ZC changes to come, and a call for help

When Jeremy (Phantom Menace) and Jarrod (War Lord) started working on Zelda Classic 13 years ago, I'm sure they had no idea how much it would take off -- that it would become the most popular Allegro project of all time, that it would be featured on TechTV and Home of the Underdogs, or that its fans would create hundreds of custom quests, many rivaling the official 2D Zelda games in quality. To help distribute and publicize their game, they and some of their friends created the Armageddon Games "company" and started this forum; the ZC splash screen has featured the AGN logo since.

However in recent years War Lord, much like most of the original members of AGN, has become very busy in real life; in a recent discussion with ctrl-alt-delete, he indicated that he no longer has the time to remain Zelda Classic's official custodian, and has asked us to take two steps to ensure that ZC continues to develop and thrive: open the ZC source, and revamp zeldaclassic.com to serve as an official home for continued ZC development.

What follows is our plan for implementing these wishes. Before I get into the details, I want to acknowledge that the proposed changes will be somewhat controversial. However, we've shared this plan with both the current developers and Phantom Menace, and recently with the forum staff as well, and hope we've addressed the most serious concerns. While the precise impact these changes will have is impossible to predict, I honestly believe they are in the best interests of the project in the long term, and will breathe new life into ZC and its community; I am therefore excited to announce that the ZC 2.50 release will be accompanied by the release of (most of) its source code under the GPL, accompanied by a switch to open development, and that we are launching a revamp of zeldaclassic.com to get it ready to be the hub of this development.

Let me be more specific about what this means, and what it does not:

• Development of ZC 2.50 will not be affected. All of the changes I'm discussing here will take effect when 2.50 is released.
• Your old password-protected quests will remain protected, to the extent they are now. The opened version of 2.50 will have its quest decryption keys stripped out; what this means is that old quests, and new quests built with the "official" zquest binary, will play only on the "official" zc player. Quests saved in the open zquest will play on both the open and "official" player.
• Dark Nation and his chosen minions will remain the developers of the "official" Zelda Classic, and will have final say over what changes get committed to the official code repository.
• You will be free to browse the source code, compile it, and if you so desire, submit patches to the developers for inclusion in newer versions of ZC.
• You will be free to make a new version (fork) of ZC, provided that you publicly release the source code to your new version. Of course, we would hope that you would instead contribute to official development, rather than splintering off your own version.
• You are free, and encouraged, to port ZC to new platforms, such as the PSP, Android, etc.

We hope to turn zeldaclassic.com into the hub for ZC's future, open development. We want to add to the site the official repository; the scripts and wiki currently hosted on shardstorm; a professional bug-tracker like Bugzilla; an improved QDB that is more easy to search and upload files to; and a modernized layout. To do all of this we will need your help! If you have a vision for what the site should look like or what features it should have, please let us know! If you're a web developer, designer, or artist and would like to help us build or maintain a worthy new home for Zelda Classic, we could definitely use your skills! And as always, feel free to reply here with any questions, thoughts, or suggestions.

I am very excited about this decision. I have been hoping for it for some time. I can't wait to see what the future has in store and get to know the inner workings of the program I have known for about 12 years.

Excellent news. I'm looking forward to finally being able to contribute to the community. New scripting and dev tools will go a long way to making ZC accessible to newbies, and an open-source code base will allow that to happen.

What parts of the code won't be made available under GPL?

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Originally Posted by bobby_light

What parts of the code won't be made available under GPL?

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The custom quest decryption key, and possibly some of the code related to custom quest decryption. As outlined above, we want to keep older quests as secure as possible while still releasing most of the code.

I'm no programmer, so please excuse the likely confused understanding of what this all means, but could old versions be rereleased as open-sourced programs, too? I'd love for 1.90 to be customizable, as that version was stable. I very much feel that most of the work done since should be redone from that last stable version. good luck with all of these plans, especially the getting 2.5 ready to be a properly stable 3.0 package. it still seems to me that a release is a long way off.

This is awesome. Great news, and news that's sure to revitalize the community. There's just one thing I'm a bit confused on. There's going to be one "official" Zquest and ZC player, and multiple branch offs, correct? And quests saved in the official player will still have the option for password protection, right? If so, interesting...

As for the new site, I don't have too much to say, except for really the role it's gonna play. The way I see it, Zeldaclassic.com oughta become the hub for general ZC discussion and development, whereas Purezc.com oughta be the hub for quest development and design. Thus, the new ZC site oughta be focused on the program itself, the source code, the various tools that will undoubtedly pop up (so far, somebody at PZC has expressed interest in making a ZScript code editor that plugs directly into the script compiler, for example) and so on.

Edit: Wait, I remember that before, ZC 3.0 was going to be a complete rewrite of the code. Is this still going to happen, or is that plan pretty much dropped now?

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Originally Posted by Russ

This is awesome. Great news, and news that's sure to revitalize the community. There's just one thing I'm a bit confused on. There's going to be one "official" Zquest and ZC player, and multiple branch offs, correct? And quests saved in the official player will still have the option for password protection, right? If so, interesting...

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Let me try to clarify. There will be an official code repository, and if you download and compile that code, you will end up with a version of ZQuest that can save password-protected quests that are playable on all Zelda player binaries. The password protection will stop casual copying of the quest assets, but will not stop a knowledgeable programmer from "cracking" the quest (by modifying the source code). Also, the Zelda player won't be able to load old quests, in order to better protect these quests.

There will also be official binaries released, compiled with all of the open source, plus some extra code not included in the open source that allows the official binary to read in old quests. It will still be possible for a hacker to crack a quest (as it is now) but since the needed code won't be public, it would take substantially more work.

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Originally Posted by DarkDragon

There will also be official binaries released, compiled with all of the open source, plus some extra code not included in the open source that allows the official binary to read in old quests. It will still be possible for a hacker to crack a quest (as it is now) but since the needed code won't be public, it would take substantially more work.

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Am I right in believing these will also be available as executable files, like the earlier official versions? Or will the new Zelda Classic require its users to compile the executable themselves?

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Originally Posted by CJC

Am I right in believing these will also be available as executable files, like the earlier official versions? Or will the new Zelda Classic require its users to compile the executable themselves?

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Lol, we'll definitely compile them. :)

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Originally Posted by ctrl-alt-delete

Lol, we'll definitely compile them. :)

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Right ;)