Support for Oak? Where to ask about a problem.

[Sandro-Halpo]

I was wondering if anyone knows about technical problems regarding Oak, and if not who does or where to ask? I'm having a few problems with the mapmaking tool Oak. Not like "what does this button do?" or "why is it not doing what I want it to do?", but serious glitches and crashes that hours of online research and experimentation haven't solved. I don't know who/where to ask for any help regarding it.

The "Map Making Support" section of the Tain's forums has about as much life as a thrall. Naturally I went there first, but it's like asking for directions at a cafe that went out of business years ago. I systematically combed through many topics and posts recent back to the beginning years ago but did not find anything talking about the problems I'm experiencing.

The Myrgard forums for the new Gate of Storms metaserver are more active but focus on tournament setup and random non-Myth subjects. Searching around the place likewise yielded no results regarding Oak, or mapmaking in general really.

Project Magma has a bugtracker section. Or rather "had" one, as the most recent post there regarding Oak was almost 5 years ago. Likewise, the pages describing Oak's features, changes, and downloads don't include any links or addresses of places to go. There is a vague mention of "the latest build thread", but if that still exists years later where in the world is it?

Fear and Loathing are good. But without a properly functioning copy of Oak my ability to create mods that are higher quality and use the newer features is very hampered, and some things like detail textures are outright unavailable. Any help finding a person or place to ask about my problems in detail would be very appreciated.

Thanks.

[iron]

Oak was created by Melekor. I don't know if he still visits these forums, or if so, how often, but he's the only person who can answer queries about it.

I can, however, help you find the latest version: http://projectmagma.net/~melekor/oak/builds/

[Sandro-Halpo]

Thank you iron for responding, but fortunately I was able to resolve the various problems Oak was giving me earlier today. Turns out, after cracking the thing open and looking through the code, it was crashing because a repeating call loop was preventing it from accessing my graphics card. This sort of thing happens sometimes with older programs that haven't been updated in a while, and it's no fault of the programmers. Once I understood the problem it was not difficult to point Oak in the right direction, and so far as I can tell it works as intended now.

While it was and is frustrating that the current community for Myth is sparse and often outdated, I would like to take a moment to say I respect Melekor, Myrd and the many others who created and improved the third-party various tools. Just as an example, Oak 1.0 was posted in 2008, and 1.23 in 2014! That's six years of real life distractions while working on something that makes no money and an extremely small number of people will use. All of Project Magma are commendable for improving and maintaining the game, but at least that comes with the satisfaction that 100% of Myth players appreciate it. The mapmaking tools, now that's a labor of love.

Now that I have Oak working I can start making real progress towards creating all sorts of new content for Myth! I'm very excited and, I hope, have both the skill and motivation to start making things equal in quality to the great plugins of the past. Wish me luck, I look forward to sharing it all soon.

Thanks again iron, both for bothering to reply, for being a Site Admin and for your dedication to Myth.

[Melekor]

Oak was created by Melekor. I don't know if he still visits these forums, or if so, how often, but he's the only person who can answer queries about it.

I check it very irregularly, mostly when Myrd or someone else pokes me for help with something myth related.

If you email me from my user profile here, that should get my attention much more quickly though

Turns out, after cracking the thing open and looking through the code, it was crashing because a repeating call loop was preventing it from accessing my graphics card.

It would be good to get this issue fixed in Oak itself. Are you able to give more technical details on what exactly was going on? Which OS are you running?

Oak currently uses a framework library called GLFW 2.7 which I believe is no longer maintained. Although it still seems to work for me (on Win10), it might be time to do a modernization release. SDL2 seemed like a promising OS framework last time I checked into these things.