What’s your definition of AAA?
This is uncharted territory and we are essentially running an experiment. For this reason we’re not licensing or open sourcing the game’s assets - the art, music, and IP will still be protected for the time being. But all of the code that makes the game run will be made public. We have not chosen the exact license under which we will be open sourcing the game’s code, but it will be one of the OSI’s approved open source licenses.
So am I understanding this correctly that means no private servers, just convenient ways to create your own client?
Not sure why you’d think that though, as the art & music assets are needed by a client, not by the server. They could release the code for both the client and the server, and distribute the assets separately (usually not the kind of thing you want to distribute via SCM anyways).
I do wonder what their reasoning was. Having the code for an MMO client and/or server would make it much easier to write exploits, but it also means community supplied fixes and features. The problem is that people writing exploits/cheats tend to have a financial motivation.
That makes sense. I didn’t really understand to be honest. Coming from old school mmos everything is locked down from my knowledge. I do agree that opening it up for all to see will just make it easier to exploit, but maybe good people will help find exploits faster and speed patching among?
I mean, Id did this for years with Quake engines as well, so we kind of know how this works out. The assets tend to be the really difficult part for open source community to replicate. Still cool that they’re doing it though.
Incidentally, this is where AI tools could really help open source community to make it easier to create nice looking open assets for the game engines like this.
Wonder if they’ll pull and id software type thing where the code is GPL
