I have some questions for the development, answer when you have time I know you are busy with the launch on the 6th.... I'll highlight the main points so that developers can read past my details.
1) What is the future of the open source part of this project, I'm assuming there already is a private or offline repository that the main beta written on, and compiled to the test team? I know the public commit is on github atm, build #398. Based on the features and stuff implemented it looks like quit a bit of differences. I'm not lawyer but I'm hoping you checked into which licenses were used for the source code, whether gpl, mit etc.... because some coding licenses require full source code available to not be in breach of law. I understand that certain parts of the server code (particularly cheat detection code needs to remain private). Just want to make sure you thought of this.
2) Server Questions and direction: I know the idea is to make this into one big mmorpg like the original, but that brings me to the second point, wouldn't a very successful launch paint a big target on this by a certain companies legal team? Going along with the opensource aspect, perhaps continuing to have functions not relying totally on a central server would be a good idea. Not saying you shouldn't make a central server as that is the intended idea, replicate the big ea land TSO world. I've worked on projects that had similar issues. After the sims online there was a game called secondlife (3d avatars looked a little like sims 4), they started out by opensourcing most of their game in order to cut down on development costs. A few projects sprung up by these codebases, opensim, for example. Unlike secondlife opensim was all local based servers, so you could do either one of two things, replicate a secondlife experience getting a lot of people and thereby content, or find someway to connect these local servers. I process called hypergriding was used. And in fact was once tested on the main secondlife grid from and opensim grid just for testing at one point. Content from one grid could be locally downloaded to another grid, and vice versa was the protocol. Now secondlife is a game of a real life economy you can trade and even make real money (they have a functioning currency), so this obviously was the one thing that couldn't be hypergrided. And it becomes a bit of permission nightmare and potential for distruptive code. Since the company that makes secondlife even included a lsl coding langague that could be used in game to write scripts and extend gameplay. Now these are two different beasts, secondlife vs the sims online. Secondlife is all about user created content and buying and selling it and land with real money, sometimes into the $1000 dollar range least on land buying. Back when I played, 270 lindens equaled a dollar and there was a whole system of land barons etc, creating content just to pay for their 350USD$ a month tier. Obviously the project here can't become that, as it would be shut down asap. As the simantics code and textures, meshes,scripts are all owned by Electronic Arts.
I think secondlife made a bad decision for the end user, (maybe good for their business initially), by relying on all content to be controlled and all servers run by them. I wasn't even a sim owner but over the course of the 8 years I played it I spent probably 10k real money. Mostly on land renting, and items i bought that did guess what, cover other peoples ridiculous land tier.
For the last few years as the opensim opensource codebase catches up to the functionality of secondlife, and prices have risen there has been a mass exodus from it. Linden Labs the owner of secondlife could decide to shut it down, and we'd be much in the same situation as ealand did here, except they opensourced the code so it would not be lost in this scale of ealand.
3) so my point is you need to balance making this tso ealand thing a real mmorpg like it was, yet think about ways to keep the project from being shut down. Obviously asking for money is out of the question as is real currency exchange in game for example. One way to do this is to decentralize at least a bit of it, otherwise a successful jan 6th etc could lead to a shutdown court order. Other internet protocols have avoided being shut down by being decentralized like bittorrent for example. Also sadly publicity might be a problem, so press could be an issue.I'm going to bomb Kotaku if they ruin this game too for example. <-figuratively with angry frowny faces that is. ;P
As I see it the TSO engine is actually better at a "hypergrid" style system then opensim even was. Secondlife/Opensim has a horrible coding strategy, where all content including avatars meshes textures, scripts, are downloaded realtime to users and barely cached for the next visit. Besides making this slow, servers expensive to run, this creates a huge headache with more people in game. TSO and simantics doesn't have to do all that, luckly, as all the content so far is already stored locally on the users computer. All it has to do tell the computer what data to put where on display at what order and time. Doesn't have that kind of bottleneck.
4) back to the mmorpg aspect, obviously having a central server connected to smaller external servers would raise fairness questions. ie: if someone came on the game brand new and brought 100,000 from their lan server to this one, it would make someone who worked hours to make a 10th that in simlions angry. Perhaps their could be two currencies then one stored only on the main server, and others for the public ones. That would keep things balanced. There are plenty of similar strategies.
5) another good thing about having private server part continuing besides keeping the project alive and more improbable to shut down is international groups, unless you plan to learn and moderate all languages its going to become quite a headache. That brings me to my last question. How do you plan to moderate all of this, it sounds like a massive undertaking? Couple this with server load, game balancing, anti-cheating, glitch fixing, and downright downtime, even triple A companies with billions of real money backing them have problems with this. The more popular this comes the more headache it will become to manage all this. This is why in everything from companies to countries have tasks delegated and subdelegated. Otherwise total anarchy.
*My main suggestions is maybe not on the 6th (since you have all this work cut out for you already) but sooner then later, not to forget about giving people the ability to run their own fiefdoms within reason on perhaps a web like structure in addition to the main grid.* If you can't agree to decentralize any, and the codebase becomes totally proprietary, this can turn from a fun life passions project, into a legal shutdown nightmare in a short while.
If when this becomes successful (which I want it to be by all means), i just don't want some lack of foresight at the beginning to be its inevitable undoing.
Sorry about the long post.
1) What is the future of the open source part of this project, I'm assuming there already is a private or offline repository that the main beta written on, and compiled to the test team? I know the public commit is on github atm, build #398. Based on the features and stuff implemented it looks like quit a bit of differences. I'm not lawyer but I'm hoping you checked into which licenses were used for the source code, whether gpl, mit etc.... because some coding licenses require full source code available to not be in breach of law. I understand that certain parts of the server code (particularly cheat detection code needs to remain private). Just want to make sure you thought of this.
2) Server Questions and direction: I know the idea is to make this into one big mmorpg like the original, but that brings me to the second point, wouldn't a very successful launch paint a big target on this by a certain companies legal team? Going along with the opensource aspect, perhaps continuing to have functions not relying totally on a central server would be a good idea. Not saying you shouldn't make a central server as that is the intended idea, replicate the big ea land TSO world. I've worked on projects that had similar issues. After the sims online there was a game called secondlife (3d avatars looked a little like sims 4), they started out by opensourcing most of their game in order to cut down on development costs. A few projects sprung up by these codebases, opensim, for example. Unlike secondlife opensim was all local based servers, so you could do either one of two things, replicate a secondlife experience getting a lot of people and thereby content, or find someway to connect these local servers. I process called hypergriding was used. And in fact was once tested on the main secondlife grid from and opensim grid just for testing at one point. Content from one grid could be locally downloaded to another grid, and vice versa was the protocol. Now secondlife is a game of a real life economy you can trade and even make real money (they have a functioning currency), so this obviously was the one thing that couldn't be hypergrided. And it becomes a bit of permission nightmare and potential for distruptive code. Since the company that makes secondlife even included a lsl coding langague that could be used in game to write scripts and extend gameplay. Now these are two different beasts, secondlife vs the sims online. Secondlife is all about user created content and buying and selling it and land with real money, sometimes into the $1000 dollar range least on land buying. Back when I played, 270 lindens equaled a dollar and there was a whole system of land barons etc, creating content just to pay for their 350USD$ a month tier. Obviously the project here can't become that, as it would be shut down asap. As the simantics code and textures, meshes,scripts are all owned by Electronic Arts.
I think secondlife made a bad decision for the end user, (maybe good for their business initially), by relying on all content to be controlled and all servers run by them. I wasn't even a sim owner but over the course of the 8 years I played it I spent probably 10k real money. Mostly on land renting, and items i bought that did guess what, cover other peoples ridiculous land tier.
For the last few years as the opensim opensource codebase catches up to the functionality of secondlife, and prices have risen there has been a mass exodus from it. Linden Labs the owner of secondlife could decide to shut it down, and we'd be much in the same situation as ealand did here, except they opensourced the code so it would not be lost in this scale of ealand.
3) so my point is you need to balance making this tso ealand thing a real mmorpg like it was, yet think about ways to keep the project from being shut down. Obviously asking for money is out of the question as is real currency exchange in game for example. One way to do this is to decentralize at least a bit of it, otherwise a successful jan 6th etc could lead to a shutdown court order. Other internet protocols have avoided being shut down by being decentralized like bittorrent for example. Also sadly publicity might be a problem, so press could be an issue.
As I see it the TSO engine is actually better at a "hypergrid" style system then opensim even was. Secondlife/Opensim has a horrible coding strategy, where all content including avatars meshes textures, scripts, are downloaded realtime to users and barely cached for the next visit. Besides making this slow, servers expensive to run, this creates a huge headache with more people in game. TSO and simantics doesn't have to do all that, luckly, as all the content so far is already stored locally on the users computer. All it has to do tell the computer what data to put where on display at what order and time. Doesn't have that kind of bottleneck.
4) back to the mmorpg aspect, obviously having a central server connected to smaller external servers would raise fairness questions. ie: if someone came on the game brand new and brought 100,000 from their lan server to this one, it would make someone who worked hours to make a 10th that in simlions angry. Perhaps their could be two currencies then one stored only on the main server, and others for the public ones. That would keep things balanced. There are plenty of similar strategies.
5) another good thing about having private server part continuing besides keeping the project alive and more improbable to shut down is international groups, unless you plan to learn and moderate all languages its going to become quite a headache. That brings me to my last question. How do you plan to moderate all of this, it sounds like a massive undertaking? Couple this with server load, game balancing, anti-cheating, glitch fixing, and downright downtime, even triple A companies with billions of real money backing them have problems with this. The more popular this comes the more headache it will become to manage all this. This is why in everything from companies to countries have tasks delegated and subdelegated. Otherwise total anarchy.
*My main suggestions is maybe not on the 6th (since you have all this work cut out for you already) but sooner then later, not to forget about giving people the ability to run their own fiefdoms within reason on perhaps a web like structure in addition to the main grid.* If you can't agree to decentralize any, and the codebase becomes totally proprietary, this can turn from a fun life passions project, into a legal shutdown nightmare in a short while.
Sorry about the long post.
