New stuff in Regnum Online

[Conzar]

So how do you know there aren't any programmers that would be willing to help on developing the source code?

How do you know that their source code is a mess if you haven't seen the source code?

How do you know which programming languages they are using?
Why in the world would they use straight assembly when shader languages exist?

Also, if the source code does get liberated, whose to say that the community wouldn't help clean it up? Sort of like a dirty park.

Releasing the game under GPL or any other F/LOSS licence would hurt NGD. NGD is really small, and it barely survived to the 2001 economic crisis in Argentina, so they don't have enough money to enhance their code as fast as Blizzard can, or make a complete rewrite of the game to put SMP and Videocard technologies to good use.

I don't understand ... how would open sourcing it hurt NGD?

Are you making an argument to open source it because if it was F/OSS then NGD would have more resources to make enhancements to the game faster?

[ArcticWolf]

Originally Posted by Conzar

So how do you know there aren't any programmers that would be willing to help on developing the source code?

So far, only five users in the Spanish forum declared that they would collaborate or help in the development. I'm one of those users.

How many here have stated that they would actually try to help? You're one, and I admire you because of that... But just one guy isn't enough.

Originally Posted by Conzar

How do you know that their source code is a mess if you haven't seen the source code?

Surak told me that a thousand times. I know the guys in the dev team... And you don't need to see the code to know it's a mess after six years of emergency patches and not a single rewrite.

Originally Posted by Conzar

How do you know which programming languages they are using?
Why in the world would they use straight assembly when shader languages exist?

Just ask Surak, Niclam or Kailer. They will answer that question better than me. They used ASM to tweak some aspects on the rendering engine.

Originally Posted by Conzar

Also, if the source code does get liberated, whose to say that the community wouldn't help clean it up? Sort of like a dirty park.

That's utopic. I'm one of the most fervent deffenders of the Free Software movement, but I know its limitations too. How many developers are skilled enough to clean up the code and improve it?

How can NGD mantain a Software as a Service economic scheme with other servers available?

It's benefical for the game, but not for the developers (unfortunately).

Originally Posted by Conzar

I don't understand ... how would open sourcing it hurt NGD?

NGD is a *very* small company with low income. They can't compete against a big company located in any other place of the globe.

Originally Posted by Conzar

Are you making an argument to open source it because if it was F/OSS then NGD would have more resources to make enhancements to the game faster?

I'd love to see that happening, but I have my doubts. I really want this game to get GPL'd... But there's something missing for SaaS companies like NGD.

In fact, free software helped this game be more than just a garage project. For instance, the linux binaries are compiled in GCC 4.1 (they had a problem a while ago and had to compile in 4.3). They had GNU/Linux in mind since the beginning of the project.

NGD used a lot of free software to develop this game, and if you ask the team you will see they're really pro-F/LOSS (well, Free software really... some don't like the OpenSource idea).

Don't get me wrong. I want this game to be great, but you also have to take into account what would happen to the developers.

[Znurre]

Originally Posted by Xephandor

How can NGD mantain a Software as a Service economic scheme with other servers available?

If they should release the Regnum client under an open source compliant license I would never recommend them to do that also with the server.

[ArcticWolf]

Originally Posted by Znurre

If they should release the Regnum client under an open source compliant license I would never recommend them to do that also with the server.

The problem is how related the server and the client are. If you release the client in a opensource-frendly licence then reverse engineering the server would be easier. The "core" of the client should remain privative, then NGD can add an API for us to manipulate some aspects of the game.

I'd like to change the GUI, to use the old compass and to have mumble controls inside the game. I'd love to have a xmms and pidgin control so I can change the track I'm listening too and reply to a friend using jabber in an in-game pm chat.

Moreover, I'd kill to have a way to export my skilltree, inventory and stats to an XML file, and then share that information here. An import feature in-game to upload our builds would be awesome. That's why the new rolgps supports XML, because I strongly believe NGD should encourage us to share that kind of information.

[DkySven]

Originally Posted by Xephandor

The problem is how related the server and the client are. If you release the client in a opensource-frendly licence then reverse engineering the server would be easier. The "core" of the client should remain privative, then NGD can add an API for us to manipulate some aspects of the game.

I'd like to change the GUI, to use the old compass and to have mumble controls inside the game. I'd love to have a xmms and pidgin control so I can change the track I'm listening too and reply to a friend using jabber in an in-game pm chat.

Moreover, I'd kill to have a way to export my skilltree, inventory and stats to an XML file, and then share that information here. An import feature in-game to upload our builds would be awesome. That's why the new rolgps supports XML, because I strongly believe NGD should encourage us to share that kind of information.

I think this would be great for the development of the game.

[-Edge-]

Originally Posted by Conzar

I don't understand ... how would open sourcing it hurt NGD?

Afaik NGD dosent even back up their data, which they should do, if they did that we wouldn't have to deal with bugs everytime theres an update, if there would be bugs they could revert the game the way it was before the update and fix the bugs, strangely enough this never happens.

[ArcticWolf]

Originally Posted by Rated_R_Edge

Afaik NGD dosent even back up their data, which they should do, if they did that we wouldn't have to deal with bugs everytime theres an update, if there would be bugs they could revert the game the way it was before the update and fix the bugs, strangely enough this never happens.

There are backups. I don't remember exactly how often they perform the database mantainance, but they DO backup. Though, I doubt they do full backups.

[DkySven]

I think NGD does backup, remember the rollbacks when the server crashed? not everything was whiped out, only placed back a little in time.

(Xephador!! 3 green boxes!!)

[-Edge-]

Originally Posted by asdfghs

(Xephador!! 3 green boxes!!)

and I was close to 100 karma (2nd box) by 7 points, until I recieved a "special" karma from someone which dropped it to 54

Originally Posted by Xephandor

There are backups. I don't remember exactly how often they perform the database mantainance, but they DO backup. Though, I doubt they do full backups.

Ah yeah they do, I remeber with the backwards thing, my bad.