No more developement for USDX?

[cRaZy-bisCuiT]

Hello @basisbit, Hello everyone,

I got the feeling that no development is happening within the last month - has the project been abandoned?

Actually there're a few feature requests that I would not rate as very important. But there're also bug reports and performance issues which are much more important.

I did not yet find the time to work on the project myself but I'd like to know if there's still interest in this project.

Cheers, cRaZy

[basisbit]

Thank you for publishing your concerns and for doing so in a public issue, so others can participate! 😄 Personally I spend most of my free time on meeting friends, family and (especially lately) traveling a lot. I still maintain this project whenever new issues are opened or pull requests are done. Dealing with objective pascal and Lazarus as IDE takes all the fun out of software development for me. This was one of the reasons why the UltraStar Play project was started (which only has little publicly visible progress because of the above mentioned other free time activities). I guess in the long run, I'll continue work on UltraStar Play, because that will be the future in my honest opinion, and help keep USDX working.

Of course, anyone may feel free to continue work on USDX, implement new features, do big refactorings or whatever, as long as it improves this game (-> see Bazaar description in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar ). This project will not be dead as long as people contribute and as long as people still use it - that is the beauty of free/libre open source software.

PS: anyone can help improve the usdx.eu website by editing https://github.com/UltraStar-Deluxe/ultrastar-deluxe.github.io

[basisbit]

Also, the most important thing to mention is: @s09bQ5 @brianch @daniel-j @ePirat and others of course contribute to and continue this project. Just take a look at the commit log at https://github.com/UltraStar-Deluxe/USDX/commits/master and you will see that indeed there is progress being done!

[cRaZy-bisCuiT]

Actually you're right, thanks @basisbit @s09bQ5 @brianch @daniel-j and @ePirat. I made the mistake to only look for issues and how long they're open as well as pull requests. I toatally forgot that some people can push directly so I forgot to look at the commit history.

And yes, you're right, objective pascal is no fun. I really don't get why this project was ever started with it. At least it's a proof of concept that it is capable of more then just being a programming learning language for schools. ;)

What is UltraStar Play? :)

[brianch]

Hi everybody,

For me it's the opposite, I love that it's written in Pascal*, but of course a big project like that shows not only the positive side (being multi-platform, low memory usage, fast binaries and compile time, object oriented, etc.) but also the negative (for me especially the troubles with linking with C libraries, and the difficulty in debugging [that may be ignorance on my part, don't know]).

Now my free time is very limited (I also got a lot of other interests as well), and I'm not working with programming at all anymore (when I did it was with Java, not Pascal, so I don't have much experience with FPC either), that said I still care about USDX and try look into urgent issues (especially the ffmpeg related ones).

Cheers. :)

---

*by the way, the reason for that is that the original Ultrastar, which USDX descends from, was made with Delphi. Anyway, Free Pascal is a very nice modern compiler, people often make the mistake of associating Pascal with the old compilers/practices from the 90ties.

[basisbit]

@cRaZy-bisCuiT regarding your question about UltraStar Play, that is a new karaoke game development project using the Unity framework and C#/mono with the goal of writing a karaoke game which is similar to UltraStar Deluxe but written from scratch and targeting all the nowadays common platforms like Android phones / tablets / TVs, whatever apple iOS devices, PC, PlayStation, XBox and so on. see https://github.com/UltraStar-Deluxe/Play

Anyways, if all your questions within this issue are answered, could you please close this issue?

[daniel-j]

Thanks for the mention @basisbit! Although, I feel I can't take any credit for UltraStar Deluxe, I have only fixed a bug and done some Linux-related maintenance. I really enjoy this game though and I wish it's developed further. In high school I did a programming course with Delphi, with a compiler almost as old as myself at the time. It's not a language I prefer to develop in, although I can adapt to it, since most languages only have different syntax/grammar but same core concepts.

Right now I'm getting into game programming myself and I'm making a game inspired by UltraStar Deluxe. I don't have any past experience with game programming (I'm a web developer and I have only made small web-based games in the past). I've noticed the UltraStar Play project, but right now I'm not interested in using a game engine like Unity3D. I like doing things from scratch and learn along the way. I'm making my game in C++ with SDL2 and OpenGL. It's called "singsing" for now, after a karaoke restaurant I've been to. Right now it's got pitch detection, music, OpenGL rendering and hardware accelerated video decoding. I develop on Linux, but it targets all platforms. You find the project here: https://github.com/daniel-j/singsing

I am curious on UltraStar Play though, I have only peeked at the source code but not seen anything in action.

[cRaZy-bisCuiT]

Thanks for sharing, you two. Does any of your projects already work on Linux? Is it in a usable state already?

[basisbit]

both these projects are just at their beginning and will take months or years to get as good as usdx eventually