A commenter asks why I haven’t released the Ultimate Universe source, when no real progress has been made on the web site since 1999.
But progress has been made on the game. If you were on the mailing list, you saw a travel-only UU engine released in 2003, supporting thousands of dimensions and millions of sectors. But from my FTP site’s logs, I saw that virtually nobody downloaded it. From the discussion on that list, I saw that absolutely nobody provided any feedback on whether it worked and how well.
But what absolutely everybody wanted was for me to hand over the source code. Source code which I bought from Garth Bigelow and Tophersoft Engineering with my own money, before funding development to the tune of six figures and the brink of bankruptcy.
I said, what do you want to see in UU? They said, we want the source code. I said, how can UU stay fresh and competitive in the internet world? They said, it should be open source. I said, what would make UU easier for new players to learn? They said, the source code.
I don’t believe that’s about making UU better. I don’t believe it’s about giving UU to more people so they can play and enjoy it. I believe it’s about random losers wanting to strip Garth’s name off it and use search and replace to pretend they wrote a game. “No, it’s different! Look, it’s the Coalition instead of the Cabal!”
Yeah. Whatever. I don’t trust you people. I’ve tried to involve the community, and the community doesn’t share my vision. Development is now behind closed doors, but there is still development. It isn’t our main focus right now, but it is being done.
UU is brilliant, and was decades ahead of its time. I respect that, and I won’t have it degraded into a massively forked tree of eight hundred shitty variants that add nothing of any value to it. I am working on making UU into something that will make the industry sit up and take notice. Garth deserves that.
March 1st, 2007 at 4:39 pm
“It is my wish that something of mine live on beyond me. I figure my best shot at that is either UU or IX. However there have been a lot of hard drive
crashes, moves and machines between then and now. I’m not sure I can locate the code, but I’ll look around for it.
Darklock, might be another source for it (he had it at one time and seems more organized than I.) As far as I am concerned it is public domain now.”
Garth’s email address can be found at www.garthbigelow.com. He is sick and may not be around much longer from what I read, which is a shame. He seems like a very caring person.
I understand your concern about the Ultimate Universe name, credit to Garth, forks that could occur, etc. Let’s be realistic however. This type of game is obsolete. There is a very small (and increasingly smaller) type of people that are interested in text games these days. I very, very much doubt that such a scenario that you describe would occur.
Also, sharing the source code does not mean open-source. You could have folks sign an agreement promising not to distribute the source and to credit Garth at every opportunity (I would certainly do this anyway). You could even have people call it something else so as not to tarnish the UU name, if that is what you are concerned with.
I argue that Ultimate Universe is fading away into obscurity. It’s already been about 10-12 years or so since it was frequently played. Internet searches for the name come up with less and less results every year. I was trying to find a telnet BBS or something where I could try playing again but I could not find a single one via a web search.
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Note: In February 2009 I officially awarded the rights to Ultimate Universe to Troy Jones. The original game will always be free to have or play for anyone that wants. But any future use of the Ultimate Universe name, or the UU symbol must be approved by Troy Jones.