Open source the engine after x years

I'm a TA and and I think it's sad that the game was never open sourced.
It's not about having a free games, but more about correct small bugs and make small improvement to have a perfect version.
Of course, only once the game is no more sell. After like 6-7 years.
Or if Uber goes bankrupt like Cavedog

We could have a bug free version on Windows 7 and Windows 8 and whatever OS come next. ( I always have network problems with Windows 7 )
The pathfinder could have been improved. The current one is very weak.
Adding improvement like a gradual metal reclaiming, even bigger maps, auto-downloading of maps, coherent right click support etc..

I'm sure the community around TA would be a lot bigger than it is now.
Look how successfull OpenTTD is. ( OpenTTD is a remake of Transport Tycoon )

If Planetary Annihilation is as good as TA, I think it would be a shame to have the same ending that TA.

Thanks for reading!

This might possibly be slightly too soon to think about.

Perhaps you're right, but I just hate when I want to setup a TA game with friends and slowly everybody give up because of small problems

Oh and it's really easier to open source a game when it was planned from the beggining.
( By avoiding potential 3rd party which could cause problems )

Actually, yes, that'd be swell.

Like Doom, Quake (1,2,3) or Descent that were open sourced.

OpenTTD is, as you say a remake. They remade the original Transport Tycoon Deluxe from scratch and didn't have access to its source. Unless you wanted to make a different point.

I agree.

Making it Open Source does not make it free. They would still own the assets, like models, textures and sound, which they could still sell.

Oh, and I wholly endorse this.

True, but yeah that was not really what I meant to say.
The mecanics of transport tycoon were deeply analyzed to make a near perfect copy.
When you start a project around an already well defined game, it's easier to keep in focus and to have a community which stand together.
An OpenTTD3D, SuperTransport or whatever would never have been so successful.

Exact, thank you for the clarification

I'm not seeing any rules against necro-ing, but I would like to say that I came here to post this very thing.

I would greatly appreciate it if you arranged it so that, when the game has run its course and there's basically no money to be made in it, that you release the code to the community as open source. I mean, look at how well FreeSpace 2 Open has done -- Volition had no more use for the code, so it released it to the community. It's still being modded on -- in fact a new mod for Battlestar Galactica came out this week, I'm downloading it now. I doubt you would have to do something as drastic as Qt's legal poison-pill option (which releases Qt as a minimally restricted toolkit should no open-source updates occur), but I think it's an area that should be explored.

I feel since the community is helping you get started, that it seems elegant to give back to the community when you eventually sunset Planetary Annihilation. I'm not saying you have a moral imperative to open-source every single line of code and art asset and IP right; I'm happy to kickstart you just for the sake of making an awesome game. I'm just saying, where you can, keep an eye towards giving back to the community.

I support this idea too. It would be great to have the game open sourced after it is no longer being maintained. The game could even handed to an open source mainenance group - a group of volunteers that aims to further improve the game and releases new updates even long after it is no longer cared about by Uber.

If we do it right, PA may have a very long life. There should be a plan that determines what happens with PA when it is no longer commercially interesting to maintain the game and host the game servers. Hosted multiplayer features should not break after X years too, I believe.

While there may be a lot of merit to the suggestions here, does anyone else besides me think that this is kinda like eyeballing Grandpa's nice boat when he's still quite healthy, and saying "Hey can I have that when you croak"?

Just sayin' :roll:

Better to ask while the makers still have control of the IP, and have not lost the source code due to something or other.

More like being engaged to someone and wanting to make sure they have a living will. It *can* look like gold digging or over cautious or such, but I don't think we mean it that way.

I agree with making it open source after a certain number of years. Considering this game is supposed to scale into the future, I think going open source eventually is a must.

I'd like to see it happen simply because I'm interested in the community being able to recompile 15 years from now for Windows 10 or Mac OS XIV. Wouldn't it be nice if PA lasted forever?

The reason TA is still playable today is that it doesn't use 3D acceleration at all, IIRC; all the graphics computation were done on the CPU. Other games that did use 3D acceleration are frequently no longer playble, as the graphics drivers and OS have evolved out from under them.

Also, open source code is a huge, huge, huge boon for modding.

As uber themselves have said, there's a real limit to the number of people who are actually looking out for the RTS genre. A commitment to release the code open-source after say, 5 years, would really make a statement.

I for one would immediately jump my pledge up.

Can we address this again in 5 years? Nobody here has anything against open source but there are a lot of business realities involved. I've always admired the fact that Carmack was able to open source his old engines but he's really the exception that proves the rule.

If you promise to actually be able to address it and not end up having no people at Uber to pin down to actually resolve this issue in 5 years

Of course! My primary reason for posting was to get someone at Uber to look at this thread and take more than 0 seconds to consider that possibility. To have you respond and say "Well, nobody's opposed to it", even without any promises or commitments, is just icing on the cake.

Ha, yes. I've already run into that with a project I was on. It was a rapid game development platform so the CS majors at my university could develop new AI games every semester for a competition. (Fun!) Recently this question came up ("Can we license/open-source this?") and it was realized we would have to track down every developer and get their sign-off/opinion. It's do-able -- we probably have git commit history going back to almost all of the project, it's only 5 years old and I'm sure we can get in touch with a few recent college grads -- but we'll still need the paperwork done before we can do anything with it other than what it was designed for.

So yeah, if you could keep that in mind, set up the minuscule amount of extra legal paperwork to keep track of things, I think the benefits are obvious and we would all appreciate it. (As an example, something like "all the copyright assignments for this project go to the company, and the company current employees can vote on how it gets licensed by 75% majority" would probably cover the bases. Things get trickier if you license other technology. I am not a lawyer, this is not actual legal advice).

Again, the decision is up to you, when you want to make the decision -- but a little legwork and planning now would make sure that all options remain open when you need them.