Liberate Terraria! (OGA needs your help)
Wednesday, February 22, 2012 - 14:32
Edit: It's been confirmed that this is definitely not happening.
Hey folks!
If anyone can help out with this, I'd appreciate it. Given the reaction to the recent halt on Terraria development, I suspect it might be possible to gather a "liberation fund" to pay the Terraria devs to open the source and content of Terraria. In order for this to be even remotely possible, we need the terraria devs to at least be aware of the idea.
I've tweeted about it here and here, from the OGA twitter account. Any retweets or other promotion would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
Bart
Comments
Good luck with that. The thing is built on Microsoft XNA. A pretty huge obstacle i'd say.
All the more reason to open source it. I'm sure it could be abstracted out and replaced with something cross-platform.
XNA actually makes for an interesting case here: it's so cross-platform that it's already missing a lot of the complicated stuff, which makes it a lot more likely that it can be replaced with something that can run on even more platforms.
The real question is just how they handle things and whether a suitable replacement can be found, or put together (project like OpenTK, Tao, SharpDX, SlimDX, and so on are the best bet there). Those both will take a bit of poking around or some info from their devs.
In general, it would be a great chance and probably pretty interesting for everyone involved, but some more research certainly needs done.
Don't snob folks who develop for Microsoft platforms. Some of them are already developing and using open source software. For the most part they are a community spirited bunch that loves to share their work when it helps others. Usually the content is portable between platforms (which is what we are focused on here, right?)
Don't snob folks who develop for Microsoft platforms. Some of them are already developing and using open source software. For the most part they are a community spirited bunch that loves to share their work when it helps others. Usually the content is portable between platforms (which is what we are focused on here, right?)
I tend to be pretty agnostic when it comes to programming toolkits. If it does what you need it to do, then I say go for it. That being said, if XNA works on Linux, I'm not immediately aware of it.
On the other hand, and I should be clear about this too -- even if it's never ported over to Linux, there's still an immense value to open sourcing it (and XNA wouldn't prevent that, to my knowledge). I'd just expect that if it were open sourced, then a lot of people would probably jump in and work on porting it to Linux. :)
And if Terraria were to be liberated, as in having its assets freed, you'd have to cull out some of the 'fun cameos' of well-known proprietary video game characters.
And if Terraria were to be liberated, as in having its assets freed, you'd have to cull out some of the 'fun cameos' of well-known proprietary video game characters.
That really depends on how blatant they are. If it's just a funny reference (that is, something clearly similar but also clearly not the exact character) then it might be okay. Regardless, I have too much on my plate to actually manage the open-sourcing of Terraria (on the off chance the devs would agree to it) so that would have to be handled by someone else. :)
BTW, xna works on linux,mac,windows,xbox,android and Ios through MonoGame.
Bye
How compatible is it, out of curiosity?
I'd certainly be happy to donate some money (and possibly effort) to a good open source terraria-like game. But I certainly wouldn't do so for XNA. It'd have to be something fundamentally multiplatform such as SDL/OpenGL.
There's nothing particularly technically complex about Terraria that I can see to make a clone a difficult proposition, the procedural world generation is really quite crude and massive grid-based worlds are trivial to page.
As I understand it Terraria was never designed for community modding, which is where I see a game like this could really shine. A modular system that allows users to create new biome generation systems, enemy AI, etc. could really boost the richness of the game world.
The Clonk family is interesting but when I've tried the games now and then over the years they've always felt stiff and clunky and I've never been able to get into them from a quick try. Terraria's generic platformer gameplay lets you jump right into the game without any initial laborious learning period. Which is nice.
Well, that has been fixed by OpenClonk (by making the controls a lot more fluid and by forcing mouse aiming). Making a terraria-like (minus the huge world and plus pixel instead of block landscape) mod for OpenClonk would be a relativly easy task (I thought about doing something like that already, but I don't have enough time for that.)
I am pretty experienced in XNA and I'd like to point out that all the content would be REALLY easily coverted back into .png format or likewise for use in other applications. So the game being made in XNA is not a problem. The only obstacle here is just getting the creators consent or whatever other legal things you need to make it ok to use the sprites.
It's confirmed by the authors at this point that this will never happen, unfortunately.