(02-25-2016, 01:13 AM)timofonic Wrote: [ -> ]Is this fork going to be eventually merged into the man/vanilla/trunk branch?
What about a Linux port?
What about making a dolphin-next branch or whatever to put this kind of half-experimental addons?
My understanding is, and simply put, no.
Dolphin = focusing on current/new hardware AND accuracy
Ishiiruka = focusing on older hardware AND user usability.
They're not exclusive to eachother, but some things Ishiiruka does, like Ascync. shader caching is unwanted by the devs in the main branch because it's a hacky solution. They frown on these kinds of "solutions" or "work arounds" because they cause lots of problems or break other parts of the emulator which makes it a nighmare to add improvements without breaking something along the way.
Which will cause some developers to pull their hair out trying to find and fix what was broken. If it can even be done due to said hackish workaround.
Long story short, they don't want hackish "shortcuts" as a solution to a problem, because it's a headache to keep them working without breaking something (or preventing what needs to be fixed from happening because it would break said hackish shortcut).
This does NOT mean Ishiiruka is a hackjob or that nothing would ever get a pull request, because Tino has gotten requests to port some of his stuff over (like partial texture updates).
There is more, but I'm new to the world of Dolphin, so I'm going by what I
THINK I read in this very thread.
And I'm not trying to speak for Tino, or the other developers/contributors, but only giving my interpretation of the views regarding both sides (Dolphin and Ishiiruka).
I use both versions, and Ishiiruka is for the games I want to play with shaders or stuttering. Async. shader caching just doesn't render anything that's not yet cached, so no stuttering, and I have no trouble waiting 500/1000ms for missing parts to show. Many native computer games have this rendering issue, which is why it doesn't bother me, but the consoles that Dolphin emulates does not.
I do understand why the devs and contributors not wanting this particular feature of Ishiiruka (despite many comments from users requesting it to be added), and I appreciate that they have decided to forgo adding this feature and opt to develop an alternative method (see: Ubershaders) that meets their codes' quality control for the sake of accuracy/stability.
But it's thanks to Tino for providing us with a version of Dolphin to use until features like Async. shader cache becomes depreciated for something that does X function(s) in a more desirable way.
Now we users can have part of out cake and eat it too
And Ishiiruka is, in my opinion, the equivalent to a typical "experimental" fork/build.