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I'm think about the licence we should choose for this engine. Personally I'd like to see this:

- The engine is free to download, use and modify. It can also be distributed freely, if it's for free (not counting expenses) and with a link to the site.
- The original source of the engine is free to download, view and adapt. If it's adapted for use in projects other than an OpenWar game, that's fine but credit is required.
- Games can be either free or commercial. If the source of the engine is modified, it will have to be accessible for people who download/buy the game, as well as OpenWar staff members.
- Every OpenWar game will show the openwar logo at the start. It's not required to leave this in, but much appreciated.

What do you think?

I liked one Engine's idea: You cannot use it commercially unless you buy a license, but as long as you don't sell it in a case on a shelf you can use it freely. Obviously you can't sell the license of this thing. Not because it wouldn't sell (Someone that's going to make money off a game plans on spending money anyway), but because, being open source, would be a legal nightmare, thus, pretty much impossible.

A logo at the beginning is nice, but here's my opinion on it:

First, it makes the game someone is creating look cheap, and all this little 12 year old boy wants to do is create an awesome game by himself. He succeeds, but then the logo ruins his game (In his fragile little mind), and then he realises his life ambition was for null then he promptly jumps off a 30 story apartment building, screaming "WORLD OF WARCRAFT MADE ME DO IIIIIITTTTTTUHMP".

Secondly, people who play games really could care less about what the engine is (They don't even know what an engine is to begin with). It affects like 2 people that play the game. Most developers do their research through google, and don't play games looking for logos.

That's my yen.

1. the logo can be in a nice video, so that it's cool. i know some games which show the unreal logo at the beginning
2. if openwar ever gets a good reputation, it will help the game
3. it might affect only 2 people, but that's 2 more than none

I think one way Open War could be implemented is by treating each game as a different module using the same engine.  In this way, the engine would be open source and available publically, and the player would need to download it before using any modules.  A designer could then either produce a module for free, or attempt to market it (provided there are no copyright issues).

The official game we're creating would be the default module, and would be distributed for free as an example and a promotion of the engine.

for the very first time i completely disagree. this will give problems when we update the engine (you can't always guarantee backward-compatibility) and when somebody wants to modify the source of the engine for his game. it's not like the engine itself will be a very large download, so why would we do it like that?

1. the logo can be in a nice video, so that it's cool. i know some games which show the unreal logo at the beginning
2. if openwar ever gets a good reputation, it will help the game
3. it might affect only 2 people, but that's 2 more than none

All true, and I agree with you completely. However, these kind of logo's are always one of the first things modded or hacked out of the game. We should create the option to turn off the intro and logo's in a game menu. At that point, the name of the engine is known to the player, and very, very few could be annoyed by having to view the intro and logo once.

In a corner of the menu, we can put the engine name and it's version. Both necessary information, the version alone could make it unclear wether it would be the engine version, or the mod version.

What Darvin proposes has been the idea that made me enthousiastic about this project from the beginning. Neverwinter Nights has as system like it and it works really well. The engine and the default game would be the basic package. We all know that player can sometimes have the greatest trouble with installing a mod. In the game we could simply have a mod importer that installs the mod at the right location. From inside the basic menu, a mod could be selected, avoiding any possible issues.

You suggest that updating could give problems, that is true, it's pretty likely even that compatability issues arise at some point.

An quite important reason for having a basic package would be to fix critical bugs, security flaws that need to be fixed. If we let modders use older versions, which are known to hold security bugs, it will likely be that we get as much of the blame as the modder if things go wrong. Better save then sorry.

On the other end, a simple way to go around the issue you raise, would be to allow multiple instances of the game. At the moment I've got two installments of BFME 2, three of NWN and again two of Jagged Alliance. Surely it could be made possible that the OpenWar package can be installed multimple times. That also covers any adapted engines, which would also be able to be installed besides any other OpenWar package.

Last point is related to something you said earlier: Advertising, getting the name of the engine out. If we only show a logo, it won't attract any players or modders, we need to show that it's the OpenWar engine that makes the mods they play possible. If we manage that, the engine has a future, if we fail in that, the engine will be unknown and as a result, less used. Sure, really interested modders will take a closer look at find it nonetheless, but casual modders won't.

Most developers do their research through google, and don't play games looking for logos.

How do you think ideas for games are generated? Yes, by playing games. Developers play games, not for watching logo's, but for ideas for future projects. But while they may not be playing to see the logo, it doesn't hurt showing it to them at the start.

Solinx

I think backwards compatability can and should be supported.  The engine should have the versitility and stability to serve any module's need.  While in development, we should be able to rip up and rework any part of the engine.  Once we're done, however, we can add and modify functions and objects, but not how they are used or called.

One of the upsides of OOP is abstraction.  People will use the engine by creating instances of objects and calling functions.  We can still change the implementations of those objects and functions, so long as the way they are called and instantiated is not changed (we can add more options, so long as the old ones still work.  We can change the ways the old ones work, so long as they are still used in the same way).  With good modularity and abstraction, we should be able to make large changes without actually affecting anyone's module.

I personally like the idea of having one engine, and one executable, and then potentially dozens of modules that can be loaded at a player's leisure.  It's just so simple and elegant.

In terms of getting the engine known, the best way would be to establish a central OpenWar module library where developers could submit their modules (or links to their store, if they're selling them).  The feature itself would encourage development to add to the data-base.

I was just about to post this when my host failed. Anyway:

All true, and I agree with you completely. However, these kind of logo's are always one of the first things modded or hacked out of the game. We should create the option to turn off the intro and logo's in a game menu. At that point, the name of the engine is known to the player, and very, very few could be annoyed by having to view the intro and logo once.

I know how annoying long intros can be (can anyone say "new line in bfme"  ), so it doesn't have to be longer than 2 seconds

In a corner of the menu, we can put the engine name and it's version. Both necessary information, the version alone could make it unclear wether it would be the engine version, or the mod version.

the menu layout will be flexible, so that's for game developers to decide

We all know that player can sometimes have the greatest trouble with installing a mod.

nobody will have to install a mod, every game will have an installer which installs the engine and the data in the same dir. every game is completely independent (not counting .net and XNA of course)

An quite important reason for having a basic package would be to fix critical bugs, security flaws that need to be fixed. If we let modders use older versions, which are known to hold security bugs, it will likely be that we get as much of the blame as the modder if things go wrong. Better save then sorry.

definitely true, but i don't think it outweighs the cons

Last point is related to something you said earlier: Advertising, getting the name of the engine out. If we only show a logo, it won't attract any players or modders, we need to show that it's the OpenWar engine that makes the mods they play possible. If we manage that, the engine has a future, if we fail in that, the engine will be unknown and as a result, less used. Sure, really interested modders will take a closer look at find it nonetheless, but casual modders won't.

so we show "Powered by OpenWar" in the intro. also, you keep saying "mods", but it's about "games"

How do you think ideas for games are generated? Yes, by playing games. Developers play games, not for watching logo's, but for ideas for future projects. But while they may not be playing to see the logo, it doesn't hurt showing it to them at the start.

why are you quoting yourself and responding to it? 

I think backwards compatability can and should be supported.  The engine should have the versitility and stability to serve any module's need.  While in development, we should be able to rip up and rework any part of the engine.

i agree, but 100% backwards compatibility is just not possible or really hard. too much work for too little gain. game developers are smart enough to update their engine

One of the upsides of OOP is abstraction.  People will use the engine by creating instances of objects and calling functions.

except that's not true. as we have decided earlier, games will entirely be made out of data files (mostly xml)

I personally like the idea of having one engine, and one executable, and then potentially dozens of modules that can be loaded at a player's leisure.

apart from the issues i mentioned before (different engine versions), game developers may not want to show a menu or even show a relation to somebody else's game. also, think of the disaster of shared dll's in windows. either one game deletes the engine while it shouldn't, or the engine just remains there unused

In terms of getting the engine known, the best way would be to establish a central OpenWar module library where developers could submit their modules (or links to their store, if they're selling them).  The feature itself would encourage development to add to the data-base.

i agree, except replace module with fully independent game 


psst solinx, i now you've got a novel coming atm 

All true, and I agree with you completely. However, these kind of logo's are always one of the first things modded or hacked out of the game. We should create the option to turn off the intro and logo's in a game menu. At that point, the name of the engine is known to the player, and very, very few could be annoyed by having to view the intro and logo once.

I know how annoying long intros can be (can anyone say "new line in bfme"  ), so it doesn't have to be longer than 2 seconds

2 Seconds is annoying. It won't be at the first time, neither the second or the tenth, but the eleventh time it starts to get annoying, no matter how short it is, it will symbolise the waiting time before you can play the game. Ive always got the thought that that time is also used to actually load the game, but that didn't make it less a symbol.

If you really want to show a 2 second intro at the start of each game, make a few and let one of them be selected randomly at each game.

In a corner of the menu, we can put the engine name and it's version. Both necessary information, the version alone could make it unclear wether it would be the engine version, or the mod version.

the menu layout will be flexible, so that's for game developers to decide

A flexible menu is good, but it wouldn't hurt any of the games if we put the engine name and version discretely in a corner.

We all know that player can sometimes have the greatest trouble with installing a mod.

nobody will have to install a mod, every game will have an installer which installs the engine and the data in the same dir. every game is completely independent (not counting .net and XNA of course)

Considering we make it easy for people to make games with .XML files, there will likely be quite a lot of small games. Personally, I d go mad if each and everyone would install as any game, including startmenu, desktop shortcut, uninstall reference, etc.

One executable which connects to all these small games would be far easier.

An quite important reason for having a basic package would be to fix critical bugs, security flaws that need to be fixed. If we let modders use older versions, which are known to hold security bugs, it will likely be that we get as much of the blame as the modder if things go wrong. Better save then sorry.

definitely true, but i don't think it outweighs the cons

What are the other cons?

Last point is related to something you said earlier: Advertising, getting the name of the engine out. If we only show a logo, it won't attract any players or modders, we need to show that it's the OpenWar engine that makes the mods they play possible. If we manage that, the engine has a future, if we fail in that, the engine will be unknown and as a result, less used. Sure, really interested modders will take a closer look at find it nonetheless, but casual modders won't.

so we show "Powered by OpenWar" in the intro. also, you keep saying "mods", but it's about "games"

What I meant is that when they go through the OpenWar executable to select and play one of the games, the name will surely linger longer than a simple annoying logo at the start. It will also be much clearer that this engine is an engine that allows people to make their own RTS games. Make their own RTS games without having to do a 3 year study.

In case nothing but Powered by OpenWar is shown, it looks like any other engine. It certainly won't make people think about making their own games. Sure, it could be said in the readme, and in the credits, but few read these.

How do you think ideas for games are generated? Yes, by playing games. Developers play games, not for watching logo's, but for ideas for future projects. But while they may not be playing to see the logo, it doesn't hurt showing it to them at the start.

why are you quoting yourself and responding to it? 

It was CoonDawg I was quoting actually...

I think backwards compatability can and should be supported.  The engine should have the versitility and stability to serve any module's need.  While in development, we should be able to rip up and rework any part of the engine.

i agree, but 100% backwards compatibility is just not possible or really hard. too much work for too little gain. game developers are smart enough to update their engine

We can't promise them 100% backwards compatability, but it's possible to do a lot about it. With new features, we can set either a default value in case nothing is written in the XML files, or, if possible, we can skipp it if no value is found in the XML files. Changes that fit into this category would make patches like from 1.1 to 1.2 or from 1.2.6 to 1.2.7

Big changes, ones that can't be arranged with either of the above options, could be given higher version changes, like from 1.2 to 2.0, or from 1.2.7 to 1.3.0

Having default values would be usefull in any case, as it service as an example, as well as it saves work for game creators that don't want to do a lot.

One of the upsides of OOP is abstraction.  People will use the engine by creating instances of objects and calling functions.

except that's not true. as we have decided earlier, games will entirely be made out of data files (mostly xml)

See points above...

I personally like the idea of having one engine, and one executable, and then potentially dozens of modules that can be loaded at a player's leisure.

apart from the issues i mentioned before (different engine versions), game developers may not want to show a menu or even show a relation to somebody else's game. also, think of the disaster of shared dll's in windows. either one game deletes the engine while it shouldn't, or the engine just remains there unused

Some may oppose it, but then again, they are free to pick up the engine and create a stand alone game with it, as long as credit is given and whatever more is decided as conditions for that.

Having a central executable, it would be useless to have uninstallers. The games could be removed using the central executable in the same way the games could be installed.

I'd rather expect the shared .dll issue would concern the engine independent games like you describe them.

In terms of getting the engine known, the best way would be to establish a central OpenWar module library where developers could submit their modules (or links to their store, if they're selling them).  The feature itself would encourage development to add to the data-base.

i agree, except replace module with fully independent game 

Finally something we all agree with

Solinx

2 Seconds is annoying. It won't be at the first time, neither the second or the tenth, but the eleventh time it starts to get annoying, no matter how short it is, it will symbolise the waiting time before you can play the game. Ive always got the thought that that time is also used to actually load the game, but that didn't make it less a symbol.

count to 2 and then rethink of that

edit: we could also put some loading indicator in a corner

If you really want to show a 2 second intro at the start of each game, make a few and let one of them be selected randomly at each game.

ok good idea

A flexible menu is good, but it wouldn't hurt any of the games if we put the engine name and version discretely in a corner.

yes and it will be default, but with a flexible menu you can't prevent developers from hiding it. i mean, technically you can, but maybe they will want to put something else in that corner

Considering we make it easy for people to make games with .XML files, there will likely be quite a lot of small games. Personally, I d go mad if each and everyone would install as any game, including startmenu, desktop shortcut, uninstall reference, etc.

the games will have sound, art and other large stuff in it. on top of that, the making of games will not be noob-level

as a game developer, i would not want to have my game dependant on something.

In case nothing but Powered by OpenWar is shown, it looks like any other engine. It certainly won't make people think about making their own games. Sure, it could be said in the readme, and in the credits, but few read these.

ok so we also included the website address or some kind of promotion text

It was CoonDawg I was quoting actually...

lol sorry then 

We can't promise them 100% backwards compatability, but it's possible to do a lot about it. With new features, we can set either a default value in case nothing is written in the XML files, or, if possible, we can skipp it if no value is found in the XML files. Changes that fit into this category would make patches like from 1.1 to 1.2 or from 1.2.6 to 1.2.7

imagine that you have to upgrade your engine to make a certain game work, but it breaks an older game you also have installed? again, fully independent games are best here

I'd rather expect the shared .dll issue would concern the engine independent games like you describe them.

we won't use any shared dlls

Finally something we all agree with

yay 

Every OpenWar game will show the openwar logo at the start. It's not required to leave this in, but much appreciated.

Hi, I agree with that, I like the logo in general, if it's a good logo, I can see it twice, maybe more... but after, always the same thing (sound especially). So I like the random idea, with that we will have publicity, and it won't be repetitive for the players. And for those you really hate this add we could add an option that stop the short movie by pressing a key of the keyboard...

oh yes, any intro movie must be skippable with a key, that's for certain

unless we let the game load while playing the movies

oh yes, any intro movie must be skippable with a key, that's for certain

unless we let the game load while playing the movies

Haven't got the time to reply to all the comments, but this one caught my attention sure enough.

You agree that any intro should be skippable with a key if possible. What I suggested at the beginning was that we make it non skippable the first time, and then offer the option (in an options menu) to turn the intro's off. It's pretty much the same thing...

(Note, I m not against this skipping of the intro, certainly not)

Solinx

well turning off is so permanent. and yeah it shouldn't be skippable the first time

btw: yay 200 posts (a bit late  ) and 4 members (+ 1 guest) online 

I lost this topic for some time

Turning off is permanent, but the other option, making it skippable with a key, will become annoying after a certain amount of time. It's like being made to hear the same commercial over and over again. You can skipp it, but not without taking action each time you start the game. Also, if we want to have an intro of a decent size, it will cost the PC time to load that intro. If they skipp the intro, which you can easily bet on, the loading was useless, and only increased the loading time of the game.

The reason that we should permanently have the engine name and it's version number in the main menu is not only to show the engine version number, but also as a permanent reminder of what made the game they are playing possible.

If game developers don't like it, then it's their problem. It will be pretty much the only price they have to pay for using the engine for their game. It doesn't hurt them in any way, it's only a name, a few letters in a corner.

Solinx

How about we just display the logo the first time teh game is played? Alot of games play an intro after it's installed (Warcraft anyone?) and they don't show it again. And in BFME, the first time you load up the game you can't skip any of the intro.  Let's do that.

ok then, you have convinced me

So, you want to force players to watch the logo the first time, and then never show it again?

That kinda permanently removes any advertising after the first go...
And at the first go, people are either excited or curious about the game itself and won't pay much attention to the logo's being shown.

What we need is a non obtrusive way to show the engine's name with each game.
We all agree that a logo does a good job at gaining publicity, but when it get's annoying, that publicity may get negative. That is something we also agree to. Wether we are making it just skippable, or have the option to turn logo's off, is a detail really. What we need is another methode, as a logo is good to have, but doesn't provide us with the perfect solution.

To 2play, I missed this earlier:

count to 2 and then rethink of that

If we show a logo for 2 seconds, rather count 21...22, that comes closer to two seconds than 1...2.

Edit: Hmm, 2playgames, you agreed while I was typing...
I'm wondering what you thought he meant exactly, since Im not completely sure we took his words in the same manner. Or we have different targets... Or, did I convince you?

Solinx

Another possibility is to create a bunch of logos and display them randomly at the beginning. They're still skipable but they play at the start of the game (Unless the developer(s) decide to turn it off).

Having more than one logo got my support, as well as that of TDP and 2play's...

If you really want to show a 2 second intro at the start of each game, make a few and let one of them be selected randomly at each game.

It's nice to know you support it too, great minds think alike

Solinx

nvm, let's do what solinx said earlier: different logos at the start, which can be turned off (though the game developer may disable this, IMO, if he really wants to give us attention  )

I am in favour of GPL.
You have given this name also.
Open source