I think that, with a healthy modding community, the influx of people who enjoy the modded game could potentially bring enough new people that some of them will filter into the “official” game. Plus, I don’t even care - modded players means more sales means money that might let the devs spend some resources implementing new features and/or officializing mods.
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So who else has no clue about tech stuff? 
I just want the game to survive at this point. If its playable, I’ll be playin it 
As a normal guy, I just want to see a price tag that says buy me and let someone else run me and I’d throw money at it 
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I run my own servers on many games and I doubt Boundless would be much different and I would run a server. 2,000 or 200,000 players would be nice. If it were 2000 on their own personal servers it would be a bunch of small communities versus the one large one and at the same time detracting from the “official” game. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just a bunch of different communities spread out on separate servers.
I’m not against it just stating some issues that will arise. The main benefit I see is that the game would be able to be played if the official servers did shut down and maybe some of us could figure out how to connect servers in order to make our own universe.
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Even with current modding possibilities there hasn’t been much action happening.
Would open sourcing do much difference?
We don’t really have modding available right now. The mods we have now are mostly just minor config changes on the client side. There isn’t really much that can be done with it, and some of the changes you could make get overwritten during play or will just cause weird out of sync issues since the server doesn’t know about your change.
If we get open source, we can make any change to the game. We could form a team to build out all of the features anyone could want (if there was interest). People would be able to download these alternate builds of the game (or just mods that plug in, depending on various things) and play locally or on privately owned servers.
If we just get the scripting API and the private server software, people will be able to set up servers with limited modding capability, just what the scripts let you do. No new blocks or items, but lots of freedom for making new functionality in the world. Additionally, if people are willing to install some settings-based local mods, those private servers could potentially modify some more fundamental things like recipe costs, though I haven’t looked into how much power there is there.
In short, I know that I have seen several people, myself included, say that there isn’t enough power in modding right now to bother with, but even just that API would be good enough to get us going.
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If we could tie multiple servers together I’m down … otherwise, kind of not a Boundless Universe so much as splinters of one. I am totally not interested in playing single player.
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oh heck yes <3 open source
there’s at least a few people out there like me that don’t get terribly motivated to play single player video games 
I believe James mentioned that the server software they intended to release was designed to be run across several servers like the official universe. If I’m remembering correctly, as long as there is one player-owned authoritative server (in addition to the official login server), it should be possible to do what you’re looking for.
As a side note, they mentioned a world spawning http accessible API, so it would be reasonable to set up automatic exos in our hypothetical indie-verse.
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I would assume that literally everyone I play with would like to play on one server. I certainly wouldn’t play alone so at least one of the servers will have at least 2 players on it lol
Maybe make a poll?
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Lol suicide by words?
(says the person who lives alone and has somewhere between 1 and 2 friends)
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I’ll play with you happily!
Not really selling the idea well…are ya? 
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Stand alone was in the road map at some point according to this from 2016.
They’ve stated in the past that they did not intend on sharing or releasing the world gen at any point though. So I’m not sure how worlds would be created for standalone servers.
I’ve tried to find the comment (I believe from James) quite some time ago - but no luck.
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There are current modding possibilities?
Yeah, the biggest problem I have with that is that you can only run a server if you are on the beta build, and then you still have to run the server through the game client, so it isn’t really that useful for an always-on universe. You also can’t do clusters, so if you want to scale your universe up on additional devices, that isn’t an option currently.
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There is a server executable on the live build, though I can’t recall whether that included the scripting abilities.
I have had success with running the server without the game open, from command line, but its certainly not ideal as it has to be run through wine, and I remember it being quite fiddly to get working
I feel like my comments haven’t been on topic though : it would be awesome, if unlikely, to have open source Boundless. It would certainly allow for the community to add content, and I’d love to tinker around with that 
I wonder, does anyone know of any precedent of this happening with a different game?
Glitch The Game made all but the server software open source when they killed the game. They used the server software for their next project, so they couldn’t open source that part. The client was in Flash, so that was basically obsolete by the time anyone got anything working. There’s a new group starting from scratch, just using the assets that is doing well, though.
1 Like