Warsow 1.0 To Be Released Tomorrow

[Simonlc]

Isn't forking a good thing?
If people have the freedom to fork, that's great!

Nexuiz was a good open source project, until those assholes fucked over the community and went proprietary. Then thanks to the fork in the form of Xonotic, now Nexuiz lives on!

Sure, I love forking projects, for many reasons. Normally though, art assets aren't always the best fit for open source. Now I could come up with many examples where art is a great fit for open source, but it really comes down to wanting to keep the look and feel of the game unique. Another huge reason for not wanting forks is the inevitable community split, which again we can see with Xonotic vs Nexuiz.

[uid313]

Another huge reason for not wanting forks is the inevitable community split, which again we can see with Xonotic vs Nexuiz.

Well wasn't the Xonotic a good thing?
Nexuiz management sold out and fucked everyone.
But thanks to Xonotic, it could live on under a new name.

[Simonlc]

Well the good thing about Warsow is that it will always remain 100% free. If that wasn't the case though, nothing is stopping you from playing the version being released tomorrow. Sure the content might not be free, but you're still fully capable of forking the engine.

Edit: typo

[uid313]

Well the good thing about Warsow is that it will always remain 100% free. If that wasn't the case though, nothing is stopping you from playing the version being released tomorrow. Sure the content might not be free, but you're still fully capable of forking the engine.

Then I tell all my friends about it, and they tell theirs. We start playing believing it is open source and remain so and a community is growing. We contribute patches, and help the developers with the game and the game grows and gets popular.

Then they fuck us all over, and close the source, and go proprietary with the game media assets.
Then we cant fork it, because the media assets are proprietary.

The media assets needs to be free in case the developers fuck the community over, or if they cancel the project. Forking is essential to a healthy system where it can continue to grow and evolve. Else it is too vulnerable.

[Simonlc]

I understand your point, though it's been 7 years now, with 7 major releases. Nothing is stopping you from picking up one of those releases, and playing the game with a new client, or mod. The developers and founder are very adamant about the game remaining free. The topic has come up countless times to ask and put the game on steam for promotion, though as you may know steam only allows games that make money.

[Loafers]

Hi, I'm the one that emailed Phoronix about the game release, just here to clear up a few things. Warsow's codebase is completely open source. The media however is not, and the reason is to prevent forks. Many of you may already know about Xonotic being forked from Nexuiz.

Warsow's engine is the Qfusion project, and can be used to create a game from. Qfusion is based on idtech 2, the Quake II engine, not idtech 3. Though it actually supports loading maps from idtech 1, 2 and 3.

I'm not an expert on the project, but Qfusion has many improvements, such as netcode, very fast loading of content, rendering improvements, and some rendering features you'd see in idtech 4. I'm not quite sure on the specifics, but it's a pretty massive project for mainly one person.

To be clear about the post, the full game is being released tomorrow, not a demo of any sort.

I hope that clears up everyone's questions.

Hi Simon. Thanks for the clarification !

From your perspective, I can kinda see why you'd want to keep the media under a proprietary license.

Anyway, so long as the game is free, I can't really complain. Plus, more competition is better !

[madjr]

I used to play it, was pretty cool game.

however some maps were a bit hard as you needed to do some precise maneuvering, but at least it was cool to watch the pros at it.

Might try it again.

[oibaf]

Just want to say that forking usually happens when the project has some serious issues. If the project is well managed and developed there is no need for a fork. See Xonotic and also Libreoffice and Xorg examples. If the project is not open source and can't be forked there is a big chance it will die.

[crizis]

Qfusion, as a stand-alone engine is dead. The last couple updates to Qfusion were basically back-porting Warsow features. That's a bit too bad, because the Warsow team is completely against having a source repo available for those who want it. You must wait for their SDK source drop after their releases. Anyway, here's the source which basically says that Qfusion is dead: http://e4m5.net/archives/34

Hey there

I wanna clear one thing up: Warsow is the Qfusion and Qfusion is far from dead 1.0 engine changes are ernomous, making the engine pretty darn modern in many aspects: Hardware rendered skeletal animations, incredibly high map performance with VBO's, octagon hitboxes, nice e-sport features like r_drawflat etc. You can read more about our new engine stuff here.

Secondly we do have our reasons for keeping semi-closed* repository. The engine projects we have are always pretty gigantic, multi-month projects which need big commitment from the guys who do them. For example we're likely first, or at least one of the very first open source engine projects to bring modern-day engine stuff to the open source engines, like hardware rendered models (classic Quake 2/3 engine forks do this in the CPU, being very inefficient in model rendering).

When it comes to the media assets, it's true that they're not open source. To clarify that a bit - we're not an open source project, we're a free game project. There are pros and cons in both ways of development. With fully open projects it's usually easier to find contributors. On the other hand our media is very high quality and professional, which then again is due "closed" nature of the project. People who contribute for us are actual game developers, and usually want something to show in their portfolio and which doesn't get forked around different projects and modified to death by other people.

To put it short, we're just trying to make the best possible free and unique fps.

*) We're actually very open to contributors who actually commit on these projects. But on the other hand having open repository would somehow imply that we're interested in merging every random idea that anyone comes up with. This is not the case - we have our vision what the game should be, and people usually just get mad when we decline their code/features which does not fit in our vision of the game.

For players everything is and will always remain free however. So hopefully you enjoy our release

[curaga]

I understand your point, though it's been 7 years now, with 7 major releases. Nothing is stopping you from picking up one of those releases, and playing the game with a new client, or mod. The developers and founder are very adamant about the game remaining free. The topic has come up countless times to ask and put the game on steam for promotion, though as you may know steam only allows games that make money.

Why's that an issue? Set it up on Steam for 10$, then do a promo 70% off, get 3$ per copy.

It wouldn't even be immoral in any way, just say in the description that this is a donation, the game is free.