Hi All- I figured I should respond to this thread with Valve's official stance on this and a possible solution to some of the problems.
Jason is right - Valve would not allow there to be public repositories for the Source SDK contents. The community is free to provide diff files for modifications made to the SDK source code, but not our source code or significant portions of our source code. Redistributing our models, textures, sounds, etc. is not allowed and we suggest mounting GCFs if your mod relies on our art assets. How about if I create a section of the VDC Wiki that is dedicated to community mods? Each of the mods can have its own Wiki page that describe and promote the mod, allow a space for discussion, and allow mod teams a space to upload and download patch files that can be applied to the SDK codebase available via Steam. Here is a rather powerful open-source patch file utility that might be a good one to standardize on: http://stahlforce.com/dev/index.php?tool=patch&back=dev I'm willing to hear any ideas you may have about how Valve can facilitate community mods in a way that is convenient for the mod teams and doesn't put large sections of our codebase out on public servers. -Thanks, Mike -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jason Stillwell Sent: Monday, January 22, 2007 5:03 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [hlcoders] Open Source Mods (again) -- [ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ] I think this is a neat idea. But your talking about open source collaboration on a closed-source product. You couldn't make the source publicly available. But they've shown that they don't mind public collaboration on changes to it. So you could make your changes (only) publicly available. This makes things slightly tricky. You can't distribute the sources publicly so distribute public patches instead using a strict diff format. A strict diff format might be something that indicates change points using exact line numbers or byte numbers, instead of example lines from the unmodified source. Also doesn't include the file content when copying or renaming files, just the file names. This way its not necessary for the patch to contain any content from the previous version, only new content. Automate creating the patch once a day, and you've got your distribution method. You just need a few trusted commiters to take patches since your repository can't be public. I'd love to see all those snippets all over the forums and wikis merged into one version. If done well, I'm sure you'd get a few regular commiters. Jason Stillwell -- _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlcoders _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlcoders
