I'm sorry if this is a hot topic, but I would like to know what happened

Hi all,

I've played Nexuiz off-and on for a few years now. I recently heard about the fork to Xonotic, but I don't quite understand something. I'm kind of curious as to what happened that made so many people want to fork.

Looking through the forums, and the FAQs and other misc. sources, I find that it looks like the originator of Nexuiz tried to sell it, more-or-less, to a third party company called Illfonic. Going a little deeper, it appears that neither the game engine or the code for Nexuiz will be used by Illfonic for their version of the game. By the looks of it, they are using the name and logo (and potentially story?) of the original Nexuiz, but mainly new code (that is, not ripped off of your code). I'm not sure if I see why the community became rather angry; is it perhaps because of the money paid to the owner that wasn't shared with the developers (this is part of what I read)? Or something else/in addition to?

Thank you for any help, and I'm sorry if this is kind of a hot topic.

Celroc.

Edited to make it more clear what I was asking.

It was seen as an abuse of trust. They basically destroyed the identity of the game "Nexuiz" and made a new game use its identity - without even talking to the developers of Nexuiz at first! The very least would have been informing the Nexuiz developers before that move. But they claim that a NDA prevented them from doing that.

Personally, I'd never sign a NDA about an upcoming decision for Xonotic that prevents me from telling other developers about it and discussing it with them. Doing that in an open source project is simply abuse of trust. In fact, I strictly believe that decisions in an open source project should not be kept secret. I am not very good at publishing them, but I have nothing against anyone who does, and describe my changes in commit messages in branches. (In fact, I'd like if someone could read recent commit messages maybe in the IRC channel, and blog about them, and especially offer upcoming large changes that currently live in a branch for discussion on the comments)

Furthermore, as it would be very confusing for users to have "this Nexuiz" and "that Nexuiz", Nexuiz needed a new name. That new name is Xonotic.

And to make such a thing not happen again, the Nexuiz development team moved out of alienTRAP and ensured such a thing cannot happen again (by sharing ownership).

In fact, if I were to now make money off the name Xonotic without authorization, at least the other Xonotic Core Team members could sue me and would win.

All hell broke loose back in March when it was announced that a console game of the same name would be made by a new development studio called IllFonic led by someone named khedrin. It was actually kinda exciting in a way to see that somebody wanted to do a console version, but it was quickly figured out that IllFonic merely wanted to cash in on the name and reputation of the game and every single attempt to talk them into just merely adding a suffix to the end of the title failed. IF they had done it right, both games could have benefited from the other increasing the popularity of both games and a back story could've told how Nexuiz began, but obviously that didn't happen. It should also be noted that IllFonic had a topic locked on alienTRAP's forums because it was lighting up google like a Christmas tree when there was a flame war going on and that they later ended up switching to CryEngine 3, possibly to avoid getting sued.

As much as that sucks, there is an upside to this. After all that drama, pretty much the entire development team (save the guy that sold the project out) forked the project into what is known as Xonotic. They are now no longer under the pressure of Vermeulen or Lord Havoc, and can now take there time to really polish the game and as a result, the game is of a MUCH HIGHER QUALITY THAN NEXUIZ EVER WAS. The art style is better and more consistent, the graphics are better, there are some AMAZING models in the game now, and (this is possibly the coolest part lol) THE TITLE IS MORE EASILY PRONOUNCED. In the end, it looks like a fork may have been the best thing ever to happen to Nexuiz and that the only thing IllFonic ever got out of the deal is a typo and a bad reputation.

Mod's note: let's not use bad words in this topic.
My bad, I'll try to keep the language a little bit cleaner from now on.

Thanks for your replies. I think I kinda see what you mean, it was an abuse of trust to do that. Not a good thing to have in an open-source project.

I also agree with Lee that a console game could have been nice, if done correctly. I've even seen suggestions for a console version of Xonotic, but I'm not sure if that's the way everyone wants to go with it (licensing may be an issue, for example).

Celroc.

If you don't mind, I just lock this topic now, as this is realy hot. Questions are answered, acknowledgement is confirmed, do we want more?