Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Open Source Games

cliffski

I’m very interested in the idea of making one or more of my games open source. Not the current big sellers, but maybe planetary defense, or Starship Tycoon. I’d be tidying up the source and preparing it this very instant if it were not for one big silly, embarrasing problem…

The hard drive with the source for both games is in a PC that died.

Now yes, theoretically somewhere I have a backup of it all, but how recent? I have no idea. and you would imagine there would be a disk carefully labelled somewhere that has “final retail release source for games” or other cunning description, but I’m just not that organised to be honest.

My motivations for open sourcing a game are 1) to see what people will do with the source and 2) promote my games! I think I might go try and boot the dead beast now. I suspect its a dead PSU and motherboard, and don’t look forward to the nighmare of sticking the old drive as a slave (is that even how it works now) on my vital 100% mission critical vista PC. I may risk it though :D.

6 thoughts on Open Source Games

  1. tsk tsk… I do a daily backup on two external HD of ALL my sources, including games 4 years old that I don’t sell a single copy :D

  2. Get a IDE -> USB converter. That way the old drive can be used as backup media without having to open up the case and confuse poor old vista.

    You can get these in an enclosure so the drive sits inside a plastic box, or you can get just the cable with ide on one side and USB on the other.

    If you want to really future proof, get one that takes IDE/laptop IDE/SATA/laptop SATA as inputs and has USB/firewire/esata as outputs.

    While you are at it, get a router with a USB port on it that takes storage media, and exposes the hard drive as an SMB / NFS drive for your whole network meaning you can backup from anywhere.

    Then no more excuses.

  3. I might be preaching to the converted,but -> get subversion (free) installed on a crappy old machine over the lan, then embrace source control. You can check in/out source code, ini files and artwork very easily. Having a history of changes is invaluable, never mind the complete backup. The other nice feature is when portal X, Y and Z ask for versions you can mark or branch the code and assets. That way you can keep working on your version but if you have to go back to their version for any reason then you can i.e. they’ve found a bug, but you don’t want to give them the very latest version in case you’ve introduced a dozen more. Just check it builds and runs now and again in case you’ve forgotten to check something in.

  4. Every 3 months I shut everything down and make full system backups which I burn to a couple of DVD’s which I then put in a safety deposit box in the bank..

    (Of course this process was put in place AFTER I lost my own batch of critical content for a project / my business operations)

    Other than that, excellent ideas in this thread.

    Too bad Cliff, hopefully you’re able to find a recovered copy. *cross fingers*

  5. Surely you could just swap the hard drives on your working machine? The OS of your old machine is stored on the old hard drive. So if you just swapped your hard drives it would turn into a souped-up version of your old machine.
    Also that way your new hard drive would be disconnected and safe from any potential damage from the old hard drive or BIOS interfering with it.

  6. You must look into cvsdude.com. Extremely reliable, worry free, home for your source. I’ve been using them for years and a very satisfied customer. Image for less than a hundred dollars a month your code is automatically backup every 10-minutes and is stored off-site in a secure facility all with zero hassle. They even offer DAV, Trac and Bugzilla as part of the package!

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