he he he ... As long as this doesn't mean "pay tribute to our greatness"...

I'm gonna explore Openciv3 and give my comments.

I vote 'no' to merger, 'yes' to collaboration. I do like their approach.

Collaboration with any and all others is always a good thing, on game rules ideas.

I have already posted this in the OC3 area, but thought that enough people would be interested that I should put it here also. Those of you who haven't register your opinions one way or the other, please try to let us know what you think, even if it's ambivalence .

What I said in the other thread...

I pondered the merger issue over vacation some, since while driving there isn't a whole heck of a lot to do other than think about things... in terms of general collaboration on some game models, and possibly some sort of resource sharing between the projects, I've got no problem with that. It seems pretty much everyone here agrees that that is reasonable. In terms of a grand merger using amjayee's guidelines, I have some big issues.

I agree with many of the posters here that an all-encompassing merger is an attractive option, but I see some problems with it, both from the Clash project perspective, and also some from my personal view.

First, the project-level issues, of which there are two major ones. Losing much of the progress Clash has made so far, both in terms of coding, and in terms of the things we have locked in for the design. I will say more about these later in the post.

I also really do think that Java is the better way to go... but we could go back and forth on that one forever On a more personal level, I would find it very difficult to go back and readdress every single issue that we have Finally, after much discussion, decided. But I'm going to spend my limited time now talking about the greatest obstacle to a merger, and will then just post this.

The largest issue:
If the OC3 coders were sufficiently numerous and dedicated to be able able to duplicate much of what we have so far in Clash over a timeframe of something like three or four months, then the Clash progress made so far could IMO be sacrificed in the name of the longer-term goal. However, I think I would be extremely negligent to just assume that your team will crank out 20k+ lines of code a month. I think it is extremely unlikely that everyone who says they will work on OC3 will actually do significant work. I have nothing against all the coders here, most of whom I don't know anyway, and am not implying that on an individual basis any one of them are slackers. But sh*t happens... In my experience with Clash, we have gone through approximately 20 coders, many of them professionals. All of them said they had 20+ hours a month to work on Clash when they signed up. The sum contribution of those 20 individuals has been something like 5000 lines of code, much of it due to just one of them. The rest I've done myself, which is why the programming progress has been relatively slow. So regardless of the relative merits of C++ and Java, I think it would be extremely foolish for the Clash project to just ditch what we have until there is solid evidence of results in terms of coding.

So my personal judgment is that nothing much could possibly be done in terms of unification of the projects until we see what the OC3 programming team can actually produce. But based on experience, my expectation is that the progress won't be all that rapid... Then again, perhaps I am underestimating the awesome power of the words "Open Source" .

However, since Clash is a team effort, I'd like to hear what the rest of the team has to say... and thanks for those of you who have come by the thread to register your opinions. Of course, if a preponderance of the team is against a merger in the first place, then we wouldn't need to wait to see what the OC3 coding rate is .