Mote Kickstarter: We are going LIVE!

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Tanthos
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Re: Mote Kickstarter: We are going LIVE!

Post by Tanthos »

aliasmask wrote:With roll20 and as a gm, I have a problem with real time reveal of FOW where it doesn't show areas explored. I can essentially look at an entire map without the GM knowing it as long as I move my token back to the starting position.
There were a number of things about roll20 that didn't appeal to me, this being one. It's a great system for casual play, but it wasn't capable of complex macros, frameworks, or any of the other things I have come to love. Plus, I prefer a desktop application to web-based design. There are loads more interface options. This is one of the many reasons that I have loved MapTool for so long, and will likely enjoy MOTE.

I assume there are established reasons why not, but it seems to me that the RPTools and MOTE teams should join forces and add some strong competition to the VTT market.

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Re: Mote Kickstarter: We are going LIVE!

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The MapTool staff reached out but Mote decided to go a different route.

There are precedents to open source products being used in commercial products. Apache HTTP Server and Tomcat are the basis of most commercial web servers/app. In those cases the commercial entities take the base product and layer on their stuff but also contribute changes to the base product back to the open source community. Often the reasons against this become one of control. A commercial product doesn't want a bunch of open source folks controlling their fate. Open source doesn't want a profit driven entity controlling what the community receives.

Mote claims to be open source on their G+ page. I hope that is the case so we can fold some of their changes back into MapTool.
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Re: Mote Kickstarter: We are going LIVE!

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RPTroll wrote:The MapTool staff reached out but Mote decided to go a different route.
The people that are in control of Mote are not the same that were doing so at the beginning of the project. Maybe it would be beneficial for everyone involved to join strength. If the RPTools dev team kept working on the free Mote, which could be used as a base for Mote-X by the Mote dev team.
RPTroll wrote:Mote claims to be open source on their G+ page. I hope that is the case so we can fold some of their changes back into MapTool.
That'd be great, but I think it'd be more constructive if both of them merged. One less fork, and the community doesn't have to split. Think about it.

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Re: Mote Kickstarter: We are going LIVE!

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Honestly I don't see that happening. From what I read, their Mote-X project will be their flagship product and be a paid for product. Some enhancements from that product, if feasible, would be ported back to the free Mote.

I don't think it's going to flow the other way. I don't see an open source community, working for free, adding code to a base product to get rolled up into a paid-for product. Also, without knowing/seeing the code for Mote-X, there no way to know their direction and what would break or port forward.

And I doubt they would want it that way as well. Now, if they release the source code for Mote, and we incorporate it either piecemeal or wholesale, and make further improvements on it, they are welcome to take it forward. But given they have a "business" model in place, I think we are pretty separated at this point.
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Re: Mote Kickstarter: We are going LIVE!

Post by booga »

Wishful thinking I guess...

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Re: Mote Kickstarter: We are going LIVE!

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booga wrote:Wishful thinking I guess...
Yeah. I think a lot of us would prefer that, but it's unlikely to happen.

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Re: Mote Kickstarter: We are going LIVE!

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You don't know until you try. :D
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Re: Mote Kickstarter: We are going LIVE!

Post by Tanthos »

booga wrote:The people that are in control of Mote are not the same that were doing so at the beginning of the project. Maybe it would be beneficial for everyone involved to join strength. If the RPTools dev team kept working on the free Mote, which could be used as a base for Mote-X by the Mote dev team.

...I think it'd be more constructive if both of them merged. One less fork, and the community doesn't have to split. Think about it.
Aye! This is roughly my suggestion. At the start of Mote, I can see why a divide took place. But now, based on how the Mote team has set up their future goals, the free Mote platform alongside the Mote-X commercial platform seems to meet the demands of both sides while strengthening the development pace, feature integration, *and* stability for the end user. I see the potential here, instead of having lots of programming hours wasted developing similar features simultaneously, develop those features in unison. By changing their plans, Mote has created an ideal environment for the combined progress of the RPTools project.

As is appropriate, Mote is more concerned with their commercial product; and as is appropriate, the MapTool team is more concerned with the community product. Hence, I think that this is a great opportunity for them to merge, as we now have a defined commercial product and a defined community product under the same banner and code base.
RPTroll wrote:You don't know until you try. :D
Exactly. I think it'd be worth the effort to bring the community together on this new opportunity. We don't need to divide our community with more forks, especially when the Mote and RPTools community are so amicable toward each other. Heck, we're essentially the same group.

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Re: Mote Kickstarter: We are going LIVE!

Post by Craig »

Tanthos wrote:
booga wrote:The people that are in control of Mote are not the same that were doing so at the beginning of the project. Maybe it would be beneficial for everyone involved to join strength. If the RPTools dev team kept working on the free Mote, which could be used as a base for Mote-X by the Mote dev team.

...I think it'd be more constructive if both of them merged. One less fork, and the community doesn't have to split. Think about it.
Aye! This is roughly my suggestion. At the start of Mote, I can see why a divide took place. But now, based on how the Mote team has set up their future goals, the free Mote platform alongside the Mote-X commercial platform seems to meet the demands of both sides while strengthening the development pace, feature integration, *and* stability for the end user. I see the potential here, instead of having lots of programming hours wasted developing similar features simultaneously, develop those features in unison. By changing their plans, Mote has created an ideal environment for the combined progress of the RPTools project.
They have? I can't see how that impression could be formed, creating an environment is a lot more than saying hey there will be a free version we will release the source for. Sure the team may of changed -- I was unaware that it did -- but I can't recall any of them reaching out to discuss anything vaguely like this... There is also no source available, I know there are promises it will be available in the future, but realistically nothing of this type of thing could happen until after it is available, also they have a clear direction that they want to go for such a thing as described above to occur they would really need to relinquish quite a bit of control of the direction, its all well and good to say lets have contributors work on free Mote which then gets turned into Mote X, but people contributing here are doing so because they want to and for the most part adding things they need/want, I can't see many of them wanting to work on a list of things needed for Mote X and not the stuff they want to work on. Sure Mote X could just take the output of the "free" Mote and disable all the bits that don't fit in with their plans but how is that really collaborating. I think for such a thing to work there would need to be a shift and large compromise on the other side. You might ask but why shouldn't it be the contributors that make the compromise? My answer to that is why would they turn something they like doing into a job they where they are doing what they are told to and not what they want and get paid nothing for? That's not a compromise at all.

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Re: Mote Kickstarter: We are going LIVE!

Post by JamzTheMan »

To follow that up with an analogy...

There's people here who contribute macro's and frameworks for a given system. Lets say Pathfinder, Shadowrun, & 5e D&D. In fact, I think there are more than five 5E D&D Frameworks? Would you ask them, "Hey, we already have 1 framework, could 4 of you work on a World of Darkness framework, we really need one of those?"

No. Well, you could, but the reply would probably be, "No, I play D&D and don't have an interest in WoD. I just do this in my spare time cause I like D&D and needed a "turn all goblins into cats macro" and went from there."
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Re: Mote Kickstarter: We are going LIVE!

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RPTroll wrote:Mote claims to be open source on their G+ page. I hope that is the case so we can fold some of their changes back into MapTool.
I wouldn't hold your breath. MOTE doesn't have a good reason to release their source code in the near future. I know there's that whole 'open and closed version' some people are talking about, but:

A) That's going to be really difficult for them to monetize - why is anyone going to buy pro when the free version suffices? There is only one reason this project works in the 'real world', and that is so called vendor buy-in. You get a large company interested in the support plan version of your software, and you get priority with bug fixes and the like. The equivalent of vendor lock in here is that:
i) You get a file or feature that is non open source, that cannot be used with any open source version of the software, crippling said software
ii) Or you get some large GM's or GM hosting companies to use the proprietary software, forcing others to use it (if they want to play in said GM's game)

This is such a complicated business model that I can almost guarantee MOTE will fail miserably if it tries this. Maptools may benefit, though that's doubtful for other reasons.

And yeah, let me interject the guy who's gonna say "we'll buy it to support it!" - yeah that's great, but real open source already depends on donations, and that doesn't go far enough to support many devs. Finance is broken for O.S., it sucks, but we don't have a good biz model. I think the best thing would be for GPLv4 to require that all projects of over a certain size cost 5$ to download - that way you either learn how to build your own software (and therefore it gets easier to dev software) or you fund the people who can. Most of the nincompoops today (who aren't pirating software) won't build squat, and I won't complain if it makes people smarter.

B) 'Open Source' doesn't mean what it used to. Its used as a marketing term these days as much as a project philosophy. There is such a thing as the clueless user who doesn't know better than to see that it is 'open source', but this can mean someone zipped a file up and stuck it on the web. With no build tools. For the last version of the software. Missing several, incredibly expensive, proprietary dependencies. MOTE may pick some license that is incompatible with MapTool, or they may never 'get around' to actually open sourcing their product.


And then there's the whole mess MapTool is already in - several false starts, lots of unofficial forks of the 1.3 project, a '1.4' that's actually a 2.0...here's a couple hard things to chew on:

1) Maptool is 'frozen' - how are you going to 'merge in' any of the stuff from MOTE? Assuming that the projects are similar enough. I would do this on a 1.4 branch. Oh wait, we can't, because we decided to call our 2.0 branch that.
2) The 2.0 (1.4) branch is (supposedly) drastically different code. At least that's the plan, to re-write the base drastically. Guess what MOTE did? Drastically re-write their fork of the 1.3 branch. So, now we have what are potentially two dramatically different code bases. You'll probably end up with something like OpenOffice and LibreOffice - MOTE will benefit more from MapTool than MapTool will benefit from MOTE. Assuming MOTE has more dev resources. Which, as they'll be paying staff, and the devs here seem to vanish, and their devs know MapTool like the back of the hand and our devs don't even know what MOTE looks like yet, let alone have a good understanding of its innards, sounds correct.
3) Lets say we rename 1.4 to 2.0 like I want MapTool to do, and unfreeze dev on 1.3 and put all new dev features into a 1.4 branch (I'll call it 1.4b from here on out to avoid confusion) instead, and that this code base is similar enough to MOTE that we can easily fold in these sorts of changes, what do we do about the 2.0 branch? Now we'll have a 1.4b branch that will be less and less defunct than the '2.0' branch. Fold it into both the 1.4b and 2.0 branch? So, twice as much work?

I don't see a good way out, not from the perspective that MOTE will be any help, at least in the near run, to MapTool.

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Re: Mote Kickstarter: We are going LIVE!

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Craig wrote: ... There is also no source available, I know there are promises it will be available in the future, but realistically nothing of this type of thing could happen until after it is available, also they have a clear direction that they want to go for such a thing as described above to occur they would really need to relinquish quite a bit of control of the direction, its all well and good to say lets have contributors work on free Mote which then gets turned into Mote X, but people contributing here are doing so because they want to and for the most part adding things they need/want, I can't see many of them wanting to work on a list of things needed for Mote X and not the stuff they want to work on.
Any collaboration has to be after MOTE releases their source code, sort of by definition. I suspect there are things we can bring into MapTool but I don't really see the products merging at this point. The best we'd see some shared libraries or methods. We have talented developers in the community that know this code base well. They will fold things in if it's worth the effort. I suspect Mote will be tracking the MapTool source for snaggables. It would be nice if they contributed back to the project.
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Re: Mote Kickstarter: We are going LIVE!

Post by Veggiesama »

An update on Mote's progress lately: they're up to 1.0.3, releasing new versions every 1-2 weeks, and they've been very responsive toward bug reports and ensuring backwards compatibility with existing frameworks. The new perspectives feature is pretty darn cool, and the built-in macro editor is a real pleasure to work with.
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Re: Mote Kickstarter: We are going LIVE!

Post by JamzTheMan »

Yes, the perspective view is very nice. And the editor is a joy. Last month when I looked for a library for syntax highlighting there were only a few and one clearly stood out and I started working with that one. I took a peek under the hood and sure enough, Mote uses the exact same library. :)

I've got it working just fine but the whole tab editing view is where it's really at. I'll probably wait to see if they open source that or not before diving in to deep.

I'm not crazy about the icon set/skin though. It's a nitpick but but they just bug me. Probably my Windows upbringing and the love of shiny glassy icons. :)
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Re: Mote Kickstarter: We are going LIVE!

Post by Tanthos »

JamzTheMan wrote:Yes, the perspective view is very nice. And the editor is a joy. Last month when I looked for a library for syntax highlighting there were only a few and one clearly stood out and I started working with that one. I took a peek under the hood and sure enough, Mote uses the exact same library. :)
That's hilarious! :lol:
The internet is too awesome.

I've been enjoying Mote as well, and the interactions we have online with their team. The perspectives has truly been real nice for a GM, especially now that they can be customized.

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