MAKE SOLDAT GREAT AGAIN!

MAKE SOLDAT OPEN SOURCE!

Dear Michał Marcinkowski,

The current model of developing soldat failed miserably and it's time to change it. We beg you to release the source code of soldat and make it an open source project.

Dear Soldat Players,

As many of you have already noticed, soldat is slowly dying... There are about 70 servers with a maximum of 10 non empty at the same moment. The player base isn't any greater. There are 30 online players on average and 70 during peak times. Competitive scene has also died. There aren't any leagues at all. Only gathers are being played occasionally and there are a few casual public servers with a small amount of players. We also don't get any information from developers about updates coming to Soldat (no devlogs about changes since 2017-02-08). Even beta testers don't know what's going on. The latest alpha release of Soldat 1.8 they got is from February 2017 and there weren't any significant changes to the game after. Moreover, management is in so poor state every new developer leaves disappointed after a couple of weeks. As I have heard they have severe problems with communication and also the atmosphere is dull, everyone seems as if no one really cared about the game anymore. So, taking to consideration that the developers don't say anything nor they do anything, we can assume they have abandoned the project and have forgotten about it. Therefore, In my honest opinion, if we don't want Soldat to totally die, it's high time for the community to react as a whole. I would like to suggest a simple but great solution. Let's make Soldat open source and let it step into its new, better era. Making the game open source means everyone will be able to edit the game. But it doesn't mean that someone can modify it in an evil way and everyone will have to play on ruined version. No. Every player will be able to choose which version they want to play (even current 1.7.1) and It is also certain, everyone will play on the best possible one.

Pros:

More people willing to help – Firstly, everyone will be able to make changes to the source code at any time without giving any promises or commitments. Also people won't be blocked nor discouraged by a poor management already existing in current developer team. In addition to that, there is a large amount of programmers in some of the communities. Some of them even stated they would contribute if Soldat was open source. Therefore, it will be much easier to help for anyone without being tied to constant expectations of making frequent updates. It will lead to having people who don't have much time but still want to support Soldat and will make updates from time to time when they have a free moment. Furthermore, nothing will change for the people who want to contribute frequently... Maybe except for the growing number of them because it will be easier to join the team.

Faster progress – It is certain it won't be slower because nothing is being done at the moment anyway. So it can only be the same or faster. But taking to the consideration the fact that there will be more people and an easier way to jump into the flow of helping, It is sure the game will have more frequent updates than in its current state.

Clear situation – Everyone will be able to check the state of development, read recent changes and even contribute. There won't be any secrets, everything will be clear to the community. There won't be closed beta tests where no one can inform anyone about the changes nor send the latest build to anyone. Every person will be able to download the most recent version of the game, test it by himself and report bugs to make the game better.

Cons:

„Easier” cheating – Firstly, there were cheats, there are and there will be just like in every game. Currently there are public cheats for Soldat updated with each version so nothing would really change to the state of having cheats. For the part „easier”, it's not really true. Of course hackers will have an insight of a code and it will lead them to find something useful for them but what can they find and how can they use it? Making cheats in Soldat is currently easy as pie and every beginner with basic understanding of hacking and searching for information skills is able to make working cheats and ruin fun for others. After publishing the code hackers won't be able to make hacks in any easier way because the way they are doing it now is the easiest one and if you make a cheat you have to follow some steps which you can't skip by looking into the code because they are simply necessary. So, the only valuable discoveries for them will be bugs and exploits. And these are able to be fixed. For example teleport hack can be removed from the game by changing the netcode into more modern one and making player's position calculated on the server side. The truth is, in the Open Source everyone wins: a group of developers get to improve the game, players get a better game to play, and the game as a whole is progressing. The best example of a game that has benefitted tremendously from the open source code released is Quake3. It's been more than 10 years since the Quake3 code was open sourced. The sky didn't fall as a result of this. The client, server, mods and, well, everything about the game is still being maintained. People still buy Quake3 - in fact it's still sold on Steam for $22 CAD.

Game clones and community fragmentation – Indeed, there will be many clones but it is also certain that their maintainers will want to have them compatible with the main repository because otherwise, people will play on the best existing version and forget about other worse alternatives. And that means, players will be able to join any server from any client. There will be main repository because at the best there will be the official one but this solution needs a maintainer and if we don't have one then one of the best clones will take over the role of the upstream just like it was in other games (like in etlegacy or ioquake3). In conclusion there won't be a problem with the community being fragmented and the clones will be helpful because they will share their ideas and the upstream version of the game will only benefit from them. 

To sum up the results, Soldat needs a change in order not to die completely. Therefore, making its code public, seems to be an amazing (if not the best) solution to the problems the game experiences. If above arguments convinced you, PLEASE SIGN THE PETITION and help making Soldat a better place! Wouldn't that be better than throwing our hands in the air and saying "well, I guess I just can't have good netcode in my game"? I also encourage all of you to send this text to your friends connected in any way with the game because the more people willing to support the better. Remember, if we don't do anything, it's highly probable that Soldat will soon become forgotten.