Rebranding and legacy support ("2.6+")

@DarkDragon , @ZoriaRPG , @Gleeok @War Lord

I just want to bring this particular topic as I do have some strong feelings about it.

But after reading some of the changelogs, I feel that Zelda Classic is going way too far away from what was originally intended. Also, there is still some negativity from previous bugs, Breaker, and other things, and quite frankly, after 17 years, some of the older people might want to move onto other projects and maybe even code their own stuff.

Plus, there's the DMCA craze.

I have a few suggestions on what to do:

1. Have this as a ZQUEST ONLY feature, but it will read in quests from whatever the last version before Whatever it comes in it comes in as, people have to make the updates like I did when I went from B182/3 to 2.50. But it's good for people that might want to update their work for a new version. It might suck for some people, but anything from 1.84 to 2.50.2 would have to be updated to 2.53, but it's the best way to deal with future compatibility.
2. Rebrand the entire thing. We had an amazing run as Zelda Classic (17 years, wow, a lot of games even small don't last that long). But we are growing smaller and on our last legs, and there is some deep division between us on vantage points. A total renaming of the project might not be a bad idea, especially if it goes into scripting/heavy new features.

Take it for what it's worth, but I thought I'd post these feelings in public.

-James

I know I've posted this already in a few places, but thinking about this I've come to the almost opposite conclusion: IMO the one advantage ZC does have is the existing userbase, existing quests and resources, and existing brand.

In the early 2000s ZC was the only real game in town, and it would have made sense to "reboot" ZC and take it in a completely new direction. Now? Other "game maker" programs are a dime a dozen, including some that are Zelda-gameplay specific, such as Solarus. What is the purpose in trying to compete with these (already established) alternatives?

Now, I'm not against major changes per se: moving beyond Allegro 4.0 to a more modern backend; revamping the scripting aspect of ZC and making ZC's gameplay more customizable in general; overhauling screens and dmaps and scrolling; reducing the barrier of entry to crafting your first custom quest; etc. But I just don't see any sense in a complete rewrite/reboot/rebrand. Instead, I believe that ZC is currently propped up by a few foundational pillars that must be carefully maintained:

1. The community of existing quest authors, and their expertise with using ZQuest's current features;
2. The large canon of high-quality quests available for download and play.

Abandoning either of these two pillars would be disastrous, IMO, including making all pre-2.50.2 quests unplayable, or rebranding the program. Why give up on our main advantages?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DarkDragon

I know I've posted this already in a few places, but thinking about this I've come to the almost opposite conclusion: IMO the one advantage ZC does have is the existing userbase, existing quests and resources, and existing brand.

In the early 2000s ZC was the only real game in town, and it would have made sense to "reboot" ZC and take it in a completely new direction. Now? Other "game maker" programs are a dime a dozen, including some that are Zelda-gameplay specific, such as Solarus. What is the purpose in trying to compete with these (already established) alternatives?

Now, I'm not against major changes per se: moving beyond Allegro 4.0 to a more modern backend; revamping the scripting aspect of ZC and making ZC's gameplay more customizable in general; overhauling screens and dmaps and scrolling; reducing the barrier of entry to crafting your first custom quest; etc. But I just don't see any sense in a complete rewrite/reboot/rebrand. Instead, I believe that ZC is currently propped up by a few foundational pillars that must be carefully maintained:

1. The community of existing quest authors, and their expertise with using ZQuest's current features;
2. The large canon of high-quality quests available for download and play.

Abandoning either of these two pillars would be disastrous, IMO, including making all pre-2.50.2 quests unplayable, or rebranding the program. Why give up on our main advantages?

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I agree with this. The fact that you can come in and play tons of quests that are absolutely amazing and could be standalone games is huge for ZC.
It's an older game with slow development. Although it does most everything needed and then some at this point. Way more than we ever anticipated.
I'd rather look to upgrading the engine while adding features to the site, such as official YouTube quest Playthroughs and reviews of quests from the main page highlighting some of these gems.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DarkDragon

I know I've posted this already in a few places, but thinking about this I've come to the almost opposite conclusion: IMO the one advantage ZC does have is the existing userbase, existing quests and resources, and existing brand.

In the early 2000s ZC was the only real game in town, and it would have made sense to "reboot" ZC and take it in a completely new direction. Now? Other "game maker" programs are a dime a dozen, including some that are Zelda-gameplay specific, such as Solarus. What is the purpose in trying to compete with these (already established) alternatives?

Now, I'm not against major changes per se: moving beyond Allegro 4.0 to a more modern backend; revamping the scripting aspect of ZC and making ZC's gameplay more customizable in general; overhauling screens and dmaps and scrolling; reducing the barrier of entry to crafting your first custom quest; etc. But I just don't see any sense in a complete rewrite/reboot/rebrand. Instead, I believe that ZC is currently propped up by a few foundational pillars that must be carefully maintained:

1. The community of existing quest authors, and their expertise with using ZQuest's current features;
2. The large canon of high-quality quests available for download and play.

Abandoning either of these two pillars would be disastrous, IMO, including making all pre-2.50.2 quests unplayable, or rebranding the program. Why give up on our main advantages?

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Well, I know this is being addressed now, but the upgrade from B 182/3 to 2.5 series (I skipped 2.10) was possible, but there were a lot of compatibility issues getting things to play around with, had to update a lot of things (some things needed to be totally remade), and this affects more than just me. Personally, I have like 10 quests now (some smaller, some larger), and keeping them all updated is a ton of work. Plus, I want to code my own engine someday and possibly make money off of it.

I think you know as a dev how time consuming some of this can be, and some of it is becoming cumbersome to deal with. Even small things like say Demo 1st and 2nd need to be updated periodically due to balance changes or just plain version updates. Now add in full testing runs of this stuff (maybe not for Demo 1st and 2nd, but Demo SP has been an extremely taxing affair testing it, going on now 2 and a half years in development), time adds up. And you lose your life in the process.

Also, as I said before, DMCA. Need we look at the BotW quests and AM2R? It'd be nice to be somewhat safety net from that too.


-James

Quote:

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Also, as I said before, DMCA. Need we look at the BotW quests and AM2R? It'd be nice to be somewhat safety net from that too.

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Yes, this is a concern, and I support efforts by ZoriaRPG and others to prepare a set of non-branded default assets that we can distribute separately from the Zelda content.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by War Lord

I agree with this. The fact that you can come in and play tons of quests that are absolutely amazing and could be standalone games is huge for ZC.
It's an older game with slow development. Although it does most everything needed and then some at this point. Way more than we ever anticipated.
I'd rather look to upgrading the engine while adding features to the site, such as official YouTube quest Playthroughs and reviews of quests from the main page highlighting some of these gems.

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An option on the site for the quest uploader to post Let's Plays in their uploads would be really nice. Should be link based and not direct video based.

-James

What you mentioned to me about the DMCA in chat the other day did get me thinking later. If Nintendo ever DMCA's Zelda Classic, we would have an easy out. All we'd have to do is yank the Zelda-related media from ZC and rename it to Armageddon Game Creator or something.

It's not so simple; the lawyers would insist we completely scrub all ZC-related code from the sites we host and even if we were in the right keeping the code around, none of us has the kind of cash to go toe-to-toe with Nintendo lawyers.

We really don't want to get DMCA'd in the first place.

If we got DMCA'ed:

We'd probably have to pull all the assets, not necessarily code. We couldn't use the official maps either probably.

The enemy structure could stay, but we'd need new maps, graphics, and sound. I think the codebase should be fine.

Also, for general purposes don't try to sell it or run a Kickstarter for funds (that's how the CV remake got wiped out, and everyone sympathized with Konami on that), or use the most recent release that they're making money on. Doing anything on that level is putting an automatic bullseye on you. Companies like ideas, but they hate it when you make them lose money (especially) or to a lesser degree cheat. They tend to jump on that quickly, and 99% of the time you're not bought out like AM2R was.

-James

On the bright side, a full DMCA would be just the excuse needed to fully rewrite the code!

I've always been of two minds regarding how to deal with the mess that is ZC's code, and even now looking at it I'm still unsure as to how it should proceed. A lot of future headaches would be averted if the entire thing were just refactored into something more extensible and less spaghetti-entrenched, but there would be a ton of current headaches if the goal was to maintain compatibility with all current quests, which is something I still want to do.

Part of me wants to just bite the bullet and do it anyway. I don't think it's a question of can it be done, it's just whether I or anyone else wants to go through the trouble. So basically the same song-and-dance that's been going on for years now :P

Quote:

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Originally Posted by jman2050

On the bright side, a full DMCA would be just the excuse needed to fully rewrite the code!

I've always been of two minds regarding how to deal with the mess that is ZC's code, and even now looking at it I'm still unsure as to how it should proceed. A lot of future headaches would be averted if the entire thing were just refactored into something more extensible and less spaghetti-entrenched, but there would be a ton of current headaches if the goal was to maintain compatibility with all current quests, which is something I still want to do.

Part of me wants to just bite the bullet and do it anyway. I don't think it's a question of can it be done, it's just whether I or anyone else wants to go through the trouble. So basically the same song-and-dance that's been going on for years now :P

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I think it should be done too. Pour everything into 2.53 getting everything up to from 1.84 on working properly, then rewrite after that. There have been a lot of pesky things even in quest making that have popped up over the years and a soft reset might not be horrible for just stability alone.

I just ask if you change the system like that, you would write a 2.53 converter somehow into ZQuest 2.6+

-James

All of the repackaging will happen over time. My goals are as follows:

Remove all infringing material from the ZQuest and ZC programmes, and put that content into a data package 'module'.
When ZQuest or ZC launch, the user can select a data module to use. The base module will be more generic stuff, but the user can shift to the Zelda package easily.

The sources should include a datapack that uses generic content, and ZC.com can continue to distribute the programme with the Z1 assets until such a time as there is a true issue with it.

The main issue is the hardcoded calls to zelda.dat, zquest.dat, all the internal sounds, hardcoded enemy names, and so forth. The enemy names, and class names, item names, and sounds should all be set by the datafile, as should the quest password names.

Add more modules as time marches on.

If the title of the programme is ever an issue, we could simply rename ZQuest and ZC to ZQuest Creator and ZQuest Player, respectively.

I have collected some sound and graphics assets. You can grab the sound assets here:
http://timelord.insomnia247.nl/zc/zc_dev/Assets.zip

If anyone wants to volunteer time to either collect, or to create, assets for OpenZC, then I am happy to work with you. One tileset creator is working on new assets for us in that direction, but we could certainly benefit from more in the art department. Finding free sounds that all work happily together is a chore. One member volunteered to make new music for us, but I have yet to see anything come from that, and it has been nearly a year.

@ZoriaRPG , contact @bigjoe if you want to talk some NSF stuff.

-James