Standoff Source Code

J

Jason_Ryock

Vice Admiral
Hey Fellas, I know I haven't posted around here for a long bit but I had a question for ya.

I know I requested - annoyingly, several times - the mission source code for UE so I could reverse engineer it for my own SO projects. And I also know that the delay on that was so great because you wanted to clean it up to make it usual.

So I just thought I'd ask, are we going to see sourcecode from Standoff eventually? (And by eventually I mean, after ALL the standoff episodes have been released)

Also, are there plans to include the information about editing/saving messages and the like in SOs to better facilitate fan made projects in the future?

I'm just curious guys, I don't want to pressure you anymore or give you more work to do, but I thought maybe if you kept an eye on the coding during the final development it might make it out into the public eye a bit sooner.
 
We haven't even released episode 1 yet. A source code release is the furthest thing from our minds... and so is episode 5, which makes it pointless to ask about whether we'll release the source code after it.

What I'd like to know, though, is what would you do with the Standoff source code, anyway? We've released the UE source code half a year ago, and the result was... nothing. Nobody's used it for anything. There hasn't even been any questions about it - it's almost as if nobody even looked at it. Why are you asking about Standoff source code when you haven't even made any use of the UE source code?
 
Code-wise, there's not much that is new anyway... Standoff's improvements upon UE are much more prominently the result of more experimenting and creativity done upon the same basics UE used (heck, done by the same programmers, even)... so I don't see anything that's new enough to justify a source code release, considering nothing ever came out of UE's source code release.
 
Without a source code release (or at least a different OS port) of Secret Ops, a source code release for a mod of Secret Ops won't really get anywhere.

Now if we were to see different ports of Secret Ops springing up, it would be justifiable to take the UE source code, change it up a little bit, and compile it into object files for different platforms.
 
Well, the reason why people (all five of them! :p) asked us about the UE source code was because they hoped to be able to learn from it how to make their own SO mods. Which is quite possible, since examples are always a good way of working stuff out. But regardless of what people wanted the source code for, the fact remains that nobody seems to have found any use of it once it was released.
 
I for one thought that the UE release was lacking. It has a bunch of source files but nothing on how you guys did anything else (movies, dantless room, comm vids, etc...) Now Standoff does even more with new huds new cockpits. why not? It shouldn't take much more time than for the you to open up its CVS or whatever you guys use and your texts. how do you know that someone isn't using the source but not relaesing anything?
 
Well, naturally, the best way to release the UE source code would have been to attach a two hundred page step-by-step guide on how to create your own fan project - but we don't have the time for that :p.

The UE source code doesn't explain everything, but most complaints about it not explaining stuff seem to come from people who expected to get everything handed to them on a platter. I get the impression it's the same with you - you complain about the absence of information about movies, the Dauntless room, and the comm videos... but this is all information already available elsewhere. There are whole tutorials about how to do create room files, cockpits, and comms - I know, because I wrote them myself (see here). Similarly all the information about how to convert AVI files into movies is available on HCl's site. Don't complain to us about the absence of things which can already be found elsewhere - that just shows that you haven't bothered to look at what's available.
 
...Yeah, that's the other thing - any information that wasn't in the source code can easily be obtained by dropping into the editing forum and asking.

The absence of such questions, in fact, is the reason why we believe nobody really bothered with the source code.

Edit: Eh, now this post doesn't make sense because Pedro edited his post into oblivion :p.
 
That site is actually new to me, all the editing sites I used were TB and HCl's sites I actually exepected that the source can be used to recreate the binary.. for examples all the community can do is disassemble what you and Origin used but a source with its comments. It is up to you guys who created the thing to release the source unlike those GPL projects who have to do so what's difficult about zipping up everything you have and posting it? no extra 200 page document is need
 
Unregistered said:
It is up to you guys who created the thing to release the source unlike those GPL projects who have to do so what's difficult about zipping up everything you have and posting it?
Click to expand...

I've read this phrase a half dozen times and can't figure out what the hell it means...


To make Quarto feel better, I'll mention that I looked at the source code, because I like to know how things work, even when I don't do anything with them.
 
Yeah... I looked at the source code as well. Then I blinked a few times and dedided to leave the coding to those with the skill at such.
 
Unregistered said:
That site is actually new to me, all the editing sites I used were TB and HCl's sites
Click to expand...
Well, if you haven't done your research, you can't complain about us not providing information. God knows, I post links to KillerWave's site every time subjects like this come up, so it would only take a few minutes of looking in the editing forum to find all the info you need.

what's difficult about zipping up everything you have and posting it?
Click to expand...
That's precisely what we did, though. I zipped up everything I had and posted it. All those other things you ask about - I don't have the source code for them. Our source package contained files that were updated regularly. If a file only ever required one change from us, we simply didn't keep the source code for it.

What it comes down to is that UE was not meant to be a tutorial. It was a game (well, an add-on, but that's the same thing). Everything we did was done for that one purpose - to produce a finished game. We never gave the source code a second thought - we were busy building the game itself. So the source code release is just something we did on the side. You really cannot blame us for not including in this release files that we didn't have in the internally-distributed source package.
 
In that aspect, BTW, Standoff's source code package which we use internally is even more incomplete than UE's. Reason being that I did a LOT of the stuff in Standoff myself before there was even a team per se, and a lot of those things haven't been modified since. Standoff's source package is basically mission files - anything that's graphics related or that was edited early on (movies, rooms, comm vids, ship files) consists of a few hundred files scattered all over my HD. Unless we went through the trouble of creating a proper source package containing all these things for external use, we'd be releasing something very much on the same level of completeness as UE's source package.
 
Isnt a bit too soon to be talking about a source package?
Those things are released after the full game is out, not before... doing so now would spoil the game, since it would have too much information about the campaign.
 
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