I've been an on and off player of Planeshift for ages. I remember eight people sitting around a single rat, and taking turns to earn experience. It was really funny actually.
I'm not speaking for everyone else's opinions but gamewise, the moment you start getting into the game you come across functionality that hasn't been programmed or designed. It kind of dampens your interest to a point. To make up for this, the game masters propose the concept of role play which is paramount to story telling. That is, sitting around and spouting make believe stories and running around on made up quests etc. Um, and whilst I find this nice, looking back... the thought of role playing for the two years I've been involved in the project just makes me think, do I not have something better to do with my life? I hope so. That side of things really doesn't interest me all that much. I imagine there are those who do enjoy doing that!? Each to their own I guess.
The other aspect I find interesting about Planeshift (which I think some people have mentioned before) is the idea of watching the code grow. I've been a Linux GNOME follower for ages and find it fascinating watching the stages, reading the developers comments and learning about how everything comes together (good and bad). Just watching the GNOME project over the years has taught me so much about how a graphical desktop works, the bits which make it up etc. It also serves to be good media coverage for people being involved. It keeps people onside and focused on your game. In part, this is one of the reasons why I tend to occasionally come back to the planeshift project. I like watching the growth of Crystal Space, observing the Google Summer of Code projects, watching the new feature enhancements to the Gaming Engine and seeing how Planeshift has put this to use. I am aware that Planeshift has a rather large contribution to Crystal Space and as such, is quite an important project to this regard. I think it would seem a valid point to say that Crystal Space could potentially change the gaming scene for Linux in a very big way. ( Yeah, I'm a Linux nerd ). Planeshift is quite a unique project given that it is the first reasonable game to take advantage of this technology and grow this into the future. I find the relationship between the two software entities to be a really big deal for Linux. It really surprises me, that in order to encourage and assist other gaming projects to follow the same path, that this project is so hush hush and secret. I would think that there would be a greater motivation to be vocal about design decisions in the off chance, that other projects may adopt similiar design models. Sure!? Planeshift might suffer a little bit by people/players losing out on some mysterious interests (there are ways around that) but the greater picture would see growth for more game/crystal space developers. This project seems to be open source without really being open.
The problem is that things don't usually happen in a hurry with this project. Understandingly, game programmers / good artists etc are probably a harder skillset to find than ordinary database programmers but also, have to admit, the selection process does seem quite daunting if anyone did want to get involved? Development Tools? Development section and roadmap on the website? Above all this, we're not allowed to get involved in blogs or read about upcoming roadmaps, futures or whatever to the game (Talads rules to which I partially see the reasoning!?). If the development model is based on peoples contributions, then I'd really like to know how somebody's contribution gets turned into reality? Its not explicit when still, it comes down to a handful of people who make the final decision anyway. That has me totally confused. In fact, most of the interesting stuff which I love to read about is forbidden and kept as developers secrets. Yeah, thats to keep people in anticipation I guess, yada yada. So in effect, the decision process for everything is held in the hands of a few people who are really the only ones who know whats going on, who also are the only ones who make all the decisions. I dunno, I'm not an artist, but when I design a piece of software - I tend to see it as a form of art to some regard. I always see code as being open to alternative ways of doing things but anyway. The existing model does take away a lot of enjoyment and education preventing people from watching the project grow whilst making the project slightly closed off and biased to a democractic decision process. All it really allows is for people to log in and play occasionally, then log back on every month to see if a) the features have been implemented or, b) something new has happened in game or on the planeshift web site. Given Planeshift has an opportunity to be the first and highly remembered original Crystal Space Project (which I have no doubt that Crystal Space is going places), all it would take is for another project to come along, with community backing and an open model, and Planeshift would just fall into the background. I personally think its losing a valuable opportunity by containing everything for the sake of a little mystery.
Anyway, just thought I'd throw my two cents worth into the project.
Now, I don't want to be unsociable, but does anyone know of any other fairly good Crystal Space projects taking off? Or is Planeshift still really the only reasonable one at this time?
