My Hopes for Hercules in Year 2

I have always hoped to achieve three things when releasing content I've written or made since rA days, and now here on Hercules:

• Inspire
• Provide Ease of Use
• Encourage Sharing of Quality Content

Now, I'm not a programmer by any means. Though I've been tinkering with HTML/CSS for nearly 15 years, I've never really dealved deeper than minor PHP things such as includes and enough to pull data from SQL databases to generate various client-side files, produce logs for my administrative teams, and the like. Much of the code I submit isn't optimized to the greatest capacity it could be, and thus I am always most receptive to others enlightening me of better methods of writing my code-based submissions.

1. Inspire
I try to provide just enough content in my submissions to allow end-user's imagination to roam free and see what they come up with. I find a lot of joy in seeing how end-users utilize my content releases and to see how their imagination deviates from that of myself and my teams making usage of the same content on our own servers.

2. Provide Ease of Use
Through my generation scripts and in-game utilities (@go/All in One NPC), I aim to provide end-users the ability to focus less time on creating their own large scripts/figuring out how to modify something to achieve a result (more often than not having processes that are more complicated than simply modifying an NPC script). As stated previously, however, my scripts are usually not optimized to the nth degree, but, they work, are typically much easier to use than manually writing out entries (especially for things such as generating client-side files e.g. my Robe Tool) manually. If you can get a machine to do work for you, why wouldn't you?

3. Encourage Sharing of Quality Content
One of my biggest qualms of seeing "Gallery" posts in an open source community, is that it puts certain people up on a pedestal without any gain to others beyond inspiring them to develop their own quality content. While I'm an ardent supporter of releasing content to others, whether free or paid, when you limit end-users from accessing said content, it's namely just for boasting and gaining popularity without really making much of an impact on the community said content is being showcased within. By releasing content that is above average of what's been publicly shared before, not only am I able to encourage/inspire end-users through usage of my content, but also allow future content creators access to seeing how I've created certain things, be it bits of code (how I've learned most things that I know how to do) or otherwise (maps, sprite recolors, etc).

My hopes for Hercules in its second year is to return periodically (I'm soon to head back to school thus inducing my 6+ month "online life" hiatus) and see more content creators upholding my three ideals/goals I myself have for the community. It took me years to stop being selfish myself by witholding my content from the *Athena communities, and as a result have grown new friendships with users at all levels of the user hierarchy. I'm glad I finally realized that even though most people run their servers for profit, there is something to be gained by sharing your own knowledge with others. While it may not help you in particular, consider it a "pay it forward" method, as your submissions will not only inspire others, but also help educate others who are hesitant to become involved with coding, map design, graphic creation, et cetera.

I eagerly look forward to seeing more ease of use and more quality addons to not only improve the quality of Hercules, but in turn improve the quality and standard of private servers running on the Hercules platform.

2013-2014 Wishlist

• Native support for Harmony (Co-operation between Hercules and Harmony dev teams and a mutual understanding that for many end-users, having a broken Harmony install is a deciding factor as to whether or not to use Hercules versus other emulation platforms.)
• Native support for Flux Control Panel (Currently many aspects broken, requiring end-users time spent modifying code to get it to work.)
• Better / more up-to-date client-side files (Translation projects are all currently outdated and are missing/have Korean text for most of the latest content now available both on Hercules and rAthena platforms.)
• Easier conversion between emulation platforms. (Currently it is a NIGHTMARE to move to Hercules from any other platform for end-users who aren't the most self-sufficient individuals.)
• More accessible guides / better documentation for various procedures. (I still have no idea how to make usage of the plugin system.)
• Greater visibility of Hercules as an emulation platform. (End-users advertising Hercules on their websites with links back to the project, whether via textual or graphic banners.)
• More community/content creator involvement. (This platform above all others seems much more receptive to deviating beyond just the meta game content. This aspect, to me at least, was a deciding factor to finally switch to Hercules. I hope to see more end-users making efforts to think beyond their own server/project and become more involved within the community. It truly does make a difference.)
• Continued focus on releasing compatible, working scripts/official content. (Things have been incredibly messy the past month after a series of processes were converted to new formats. While these new formats do infact increase ease of use, many official things have been broken as a result and need to be sorted out. Numerous items are/were missing from the databases, many packages/group contents are/were broken, and many scripts aren't behaving as they should e.g. Instances.)
• Greater visibility/understanding of where our content is being emulated from. (iRO? kRO? As a server owner myself, I receive countless skill "bug reports" daily when skills deviate beyond what iRO Wiki states, resulting in tedious searches to learn just where our skill calculations are coming from, and upon reporting discrepancies results in "Working As Intended" bug closures. Where is this information coming from? End-users NEED to know!)

If you're in a position to help the community, I encourage you to please do so. This project, like all other emulation projects, thrive on involvement not only from the administrative and development teams, but also from end-users. It won't hurt to take an hour of your time to find/fix/submit bugs/discrepancies as you find them. Yes, it detracts from the time you spend on your own server, but it advances the project as a whole further, which ultimately helps your own server(s) in the long run.

Be active, do what you can, and share, grow, and help build this community: together.