how long will this game survive?

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kdnator
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how long will this game survive?

Post by kdnator »

im worried of being alone in some time
Last edited by Iris on November 17th, 2013, 9:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Anonymissimus
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Re: how long will this game survive?

Post by Anonymissimus »

For as long as developers/contributors keep joining. Watching evolution over the last years, the team's slowly increasing I think. A major problem could be if C++ becomes outdated and badly supported by third party libraries/tools. Other than that, unlimited life expectancy I'd say.
projects (BfW 1.12):
A Simple Campaign: campaign draft for wml startersPlan Your Advancements: mp mod
The Earth's Gut: sp campaignSettlers of Wesnoth: mp scenarioWesnoth Lua Pack: lua tags and utils
updated to 1.8 and handed over: A Gryphon's Tale: sp campaign
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Sapient
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Re: how long will this game survive?

Post by Sapient »

I think he was asking about the multiplayer community. Who knows.
http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/User:Sapient... "Looks like your skills saved us again. Uh, well at least, they saved Soarin's apple pie."
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Turuk
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Re: how long will this game survive?

Post by Turuk »

kdnator wrote:im worried of being alone in some time
I think you'll have a pretty good idea on timing whenever the amount of people online dwindle.
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iceiceice
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Re: how long will this game survive?

Post by iceiceice »

Anonymissimus wrote:For as long as developers/contributors keep joining. Watching evolution over the last years, the team's slowly increasing I think. A major problem could be if C++ becomes outdated and badly supported by third party libraries/tools. Other than that, unlimited life expectancy I'd say.
Do you think MP slowing down, art contrib. arguably slowing down, could potentially be leading indicators for dev slow down?

How many devs begin as players that become interested in the project? Are there devs who got involved with coding for wesnoth before they played the game?

I guess I don't have any idea if SP / campaign play has slowed at all, probably only way to know is to check graphs of downloads from server / add-on server. If that has not slowed then maybe devs will always come from there.
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Crow_T
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Re: how long will this game survive?

Post by Crow_T »

https://www.ohloh.net/p/wesnoth
so you can see here development peaked from 2007-July 2010 but there is still some activity.
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Dixie
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Re: how long will this game survive?

Post by Dixie »

iceiceice: You've only been around for a handful of months, don't take some slowing down in any area to be an indicative of the project crashing. I've been around for a few years and I can tell you (as probably can a lot of other people who have been around even longer) that people come and go when they have the time, or sometimes develop stuff on the slow burner for many months before coming to show it. Development typically is done in waves, sometimes it feels like the game is booming, and sometimes it slows down. But contributors mostly come and go according to their schedules. May to september tends to be a busier period on average, from my possibly flawed point of view, with sometimes the occasional peak around december/january.
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Anonymissimus
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Re: how long will this game survive?

Post by Anonymissimus »

Sapient wrote:I think he was asking about the multiplayer community. Who knows.
Probably. Well, the project can very well live without multiplayer. Multiplayer without the project cannot. Contributors come from the wml authors or GSoC groups most of the time rather than multiplayer.
Crow_T wrote:https://www.ohloh.net/p/wesnoth
so you can see here development peaked from 2007-July 2010 but there is still some activity.
Number of commits cannot be considered an indicator for activity. Such peaks can be caused by a huge number of small cleanups (wmllint, cppcheck etc) not taking much time.
Dixie wrote:iceiceice: You've only been around for a handful of months,
I suppose he's been around for much longer, like the usual MP player who rarely ever joins the forums.
projects (BfW 1.12):
A Simple Campaign: campaign draft for wml startersPlan Your Advancements: mp mod
The Earth's Gut: sp campaignSettlers of Wesnoth: mp scenarioWesnoth Lua Pack: lua tags and utils
updated to 1.8 and handed over: A Gryphon's Tale: sp campaign
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iceiceice
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Re: how long will this game survive?

Post by iceiceice »

Dixie:

Yeah I'm not trying to play chicken little so much as devil's advocate :) I agree with you mostly I think, the project seems stable and the current devs seem committed. I guess what I am trying to argue against is the idea that as long as the devs don't leave the project is healthy. It is true but ignores that all of these things are connected -- the more people use it the more things devs will be inspired to do, the more people will be inspired to be devs, etc.

At various times in the past people have suggested things like humble bundle, steam store, kickstarter for wesnoth. Obviously wesnoth does not need to do any of these things to continue to succeed. Many of these are inappropriate for various reasons like GPL, restrictions of the partner, wesnoth not actually being underfinanced, etc. Also doing any of these things would require significant work and there's no one whose job it is to do them.

I think that wesnoth *could* benefit significantly from some kind of marketing like this. Even though its a fairly well-known project I think the current audience is aging, and the long term health of the project would probably be improved if some effort were made to reach the target group, some of whom would become future devs and contributors. So in that sense something like humble bundle or steam store would be healthy for wesnoth. Esp. when 1.12 comes out, which looks like it will be very good imo. I guess that will also attract new players and such.

Anyways it seems like right now the project is mostly limited by number of devs. Would be very interested to hear any competing assessments.
Anonymissimus wrote: I suppose he's been around for much longer, like the usual MP player who rarely ever joins the forums.
Dixie's right, I've only been playing since about January, didn't know about forums and MP until probably like April or May. Apparently I registered "involution" in May.
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Dixie
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Re: how long will this game survive?

Post by Dixie »

By the way, I didn't mean to sound pendantic or anything. If I did, it wasn't intended ;) And it is true I didn't think of the long-time-unregistered-Mp-player possibility.
Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny - Frank Zappa
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lipk
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Re: how long will this game survive?

Post by lipk »

I think that wesnoth *could* benefit significantly from some kind of marketing like this. Even though its a fairly well-known project I think the current audience is aging, and the long term health of the project would probably be improved if some effort were made to reach the target group, some of whom would become future devs and contributors. So in that sense something like humble bundle or steam store would be healthy for wesnoth. Esp. when 1.12 comes out, which looks like it will be very good imo. I guess that will also attract new players and such.
Personally, I'm not regarding Wesnoth as a mission or something. I code for the mental challenge and the joy of creation. I absolutely agree with you, Wesnoth could be much more popular with active marketing, but honestly, I don't care. Number of players, downloads, add-ons and such quantities are completely indifferent to me. I don't know about the motivations of other contributors, but I think many of them feel the same way.
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Iris
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Re: how long will this game survive?

Post by Iris »

Personally, I started contributing to Wesnoth solely to give back to the development team for making this great game and the players and content creators community for making it even better.
Also to learn C++ and become disillusioned with it two years later, I guess.

That said, personally I’m all for marketing as long as nobody has to sign dense legal agreements and other stuff I dislike on principle. Our past experiences with Wesnoth on large application/game stores (Apple, Desura) aren’t great either, which makes me even more hesitant about aiming for a big name like Steam.

I keep saying personally because this is my personal opinion, and where Wesnoth gets distributed and how is ultimately the call of whoever gets appointed/appoints themselves to handle that task.
Author of the unofficial UtBS sequels Invasion from the Unknown and After the Storm.
Naron
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Re: how long will this game survive?

Post by Naron »

I think and hope that Wesnoth will exist for a long time. As long as people will continue to contribute to Wesnoth, it will exist.
I think that Wesnoth is like Linux: few use it, but use it constantly.
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Crow_T
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Re: how long will this game survive?

Post by Crow_T »

Naron wrote:I think that Wesnoth is like Linux: few use it, but use it constantly.
That's an odd statement. Use Linux constantly? It's my OS, I have to!

I actually feel like Wesnoth is less a game and more of a content creation tool if that makes sense, kind of a creative application like Blender or Krita, the game content being the end product instead of a picture.
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Midnight_Carnival
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Re: how long will this game survive?

Post by Midnight_Carnival »

A while ago, while making a different point, I invoked something similar to the Chewbaka Defence, claiming that in 4000000 years time, beings from another dimension/galaxy will come across our internet through various unknowable means, they will resurect Wesnoth as well as this forum.

Slightly more seriously though, I was worried about the community dying a while back, but never the game. I put Wesnoth up there with early Final Fantasy games, Tetris, etc games which people will keep on discovering and being amazed that there are still so many people who play them.

The only way I see Wesnoth dying is if it sagnates completely: 'we want nothing more, we don't want any more UMCs or user art, that's as far as it goes!' -since this is not likely in the near future, I don't think there is much cause for worry.
...apparenly we can't go with it or something.
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