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State of Xconq


What with a combination of vacation, stock dealing, job hunting, and
home system admin, it's been a month since I've done any Xconq
hacking.  However, it has been a good opportunity for thinking and
reading about where Xconq is at and how it's going.  The following is
a personal assessment, and you may very well disagree with the
premises and/or conclusions.  I encourage you to post your reactions
to this ("stop thinking and get back to hacking" :-) )

The basic situation is that Xconq is not really successful.  Why do I
say that?  It works, right? (modulo a few bugs :-) )  There are two
main ways in which I would say Xconq is not winning:

1. Few players.  Xconq is among the largest and most sophisticated of
the open-source games, approaching commercial games in elaboration.
It has the graphics, the AI, the network play, the game library.  And
yet, when I talk to random people that have played Xconq, usually they
fondly remember playing it in 1991, and are surprised to hear it's
still being worked on.  It as if the years of work since then never
happened.  Most of the Web's references to Xconq are either to old
versions or copies in mass software archives.  Xconq does have
players, just not very many of them.

2. Minimal game design activity.  One of Xconq's main features is
supposed to be its designer language.  Indeed, there is still nothing
quite like it in either the free or the commercial game world.  And
yet, very few people seem to work with it; in the past five years,
I've seen or heard of maybe 15 game designs not written by myself.
Perhaps there are more, but if so, where are they?


So why do I think this is a problem?  If it works, why care about how
popular it is?  It's true that to a great extent I work on this for my
own amusement.  For instance, I'm very interested in gaming the
Peloponnesian War, and will continue to be, even if (as seems to be
the case :-) ) I'm the only one in the world who cares.  However,
that's not the whole story - presumably a good thing, because
otherwise the code would be available only on my hard disk!

I personally have two reasons for putting all this out on the net.
First reason is that it is very pleasurable to know that other people
are playing and enjoying Xconq.  I love the fan mail; one message can
make my whole day.  Xconq comes up in job interviews.  One time I was
talking to a member of the trade press covering Cygnus - he mentioned
discovering Mac Xconq while researching the company, and playing it
all weekend.  So that's the motivator to "productize" Xconq and make
it widely available.

Second reason is to recruit other people to help develop Xconq.  While
something like Pong or Tetris could be perfected by a single person
working part-time, Xconq's goals are too ambitious for that.
Certainly it would not have gotten to its current state without the
contributions of the people on this list (for which I'm very
grateful!).  In exchange, I help people modify Xconq to do things that
they want.  The end result of a large numbers of contributors is
something much greater than any of us could have built individually.

So a large chunk of my daily Xconq hacking is focussed on making the
game more attractive to other people, whether players, game designers,
or developers.  If that work is not achieving the desired results,
then I want to understand what's wrong and fix it.

In the next message, I'll talk about specific problems and solutions.

Stan

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