AlexMax
Forum Regular
Posts: 757
Registered: 01-03 |
HobbsTiger1 said:
Nobody has ever forced the ZDaemon team to change from their ways last I checked (yesterday). And I've never seen a thread similar to the one that was the Risen3D licensing thread about ZDaemon. Perhaps you could point me to it?
From what I understand, ZDaemon's licensing quagmire is closer to ZDoom's than Risen3D's, in that there are tons of things from different people thrown together into the package. In fact, there was at one time or another GPL code in the codebase, which couldn't really be called GPL code due to the licencing conflicts in the underlying ZDoom engine, a conflict that stems from its csDoom 0.62 roots. At the time, the lead coder reassured me that all GPL code had been taken out or rewritten for 1.07, though I only have his word to go on.
david_a said:
Why is it that the multiplayer ports have such hostility towards each other? You don't really see this in the singleplayer world anymore.
Port rivalries have always created bad blood in the Doom community, for one reason or another. Risen3D is a recent example where tensions flared between the authors and its fans. And of course, I've noticed an undercurrent of poking fun at ZDoom and GZDoom, while fans of said ports do the same the opposite way.
However, you're quite on-point, in that multiplayer ports are lightyears behind the rest of the community in terms of port relations. The best reason I can think of is because with multiplayer, the port you choose designates who you hang out with, since Skulltag players can't connect to ZDaemon servers and vice versa, due to their proprietary codebases. It's more then just "Skulltag has feature X and ZDaemon has feature Y", it's about two different communities, and it inherantly creates source port 'cliques' due to the divisions between players. Notice how you don't see nearly this amount of bad sentiment between ports of later games such as QuakeWorld, where the netcode is standardized and the source is GPL, where players from multiple ports can coexist on the same server.
In my opinion, this is part of the reason that makes Odamex so cool. It is very conceivable that Odamex will eventually mature to a stable GPL base where other people can use it as a base to write their own ports off of, kind of like a modern csDoom without the licencing nightmare. Our port may never be as sucessful as ZDaemon (though I sincerely hope it eventually is), but I beleive that, due to it's GPL codebase, it will have the longevity to make a bigger impact on the multiplayer community than just coming up with X numbers of players on a given night.
Anyway, I wouldn't worry about it too much. I didn't mean to derail this into a multiplayer source port war, and I'd much rather concentrate on Odamex itself than the very same stupid community politics that I had hoped to avoid. Sorry =).
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01-20-07 04:20 
