Time for my side I believe. You are all partially right, but not in the ways you may think. I am not trying to split the community, I am not trying to start a rival to SA:MP, and one important side point: I am not stealing anyone's code. You all think the cat is out of the bag because of one poorly worded post missing all context of the conversation it was a part of. You got a peek in to the bag and think the whole thing is stupid, which is understandable given the lack of information. I was trying to give the important points without revealing too many details, unfortunately that backfired because now you only have half a story from which to draw conclusions.
So let's put it all out there.
I am not trying to split the community. However, someone IS trying to destroy it - they have hoarded information, withheld long sought updates, threatened to delete the whole forums (last week), and bans anyone who says that maybe that's not great. This person has already split the community - releasing two separate parallel versions of the mod, then wondering why uptake on one was not as all-encommpasing as originally envisioned. For over a year people have asked for 0.3.7 and 0.3dl to be merged, while he just sat there and wondered if there was actually anyone that wanted it. He has said that he believes the community is dying, SA:MP is dying, and only has a year or two left; and is content to just watch it happen. Some of us disagree and have tried to convince him to do something - either carry on or pass on the reigns. The community shrinking is probably inevitable, but it will only die if not supported - and that's what happening right now.
There is an unofficial discord, where yes people sometimes have fun and joke around with each other. But it wasn't founded as a place for rebellion. It came in to being because people liked SA:MP, and people use Discord, thus the community naturally wanted to combine both. There's an unofficial forums, Kalcor himself has previously said if you don't like these ones, make your own, but now bans those that do. However neither the forums nor the discord are run by me. They are simply a result of the official areas failing to move forward. That's not splitting, that's progressing.
I am not trying to start a rival to SA:MP. Two of the words there are wrong "start", and "rival". I'm not "starting" anything, I was trying to gauge further interest in a project well under way. These are the commits from just the last year:
There's nothing new about this, so what is this? And why is it not a rival?
I did once leave SA:MP, yes, but that was 6 years ago - get over it!
I am not betraying SA:MP, and I am not betraying Kalcor - he is the one betraying SA:MP, but most people are unable to separate the two. Yes, he founded it, but that doesn't make it his. Hundreds of other people have spent countless hours/days/weeks/YEARS working on this, making it what it is today, but just because Kalcor has sole access to one little part - the server code, he believes he is the most important part and can dictate where it goes and when it stops. In the beginning yes, he did most of the work, but ask yourself who you honestly believe has done more for this mod in the last few years - Kalcor or any one of these people:
We don't want to usurp him, we don't want to belittle him or his contributions. He founded this mod, he got people involved, but all those other people helped him bring it to where it is today, and it is those people - the community, who are being repressed and ignored. I've tried to act as a mediator, brining Kalcor's views to people, and the community's views to him, and have received endless flak from both sides for it. I've also tried repeatedly to have Kalcor pass running/updating the mod on to someone else (not necessarily me, but there's no-one else stepping up). What were the responses?
He doesn't believe I'm capable of adding major new features. Of course he isn't adding any either, and actually doesn't believe there are any to be added, so why would that matter?
He wanted a plan. My main priorities were to fix bugs, improve the obvious gaps in the API, and create a better platform for other languages - i.e. a proper C/plugin API. Not even difficult tasks and ones I've more than shown I'm capable of. But apparently that doesn't qualify as a plan.
In his words exactly "they don't deserve it". That's what he thinks of this community that apparently I am the one trying to split up, and the idea of someone trying to carry it on.
No-one minds if he wants to quit, that's blatantly obvious and perfectly natural. We object to him taking everything else down with him. This is a community - it is a great community with a lot of very good long-time friends, centered around a close-source mod with a paranoid controlling leader. We want to move this center, that's all. We don't want to destroy SA:MP, we don't want to split the community (this got found out because I was trying to involve the long ignored Russian community, thus bring back in people already split off), we want to ensure its continuation - because Kalcor doesn't.
So I give you:
open.mp
That's the project (and domain, the burger-shot forums were just a temporary until we got the real one up, which hasn't happened yet). A team of TWENTY-TWO of the top people from San Andreas Multiplayer - server owners, scripters, testers, and other community leaders working together to recreate the whole thing from the ground up. Making a new forum is easy; the thing that always cemented Kalcor's control was his sole access to the mod source. There is a leaked version, but from the start I made it absolutely clear that we would take the high road in this regard and flat out refuse to use that in any way what so ever. So we have been reimplementing the whole thing from scratch. We originally wanted to release a full 1.0 version out of the blue, with that announcement being the first anyone heard of it, but that's not going to happen now. But it isn't too far off.
There have been forks, but they had two major problems: 1) They used the stolen code, something we don't, and 2) They were trying to reinvent the wheel, new scripting languages, totally different features, etc. We are making this fully backwards-compatible. You could switch your server over to ours, running the same script, and your players wouldn't even notice. There are of course plans for new features and improvements over time, but for now the focus is on backwards-compatibility, stability, and bug fixes (fixes we as a community have already done before because Kalcor wouldn't).
I tried very hard for over a year to work WITH Kalcor on improving SA:MP, I just happened to have a backup plan. So you can stick with him if you believe his approach is about to change and suddenly updates will happen (and if this debacle forces that, then we actually succeeded in the original goal). Or you can stick with the majority of the community, who know there is a problem and want to fix it - those that have been there for you through all this, helping, teaching, hosting, and leading.
It's up to you to decide who you think has betrayed SA:MP... You know where to find us.