How Not To Fork...

How Not To Fork...

Postby charlie » 22 Mar 2010, 17:31

Just perusing Xonotic's website - the fork of Nexuiz.

Let's see, what is Xonotic...

Xonotic will also pursue a clearer agenda including the following:

Game Changes:

* A new set of player models and animations
* A new set of sounds
* New music
* Default maps will get a makeover
* New stronger bot AI
* New names for weapons and gamemodes (especially ones using the “nex” prefix)
* Low quality content will be dropped and replaced with higher quality ones


So... Xonotic will... replace all content with better content, have better AI, make over maps, replace all audio, and not have low quality content?

I mean, talk about setting the bar high.

Fork X will be better than Orig X

We know you forked because you have ideas, or fundamental unresolvable disagreements on project management and direction. We get it that you think you are capable enough - individually or collectively - to do better. That's why you forked. But why oh why do you declare you'll be doing something that took already took many years, and doing it better? What are you? A commercial company with full time employees?

Reality, the enemy of dreams.
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Reasons

Postby Gallaecio » 22 Mar 2010, 19:39

After reading the FAQ[1], and believing they are not lying, I think I understand the reasons for this fork, and just hope the best for them.

---
[1] http://www.xonotic.org/faq/
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Re: How Not To Fork...

Postby amuzen » 22 Mar 2010, 20:27

The philosophy of the project in a nutshell: "fucking sellouts!" :p

Or maybe not. Although the list quoted looks a bit sketchy to me, the project related plans they have on the site make sense. I hope they'll focus more on the community aspects and less on not looking like Nexuiz. Redoing all the content sounds ambitious and not all that interesting to me, but then again I'm not the target audience of games like this. Perhaps FPS fans find pretty graphics more important than I do.
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Re: How Not To Fork...

Postby TheAncientGoat » 22 Mar 2010, 20:46

Well, at least they do have a few things to show so far, as shown here : http://www.xonotic.org/media/ , so if they keep on going with the same steam...
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Re: How Not To Fork...

Postby charlie » 22 Mar 2010, 22:11

I know they are trying to appeal to the current Nexuiz player base, and I don't have a problem with long term goals including replacing all content, but they should be careful not to fall into the gamer dream trap of laying out something far too ambitious to be accomplished.

I mean, for instance, "Low quality content will be dropped and replaced with higher quality ones" - do they think that "low quality content" was present for anything other than pragmatic reasons? Are they delusional enough to believe they won't have such decisions to make?
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Re: How Not To Fork...

Postby andrewj » 23 Mar 2010, 13:27

I'm not sure if this is a "fork" in the true sense of the word, as it seems that the two branches are (1) Xonotic and (2) Illfonic's Nexuiz, and the existing GPL Nexuiz could just wither and die if most of the developers go to Xonotic, while Lord Havoc (and others?) will be working on Illfonic's version.

Those game changes could be summed up as "we're gonna give the game a good makeover" and if they really have dozens of contributors then I think they could achieve a lot. It's all about the time frame, young guns would want to do all that in 6 months and crash and burn, but older guys would be thinking in terms of years.
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Re: How Not To Fork...

Postby qubodup » 23 Mar 2010, 17:28

Great thread! I thought "Ok, so you want to fork Nexuiz for philosophy reasons and incidentally create lots of content out of thin air? :D" when reading Xonotic's pages.

This was yesterday or the day before that - there were no screenshots in the gallery yet. To be honest I am impressed by it! Good-looking portals! New char models! Wowsome! If this new media was created in the last three weeks, then this sounds like an interesting deal to focus the anger at the Nexuiz 'sell-out' (IMHO only the fact that Illfonic will use the name is a reason for rage) into creating new content (and maybe find a solution to the name-issue).

I don't know how development regarding 'adding new stuff' was managed at nexuiz. I assumed it was more liberal than Sauerbraten's (one [two?] person decides) or OpenArena's (one person decides).

Since apparently most improvements seem to be content-based, it will be also probably easy to re-integrate the fork's improvements back into Nexuiz, since it seems that they will stick to GPL (and that makes me happy).

amuzen {l Wrote}:The philosophy of the project in a nutshell: "fucking sellouts!" :p

LOL!

I have one problem with Xonotic so far:
http://www.xonotic.org/faq/ {l Wrote}:It should also be noted that IllFonic’s code may be in violation of the GPL as most contributors to the Nexuiz codebase have not relicensed their work for inclusion in a closed-source project. This has been another source of outrage for many.

This kind of claim and no source? FUD FUD FUD.
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Re: How Not To Fork...

Postby NeoStrider » 24 Mar 2010, 04:24

While I feel sad about the "loss of good people working on our cause", I see a positive side of it.
Should this game succeed, people will look at our games with better eyes.

Also everybody will try to discover the "next Xonotic", so we will see lots of projects getting some funding.
In the end, "why not"? We wont lose our code anyway.
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Re: How Not To Fork...

Postby Irritant » 21 May 2010, 14:52

I think that they felt they had litle choice but to fork, although some of it was done out of pride. Personally I thought they should have just continued on with the Nexuiz name and project, because I think that they would have outlasted the console product(which honestly I would not be surprised if it never sees the light of day).

The complete overhaul is necessary though. I don't want to sound like a hater because I work on a rival game(and also I have friends who work on Nexuiz who would agree with this), but the game had a number of problems. First and formost, the content really needed an update, particularly the player models. So it's great to see that being at the front of their focus. The maps, some are great, some needed updating. I'm not that encouraged though by some of those updates to them. Some look like a step backwards. The one thing they really need to do is start using more static meshes in their maps for things like railings, equipment, etc. Somebody did a nice rework of the "basement" level a year or so ago with meshes, but it seems to have fallen by the wayside.

I think for the most part the Xonotic team has all the right ideas, including making the game leaner and meaner(it had gotten bloated IMO). The one thing that they should consider is to go the opposite route with polycounts of models though. Right now they are increasing the polycount, they should be decreasing it and using normalmaps for detail. The biggest, most obvious problem with that game is that framerates are crippled when there are alot of people on the screen, and this is due to the player models having such high polycounts(they were just poorly made).

It's an ambitious project design, and the fork puts an awful lot of pressure on them to actually produce a viable game. Nexuiz development had been quite stalled over the last year, and if this stalls as well, it could be a real problem. I think that the original Nexuiz will have an audience as long as it continues to remain in Linux distros and their repos, but without further development, that may not always be the case.
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