Why is CM closed source?

[Khlorghaal]

Its very unusual for a free game to be closed source. What is the reasoning behind this?
My guess is that its to monopolize the playerbase so that active players don't diffuse onto other servers?

Is it worth the detriment to development progress? It completely prevents people from contributing casually.

[solidfury7]

Its very unusual for a free game to be closed source. What is the reasoning behind this?
My guess is that its to monopolize the playerbase so that active players don't diffuse onto other servers?

Is it worth the detriment to development progress? It completely prevents people from contributing casually.

It allows us to completely keep certain mechanical features secrets, we have a pretty decent development team who work together quite well. So I don't think we miss out too much on user submissions.

So yeah, it's mainly so that someone doesn't go code diving, work out a certain weapon is statically the best so everyone uses it. It also allows us to add secret chems. Recipes, etc. In the game.

There is some CM code out there, very dated now but there is nothing really stopping servers from using that and working on it.

And yeah, I'd personally rather had 200 people in a huge war than 200 people spread across 4 servers.

[Casany]

Its very unusual for a free game to be closed source. What is the reasoning behind this?
My guess is that its to monopolize the playerbase so that active players don't diffuse onto other servers?

Is it worth the detriment to development progress? It completely prevents people from contributing casually.

Apop once told me actually, though I can hardly remember.

He basically said that the main reasons are to prevent powergaming and metagaming, getting exact values for weapons and armor and also revealing sekret stuff like Predators.

[Khlorghaal]

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[Khlorghaal]

It allows us to completely keep certain mechanical features secrets

Whats the motive for that? Personally I strongly prefer to know the exact mechanics of a game when playing it.

work out a certain weapon is statically the best so everyone uses it.

Shouldn't that instead be handled with proper balancing?

[Casany]

Whats the motive for that? Personally I strongly prefer to know the exact mechanics of a game when playing it.


Shouldn't that instead be handled with proper balancing?

People can guess that the shotgun does te most damage, and the SMG is shit but it’s mainly so that you don’t have people getting exact values of items.

There’s nothing stopping you from learning all the mechanics, like with any game ever. You don’t need the code for that.

EDIT: I should say, this game is competitive by nature. With a competitive game you don’t want people abusing features and bugs in the code to get the upper hand, even for one round. Unlike other SS13 servers where it isn’t really competitive, this one is.

[Khlorghaal]

But lots of closed source competitive games, for example EvE, reveal the exact formulas used for their mechanics.
If theres a flaw in the mechanics then its the fault of the mechanics.

Being open actually REDUCES the chances of people exploiting things, as anyone can find an report an exploit, instead of someone finding it and hoarding it. Example - information security, especially cryptography; zero-day exploits.

[spookydonut]

because.

[Lorem123]

If anyone else got the code, they could probably do it better. That's pretty much been the history of SS13.

[Casany]

But lots of closed source competitive games, for example EvE, reveal the exact formulas used for their mechanics.
If theres a flaw in the mechanics then its the fault of the mechanics.

Being open actually REDUCES the chances of people exploiting things, as anyone can find an report an exploit, instead of someone finding it and hoarding it. Example - information security, especially cryptography; zero-day exploits.

Honestly I couldn’t care less, just giving all the reasons the devs have given the playerbase in the past.

[Sir Lordington]

Closed source makes it easier to develop a cohesive, focused experience.

[Khlorghaal]

Closed source makes it easier to develop a cohesive, focused experience.

How exactly?

By the way I'm not necessarily arguing that it should be open source, I'm just trying to understand why it isn't.

[solidfury7]

Whats the motive for that? Personally I strongly prefer to know the exact mechanics of a game when playing it.


Shouldn't that instead be handled with proper balancing?

That's totally fine, I've come from other teams where the code was public. And now personally I prefer this closed source method.

[Lorem123]

Closed source makes it easier to develop a cohesive, focused experience.

This is a really good joke.

[Davidchan]

TL;DR coder elitism and sekret mekanics. Just like goon station without the humor

[Karmac]

its funnier this way

[Nickvr628]

Because the coders like to pretend they are better than the rest of ss13 development community, and it ransoms the server because lets face it: if it was open source someone would be doing it better. Corporate Mercenaries has proved that the CM "style" of game can have better gameplay, with less drama, and more unique features.

CM going open-source would be the best thing that could happen to the server in a while. The amount of new ideas and fresh coders coming in would breathe some new life, and lord knows the current changes the coders are making are pissing people off more than they are inspiring them to play.

TL;DR: Going open-source would be good.

[Royal Griffon]

Tbh I thought it protected from piracy and stuff so

[TheMaskedMan2]

because it is

[Nickvr628]

And by preventing piracy it means: "We are not confident in our own ability to make a better experience than other devs, we are going to hold all our stuff ransom so we have no competition."

[NoahKirchner]

As far as keeping damage values and stuff secret, you can hide those in config files just like you can hide secret recipes in config files.

As far as developing a cohesive experience goes, being open source doesn't mean that everyone can submit whatever they want. In an open source enviroment, you still have a dev team and more importantly, you have people who curate the pull requests to ensure that nothing is going in that would harm the game experience. As an open source project if someone's putting in something that isn't conducive to the general feel of CM you can just close their pull request and you can also still have a dev team that develop cool projects in their spare time secretly with some careful management of how you get those updates to the repo.

Another thing that open source allows the dev team to do is to focus less on bugs. Sure they still have to deal with bugs if nobody else will, but if you have minor bugs or spelling mistakes that people are complaining about there's a pretty solid chance that a casual player with some knowledge of DM will come along, fix it and submit a PR that fixes a bug that the devs haven't gotten to yet or didn't even know existed. An issue in today's community meeting was one of lack of communication in the dev team for relatively simple things, specifically a number of bugs that have been in the game for a month or two and haven't been fixed because of poor communication. If the code was open source someone could just make an issue on github and another person with nothing better to do could go and fix it.

As far as using CM code goes, this works both ways. Yes, people will take CM code for their own servers. But this also opens up the possibility of CM porting interesting mechanics from other servers and adapting them to fit CM. A good example of this could be lighting for example. Aurorastation's lighting system looks very similar to the /vg/ lighting system and, when used correctly, makes for some cool ass scenes with really pretty lighting (it also runs rather well.) They could also port things like directional flashlights or a discord bot that would allow people to know when the round's over. All that CM would really have to lose code wise are tanks, their projectile code which was already leaked and some other minor stuff like CAS which only really makes sense in the niche of the server.

Open sourcing is a net positive all around and has no drawbacks from what I can see, there can still be a dedicated dev team and instead of needing to have a long pain in the ass wonky application process you can just wait for people to submit PRs and then if you like what you see you can ask them if they'd like to be a dev. All of this said, I fully understand that CM will never be open source, I just really don't understand why that is and I have yet to see an answer that isn't "because it won't be."

[Simo94]

open source can ligma

[Jeser]

Wew, noah managed to completely convince me that open-source is better. Huh.

[Kesserline]

Let's settle it another way.

You have a car.
You take your friends for a ride.
They ask you to let everyone ride your car, to open the car, to modify it, to duplicate it for their own use (not yours of course).

_______________________

So, to sum up : it's your thing. You PAID for it (Devs paid with their time), and you should give it away for the Good of the Humanity ?

It's a fucking 2D spess game, it won't change anything to open-source it. It's their possession. You play on it for free. Stop asking more, you bravosi.

[Davidchan]

Let's settle it another way.

You have a car.
You take your friends for a ride.
They ask you to let everyone ride your car, to open the car, to modify it, to duplicate it for their own use (not yours of course).

_______________________

So, to sum up : it's your thing. You PAID for it (Devs paid with their time), and you should give it away for the Good of the Humanity ?

It's a fucking 2D spess game, it won't change anything to open-source it. It's their possession. You play on it for free. Stop asking more, you bravosi.

Strawman.

The only legitimate reason to keep cm 13 closed source is if the team plans on selling it for profit somedays.