haha ok then, Good Hunting

The person who is attempting to create Openlancer has some growing up to do.
I am as of this moment withdrawing my support for it. Let it be known that I have forbidden the use of any of my ships or stations in his mod.

While I was in the military I got to travel the world. With the "net" I never dreamed of how many people I would meet and where they were from. This world is moving at a much faster pace than say 10 years ago.





Edited by - Slayerhawk on 1/9/2006 12:18:58 PM

Rankor,
Half of that development team are teenagers. Its touch and go at times but they're smart (when not acting stupid), work hard, have a fair amount of time on their hands, and generally mean well. I'm dumping extreme amounts of time into Openlancer and promoting it as much as I can because its probably the best shot we have at a free open community open source game. I'm sure there are other game development projects out there but as long as this one stays rooted on TLR I think it will do well. Also keep in mind that not all of them are teenagers (myself included), so please keep an open mind about it.

Please reconsider allowing the Openlancer project use your ships or better yet, join the development team. They're not creating much at this point, its still mostly planning but that will change in the coming months.


Finalday,
I know exactly what you mean. I basically grew up on IRC (DALnet and NullusNET). I've talked to people from all over the world, gotten to know countless people, made lots of friends, a few enemies, and in general had a lot of fun in the process. I think if anything my problem is I spend too much time online. I don't have much of a real life counter part to my "online social life" but thats not really a bad thing. I use to think "if I could only FTP (or DCC on IRC) a beer to my friends I'd be set" but now I don't know. I'm pretty much a hermit in real life but I have a thing for brewing beer and mead but I don't have anyone to drink it with and I refuse to drink alone. I also like to have someone to bounce weird ideas off of but when I left IRC normally the only people willing to listen to my technobabble were the chatter bots (generally a bad sign). Some how I found my way to Hals, then the Haven Enterprise Clan, TLR, the Haven server, and now I'm working on two mods and in another few months Openlancer.

Its been an interesting trek so far and I'm eager to see where it leads. I also think I'll be very much for the better in the long run. My writing skills have improved a lot through posting probably few hundred pages across a half dozen forums. I've learned more in the past few months than I probably would have in a year if not for playing Freelancer. Best of all, I'm going to relearn C++ and learn most of the .NET framework in the coming months, thats something that I didn't even realize that I missed. All of it is like something lost but now found.

I've also come to see gaming as a proxy for reality, a means of trying different things that aren't otherwise possible. I kind of new that all along but when you get into the game design theory it really gets interesting, dare I say profound at times. I think gaming in general has a long ways to go and as free open community open source game development becomes more prevalent we'll start to see a cultural change in online communities, like this one, where we forge our own reality. Not to escape from our daily lives but to extend them in ways that go beyond chat channels, forums or how decades ago people reading National Geographic to explore the world. I think I came to fully realize that while playing Morrowind mods, people pour their souls into some of those mods just to share it with the rest of the community. Some people say games are not art and if thats true its only because they're heavily filtered through corporate marketing to be spoon fed to “mindless consumers”, but now people are getting sick of consuming the same old crap time and time again. Through free open community open source game development games will fully realize their full potential of being an art form and at some point cease being “just” games. Thats the point I'm eager to see, when games are added to the platform of mediums for people to learn about the world in ways that are otherwise impossible in real life.

I'm happy and existed with these prospects. Now if only I could find a local drinking buddy willing to listen to my technobabble at the risk of actually having a intelligent debate...I think finding a girlfriend might be idealistic at this point (thats another story for another post).


-Burn

"Only the dead have seen the end of war"-Plato