The future of Dominions

[Beorne]

First of all sorry of my written english that is not so good.
I am worried about he future of the game I love most, Dominion. It is at least 4 years that is almost the
only game I play, in mp, starting from DomII in 2004.
I have seen that the support of the game engine is tweaking. There are a discrete amount of bugs, some
severe, some less severe, that have not been tackled in months, some in years. there are a lot of (from my
point of view) simple feature request that are years old and that could improve much the play experience.
The devs are saying the game engine is old, patched and garbled so any improvement is difficult. In addition
they will not work on DomIV cause the huge amount ow work in reworking all the engine and their interests on
other projects.
I'm not saying the game is not supported, ko is working hard to add new race and a lot of "color" on the
game, (we all know the excellent ko work is the key of the success of this title), and the most severe game
disrupting bugs are managed in sort time. And I know this is their 2nd work.
My selfish proposal is to free the game to the public and to build an open developing community around this
to rework all the engine and to add quality content in a controlled way. In my view ko an jo should be very deep into
this, atively developing ad coordinating all. I'd like very much that the good contributors that are in this forum
(tackling bug raports, creating mods and much more) would be integrated in the process of Dom developing.
I know that for one very good open game project (Wesnoth) here are ten others that slowly die, but I don't
think, given the level of Dom community, this would happen. On the other side I have no idea nor experience
about open projects, so my observatios coul be faulty.
I'd like to know what do you think about this, knowing that, obvioulsy, this is a decision only due to the
legitimate rights owners.
One last: this is not a price issue, given the value of the game I could pay 100$ for DomIV.

[Edi]

I'm not a member of Illwinter Games, but I feel I'm qualified in making a couple of statements here.

As the person responsible for keeping the bug and issues lists sorted out, I've had quite a bit more direct contact with IW than most people on the forum (beta group excluded) and it has been clear that Illwinter is NOT going to open things up. I'd like to flatter myself enough to claim that there exist a good level of trust between myself and the developers and when a discussion of just doing the statfixes currently in the shortlist came up, I got a flat, unequivocal no in response. There is absolutely zero chance that the inner workings of Dominions 3 would be exposed to the world at large and handed over for anyone to develop as they please.

The content is Kristoffer's creation and he intends to keep control of that. He has encouraged derivative works based on it, though, and those can be done via modding. The modding tools are really extensive, in my opinion, even if they do not give total control of the engine.

As the primary author and/or editor of the most used fan documentation (Dom3 DB and lately the Reorganized Mod Manual) and sometime student of programming, I am also qualified to comment on some of the other things related to this aspect if Dom3 were to be made public.

Accurate, comprehensive documentation would be absolutely essential for any project like this to have even half a prayer of success. It took nearly six months to put the Dom3 DB together and it's been another month and more of work all told to get everything updated into the current form as it now stands. It took two days after a few false starts to produce the reorganized modding manual, and that only because it was simply reorganizing existing documentation, not producing new stuff from scratch.

Next up, development tools and programming. You need people who are able to program in the same programming language that has been used in Dom3 and they would also need to understand the existing code. This is by no means given if the code is not thoroughly commented. I have seen some small code snippets (Dom2 code for sites, Dom3 code for descriptions) and there are few if any comments. I've also seen examples of how code for weapons, armor and creatures has been structured. It is hard to read unless you are thoroughly familiar with it and mistakes are easy to make. That's not even going into the more complicated aspects of it.

And in the hypothetical parallel universe where all of this was released, you need documentation for every bit and often you would need to produce it from scratch. Having written software documentation for a living at one point and all the fan documentation I did for Dom2 and Dom3, I can assure you that it's a boring, dull and thoroughly unenjoyable task to do. Where are you going to find the people who will produce that documentation? You could count me right out of it, because I'd much rather write stories based on the poems I posted here or other things or do something else altogether.

Finally, there is the request that Kristoffer and Johan spend their own free time to supervise this kind of a massive project on top of their day jobs instead of using that time for other pursuits they see as more worthwhile. That is a totally unreasonable request from anyone under any circumstances. They would have no time at all for anything but organizing and coordinating. If you have ever been in charge of or even involved with a large project, you would know this, Beorne.

*****

I will also expand more on the various fanmade documentation, utility and mod projects that have been posted on these forums: Practically every one of those was made by a single person in response to some personal need they had. If it fell outside that narrow self-interest, it has been ignored.

For myself, the motivation in doing the Dom3 DB was that I wanted comprehensive lists of things that can be used in mapmaking (originally). The same lists also serve modders, which was just as important, because mods (CBM and others) extended the life of Dominions 2 for months if not years after the vanilla game had begun to feel stale in some respects. I never played anything but CBM games in Dom2 after a certain point. I wanted similar sort of possibilities for the Dom3 community and it was easier to start doing things from the beginning, especially with my prior experience in doing the Dom2 DB. From what I have seen it has been a smashing success in terms of demand.

The reorganized mod manual was done for similar reasons. I like to be on top of things and I've needed the mod manual more than a few times. The lack of categorical organization in the official mod manual drove me nuts, so I did something about it with Arralen's help. All the modding I do will be with the reorganized manual because for me it's less hassle.

The Dom3 FAQ was done so I won't have to answer the same questions in ten different threads every two days. Judging by view count, it's also been widely used.

The bug list, that's a bit different. I was frustrated as all hell how the reporting was managed earlier, made some very unflattering remarks on the subject along with a couple of suggestions and subsequently I was being offered a chance to do it. I took it because I knew I was good for it and could do a good job and also because I'd have been a complete chicken**** if I'd refused after all the vocal harping on the subject.

With regard to other tools, the spell modding guide DrPraetorious, RanDom and SemiRandom by Ballbarian and others done by other people address different needs of the community, but they all spring first and foremost from some need of the author, not of public demand, though sometimes they may coincide with public interest in the subject.

But to try to herd all of this under one roof, into one project? Even if IW were to give us full access to the code, which will happen about three minutes after the heat death of the universe, it'd be unworkable with the current pool of potential project members who would really put their time and effort into it.

In short, the answer to this suggestion is simply: Not. Going. To. Happen. Ever.

If Kristoffer, Johan K and Johan O have something to add, I'm sure they will take care of anything I didn't manage to cover or correct what I got wrong.


EDIT: Corrected some small details, because my post earlier gave the impression that I had written official Dom2 and Dom3 documentation, which is NOT the case! That has been corrected. Also fixed some typos.

[Beorne]

Thank for your exhaustive answer.