Announcement Regarding the Status of Zelda Classic Development

[Gleeok]

The way it sounded like things went down was that 1) the now banned developers copied the original GIT repo into their own account, cutting off other AGN ZC team members, and 2) after doing so went back and deleted the original GIT repo, so it appeared their copied repo was the one and only ZC. Is that correct? I totally missed when all this happened and tried to catch up, but I didn't get a reply to my December post, so I wasn't sure.

Based on the posts from the last few days, am I right we were able to get the original repo back? If so, I'm so glad Though since the now banned developers took the ZQuest Classic name (which Zelda Classic was changed to at some point) when they copied the original repo, we had to revert back to the original name of "Zelda Classic" right? (which I actually prefer).

But yeah, if the now banned developers weren't happy with the way things were going with ZC, they could have done a fork, which is the whole point of forking software! I don't remember seeing an explanation as to why they didn't do a fork, so to me their actions came off as really pretentious and without regard to the history of ZC and all the developers that came before them.

Sorry for not responding, I figured the next update would help explain the situation, but we haven't gotten there yet.
Unfortunately, no. They just stole (transferred) the entire repo and still have possession of it. It had nothing to do with being unhappy with ZC since they were the only ones working on it at the time.They simply wanted nothing to do with agn, so they made their own website and misappropriated the entire project. It really is that bad, and we have all the receipts to back up these assertions. Even now, you will not find any mention of www.zeldaclassic.com or Armageddon Games from any of their links either at purezc, github, or any of the rest of it. Moreover they have been going around to Zelda sites and removing or altering the history of the zeldaclassic project even though AGN has been the home of Zelda Classic for 25 years! purezc is entirely complicit in this act of betrayal.

Actually it had been renamed to https://github.com/ArmageddonGames/ZQuestClassic for a while, before the repo got transferred to the ZQuestClassic organization.

What happened recently was Gleeok downloaded a source snapshot of the ZQuestClassic repo then uploaded it as an "initial commit" to ZeldaClassic/ZeldaClassic repo.

He could have easily just pressed the Fork button on the repo and automatically got a copy under his full control preserving the commit history in the process, as their repo is still fully public.

In addition, after forking, you can "detach" a fork by going to https://support.github.com/request/fork

Let's not entertain too much speculation please.
We have multiple repositories in the background you are not aware of yet, and two have full history. The repo in question was made public for vetting and various purposes; it is branch-specific and gigabyte+ of unwanted and unused cruft were simply left out of it. If you are interested in making sure we maintain the history I'll be happy to send you a message and a link when this happens in the next week or two. I do believe it is important as well. Thank you for your concern.

[vegeta1215]

Sorry for not responding, I figured the next update would help explain the situation, but we haven't gotten there yet.
Unfortunately, no. They just stole (transferred) the entire repo and still have possession of it. It had nothing to do with being unhappy with ZC since they were the only ones working on it at the time.They simply wanted nothing to do with agn, so they made their own website and misappropriated the entire project. It really is that bad, and we have all the receipts to back up these assertions. Even now, you will not find any mention of www.zeldaclassic.com or Armageddon Games from any of their links either at purezc, github, or any of the rest of it. Moreover they have been going around to Zelda sites and removing or altering the history of the zeldaclassic project even though AGN has been the home of Zelda Classic for 25 years! purezc is entirely complicit in this act of betrayal.

Wow, that is really terrible. I just don't understand some people I tell you what, Raichu86/Wild Bill (RIP), a friend and long time member of AGN who originally founded PureZC, would never have stood for it. He loved AGN and loved Zelda Classic. In my opinion everything they did is a betrayal of him as well.

Anyways, thanks for the update. I'll be curious to hear more later on.

[BFeely]

GitHub is based on Git which means getting possession of your own repo from it is completely trivial.

[Moosh]

Moreover they have been going around to Zelda sites and removing or altering the history of the zeldaclassic project even though AGN has been the home of Zelda Classic for 25 years!

Do you have some examples of these sites? I've heard nothing about any such effort, and find it unlikely given how little outreach the ZC community has had. We're pretty isolated and have barely put in any effort to advertise the program to the greater internet or even other Zelda fan sites lately despite declining interest. So I'd be surprised to hear if someone did put in that effort.

I'm also kinda surprised that PureZC actually removed the AGN link on their about page. Pure is one of the slowest moving sites I know and they got on that change with unprecedented speed. I'd have figured they'd just forget it was there. There's probably more links buried in the forum's many old pinned topics that they have forgotten. In fact...Yup, there we are.

Sorry for not responding, I figured the next update would help explain the situation, but we haven't gotten there yet.
We have multiple repositories in the background you are not aware of yet, and two have full history. The repo in question was made public for vetting and various purposes; it is branch-specific and gigabyte+ of unwanted and unused cruft were simply left out of it. If you are interested in making sure we maintain the history I'll be happy to send you a message and a link when this happens in the next week or two. I do believe it is important as well. Thank you for your concern.

Are you at liberty to share anything about the planned direction for the AGN repo and what cruft is being done away with? Understandable if it's all being kept hush-hush for the moment, just curious how the two versions will differ and why users would want to pick one over the other.

[BFeely]

Perhaps AGN ZC will be more about emulating Zelda 1 and ZQuest Classic will be more about being a fully-featured game engine that happens to run quest files made for ZC 2.55 and below?

By the way, git history doesn't necessarily take up gigabytes of space as the git system compresses the differences. I personally have in the past migrated a self-hosted SVN to GitHub, at first using a hook to sync the two before retiring the SVN in favor of Git. All history was maintained, except for some extremely early revisions that were lost when my first VPS provider suddently went under.

Git repos are designed to be cloned as I said multiple times. The ZQuestClassic repo can be cloned using any Git tools you want.

[Russ]

www.zeldaclassic.com[/URL] or Armageddon Games from any of their links either at purezc, github, or any of the rest of it. Moreover they have been going around to Zelda sites and removing or altering the history of the zeldaclassic project even though AGN has been the home of Zelda Classic for 25 years! purezc is entirely complicit in this act of betrayal.

Hey Gleeok, hope you're doing well. Speaking on behalf of the PureZC Staff here.

We just wanted to touch base around a few things you have stated around PureZC's involvement - and us being "complicit" around the ZQuest Classic devs and their moving of the repo.

First off, an apology - while we did scrub most links to AGN at the time, removing acknowledgement of AGN's contributions to ZC development was a mistake. We have decided to restore those acknowledgements on our About page.

In the days after the repo pull, you approached us regarding the status of the repo ownership - David and I agreed with you about moving it back. We began conversations with the ZQuest Classic dev team to try to intermediate and facilitate a return.

In the meantime, you posted the "Announcement regarding the Status of Zelda Classic Development" thread on PureZC. This thread served nothing more than to agitate the community further in the wake of the monetization proposal from the ZQuest Classic devs, as well as deadnaming several of the ZQuest Classic developers in the process. The handling of the entire situation by the AGN devs was disappointing and frustrating to say the least.

You declared us "complicit" after the PureZC staff held a poll in regards to pre-emptively banning you from the website - a poll that ended with the majority of PureZC staff voting *against* the ban. You had access to the moderator forums as a show of good faith courtesy of being a ZC dev, and in response you leaked remarks around your own ban poll, as well as other internal discussions. As a result, the website was DDOS'd out of spite for three weeks by another member of the community.

While the work they have done should be recognized, PureZC does not agree with everything the ZQuest Classic dev team have done. Frankly, we've had our share of frustrations with them. However, our priority is the community; one that is currently in a state of decline accelerated by the entirely unnecessary monetization proposal from the ZQuest Classic devs, the repo pull, as well as the fallout between them, AGN, and the wider community.

Finally, for the sake of clarity, while PureZC will not platform accusations of malicious intent toward the current developers, we maintain our stance as a neutral party regarding ownership and the status of the repo. We acknowledge AGN's contributions towards Zelda Classic, as well as what is now ZQuest Classic. We just want to grill, man.