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Date: 12/06/07
Posted by: Black Monk
Reaction and Steam?
To rehash some of my comments in a previous news post:

We resigned ourselves long ago to not being a hugely popular mod. We had a good run and we're proud of that. Several people have moved on but we have enough people left, I believe, to finish things up. We've not stopped work due to lack of attention. First and foremost, we love the gameplay and do this out of respect for the game and the players. Sure, the online servers aren't too populated right now, but we know people pull out RQ3 from time to time on a LAN and have fun with it!

Someone mentioned Steam. This is something I had been working on for over a year, literally. My first attempts were thwarted because the contact information for "getting your mod onto Steam" was... well, it was wrong. Took literally months to find out who I even talk to--the Steam blokes updated their "knowledge base" entry for that and that's the only way I got the new contact info. Beyond that, Steam reserves the right to tell mods to shove off unless they have a huge playerbase. i.e. they don't want to waste time with a dinky mod that no one will play. Understandable, but the examples they give are like CS and DoD, stuff like that. It's still something I'm pursuing, but I don't know how likely it will be.

I have also made one or two inquiries as to using the physics engine Havok. They announced a while back that they'd be allowing free use for noncommercial software, but when I inquired about using it in a GPL'ed program like ioquake3, I never got any response. Another thing to follow up on, but the problem I think we run into is that unless people see $$$, they tend to write you off and ignore you.

And remember, no matter what, when we're done working on Reaction, we will open the source. Even if we're not done and we abandon the project before a hoped-for final release. Reaction was put together with the intent that it would one day be opensourced. So, we're doing that no matter what.