Free Allegiance Forums

I understand that we can't make money for profit on this game but nothing say we can make money for the dev team, as long as the game is free
I do not think we breaking any rules,

KGJV wrote:QUOTE (KGJV @ Jul 13 2015, 05:45 AM) yet another of those...

Don't people realize the real complexity of Allegiance ? it's like an AAA game today.

For Elite Dangerous which is, on many aspects, simpler than Allegiance, they had to collect $2.4 millions thru Kickstarter just to boot up the whole thing, based on a £8 millions budget ($12 millions).

Sure you can cut a lot of costs when doing 'amateurish/indie' work but still it's not something that can be done so easily...otherwise it would have been done a long time ago.

Allegiance is a complex game, it's not Tetris or Minecraft.

I don't want to discourage anyone but look at the complexity first. Take a pen and right down the detailed specs and everything that is needed.

This is all fair enough, and I apologize if any of the folks who have spent time and effort sustaining and extending the game felt like I was trivializing their efforts. That absolutely isn't my intention whatsoever. I think it's also fair to ask for a design document or summary before seriously soliciting interest. These were mostly thoughts off the top of my head after reading the license and skimming through the existing codebase.

With regard to the complexity, I believe I have a fairly decent grasp of it. I'm not sure Elite Dangerous is a great comparison as it's scope is quite a bit different (and larger) than what Allegiance, with much different gameplay objectives. EVE is pretty aligned with Elite Dangerous, it will be interesting to see how those play out against each other. That aside, the reason these games are as expensive as they are is mostly due to content work, not so much engine work. The models, art, sound, etc all require different specialties to do well, and these aren't things you can just expose by dropping in a 3rd party engine and exposing the API. This is what I see as the greatest challenge to a port, re-creating the content side in a way which was familiar but not going to require a team of 30 artists/engineers years to complete. I think one of the advantages of resetting
are programs like Steam's Greenlight which will allow incremental build out over time (think Kerbal Space Program, which started out with two guys).

A lot of the actual mechanics complexity in Allegiance has been fleshed out fairly decently, and many improvements can be introduced almost for free by utilizing the API of whatever engine is used. Rome doesn't need to be re-invented by any stretch. Getting the code base to the point where it's abstracted enough to have different teams implementing the various gameplay mechanics would be much easier starting from scratch and liberally borrowing from the existing codebase where appropriate.

With regard to the challenges presented by the overall scope of such a project, of course there's going to be difficulties. Again, I hope I didn't imply at all that it would be a quick and painless process. There are however a lot of tools and resources available that would make those difficulties surmountable, and with people dedicated to rolling up their sleeves and getting it done, there's no reason it can't happen (even if it hasn't been done yet). If it had been done, this wouldn't even be a conversation!

Honestly, this is not a manifesto or push for this at all, I'm merely curious and speaking off the top of my head. This is all just stream of consciousness until a design proposal and prototype are created.

Globemaster_III wrote:QUOTE (Globemaster_III @ Jul 14 2015, 01:08 PM) I understand that we can't make money for profit on this game but nothing say we can make money for the dev team, as long as the game is free
I do not think we breaking any rules,

The issue with the current license is that Microsoft still owns all rights to it, and can at their discretion pull those rights. All the content and code created on top of it belongs to Microsoft at this point. That's just a scary place to start from. If someone figures out a way to successfully monetize the game, the more successful it is the higher the chance that Microsoft pulls the rug. It's highly unlikely they'd notice or care about generating a few thousand dollars, but start generating more money and lawyers get nervous because it runs the risk of usurping copyright/patents around the game.

Further, the bigger distribution channels like Steam, Gog, App Store, or Kongregate won't touch it with this type of license, and even cross promotional or distribution opportunities are limited because the license isn't free and clear (bigger companies don't want to get caught holding the bag for software that could be re-ingested in the future).

i like where this thread is going. i see goddesspapa has forked the github repo. add more STEAM to the engine.

I think Allegiance is abandon game


Law[edit]
In most cases, software classed as abandonware is not in the public domain, as it has never had its original copyright officially revoked and some company or individual may still own rights. While sharing of such software is usually considered copyright infringement, in practice copyright holders rarely enforce their abandonware copyrights for a number of reasons - chiefly among which the software is technologically obsolete and therefore has no commercial value, therefore rendering copyright enforcement a pointless enterprise. By default, this may allow the product to de facto lapse into the public domain to such an extent that enforcement becomes impractical.

Rarely has any abandonware case gone to court. But it is still unlawful to distribute copies of old copyrighted software and games, with or without compensation, in any Berne Convention signatory country




as you can see, our community have distribute free game for years , we put up on the ads, you tube, Microsoft have not done any thing yet
I think we have done everything that we can and still no reaction from Microsoft
making little money to help support dev team and to improve the community would be good
come on guys, it is abandonware it is old, worse things they can do is asking us to stop..

just remember something, Microsoft abandon our community, we didn't abandon them, they fail to make money and allegiance is their test bed
it is our right to continue to play this game and it is our right to improved it and what ever it take to get more players

far from abandonware. ms gave us the code. think about it.

I agree with you on that imago, cashto is unable to contact Microsoft, which is a good indication
so what ever holding us back ?

not exactly true globey old pal, Cashto was in talks with the folks at M$. but because there hasn't been any updates in a while i'm assuming that those talks petered out. it's a shame aswell as the talks was starting to look quite promising. the powers that be may know more about what has happened with those talks and perhaps just this once we should stop telling Cashto to go $#@! himself long enough to give us some kind of update on what has happened.