It's
Open Sauce! I have to work out the details, but here is my awesome win-win-win-win (-win?) plan. There are people here who will definitely be excited about this. First, I'll need to work out some details that are tricky and annoying and I am no good at, then when I have,
I'll make the source code to Dr. Lunatic (original) available to the public! Bolded for our ADD readers.
The win for me in doing this is multifold, but the biggest is that I hope and suspect that people will very quickly re-compile the game to use SDL or something like that and run in normal color modes, so that it works right on modern machines every time instead of just for lucky people. Once somebody does that, I will steal their work and hopefully be able to trivially update all those Dr. L engine games to do the same, without any of that pesky "work" on my part. The other major win for me is shared by the community: that of people hopefully gathering around to chat about and get involved in projects using the code, and playing weird new mods and such. I know there are a lot of serious and new game coders on the site, who would probably find this interesting.
I've been thinking about doing this for quite some time, but the challenge of actually getting it out there in a safe way is tricky. I'm not at all concerned about somebody stealing the code, because it's garbage, but I don't relish the endless issues with the non-open-source art, sound, and music (especially music... it's not mine, and it's not yours!).
Anyway, I still don't know the process by which the code will become available... it could be just a download you can get if you own Dr. L on your account, or it could be the more proper
open source of making it available to all for free (and making the game free at that point? I don't know). Whatever it is, and however it's licensed (another issue I don't look forward to dealing with! I don't even understand code licenses when I read them, much less try to implement them), you'll be free to use the code in whatever way you see fit, provided you can survive the damage it does to your brain. As always, Hamumu Software warns you that our code becomes progressively more Cthulian the further back in time you go. And Dr. L is a
long way back in time.
I can't say when this will happen, but it is the plan, and it'll come around when I get the details worked out and learn how to license code. And comb through the code looking for profane comments and variable names. Exciting?
