THE problem with xconq (long)

[Stan Shebs]

"A. Rick Anderson" wrote:
> 
> Also, on Stan and Hans' comments about motivation.  There is real merit to
> those comments.  For thirty-five bucks, I can pick up Starcraft, Lord's of
> the Realm or Age of Empire and they are light years ahead of any Freeware
> or Open Source project.  Maybe it's age.  Lately, I'd rather spend the money.

That is a key observation that you can use to evaluate the prospects
of any open-source project - what are the motivations, and how strong
are they?  My original motivation for Xconq was to play Empire on a
Unix machine, because I couldn't get sources to the VMS one that I
got to play briefly.  Since there was no other way to get it going,
my motivation was very high, and several weeks of coding gave me
something that was gratifying to continue with.  Later on, Xconq
was the only terrain-based strategy game for X11 workstations, so
anybody with such a workstation was very motivated to maintain
and improve it.

Something along the lines of Starcraft requires massive motivation
for a long period of time, with multiple specialists getting into
the act.  It would be really hard to assemble a team of volunteers
for that, and by the time you're done, it would not be as appealing
as the latest commercial game.  If StarCraft cost $1000/copy,
it would probably be easier to assemble that group...

Another benchmark is FreeCiv.  It has a pretty sizeable group of
developers, including multiple specialists.  But, this is *Civ*,
the #1 most popular strategy game of all time, and, I believe,
the only commercial game from 1996 still selling at a commercial
price rather than from the bargain bin.  So you'd expect any game
less popular than Civ to garner a correspondingly smaller number
of volunteer cloners.

This all sounds a little negative perhaps, but I don't think of
that way - it's that success is to be had by designing projects
of a scope commensurate with the resources available.

> BTW: congrats to Stan on getting back with Apple.  I was wondering where
> you ended up after the Red-hat buy-out.

Have I been that quiet?  My second anniversary with Apple is on
Thursday...

Stan