0 A.D. Goes Open Source 88
DoubleRing writes "Wildfire Games has announced that it will be moving its previously closed development process for 0 A.D. to open source. All code will be released under the GPL and all art under CC-BY-SA. 0 A.D. is a historically-based RTS, and while it's not yet complete, this trailer is purportedly actual gameplay footage. With a codebase of over 150k lines of C++ code plus 25k lines in development tools, this is looking like a fairly promising entrant into the open source RTS field. The screenshots are definitely pretty, to say the least."
Re:What the devil? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you aware that the year 0 A.D. did not technically exist?
Indeed. Think of 0 A.D. as a hypothetical time period that never existed. It is a snapshot in time where major players of the classical ages were placed in an observatory. This is your chance to see them 'duke it out'. Your job as the player is to create the hypothetical and recreate the historical.
It's called suspension of disbelief, and there are times when it's a good thing. Situations may include books, movies, video games, and other works of fiction.
Lines of code.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What a great thing for Open Source! (Score:5, Insightful)
Coders with enough time and skills will look at the code. If they will find things that can be improved they'll improve them, if they find things that can improve other games they will port them. Open sourcing stuff is like allowing people to communicate, before we have each person and his/her own idea, after we have each one evaluating others perspectives. That's how human knowledge progresses.
Re:Lines of code.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What the devil? (Score:4, Insightful)
Fine. They magically created the concept of "0 A.D." to illustrate that while attempting to be historically accurate, it is still essentially fiction and fantasy ultimately designed to be fun. How's that? Good enough for the ol' ego? Okay, wait, I've got a better one...
The only reason there wasn't a year "0 A.D." is because the people who created the calendars back then weren't as smart as you are and didn't fully understand the concept of zero-offsets, and this game gives you the chance to see what an ancient civilization -- including its calendar -- would have been like if they had been ruled by someone so amazingly intelligent that mentioning "0 A.D." in the context of the real history that was not ruled by their stunning intellect is, to them, insultingly dumb.
There ya go. That has to be at least as good as invisible entryways to magic universes, which I should point out is implicitly implying that you, a stupid muggle, are too dumb to see even when crowds of rambunctious children vanish into them.
Could it be Glest? (Score:2, Insightful)
Glest is OpenSource, too...and if you change the textures on the people and the 'world' a little, you'd have a pretty nice start at a different game. Just another thing to love about OpenSource.
Re:What the devil? (Score:3, Insightful)
you forgot marriage.
Re:What a great thing for Open Source! (Score:4, Insightful)
That sort of approach is wonderful for science, since science has a target: the true state and function of the universe. But it's not so simple for something that amounts to a work of art like a game. There is not an absolute target; the target is arbitrary fiction. Without good central leadership the artistic expression risks becoming fragmented. Now, I'm not saying it's impossible for the open approach to work, but suggesting that it's equivalent to the progress of human knowledge is missing an important complication.