Free Allegiance Forums

French_Touch wrote:QUOTE (French_Touch @ Oct 5 2010, 03:37 PM) Actually, there are usually two different kind of websites. The first one is "classic" (download.com, tucows, etc.) and the second one is more more recent and came up when the "open source" philosophy became famous.

Actually, there's four or five different types. There's shareware (which would roughly fit your first category), there's abandonware (where you find the $#@!ing BEST FREE GAMES), there's freeware (typically pretty good but prone to oddities), there's open source (typically not fantastic), and of course there's commercial and indie games. Allegiance would fit squarely in the second category, abandonware: games that were once commercial, became free or de facto free due to the owner no longer having any interest in it, but can be "reclaimed" by the original creator at any time.

first, goodness, gracious did I just catch spunky reading this thread?

Second, yes Jimen, which is why it is sometimes harder to get the game publicity on the other types of sites you mentioned. Being able to do so would certainly be nice though. The aforementioned download.com still has the MS Allegiance demo from 2000 hosted (which still gets a handful of hits...). Having at least an up to date installer would be nice, but as mentioned is unfeasible. Not so much because we do or don't have GPL, but simply because they and some other sites simply won't let you post unless you own the rights to the content you post and have the authority to grant it to them. I had looked into this myself a few months ago.

GPL would be nice, but it wouldn't be an end all solution. If it magically falls in our lap, great. We could still use help from the community to keep the resources we do have access up to date.

Luckily some places are less stringent, I was pleased to find in my survey that Fileplanet at least has an installer that's only a year or two old and should still connect to the right lobby.

gamershell has an old installer as well, but updating it fell on deaf ears (someone from the marketing team forgot it over and over again). I might contact them myself, at least they post the release of an updated version on their front page.

Frenchie - Urban Terror is not open source at all AFAIK (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Terror)


Mind you you have good ideas.

I suggest you PM Saisoma (if you're not in touch with him already) he runs a marketing team which aims to promote allegiance.

I've read a lot of false stuff and misconceptions here so I feel compelled to answer.

First, I don't know why people are so 'scared' and concerned about that Allegiance licence.

Reading stuff like 'They can shut us down anytime' reminded me of kids in a classroom...no they can't but more importantly they don't care at all.

Like TE pointed out the licence is MSR-SSLA (shared source). Don't be paranoid and think M$ is evil in everything they do.
They put this licence because it's the one they use with everything released by MSR (not MS). Not because they had an evil plan for Allegiance...

Do they care about what we make with that 10 years old buggy source code ? not at all. they might eventually care about the trademark 'Allegiance' and other names like Gigacorp, Iron Coalition, Bios, etc. So be advised that some negotiations about these trademarks (and these trademarks only not the code) might take place with MS in a near future...

What they don't want is people earning money by using their name as a selling point.

If someone rewrite a 100% identical Allegiance from scratch and call it Pigs In Space and sell it, they won't mind.
If someone compile the code, rename it Pigs in Space and sell it, they can mind (and have the right to).
if someone rewrite 100% or compile current code and sell it as 'Allegiance' using MS brand to attract customers : they'll mind strongly.

That's what the MS-SSLA is all about. They don't wont people making profit by using MS work and notoriety. And it's profit by selling software only.You can charge for hosting a lobby or a game server without violating the licence.

As for the 'granted back' part of the licence (section 5), don't worry either, they're just protecting themselves to not be accountable in case they redistribute your modifications. But this mainly concerned other works released by MSR.

Because, now get real, all the changes done by this community since MSR released the source have no value for MS. Compared to a modern game budget, this is roughly the daily coffee break budget. If they want to reboot the franchise, they'll throw the $ and tons of devs. It's MS ffs, they talk in billions. It's not a random indie 3 guys game studio.

Relativise this: Having one of their lawyers or employees taking time looking at us will cost them more than what Allegiance is worth today...

As for this 'shared' licence, it stops to "shared". So things like ASGS , CSS, ICE, AME, etc are not covered by it. They are additions not modifications.

Now back to the OP and the FOSS community:

I don't think it's the good people and approach. In fact you might want to keep these people away or the drama we've been experiencing here will look like nothing compared to the one they people can pull out...
I mean as new players of course, nothing bad in trying to attract new devs from the FOSS community.

Right, notjarvis, I should've taken games like Tremulous or Open Arena...
Nonetheless, it's amazing how UrT has attracted a lot of players.
(I read that the game itself is GPLv2+ from the quake3 engine, in GPL, but the "associated data" are not open-source).

Anyway, I'll contact Saisoma. Thanks.

KGJV wrote:QUOTE (KGJV @ Oct 6 2010, 09:10 AM) .....
If someone rewrite a 100% identical Allegiance from scratch and call it Pigs In Space and sell it, they won't mind.
......

I like your idea when do we start..

Grimmwolf_GB wrote:QUOTE (Grimmwolf_GB @ Oct 6 2010, 02:54 AM) gamershell has an old installer as well, but updating it fell on deaf ears (someone from the marketing team forgot it over and over again). I might contact them myself, at least they post the release of an updated version on their front page.

That would be me, and it's not forgotten, but if you'll notice, there hasn't even been an updated ep of Alleg Sports in almost a year:(. ALso, I was hoping for the new installer that was due for R6 that would make the install much better. Marketing is holding off on a lot of things (not just because of me) because there are just too many issues with the current release and any big "push" would draw more players, sure, but keep a lot less than R6. . . at least that's our thought.

Moetop wrote:QUOTE (Moetop @ Oct 15 2010, 07:24 PM) I like your idea when do we start..

While I'd love for this to happen, the time and effort involved is way more than one person could do alone, and as awesome as the devs of this community are, I doubt they would want to rewrite an entire game from scratch for free to support some 400-600 players. And if they were to try to sell it- it could be an awesome game and even make them some money- but marketing is tough.

But hey if there is anyone out there that will and can do this it would be awesome

By the way, why don't we put a "sourceforge" pic on the website. All the projects use them to attract people and it helps a lot when you want to "trust" a program. It's not complicated and to me, it would be much more convincing than a "CNET"...

What about something like that ?





The source ARE on sourceforge website, why not use it at our advantage?

Personnally, I would trust this game more than all the free games you can find on Internet with spywares or freewares that are actually sharewares.