[Recruiting] Galactic Vice Development

[Conoktra]

Hello,

I represent an international group of Open Source developers called the Electric Eye Productions. Galactic Vice, the Electric Eye Productions premier game, has recently matured too the stage of Alpha 1 -- generating a lot of anticipation from the open source and RTS communities.

Back when the project was first emerging I posted a recruiting advertisement similar to this one in hopes of recruiting some new developers. I learned a good lesson then: If you want people to join your project you've gotta have something to show for it.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly what we now have. As many of you may already know, 99% of open source projects don't make it to a stable release. The very fact that Galactic Vice has reached Alpha 1 is a testament to our dedication in making Galactic Vice a commercial quality - but free - open source game.

Now that we have proof of our dedication to the project, we would like to find others who share the same dedication to the Open Source world -- those of whom have the desire and willpower to develop what could be the next generation of open source RTS gaming.

Here is a demo video of Galactic Vice: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFiXJUESvgE


Team name:
Electric Eye Productions. The Electric Eye Productions is a group of Open Source developers dedicated to produce commercial quality - but free - games for both Windows and Linux. The EEP was originally founded by a group of high school friends, but over the years has developed into the international group of Open Source developers that it is today.

Project name:
Galactic Vice.

Brief description:
Galactic Vice is a 3D, open source, Real-Time Strategy game featuring two races at war. Vital mistakes made by a corrupt human empire lead to a catastrophic war against an alien race -- one in which humanity is pushed to the brink of extinction.

Players can choose between the epic onslaught of survival with the Terran, or the satisfying taste of revenge with the Nazar.

Galactic Vice has been in development for several years now. Only recently (March of 2010) has it become public.

Target aim:
The Open Source and Linux world. We are also targeting the Windows platform, but not as heavily. We plan to ultimately have Galactic Vice available via package management systems for the Ubuntu and Debian Distributions. Galactic Vice is currently available for 64-bit Linux and 32-bit Windows XP.

Technology:
The core-engine of Galactic Vice is programmed in C++. Various other tools (such as our Gimp texture plug-in) are written in C, and a Blender model export/import script is planned to be written in Python.

Galactic Vice currently supports advanced particle systems, animated models, quad-tree based tiled terrain with bump-mapping and unlimited textures/tilesets (similar to that found in Starcraft 2), bounding box frustum culling, custom filesystem manager with a custom archive format that supports Bzip2 compression and 448-bit blowfish encryption, custom scene management system that supports animation and GLSL special effects through a set of VERY simple configuration files, simple RTS unit-management, simple RTS game-logic, runs on Linux and Windows, Octree scene support, animated lava, reflective/refractive/fresnel water, and much much more.

Talent needed:
We mostly need 3D artists capable of modeling, animating, and texturing models for in-game use.

We do also need texture artists capable of creating new tilesets/textures for the terrain system.

We need sound artists to create sound effects for use in-game (Explosions, gun-fire, selection sounds, etc).

And we do also welcome C/C++/Python programmers that have experience with any of the following: Subversion, autotools, Linux API, Windows API, Network programming, game logic programming, Lzma2 compression algorithm, and other RTS video game related stuff.

Team structure:
There have been many people who have contributed to Galactic Vice. I am the only one who has stuck it out the entire 5 years since Galactic Vice was started, but we do have some new members who have been actively developing:

Daniel Pylican: Concept Artist. Been with us since 9:00 PM on March 21st, 2010.

Kristo Kaas: Musical Composer, has also contributed heavily to the project management and storyline. Been with us since 12:32 PM on April 4th, 2010.

Daniel Gray: Financial Supporter and forums moderator. Been with us since sometime in 2009.

Seth Smith: Financial Supporter and forums moderator. Been with us since sometime in 2009.

Mikey Miles: Our public relations guy. We use him as a stooge for making the Electric Eye Productions look like people, not robots (Thanks Mikey!!). Been with us since sometime in 2009.

Jonathon Goodliffe: Me. The one making this post. Co-founder of Galactic Vice next to Blake Robision (who is no longer developing), and the project manager. I also have coded every line of the engine exempt of the external dependencies, designed/created every part of the GUI's in the current Alpha 1 release, have designed/created the terrain system and tilesets to go along with it, designed/created the entire Galactic Vice webpage, and financially supported the project all these years.

Previous Contributors:
Daniel Santos
Nathan Turner
Forrest Voight
Blake Robision
Cody Barnes
Don Anderson
Jim Norris (not related to Chuck Norris)
Ryan Reber
...

Website:
Galactic Vice Homepage

For a demo video: Click.

Contacts:
Galactic Vice Project Manager
The Electric Eye Productions

Previous Work by Team:
None as a team. This is our first collaborative video game.

Feedback:
Any positive feedback is welcomed.

[Perfect Storm]

Looks really nice so far

Going to sticky it for awhile - it may help you getting people into the project.

[Conoktra]

Looks really nice so far

Going to sticky it for awhile - it may help you getting people into the project.

Thanks! I take it I posted in the right area?

[J.K.Makowka]

Nice work so far. made a quick promo post on FreeGamer:

http://freegamer.blogspot.com/2010/0...-vice-rts.html

CC-NC-ND as a media license is not so great however, NC makes it incompatible with most other open-source stuff (and is also not needed if you choose the Share-Alike option), and ND is even worse, as it is really the opposite of open-source

[Conoktra]

Nice work so far. made a quick promo post on FreeGamer:

http://freegamer.blogspot.com/2010/0...-vice-rts.html

CC-NC-ND as a media license is not so great however, NC makes it incompatible with most other open-source stuff (and is also not needed if you choose the Share-Alike option), and ND is even worse, as it is really the opposite of open-source

Are you complaining about my data license? (said in a teasing and sarcastic manner) The data distributed with the Alpha 1 release is packaged up in a archive, which in Galactic Vice is a one way process. So, the data is not really available anyways.

We do, however, plan to package up the data in a separate tar archive next release and release it pure GPL .

Thanks for making that post on freegamer! However if I could get you to change one thing I would appreciate it: Neither Blender3D nor Blender Game Engine has ever been used in the development process. The engine is 100% custom coded to fit Galactic Vice's needs, but Blender will likely be used in the long run for creating the 3D art.

Thanks again!

[J.K.Makowka]

I made some changes to the text.

Could you further elaborate what you mean with the data license. Even if it technically not available, why put it under such a restrictive license?
Maybe just put it in the public SVN (if you have something like that)?

But it would be REALLY cool if you would go completely FOSS both in regards to code and content!

[Conoktra]

I made some changes to the text.

Thank you, I appreciate it.

Could you further elaborate what you mean with the data license.

Looking over the CC-NC-ND I have come to the conclusion that it is too restrictive as you mentioned. The intention is to prevent commercial use of Galactic Vice's game data in commercial games, but the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license would still do that w/o all the extra restrictions.

So, I have switched the license on the Alpha 1 release game-date to the CC-NC-SA .

EDIT: I am looking to post something on Galactic Vice at digg, but it doesn't seem to like me... It says an known error occurred and that theres 12.3% chance its Randy's fault..?

Anyways, could I get some help posting a digg post for Gv? Thanks!

[J.K.Makowka]

Good that you are considering a license change, and I understand that you want to prevent commercial use. But choosing the NC option is in this case overkill and actually causes a lot of problems (like for example the inclusion in repositories of Linux distributions, lots of incompatibilities with other freely licensed works and it could not even be used on a larger LAN party as a tournament game, as they take entry fees to cover their costs).

A good/long read on why the NC option is not a very good idea can be found here:
http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC

Personally I think the SA option also makes it nearly impossible to use it commercial (in the sense that you probably want to prevent), as you have to share all the content (and even the combined work) also freely. And all legal commercial efforts will not touch "free" artwork from the "internet" anyways as they can not verify it's all legit.

So in the end you just cause problems for normal open-source use when choosing the NC option, while not really getting a benefit out of it.

Edit: I license all my art projects dual as CC-BY-SA and GPLv2orlater, and I think that's the best option to ensure optimal compatability, while taking care that it stays free (as in freedom).

[Conoktra]

Good that you are considering a license change, and I understand that you want to prevent commercial use. But choosing the NC option is in this case overkill and actually causes a lot of problems (like for example the inclusion in repositories of Linux distributions, lots of incompatibilities with other freely licensed works and it could not even be used on a larger LAN party as a tournament game, as they take entry fees to cover their costs).

A good/long read on why the NC option is not a very good idea can be found here:
http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC

Personally I think the SA option also makes it nearly impossible to use it commercial (in the sense that you probably want to prevent), as you have to share all the content (and even the combined work) also freely. And all legal commercial efforts will not touch "free" artwork from the "internet" anyways as they can not verify it's all legit.

So in the end you just cause problems for normal open-source use when choosing the NC option, while not really getting a benefit out of it.

Edit: I license all my art projects dual as CC-BY-SA and GPLv2orlater, and I think that's the best option to ensure optimal compatability, while taking care that it stays free (as in freedom).

Thats some good advice, thanks! I will present it on the Gv forums.

EDIT: After thinking about it and doing some reading I decided to go ahead and dual-license the Alpha 1 game data (CC-BY-SA and GPLv2). I am going to to release the Alpha 1 game data in a nice little tar archive when I get the chance. A lot of the data is in a custom format and requires special tools to load/save. So, I would have to compile and package those up too.

[J.K.Makowka]

Awesome! This will really become a perfect open-source RTS then!

I will look into contribution models for sure!