My view:
*I am concerned about whether or not Quintus will get enough help with the rewrite. He
has been doing a massive portion of the work on TSC himself for a while.
*We need to get new features into the game again. We have largely held off on new
features during the SDL -> SFML port and Cegui port and have spent large amounts of
time on bug fixes for these upgrades and release 2.0. Doing a complete rewrite will again
put features on hold as we spend a lot of time laying groundwork again. The rewrite will
most likely take 1-2 years, assuming non aggressive features and adequate participation.
This would still be true with reuse of some code that the TSC team introduced. I know
this, since it has taken me a lot of time to write a Unity game, which uses an existing
game engine.
*A lack of new features does not help user growth. We need to have user growth in order
to have new maintainers when we all leave the project.
*Most people (myself included) will be hesitant to spend much time on the old code for
features or even bug fixes if it is going away. We do not have the manpower to support
both versions well at the same time.
*Level development will largely halt during the rewrite
*Some systems, such as the modern OpenGL system I was interested in possibly working,
cannot be easily developed within the rewrite until other systems are in place.
Personally, I also feel like modifying the old code makes use of it by allowing it to
evolve rather than dumping our old work, but that of course is a non practical argument
and only a personal one.
It's questionable how much time I will have to commit either to the rewrite or an
incremental approach. If the team decides to proceed with the rewrite, people will need
to step up and contribute as much as Quintus is contributing, consistently. If Quintus
does 90% of the commits on the rewrite, he will be forced to cut features or just take a
lot longer to get it coded.
I hope I have time to participate sometime after server upgrades.
@xet7, if you will likely be contributing, this will put 2 of the potentially active
programmers for the rewrite and one against. We will have to see where Kirbyfan64 falls,
which at most could land a 50% split. Are you certain you will probably be able to
contribute? I in no way want to discourage you, as we could use your help.