PtD Source-Code

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Are there any plans to release the Prelude to Darkness source-code? The game is too buggy in its current state and could use a group of maintainers.

I would love to have a look at that.

It would be pretty good, a few fan patches would help a lot.

Well, I don't see any reason not to.
But I guess they might be picky about something that has that much blood and sweat included. Still, I'd love to see the thing go open source. I'm sure there might come great things out of it.

petition?

I know I'm necro-ing, but I haven't been here in a year, and just dropped by to see if any progress has been made on this game, at all.

I know others have finished the game, and I really, really want to do the same...but the crashes and bugs kill my fun. PtD is quite possibly one of the best fantasy rpgs ever made...and yet, with the bugs, I can't do anything with this game.

Anyway, after reading through the other old threads here, I see the developers are on to bigger and better things...like, jobs.

I understand their desire to someday get back to this game--and their hesitation to release it as open source. But...honestly, how likely is that to happen? I mean, if the developers won't have time to work on this game for the next 10 years, in 2018 will anyone really care about a patch?

I'd like to add my suggestion here to release the game as open source, and cut your losses. In the future, when you have time to work on an independent project, I'm betting you'd want to start something new anyway--in 2018, or whenever.

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If, however, the developers would prefer not to open source the game, perhaps they'd be willing to release the code to one or two trusted colleagues? Or another indie game development company? They could even draw out a legal contract, have signatures, and retain some measure of control over the game...

I just hate to see PtD end on a note of "could've been, should've been". Reading the forums, it looks like only six* people in the world have been able to complete this game start to finish. If I were a game developer (which I'm not) but if I were, I would feel a lot more satisfaction knowing that the game I developed continues to grow, and that a lot more people are able to play and enjoy the game (or enjoy fixing the game) I had started.

Please open-source or let someone continue development?

--Zeno

*that's a guess, not a count

Hopefully they were able to implement all the things they might have wanted from the PtD engine.

I downloaded this game, but never got to playing it properly due to the damn bugs. I think letting some coders take a look at the source code would be a great thing.

Not source code but some of the .txt files on the game's main directory, like for example the events.txt, can be modified and (if done correctly) they will recompile on the next run of the game. It is some scripting language.

Someone should try to contact the original author about this. I have extensive professional debugging experience, and this is something I would love to do in my freetime.

I tried to contacted them and asked for the source code, but I didn't get any reply.

I shot the guy with a profile here a PM to no avail.

Try contacting VD. He might know how to get hold of these fellows.

Unfortunately, they backed out on letting him use the engine for AoD, so contacting VD might not lead to anything either. It seems they just want to bury the game in the past and not be reminded about it.

Perhaps he has other email addresses, or frequents places where others that knew them may go. No harm in trying.

I never understood why some people would rather hoard their creations (not saying this is the case here) than just release them into the wild to possibly live on.

http://www.zero-sum.com/about.html

CP McBee
President, Co-Founder, Finance/Marketing, Area Designer (The Barrier Fortress, Jerrock)

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Mat Williams
Co-Founder, Lead Game Designer, Programming, and Art

• mat@zero-sum.com

You know what to do...

Or possibly they licensed a piece of code and can't release the source for that reason... Though the JA2 and Homeworld devs managed to get around this problem by releasing everything *except* the licensed bits.

Hey, sorry I've taken so long to get on this. I'm up for releasing the source out. There shouldn't be any licensing issues. Would have let it go to VD a long time ago, but got lost in the shuffle in a transition between jobs for me.

The source is pretty crappy frankly, although you can do a lot with it. If I do let it out I'll try to answer questions, but I don't have a lot of time to work on it these days. I started re-factoring it to switch graphic engines and get it working on windows 7/vista, but didn't get very far.

Let me look at some repositories for getting it up.

stay tuned,
-mat

Great news. Thank you guys for all you have done.

Although I'll probably never do anything with the code, this is pretty cool.

Awesome.

Wow, this is awesome! Cheers.