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Aquaria Goes Open Source
A post on the Wolfire blog yesterday announced that the source code for Aquaria has now been released. Aquaria, an action-adventure, underwater sidescroller from Bit Blot, was part of the Humble Indie Bundle, which was so successful that the developers of four games pledged to release them as open source. This marks the final release, following Lugaru, Gish, and Penumbra: Overture. The source code is available from a Mercurial repository.
Very reminiscent of Ecco the Dolphin. I found it a bit weird that the environments were so awesome looking while the main character looked like it was drawn by a ten year old, but other than that it was a great game. Be sure to check it out.
Living With a Nerd
Quake, Quake 2, et al., are the same way.
Better known as 318230.
This opinion has come up in every story about these games. It's simply wrong. There is plenty that can be done with the code, even while the data remains proprietary.
It would be extremely nice, in fact, if it became common practice for commercial games to have open-source code and proprietary data. That way the creators could still have an obvious way to make money, while the community could take care of making the game run on different platforms etc. (I guess it wouldn't work for multiplayer due to the rampant cheating that would ensue ...)
Why a non-story? I have the data already, since I bought the game. The source code was what I was missing to be able to make some improvements I've been thinking of.
This is exactly what I wanted, and I didn't expect anything more than that.
If you're the same guy who keeps posting about this on the wolfire blog, just do a favour and stop complaining. If you don't see this as an opportunity for some improvements, then perhaps you're not really able to do any, and what you really want is free of charge game, but that was never promised in the first place.
On my part, all I wanted is the source, I got it, so I'm happy.
The outcome of the humble bundle couldn't have been better IMO, and I'll gladly contribute to any future initiatives of the sort.
(I guess it wouldn't work for multiplayer due to the rampant cheating that would ensue ...)
Quakeworld was an object lesson in this. Very shortly after the Quake source went GPL, you saw speed hacks. There were those in the Quake (specifically Team Fortress) community who believed that this was Carmack's poison pill to finally kill off the game. However, newer server code soon followed that detected speed hacks (among other things). And, for the most part, a game that had already survived numerous cheats before it was Open Source, continued to survive afterwards.
It should be noted that one of Carmack's discussions around that time was the problem of balancing out latency without trusting the client too much (said trust being the issue that lead to speed hacks).