A merge with custom versions of Dolphin and more.

[VegetaSuperSayin]

Hey,I got some ideas for the developers of Dolphin.I appreciate the team to the fullest.

As I have mentioned in the title,I would prefer a merge with custom versions of the emulator.Either a team merge or just merge the builds.It would save the pain of downloading each version for a specific texture pack.

On the topic of painful downloads,could someone from the team make an auto updater for Dolphin?I'm not sure if it's hard or not,but it would be very useful since Dolphin is updated so frequently.

A few more ideas:

Slow down development for the PC version of Dolphin and focus mainly on the Android version of Dolphin.Also,give it a name,maybe...."Dolphin-A" with the icon being of a fusion of the GameCube Dolphin icon and an Android .

And for settings,could you make a Reset button and simplify the settings a bit?(like Project 64's "Hide Advanced Settings" option and profiles for performance,balanced,and quality)

Thanks guys,and may Dolphin live forever!

[DJBarry004]

I think some member here brought an experimental updater for people to try, not sure if it´s still around though...

[Helios]

An update system wouldn't be the worst idea if it wasn't for the fact that changing Dolphin revisions also tends to reset the shader cache, causing more shader cache compilation (stuttering), which leads to a poor experience for the user. At least until the dev working on ubershaders fixes that.

Additionally, with how often Dolphin development revisions update, we make no real guarantee that your configs won't randomly change on you or screw up because config sometimes change.

[JosJuice]

(02-05-2016, 09:19 AM)VegetaSuperSayin Wrote: As I have mentioned in the title,I would prefer a merge with custom versions of the emulator.Either a team merge or just merge the builds.It would save the pain of downloading each version for a specific texture pack.

Um, what? You don't need specific Dolphin versions for specific texture packs.

The only major custom version I'm aware of is Ishiiruka, which already is kept up to date with the official builds. There are reasons why Ishiiruka's changes aren't going to be merged into the official builds. If you would like a "team merge", i.e. Tino working on the main branch, you should ask him, because he's the one who decides what he wants to work on.

(02-05-2016, 09:19 AM)VegetaSuperSayin Wrote: Slow down development for the PC version of Dolphin and focus mainly on the Android version of Dolphin.Also,give it a name,maybe...."Dolphin-A" with the icon being of a fusion of the GameCube Dolphin icon and an Android   .

Most of Dolphin's developers don't want to or can't work on Android-specific things. Slowing down other development won't lead to more Android improvements, it'll just lead to less improvements in total. If you want more Android progress, you should add more Android developers.

I don't see the point of having a special name and icon for the Android version.

[timofonic]

Are there custom Dolphin versionS? Why is happening such fragmentation issue? If it happens, I think there should be some merge effort and have the best on one version (maybe dolphin-next branch too as I suggested to a Dolphin fork a bit earlier).

https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-unofficial-ishiiruka-dolphin-custom-version?page=406

[JosJuice]

(02-25-2016, 01:49 AM)timofonic Wrote: Are there custom Dolphin versionS? Why is happening such fragmentation issue?

Yes. Everyone is free to modify Dolphin however they want, and some choose to do make changes that we don't want in official Dolphin. I don't think there's a way to change that without making Dolphin's source code secret, which is undesirable and even impossible at this point.

(02-25-2016, 01:49 AM)timofonic Wrote: If it happens, I think there should be some merge effort and have the best on one version (maybe dolphin-next branch too as I suggested to a Dolphin fork a bit earlier).

https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-unofficial-ishiiruka-dolphin-custom-version?page=406

We're not going to have a "dolphin-next" branch. Features that are okay for general usage go in the development versions, and features that aren't stable enough yet but will be more stable in the future go in pull requests on GitHub so they can be tested without disturbing the rest of the emulator. Features that will never be stable and non-hacky enough or that we don't want to have in Dolphin for other reasons will not be added.

The reason that Ishiiruka and official Dolphin won't merge to make a version with "the best" is essentially that our view of what is the best is different from Tino's view. There are however some Ishiiruka features that could be nice to have in official Dolphin, like https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/pull/3053, which aren't in official Dolphin because Tino's code for it currently isn't clean enough to be accepted.

[timofonic]

@JosJuice

Thanks for your reply.

I just hope it doesn't happen like many Open Source projects that get into forking hell: Putty (kitty, MobaXterm's fork, ExtraPutty, MTPuTTY, PuTTY Tray, PieTTY, QuTTY, PuTTYCM, AutoPuTTY, Pocketputty, FuTTY, SuperPuTTY, mintty, PuTTY Session Manager, PuTTYND, MTPuTTY), gEDA, CoolReader (each port to a device or eink reader is a fork itself, KOreader has it's own fork too), BSD, OpenSSL vs LibreSSL, MeeGo (Mer/Tizen, Yuanxin OS), Tux Racer, (OpenRacer, PlanetPenguin Racer, Extreme Tux Racer), Android (LeWa OS, MIUI, Replicant, Xobot X, OmniROM, Color OS, Flyme OS, Paranoid Android, AMOS/Alyiun OS, Blackphone, PrivatOS, Nokia X, Fire OS, CyanogenMod, AOKP, Baidu Yi...).

Of course I trust Dolphin project a lot more than others. At this moment you all aren't only brilliant, but still on ground people managing this project to success

Thanks for making it happen!

[KHg8m3r]

Most forks don't change too much and get merged back into master, as seen with the experimental D3D12 fork that was merged once it was stable enough. The exception is Ishiiruka where Tino manages all changes and even adds master changes to it.