[Ed Kolis]

Originally posted by Phoenix-D:
More to the point, you can't really make money on open source projects, and this is Aaron's job. He may not be making enough to hire another programmer, but SF -would- suffer if he had to get another job (see the recent patch history for an example of that, and rememeber that he's working on the SE4 patch too)

Which is why I'm hoping for of a plugin system for SE5 - it keeps the basic game engine proprietary, so Aaron can still make money off it, but people can write plugins in some programming language or another (hopefully via COM objects or something common enough that you don't have to use the same language the game was developed in), but people can still add to the game in much greater depth than they can by modding data files. (Imagine if the combat engine was just contained in a DLL function that took as input some predefined data class containing all the ships and formations involved in combat and returned the results (survivors, damage, etc.) ... and if you set the game to use a different DLL created by someone with the publicly available SE5 SDK then you could use a whole new combat engine! )

(edit: obviously this makes cheating by mod creators and writing of Trojan horses much easier, but it's no worse than the risks you take when you download a freeware game off the Internet )

[ December 18, 2003, 14:27: Message edited by: Ed Kolis ]