Crowdfunding to Revamp and Preserve Open Blades of Exile

[Duck in a Top Hat]

Hi all! I've introduced my IRL self on the forums before, but here's a recap. My name's Nat. Inspired by Blades of Avernum and Blades of Exile, I'm a writer and a programmer now! This month I launched an IndieGoGo campaign with a goal of spending my summer revamping OpenBoE, because it needs some serious bug fixing and quality-of-life improvements to be playable on modern systems. JV tweeted and shared my campaign on Facebook, and it's actually going really well! So, if you take a look at the page and find yourself inclined to contribute, I'd be very grateful, but no pressure!

 

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/open-blades-of-exile-2-0/x/17149866#/

 

One of my main goals is to make as many of the old scenarios playable as possible, and preserve them in an accessible format--instead of scattered all over old fan sites which are slowly going defunct over the years, I'd like to centralize them in a lasting place and make it easier to load them into the game without fussing around with folders and zip/rar files. So, if you're a scenario designer, could I have your permission to host and maintain your scenarios? This might mean committing them to a GitHub repository, or uploading them to itch.io, and/or editing them to fix bugs and compatibility, without changing content or creative intention, of course.

 

Thanks so much for your contribution to the Blades  community which was so formative for me!

 

I sent the same message to every email address that was listed on the official Scenario List Page, all of which are more than 20 years old. Guess how many Mailer Daemon responses I got within moments? 😅

Edited May 30 by Duck in a Top Hat

[*i]

You can certainly host mine.

[...are from Tibus]

I'm curious about editing scenarios to fix bugs and compatibility.  It seems like, with so many scenarios, if there are compatibility issues, it would make more sense to just fix them on the engine end?  Even if it's in a clunky way that's equivalent to patching changes on every scenario.  That seems like it would be a lot less work, and it sidesteps any questions/effort about getting in touch with authors, keeping original versions available, etc etc.  But maybe I'm misunderstanding what's in play here.

[Celtic Minstrel]

I think I would say that dealing with compatibility issues without changing the scenarios themselves is certainly the ideal goal. But on the other hand, adding a special engine patch solely for one specific scenario seems like a terrible idea. So I would guess that getting permission for minor changes is a way of covering all bases?

 

For my part, I was never planning to edit any scenarios other than Bandit Busywork and the three originals distributed with the game, nor even update other scenarios to the new scenario format. I'm not going to stop other people from doing that if they want to, however.

[Duck in a Top Hat]

Yeah, I don't have any particular intention to edit any old scenarios, I just figured, as long as we're asking permission for things, might as well.

 

What I really want to do is bundle scenarios for easy download and installation. Which, as I mentioned in this past discussion, I think can be done without direct permission within a reasonable interpretation of Fair Use law. But since there's an opportunity to reach out to past community members and ask for explicit permission, it seemed like a good idea to do so. If everyone who responds says "Yes, this is reasonable," I think it also supports the idea that going ahead with bundling en-masse is unlikely to harm anyone--if someone says no, and gives a reason, then I'll be able to see why Fair Use might not be applicable, by learning that perspective.

 

Also of course, if we do a large bundle, we can 100% accommodate anyone who might come forward later saying "Hey, take my scenario out of it."