all,
because we are using Zope which resides on a non-standard port, the users
are either needed to use port number to connect to our site or come to our
site through index.html which in fact only contains directive to redirect
the user to the port where the Zope is running. That alone breaks
compatibility with many web browsers, that can be seen from the logs:
index.html has received many repeated hits from same client, meaning that
the clients have got in to a loop. Also other problems may arise of
non-standard port, for example, firewalls may block connecting to such
ports. I see that there come more problems from using Zope than from not
using it. After all, we are doing the pages for the users. If it is a bit
more work for the developers to do the page but the users can actually
view then, then I see that it is a better choice. You can find the old
web site design from https://majik3d-legacy.org/index-old.html that use PHP.
They may be uglier (as they're made by myself and I'm certainly not
graphically talented), but they work - and I see that it is more important
than the looks. After all, the people are looking for information and I
would like that they could get that as easy as possible.

You certainly aren't the only one who have blamed that our pages are
broken.

> I'm curious about if your system will be GPLed server/client or not. 

Majik 3D, as we are co-operating with Taika Technologies, will no longer
be GPLed because of proprietary code that we are using to speed up the
development. Majik 3D is thus quite a closed project. Only designers are
accepted. That is unfortunately, but we couldn't have avoided it. Taika
Technologies bought all core Majik Developers at the same time and the
offer was so good that we couldn't have refused it. This however doesn't
mean that Majik 3D will ever cost money. Majik 3D will be free - always,
whatever might happen. It is only that we no longer can keep it GPLed. We
don't see much harm in that. We haven't always been GPLed. Once we decided
to go under GPL license in hope of receiving support from Open Source
community, but we received none. People actually seem to respect us more
now, as we have commercial support behind us. - We could really get
something done! Someday..

> If so,  I'll also be inpressed.  if not, I could understand as well, and
> am interested in potentially becoming a part of the design team. 

Majik 3D is frozen at the moment. I don't see much that you could do for
it. The only where you could possibly help is the worldbook.

> I've got 4 under my belt I've been working with, 3 Fantasy, one Sci-Fi.

One coder/designer trying to code/design 4 worlds at the same time. Doesn't
sound too good. I see that it is much easier to do a world if you can do
whatever you wish without asking opinition of ~20 other people, for who
nothing is sufficient, but 4 worlds for such a small design team... We
hope to only do one world and do it well.

-- 
Tommi Leino <namhas@taikatech.com>
Principal Software Specialist, Taika Technologies Ltd.



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