To release or not to release...

[Covenant]

But then, this is becoming a full-blown flamewar.

That wasn't my intention. I recognise my post was perhaps a little reactionary. I don't want to start an argument, and I'm happy to leave it; the posts just evoked very unpleasant connotations to me.

[Sradac]

(Non-English Speaker) Okwonko: 'Wow, this Shakespeare seems like a pretty cool guy (he kills Romeo and isn't afraid of anything) - I'd like to read his works. I'll see if there's a version available in the language of Umuofia... Oh, there isn't. I hope someone translates it soon, I deserve to be able to read them just as much as anyone else.'

Sradac: 'Don't make such a big deal out of it! Just go read some Marlowe plays, it's all the same. It's not worth the effort of translating it - be happy with what you've got.

Look at me, you don't see me complaining about not being able to read... Well, there isn't much I can't read because lucky for me the rest of the world caters to English speakers, so I have a much wider selection available than someone like you. But I wouldn't complain. So don't you complain!

If you really want to read it, go learn the language yourself. It's not like I've ever read or watched anything that's been translated from its original language for my benefit. Japanese films/games? Hell no, I don't play those. The Bible? Never heard of it! Games developed on a different OS than my own but then ported to the one I use? THEY DON'T EXIST!'

Look, the point is, Shakespeare's works have done great all this time not being available in your language - so go away. We don't need your kind here.'

Maybe I'm extrapolating incorrectly, but in my opinion that's entirely how you've portrayed yourself.

Seriously Sradac, I find your comments abhorrent, and entirely xenophobic.

I 100% have no idea where you were going with any of that. Your ramblings there made no sense. The bible???? Japanese films??? Wth does any of this have to do with translating adom turning into more of a hassle than its worth?? dude go eat some prozac or something.

Throwin an example out here too.

Dante's Inferno.

Anyone that i've encountered that can read italian says there is not a single translation of Dante's Inferno to ANY language that does the book justice, in fact some flat out hurt the book. So again, why bother? Why fix something if its not broke? They say the inferno was perfect in its original form, I say adom is perfect in its original form.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

not xenophobic at all, but people are making such a huge deal about translating adom, all im saying is it seems to be a heck of a lot more of a job than its worth, there are plenty of non-english roguelikes out there to satisfy people that dont speak/read it. Im not complaining that those ones arent english and demanding they be translated, so no one else should do the same towards adom.

If translating ADOM is worth it or not, is something that the potential translators would have to decide by themselves if the source is released. You seem to be acting as if someone were asking you (or other people) to translate ADOM, when no one has done that. In fact, this flamewar started because I said that I would personally be willing to devote time to translate ADOM to Spanish, if the source were available. So if I think that's something worthwile to do with my time, that's my problem, not anyone else's.

About the comments that consider that translating ADOM would be harmful... well, I wouldn't call them xenophobic, but they are extremely egocentric. How can opening something to more people be harmful? I don't really think it would split the community, because people who know English would still prefer the original version, and people who don't know English are just not playing. But even if it did split the community, so what? It would create more communities and more people playing the game. Preventing people who don't know English from playing ADOM just because you don't want to give foreigners other forums to go to, so that they stay here, sounds really egocentric to me.

Seeing that you cite Dante's Inferno, you should know that it has been an inspiration and an influence for lots of relevant works, including many British and American works ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_a...opular_culture ). Of course, many of these were from authors that cannot read Italian (and thus were reading a translation).

[Grey]

If you guys are going to have this extended discussion dancing around the issue of translating ADOM then I suggest someone starts a new thread instead of hijacking this one.

[gut]

I'm 100% with Covenant.

*not that it matters in the slightest*

[sgeos]

If you guys are going to have this extended discussion dancing around the issue of translating ADOM then I suggest someone starts a new thread instead of hijacking this one.

Done. Please post any follow up comments regarding translation in the new thread.

[mike3]

Technical and social limitations. I wont repeat myself again here.

So why would you deliberately not support someone who decided to take on the work to challenge these technical limits? Who decided to be the "unfree" developer? What harm would they be doing challenging them?

[Gnoman]

One of the problems with open-sourcing the code is the question of what "bugs" are fixed. Hitherto, we've been able to accept pretty much any change, because ADOM is ultimately the product of one man's vison, albiet a vision that takes into accont the advice of a vast many others. If doesn't crash the game, the community will have toruble accepting it as a bug unless TB says it is. THus, I'm unsure how much good releasing it will actually do.


Regarding the "Angband effect," there's a number of factors that ought to migitate against it happening to ADOM.

Setting: ADOM has it's own unique setting. The only fans of that setting are themselves ADOM players. Angband is directly based on Tolkien, where most of the Tolkien references in ADOM are subtle. About a third of the variants I'm familiar with are intended to adjust it to better fit that setting. Another third of them are meant to tie it to a different setting altogether.

Development: By the time it became Angband, the fgame had already gone through two or three previous incarnations (four if you count the original Rouge) by different developers. That means that there were a niber of different visons in play before there was a single band variant. ADOM has only ever been developed by one man. While other games influenced it, it was not based off of any of them directly, as far as I know.

Flavor: Adom's flavor is extremely distinct. It's one of a very few rouglikes that does not feel like either a 'hack or a 'band. That flavor is what draws the fans of the game, who are the ones most likely to edit it for reason #4.

Difficulty: Open source software tends to lose a great deal of "style" in the code. (By style I mean the individual idiosyncracies in programming structure and methods.) This is because the hundreds of different individual styles would cripple develpoment if a standardized structure was not used. Closed source software that is primarily the work of one person is often crystal clear, to the person who wrote it. To others, it might as well be mud. I don't have any idea how well the ADOM code id documented, but the sheer length of time that it's been in development means that it would probably take weeks, maybe even months, just to figure out what everything does and how its connected. As a basis of comparison, the program RPG maker xp includes scripting support to allow users to add new features of their own devising. In order to make it easier to make sure scripts would not conflict with each other, the staff at the largest forums got a group together to thoroughly document and rewrite the scriptable sections (whic are a small part of the overall program) intending it to have the same effect but be easier to work with. That project took two years. While the situations are not, strictly speaking, analogous, it serves to show how massive an undertaking major work on someone else's code can be. Most people who simply want to create thier own rouglike variant will work in the already well documented codebases.


One possible method of releasing the code would be to seperate ADOM into "Engine" and "Data." The engine would contain things like monster inventory code, level generation algorithms, and combat code, while data would contain things like the monster and item databases, the world map, non-random locations, NPC information, etc. Then the engine gets generally released, while the data is kept restricted, with only the ways in which it interfaces with the engine known. That way, any variant that did get made would have only engine elements in common, so it wouldn;t be a variant anyway, any more than Medal of Honor: Allied Assault is a Quake III variant (That particular Medal of Honor uses the Q3 engine.) I have no idea to what degree this is practical or even possible with this particular set of code. I simply suggest ti as an option to consider.

[Molach]

"the only problem I have with TB having to approve ALL changes for all modifications is, he is basically outsourcing ADOM to people to do his work, and only his work. and they arent getting paid for it."

How much did TB get paid for writing ADOM again? The people doing "this work" should probably get as much as he did...

Being no programmer, just a happy-go-along player (ADOM player, that is)...

* I'd sure like to see bugs squashed
* I could see an extended version of ADOM as something I would play. Occationally. But still, I'd like to be able to always come back to the good ole 1.1.2 (bugfixed) old ADOM.
* Extended version could be...More Areas. More classes/races. More possible levels available. More talents. More class powers (for the new levels). More skills. More abilities and spells to levelled monsters. Extra items/artifacts. More women. Would be fun to be unspoilt again. Nothing really changes, just...gets bigger. ADOMplus. But here cool heads are needed, or we get races like "Dragon" (super everything, breath, and even drop gold when you're killed) and items like "Artifact spear Slayer" (10d24 +20 +20, slays everything, penetrates, is vampiric but without the nasty align loss and is obviously one-handed) and monsters like "Space Alien" (which is just silly).
* Anything done must meet the Creators approval before being ...approved. Unofficial work would hopefully be shunned by all respectable gamers. In my ideal world this would work perfectly.

[sbumps]

races like "Dragon" (super everything, breath, and even drop gold when you're killed) and items like "Artifact spear Slayer" (10d24 +20 +20, slays everything, penetrates, is vampiric but without the nasty align loss and is obviously one-handed) and monsters like "Space Alien" (which is just silly).

Allowing stuff like that isn't a bad thing. It follows a Darwinian evolution, where bad ideas are first tried out, and then they die out. Can you honestly see the ADOM playerbase starting to play with that sort of silly characters equipped with overpowered items on a more permanent basis? Because any fickle variant like that is going to die out right away, if they can't attract a strong following. To mention another game, Dwarf Fortress promotes heavy modding of the game, and on the forums for that game you can see that same evolution take place every day. Weird mods are suggested, maybe even some proof-of-concept is posted, and then a while later no one even remembers seeing something like that. A lot later someone necroes the relevant thread with a "lol i palyed wit yr mod, wen is new verson out?" and someone else might pick up the same idea for another similar project, but that's the extent of it. Flying triangle-headed space monkeys with boiling banana breath attacks aren't ever going to surmount the place of the mainline game.

Then there's the Total Conversion mod, which is a slightly more motivated effort. While someone might cringe on the idea of an ADOM in the Star Wars universe or in a nuclear wasteland with Fallout weaponry, things like that have a couple very important points to them: The amount of work needed to pull off big changes is always beyond enormous, as they mess with game balance. Out of a thousand total conversion mods, one is lucky to survive a year later. If the work made by this developer is not genuinely inventive and enjoyable by a wide range of audience, it will not garner an audience. No one likes to play a bad mod - The developer will be feeling very lonely for a long time as they try to add features and get everything work out. Those few and far between mods that survive to the end of this thorny road are alone worth opening the source code for. This is completely analogous to how many roguelike projects are started all the time and how many of them become something as good as ADOM.

None of that is going to take place too quickly after opening any source, though. It would be a long effort of studying and documenting the source code before anyone got any serious work done. Maybe in a year or two that 1.1.2 bugfix could be released, which then could become a solid base for more ADOM developing. I myself would like to see ADOM ported to Python.

Edit: Other than bugfixes, I believe the first "real" enhancements to ADOM source code would be small and functional patches to things that individuals feel strongly about. A bunch of people interested in rocks wander into the same topic and some of them have coding skills -> They start to bounce around ideas to enhance mining and smithing and everything involved. In another corner of the forums you could see a little botanist club arguing whether this or that tree or shrubbery (NI!) should be coded in, and how the different trees would affect the value and power of the items carved from them. A little later someone packs these different projects into a larger umbrella type project for easy installation package over the latest ADOM version - Whatever it's going to be at that time. Perhaps the first bigger project to finish would be something involving graphical tiles.