I was thinking the other day. A bad habit, I know. I was thinking about what the difference between a good tactical shooter and similar games. Many years ago I played the SWAT series of games. Oddly enough the things I liked about SWAT were very similar to the things I like in INF. This whole line of thought was brought to the surface the other day when I saw a forum survey somewhere about the most realistic games. One of those games was SWAT. I asked myself what is the real difference between a game like SWAT and one like Inf? Maps and uniforms. SWAT was everything Inf wants to be. Of course freeaim and iron sights were not in vogue then but the game stressed team work, fire control, room clearing and proper weapon selection. The game had bullet penetration and enemies that would surrender if met with sudden force, tear gas, commands to surrender and perhaps a leg shot.
Given all this and the fact that there must be plenty of SWAT fans who would love to see a remake with a new engine I thought that if someone were to develop a mod like SWAT it would be a huge duplication of effort. That is to say the perfect Inf mod is pretty damn close to the perfect SWAT mod. For that matter any mod that wanted to be as realistic as possible would duplicate this effort. It seems logical that sharing resources could be mutually beneficial to everyone.
Here's the problem, no one wants to do a lot of work only to have some lame team somewhere else contribute little or nothing and walk away with all the assets developed by someone else. Because of this development teams such as the Inf team jealously guard these assets and keep them to themselves.
I think I have an answer. A cooperative community that uses a point system to buy and sell licenses to use developed assets. Let me give an example. Let's say you have developed a pretty good M16 with animations. You could then put it up on the site for sale at say 100 AP (asset points). Now other developers could then spend their AP to buy the license if they liked the price. Now let's say someone else offered an M16 with a grenade launcher and all those animations for say 110 AP. Now then for only 10% more you could get a grenade launcher. Now you could keep your asset at the same price or lower it or add a launcher. Of course this is the problem with a very common thing like an AR family or an AK family weapon. But what if you developed something like a .45 Dragoon? Now you are likely to be the only game in town and such things might be valuable to an old west gun fighting mod. The value of any asset is set purely by supply and demand. To keep things reasonably under control we would only allow assets to be bought and sold by qualified individuals. We would also only license for non-commercial uses unless the seller specifically allows commercial use. Distribution of assets would be strictly limited and violation would carry all the penalties of software piracy. That is to say that if you developed something and someone got a hold of it and used it in an unauthorized manner they would be liable for a $10,000 fine per incident. Any mod created with such material would not be legally distributable. As a part of the license the mod team using an asset must give credit for that asset.
OK that's the part about assets now we can talk about basic game collaboration. Let's say that we want to develop a base mod for realistic games. All the features of this are laid out. Now two our more parties agree to collaborate on a system. This works by using a buy in price. Let's say for our system the buy in is 3000 ap this would give the basic developer 6000 ap to spend on assets for the basic system. These points must be spent on agreed on items such as perhaps in our case iron sight code, realistic movement, head tracking integration, what have you. A team leader would have final say on what assets were purchased and for how much.
Given all this and the fact that there must be plenty of SWAT fans who would love to see a remake with a new engine I thought that if someone were to develop a mod like SWAT it would be a huge duplication of effort. That is to say the perfect Inf mod is pretty damn close to the perfect SWAT mod. For that matter any mod that wanted to be as realistic as possible would duplicate this effort. It seems logical that sharing resources could be mutually beneficial to everyone.
Here's the problem, no one wants to do a lot of work only to have some lame team somewhere else contribute little or nothing and walk away with all the assets developed by someone else. Because of this development teams such as the Inf team jealously guard these assets and keep them to themselves.
I think I have an answer. A cooperative community that uses a point system to buy and sell licenses to use developed assets. Let me give an example. Let's say you have developed a pretty good M16 with animations. You could then put it up on the site for sale at say 100 AP (asset points). Now other developers could then spend their AP to buy the license if they liked the price. Now let's say someone else offered an M16 with a grenade launcher and all those animations for say 110 AP. Now then for only 10% more you could get a grenade launcher. Now you could keep your asset at the same price or lower it or add a launcher. Of course this is the problem with a very common thing like an AR family or an AK family weapon. But what if you developed something like a .45 Dragoon? Now you are likely to be the only game in town and such things might be valuable to an old west gun fighting mod. The value of any asset is set purely by supply and demand. To keep things reasonably under control we would only allow assets to be bought and sold by qualified individuals. We would also only license for non-commercial uses unless the seller specifically allows commercial use. Distribution of assets would be strictly limited and violation would carry all the penalties of software piracy. That is to say that if you developed something and someone got a hold of it and used it in an unauthorized manner they would be liable for a $10,000 fine per incident. Any mod created with such material would not be legally distributable. As a part of the license the mod team using an asset must give credit for that asset.
OK that's the part about assets now we can talk about basic game collaboration. Let's say that we want to develop a base mod for realistic games. All the features of this are laid out. Now two our more parties agree to collaborate on a system. This works by using a buy in price. Let's say for our system the buy in is 3000 ap this would give the basic developer 6000 ap to spend on assets for the basic system. These points must be spent on agreed on items such as perhaps in our case iron sight code, realistic movement, head tracking integration, what have you. A team leader would have final say on what assets were purchased and for how much.