About what went on in the Darkplaces engine community, how this affects VoreTournament

Found some energy lying around to talk about this one here: The whole thing was a big drain on me in the moment, to the point where I had issues sleeping the night it took place. As it's related to a landmark project many people follow me for, it's fair I post about it here as well... by which I mean Vore Tournament which through Xonotic uses the Darkplaces engine to run.

Later this month I was planning to announce on Patreon a change to the lighting system I planned to develop for Xonotic and in consequence my Vore Tournament game. It's something I've been hoping to do for a while now: The game presently uses boring old pre-compiled lightmaps for world lighting, no shadows and other fancy effects. My goal was to change this using a trick I had come up with, essentially implementing emission maps from glow textures using the existing point light system, no need to dive into technical details here. This required a change to Darkplaces engine to do properly: Inspired by videos on realtime raytracing I recently saw, I visited its development Discord server and brought up my idea, after which I started testing some existing features with other DP members and developers.

So what happened. To keep it short and mention the same thing I said to the Xonotic crew: In the middle of a test I was conducting in-game, I was banned out of the blue from the entire Darkplaces community in a matter of seconds, by one of the developers with whom 5 minutes prior I was just talking to about my code. The reason? Something I said on a social media platform years ago offended them, that's pretty much it. After 15 years of being in that community (if you count their Freenode IRC room), I'm banned out of the blue purely out of cancel culture over opinions I had, which I never brought up or imagined bringing up in that community to whom I was always professional. I was given no prior warning, no way to get back to the team afterward, not even told exactly what it was they saw, asked why I said whatever I might have given I even remember every past argument, not even asked if it's accurate or could have been some fakery from a 4chan / Kiwifarms type website looking to troll people. As far as the others are aware to this day, I simply disappeared in the middle of working with them for unknown reasons... other people there to whom I spoke privately the next day expressed the same confusion as myself.

I'm not going to make further comments on what I think of this insanity, I believe it's pretty obvious: We live in fucking glorious times, that is all. Also not gonna dive into what they freaked out about as I do NOT want more drama nor new issues on top of what already happened, especially with places like Patreon or Furaffinity losing their administrative minds and becoming as savage and intolerant. I don't even see why it should be relevant, even if I supported murder (which I DON'T) pulling this sort of stuff on people out of nowhere is more than uncalled for. It is however official that if you ever had an opinion people don't like on a sensitive subject at any point in your life, you can now expect cancer culture to follow you everywhere you go and get you banned out of the blue by those you thought are your colleagues. Now including FOSS projects... a warning to other developers here to be careful, for your team may ban you from working on your own code if someone doesn't like what you said on Facebook or Twitter last decade, this is where we are guys it's 2021.

Luckily this was just the engine team: I spoke about it with the Xonotic community and folks are a lot more cool there, no issues with them and they have my love. Theoretically this shouldn't hamper me too much in working on Vore Tournament, just that if I need any engine changes for it I'm out of luck as I can't even reach their developers any more. On top of that I'm honestly demotivated from working on anything Xonotic related now, after getting struck with such garbage out of nowhere just as I was preparing to try and do more for it again: I apologize to everyone expecting more VT updates, please understand it causes a sour taste to even think about the project for now. If and when the situation cools down in some form, I shall feel comfortable picking up my work there again.

I honestly wish Xonotic could switch engines: There's an ongoing plan to move to the newer Daemon engine (used by the game Unvanquished) but just like the weapon / ammo refractor it's taking more than a decade to complete. Both are Quake 1 / 2 / 3 based though, that's pretty ancient: We should at least be using the newer idTech 4 as a base, if not Tesseract (RedEclipse engine) or Godot which is basically the Unity / Unreal Engine of open-source. This would of course require porting the assets and rewriting the game code from scratch, so yeah... don't see that happening I'm afraid.

I have been working on a lot of stuff none the less: Blender, TheDarkMod, now even 0ad, etc. Just little steps as usual so not much to show: Doubt anyone would be interested to see how today I added a little area to a map in one game, redid this one material for that one Blender scene, so on and so forth. I know updates are slow for this reason as I'm not motivated to write about what I'm doing until it's actually something worth showing: Thank you for your continued support and hopefully I'll have more to show for in the coming month.