First and foremost, I'm stating that I'm not doing After Nova anymore. It's a very interesting concept, but I've found I'm not morbid enough of a person to continually write about how civilization was wiped out on each planet and station, etc. When I get some spare time, I'll extract the altered resources and compile the notes sitting around in my mind and release them publicly in case that someone want to take the plug anywhere or find something useful in it. I shouldn't have let myself get hyped into it by all of your interest. I BLAME YOU ALL! :laugh:
Don't know what After Nova was? Read this topic.
However, despite that, I'm feeling a calling to do something plug-in related with Nova. Whether it be a small useless plug or something nice and big, doesn't matter. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to come up with any one idea on my own that interests myself. I've thought of things spanning from silly plugs such as scrambling the ship resources so you have things like Shuttles with the stats and weapons of a Fed Carrier or turning all the ships invisible, but leaving things like running lights and engine glows visible, to the bigger and more serious such as a Moash storyline plug-in or coming up with some other random story with a new group and what not.
But then I got a new idea, one that I'm a bit surprised nobody has had before. When doing their large plug-ins, people tend to work by themselves, in pairs, or with a small team. We go and hide in our secret towers, slipping out minor details here and there to the curious masses below. They look upon the tower and see that there are never lights on, never giving indication whether we're still there working on our secret projects or not. Occasionally someone is invited to help out, but not often.
Why must we keep this up? Under this system, very little as actually seen the light of day. Many TCs and large plugs are announced, few are updated much beyond the first few posts, most silently slip into land of vaporware, a are publicly stated to be so. The ones that do keep going are being done by people who only come down from their towers every great once in awhile to feed us some information before locking themselves back in and vanishing once more. And we often find out that lack of free time or enthusiasm is causing it to go slowly. It's not an efficient system, especially since I managed to start on a TC a few years after some of these projects started and finished before all of them, perhaps also by a few years. Not bragging there, but I just feel that shouldn't happen, even if Colosseum was small.
So, here I am making a radical proposal when it comes to plug-in developing. Heres my idea: an original universe TC. What's the TC about? I have absolutely no clue at the moment, but you can be assured that, if made, it would involve ships, missions, planets, and text. And Earth would likely be somewhere in it too. Now, why am I so uncertain as to what this TC will be about or contain? Well, how about I just cut to the chase.
I'm proposing a public, open-sourced project. A TC that anyone can come in and help out on and contribute to. All facets of its development would be a public affair. No secret emails, no webboards that only few can access, no tall towers for all to hide in while people have no idea whether we're actually getting anything done. All discussion about the project would be held here on the Dev Boards. It would be a project theoretically immune to being vaporware, because anyone could be involved and there'd be no critical developers. If someone is unable to work on it, it could go on without them and, if they were able to, that someone could join back in later. It probably wouldn't get done at the fastest rate, but those following its progress would know when things are getting done and when things aren't.
If we were to go with this, I'd like to suggest some guidelines.
- It'd need to be totally original, not based off of an existing universe. That way we could create as we saw fit and nobody would be left out just because they didn't like that book/game/movie/tv show/whatever.
- It'd need to be set in a generalized interstellar space age. Aka not just setting out to explore the stars, not post-apocalyptic, etc. In other words, think like the EV trilogy. Have a war going on and an age of great opportunity for an up and coming pilot.
- Major things would need to have a general consensus, such as what groups to include, what storylines to do, etc. I say general as opposed to complete, because otherwise nothing would get done.
- Participants would need to be open to having others edit and modify their contributions. You may write an awesome planet description, for example, but it'd seem awkward if it didn't fit the tone and style of the rest of the text.
- They'd also have to be willing to go with something they don't quite agree with. For example, if they want to add a super-powered malevolent alien species who swoops in and kills everything and the general consensus isn't for it, then they'd need to be fine not having them if they wished to continue developing. We don't want to stall the whole thing just because a couple of people disagree with something.
- Things would also have to not be set in stone. An idea that sounds good might not be so good later, and vice versa.
- Public discussion would be key here. Informing people of your progress and additions, as well as distributing them would be very important. Feedback would be critical. If someone adds a weapon, it'd be best if others could look at it and see if it needs anything changed about it.
- We'd need to come up with a way to keep everyone up to date and an easy way of distributing contributions. For the latter, I recommend passing around of plug-ins containing only the new/modified resources, which other devs could then paste into their copies. On the former, I'd advise against using the addons page.
That's about it. Anyone interested in an open-ended project like that? It doesn't necessarily have to be a TC, though I think that'd actually be the easiest since it'd allow for greater creativity and we wouldn't have to worry about meshing with the Novaverse. I think something like this would have great potential, even if everyone participating can't work tons on it because of other projects and/or Real Life.
