SEIV as OPEN SOURCE?

[Instar]

I believe that Aaron is against this. He has said no before, and I see no reason why he would change his mind.
Myself, I think that open source is decent at times, however, it won't make money. Anybody could get the code and make a free Version of it.
And besides, its in Delphi, and all I know is C++!

[Eisenhans]

the game being in delphi is too bad. But why do people think open source would get "distributed" (pirated that is) any more freely than other software?

[ColdSteel]

The problem is that this isn't a good economic business model for a small company such as MM. They'd kill themselves IMO if they went the whole open source route.

However, many other games, notably all the Quake Games and Unreal Tournament have released source for a sizable portion of their game engines. Quake2 did this in the form of C language DLL source that you could modify and recompile. That way the core game and game technologies that they wanted to protect remained inaccessible and yet it allowed the mod community to do a whole lot more than just play around with some text file settings (flexible though they may be).

That's one way they could go but a game has to be designed for this approach from the start and SE4 probably is not.

It is something they could consider for the future though.

[Atrocities]

The only game that I know of that has ever been released as "open source" was starseige Tribes. That was a big break for the modders out there, and they all produce some awsome mods. Voice packs, skins, mods, etc.

But in this case, SE IV, I would think that given the tight competition in this market, that would spell doom for MM. You know how people are, they would take someone elses idea, modify it, and thus claim to have a "new" code. Then MM would be SOL on the deal, and that just won't float.

[KiloOhm]

quote:

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Originally posted by Atrocities:
The only game that I know of that has ever been released as "open source" was starseige Tribes. That was a big break for the modders out there, and they all produce some awsome mods. Voice packs, skins, mods, etc.

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ID released the source to it's older games (Wolfenstein and Doom, ad maybe even Quake 1). Not that I think Malfador should. Maybe the source to SEII or something. Releasing teh source to SEIV or can only hurt their sales.


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Regards,
KiloOhm

[Taqwus]

Descent's also open-source, and ditto with Hexen. Yes, Q1 too.

...with the caveat that id Software and other companies may open up the engine code (at least the parts they have copyright on), but generally don't relax licensing requirements for the data files.

StarOffice (well, now it's... OpenOffice, IIRC) was a full-blown commercial office suite, for multiple platforms, that got bought by Sun and opened up. But Sun, being huge, has far more revenue lines than Malfador and Shrapnel.

There are also interesting free clones of commercial games out there, like FreeCiv and so forth. And many darn good non-commercial games like Xconq. But for now, MM has better things to do...

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[jpinard]

Terrible idea.