Whitecold wrote:Honestly, I fail to see why this would have to be online. The supposedly 'closed part' is all revealed in the Rules PDF, so no need to be secretive about it. You could wrap the functions into some nice library, and make that available to developers.
Making it offline relieves you of the trouble of identifying who has access rights to your functions, especially for scripts which run offline in the first place, and if someone wants an online app, they run the library on your server.
You are quite right, it could be done as a library. There are many reasons for and against both methods. And it's not just about access rights, but also maintenance and security. Either way we choose, it would be an interesting support option to our software agreements.
If the idea is to provide some online DRM, getting a commercial DRM software into your project is probably more useful.
I'll skip the lecture. No.
I implemented most tactical functions for my unfortunately on-hold tactical simulator. The proprietary part would be the xml files storing range tables, the actual combat can be determined from quickstart rules. Putting those online just makes the game unplayable offline, makes it reliant on some server staying up, and removes the automatic mod support you get from having an accessible database.
An accessible database would be the opposite of a library. There is no way to provide a secure data store, especially if you rely on xml format. The advantage of a library is that we can black box functionality. But you are correct in that it doesn't provide full moddability, and that is part of the strength of our rules systems.
Choices... choices...