What if Space Empires VI went Open Source?

[Will]

Imperator Fyron said:
The PBW2 project stopped mostly because they had no idea what they would have to do to support SE5. It's hard to design a support system around a game you know nothing about. I dunno when (if?) it will start back up now that SE5 is coming out, though.

Fyron's got it right here. We could have worked on the assumption that multiplayer would work exactly like for SEIV, but then a lot of work could have gone to nothing if things were changed. Then there was also the question of what extra features could be added; PBW now is very bare-bones, all it does is blindly take turn files, execute the turn, and zip and mail if there are no errors. Everything depends on external sources setting up things. But, if there is support in SEV, we could possibly do things like online empire creation, online game creation, etc.

Anyway, I would have started looking into a new iteration of PBW as soon as the demo came out, but as it is only single-player, I still don't know how multiplayer would work. Once the game is released and we know all that, I would dive right into design discussions, and help out with any needed coding.

As for SEVI open-sourced, I doubt it. Although there isn't really anything stopping a fan-initiated open source game (besides motivation), it wouldn't officially be SEVI (due to trademark issues, etc).