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Last month Electronic Arts was releasing the TiberianDawn.dll and RedAlert.dll and their corresponding source code under the GPL version 3.0 license on Github.
https://github.com/electronicarts/CnC_Remastered_Collection/
So you might ask now what that could have to do with the AoE franchise?
Well, I think (IMHO) it could be essential to the healthy development of the game to create an open-source development environment (on Microsofts own platform Github e.g.) together with the community developers.
As Electronic Arts shows with this release they accept community projects and their work and are willing to open themselves for the greater good and the future of the game - something people are worried about in the community for AoE2DE.
Releasing the code to another >20-year-old engine of a RTS game and the corresponding data formats would be a key moment for the game industry as well. And would be a huge gesture towards its' community.
We should start bugging the people over at World's Edge (that are in charge of bugging Microsoft about certain things) to give this more attention.
Q&A - Questions and Answers
A collection of questions and some answers (updated regularly)
Doesn't that make it more vulnerable to hacking?
I don't think so. It will not make it worse as the hacks are already open-source and easily accessible. In China you can buy a resource hack tool for 14$, the source code to an ESP (Fog of War hack) is existing on Github. So imho: No, you can not make the engine more vulnerable to hacking than this with open-sourcing something. I don't say cheating is less likely, it's just less likely that even more cheating will happen.
What implications has open-source on monetization for Microsoft?
I would say not many. It will be still possible to create official DLCs and monetize them via Steam for example or MS Store. It's still possible to sell AoE2DE as a content package for this engine, because the franchise still has the license for the assets. But in addition people are able to create their own content like DLCs and things with their own assets and even sell them as well (depending on the license). Furthermore changes, enhancements by the people could be merged in the official codebase, that means both sides are profiting from that (also depending on the license chosen, I'm personally in favour of GPLv3).
What does open-source change in terms of communication with the community?
People are frustrated these days that there is no official communication channel with regular status updates to development of features or bugfixes. Well, Github projects can help (e.g. WK task board), also to have an issue tracker (e.g. openage issue tracker) can make common issues more transparent and give people the choice to directly sent feedback on bugs to the developers. With Pull requests you can be part of the development, because you are able to commit code to the codebase. Once a pull request is opened, potential changes can be discussed and reviewed and others can add follow-up commits before the changes are merged into the codebase.
So the community would be able to see, how far is a certain feature in development, how is the prioritisation of a certain feature etc. More transparency towards the community (as it was before) can be really helpful here.
How could a possible open-sourced Genie engine look like in infrastructure/distribution terms?
When we talk about open-sourcing the engine that is running the game we talk about the common ground of AoE1, AoE1DE, AoC, AoK, AoE2DE, AoE2HD, Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds - the Genie Engine with all the quirks in the build files it needs to get these games running BUT - and that is important - without the original assets. So for example we could imagine, that there is a base engine distributed over Steam that would take AoE1DE or AoE2DE (or others) as an asset pack to play the games with people that bought these asset packs as well. Cross-play with other asset packs would be most likely not possible in the first place.
A good read by the way is this here:
Reddit - Dive into anything
www.reddit.com
https://github.com/electronicarts/CnC_Remastered_Collection/
So you might ask now what that could have to do with the AoE franchise?
Well, I think (IMHO) it could be essential to the healthy development of the game to create an open-source development environment (on Microsofts own platform Github e.g.) together with the community developers.
As Electronic Arts shows with this release they accept community projects and their work and are willing to open themselves for the greater good and the future of the game - something people are worried about in the community for AoE2DE.
Releasing the code to another >20-year-old engine of a RTS game and the corresponding data formats would be a key moment for the game industry as well. And would be a huge gesture towards its' community.
We should start bugging the people over at World's Edge (that are in charge of bugging Microsoft about certain things) to give this more attention.
Q&A - Questions and Answers
A collection of questions and some answers (updated regularly)
Doesn't that make it more vulnerable to hacking?
I don't think so. It will not make it worse as the hacks are already open-source and easily accessible. In China you can buy a resource hack tool for 14$, the source code to an ESP (Fog of War hack) is existing on Github. So imho: No, you can not make the engine more vulnerable to hacking than this with open-sourcing something. I don't say cheating is less likely, it's just less likely that even more cheating will happen.
What implications has open-source on monetization for Microsoft?
I would say not many. It will be still possible to create official DLCs and monetize them via Steam for example or MS Store. It's still possible to sell AoE2DE as a content package for this engine, because the franchise still has the license for the assets. But in addition people are able to create their own content like DLCs and things with their own assets and even sell them as well (depending on the license). Furthermore changes, enhancements by the people could be merged in the official codebase, that means both sides are profiting from that (also depending on the license chosen, I'm personally in favour of GPLv3).
What does open-source change in terms of communication with the community?
People are frustrated these days that there is no official communication channel with regular status updates to development of features or bugfixes. Well, Github projects can help (e.g. WK task board), also to have an issue tracker (e.g. openage issue tracker) can make common issues more transparent and give people the choice to directly sent feedback on bugs to the developers. With Pull requests you can be part of the development, because you are able to commit code to the codebase. Once a pull request is opened, potential changes can be discussed and reviewed and others can add follow-up commits before the changes are merged into the codebase.
So the community would be able to see, how far is a certain feature in development, how is the prioritisation of a certain feature etc. More transparency towards the community (as it was before) can be really helpful here.
How could a possible open-sourced Genie engine look like in infrastructure/distribution terms?
When we talk about open-sourcing the engine that is running the game we talk about the common ground of AoE1, AoE1DE, AoC, AoK, AoE2DE, AoE2HD, Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds - the Genie Engine with all the quirks in the build files it needs to get these games running BUT - and that is important - without the original assets. So for example we could imagine, that there is a base engine distributed over Steam that would take AoE1DE or AoE2DE (or others) as an asset pack to play the games with people that bought these asset packs as well. Cross-play with other asset packs would be most likely not possible in the first place.
A good read by the way is this here:
Dear Microsoft, let’s open source Age of Empires II
tl;dr: game is broken but still popular, my suggestion for fixing it and making more money in the process is to open source
medium.com
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