I think catching Live periodically would be awesome, but I think that them perfecting the current code will make it much easier in the future to catch Live--- that's something worth waiting for, in my opinion.
The independent EQ client would be great, but it would need to be open source and, here's the kicker, I almost guarantee you'll need to program it in Direct3D and OpenGL. This, in my opinion, would be the hard part. However, once the client was done, it would be better then the one we're currently using since I almost guarantee someone would get the freakin' collision detection working with the boats!
As for me, while I wait for them to get back to Live, I've been working on a little BSP Renderer in OpenGL. It's not difficult stuff, but it's given me a taste of why programming games takes so long. It took me two hours to hunt down a problem that my compiler wasn't catching and that was corrupting several of my pointers necessary to render and load the BSP. In fact, when I finally got it fixed, I had no idea how I fixed it, just that my pointers were suddenly showing values.
All-in-all, I should be thanking the devs on several accounts: for continuing to develop on the project, for catching up to Live periodically, and for not catching up to Live and giving me time to get back into programming.
You guys suck (thank you!). =)
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