FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

Kenney wrote:Also, I'm not sure what PM or messaging you're referring to.

I tried to "recycle" a few of your assets to one of my mod, seeing how VoXus was idling. I tried to get your permission by PM, you read it and did not even answered. I concluded (maybe wrongly) that you were here for not sharing and use VoXus as a focal point to your company, through Steam, the social networks, etc.

And I still maintain that it's paradoxical and ungrateful to close the sources of your game whereas you got people spending time to help you for free. Opening the sources/assets is the best way to enrich our collective culture.

I'm done with this topic.

It seems there is a lot of confusion about the terms “free software” and “open source” here.

First of all, to me, “free software” and “open source” almost mean exactly the same thing. Seriously, read and compare the official definitions. The differences are actually pretty minor.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
http://opensource.org/osd

(I also hope it should be clear to everyone here that this is NOT about price.)

Anyways: The only “real” difference between both terms lies in the motivation under which those terms are usually promoted: Free software advocades tend to argue on ethical grounds, open source advocates don't (they emphasize more on practical grounds; a bit too much for my taste. Whatever.).

Also, a software is certainly neither free software nor open source if one of its key components (in this case: the engine) is not available in source-code form. A non-restricive license is also requirement of both definitions.

So, if Unity is a requirement of running Voxus, this means that Voxus won't be neither open source nor free software.
If this was clear to you all along, then sorry for annoying you. xD


Anyhow, I (and probably others, too) would be grateful if at least the media files (images, etc.) you (Kenney) have created so far would be released for future subgame authors to play around. I bet there would be a high interest in these files. :)

It is a major falling of the Minetest project.

What else do you expect from a software with a big fat “0” in its major version number? ;-)

But yeah, Minetest still has a long way to go.

jp wrote:I tried to "recycle" a few of your assets to one of my mod, seeing how VoXus was idling. I tried to get your permission by PM, you read it and did not even answered. I concluded (maybe wrongly) that you were here for not sharing and use VoXus as a focal point to your company, through Steam, the social networks, etc.

Ah gotcha! I often read e-mails/messages and such, and reply later on. I just get a large amount of messages a day and have to schedule a few hours every so often to answer things, while I can 'star' e-mails to answer later on that's not an option on forums for example, so I often forget to answer. Instead of giving you permission to use those I was going to offer you to create some custom textures, since I don't think Voxus' textures fit your mod pack - so yeah, I'm still up for that if you want.

jp wrote:And I still maintain that it's paradoxical and ungrateful to close the sources of your game whereas you got people spending time to help you for free. Opening the sources/assets is the best way to enrich our collective culture. I'm done with this topic.

I'm absolutely grateful for all the people who've supported me during the project. I've occasionally asked for help but in my opinion haven't abused anyones knowledge. I'm not sure if you know, but I spend a few hours a day creating sprites for the public domain to help game developers get started - I think I do enough to the open source community as it is.

Wuzzy wrote:...

Gotcha! The new Voxus will be free as in: You can download the game, and play it, without paying. Some of the sources (which can be shared) will be shared, but it won't be completely open source as Unity isn't. There will be tools added to allow for super easy modding though, that's still really important for me.

I'm planning to create a different set of voxel based game sprites that are public domain, which people can use without worrying at all about licenses. I want to keep the Voxus files for the new version.

(Preview)

Okay, Kenney, one last thing:

I am also slightly surprised to hear you, Kenney, claim that there is almost nothing signicifant to release in Voxus. I am not so sure if this is 100% true.

What about the mini-helicopter? According to the first page, it is finished and working.
If this is true, then this may be something which could be useful as a mod.

According to the first page, there are also “some critters”. Is there something significant to share, like new models, mob-related code and whatnot (sorry, I haven't read the entire thread yet). Or is this all unfinished and uninteresting?

Wuzzy wrote:What about the mini-helicopter? According to the first page, it is finished and working.
If this is true, then this may be something which could be useful as a mod.

Ah yeah it was working about ~75%, I can release the code for that but it's not too exciting. Basically the boat mod rewritten to support flying :)

Wuzzy wrote:According to the first page, there are also “some critters”. Is there something significant to share, like new models, mob-related code and whatnot (sorry, I haven't read the entire thread yet). Or is this all unfinished and uninteresting?

Nope, nothing on the mobs was done yet. The mobs had to spawn in tar lakes which weren't in yet, and they had a few unique treats that are simply not possible in Minetest at the moment. So nothing other than a sprite was made for them.

Minetest has been in development for 5 years. If this was a commercial/proprietary game, people would be upset with the progress. However it is not. My philosophy is to look at what it could be, and then work towards it, rather than settling for what we have. It's more practical in my opinion.

Whilst the code can be licensed with an open source license, Voxus won't be able to be run using purely free software so you could argue that it is non-free.

I've enjoyed (minor-ly) helping you Kenney, your insights are very valuable.
I've will keep up with the development of Voxus.

Yep... my point as well: If Unity is proprietary, anything based on it should be considered such. That would be like if Irrlicht was commercial, or free but closed-source... Minetest wouldn't be truly open-source even if its code was the same as now.

WOW
Sad news for Minetest, but probably another good voxel game for my inventory :D
Please do make it free and also give us a way to keep track! :)

I was thinking about awhile.
But what will ever happen to servers and mp? will it still work in a way? and the bandwidth needs?

But all I know if planned add to an Console(s) you could to add split-screen/co-op I know.
I just know one my friend made an game with Unity3D an Indev MP mode and He, used this one Unity3D Script allowed us create an server without even needing to port forward. Idk the script was but was kinda cool.

Dang!
God Speed Kenny. Do what you got to do :)

Kenney wrote:As stated above, I don't think the source of Voxus does any good at this point. Most of the code is incomplete, flawed or generally just doesn't make much sense to use outside of Voxus. I am willing to share snippets here and there though for people who want to know how I did stuff.

I would still ask you to consider it, a code dump is better than no code at all. Even though ideas in it might not be correctly or fully implemented, it still means that there is knowledge in the code, knowledge which others can draw from and use. It doesn't mean that anyone can use it as it stands, but from time to time I'm sure somebody finds the code very useful. As somebody who had his own idea of a subgame in his head for quite some time, I found it very useful to look at the code of others, how they do stuff and how they solved problems, even if I'm not going to use that code for a various of reasons.

In this vein I'd like to quote one of my favorite quotes, I unfortunately lost the source to this one, sorry:

We can either stand on the shoulders of giants, or on a big enough pile of dwarfs, works either way.

Personally I'd make it a "read only" repository on GitHub or BitBucket, turning off any interactions (ticket system, wiki pages etc.) and sticking a big "don't ask me about it" sticker on it. Also you should not release the assets with it, as you're obviously planning on still using them and it wouldn't be that good if they're floating around the webs before you release a version of your game.

BobbyBonsaimind wrote:Also you should not release the assets with it, as you're obviously planning on still using them and it wouldn't be that good if they're floating around the webs before you release a version of your game.

He said he's remaking the textures. I'd love to see his old ones.

rubenwardy wrote:He said he's remaking the textures. I'd love to see his old ones.

+100

Im very sad since i readed you last news... cancelled...
I hope you will share code/textures/models you do, even if it's not over, if you have a "free" mind it will cause you no problems ! :)

Re: I have some old copies of Voxus textures somewhere on my drive completely redrawn from existing screenshots - providing Kenney can give me permission, I can give them to you.

The textures are being transferred to the new game version, so I wish to keep them solely for Voxus for the time being.

Kenney wrote:The textures are being transferred to the new game version, so I wish to keep them solely for Voxus for the time being.

Thanks for letting me know, I'll leave them archived for eternity just in case you ever change your mind. :)

Hah alright, well, I'm currently working on some public domain textures though - those might come in handy for you.

Kenney wrote:Hah alright, well, I'm currently working on some public domain textures though - those might come in handy for you.

I've seen this design in a Nintendo game before. *Hint, hint.*

Jordach wrote:I've seen this design in a Nintendo game before. *Hint, hint.*

Hah yeah, I love the texture ideas Animal Crossing has.

Kenney wrote:Hah alright, well, I'm currently working on some public domain textures though - those might come in handy for you.

http://i.imgur.com/P29fuQb.png

Thank you for releasing such great textures as always. Even if you decided to cancel Voxus for Minetest, offering such quality media still helps and will aid people in creating good games of their own, and maybe something nice will happen with them :)

Kenney wrote:

Jordach wrote:I've seen this design in a Nintendo game before. *Hint, hint.*

Hah yeah, I love the texture ideas Animal Crossing has.

Maybe can make Animal Crossing as an Subgame in Minetest.
That if it alright use the textures like so.
Kinda be cool to have an to Tom Nooks store and buy stuff so on. might can be done not sure yet. but we will find out later on.

But it lovely all the textures.
Can't wait use them and see I can do.

Well, whoever's interested, I'm working on a game inspired by Voxus.
Pixture
Edit: better formatting and links

Will it still be open source in Unity?

Jisej wrote:Will it still be open source in Unity?

Even if the game logic is free/libre, the game would still be proprietary since it depends on the proprietary Unity engine.

Kenney wrote:Sad news today for those excited to see Voxus in Minetest.

I've decided to switch engines and continue developing Voxus using Unity and Voxelmetric. There are a few reasons why I've decided to switch;

First and foremost; I'd like to have total creative freedom on how the game looks and acts. Currently, Minetest offers very little in this regard. Without diving into the source files, there's no way to properly change the skybox, add visual effects or change the way the game behaves. I'm sure these features get added to Minetest in the future, but as it stands right now it's just not usable for this project.

Second is the fact that Unity supports multiple platforms out of the box. With very little work the project can be exported to Android, iOS and game consoles like Wii U. Especially Wii U is important, my company has recently gained permission to purchase a development kit and I'd love to check that out.

The performance of Minetest is often lacking and I think that in combination with a modern framework and engine a lot of issues can be solved in regards to this.

I hope you guys understand my decision to do this and continue supporting this project, I won't be updating this thread with progress anymore because well, it's not Minetest anymore.

Here's a screenshot of Voxus running on the new engine.



You can follow me on Twitter to keep up-to-date with progress.

can you please release the source code or at least a broken test build,
also so sad you stopped the development on this project it looked so good :(

look at the date/ He stopped like an year ago

That looks all great but can i download this game??

Looks like he gave up with Unity too, his twitter is KO

EDIT - I googled Kenny and found this, looks like he did cancel Voxus in Unity too.
http://kenney.nl/