Teseng, no, because the money isn’t really for the game - neither myself, kevin granade or Darkling Wolf are likely to be seeing a dime of it either. And its hard to call it a profit for Soron when success in this case means a significant pay cut. Open source games have a cost, usually measured in developer time, and the kickstarter will be solely a way for us to be able to get more of it… It IS a donation system - that’s how kickstarter works. Its just a donations system attached to an obligation on our part. This is not money we are receiving in exchange for things that happened in the past, but so that we can do something more in the future (and also a chance for me to justify making a cataclysm poster :P)
Me and kevin and DW will still be working for free, as will soron if the kickstarter falls through,.
Well, there are as many as twenty websites that host open-source projects, many of them are funded through advertising, webrings and such. To see this game amongst those would be a bliss - and hear me, there are much less time-consuming projects that achieved a shareware status.
The aim is, since distribution was free when I registered here, once the licensing was announced I anticipated this step in game development. Devs are strongly encouraged to find and take marketing sites of the kind into account, since everything dealing with consumer’s market is further handled by the site base. I know how business can be demanding, and the deal is - the ratings, the comments and user input is away from this site/board, which in my opinion is a developers’ corner with a contributors fanbase.
Personally I try and stay the hell away from business I’m not running, so I will nicely apologize for lack of links that could come into discussion. That, and the legal/commercial side.
Just one more tip, if I may - don’t mirror Kickstarter with other fundraiser projects.
Fair enough GlyphGrpyh, and I see your point. I suppose this is more like funding to hire someone to help with the project rather than funding for the project itself, right? I’m cool with this
Everyone relax. The main dev team for DDA have always been awesome. I can hardly see them wasting huge amounts of cash for no reason, and I’m sure their requests will be modest.
Also a kickstarter can be a good way to raise awareness about the game, as well as to enable further development. Remember every player who learns about DDA is a potential contributor to the development process!
Ah, new website and that official announcement, cool :). The nightly builds aren’t linked any more, though - it’s been very helpful having user feedback from those, so I’d like to see that link posted again. It also looks like the forums don’t have a favicon any more, and cookies got invalidated, but those are more minor issues.
As for the CC-BY-SA license: first of all, the “SA” bit means that even if we put the game behind a paywall (which is a silly thing to do in the first place), the first person to purchase the game would have access to the full source, and could distribute it for free. So that doesn’t really make sense. Second, it was actually Whales who chose the CC-BY-SA license; we’re just following his lead (since, y’know, primary author and all).
In terms of Kickstarter funding goals: the goals we’re looking at are basically just enough to let me work on Cataclysm full-time without worrying about things like rent and food. So, don’t worry about us trying to gouge the players, that’s not our intent. We’re just trying to accelerate the pace at which we can make Cataclysm more awesome :).
Yep, you’ve got it. The project itself is in no way dependent on the kickstarter, the kickstarter project is solely based around getting a full time developer, and I think it’s obvious to everyone the game will continue to be developed without one, since that’s how it got where it is right now and I can’t see additional attention changing that.
It does mean one of our main contributors won’t be able to suddenly disappear though! Heheh.
Thanks for the feedback on the website, I’ll try to fix the broken stuff and add back the missing stuff tonight.
Talking about internationalization, perhaps the code needs to be in utf-8 encoding (or windows code page which is not as good since it is platform dependent, but easier to code anyway) first. The curse needs to be rewrite to support multibyte characters (so wall symbols need to be changed). A non-ascii character may also have different size, for example, most if not all mono-space fonts have cjk characters twice as wide as alpha-beta characters. So if we print a string at (x, y), it may cut the character at (x-1, y) and produce a junky character.
I guess the most hard part is grammar and menu layout, which requires the translator to under stand the code and make his own change. Because the game was written base on English grammar, it will be a long way to make it “foreign” language friendly.
You’re wrong.
Code Page app character generation doesn’t work that way.
If you load a SH*TLOAD.PNG, or a JENNAHAZ_01.RAW into the screen, it’ll keep the intended formatting.
As once I said - there are no buts, only bits. Keep your inputs for the Contributions&Mods section.
Now, how about some alpha blending for those shiny ANSIs?
New website design is nice. But do we really different language support? Now only navigation elements are translated, but articles are still in English. Is it necessary to translate them too? I may translate them to Russian
Change please forum graphics theme from black to gray (the similar style as the website).
Would be great, if the game supported Unicode, I have about 8 extra letters, double with caps.
Also, it would make things easier for people with completely different characters, for example Russian has only about 10 characters from the Latin alphabet.
[quote=“uzername, post:31, topic:1554”]New website design is nice. But do we really different language support? Now only navigation elements are translated, but articles are still in English. Is it necessary to translate them too? I may translate them to Russian
Change please forum graphics theme from black to gray (the similar style as the website).[/quote]
How do you even play the game?
Internationalization would indeed take a lot of under-the-hood changes, on top of needing to actually get the game translated. We’d have to set up a way to grab the appropriate text in the appropriate language, and for a lot of languages, we’d also need to enable unicode support. Both of those require a substantial amount of work, although they’re doable.
It’s something that we’re considering, but there are a few higher-priority big projects on our list.
I also doubt the immediate need for internationalization.
Cataclysm as an (at the moment) ASCII - based rougelike, with all the complexity and the learning curve that implies, appeals to a certain demographic that I assume has at least basic english skills.
This is, mind you, an ignorant guess on my side and localisation would of course always be a good thing, but personally I would, even as a non-native speaker, always prefer the english original.
Development time spent on improving the game would benefir it, for the moment, a lot more then trying to localize it.
Serious question: how does one with a Cyrillic/Greek/Hebrew/Arabic/whatever keyboard play the game? I don’t seem to be able to use my non-English letters, what is playing on a keyboard that has only non-English letters like?
I haven’t been around for awhile, just wanted to say donation-style kickstarter is a pretty nice idea. I was actually wondering why you didn’t have ads on the main site as a way to even further fund the development.
Even though I haven’t been following for the past few weeks I just wanted to give you guys a pat on the back, I’m seeing some nice changes in the git changelog.
Actually, about half our fanbase (from the numbers we’ve seen) don’t have English as their native language. A not-insignificant portion of those can’t speak English at all.
