Some statistics?

[maxpower]

Hi,

I was wondering if you have statistics from the time before going open source and after.

Did you notice an increase in development speed after going open source? Did the quality of the content get better? How much new developers did you get? Were there significant changes in the community? Were there other changes or improvements or things that are more bad now?

[Jeru]

Hi maxpower, thanks for your interest. Are you writing a blog post or a news article about 0 A.D.?

Did you notice an increase in development speed after going open source? Did the quality of the content get better?

Yes, but most of it was due to added motivation to one pre-existing contributor, Philip. Most progress after the OS release consisted of his reimplementation of part of the engine called "simulation". Simulation was planned wrong and had to be redone, and the OS release gave him a shot in the arm, I'm guessing because he realized more help was on the way.

Many other contributors pitched in with various bugfixes, like those which let the game run properly on different platforms. Those were great, and we're expecting more contributions, and even more substantial ones, in the near future.

How much new developers did you get?

I will let Erik answer that, he keeps track of contributors joining and leaving the team. If you count contributors outside the team (like the bugfixers), it's probably under 50. (Philip - correct me if I'm wrong)

Were there significant changes in the community? Were there other changes or improvements or things that are more bad now?

We got a lot of interest, a lot of website traffic, and more people passing by on the forums, some of them applying to join the team, but only a few so far really offering heavy-duty contributions (the few, the proud!). Things that have got worse due to the OS release - I can't think of any.

Edited March 27, 2010 by Jeru

[maxpower]

Thanks for the information. No, I don't write an article about 0 A.D. I'm just very interested in the whole OpenSource Gaming scene (also freeware, but OS is better ). And 0 A.D. is one of the very few titles that are really promising (meaning: real alternative for commercial games). That's why I wondered if going open source did improve the development speed or quality significantly.

[feneur]

We haven't been getting many more new developers if you think about people actually joining the team, I think the number of new people joining is roughly the same. I think Open Sourcing was a good way to get more people involved though, participating in a big project like this takes a lot of time and can be a big commitment, but if you can do relatively small things like submitting a bug report, packaging the game for some Linux distribution or translating a web page, that makes it easier for people to contribute. And that makes more people involved in the development process, even if they aren't "officially part of the team" or actually writing code or so. So, in other words, even though I'd been happier if we'd have gotten more actual developers thanks to opening up the source code I'm really happy for the new ways of contributing it's opened up for people.