[Nel] Greetings! And some questions / comments

Sun, 12 Nov 2000 10:34:56 -0500

> Hi Sal,
+>
+> My name is Olivier Lejade, I am Nevrax's CEO. I won't be intervening too
+> much on this list since we really would like to keep things technically
+> oriented, but since there seems to be so a lot of questions, I figured it
+> would be a good idea to answer some of them here so that they can go in
+the
+> FAQ.
+> I'll leave the technically oriented ones to the Code Team though.
+
+    Thank you for taking the time to respond Olivier, this clears up a lot
+of questions!
+
+> Managing a team of artists over the internet is especially
+> daunting and WF has accomplished an incredible feat in this area.
+> As Bryce kindly reminded me, code is cheap compared to Art...
+
+    I very much agree here.  In my experience I've discovered that media is
+very hard to come by.  Talented artists don't like to work for free, and who
+can blame them, a lot of the industry's tools are expensive and take a lot
+of effort and time to learn.  I think this is one of the biggest obstacles
+in free game software development, the lack of good, free media.  If Nevrax
+is able to help out in this area, the opensource commmunity, Worldforge
+included, would be very grateful...
+
+[ ... ]
+> Well, we are following an internal plan and Freeing the resulting
+software,
+> however we are very open to outside influence on technical aspects. And
+> while we concentrate on our priorities, we will integrate any worthwhile
+> functionnality.
+[ ... ]
+
+    I understand your intentions.  With openness in development comes
+conflict in views on many issues.  As a project under a tight schedule,
+resolving all issues in the open might not be the most efficient approach
+timewise.
+
+    If there still is any desire to collaborate on things such as client
+engine design, I would be happy to.  If XClient and the Nel client could be
+made more compatible in any way, I think it would be worth the effort.  If
+similairity in protocol could be obtained, then our software could
+communicate with each other.  Likewise, if rendering architecture was
+similair, we could collaborate on, and/or share pieces of code for the game
+engines.  Either way I think it could mean saving work and time for the both
+of us...
+
+    On the other hand, collaborating would logically take some effort, which
+I understand Nevrax may or may not have the time for.  It still might be
+worth considering, at any rate.
+
+> Bottom line is : Free Software and commercial MMORPGs are a perfect match.
+> And we believe we have everything to gain and nothing to loose by opening
+> our source code.
+
+    Here I very much agree, also!
+
+> I hope this clarifies things a little even though I'm sure it will raise
+> even more questions !
+
+    Thanks again!  And I await the answers to the other, more technical
+questions. ;-)
+
+- Sal
+
+
+