And what of the possibility of AI War becoming open source in the distant future? If it is a cult classic then surely it will still be loved after Arcen has closed it's doors.
Well, regardless of what happens with AI War, the only way Arcen is going to be shutting down is when I retire... which is not going to be for another 38 years, speaking in terms of averages. That's assuming something doesn't happen to put us out of business forcibly, of course, but there's certainly not any other job that I'd prefer.
But either way, AI War is likely going to not become open source for at least 10 years or so, and I'm certainly not basing technology decisions around that. A Unity Pro license is not needed to run the engine we use for AI War, anyway (just for us to sell it), so folks could use the Unity Indie one, which is free. But none of my decisions about which platforms to choose will ever be based on how easy it will be to open-source down the line, because that's just foolish to limit things in the short term so that something that happens after our company is done with the game would be easier. Things will be so different in 10 years, anyway, that the current state of technology will be just a distant memory in the first place; who knows what else will happen with Unity or otherwise during that time.
I suppose replacing unity with another 2d rendering engine wouldn't be extremely difficulty?
Heh, yeah, right.
That's why it's going to take Keith and myself the better part of a full month, working together. And having had past experience in Unity (having already spent a month porting Tidalis), and a full knowledge of the original AI War source. For someone else to later port it away from Unity in their spare time would be all but impossible with the current state of all the various technology platforms.
I wouldn't fret too much about it, though. There's the Unity Indie side of things, and in 10 years who knows where Unity will be, in general. There are only so many corners one can see around, and right now my focus is on making sure that AI War stays viable and growing as a product that
is still active. I'm not actively trying to do anything to mess with the open-source-ability of the game down the road, but neither is that a factor that weighs in any of my decision making about shorter-term stuff.
