KSP1 should go the way of id software

[Jack Mcslay]

For those who don't know , id software has a tradition of releasing the source code for their games a couple years after it's tech becomes obsolete and a new game was released a couple years by then. It would be a great way to keep KSP1 alive long after the release of KSP2 without requiring any effort from the team

[Slyguy3129]

On 6/22/2021 at 3:25 PM, Jack Mcslay said:

For those who don't know , id software has a tradition of releasing the source code for their games a couple years after it's tech becomes obsolete and a new game was released a couple years by then. It would be a great way to keep KSP1 alive long after the release of KSP2 without requiring any effort from the team

Yea, that would be awesome. But I think ID had more control over their games than Squad does/did.

And that's just the first issue. 

Assuming they no longer have any control due to publishers, they would be unable.

Going off the current trend in the industry which I see as: "Make" a game, break it into tiny pieces, release "main" game, release rest of game through DLC, "Make" sub-par sequel appealing to "general masses" for moaw profits, desperately try and fix sequel because built in fan base has abandoned you, abandon franchise; having an "older" but superior product competing with the "new sequel" would cut into those profit margins. Because word of mouth works far better than advertising. And fans would be telling people to stick with the original because the source code is available for fans to do everything they ever dreamed of.

Heaven forbid the fanbase actually make a competing sequel from the source code.

All these things keep publishers up at night in pools of cool sweat.

[eekee]

I'm not going to comment on KSP 1's future, but I'd like to relate the story of the survival of Transport Tycoon Deluxe. It has something in common with KSP: it doesn't dumb things down very much. Newbies can easily get stuck and it's easy to find very hard challenges. I remember one time, a guy who'd played Railroad Tycoon avidly from version 1 to version  10 (how many years is that?) came on TT-Forums looking for help because his train network wasn't working. He'd got his trains into a mild form of deadlock - something natural to train networks. It was a thing every Transport Tycoon newbie quickly learned to deal with, but... well, Railroad Tycoon wasn't that real, Transport Tycoon was.

In those days modding wasn't really accepted by game publishers, but nonetheless a modding patching community got going and "TTDPatch" got a large number of improvements and extensions. TTDPatch was very much alive 10 years after the release of Transport Tycoon Deluxe or 12 years after the original Transport Tycoon - many years after the publishers had stopped selling the game. In those days, games didn't really get updated. They were released, maybe had a few variants, and if they did well, maybe sequels. Transport Tycoon had 3 or 4 versions which were more art changes than program updates. Deluxe has some extra train signals over the original and some different terrain generators; that's about it for code changes. So I guess its last release was probably about 1996, but TTDpatch was still going strong in 2004.

By 2004, another fan project was ready for prime time: OpenTTD. With all new code, OpenTTD is a clone of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, a faithful reproduction but not bound by the same licenses. Until about 2005 or so, you had to have the original graphics data to play it, but as the coders matured they got uncomfortable with that. They started a project to get open source graphics; compatible but looking a little different. Some of the many "NewGRF" artists were willing to contribute, so OpenTTD was soon able to include a complete set of open-source graphics. It's still going strong; you can today play Transport Tycoon Deluxe much like it was originally (but with much better pathfinding), or with almost all the extensions from TTDPatch and many more.

In short, fans of a complicated, technical game had the technical skill to make sure it survived and to make it better than the original. It's still going strong today. I'm almost certain the same will happen to KSP 1.

For reference of the sort of activity level I mean by "still going strong", here are links to OpenTTD's news page and TT-Forums.

Edited June 30, 2021 by eekee
typo