Joined: Sat Mar 17, 2007 11:37 pm
Posts: 68
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To preface this, I've been a big fan of all things Myst for a decade or so now, but I've never really had any sort of involvement in its community, not even in the context of MOUL. (When I look around here and UO, I see all sorts of acronyms and names flying about that I've never taken the time to learn.  ) I learned about the most recent development in this game's long and colorful history only an hour or two ago, and I'm not quite sure what to feel yet. I'm obviously very excited that Uru will get the chance to live on in some form, perhaps indefinitely, but I'm also somewhat apprehensive as to what the future will bring (not to mention a bit regretful that, at least as of right now, Cyan won't be holding the reins). I know that there's already been a lot of discussion about the ramifications of "open-source" and just what it means to Uru, so as someone heavily involved with a game community whose developer similarly released its source code to the fandom, I thought I could throw together a few (or more) of my thoughts and experiences, as well as lay out what I'd really love to see happen.
Let me lay out a bit of background first. I'm a huge fan of a series of space combat sims called FreeSpace, which were created by a developer called Volition. The original FreeSpace drew from many elements of past space sims (a sadly near-extinct genre) to create a very solid and coherent game, and its sequel FreeSpace 2 took everything good about the first game and cranked it up to 11. FS2 received rave reviews from gaming sites and is widely considered the finest title of its genre; it's even managed to make several "best games of all time" lists. Sadly, due to some rather incompetent marketing on the part of its publisher (sound familiar?), FS2 was something of a sales flop. A few years after its release, Volition gave its fandom the extraordinary gift of its entire source code. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the concept, "source code" generally means the underlying code that drives a particular program; it's the fundamental heart and soul of any program that you use. In the case of a game, it's literally the engine that powers the game's audiovisual content.
So anyway, Volition released the source code to its fans wholesale, to play with and modify as they wished, much like it seems that Cyan will in the (hopefully) near future. I wasn't part of the community at the time, but the fans were understandably somewhat overwhelmed, much as most of us are right now. A few of the more technically-minded members started diving into the reams of C code, trying to determine how everything worked. After a short time, people started releasing slight modifications to the codebase, either adding small features or fixing a few of the small bugs that had existed in the game up until that point. If things had continued down that road, it's rather possible that it might have become one big mess of code forks ("splits" of different modifications to the original code) and conflicting versions.
But soon after the release, one member of the community suggested that there should be some sort of structure to these improvement efforts, so as not to have a thousand incompatible versions of the game flying around. And after some discussion and agreement amongst the community, so was born...the Source Code Project. The coders of the community pooled their resources and started to coordinate their efforts into one central codebase, so that any improvements and bugfixes could all wind up in the same place. While each coder might have his own personal code projects to work on, it was with the general intent that they would eventually be committed to the central source. The project set up a central bug-tracking system, so as to get input from the community on what needed fixing. Over the years, the project's members added a staggering number of technical advances to the game's engine, adding all sorts of new features and modernizing the game's capabilities. A related project sprang up to update the retail game's content (such as models and textures), taking advantage of the new features that the coders provided. The project's still going strong to this day, and the difference between its current iteration and the original retail game is like night and day.
So what does all of this have to do with the new situation this community finds itself in? Well, I think it serves as somewhat of a possible lesson as to how an open-source game movement can work well, provided it starts off on the right foot. I've seen a lot of people around here talk about having all sorts of different versions of the game, complete with all sorts of wacky modifications and individual servers to host them, and I get these visions of a horribly-fragmented base of players, with only a few people populating each individual server. That's not really what I want at all, and I'm sure most people around here don't want to see that either. (Just for starters, I don't think this community is large enough to support a model like that.) What I'd like to personally see is the same sort of setup that's worked so well for FS2: a central code project that would provide a single stable release of the game, one that everyone could run with assurances of this working. I'd like to couple this with the sort of server model that Chogon mentioned: multiple machines hosting one big "official" instance of Uru, much as we saw in MOUL, the sort of place where the spirit of Uru could live and thrive.
Now before you think I'm against any and all sorts of more esoteric modifications to the game's code, I'm not at all. To return to the FreeSpace example, there are several groups that have sprung up within the community to create total conversions of the original game based on various outside universes. (These include the new Battlestar Galactica series, Star Wars, and Wing Commander.) Some of these total conversions use a slightly separate release of the codebase, with a few special features added in for their particular mod, and they've managed to achieve some really amazing gameplay mechanics. But as it turns out, just about all of those new features have wound up back in the main codebase, for use by anyone else who'd like to try doing something similar. To get back to Uru, I'd be all for anyone who wants hosting their own server with whatever features they so desire activated on it, as I'm sure they'd be a whole lot of fun. But it would be with the understanding that there would always be that one central location based on that one central codebase, where all members of the community could gather to continue Uru much as it was (albeit with an improved codebase and all sorts of fun new features). It would allow for all the code forks and AdminKI-like servers in the world to flourish around it, but it would always remain the central pillar of the community, a place where we could direct new members to and could all gather ourselves.
The bottom line? Cyan's just presented us with a wonderful opportunity, and if we handle it right, we could produce something truly unique and spectacular in the gaming universe. But that power should come with the responsibility to avoid fracturing the community to the point that what made Uru great to begin with is lost to us.
(I'm sure this thread will most likely get lost in the mob of new posts around here at the moment, but if even one person gets something out of it, I guess it was worth it. I'm just wondering if anyone will feel like reading the whole thing. )
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Prepare for Descent...
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) New Features! I've always been one for giving people tools to create, and I think that if we collaborate intelligently, let the guilds do their part, and stay united; we can not only keep URU alive, but create a better game for MORE people to play!
(it have the meaning "mess" in french.
