Still alive?

[m0d hippY]

Well that's pretty much what we did. Not sure if you're aware of this, but Q3 is open source and has native support to other OS's. We chose to work with IOQ3 because it has more fixes and is a more stable version of Q3. So we are in essence (hacking) the code to get it to work. Even if we didn't try to get it to connect to existing MOHAA servers, it would still require ALOT of modification to the code.

As far as OMOHAA is concerned, I wouldn't say it's a lack of motivation, it's more or less the fact that we only had 2 main programmers. I guess you could say 3 with heiko, but a project of this size would require far more programmers to attempt on a release of this magnitude.

On top of that, we were taking time out of our already busy lives to work on this, now we're even more busy. I know heiko doesn't get on much because he always has his hands full with something, rookie has a new job and not much time for this + he technically withdrew himself from the project already and wombat well, he can't do everything himself. I work 2 jobs and barely have time to do anything now days.

I'm not nearly as good in programming as they are, so I wouldn't be of much help. If anything I'm somewhat of a road block. I have however in my spare time worked on some fixes with heiko, but unfortunatly that too didn't go as far as we had hoped because the limited amount of time that we have.

I do believe wombat said he's going to try & work on the networking code parts to see what he can do.

here's a quote by him:

i updated the network code. connecting works as far as the data packets come in. since they are compressed, it's hard to follow them in a packet sniffer, so i must do it by comparing our code piece by piece to the MOHAA assembly code. that's going to take some time... i completed the implementation of the snapshot parsing (if i made no mistake).
now i started parsing the 'CG messages' though i don't know what they are and why the hell they use them (there's nothing like that in Q3). but basicaly there seem to be 37 different ones and i'll have to implement each Confused

so we're getting closer to maintaining a connection to MOHAA servers (though we still can't draw the models)

Aprop is doing a pretty fancy job with using the Irrlicht engine though.

[marcoz]

I was thinking about an idea to convince EA to open source Mohaa's game engine.

As far as I understand the game engine is so old that it is not used and won't be used in recent and future games. So they don't risk to give a technological advantage to their competitors if they open it up.

Also probably they're not selling a lot of CDs of Mohaa, even if on Amazon and on Play.com I see they're still available for a price that goes from $ 3-4 to $ 10. To not talk about all the pirated copies people download using emule or bittorrent (to connect to a server with AA it doesn't even check if the game is original, like it happens in Spearhead).
So economically for EA Mohaa is almost irrelevant.

But since they're a corporation they won't release anything under a GPL until they find a good reason. And the good reason must be -> $$$

But what if you show to EA that Blender foundation bought its own source code from a private company using a donation campaign? Placing a thermometer in their webpage to show the donations progress and raising the money in a few weeks? And that they did the same for the production of other short movies.

So you can propose to EA:
What if you(EA) do something similar. You state in public that if you sell a number. X of copies of this old game you then will release the game engine under GPL (excluding the sounds and textures, so people will still need the original game to play it legally). You also say that it will be a test to know how big is the open source community and how much they care of having games on Linux.
Instead of asking donations you just place on a page on EA.com a thermometer and a couple of banners of mohaa that redirect people to amazon.com and amazon.co.uk. So you can keep track of how many people are buying the game because of this campaign and update the thermometer everyday.
The thermometer is important because has a terrific psychological effect on people.

What are the risks for EA?
Zero, if you don't reach the number of copies you asked (that can be 1000, 10000, 1 million...it is your choice) you just don't open source it under GPL, but anyway you had the chance to sell more copies of a game that few people did care about it.

What are the advantages?
If you do this move you'll get free press on Slashdot, digg.com, reddit and thousands of forums connected with open source that will care to make your idea publicized and let you sell many copies of mohaa.
You'll have a community of people that will fix the game and port it to Linux doing the work for you. You don't have to make new investments.

_________________________

I would send it using a normal letter (paper I mean) sending it to th EA headquarters to one of the managers you see on this page:
http://aboutus.ea.com/executive-sectionofficers.action

Because if you send a normal letter you maybe bypass all the people that could filter you. This way the letter will go directly to the secretary of one of these managers and then to....the trash can

What do you think about it? I don't really give a lot of chances to my idea, but I want to know your opinion.

[Rookie One.pl]

Sorry to spoil the fun, man, but you're not the first person to come up with the idea. Many personalities from this community have been trying over the years to convince EA to release the source, under various licensing terms, but to no avail. The excuse they've been using to deny the requests is one of a legal nature, and you'd sooner teach quantum physics to an amoeba than get them to cooperate.

They say they don't own the code, which means one of three things:

• their contract with the game's developer (EA is only the publisher) leaves the ownership of the engine to 2015; quite unlikely, besides the expansion packs wouldn't be possible in this scheme, also 2015 is now defunct and no one really knows what happened to them,
• their licensing contract with Ritual (the authors of Ubertools, the Quake 3 engine development that MoHAA uses) allows derivative products but prohibits the public release of source code of any of them, let alone relicensing it,
• they're simply stubborn liars.

Either way, EA has shown in the past that they just will not give and any attempt made by the community to cooperate is bound to fail. I'm not talking only about source code here, but also their support for mods or patches for obvious and annoying bugs (of which there have been plenty in their games in the recent years).

On a side note, I seriously believe it would take less time and money to mod Q3 code to support the game assets than bugfix the original MoHAA.

[marcoz]

Ok, well I guess EA is just a lost cause.

On a side note, I seriously believe it would take less time and money to mod Q3 code to support the game assets than bugfix the original MoHAA.

I would like to help, but I have not the knowledge to do it. I'm a total noob, I just followed a course about C language a long time ago.

Btw if someone would like to learn how to mod Q3 which books would you suggest? (excluding books about C language and OpenGL)

[Rookie One.pl]

There are no books on it. In fact, the Q3 engine is not even documented at all. Everyone who knows this stuff learned it just by reading the existing code, plus trial and error when modifying it, of course. Thing is, this engine is actually quite simple.

If you read carefully into the code and make sure you understand what you're reading, you'll grasp it eventually. At least that's how I learned what I know about it - my C knowledge was very superficial when I started modding Q3.

[Aprop]

Marcoz, I would suggest you lecture of q3 source, its a great book about itself.

But first you have to know C, at least the basics. Some kind of math knowledge can be usefull too. And the will. If thats granted, all else follows.

[marcoz]

Ok I'll try. C is the only language I studied in the past, but now I don't remember a lot of things.
Anyway for me will be easier than learning a complete new language from zero.