Interview with Juho and Antti forthcoming :)

[badhabit]

Well that was a rather good chance to chat with the devs. Thanks again Juho and Antti =)
Twitch just didn't work out for me because it was buffering half of the time and because of that i missed lots of stuff. Guess those Dota and LoL matches hammered their service :/ Iam glad that this will be uploaded to youtube.

Did anyone asked if they plan to release the source code of this engine someday in the future?

Open sourcing the engine (not content, they need something proprietary to sell) would be a cool move... and in best case they would out-source the debugging and optimizing and porting (!) of the current game and engine to the caring community while they could focus on the design of the next game.

[Dr.Disaster]

Well that was a rather good chance to chat with the devs. Thanks again Juho and Antti =)
Twitch just didn't work out for me because it was buffering half of the time and because of that i missed lots of stuff. Guess those Dota and LoL matches hammered their service :/ Iam glad that this will be uploaded to youtube.

Did anyone asked if they plan to release the source code of this engine someday in the future?

Open sourcing the engine (not content, they need something proprietary to sell) would be a cool move... and in best case they would out-source the debugging and optimizing and porting (!) of the current game and engine to the caring community while they could focus on the design of the next game.

They can't open-source the engine because that's the real money maker. The engine is what set's everything in motion. Content in form of tilesets, monsters, items and maps can be done by any artist skilled enough as the community showed for LoG1 and it will be the same for LoG2.

Nevertheless chances are good that we will see performance tweeks done before AH tackles an OSX version to prevent players with Apple laptops featuring only the Intel HD GPU's from raging too much

[eispfogel]

Well, John Carmack does not agree to your theory

Imaging this: If i do a Total Conversion of LoG and turn it into something like System Shock and it turns out to be a very great game on its own.
I wouldnt make any money of it because it still needs Legend of Grimrock to run and is basically "just" a mod.

Now if the engine was open source i could make a standalone game - independent of Legend of Grimrock and i also could sell it.
AND when i sell it i have to pay Almost Human a license fee for using their engine.

Thats the way it was with the quake- and even the unreal-engines. So there is even more money to make if you go the open source way.
Just think about it

I still hate that i couldnt ask all my questions and that i missed so much stuff because twitch didnt work(maybe it was my ISP? German Telekom is known for throttling down services like youtube and twitch). At least arv uploaded the whole thing to his youtube account: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-_Z_U ... lRAA11d7sQ

[badhabit]

They can't open-source the engine because that's the real money maker.

Tend to disagree, engines are available nowadays in great amount, the focus and team to create a game & content with a consistent vision is the hard part (see the many mediocre open source games, while having technically a good to excellent base). Also, there are already successful examples, for instance the "Arx Fatalis" engine source code was given out (later) while still being sold via the assets.

To some degree AH gave out the game-engine already to the public, via the editor (I think under a non-commercialization clause), giving out then the complete engine via source code would be just the next step. If they are afraid that some mod maker could come to riches with their engine they should give out the source code under a non-commercial (e.g.CC-NC-SA-BY) license, like it was done for instance with Shadowground or Darwina (all Introversion games). Then they have always the possibility for a commercial license agreement afterward. Win-win for everyone.

[Dr.Disaster]

An editor is not handing out the engine. All it does is allow players to create something personal they want the engine to do. Sharing anything created within the editor on i.e. Nexus is sharing a plain file that does nothing if you don't have the game.

If a mod maker wants to make money out of his work .. well he can try like any other DLC maker .. but he needs to ask AH first if he is allowed to sell his creation because he is riding along on a train that others have build.

[badhabit]

An editor is not handing out the engine. All it does is allow players to create something personal they want the engine to do. Sharing anything created within the editor on i.e. Nexus is sharing a plain file that does nothing if you don't have the game.

If a mod maker wants to make money out of his work .. well he can try like any other DLC maker .. but he needs to ask AH first if he is allowed to sell his creation because he is riding along on a train that others have build.

Exactly, nothing would change on this situation with the model proposed by me; giving out the source code is not a problem.

[Arvan Eleron]

Thanks again to Juho and Antti for the interview, and for those of you who stopped by--we had an excellent turnout and questions, and they went above and beyond the call of duty by staying almost two hours (they even gave away a free T-shirt!). If anyone's interested, you can find the interview here: http://www.twitch.tv/arvaneleron/c/5361029. It's also available on my YouTube channel, starting about 28 minutes in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw0kuj0sDzA. I'll be continuing my LoG2 playthrough over the next couple of weeks, so please stop by if you'd like to chat with other LoG2 enthusiasts!

--Arv

[sapientCrow]

Got agree opening up the source would be a great next step.
At the very least opening up item/class/and some core game mechanics in a configuration type setting would rock.
It would appear from the previous LOG that this is not their intention sadly.
Perhaps that might change over time.
I myself would actually like to Mod some aspects to the game (UI, item attributes, exp tables, class traits)

A game like Skyrim (Elder Scrolls titles) do this exact thing and as far as I can tell they have not lost any amount of $$ from doing it.
In fact because of it Morrowind is still an active game for some and is still to this day being modded even though its base has outdated graphics and is nearing ten years in age. This translates into Morrowind boxes or digital copies still being sold now (a t a lower cost mind you but still...)
AH has a rock solid game here and has done so much right with this genre and design. Opening things up a bit more would not hurt them.