A proposal -- the community can contribute if the code if open-sourced

[ruzen]

 

A wise man once said "If you're good at something, never do it for free.".

 

 Nonsense. 

I guess insane men like Joker could talk about nonsense 

[b0rsuk]

 

A wise man once said "If you're good at something, never do it for free.".

 

Encouraging software companies to "tap into" the reserve of programmers willing to program for free is bad for code and bad for coders.

As well as bad for companies in general.

 

There are a reason why things like NDA and copyright law exist. There's a reason why newbie writers can't just pitch a Batman story to a DC Exec at a personal lunch.

 

 

The wise man never heard of Linux, which powers at least half of the internet, or Android. He never heard about Firefox, VLC, or OpenOffice. That's because he's not a wise man at all.

 

And yet millions of people are writing fiction containing cyclops, hydra, chimera, gorgons, harpies, minotaurs, sirens, satyrs, manticores, centaurs(Greek), ghosts(everywhere), dragons, goblins, vampires, dwarves, elves (Tolkien) werewolves(Slavic), trolls(Nordic), golems(Jewish), Angels(Jewish), witches... This is possible because of NO copyright on those. On the other hand, people still can't use hobbits in their fiction because Tolkien estate is strict about that. That's why we have halflings.

 

Open-sourcing a game can also lead to ridiculous fragmentation. Very few DooM source ports can actually play the demonstration demos we all know from the main menu. Heroes of Might and Magic III has tons of settings for WOG mod, and they're all incompatible.

 

At the end of day they probably can't open source this game because it has too many proprietary parts.

[Yonjuro]

Obsidian created this game to make money; they are not then going to immediately turn around and give everyone the right to use, modify and distribute their software for no fee (unless they think of a way to somehow make even more money by doing it).

 

  Making software open source doesn't mean that you give away your product for free. For example, if you have a game engine and a script compiler and some other components that you use to develop games, it can make sense to open source some of them. It doesn't mean that you give away the games.

 

 

I get that there is Open Source software out there that is making money, and that there are people out there volunteering their time on Open Source projects, but I expect that those are two different sets that don't overlap much.  Where they do overlap, you'll find gullible people being taken advantage of to their detriment.  It hurts the industry as well, because instead of a programmer filling a programming job you've got one less programming job available but the same number of programmers looking to earn an income.

 

 

 Of course they overlap. There are plenty of examples where people and companies contribute to open source projects for good reasons. 

 

The fact that Obsidian might not publish the data separately would be no impediment to piracy at all.  Pirating software implies access to a copy of the software, which implies possession of a copy of the non-code data.  Since we're talking about someone willing to do illegal things, naturally they will simply copy and distribute that data with their pirated version of the software.

 

 Right. And not having the source code at all is also not an impediment to piracy. Open source and piracy have nothing to do with each other.

 

 

Yes, it is Obsidian's decision whether to convert their for-profit game into an Open Source game.  Since that would eliminate all future profit (from sale of the software) and surrender to their competitors all of their hard work, it seems very unlikely to happen.  Indeed, I would go so far as to say that it is more ridiculous to think that it will happen than it is to think that it will not.

 

 

 Nobody other than you is talking about Obsidian giving away the game for free. The question is whether the engine that runs the game would be worth open sourcing. It probably isn't - for the reasons people have already covered, but it is a reasonable question to ask because it has nothing to do with giving away the game for free. Open source doesn't mean non-profit.

 

 

There are a lot of open source operating systems.  My impression is that they are generally the product of academic research.  So while those programmers are not being compensated for their work, they are doing that work either as part of learning how operating systems function or as a means of academic advancement.

 

 

 Ok, let's try to get your impression a bit more in line with reality then.  Here are few prominent examples: The Linux kernel was developed by a hobbyist and is maintained by volunteers with lots of code contributed by commercial companies. All of the GNU tools that make Linux (and other operating systems) useful are open source (the emacs editor, the gcc compiler and hundreds of other projects).

 

 The Android operating system is open source with most of the development coming from Google. The programmers at Google are compensated very well for their work. Other groups that want to use Android for their own purposes also contribute to the code base. The Chrome browser is open source and also developed by Google.

 

 The Firefox browser is open source developed by the Mozilla foundation with the development paid for by donations. The Apache web server that runs the majority of web sites  in the world is open source (and often running on top the Linux operating system equipped with the Gnu tools ).

 

 And so on. There are often good business (or organizational, or personal) reasons for open sourcing code and for contributing to it.

[wickermoon]

The Linux kernel was developed by a student who was trying to get a better understanding of operating systems and proving a point.

 

The Android OS was created by google to get market dominance, the same goes for the Chrome browser.

 

The Apache Web Server and actually every other software except for the Linux kernel, are supported by big companies who can provide for most programmers, or are maintaining a profit by selling support (especially the Apache Web Server). Even the Java developers are paid by several companies and the ulterior motive for the programming language was to create a platform independent programming language because Microsoft was dominating the market with their OS.

 

In the end, all of those companies earn a living mostly by selling support policies, because, quite frankly, they can.

 

And all of those examples are pretty bad comparisons to PoE. Obsidian could never expect to make money by selling support services, nor is a specific game implementation a platform for anything. The UE3/4 engines are sold to bigger companies and the reasons why they're mostly free to small developers is again to create a market dominance (quite successfully, I might add). The same goes for Unity3D, by the way, which is partially free. But it's an engine, a platform for creating software.

 

The risk of having any bigger game developer copying PoEs code, modify it enough to not warrant a copyright lawsuit, and then selling a game along the lines of PoE would be just too big. It's not about redistribution, because I'm pretty sure Obsidian could just create their own license which would restrict redistribution, the risk is about copying game mechanics. And Obsidian isn't near big enough to compensate for that, as opposed to Google or Apache. For Obsidian, competitors are an immense threat. For Apache and Google, not so much, because they're an established brand and work on a complete different scale and/or basis. It's absolutely incomparible, as much as I'd like to help Obsidian work on PoE bugfixing.

 

 

P.S.: Also, coding guidelines. As much as everyone thinks that it's not an issue, I know that most people would be too stubborn to do the very boring task of documenting their code, work with the coding guidelines given by Obsidian and whatnot. It's a horror to get a piece of code from someone who's not acting by your coding guidelines or who was just too lazy for documentation. And code review takes up a lot of time.

Edited April 19, 2015 by wickermoon

[tinysalamander]

P.S.: Also, coding guidelines. As much as everyone thinks that it's not an issue, I know that most people would be too stubborn to do the very boring task of documenting their code, work with the coding guidelines given by Obsidian and whatnot. It's a horror to get a piece of code from someone who's not acting by your coding guidelines or who was just too lazy for documentation. And code review takes up a lot of time.

Coding guidelines aren't a real problem as long as you can reject anything which does not meet them (you'll see it quite fast – if it's there at all it's everywhere). Works fine for Qt.

[Yonjuro]

....In the end, all of those companies earn a living mostly by selling support policies, because, quite frankly, they can.

 

  (You realize that I am not arguing that Obsidian should open source anything, right? I am arguing against the blanket statements made about open source. Anyway: )

 

 Suppose we go with your interpretation of the motivations of all of the people you mentioned, for the sake of discussion.  A company that makes games could find that is in their best interest to open source the game engine that doesn't directly make them money, and sell games that run on that engine which do make them money.To make that business decision, they would need to look at risks vs. return. 

 

 

...The risk of having any bigger game developer copying PoEs code, modify it enough to not warrant a copyright lawsuit, and then selling a game along the lines of PoE would be just too big..

 

 And, that isn't one of risks. If a larger company wanted to steal their IP, the effort to reverse engineer the engine wouldn't prevent them from doing it. The fact that they would obviously lose a lawsuit would. It would be easier to prove the lawsuit if the code was the same. That's why companies do clean room implementations (where the project team purposefully doesn't look at the original or read anything about it) to avoid IP litigation if they reverse engineer something.

 

....

And all of those examples are pretty bad comparisons to PoE. Obsidian could never expect to make money by selling support services, nor is a specific game implementation a platform for anything. 

 

 It is a platform - that's the point. If Obsidian wanted to license their rule set, look and feel and/or lore to other companies they could give away the software that implements it and license the IP in way that maintains their control over it. In a world where people were clamoring for new games like PoE and where Obsidian had too many other things to do, it could be a viable way to make money off of the IP. 

 

 I don't think I have just described the world as it is today but that is a situation where open sourcing the engine would make sense from a business perspective for a game company the size of Obsidian that reduces risk for everyone involved by reducing wasted effort ( -- there are other ways to minimize that risk, of course).

 

P.S.: Also, coding guidelines. As much as everyone thinks that it's not an issue,

 

 All of the large open source projects that we have talked about have very strict coding guidelines and they don't accept code that doesn't meet the guidelines. This is very easy to verify for yourself if you don't believe me.

 

 As much as everyone thinks that it's not an issue, I know that most people would be too stubborn to do the very boring task of documenting their code, work with the coding guidelines given by Obsidian and whatnot. 

 

 This something that you think you know. Reality disagrees with you. You can look at the guidelines and the code of successful open source projects and see that it isn't true.

[Yonjuro]

 

 

A wise man once said "If you're good at something, never do it for free.".

 

 Nonsense. 

I guess insane men like Joker could talk about nonsense 

 

 

 Haha! I didn't know the reference. Hmm, I guess 9 out of 10 psychopathic supervillains agree then?

[Emptiness]

Obsidian created this game to make money; they are not then going to immediately turn around and give everyone the right to use, modify and distribute their software for no fee (unless they think of a way to somehow make even more money by doing it).

 

  Making software open source doesn't mean that you give away your product for free. For example, if you have a game engine and a script compiler and some other components that you use to develop games, it can make sense to open source some of them. It doesn't mean that you give away the games.

 

You seem determined to argue that there are ways to make money through Open Source projects.  I've already admitted that is true.  If you read and comprehend everything that I am saying, you will see that I point out that it is unrealistic to believe that Obsidian will convert their profitable for-profit game into an Open Source project.  The fact that it is possible for them to do so and still make money does not mean that A) they will be making more money, or B) that they will be making enough money to cover expenses, or C) that they will be being adequately compensated for the time they have spent developing the game, or D) that doing so will not open up the competition to use their hard work to make competing products for free.  I believe that converting this game to Open Source would be to Obsidian's extreme detriment, and so I also believe that they won't do it.  If you choose to believe otherwise, godspeed...but I would encourage you not to hold your breath.

 

 

 

I get that there is Open Source software out there that is making money, and that there are people out there volunteering their time on Open Source projects, but I expect that those are two different sets that don't overlap much.  Where they do overlap, you'll find gullible people being taken advantage of to their detriment.  It hurts the industry as well, because instead of a programmer filling a programming job you've got one less programming job available but the same number of programmers looking to earn an income.

 

 

 Of course they overlap. There are plenty of examples where people and companies contribute to open source projects for good reasons.

 

"Good reasons" = some benefit which constitutes compensation for their work.  Obviously I'm not doing a good enough job of choosing my words to prevent you from twisting them around.  In hindsight, where I said "volunteering their time" I should have said "not being compensated for their time", to close up the opening through which you attacked.  I'm sure there are others, though.  I'm trying to express simple truths in simple ways, but there's always going to be some exception or special case that someone can try to hold up as contradictory to the entire statement.  The truth is still there, even if I am not a sufficiently skilled wordsmith to fend off your underhanded attacks.

 

 

The fact that Obsidian might not publish the data separately would be no impediment to piracy at all.  Pirating software implies access to a copy of the software, which implies possession of a copy of the non-code data.  Since we're talking about someone willing to do illegal things, naturally they will simply copy and distribute that data with their pirated version of the software.

 

 Right. And not having the source code at all is also not an impediment to piracy. Open source and piracy have nothing to do with each other.

 

Perhaps you are deliberately choosing to miss the point; I'm not sure.  It isn't such a complex concept.  Right now, it takes a great deal of skill and specialized knowledge to pirate a game.  I expect that PoE has already been pirated (although I haven't gone looking to confirm that, and it really doesn't matter to my point whether it has or has not), but that doesn't matter in connection to this topic.  The pirate still doesn't have the source code for the game; at best they have uncommented machine code, possibly reverse-engineered into a mash of some flavor of C and machine code if they have a good decompiler (and Obsidian hasn't taken steps to deter decompilation).  That's enough to poke around and cut out the bits that are interfering with your piracy, but you wouldn't want to try to write your own game off of that mess - and if you did it would be a lot of work.  If you open source the game, though, then you give everyone (not just that pirate, but also other game companies who make competing products) the original and commented fruits of your labors for free.

 

Now, before you slam me yet again about how it is possible to make money off of Open Source projects, be clear on this fact: you may have a strategy for making money for your Open Source project, but it has nothing to do with access to the Source Code of your project.  That is, by necessity, freely available to anyone.  Even if you set up a web site where you charged people for a copy of it (and somehow that didn't violate the Open Source nature of the project), as soon as you sold the first copy it would be pasted someplace else free of charge.  The age of disseminating information and also retaining control of it has ended.

 

So the connection between Open Source and piracy is that by going Open Source you stop trying to not be pirated and you lower the skill level needed to pirate your software significantly.  The connection between Open Source and piracy is that by going Open Source you do the work of piracy yourself, and publish results better than a pirate would be expected to produce, and hand that over to your competition on a silver platter.

 

I brought up piracy because someone else claimed that is was possible to publish the Source Code but still charge for the game.  While that is true, it falsely implies that the revenue stream from game sales would not be impacted.  I was trying to illustrate that it would be impacted, because A) people willing and able to use the Source Code to build the game would be able to do so without buying the game, and B) there would be no impediment to those people distributing copies of the game for free, and C) competitors would be able to use the game's Source Code to make competing software with the potential to draw away whatever potential business might remain after the influence of the A and B.

 

So the point here is not that Open Source = piracy and Closed Source = no piracy.  I'm not saying that, and trying to make it look like I am is not actually countering my position.  The point is that releasing the game's Source Code would have a negative effect on the company's already existing revenue stream that I compare (for illustration purposes) to pirating the game (better than any pirate ever could) themselves.  Once revenue has wound down, and if Obsidian has no other plans to use the game's IP or code to leverage future revenue, then maybe Open Sourcing PoE is something they would consider.  Indeed, at that point, it is possible that Open Sourcing the game could be an opportunity to take advantage of non-standard revenue streams that are not currently being tapped (and thus Obsidian might, at that point, be able to make money off Open Sourcing the game).  Right now that would be a foolish move, however: they would be trading a large revenue stream for a smaller revenue stream.  That's just bad business.

 

 

 

Yes, it is Obsidian's decision whether to convert their for-profit game into an Open Source game.  Since that would eliminate all future profit (from sale of the software) and surrender to their competitors all of their hard work, it seems very unlikely to happen.  Indeed, I would go so far as to say that it is more ridiculous to think that it will happen than it is to think that it will not.

 

 

 Nobody other than you is talking about Obsidian giving away the game for free. The question is whether the engine that runs the game would be worth open sourcing. It probably isn't - for the reasons people have already covered, but it is a reasonable question to ask because it has nothing to do with giving away the game for free. Open source doesn't mean non-profit.

 

I never said it was an unreasonable question.  What I have done is take the position that the answer is obviously no.  When I talk about giving the game away for free I mean that this is essentially what will happen, as I described earlier in this post.  Yes, it is possible for Obsidian to make the game Open Source and then try to charge money for the game.  The point is that there will be little impediment to people who want to legally find a copy of the game elsewhere - and if people can legally get your game for free then what difference does it make to your revenue stream if you ineffectually hang a price tag on a picture of your game in a store no one uses?

 

 

 

There are a lot of open source operating systems.  My impression is that they are generally the product of academic research.  So while those programmers are not being compensated for their work, they are doing that work either as part of learning how operating systems function or as a means of academic advancement.

 

 

 Ok, let's try to get your impression a bit more in line with reality then.  Here are few prominent examples: The Linux kernel was developed by a hobbyist and is maintained by volunteers with lots of code contributed by commercial companies. All of the GNU tools that make Linux (and other operating systems) useful are open source (the emacs editor, the gcc compiler and hundreds of other projects).

 

 The Android operating system is open source with most of the development coming from Google. The programmers at Google are compensated very well for their work. Other groups that want to use Android for their own purposes also contribute to the code base. The Chrome browser is open source and also developed by Google.

 

 The Firefox browser is open source developed by the Mozilla foundation with the development paid for by donations. The Apache web server that runs the majority of web sites  in the world is open source (and often running on top the Linux operating system equipped with the Gnu tools ).

 

 And so on. There are often good business (or organizational, or personal) reasons for open sourcing code and for contributing to it.

 

I'm not sure what your point is here, unless you just want to argue with everything I say.  In my statement, which you quoted, I specifically made a general statement.  Doing so acknowledges the existence of exceptions, so in listing exceptions to my statement you accomplish nothing.  I would be very surprised to learn that Linux and Android did not contain contributions from the academic sector.  Even if they don't, that would just make them two of those exceptions that my statement has already accounted for.

 

(By the way, if you reread my statement you will note that I was discussing open source operating systems, so it is odd that you chose to include two browsers, a web server, and various tools in your list.  Also, about those programmers at Google being paid to work on open source code...I would think it would be very clear to everyone that the community coders that would be doing the work the OP is talking about are not going to be paid Google salaries, or indeed at all.  The fact that there are programmers out there making money writing open source code has nothing to do with the (non-existent) earning potential of people volunteering to work on PoE code.)

 

I think maybe you and others are mistaking my position as being anti-Open Source.  Let me clarify that I am not anti-Open Source; I use Open Source software, directly and indirectly, and benefit from it.  I realize that there are people and companies who make money, directly and indirectly, through Open Source projects.  The disconnect here is that some people, including you, seem to think that Obsidian is in a position to just wave the Open Source wand and reliably convert PoE from a profitable closed source game into a profitable open source game.  I contend that Obsidian is not in a position to do that, and that such a change at this point would be certain to negatively impact their bottom line, both in terms of actual revenue and in terms of lost future revenue.  It would be a bad move for Obsidian to make at this time.

Edited April 19, 2015 by Emptiness

[Yonjuro]

....

 

(By the way, if you reread my statement you will note that I was discussing open source operating systems, so it is odd that you chose to include two browsers, a web server, and various tools in your list.  

 

 I mentioned browsers (and web servers) due to the trend of the web being the destination and the browser being one and only UI for a lot of people, but fair enough - you did say operating systems so ignore the part my post after Android.

 

I think maybe you and others are mistaking my position as being anti-Open Source.  Let me clarify that I am not anti-Open Source; I use Open Source software, directly and indirectly, and benefit from it.  I realize that there are people and companies who make money, directly and indirectly, through Open Source projects.

 

 It sounds like we don't actually have a disagreement then. (It isn't the first time two people have misunderstood each other on a message board.)

 

 The disconnect here is that some people, including you, seem to think that Obsidian is in a position to just wave the Open Source wand and reliably convert PoE from a profitable closed source game into a profitable open source game. 

 

 Nope, don't include me because I agree with you on that too. It isn't necessarily true that that an open source game engine can't be used to make profitable games but I agree that Obsidian is not in a position where it makes sense for them (mainly because they are more interested in continuing work on the franchise rather than getting others to continue it while they do something else).

[Zwiebelchen]

The game is out now for roughly a month and we already got two major patches that fixed the biggest chunk of bugs already. And here's that one guy that complains they aren't working hard enough.

 

Give them a break, really. Making anything open source here won't help anything except your own personal agenda.

[wickermoon]

(You realize that I am not arguing that Obsidian should open source anything, right? I am arguing against the blanket statements made about open source. Anyway: )

 

 Suppose we go with your interpretation of the motivations of all of the people you mentioned, for the sake of discussion.  A company that makes games could find that is in their best interest to open source the game engine that doesn't directly make them money, and sell games that run on that engine which do make them money.To make that business decision, they would need to look at risks vs. return.

But they do not have an engine. They created a game using the Unity3D engine. What they have are game mechanics, specific game mechanics. They can be adapted to other games, yes, but why would you give some other company the possiblity to create the exact same kind of games and create a competitor who might even outdo you with what you have created? I like the thought of open source, I really do in all honesty, but in order for a project to be OSS-compatible there need to be several criteria met and a game has mostly none of them. Linus didn't open source his os so he could turn a profit on it. He knew exactly he wouldn't be able to turn a profit whether he open-sourced it or not. And most linux distributions actually do have closed-source parts because they want to keep that edge over their competitors.

 

As I said, most profit-oriented open source projects earn their living by either selling support or doing something completely different, simply because they're able to. Small game companies can't.

 

And I'm actually arguing against Obsidian OSing PoE, because that's what your opening post stated.

 

And, that isn't one of risks. If a larger company wanted to steal their IP, the effort to reverse engineer the engine wouldn't prevent them from doing it. The fact that they would obviously lose a lawsuit would. It would be easier to prove the lawsuit if the code was the same. That's why companies do clean room implementations (where the project team purposefully doesn't look at the original or read anything about it) to avoid IP litigation if they reverse engineer something.

Apart from the fact that reverse engineering is a fellony (or even a crime? I'm not sure about it), it's not about the effort. It is about the lawsuit. So you're arguing for me. And clean room implementations don't have anything to do with reverse engineering. Reverse engineering would be just that, reverse engineering the original product. But that's not what I was arguing. What you describe is a reimplementation and that effort takes not only time, but money. Handing them the code would be saving them so much time and effort - and consequently money - that it would be a liability to open source your game mechanics (which is what I was arguing). We actually have a very similar situation in my current company. We can't do anything about it, because we're a research institute and don't do much patents and stuff, but hey, their product is so much behind that we don't have to worry about them being actual competition. I just attended an industry fair that even proves this point, because most companies wanted to work with us not them. If we had given them access to our code, well ****-out-of-luck we could've stopped the whole project. Wouldn't be worth it anymore due to several reasons.

 

It is a platform - that's the point. If Obsidian wanted to license their rule set, look and feel and/or lore to other companies they could give away the software that implements it and license the IP in way that maintains their control over it. In a world where people were clamoring for new games like PoE and where Obsidian had too many other things to do, it could be a viable way to make money off of the IP.

It's not a platform. You're arguing that Obsidian should go the way WotC and several others went and release their ruleset. That is something totally different and has nothing to do with open-sourcing their game. And tying it to the software has nothing to do with open-sourcing it. They could do that with closed-source software as well and would be even safer. Also, as you suggested, the world isn't clamoring for new games like PoE, the feasibility isn't given and there's no point in discussing this particular point any further.

 

All of the large open source projects that we have talked about have very strict coding guidelines and they don't accept code that doesn't meet the guidelines. This is very easy to verify for yourself if you don't believe me.

Are you comparing the PoE community with professional programmers who - mostly - actually know what they're doing? I would not make that claim. Can't prove it might be the opposite, but code review is still a pain in the ass and there's a difference between gamers trying to assist gaming companies in bugfixing their pastime hobby and programmers who do this for a living. Gamers are fickly mistresses and I do not hold much faith in them, but this is my personal opinion and I won't argue about it, because neither of us could actually argue for their respective point of view. But If this is my weakest point (and I can agree that it is) then I'm not too worried about my argumentation.

 

P.S.: Also, I don't consider the code for any non-profit-OSS to be exactly clean or easily maintainable. The ICQ (or was it pidgin? It was some messenger software) branches prove that. They are a horrible thing to look at and most programmers won't touch the core stuff, for which the main programmer responsible is not working on the project anymore, out of sheer fear of breaking anything and not being able to fix it. Most oss software is a pile of garbage due to poor documentation and the few rare cases - the big ones - are just a small oasis in a vast sea of code-horror.

 

P.P.S.: I'm not sure if they finished the job, but up until a year or two ago, or so, even JAVA wasn't actually (totally) open source. Many of the core code was (is) still closed-source. Maybe they did it and now have a truly open source project, but I doubt it.

Edited April 20, 2015 by wickermoon

[Jasta11]

There's a reason no game developper that has any sort of success has released an open-source game, apart possibly from Valve who have the absurd Steam cash cow to print money with. Open source is not profitable at all, and games are expensive stuff. 

[Dadalama]

There's a reason no game developper that has any sort of success has released an open-source game, apart possibly from Valve who have the absurd Steam cash cow to print money with. Open source is not profitable at all, and games are expensive stuff. 

that's not exactly true. While they are far from making a killing, Wadjet Eye studios use an open source engine for most of their games and they've been around since 2006. And I got that from a quick google search. A company that doesn't generate profit wouldn't be around for 9 years. I assume the company at least makes a lower middle class living.

 

Though not a lot of commercial projects are made with open source engines so we don't have that much data to work with anyways.

 

Back to POE, there's no way it can go open source until the sequel, and then they've already licensed unity. It would be a better idea if they worked with unity to create a things like area and npc builders and other modding tools that let you change the way the game works.

 

Edit: Torchlight uses Ogre3D which is an open source engine.

Edited April 20, 2015 by Dadalama

[Yonjuro]

 

(You realize that I am not arguing that Obsidian should open source anything, right? I am arguing against the blanket statements made about open source. 

 ...

But they do not have an engine. They created a game using the Unity3D engine. ...

 

 

 Yes, I understand that. See the part of my post that I've left in the quote above.

 

 

 

As I said, most profit-oriented open source projects earn their living by either selling support or doing something completely different, simply because they're able to. Small game companies can't.

 

 

 Yes, you certainly said that but it still isn't true. Or, rather, it isn't the only way that companies make money from open source. Open source makes sense any time that the thing that you give away is not the thing that makes money for you and, that by giving it away, you can do more of the thing that does make the money for you. There are a lot of business models that include open source and make money other than the one that you mentioned. See upthread for some additional examples (and there are more).

 

Apart from the fact that reverse engineering is a fellony (or even a crime? I'm not sure about it), it's not about the effort. It is about the lawsuit. 

 

  It isn't a crime. Breaking DRM is a crime in the U.S. (since the DMCA) so that may be what you are thinking of.

 

.. What you describe is a reimplementation and that effort takes not only time, but money. Handing them the code would be saving them so much time and effort - and consequently money - that it would be a liability to open source your game mechanics (which is what I was arguing). 

 

 

 You don't need to argue that - I agree. My point in this discussion is that, hypothetically, a game company like Obsidian can open source some code (which is not their high value IP) and make money licensing their content (which is their high value IP). Doing so makes sense if doing the former increases their ability to do the latter. 

 

 

It's not a platform. You're arguing that Obsidian should go the way WotC and several others went and release their ruleset. 

 

 Just so that we're clear, no, I am not arguing that Obsidian should release their ruleset (or that they should release anything else) as open source. My point is that open sourcing some of their code is not the same thing as giving the world permission to copy any and all of their intellectual property as someone seemed to think (though it turned out that he didn't actually think that as was eventually uncovered in the discussion).

 

 

 

 

All of the large open source projects that we have talked about have very strict coding guidelines and they don't accept code that doesn't meet the guidelines. This is very easy to verify for yourself if you don't believe me.

Are you comparing the PoE community with professional programmers who - mostly - actually know what they're doing? I would not make that claim. 

 

 It might not be obvious when you only see screen names and avatar pictures but, several people who regularly post here are professional programmers with decades of experience who very much know what we are doing. 

[LeonKowalski]

In the old days separating game code from engine code was standard operating procedure, a practice which was perfected by Carmack and Sweeney ... and it's all been downhill from there. In D:OS and PoE the game developers seem to have gone out of their way to make their games unmoddable ... and somehow the community hasn't stood up to say DAMNIT WHY THE HELL DID YOU DO THAT?

 

Open source without capitalization doesn't mean open licensing ... just because we could mod the hell out of Infinity Engine games doesn't mean we could just take all their dialogue and copy/paste it, we could edit it. Given the quality of this game now there is no hope in hell of this being truly polished by the time they pull all their coders off it, it needs community fixing more than any of the Infinity Engine games ever did ... it has made it harder for the community to fix anything than the Infinity Engine games ever did.

[Dadalama]

In the old days separating game code from engine code was standard operating procedure, a practice which was perfected by Carmack and Sweeney ... and it's all been downhill from there. In D:OS and PoE the game developers seem to have gone out of their way to make their games unmoddable ... and somehow the community hasn't stood up to say DAMNIT WHY THE HELL DID YOU DO THAT?

 

Open source without capitalization doesn't mean open licensing ... just because we could mod the hell out of Infinity Engine games doesn't mean we could just take all their dialogue and copy/paste it, we could edit it. Given the quality of this game now there is no hope in hell of this being truly polished by the time they pull all their coders off it, it needs community fixing more than any of the Infinity Engine games ever did ... it has made it harder for the community to fix anything than the Infinity Engine games ever did.

POE uses unity. Unity is it's own engine. Obsidian did not make unity.

 

http://unity3d.com/

[Emptiness]

Given the quality of this game now there is no hope in hell of this being truly polished by the time they pull all their coders off it, it needs community fixing more than any of the Infinity Engine games ever did ... it has made it harder for the community to fix anything than the Infinity Engine games ever did.

 

As consumers of a product of the gaming industry, we need to hold the industry to a higher standard of game production.  If you feel that Obsidian is not producing games that are worth playing without being polished by programmers who must work without compensation by Obsidian then you should not buy Obsidian's games.  Game companies need to take responsibility for their products and deliver to their consumers products that are worthy of consumption, instead of producing faulty products and then leaving the consumers to clean up after their mess.  If gamers embrace this paradigm (we give you money, you give us junk, we fix your junk while you're off making other junk to sell us) then we are sabotaging ourselves.  I say this not to attack Obsidian, or freelance programmers, or the modding community, but because there is a real danger that game companies will become accustomed to selling us unfinished products unless we act to oppose that force.  We need to hold game companies to task by demanding that they polish their own games before we buy new things from them, instead of empowering them to avoid that responsibility by offering to do it ourselves.

 

Edit: Corrected error made while quoting the post to which I was responding.

Edited April 23, 2015 by Emptiness

[LeonKowalski]

POE uses unity. Unity is it's own engine. Obsidian did not make unity.

 

http://unity3d.com/

 

 

The division between engine code and game code is more an (lost) art than a science ... but there will be a lot of original code in PoE which most people would count as engine code (the dialogue system, saving/loading etc).

 

 

As consumers of a product of the gaming industry, we need to hold the industry to a higher standard of game production.  If you feel that Obsidian is not producing games that are worth playing without being polished by programmers who must work without compensation by Obsidian then you should not buy Obsidian's games.  Game companies need to take responsibility for their products and deliver to their consumers products that are worthy of consumption, instead of producing faulty products and then leaving the consumers to clean up after their mess.  If gamers embrace this paradigm (we give you money, you give us junk, we fix your junk while you're off making other junk to sell us) then we are sabotaging ourselves.  I say this not to attack Obsidian, or freelance programmers, or the modding community, but because there is a real danger that game companies will become accustomed to selling us unfinished products unless we act to oppose that force.  We need to hold game companies to task by demanding that they polish their own games before we buy new things from them, instead of empowering them to avoid that responsibility by offering to do it ourselves.

 

The easier to mod a game is the more slack I'm willing to cut the developer ... I'd prefer to get polished AND moddable games, but if I restricted myself to those I'd not be playing many games. Although if I had known the state of PoE I would have held off buying it, I'm not playing it any way (waiting for my ranger's pet to stop being fatigued all the time). I'll certainly be more careful in the future (like I have become with Bioware games).

[Zwiebelchen]

I don't know what you guys are talking about; a lot of the game content of PoE is externalized, including models, maps and localization files.

 

Just because the community hasn't made tools to manipulate stuff yet doesn't mean it's hard to do.

 

 

I expect the first minor community content pieces like new companions around the end of the year.

[Luckmann]

I don't know what you guys are talking about; a lot of the game content of PoE is externalized, including models, maps and localization files.

 

Just because the community hasn't made tools to manipulate stuff yet doesn't mean it's hard to do.

 

I expect the first minor community content pieces like new companions around the end of the year.

 

It's still pretty damn hard, though. Have you tried mucking about with the .cs files?

[Quantics]

I don't know what you guys are talking about; a lot of the game content of PoE is externalized, including models, maps and localization files.

 

Just because the community hasn't made tools to manipulate stuff yet doesn't mean it's hard to do.

 

 

I expect the first minor community content pieces like new companions around the end of the year.

 

 

You're wrong. Extensive Modding for PoE requires Unity 4.6, which costs a lot of money. I think this is the main reason why we won't see many big mods like the Baldur's Gate series had. 

 

Unity 5 is free, but Obsidian already stated that it would be too much work to port the game to Unity 5. IIRC they even stated that potential sequels would use Unity 4.6.

 

So yeah, not too optimistic about that really. 

[Luckmann]

 

I don't know what you guys are talking about; a lot of the game content of PoE is externalized, including models, maps and localization files.

 

Just because the community hasn't made tools to manipulate stuff yet doesn't mean it's hard to do.

 

 

I expect the first minor community content pieces like new companions around the end of the year.

 

 

You're wrong. Extensive Modding for PoE requires Unity 4.6, which costs a lot of money. I think this is the main reason why we won't see many big mods like the Baldur's Gate series had. 

 

Unity 5 is free, but Obsidian already stated that it would be too much work to port the game to Unity 5. IIRC they even stated that potential sequels would use Unity 4.6.

 

So yeah, not too optimistic about that really. 

 

 

Source? It was my understanding that, while certainly not on the table right now, they would consider porting it to Unity 5 later, possibly in the expansion(s). And I haven't even heard about the potential sequels still using Unity 4.6, that'd be daft.

[Quantics]

@Luckmann don't quote me 100% on this though. I'm trying to find the post in question, but the search function on this forum is crap.

 

EDIT: found them, and it doesn't look as definite as I remembered so that's good

 

 

 

 

 

I could see this for a sequel (if we do one).

Will you guys look into using the Unity 4.6 UI system for a sequel because it's a lot faster to develop with than NGUI and it's WaAaAAAAy better at scaling 2D assets.

 

 

We will have to evaluate it at that point. It may be very easy for us to convert everything over... or it might be a nightmare. Hopefully the former.

 

 

 

 

 

I don't know what our plans are going forward but, I do know we are shipping with the version of Unity we are currently using (4.6).

 

Just for some insight, last time we upgraded Unity, Dyrford Crossing mouse collision handling broke on a lot of little plant containers (as is with beta version 435). It took us a few weeks to diagnose the problem and find a solution. But that's the kind of unknown mystery that can crop up from upgrading and why it would be dangerous as of right now to do so.

 

I agree with Sensuki. Could you consider this for the expansion?

Shadows Heretic Kingdoms is considering it for Ogre3D, I'm actually also helping

 

To be honest, I can't imagine doing this for the expansion. It would be a very large amount of work to do this and we would need to pour a bunch of resources back into the base game to make everything play nicely. I guess anything is possible, but there are many other things we would rather spend programming time on for the expansion.

 

I could see this for a sequel (if we do one).

 

 

 

I don't know what our plans are going forward but, I do know we are shipping with the version of Unity we are currently using (4.6).

 

Just for some insight, last time we upgraded Unity, Dyrford Crossing mouse collision handling broke on a lot of little plant containers (as is with beta version 435). It took us a few weeks to diagnose the problem and find a solution. But that's the kind of unknown mystery that can crop up from upgrading and why it would be dangerous as of right now to do so.

Edited April 24, 2015 by Quantics

[anameforobsidian]

There's a reason no game developper that has any sort of success has released an open-source game, apart possibly from Valve who have the absurd Steam cash cow to print money with. Open source is not profitable at all, and games are expensive stuff. 

 

Aquaria disagrees.

[b0rsuk]

There's a reason no game developper that has any sort of success has released an open-source game, apart possibly from Valve who have the absurd Steam cash cow to print money with. Open source is not profitable at all, and games are expensive stuff. 

 

Have you heard about id Software ? Wolfenstein 3D, DooM, Quake ? All their engines up to and including DooM 3 are Open Source. You still need data files (levels, artwork, sounds etc) to play the game. They made games first, then released the source code after a while.

Edited April 24, 2015 by b0rsuk