Secrets of Dragon Pass

From: waferthinninja <waferthinninja_at_...>
Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2009 09:26:02 -0000


Okay my open source suggestion seems to have opened a can of worms, and people seem to have focussed on the intellectual property issues, and who would make or lose money from open sourcing the game. Everyone has expressed their opinions on the merits of open source, and raised the relevant issues, but I think it is a distrction from why I raised the idea in the first place. I really don't care about compiling it, and whilst being able to rewrite it and make mods and extensions to the game would be cool, its not really what I am after.

What I really want is to discover the "secrets" of Dragon Pass.

To make a comparison, NetHack is another "low tech" game (even more so than KoDP) with a cult fanbase. I still play NetHack, a 25+ year old game, as do a large number of other people. NetHack is open source, and a huge number of people have developed it over the years. Being open source, if someone wants to know the exact mechanics for how something works, they can go into the code and find out.

King of Dragon Pass is a game with a similar level of depth, and one which raises questions every time you play:

With access to the code, those of us curious enough can go in and find out the answers.

Is there another way we could get this sort of information? Is there a design document for example which details the mechanics? Could the scripts (as per the example) be released without the engine code?

You might not want these kind of spoilers to be released, but I think the game is old enough now that people have played enough "unspoiled" for spoilers not to reduce their enjoyment.

Again, I don't want David to feel harrassed by any of this, it is really just a plea from a fan. He is quite within his rights to just say "No, sorry, not going to happen".

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