Do to my fairly extensive involvement withe the spring engine, I have quite a good working knowledge of lua based particle systems, and if it is anything like Spring's system, it's not hard to learn either.

So here is my suggestion:
We can all agree that seeing things go boom and fancy effects are fun to watch. As i pay more and more attention I see explosions and effects being reused to quite a large degree. Now this is fine, but unfortunately it's not a neat looking as it could be.

How about allowing the players and other motivated peoples to help in the way of creating Public Domain particle effects for VO? With PD the content ownership can be established for free without even credit given to the original author. So how about it? People here prolly aren't to familiar with stuff like that, and it's okie dokey, but it is a lot of fun to design explosions and so on.

Thoughts?

I think spidey will be all over this suggestion once he reads it. :P

That's an interesting thought. We do have a couple of players who have agitated at various points for access to our particle-prototyping system.

As for Public Domain goes.. I'm not sure if that's wise for us or not. Basically, the concern that drives me on that is the outlook of securing another round of funding, and the like. Investors tend to only put money into products that have their IP ownership clearly defined, and have it held within the company. Otherwise it becomes a question of "well, if it's all free, what am I investing in, exactly?"

With the PCC, we make applicants agree to an assignment of intellectual property, basically stating that anything they make belongs to our company. This is done both to allow us to say to investors, "yes, we own all our IP, yadda yadda", as well as possibly protecting us from some sort of outside lawsuit ("I made this stuff, therefore I demand compensation!").

Anyway, I don't have any particular problem with rolling particle-effect creation into the "PCC" construct. It requires access to some of our own internal toolsets, for prototyping, so I would want it to be a "limited" group anyway. But aside from that, I'm open to the idea.

That would be badass. Pls let me know if this happens :-)

Well, if you're subscribed again, you can apply to the PCC (see sidebar, under "Community"), and then lobby for it there. Spidey would support that, I imagine.

have your investors ever heard of this little thing called 'youtube'? its all the rage with the kids these days, kids that own the content they post on it.

That would sure be great. Especially if we could get bought by Google for 1.6 billion dollars and not have to worry about producing a functional business model.

Anyway, no I'm not going to go all freedom-happy if I think it could substantially hurt our company or reduce our chances of finishing/improving this game. It is not the wise course at this time. Maybe some other time.

In a perfect world, where we were reasonably secure, I would be much more willing to take on that kind of risk. And a lot of other MMO startups apparently are doing that (and more power to them!). But we've survived for a decade, outlived a great many startups, and even some major players (EnB, Privateer Online, etc). We still exist explicitly because we are careful.

*cough Hack Cough cough cough*

I have wanted this for some time...

Can't think like this count as PCC? I don't see why PCC should be limited to quests and suggestions, perhaps it should also include things like backgrounds, skins, and particle effects?

Well, it can count as part of the PCC. That was my suggestion, above.

Ah. I really need to reread before I reply. Playing Wii while posting doesn't mix well.

Come to think of it... Would skyboxes be out of the question?

nop don't think so.

Sky-boxes? Did someone say skyboxes? Sounds like we're talking avatars, player-designed ships, Second Life, and everything. Sounds great!

OJB, plz play just a little more and get a handle on the game mechanics before posting any suggestions that are not directly associated to the new-player experience.

There is no question that you are interested in being involved and that is great, but it seems that you don't have a full grasp on all of the underlying matters.