Open Source mEAn?
 

After the next release, which will provide Linux support and several other enhancements, as well as supporting more bots, I plan on open sourcing mEAn and turning it over to the Bots United community if there's enough interest.

mEAn has come a looooong way since I started the project a few years ago (3 or 4 years?) and I think it will be time to turn it over to the community so that the project can advance further. I simply don't have enough time for it anymore, and I have some new and very interesting projects (such as the United Bot project) to work on.

The United Bot project should have a "bot admin" component added to it, and a future version of mEAn could plug directly into the UB as a plugin to provide admin mod support. Of course, other admin mods will be able to do this as well if they are developed.

As far as I know mEAn is the only admin mod that provides explicit support for bots on a server, so it can serve as an excellent real world example for the UB project of what server operators will want for administrative bot support.

Also, mEAn should be extended to support other HL based mods, which is probably not that hard to do.

There's *many* enhancments that I'd love to make to mEAn. I am an experienced programmer, but when the project first started I was just learning the details of C++ and the complicated details of HL mod/plugin coding. At the time I did not know about metamod for example, so I built my own interface from scratch using botmans template as an example (I wonder how many thankyou's botman has received for his template?). There's a ton of old code that could be made much better. The mod could be made into a metamod plugin, it could provide even more support for bots, the bot enhancer component should be separated from the mod as a stand alone metamod plugin, etc, etc, etc ....

I just cannot do all of this myself! :)

Any comments, suggestions, etc on this topic will be appreciated

Botmeister

Re: Open Source mEAn?
 

Great! I bet you get some help!
Open source is the new wave.

When you open up your source everyone wins.
You get bug fixes, feed back and help, everyone else learns from your code.

Re: Open Source mEAn?
 

I'd like to see BU build up a number of "in house" (but open to the public) bot related projects.

There's a ton of code that PMB has behind him that could go into a repository here.

There's the mEAn mod comming soon.

There's the old JoeBot code at sourceforge - would it do better if located here?

There's the POD bot 2.6 fix up project.

etc etc

We have a good number of very nice projects for a open source repository already!

note: I'll repost this into the Agora.

Re: Open Source mEAn?
 

Is this still going to happen?

Re: Open Source mEAn?
 

hm, at least we could put that readable for all on the bu repository, dunno if leaving sourceforge at all is so nice, they got some nice mirrors for downloading ;)

Re: Open Source mEAn?
 

Progress report:

I've just finsihed creating a package containing the mEAn source code. It's late in the evening (actually its now early morning), so I will delay posting the archive until I've had a good nights sleep and time to give it a final look over.

I'm almost there!

Re: Open Source mEAn?
 

W00T!!!
I can't wait!