Game News The Golden Baby Flaps Its Wings: Grimoire Demo Released!

[Tramboi]

They sell services, not products... having a wrench at home doesn't stop people from calling a mechanic; having a free game does stop people from buying it.

No, the game is NOT the source code.

 

[Davaris]

What's the point of hiding your sources besides basic programmer's fear of every douchebag in the world laughing at your code?.

Good enough reason for me.

 

[felipepepe]

They sell services, not products... having a wrench at home doesn't stop people from calling a mechanic; having a free game does stop people from buying it.

No, the game is NOT the source code.

And just what people will do with the source code, if not their own versions of Grimoire?

 

[Infinitron]

Okay, which one of you guys is Matt Barton?

 

[Moribund]

Without binary assets and scripts? For a niche game like Grimoire?
Go and get Arx Fatalis sources and make me a cool dungeon crawler then.

That would be perfectly reasonable if you were making a AAA shit-game done entirely in throwaway code like every single commercial game made on a big engine today, and your assets were something hard to improve on. But as I already said you'd just be releasing yet another lame game engine, which is completely pointless.

However for a game like this that has a level editor, complicated game code in C++, etc. it's giving away a free game. A free game someone like Herve Caan can take as a starting point, hire a dozen artists, and release a game that's exactly the same but ten times better production values. All in a couple months since everything is already debugged and art can get churned out fast.

Or just a single artist from grimrock can go "hey thanks" and do the same thing. Oops you're out of business.

But if you don't release all the code, again it's pointless. You can't debug anything if you can't play it, and having my own open sores library that surprising number of people use I've never had one person fix one fucking bug for me in 5 years, not even once. It's a fantasy.Oh I get lots of iritating emails asking me to port to mac or linux, but no help of any kind.

Unless you are making something that becomes wildly popular with tens of thousands of users you won't get any useful help, period. And even if you do you will spend as much time or more managing it than just doing it most the time.

 

[Tramboi]

But if you don't release all the code, again it's pointless. You can't debug anything if you can't play it, and having my own open sores library that surprising number of people use I've never had one person fix one fucking bug for me in 5 years, not even once. It's a fantasy.Oh I get lots of iritating emails asking me to port to mac or linux, but no help of any kind..

It's a bit sad. What is your lib?

And the point is that with the source and the retail game, you can debug it.

 

[Sacred_Path]

Cleve, before I throw any money your way: could you tell a bit about what you did to ensure balance in the game (esp. considering its many skills and attributes), and how extensive a playtesting effort there will be?

 

[Davaris]

and having my own open sores library that surprising number of people use I've never had one person fix one fucking bug for me in 5 years, not even once. It's a fantasy.Oh I get lots of iritating emails asking me to port to mac or linux, but no help of any kind.

I read a similar complaint by the guy that wrote Recast Navigation. So it seems the only advantages, you can expect from going open source, is you get free testing of your favorite lib and others open their libs to you in return.

 

[Tramboi]

Or if you're popular enough, free ports to other platforms, new features, optimizations and bugfixes.

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

Okay, which one of you guys is Matt Barton?

J_C , duh.

 

[Tramboi]

"Something that is often overlooked about Id is that Kevin and Adrian together own 60% of the company. They are artists, and most definitely do not "get" free software"
John Carmack

 

[shihonage]

Stop the demagoguery. John Carmack didn't release sources of his games at least until 5+ years after the game is out. Same goes for 3D Realms. And most other sane commercial developers. Most of whom don't release the source at all.

There's an opposite end of that spectrum - for instance, a game as old as Fallout could benefit from a source code release - but that's clearly not what you're talking about. You're just being a commie.

 

[Tramboi]

Carmack made it clear he would have no problem releasing the major part of his engines sources if he wasn't an associate. And he's selling the technology, so he should be more defensive than 95% of studios issuing gameplay code.
You can also remove all the studios who use middleware not compatible with open-sourcing (the majority).
Anyway in studios, programmers make the code but they clearly don't make the call about this. If you release the runtime code without the tools, nobody can sanely make a game.

And what about Radon Labs and their Nebula Engine? With a MIT license!
Who took the engine and made a Drakensang clone for free? And this is a really good engine.
Where is the "brand dilution and fragmentation, people releasing competing products and even their own "sequels" and stealing your customers"?
I hope you won't be a big enough troll to say they went bankrupt because of this. Sad because they made good games and had the balls to go open-source on their engine.
Making your non-commie point totally valid, I guess.

PS: Floh is a great coder, http://flohofwoe.blogspot.fr/

 

[Kz3r0]

And what about Radon Labs and their Nebula Engine? With a MIT license!
Who took the engine and made a Drakensang clone for free? And this is a really good engine.
Where is the "brand dilution and fragmentation, people releasing competing products and even their own "sequels" and stealing your customers"?
I hope you won't be a big enough troll to say they went bankrupt because of this. Sad because they made good games and had the balls to go open-source on their engine.
Making your non-commie point totally valid, I guess.

Let's talk about Minecraft.

 

[Davaris]

Or if you're popular enough, free ports to other platforms, new features, optimizations and bugfixes.

Recast Navigation is as popular as you can get, for open source path finding and navigation in 3D games and even that dev complains he gets zero help. So realistically, you can only expect free loaders, if you open source. What you are talking about - other people improving your library for free, is very rare, it is the stuff of pipe dreams. So I would advise people not to open source, unless they really love their library and don't mind supporting it week in week out, for years and years.

Speaking for myself there is code I have worked on, I can't face looking at again. So open source is not a decision anyone should make lightly. It is a responsibility.

 

[Davaris]

The other huge problem with open source, because no one gets paid, they only support it when it is convenient, or when they feel like it.

That means when you really need help, you may never get that help. When you want to get things done and are blocked by something simple, because no one will answer a simple question, that is an awful feeling and a huge waste of your time.

I have waited weeks for answers on open source forums and never got those answers. However with the commercial engine I am using (C4), my questions have never gone unanswered and they were answered within a few hours, 24 at most. So if I had the choice between open source and properly supported software I can afford, open source will always lose. Paying people to do work they may not always enjoy, is the only sure way to get them to do that work.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

Cleve, weapon skill raises even when you miss?

That's right. Your intelligence affects the way you learn from your successes. Your wisdom affects the way you learn from your mistakes. If your wisdom is high, missing can be a learning experience.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

They sell services, not products... having a wrench at home doesn't stop people from calling a mechanic; having a free game does stop people from buying it.

No, the game is NOT the source code.

My advice is - keep your day job. You are not going to succeed indie. It sounds right, which is good enough if you don't actually have to try it.

 

[Moribund]

But again you always go back to releasing engine code which is pointless these days except as a curiosity, for games that have spent millions on assets. Modern game, the code aside from the engine is completely worthless. You think it's hard to make the A button move the character forward?

If Cleve for example were doing it all open source here's exactly what would happen. Before he even released anything, someone else would release his game for him, with a much higher budget.

Then a bunch of dudes would rip out a bunch of stuff and put in "standard" libraries. It would run a lot more shitty and have a bunch of new bugs but hey it would be "standard".

Anyway, I have interest in doing things open source to some extent, but for a game it's difficult to separate stuff out.

Also people underestimate how hard it is to do things if you don't take time to cut things out and simplify their use as in recast navigation. I never expect to see a bug fix in my library either because 1. Most people just can't contribute, it's very difficult subject area. 2. Things are not as separated out and simple as they could be or well documented. 3. People just don't. On the other hand any bad thing they could maybe do, you can be sure they will do immediately, so you have to think through carefully what they could do that you won't like because you can be certain this is the first thing anyone will do.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

Stop the demagoguery. John Carmack didn't release sources of his games at least until 5+ years after the game is out. Same goes for 3D Realms. And most other sane commercial developers. Most of whom don't release the source at all.

There's an opposite end of that spectrum - for instance, a game as old as Fallout could benefit from a source code release - but that's clearly not what you're talking about. You're just being a commie.

I promise to release complete source of Grimoire 1 when Grimoire 2 development begins in Unity.

 

[Zeriel]

Stop the demagoguery. John Carmack didn't release sources of his games at least until 5+ years after the game is out. Same goes for 3D Realms. And most other sane commercial developers. Most of whom don't release the source at all.

There's an opposite end of that spectrum - for instance, a game as old as Fallout could benefit from a source code release - but that's clearly not what you're talking about. You're just being a commie.

I promise to release complete source of Grimoire 1 when Grimoire 2 development begins in Unity.

Pretty sure joking. Not entirely sur--oh, fuck it, 2D developer doing Unity? Nopenopenope, joking.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

I have gathered that these problems (which have never appeared on any of my development machines) may have a strong correlation with my switch from STLPort to the Visual Studio 10 STL implementation. There may be corrupted heap pointers (a famous feature of M$ STL) that do not trigger an exception on Win XP but do in the more controlled memory space of Win 7.

Are you serious? You really think you're hitting bugs in MS STL instead of doing undefined stuff?

Are you serious? If you are not familiar with the problems between the STL standard and the Microsoft implementation, this interview ends now. You're clearly a fraud. The problems with M$ STL go back to Visual Studio 6 where it was so buggy it was totally impractical for use in any release code. But hey, since you claim to have been developing for 13 years I am sure you have heard these issues a million times. After all, they have always been a primary point of inquiry for anyone writing C++ using a M$ compiler. This is directly connected to the rise of the Boost library in its place. But hey, you're a developer so you already know about all this, right? After all, anybody writing C++ code has to have collection classes of some kind or they'd be better off writing in ANSI C, right? Mysterious, your references. I'm sorry but I think we will end the interview here.

Moribund is obviously a real developer. I've heard ten of them tell me already I was really asking for it when I defaulted to M$ STL after using STLPort all these years. Everybody tells me the same thing - it's crap, guaranteed heap errors doing the simplest operations. I don't know what you are. I think you are in a trailer right now getting ready to scrub up for your shift at Dennys working the cash register. Are you a C++ developer or do you work in Lisp or Turtle or something at your "big game development house?"

 

[evdk]

Pretty sure joking. Not entirely sur--oh, fuck it, 2D developer doing Unity? Nopenopenope, joking.

Prepare to be surprised.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

Stop the demagoguery. John Carmack didn't release sources of his games at least until 5+ years after the game is out. Same goes for 3D Realms. And most other sane commercial developers. Most of whom don't release the source at all.

There's an opposite end of that spectrum - for instance, a game as old as Fallout could benefit from a source code release - but that's clearly not what you're talking about. You're just being a commie.

I promise to release complete source of Grimoire 1 when Grimoire 2 development begins in Unity.

Pretty sure joking. Not entirely sur--oh, fuck it, 2D developer doing Unity? Nopenopenope, joking.

I've got a full prototype running right now and I don't even know much about vector math.

I combined three different libraries from the asset store and they handled the step-based movement and the phased combat for me.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

What you are talking about - other people improving your library for free, is very rare, it is the stuff of pipe dreams.

This.