A question to Jorb & Loftar

[jock]

If you were to have a price and the community could band together by buying tokens or pulling into a collective fund. What would you guys need for the community to collectively fund the open sourcing of the game?

this is a hobiest labor of love for you and that is great but for the players it can often be confusing, we expect deadlines and progress. As an open-source game, you would still be able to work on it without the stress of deadlines. without the players expecting so much from you. I have no doubt the main server would remain popular due to its stability but Haven has so many directions Its player base wants to pull it. I can only assume this gets tiresome and honestly i think it hurts the game. If anything, i think open sourcing it might actually rekindle the reason you made the game or open up the creative freedom to explore new projects. while always having the option to return.

Now this isn't another "hey, open source the game" dev sucks post. This is a genuine question, that offers a lot of potential for the future of Haven and the direction(s) it can go.

Think about it and toy with the idea a little. You have a community here endlessly supporting the game in 1 form or another . Maybe it's time to see what they can do with it?

[Massa]

a haven private server would be a wowkiller bro

[Clemins]

What would you guys need for the community to collectively fund the open sourcing of the game?

Hello yes? I'd like to buy you out of your intellectual property so you no longer have to work on it!

As an open-source game, you would still be able to work on it without the stress of deadlines.

But also uh, keep working on it without financial incentive!

Now this isn't another "hey, open source the game"

but aslo

What would you guys need for the community to collectively fund the open sourcing of the game?

Lmao bro, just bump and old single player/"open source"/Server files thread instead of making a new dead horse to beat

[vatas]

Jorb said in on stream that if Loftar dies or otherwise becomes unable to work on Haven, he will release the server source code. He basically can't hire a replacement that knows the code, but community as whole would probably decrypt his mess if it means they can host their own servers.

I do have to point out that if someone from the Haven community tries to intentionally make this happen, Jorb will almost certainly and justifiably call "backsies" on what he said.

Also yes, this thread is basically redundant to viewtopic.php?f=48&t=71645

[rfxDarth]

open sourcing of the game

You think you do, but you don't™. The community hasn't even managed to have a consistently maintained client fork (with maybe the ender's being close), nevermind the alternative ones. I can't even imagine the mess going on on the back-end side. Open-sourcing it would split an already tiny playerbase across dozens of extremely buggy and inconsistent realms, probably with ads, pay2win and other shitty mods.

[TerraSleet]

open sourcing of the game

You think you do, but you don't™. The community hasn't even managed to have a consistently maintained client fork (with maybe the ender's being close), nevermind the alternative ones. I can't even imagine the mess going on on the back-end side. Open-sourcing it would split an already tiny playerbase across dozens of extremely buggy and inconsistent realms, probably with ads, pay2win and other shitty mods.

I don't buy the argument that "splitting a playerbase" is an exclusively bad thing. Maybe for a game that needs a minimum amount of players to play, like a BR. But a game like H&H can, from a design standpoint, be easily modified to be more suitable for smaller or larger scale communities, or for multiple communities. It has a lot of procedurally generated elements that could be adjusted to suit whatever needs a community wants, without much difficulty. Different map size, world generation parameters, reduced/increased resources/stat gain, animal/forageable spawn rates, etc. Also the current active playerbase fluctuates a lot based on the state of the game and the world, having multiple choice of worlds/servers/whatever would in theory make the overall playerbase more stable than currently. From what I've seen of games "splitting off" by creating more options to play, the combined playerbase usually goes up, not down.

Minecraft is a basic example of this. Thousands of custom servers, with anywhere from 2 to >50000 (Hypixel) active players in them. But the base survival/creative gamemode is still very popular and by far the most played. Granted it's a way more popular game and also not explicitly an MMORPG, but I think the point still stands.

Still, agree that open sourcing Haven is probably not in the devs' best interests and has a risk of just killing the game outright if there are no talented coders willing to support it. I don't know how the source code looks (obviously) but with how long this game's been around and the sheer number of updates, I imagine it's not pretty.

[donatas081294]

Doesn't it like already exist, like how ender client works with already existing game engine or in the old version there was different art style patch, sure the main thing that it needs is a server from devs side to be up, but you could in away mod everything in the game if you wanted. Like hafen moded. Huge bugs, tiny boars and massive hearthling heads. As long it doesn't break the game or the server.

[APXEOLOG]

You think you do, but you don't™. The community hasn't even managed to have a consistently maintained client fork (with maybe the ender's being close), nevermind the alternative ones. I can't even imagine the mess going on on the back-end side. Open-sourcing it would split an already tiny playerbase across dozens of extremely buggy and inconsistent realms, probably with ads, pay2win and other shitty mods.

Well, there are consistently maintained clients out there, it's just that they are private

[vatas]

"Private clients are technically a violation of Open-Source license but unfortunately there is no cyberpolice to enforce it."

"Having an in-house software developer shouldn't be a requirement for a village/faction to be competitive."

Worst case of this was when all public clients had a bug that prevented them from loading new item models. People with private clients (with bug fixed) would drop something obscure like Rose Gold Coins on the grounds and because Loftar refuses to put any kind of placeholder thing for case like that, the client just committed Sudoku.

[dafels]

A server that they can open source would probably take another 2-3 years of dev time. I would rather see them developing and contemplating on the current game mechanics, there is a lot of space that could be improved instead of just making new stuff