Steam.

Bitfighter has been around for years and has never got the popularity we have all hoped for. And at our current up and down rate that bitfighter has been having, the only hope for popularity we have is steam.

I suggest we put bitfighter on greenlight.
And by the way. Fully free games have been put on steam before, so bitfighter wouldn't have a problem being there.

Seriously, we have to surface this game somehow.

[Quartz]

Thread #24 on this subject and counting.

Thread #24 on this subject and counting.

It's an appropriate time to bring this up as bitfighter's popularity is lower than ever.

I care about this game and don't want it to die.

[Quartz]

Thread #24 on this subject and counting.

It's an appropriate time to bring this up as bitfighter's popularity is lower than ever.

I care about this game and don't want it to die.

It's not lower than ever, trust me.

It's not lower than ever, trust me.

Maybe not ever, but I'm inclined to agree with him that there's a noticeable drop in activity. I think we get more players during the summer and downsize a bit as school/work kicks in.

Well, ironically, there is a burst of activity with a few 4 player games since yesterday since Nothing_Much brought a few guys over

Well, ironically, there is a burst of activity with a few 4 player games since yesterday since Nothing_Much brought a few guys over

There was once a time where we would at least once every two days there would be 7-9 players on. It's not a lot. But it's better than 5.

I am serious. Bitfighter needs this. We are practically going nowhere.
New players don't want to stick around because of the lack of people here and old ones (some of them anyway.) are slowly vanishing.

Our best shot is to throw ourselves at steam and see if we stick.

Bump.
Need more feedback

yes its time we STEAMROLL bitfighter out for more people to play!

It can be released on steam, but....

Bitfighter is released under the GPL (General Public License). It had to remain GPL until Torque Network Library is stopped being used (which Torque3D MIT could replace it, its pretty much the same net code as Tribes2 and this ).

Steam does support GPL games and programs (see Blender to name one), but the SteamWorks API is not compatible with the GPL, so you can say goodbye to achievements and the like available through the goodies package. You can see this company as to why they don't want to go with steam:

http://www.xonotic.org/2013/10/about-xonotic-and-steam/

Although it would be alot of work could we obtain a full liscence over Bitfighter and switch to a different network type?

1. it would be a lot of work as that's the codebase foundation from what i've looked at

2. I doubt GarageGames would do that, they would probably tell you to just integrate the code from Torque3D MIT

3. you could switch, but it would be a loot of work.


edit: now that I think about it, if tehre's any Zap! demo code in there, that is under the GPL too, so that means all of that couldn't be used either :/

im sure there are better alternatives to TNL (Cant think of any atm.) even if it would take to version 30 to covert to somthing else im sure it would be worth it.

I don't think anybody would want to drop GPL though. We can put it on Steam without achievements, right?

I don't really understand how licencing works, but I would doubt using their API/SDK would cause any problem, right? And if this whole thing doesn't work, we can always use the Web API. This would be similar with what we have right now with GameJolt.

It looks like open-source games on Steam is still new, though, so who knows how it works? http://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/828934724038646872/

EDIT: I think Steam's SDK is not free, which would explain why we couldn't really use it, but I think the Web API is a possibility

Hmm I will have to think about this for a while.....

[watusimoto]

We're pretty firmly stuck in the GPL world... even if we wanted to, there is no practical way for us to remove all the GPL code from Bitfighter.

[watusimoto]

I will say that the GameJolt API was a bit of work to integrate into Bitfighter, but we did so successfully, even to the point where our achievements (such as they are) are displayed on the site. The GameJolt API is web based, though, so we didn't need to use any GameJolt code, only make calls to their web server. I don't really know how the Steam API works, but it sounds a bit different.

hmm is there some sort of intermediate program we could use ?

[watusimoto]

That might well be possible.