Nexuiz.com makeover? Nexuiz going to consoles?

[Ronan]

Alientrap is under the leadership of a guy who didn't really speak with the Nexuiz' devs since 4 years. Even if Nexuiz was originally supposed to be a commercial project, the product wasn't good enough to be sold. The works done wasn't lost thanks to Lordhavoc convincing Lee Vermeulen to release it under the free software GPL license, with the authorization of involved artists. But after that, Vermeulen left Nexuiz to work on others private projects (Zymotic, Capsized, etc.).

Nevertheless, releases after releases, Nexuiz became an enjoyable and quality game, polished by the community, particularly thanks to :
- divVerent, who rewrote most of the gamecode and menu.
- LordHavoc with the work done on his darkplaces engine over the years.
- various artists like Morphed, Tenshihan, Strahelemann, Sev, ai, etc.
- valuable contributions bring by esteel, savageX, willis, morfar, tZork, Blub\0, FruitieX, -z-, etc.
- all the admins hosting nexuiz servers for the community and the mappers

The credits list is pretty long and show many people was involved, all done with passion, on their free time, without money. When you know that not a single dollar from the donation was invested into Nexuiz, it's surprising towards the community hard works and donators. But when we learn Lee Vermeulen sold to a private company the Nexuiz domains and branding, without telling anyone, even the current active Nexuiz developers, it's quite disrespectful to the works done over the years.

We don't know yet the detail, but we can suppose Vermeulen got a good amount of money for the branding (thanks to the works done by the community). Now the question is what all of this will bring to our game, except confusion between the 2 games. In any case the pc version is safe, protected by the GPL license. The console version will be a propriety game, that why all the artworks is redone and code properly licensed, powered by what I heard a ps3 version of the darkplaces engine. But a priori no contents (textures, models, etc.) from the commercial game will be included in the pc game i.e. what our game is missing the most in quality. Indirectly, the new features bring to the engine for the ps3 version are also included in the gpl engine thanks to LordHavoc.

In any case, Vermeulen should better reveal quickly his intention :
- keeps all the money for him and screw the community
- use the money this time to at last pay artists (textures, playermodels, animationetc.), coders (csqc players prediction), and whatever is needed to make Nexuiz a better game.

[[-z-]]

Give my cut to divVerent, no one would have ever offered Vermeulen money if it wasn't for his hard work

[TVR]

Start referring to our game as Nexiuz, because it isn't affected by Vermeulen's misspelled trademark registration of Nexuiz™.

[MirceaKitsune]

Very nicely said Ronan! And no, I don't want any money from Nexuiz either (unless someone would want to donate in other circumstances, etc). It is exactly why I like this project so much, apart from being a great game; That it's done by people who work on it without doing it for money, or expecting something back rather than the game being improved.

@ Vermeulen: Although I spoke with most of the devs as I did my contributions over the last year, we never got to meet. I am grateful you've started this game, which imo is one of the best free shooters out there at this day. In my opinion, doing this was a very big mistake, and I don't know exactly what all of your intentions are. But if you really wish to prove you care for this community, and wish to fix this mistake, I believe these would be two things to do (please correct me if I'm wrong):

1 - Use at least part of the money which was made off this deal for Nexuiz (this one). Eg. For buying it some better art (of course as long as it can be GPL-d), or even making some publicity for it.

2 - Help us press the people at Illfonic to change the name. If they really want, they can keep nexuiz.com I guess... but at least change anything in the name. Nexiuz, Nexuiz Something, Nexuiz 2010, anything.

[Vermeulen]

Alientrap is under the leadership of a guy who didn't really speak with the Nexuiz' devs since 4 years. Even if Nexuiz was originally supposed to be a commercial project, the product wasn't good enough to be sold. The works done wasn't lost thanks to Lordhavoc convincing Lee Vermeulen to release it under the free software GPL license, with the authorization of involved artists. But after that, Vermeulen left Nexuiz to work on others private projects (Zymotic, Capsized, etc.).

K I have to response to this. I did respond in the other thread and apologized to TZork for not letting him know beforehand, and other developers, since I was under a NDA and wasn't sure what information I could give. I definitely take blame for that, this shouldn't have come as a surprise for many of the developers.

But, to respond to this by a point by point basis, since it seems to be somewhat of a personal attack,
The decision to release Nexuiz under GPL was entirely mine. And the entire reason I did it was to market the release of Nexuiz (releasing it as GPL I thought was a first for a project like this, and it did end up helping it get news on slashdot and other sites), and also hoping that forks of Nexuiz would happen from other developers.
The reason I have been away from Nexuiz development is simply I was not good at maintaining the project, I messed up the 1.1 release and because of that gave it to other maintainers. Since then this has been entirely a community run project. To be honest many of the game elements have taken a direction I don't agree with. I don't like the current weapon balance, I don't like the current movement, but I've always believed this should be a community ran project and not under the design of one person. Nexuiz development since 1.0 has always been ran by whoever helps the most and has ideas the community likes.

My focus has shifted away from Nexuiz onto other Alientrap projects. Zymotic has mostly failed, so now my focus is on getting Capsized done and expanding to other small casual games.
The biggest reason I wanted this sale to happen was not only to expose Nexuiz, but to expose the company Alientrap as a game developer. To help with future projects, to give more creditability to publishers and other developers.

When it comes to money, I obviously can't give the exact terms but this is not a giant sale, but if this game does succeed there are royalties to Alientrap. I didn't ask for a lot because my main concern was actually making this game happen.
I've discussed this with LordHavoc (who being a developer with Illfonic the NDA did not apply) that major contributors would be given royalties that Alientrap received, and by this I mostly mean Div0, to encourage further development of the GPL Nexuiz.

[[-z-]]

Start referring to our game as Nexiuz, because it isn't affected by Vermeulen's misspelled trademark registration of Nexuiz™.

www.nexiuz.org

[MirceaKitsune]

http://www.nexiuz.org

The devs may wish to secure that domain, otherwise someone porting Nexuiz to Nintendo WII may take it next

The biggest reason I wanted this sale to happen was not only to expose Nexuiz, but to expose the company Alientrap as a game developer. To help with future projects, to give more creditability to publishers and other developers.

When it comes to money, I obviously can't give the exact terms but this is not a giant sale, but if this game does succeed there are royalties to Alientrap. I didn't ask for a lot because my main concern was actually making this game happen.
I've discussed this with LordHavoc (who being a developer with Illfonic the NDA did not apply) that major contributors would be given royalties that Alientrap received, and by this I mostly mean Div0, to encourage further development of the GPL Nexuiz.

That makes sense, and is rather nice if it's the real reason. Still, an exact name and taking nexuiz.com away from this project was not a good way. Since they are making the new game, it was their job to find a slightly different name and website (through which they could have remained attached to this project and benefited from its popularity) rather than basically hijacking us.

Taking the name and website was the only thing that upset me personally. Well I can't say I'm not slightly sad that a commercial Nexuiz is developing from this one, but if they would have been the ones to take nexuiz.org and named their game Nexuiz InsertAnythingHere I wouldn't have found this so horrible. I'm still hoping there's a chance we may push them to make some changes, and not force us to rename the whole game.

[TVR]

... The biggest reason I wanted this sale to happen was not only to expose Nexuiz, but to expose the company Alientrap as a game developer. To help with future projects, to give more creditability to publishers and other developers. ...

Unless you are willing to forfeit Alientrap's non-profit status, and the .org TLD, and our good will to you, it's a really bad idea to sell our search engine hits, Wikipedia link, and word-of-mouth to Illfonic.

[Dave]

Actually Quake and Quake 2 are id Tech 2, Doom is id Tech 1.

The license has already been obtained for this title.

Confusing! :) Well good luck on the release!

What I'm interested in this console port is how the Darkplaces engine was adapted to the parallel architectures used in the Xbox 360 and particularly the PS3, and whether Darkplaces would be able to use some of those approaches through OpenMP or pthreads, though it seems that only the servers in Nexuiz are very CPU-bound.

[Hew]

Hijacking the Nexuiz name is an insult to all Nexuiz players. Why not pick a new name for this new game? Are they expecting to profit off some kind of brand recognition?