Re: [Nel] Greetings! And some questions / comments

[Sal]

> 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