Game Engine Buyout for Modding

The engine and the game are two separate entities. Yes, Atari has the rights to D&D, and WoTC is the owner of the D&D brand, but that has no bearing on getting rights to the engine. Both Atari and WoTC have allowed the modding community to make changes, so while I agree that Atari probably wouldn’t distribute a game with objectionable content, that doesn’t mean we can’t mod the game in that way, as long as the mods are non-commercial. So if we get rights to the engine, we can simply make engine improvements available to the already existing modding community.

 

Actually D&D is trademark as much as TSR or Forgotten Realms. But so was Ravenloft and that is no longer with WOTC. So, things come and go. Using "house" D&D rules can change a game a lot, and no matter how much you adhere to PnP D&D, you always make changes to fit in with a PC gaming engine. So, no this is not a vanilla D&D engine, and yes - we are not talking about buying TOEE, just the engine or the source code to it.

 

Bad news.

It appears that there is a company interested in licensing the game engine from Troika. As such we will not be able to get to the source right now. They were nice enough to not turn me down flat, and I completely understand their decision. Just thought I would update everyone on the status.

If something changes I will post a new responce.

-Firestrand

 

something of intrest.....apparantly ToEE has been rereleased. i havent picked it up to see if there is anything different but the store just got it in this week as a new release

 

This engine is a nicely built, complicated, powerful application base. It was well crafted; the cool things we're able to do with it are testament to this. That someone would want to license it makes total sense to me. I can only hope this turns into something very cool. It was a shame that more couldn't have been done with the engine; perhaps all is not lost.

-- dulcaoin

 

Partly, you are right - licensing means developing things further. It does not mean making them better. You will note that by owning the game you can basically rip (OK, decompile) the code and use it for personal purposes if you don't ditsribute it or the content you have custom created. Is this good news, I wonder?

 

I doubt this would work at all. Licensing an engine requires a lot of money -- consider how many people worked for how long coding the engine. If Atari chooses to license the engine, they're going to want to make that cost back, and it will be pricey indeed. Assuming you did get the engine, then what? Can anyone here actually code DX or OpenGL? Can anyone here write platform optimizations in low-level languages? The long and the short of it is that there is just not enough interest in D&D CRPGs for any endeavour like this to be a success. You won't be able to get enough donations to afford Atari's price, I can assure you of that. That means you're paying out of your pocket (plus THOUSANDS of hours to build a new module with the coder base available to Co8). No one with a job can afford the commitment necessary to remake this game in a reasonable timeframe. And if you DID manage to do that, it would almost certainly be at great personal cost to one or more members of the coding team. You would then need to recoup this loss (unless you're a real fanatic...). The most obvious course is to re-sell the game, right? Well, no one's going to buy it, just like no one would have paid for Counterstrike when it was first released. You would have to create something as successful as CS (and with a D&D game, it's just not possible) for your FIRST TRY. It would also have to be free to create product awareness. THEN you could POSSIBLY release a game for money (requiring THOUSANDS more hours) and finally recoup your losses, say, 10 years later.
It's just not feasible.

 

Kespoosh: You need to read this board more thoroughly.

We weren't asking to buy the engine; we were asking to get access to the source on a non-profit basis. So that we the community could fix the problems with the game, there was never any intention to profit from the game engine. We would make modifications to the game engine, and simply require an installed copy of the game, just like to Co8 patches, to use the modifications.

I think everyone here understands how difficult it is to write a game engine, that is why ToEE is basically a modified Arcanum engine; even the developers didn't want to start from scratch.

As a matter of fact I can! However, as to programming prowess on the board in DirectX or OpenGL take a look around, people are writing new AI scripts in Python, decompiling and recompiling machine code to correct errors. I don't think programming ability would be lacking, and even if it was we could always recruit. I know five programmers who would love to play with modifying an RPG engine, even though they have never touched ToEE specifically. The most difficult part of the game in my mind isn't programming, it is the art! I couldn't do a good 3D mesh, texture, or figure to save my life. Let alone for every figure in the game.

Again, we just want to make modifications to the engine. Take a good look at this board, as far as I can tell everyone works, and yet we all find time to both play the game, and mod in some way. Commitment to modding the game is not fanatical. I would rather mod a game than sit in front of the TV letting my brain rot on the latest rerun of Friends.

You are right, a commercially viable game engine created from an existing code base, using the abilities and knowledge of volunteer programmers isn't feasible... Oh, wait, isn't that exactly what open source projects do? Yes it may take longer, but I bet the people who would be attracted to this project would be better qualified than most.

I want to end with one lesson you should learn about the RPG game market. A good RPG allows the player to get immersed in the game world; the games remain a viable commercial product for much longer than your average game. So a good RPG can stay on the market for quite a while and still sell. If you doubt the validity of my statement, BG and BG2 are still for sale. Arkanum (out of print) goes for crazy cash on Amazon. Not every RPG is good, many developers have done a half assed job, many games aren't extendable, or immersive, or they just plain aren't really a RPG.

So if I or someone else did have the cash to license the game engine, and we took 10 years to develop a new game, I bet it would rock, and last on the market for another 10 years.

-Firestrand

 

well Firestrand i must say you summed it up nicely i think that covered everything . hell if i hit the lotto tomorrow you can guess where a part of my money and time would goto lol.

 

Firestrand:

Think about that statement from Atari's point of view. Someone wants them to release proprietary code that is the basis of a commercial venture only maybe a year or two old (I actually forget when TOEE came out). Doing such a thing is equivalent to Atari saying "Well, we screwed up this game, so we're going to let some people on the Internet fix it for us." No developer will release anything so just anyone can "fix the problems in it." And I realize there was no intent to profit, but people were talking about "making a new module" and there's no way that's possible.

I'm not sure if everyone does. There's a lot of talk of "if only we could play with the engine...", well, you honestly don't need the engine for a whole lot of modification. There is a reason the engine was ported from Arcanum: It draws pixels! It does some calculations! It makes some physics rules! It doesn't really do anything else. What you would actually need to remake this game is access to the methods used to create, store, and modify all the art, models, and animations. If you wanted to change it to a FPS, yes, that would take some engine modding. But for what you're proposing, you don't really need the engine. I'm assuming Troika followed the minimal hard-coding rule, but based on the amount of modding already possible I think it's pretty accurate.

While I didn't know about the machine code part, Python is a gigantic leap away from assembly, and even DX. People like Liv, who seems to be truly dedicated to this, could probably pick it up quite quickly, but we're talking about going from coding AI to direct, optimized interfacing with hardware, here. We're talking about going from cute little words and phrases to offsets, registers, and extraordinarily large amounts of code. That's a step many people can't take.

So is TOEE. Before I can see Atari releasing their source for any non-profit use, TOEE would have to be taken off store shelves.
Since this is getting long I want to end on this note:
My point is that it's not viable or necessary to license the game engine itself. It's less of a concession to get content formats from Atari than the engine source, and less of a burden on the modding community to make use of that material.

 

I am afraid that Troika didn't follow a minimum hard coding rule. There are many things hard coded into temple.dll that have been, and should be changed. So while I agree that the most important thing needed for modding the game is the content format, it wouldn't correct some of the other flaws. Like npc spell targeting, or lack of prestige classes, etc.

And that Dragon will never fly with the current physics / graphics engine...

-Firestrand

 

If anyone decides to buy the engine you should work towards making it public domain, that way a lot of people could create their own projects at Sourceforge.

 

I agree!! But you would still have to own a copy of the game. Even if the game engine was public domain, the art, story, etc. Would still be copyrighted by Atari, and WoTC.

-Firestrand