Monday 26 April 2021

GW2 TacO is Going Open Source

 Hi.

There comes a time when one must admit that things have changed. It's been quite a while since I logged in to GW2 for anything more than the daily login rewards, and that has also become a sporadic thing. I haven't even played the last living world episode yet. I'm focusing on work and a new big sideproject that's taking up my time, and I find myself waiting for the new Diablo games instead of GW2. So... for the time being at least, I've moved on from Guild Wars 2. This may not be a permanent thing, I'll definitely be back for the next expansion, however this also means that I don't have the time/energy/will to focus on TacO.

I've built the overlay to be a robust piece of software that can stand on its own even in times where I may not be able to tend to it, which woked out quite well, I'd say. It hasn't been open-source for several reasons, the main one being that my previous job was the development of a UI engine and the codebase under TacO could have been seen as a derivative product (even though it predates my working at the company, but it wasn't worth the risk based on some of the stories I heard). Since about a year now that issue is gone (and by now any non-compete clause as well). The codebase under TacO is now being sunsetted in other projects that use it as well, and this gives me the possibility to (for the time being at least) hand over the reins to the community.

So. The Guild Wars 2 Tactical Overlay is going open source.

One important note: the code above isn't _exactly_ the same as the last release due to an unfortunate data loss suffered last autumn. I've done my best to recover the lost code of the last couple builds and I think it should all be there, but the newer features are completely untested and require reevaluation.

I made no attempts to clean up the code, so you'll see some "yeah this is a hobby project" level hackery in there including global variables and copypasted code all over the place. You have been warned. (The code is provided as-is)

Visual Studio 2019 and the June 2010 DirectX SDK are required to build it.

Hopefully this will finally satisfy all the opensource zealots I got so much flack from over the years out there as well.

The source code of TacO is released under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

18 comments:

  1. Thank you for your updates over the years! TacO still remains my favourite mod for GW!

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  2. Hey just to say thank you. I used this mod and still use it so useful. Thank you and hop to see you again later ^^ Good luck!!

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  3. Well good luck. I have enjoyed your work. Hope to see you ingame again one day.

    Greetz Chemox

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  4. Much respect. Thank you for everything you've done.

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  5. Replies
    1. i need help . my discord DSA-Evolution#4711

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  6. Can I dl this as a normal dl instead of as a zip? Im having trubble extracting it.

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  7. Open source zealots, aka, people who want a thing to be the best it can be and not just die when a sole maintainer quits.

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  8. Hi. I was using TACO some time ago, but then it stopped working. I removed & re-installed it (twice). When I try to run it, I get an error message saying "this program isn't designed to run in Windows or has an error." I removed it and tried an earlier version with the same results. What's going on? .

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    Replies
    1. Never seen that before, maybe you can get more info from the windows system event log about the error event and let me know?

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    2. Hi. I sent you a link to the info in your GW2 game mail.

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  9. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  10. Hope this will one day work with the 64 bit client since now the 32 bit client no longer works.

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  11. I cannot get the taco markers to show up giving me the path for farming and doing jump puzzles. Already downloaded the most recent version. This worked fine on my other PC before I got a new one.

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    Replies
    1. You'll need to install the appropriate marker packs as well.

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  12. you're the man
    not the hero we deserved but the hero we needed

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