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XCOMUFO & Xenocide

How Goes Xenocide?


spacekdet

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  • 1 month later...
  • 5 months later...

I'm sure Xenocide is going very well, but I'd like know something. Xenocide was started in 2002, right? Do you have a schedule, or is it so that in june of 2003 you did quite a lot and then in november 2003 you didn't do very much? I understand that you work on your free time and purely on voluntary basis, but wouldn't it practical to agree on a pace of work, even such a pace that allows your other activities, but a pace that would stand as a backbone and a motivator? Please note that I don't want to be some sort of inpatient consumer. I'd like to help, though my computer skills are limited. There is a limit, however, what is the acceptable time of waiting for a however good game. Seconly, if you had a schedule, you could easily answer the questions of what and when, which I too like to know.

 

Kind regards, Miltopaeus, Finland :Blush:

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Well having in mind that the common titles (commercial ones) do have budgets that are bigger than 3 millions, employ at least 6 programmers working full-time ( at least 8 hours a day, 5 days a week ) and took 18 month (more or less)...

 

And that we have lots of people doing modelling but far less programmers (I can count 4 or 5 doing free time work) even if we unload the work to the graphics engine (OGRE), the work that we are doing is very good, and we are slowly moving forward (as we want to do a commercial quality game) but we are moving.

 

Another thing is that we do this for fun so most of us has full time jobs or are full time students so agree on a pace it is somehow difficult (even if you want to). And as I always say, Real Life is top priority, Xenocide Idle.

 

Greetings

Red Knight

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RK, you forgot to mention that we aim to be ready by the end of the year. That means we would have made very good time, even in comparison with commercial games. If we don't, ah well, there's always next year.....
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RK, you forgot to mention that we aim to be ready by the end of the year.  That means we would have made very good time, even in comparison with commercial games.  If we don't, ah well, there's always next year.....

"by the end of 2004" was and is an extremely rough target that we threw out so people would stop asking. Xenocide v1 will probably be completed some time after that date.

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Why not pull a DNF? It'll be released when it's done :P

hehe :D That's the exact time! You can't ask a better estimate :)

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  • 4 months later...

Why not get corporate sponsorship? (I know, easier said than done.)

 

The video game industry is saturated right now with crappy games.. This forum is more active than half the game forums out there for games that were released 6 months ago, and this game is 10 years old. Go to www.planetageofmythology.com if you want an example of this. The game was released within the last 2 years and is still in the top 10 of sales. It's a good game, yes.. But it's no X-Com. If Xenocide had more exposure it would certainly draw in a massive fanbase of old school gamers. Every time I have ever shown any of my friends X-Com they have either loved it, or said "OH MY GOD I REMEMBER THAT GAME! IT'S AWESOME!"

 

Another great thing is that X-Com is truly unlike the majority of popular games now-a-days.. It's a break from the hum-drum of First person shooters, Real Time Strategys, Massively multiplayer online RPG's, and all of the high-end computer graphics accelerated blahtitityblahblah blah balogna.

 

The only game I have found with more re-playability than X-Com is Counter-strike.. Both games have somehow managed to find the elixer of eternal youth.. I understand why Counter-strike .. It's a team based multiplayer game with a dynamic community. X-Com however is quite the opposite.

 

I'm sure there has to be somebody out there who would be willing to supplement your pay so it wouldn't be "In your spare time", of course, you would probably be required to hand over copyrights once the game goes public.

 

I guess it's all a matter of what you're willing to do, and what you can handle.

 

Are you martyr enough to sell yourself out for the sake of the X-Com community? If not, teach me to program and I'll sell myself out for you. :D

Edited by EtherImp
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Why not get corporate sponsorship? (I know, easier said than done.)

 

The video game industry is saturated right now with crappy games.. This forum is more active than half the game forums out there for games that were released 6 months ago, and this game is 10 years old. Go to www.planetageofmythology.com if you want an example of this. The game was released within the last 2 years and is still in the top 10 of sales. It's a good game, yes.. But it's no X-Com. If Xenocide had more exposure it would certainly draw in a massive fanbase of old school gamers. Every time I have ever shown any of my friends X-Com they have either loved it, or said "OH MY GOD I REMEMBER THAT GAME! IT'S AWESOME!"

 

Another great thing is that X-Com is truly unlike the majority of popular games now-a-days.. It's a break from the hum-drum of First person shooters, Real Time Strategys, Massively multiplayer online RPG's, and all of the high-end computer graphics accelerated blahtitityblahblah blah balogna.

 

The only game I have found with more re-playability than X-Com is Counter-strike.. Both games have somehow managed to find the elixer of eternal youth.. I understand why Counter-strike .. It's a team based multiplayer game with a dynamic community. X-Com however is quite the opposite.

 

I'm sure there has to be somebody out there who would be willing to supplement your pay so it wouldn't be "In your spare time", of course, you would probably be required to hand over copyrights once the game goes public.

 

I guess it's all a matter of what you're willing to do, and what you can handle.

 

Are you martyr enough to sell yourself out for the sake of the X-Com community? If not, teach me to program and I'll sell myself out for you.  :D

 

There can be no corperate sponsorship because there is no money to be made on xenocide due to the legal license that we use. The license protects the IP in the sense that it assures that noone can profit from xenocide other than through intellectual enrichment. If I understand it correctly, people can chop it up, turn it inside out, use any portion of the contents and call it their own creation, but they cannot sell anything based on it.

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Yup. The GPL prevents us from selling it, even if we wanted to.

 

The truth is that many of the more important xenocide devs are here because it's an open source game. If we gave this to an actual company, much of the creative talent would leave.

 

Then, it couldn't really be called Xenocide, the company would lose contact with the fans, etc.

 

We don't have that problem because we are the fans. We don't need any fancy groups to make sure we get the game right.

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There can be no corperate sponsorship because there is no money to be made on xenocide due to the legal license that we use.  The license protects the IP in the sense that it assures that noone can profit from xenocide other than through intellectual enrichment.

GPL license does not to restrict your freedom to make profit from GPL programs, as long as the sources are freely available. In fact, Richard Stallman, the author (or one of the authors) of GPL license even encourages using GPL license in business. Confusing, right ;)

 

And that's not just a theory, there are many commercial projects using GPL license, check these two links for example:

http://www.mysql.com/

http://www.trolltech.com/

 

Also there are many examples when large corporations donate money to free projects, which are essential for IT progress and used by many people.

 

If I understand it correctly, people can chop it up, turn it inside out, use any portion of the contents and call it their own creation, but they cannot sell anything based on it.

You understand it wrong. People can chop it up, turn it inside out, use any portion of the contents, and can sell it. But they can't call it their own creation (or at least, they can't claim that they made that software completely on their own) and must provide for free all the sources of what they have modified. People even can't distribute derived work for free if they do not provide the sources.

Edited by Serge
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You understand it wrong. People can chop it up, turn it inside out, use any portion of the contents, and can sell it. But they can't call it their own creation (or at least, they can't claim that they made that software completely on their own) and must provide all the sources of what they have modified. People even can't distribute derived work for free if they do not provide the sources.

 

So in theory, a publishing company could make some sort of a strategy guide for Xenocide, bundle the game with it and market it in bookstores as they please? This is happening with linux distributions too, there's about dozen different linux handbooks in my local store and most of them bundle the software with them.

 

I'd imagine that Atari or whoever owns the rights to the X-com series would put their foot down at this point if they could prove the resemblance between the two games.

 

Edit: On the issue of sponsorship, I wonder how much news coverage gaming magazines like PC gamer would exchange for some in-game advertising (small posters, road adverts and such). :D

Edited by fidel_
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Exactly, but it is free anyways and that is the point. You have a choice, you can download it for free or buy it with manuals, cool CDs and that stuff. If some company wants to do that and help making Xenocide it would be foolish not to do it, cause they can do it anyways under a free license, and if they make a fork of it they have to make it free too. So everybody wins.

 

We once got a call from a small publisher and we encouraged it, but after we told them what the GPL means (they were not wise enough I think, they should had investigated before contact us) they shutdown contact (it seams they wanted the IP in the bargain too), something we cannot give them, that is the reason there are not companies investing in open source games, while there is in the bussiness market. In games what it is valuable is the IP, in bussiness the profit can be given not only by selling IP software, but by using it internally and open source do the mantainance (like in the case of Eclipse, Cloudscape and several others projects). Mhhh there is third way, debunk the competition and when everybody is using the open source version because of cost, win the consulting contracts ;) or custom tailoring contracts, in most cases there is more money involved in consulting that in selling software.

 

Greetings

Red Knight

Edited by red knight
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We once got a call from a small publisher and we encouraged it, but after we told them what the GPL means (they were not wise enough I think, they should had investigated before contact us) they shutdown contact (it seams they wanted the IP in the bargain too), something we cannot give them, that is the reason there are not companies investing in open source games, while there is in the bussiness market.

Publishers are just dumb greedy ill mannered persons. One of my friends is working in a game development company. They had very bad experience dealing with publishers. The game was available on shelves, a lot of people bought it, but the developers did not get a single cent from the publisher. The only profit they got was what they sold from online store on their website :(

 

By the way, X-COM is now also dead because of evil publishers :cussing:

 

Looks like the only possible ways for open source projects to get profit are:

  • donations
  • paid support
  • contracted work

Edited by Serge
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one of the problems of big-time publishers is the amount of games from developers that they just dump because there's a 1% chance they won't be successful :(

 

1% is a lot though when you view it on the world market.

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