PocketMatrix

Hi Guys, Thanks for the PocketPC!

RE: Price. Yea, $3000 sounds like a lot, but considering major phone companies can release the same game across multiple platforms, its worth it. Personally, I think its too cheap. Communication companies pay million dollar saleries to CEO's. Trust me, if I wanted to make money, I wouldn't be spending this much time earning less than I would in the local fish'n'chip store. I'd probable be writing chonky SEO tools to people that think ranking comes by spamming FFA's and search engines.

You can make money from the GPL version, you just have to release your source. Simple! Data files arn't GPL'ed, so yes, it is possible to write a game, and sell the textures/worlds. a-la Quake II. You dont see the Quake II GPL source stopping IdSoftware from selling Quake II.

Note, the latest version is somewhat better than the GPL version, and trust me, getting MD2 models rendering at a high speed on ARM processors is somewhat harder than OpenGL PC development.

Anyway, have fun with the GPL code. Write some free games, and look out for new code.

Kind Regards
Derek Evans

On the topic of selling extra worlds. A very popular, and highly profitable sales method is to give FPS shooters away for free, and sell additional worlds.

I remember buying Blood and being shocked that the demo version wasn't all that limited after all!

So, heres a buisness plan for you guys.

Write a FPS game. Give away the demo for free with 2 episodes (plus source code ofcourse). Thats about 2x6 = 12 worlds. Sell the full version (ie: 5 episodes). And, pay nothing at all for the engine!

Yep, Some people call me crazy.

Catch Ya
Derek Evans

Whats stopping people from stealing Quake worlds? Nothing. It general, most software thieves are too lame to host large amounts of data, so just having megabytes of textures/sounds/models will keep most illegal data off the net. After all, game code is the smallest component of most games.

If you are worried about releasing a serial based decryption algorithm, then a simple external exe that decrypts/decompresses a pak file will do the task & wouldn't be effected by the GPL license. DLL's are a grey area.

But see there is a little catch too all this :-)

If you dont own the content, then there is nothing stopping people from hacking it out, rebuilding some new worlds and releasing the game with your AI code.

So, there is a lot of work to be done for this system to be successful. Hence why GPL works so well.

After all, you cant really expect to compile a bunch of GPL/Free content into a EXE and make money.

Thats called ripping people off. I dont make much money from all this either. Some people have made comments regarding my strong copyright notices on my site.

Well, at the end of the day. Copyright is the only protection programmers have.

Derek Evans

Actually, on the topic of compilations of free content. There is a little legal issue that I dont fully understand, but it relates to the copyright ownership of a collection of free content.

Say, it takes you a year to search the web for free game content which you then compiled into a pak file.

Do you have ownership of the collection? But, surely, your collection is based on other collections based on other collections.

ie: You might search free texture databases, or free poly model sites. What about Google!

Google has idexed most free content. If you found your content via Google, does it mean Google actually owns your work?

This might seem all very odd, but yes, I did work for internet companies that based there entire income on the compilation of free web data. You paid for the _database_! Not the _program_! Infact, you paid a monthly fee to update the _database_ of the program you originally purchased. The database was often made obsolete in 2-3 months, making your investment worthless.

But, other companies started to steal the database, which means we all danced off to court.

So, who owns what?

Id say this is the most important issue theses days relating to programming, GPL and the HUGE mass of free content on the web.

Hence why encryption is used. Not because you are protecting what you own, but because you dont want other people to have what you have got.

So the digital question is...
Does GPL = Karma

Derek Evans