FLOSS Weekly 742, Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Doc Searls (00:00:00):
This is Floss Weekly. I'm Doc Searls. This week Jonathan Bennett and I talk with Jonathan Steck and Shaughn Merrill, both of Endless Sky. Endless Sky is, we think, one of the premier open source games. It's a really exciting game. It's in space. It's a lot of fun. It actually runs on more than just the Linux platform. It's also on Android. A lot of fun. And these guys, we talked to 'em two years ago. We're catching up with this one. A lot has happened. In the meantime, it's like a much more expanded team. They're doing really good work. If you wanna get into how games are made in the open source world, this is the show to see or listen to, and that is coming up next. This episode of Floss Weekly is brought to you by Cisco Meraki. Without a cloud managed network, businesses inevitably fall behind. Experience, the ease and efficiency of Meraki's single platform to elevate the place where your employees and customers come together. Cisco Meraki maximizes uptime and minimizes loss to digitally transform your organization, Meraki's intuitive interface, increased connectivity and multi-site management. Keep your organization operating seamlessly and securely wherever your team is. Let's Cisco Meraki's 24 7. Available support. Help your organization's remote on and hybrid teams always do their best work. Visit meraki.cisco.com/twit

(00:01:44):
Podcasts you love

Speaker 2 (00:01:46):
From people you trust. This is twit twi.

Doc Searls (00:01:53):
This is Floss Weekly episode 742. Recorded Wednesday, July 26th, 2023. Endless Sky, endless fun. This episode of Floss Weekly is brought to you by Cisco Meraki. With employees working in different locations, providing a unified work experience seems as easy as herding cats. How do you reign in so many moving parts with Meraki Cloud Managed Network? Learn how your organization can make hybrid work work. Visit meraki.cisco.com/twit and buy FastMail. Reclaim your privacy, boost productivity and make email yours with FastMail. Try it now free for 30 days at fastmail.com/twit. And buy fit warden. Get the open source password manager that can help you stay safe online. Get started with a free teams or enterprise plan trial, or get started for free across all devices as an individual user at bit warden.com/twit. Hello again, everyone everywhere. This is Floss Weekly. I am Doc Searls, and this week joined by Jonathan Bennett, j Bennett, himself. Hey, are you Docs?

Jonathan Bennett (00:03:16):
Good to be

Doc Searls (00:03:16):
Here. <Laugh> good to be here too. Yeah, wherever here is, here's now an average of Oklahoma and Boston, which is, I'm in a basement apartment here in Boston, which I think I'm in like once or twice a decade, <laugh>. But <laugh> and the AC turned down all the way. And yesterday we arrived here and it was hot. And, and we immediately thought the, the thing near the door was the air conditioner and it was broken. It was the dehumidifier and the air conditioner, which you might be able to see in the wall behind me there. That's, that's the actual air conditioner. And

Jonathan Bennett (00:03:53):
It is working

Doc Searls (00:03:53):
It's foot unit. It's on quiet right now. Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett (00:03:56):
Yes, those are, those are nice. That's actually why my office is not 80 degrees anymore. I put one of those in out here. And yeah,

Doc Searls (00:04:02):
A split unit, meaning that, that the part you see is here, but the part that's throwing heat outside is somewhere else. Completely. Yes. Yeah. Not like in a window, which is cool. Yeah, I like those. You see these all over Europe. They're pretty cool.

Jonathan Bennett (00:04:17):
Yeah, it's, it's, they're real popular in Europe.

Doc Searls (00:04:20):
Yeah. Yeah. So, so this today's show features Endless Sky. This is your idea and you're a player.

Jonathan Bennett (00:04:28):
It it is. I am a player. I, we were talking before the show got started. I, I got somewhat addicted to Endless Skies. It's a video game about space exploration. I got somewhat addicted to it back a few months ago and played through pretty much all of the the released content for it. And of course, that content ends on a cliffhanger, and I've not been back since then. <Laugh>. but there's quite, there's quite a bit of new content that we're gonna for sure. Ask these guys about. But it, it's, it's a lot of fun. It's it's kind of your, your, your typical you know, exploration and trading and fighting. But rather than being in three D it's actually in two dimensionss. So it's a top down view on all of this is you're, you're moving your spaceships around and all of that. But it's, it's really interesting. It's a, it's a lot of fun <laugh>. I don't know that I'm doing it quite justice in my description of it, but I, I really enjoy it.

Doc Searls (00:05:22):
Yeah. And it's, and it is open source, right? So anybody wishing to contribute and improve on it, is there, well, I I wanted to jump into this. So we're gonna bring in not one, but two guests this, this morning, this evening, whenever it is. Shaughn and Jonathan, not to be confused with the other Jonathan, we're half of the people on the show are Jonathan's right now.

Jonathan Bennett (00:05:45):
In hindsight. In hindsight, we may have made a grave error here. <Laugh>. <laugh>.

Doc Searls (00:05:50):
Sorry, we only allowed one on the show. Yeah. So, so, so, and one is lead artist, one is lead developer, and both of them kind of half disclaim that because it's a team, team thing. So why don't we just start with with this, with Jonathan Steck Steck. Is that right? Do I have

Jonathan Steck (00:06:08):
That right? Steck? Yeah,

Doc Searls (00:06:09):
Stack. So tell us about yourself and what you're doing there with Endless Guy.

Jonathan Steck (00:06:15):
All right. Well so I'm Jonathan Steck. I'm effectively the lead developer. I was kind of saying before the show, that was kind of a defacto title for a couple years now, but I think relatively recently we've kind of concretely said like, oh yeah, this guy's, the, the lead developer. He well, I I lead the, well, the developer team. So we have a team of, I believe it's 10 developers at the moment. Don't wanna start naming names in Fear of Missing Someone. But so the, the point of the, so the developers are the ones who have right access to the games repository on GitHub. And we've been chosen over the years from among the community. We have people who were interested in making content for the game or making new features, updating the engine, fixing bugs, helping out with C I C D jobs on GitHub.

(00:07:07):
Just people who were pretty much experts in their field to an extent, who we noticed like, we're really good at helping out with the game and we're really interested in doing so. And so we reached out to them and we're like, Hey, do you wanna become a developer? Do you want Right access? Do you want to kind of lead things here? So that kind of begs the question about who did, who was the first one? So the first one was actually this guy called Michael z Eiser. So as as Jonathan Bennett described Endless Guy is this top-down two D space adventure game as a tech space choose your own venture type aspects to it. And it was started by Michael z Eiser back in 20 14, 20 15, as a spiritual successor to the Escape Velocity series from Umberger software from back in the late nineties, early two thousands.

(00:07:56):
And he built this game mostly on his own, but he seemed to have some friends and family who looked to help out. 'cause They're in the credits under beta testers. And he developed a game almost primarily by himself from 2015 up until about 2018. But closer to 2018, we noticed that he was starting to slow down his involvement in the game. There's a lot less pool quests being merged, a lot less commit being made by him. And we at this time had a bunch of people who were really excited in this game and contributing to the game. So eventually he noticed, Hey, I don't have enough time, but you guys seem to have a lot of time on your hands. You're really passionate about this game. So he made myself pointed stick and the ouch contributors to the game, or collaborators to the, the repository where we could have the right access to actually build up the game ourselves. And since then, it's mainly been, or well since then, it was us who working on it. And over the years, as I said, we've built up our developer team to now 10 individuals. So that's basically the, the long and short of it.

Doc Searls (00:08:59):
So, so Shaughn, what what did Jonathan just miss and tell us a bit about yourself, <laugh>.

Shaughn Reynolds (00:09:05):
So I'm Shaughn Reynolds. I am a bit newer to the team within the last year or two. I mainly work with the art of the game and making sure it's all fitting together nicely. I'm also one of those 10 developers, but I, art is definitely more my expertise in things. I don't, I'm code is something I'm a little bit away from <laugh>, but in terms of content and artwork, that's more my, my vibe. I also I, I played the original Escape velocity series that this game is based on and building up from there it's kind of done a lot of justice in my life in terms of my career. So a lot of, a lot of like what I do nowadays with just art and modeling all that stuff is from that, those original days. And it, it's just really cool to be part of this, a similar project and be trying to help out with the community and get some stuff going for it.

Jonathan Bennett (00:09:59):
I am, I'm very much reminded of an X K C D comic where it's, it's, you know, the things that contributed to my career success. And it's like, you know, 10th grade, 11th grade, 12th grade, these little tiny graphs and then, and, and that when it's messing around with Python, that one weekend is like this huge, this huge part of the graph. It it fascinates me the way the careers work and not necessarily the way that they're supposed to. We'll get into that more. I actually wanna ask Jonathan about, a little bit more about that transition of power as it was where you had the original lead developer that, that kind of faded away from the scenes. Was there a bit of a challenge getting like full admin access to the GitHub repository? And then I know there was quite a, quite a story about the Steam page, the Steam store. Let's, let's dive into that a little bit more.

Jonathan Steck (00:10:53):
Yeah, so last time we were on, we talked about how Michael er had given me and the others, as I mentioned, right, access to the repository, but Right. Access isn't total access. We did not have admin access, right. We also had no access to Steam. So I'll mention that. The game is distributed on GitHub, of course, but also on Steam and on Debian and some other locations that you might find it. But the officially supported ones are GitHub and Steam Steam is where a lot of our player base came from. It's where I came from. It's where I imagine Shaughn came from. Correct me if I'm wrong though. But it, so the fact that we didn't have access to update the game on Steam was a big blow, which meant, 'cause we had all this content, like finished and ready to go.

(00:11:38):
We just couldn't give it to a vast majority of the players in this time. We found some workarounds. So we actually developed a, a continuous branch, or not a continuous branch, but like a continuous job on the GitHub so that every time there's a new commit, we'll make a new build and it'll put that on the release page for everyone to access. We started to have people notice, oh, hey, the game's dead. Is there anything going on? They would come to the GitHub page, they would start finding the continuous build so they can actually still continue to play the game. But that still left out a lot of people, people who didn't even know the game was on GitHub up. Since then, we actually do now have access to the game on Steam, and we have admin access on the, the repository as of about a year and a half ago now.

(00:12:24):
So March of last year one of our community members, Z Jaz, actually reached out to Mike Gold, was like, Hey thanks for giving us the, the right access so we can continue to develop the game. But things are starting to kind of slow down now because we're not getting the releases from you on Steam, and there are things that we would like to do that we just can't do right now 'cause we don't have the proper access. And Michael responded, he was like, Hey, I understand. So what he did was he actually converted his own GitHub account into an organization, which meant we actually lost all of the history of his commits, which is kind of, I think like the commits are still there, but they don't link to an account anymore, which is kind of weird. Right. And his name is no longer in the, the co the contributors if you go to the insight on the, the GitHub stats.

(00:13:05):
Yeah. But but in, in, in doing that though, he made zzz himself on a new account and to uch admins on a repository, and he gave M c o one of our other developers developer access on Steam. So because of that, as of like that year and a half ago, we're now actually able to do basically anything we wanna do. There are still some, some bumps here and there that we're trying to work out. Like we're not too sure on what should an admin on the repository be doing, what, what should a developer do be doing that that admin isn't, and then vice versa. So we do have some organizational things to still work out that were actively working on, but for the most part, things have been a lot smoother sailing than they were years ago.

Jonathan Bennett (00:13:46):
Right. Now, I'm, I'm curious as a community, have you kind of anointed someone as the benevolent dictator of the entire project? Or is there just kind of a, a group of loose people that make the decisions? What does that part look like?

Jonathan Steck (00:14:02):
I don't wanna call myself the benevolent dictator. Some people are gonna take that outta context.

Jonathan Bennett (00:14:07):
<Laugh>

Jonathan Steck (00:14:07):
<Laugh>, we, we do have a bit of like a balance of power situation. So I mentioned that DEHA Michael and Jaz are admins. Deha has been inactive recently. He actually got married, bought a house. We joke around that he has kids now because he is, he's better away that long. But <laugh> and Michael still hasn't returned to the game, but but Zzz is the admin who is currently the, the active admin. And he is separate from the developer team at the moment. And because of that, we do have this balance of powers where the developer team has some say on things. He has some say on things. There's a bit of a back and forth there. And then we also have two people who we call our community organizers. Those are Hector and Master of Gray. And they are a lot more involved in the community aspect of things.

(00:14:53):
So whenever they feel like there is a deficit in the way the developer team is doing something with the community, they'll point that out and be like, Hey, I think you should be a bit more communicative with the community, or you should maybe add a new role here and there. 'cause We have so we have a Discord server with almost 5,000 people on it now. Oh, wow. And that is where a majority of the games development actually happens. Or at least the discussions about the development happens there because we'll, we'll spitball ideas back and forth and, and all sorts of stuff on there. We'll talk, we'll talk crap about each other, <laugh>. But but but yeah, so, but we also have this so speaking of the, the organizers though something that was Gray's idea primarily I believe was the creation of this suite of what we call reviewers, reviewer with a capital R.

(00:15:41):
And our reviewers are people who we recognize as actually being pretty good at giving positive feedback reviews or like good feedback reviews to new pool requests that come in. So we'll have like grammar reviewers, spelling reviewers or code reviewers and content reviewers. And these people, we, we give this title of reviewer, we give them triage permissions on the repositories so that they can mm-hmm. Help us add labels where we need to. And maybe slightly moderate conversation here and there. And those are the ones that we, that we the developers primarily look to for help. So they're kind of like the, the, the front lines of things, so to speak. And they're primarily the, the number one pick for new developers should we ever decide to add someone else with right. Access to repository. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Jonathan Bennett (00:16:32):
Alright. Now let me kind of ask Shaughn some of the same questions where mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, where do you fit into this? Are you you know, we just, we just heard about this idea of, of reviewers. Are you the head reviewer for new content? What all is under your purview?

Shaughn Reynolds (00:16:47):
So actually to come off of what he was saying, I worked my way up through as a reviewer to become a developer Uhhuh. When I, when I joined, I was immediately passionate about everything. I wanted to get artwork into the game. I wanted to like take a look at other peoples, how they do it. So I ended up being an artwork reviewer for a while. And like he was saying, there's a, a lot of people throughout the years who've made artwork for the game. I'm by no means the only person, and there's people who've done quite a lot more work than I have. But a few notable people. So Becca Bunny is the name that comes to mind. There's another name called Gfu I can't pronou the rest of it. <Laugh>. so there's a lot of people who have contributed quite a lot of artwork to the game.

(00:17:29):
And eventually John was saying how it'd be beneficial to have like an artwork dev to kind of keep track of what, what new artwork gets added to the game. 'cause We were in the middle of like this period where we updated a lot of the models and from like, you know, years years of them just sitting there they've been detailed quite a bit. And you can tell the difference, like back in the day they, they were just very basic top view images and some of them were even just drawn. And I Michael did some Inkscape just, just views. And nowadays we have people making them in blender and and like different versions of Blender. So pe some people are sitting in the older versions and some people are like on the newest one. Some people are using Gimm for post-processing, other people are using Blender internal engines for post processing. And there's just so many different ways that the art's made for the game. And, and it's all like, you know, it's all free stuff, which is what Michael wanted. So that's where I come in. And so I basically, I look at all the artwork of the game. I look at some content of the game, like story-wise, but not really anywhere near as much as Jonathan does. But yeah, that's where I'm at.

Jonathan Bennett (00:18:52):
So, so how, how does that work as far? 'cause There's, in, in, in the sky there's different factions, there's different races. Who has ownership? Like, is there one person that just has ownership of the entire storyline, or is it broken down into parts and, and different people kind of take ownership of their, their little bit of the pie?

Shaughn Reynolds (00:19:14):
You mean like the overall storyline or each faction storyline?

Jonathan Bennett (00:19:17):
Well, either way, which way does it work?

Shaughn Reynolds (00:19:20):
So faction stories, usually they come from the mind of the person who wrote, like, you know, the faction owner, so to speak. Once someone submits their faction to be added to the game, though it does become like, quote unquote property of endless sky, as in it works with everybody else. So they do have a say on the faction, but when something is merged into vanilla, they kinda have to work with everything else that's in the game, make sure there's nothing that's too far from the base vision of the game. It's like nothing crazy. Specifically with artwork, there's, there's like a kind of a set, set of guidelines, so to speak for it. Mainly we have templates for the lighting of the ships, so it's like, it's basically just the lighting and trying to do the similar texturing with top down view. So most

Jonathan Bennett (00:20:11):
Kinda a style, kind of a style guide that you give everybody?

Shaughn Reynolds (00:20:12):
Yeah, yeah. Like a style guide and Right. Most people like over the years it's always been overlaying textures and stuff like that on top of the ships. But with one of the images you guys showed some people are starting to do everything in Blender now mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. it is kind of a juggle to try and get these different looking factions and ships altogether to match the game. But so like, you know, you have like spoiler aliens on one side of the ca side galaxy that look quite different from the other side of the galaxy. But it all kind of comes down to keeping design, like you said, like a style guide. So like not overly detailed graphics, not under detailed, same lighting, same shading, stuff like that.

Jonathan Bennett (00:20:58):
A as you get some things done in, in three D completely done in Blender, I, I have to imagine that, you know, if you look at it, you've now got this nice three D model that theoretically looks great from any side. Although on that last shot at the bottom of that may have been completely UNT textured, we don't know <laugh>. Does that kind of make your spider senses tangle and think, boy, there's some possibilities here that we're not really using with just a two detox down view? Yeah.

Shaughn Reynolds (00:21:23):
So that kind of was like talk what I talked about earlier with whole, our transition to thumbnails way in the past, so that that was a big opportunity. So everything wasn't top you anymore. Now, now there's three dimensions, <laugh>, and same thing as like landscape images and scenes is something it's somewhere sorry about in the game. So like, having different angles of the ships or where they might be sitting at in like a, like a shipyard or outfits. When you're unlocking a new outfit, like that example right there, it's showing one is it's like a little garage with like a gun in it and a bunch of parts laying everywhere. That's not something you would normally see from the original top view of the game. And there have been people who make animations with the ships and the, and the assets in the game. So I'm not sure if our engine can handle like, straight these like, movie style animations quite yet. But it's definitely a definitely thing goes by sweater since I'm like, oh, I wanna see those in more places than just top down <laugh>.

Jonathan Bennett (00:22:26):
Yes. has anybody seriously kicked around the idea of, of porting all of the, the storyline and the graphics to something like the, the Vegas strike engine or the free space engine <laugh>?

Shaughn Reynolds (00:22:38):
I don't believe so.

Jonathan Bennett (00:22:40):
<Laugh> <laugh>, I, I know, I I I I do understand the incredible mountain of work that I just spit balled there. <Laugh>. Oh

Doc Searls (00:22:52):
Yeah. Well guys, I, I wanna get to some more questions, but first we have to let everybody know that this episode of Floss Weekly is brought to you by Cisco Meraki, the experts in cloud-based networking for hybrid work. Whether your employees are working at home at a cabin in the mountains, or in a lounge chair at the beach, the cloud managed network provides the same exceptional work experience no matter where they are. You may as well roll out the welcome mat because hybrid work is here to stay. Hybrid work works best in the cloud and has its perks for both employees and leaders. Workers can move faster and deliver better results for the cloud managed network, while leaders can automate distributed operations, build more sustainable workspaces and proactively protect the network. An IgG marketplace research report conducted for Meraki highlights top tier opportunities in supporting hybrid work.

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(00:25:48):
So I'm, I'm wondering about the 5,000 people on Discord. We know about the reviewers so far. What, what are the other, you know, in, in the boiling system that is there, what else is emerging as roles as the, as the whole thing matures? And neither one of you guys can answer that one. I guess.

Jonathan Steck (00:26:06):
So I'll say that we don't have 5,000 people working at the game, that's for sure. <Laugh>. Yeah, it's a vast majority of it is just players at the game who, 'cause we actually have the, the link to the Discord server and the game's credits. So if you're actually looking through the credits, you can see that if you're, if you're interested in being on the server, well, you can come show up, talk about the game, see what people are going on with. But the, the main the main roles in the server are we have our developers we have our community organizers that I mentioned. We have some moderators just to make sure that no one's now doing anything too crazy on the server. Then we have our reviewers, which I already mentioned, and we also have a group of people who we call our core members.

(00:26:48):
And the core members are just people who we have recognized as sticking with the game for a long time. And who usually are people who have contributed to the game. Not only in the sense of they have commit on the repository, but contributions can also come in the form of creating new tools for the development of the game or just making plugins. I'll, I'll note that part of the, the goal of Endless Ski is to have it be highly modelable. So we have this extensive plugin system that allows you to make anything you want. If the, if you see the game doing something, then you can do that thing. And even more than that, because there's actually a lot of mechanics that the engine is capable of that we currently aren't using at the moment. Mainly because somebody will have an idea for a feature and we'll be like, Hey, that sounds like a good feature, let's add it to the games engine. But then we just never get around to finding a good spot for it to actually show up in the story.

Shaughn Reynolds (00:27:46):
We

Jonathan Steck (00:27:46):
Actually have that's, that's kind of the

Shaughn Reynolds (00:27:48):
Go ahead. Yeah, sorry. A member who just recently opened a pull request to have plugins, installable and openable through the game itself. So we, we have all these, like, we have a different launcher to launch the plugins. We recently do have that capability to, to disable them or enable them. So yeah, moding is really a really big important part of it.

Jonathan Bennett (00:28:10):
So I am curious about something is is there any voice acting in the game?

Jonathan Steck (00:28:16):
There is not, is

Jonathan Bennett (00:28:18):
Something

Jonathan Steck (00:28:19):
Will never be

Jonathan Bennett (00:28:19):
<Laugh> there, there will never be

Jonathan Steck (00:28:23):
Unlikely. Unlikely. So I mentioned earlier that, that the game story is all text. So you'll land on a planet you'll get a mission, and then the mission is it's all text. We've, if we were to, it's a voice act. That's a lot of text to voice act. If you only use it sparingly, we kind of have to question like, why would we only be using it sparingly? Where would we even use it? At a certain point it feels like it would just be, like, would stick out like a sore thumb. Like, oh, why is this voice acted? Not that we do wanna keep a relatively consistent quality to the game overall mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And if we were to start voice acting in one area that would kind of egg on to the rest of the game. Like, hi, why isn't this voice acted? And that would just be a big mess for us to actually deal with.

Jonathan Bennett (00:29:05):
Sure. Yeah. So I I, oh, go ahead.

Shaughn Reynolds (00:29:08):
Oh, sorry. I was gonna say, it's kinda one of those things with like, when you're reading a book and people like to imagine the voices or the characters themselves, and I feel like if we give everybody voices that might kind of narrow the vision of them a little bit more than we'd like to.

Jonathan Bennett (00:29:21):
Yeah. So I, I am, I'm kind of remembering, I think it was a Skyrim mod that somebody came up with. And it, it did two things, if I remember correctly. First it used chat g p t to create on the fly dialogue, and then it used ano some other, you know, AI engine to voice that dialogue and ended up with this really novel game that every time you, you talked to an N P C, they would come up with a slightly different bit of dialogue and it would be voiced. And I I thought that was a really cool <laugh> cool idea. There. There was, yeah. So there's this, there's this article I saw on hack age a couple of days ago about Bark, which is an open source voice acting module that it, it just bef, when I was thinking about the show before we started it, it occurred to me that it would be really fun to take something like this and get it to do your voice acting for you for some open source game. So I wanted to <laugh> I wanted to pitch the idea to you guys and see what you thought <laugh>

(00:30:26):
Shaughn actually has topic done silence.

Shaughn Reynolds (00:30:28):
Oh yeah. <Laugh>. No, no, actually I was expecting AI to be brought up.

Doc Searls (00:30:34):
We have, I was gonna do it eventually anyway, but yeah, you

Shaughn Reynolds (00:30:37):
Got me already considered the usage of it. It's mainly what's brought up for it is using it for like landscapes. Because landscapes for the planets are usually images from free source sites like Unsplash or some NASA images. We did initially have like a channel on Discord for people to throw like out examples of AI and stuff of like that. But we ultimately decided just for, for for things as they're now we kind of don't want AI to be used in the game quite yet. And that's not because it's like a super bad thing or anything. It's partly because there's a lot of copyright issues when it comes to AI and what they generate and where they source it from, if it's from the person or like their libraries. And the other part is we have, we, we do have a lot of dedicated creators who would love to make this kind of content themself and make the scenes in Blender or things like that. <Affirmative>.

Doc Searls (00:31:34):
So that's, and this is very for, for Shaughn. I think we're reaching a point, and I might be wrong about this where you can spot AI art, it looks like AI art, even the good stuff mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And, and I'm wondering if you agree with that? Certainly with people, it's possible. I mean, some of them, like the eyeballs aren't right, you know, stuff like that. But, but even with landscapes and shapes and, you know, show me a bunch of spacemen and what do those look like? And it makes up a bunch of things. They're sort of Star Wars derived mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and are, they're plausible, but they're, but there's something a little bit weird and, and glossy about them. And I'm wondering if, if I'm right about that or if that's just a projection on my part.

Shaughn Reynolds (00:32:15):
Yeah, I I think that's it does get a little hard to tell at times, but it's especially predominant people. It's like, you know, hands and other appendages like that with landscapes, I guess that could come into play with like shading or like texture consistency. Like maybe something blurs lines together towards like the horizon or between different materials. So it's definitely, you can definitely tell. But I do think there are, it is like a way things are going to where it is harder to tell nowadays, but at least in my thought, there will always be like a way to tell you can't, like ai, I don't think we'll be able to perfectly manipulate what a person can do. But that's not to say they can't do a good job of trying to,

Doc Searls (00:33:00):
So, so I'm gonna throw something in here. My, my daughter who's a theater professor at the University of Maryland in Baltimore just wrote a book called A Galaxy of Things, and it's about Star Wars puppets and Star Wars characters that are not human, but have human qualities. And I did a whole bunch of covers for her that just said a galaxy of things using ai. She went with an artist <laugh>. So, so I just wanted to report that and get a plug in for her book <laugh>. So, yeah. So I'm, I'm wonder, oh, go, go ahead. Jonathan, or you had a question.

Jonathan Bennett (00:33:46):
Okay. So I, I think, I think before we let you guys go, we've, we've got about half the show left. Let's cover what's changed, what's, what's new and endless Sky since the last time we talked to you. It's been Oh good. Probably a couple of years now. I think. We've got a couple, you've got a couple of releases under your belt. What what's the new goodies?

Jonathan Steck (00:34:07):
Oh, what did you even start? Is the, the problem? <Laugh>. So we have two new alien factions. We have greatly expanded capabilities in the engine. So by that, I mean missions can be a lot more complex. We have a lot more complex things that the ships and the outfits are capable of doing. I think my favorite thing, I don't know if this was since we last spoke, but it probably was actually back several years ago. We, so there's this section in the safe file for all of your characters called the conditions section. And the conditions is basically just the map where the keys are strings and the values are integer mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And whenever you are trying to figure out when to do something in a mission, you have to check the condition map. So you could say something like, in order for this mission to offer, you have to have, finish this mission, and your combat rating has to be above 3000 or something like that. So combat rating is just a measure of how much combat you've engaged in.

(00:35:14):
The problem with this map was that if there was ever any information we wanted to be able to access through a, a two offer on a mission, we had to first put it in the map. So, for example, if we wanted to check if the player has a certain outfit installed on their ship, we had to stick in the map. This outfit exists basically, or this outfit has a count of one. Now, if you wanted to do that for every outfit in your fleet, but also ask where that outfit is, you're massively ballooning the number of entries in this map. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, which was just impossible to work with after a certain point. One of our developers Peter v Deir actually completely refactored how the conditions are constructed. So we do still have a map of conditions that are set under certain conditions that are just static values where again, you have a string and you have a value that is in your safe file.

(00:36:22):
If you wanna go in and tweak it, you can. And there's always accessible. But he also added what we've called auto conditions or derived conditions where we have certain keywords for this map that instead of storing them inside the map itself, if you call this keyword, there is a function that we define that actually goes and grabs the information on the fly. So the example of your outfits, you can now see which outfits you have, but also tell what condition or what state that outfit is in. Is it on your flagship, is it on your escorts? Is it in another system? Is it in the system you're in at the moment? Is it parked? You can do all sorts of stuff with this that we just could not do before. And we have added tons and tons of auto conditions because with this ability and we could just, like I said, do all sorts of stuff we couldn't do before.

(00:37:12):
I think we actually have a wiki page with all of them on it. If you go to the Wiki I think there's a page on player conditions if we wanna pull it up and you can just scroll through all the stuff we have. We actually have the version number ex next to every single condition. And when it was added I think it's further down player conditions, not the player's manual <laugh> mm-hmm. <Affirmative> right there above compiling or modifying mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And we describe how conditions work. But this, see that, that scroll bar, this is a longer page and further down there's just, it's a bunch of conditions with what they do when they're usable, and then what or what version they were added in. And you can see, I think there's a bunch that come in and a single version. 'cause That's when we actually got that capability. And then just every version after that, there's another, a whole set that we shove in. 'cause People are like, oh, I wanna do this, I wanna compare that. And it's just really expanded our capabilities in terms of what we can do with missions. Mm-Hmm.

Jonathan Bennett (00:38:11):
<Affirmative>. Alright. So same question for Shaughn on the art side. What has changed in the last, it's been over two years actually, since we last talked to you guys? So Shaughn, what, what is new in the game from your perspective?

Shaughn Reynolds (00:38:23):
So I was say earlier there's a been a lot of re detailing of outfits and ships. All the Sprites for Stars got an update as well. They're originally they were like, they more just like a simple gradient with like, kind of like flares around it. Now they have more depth to them. Some of 'em got bigger sizes. Just, just a lot of ship remodels. Especially with like the new factions too. There's also like a ton of new ships outfits there on that side. Yeah, with like that graphic there, like you can see how, and the very old ships were very basic and they, they looked good. Like for what Michael was trying to go with the game. It this kind of retro kind of style. But over time we kind of started adding more detail to the models themselves. And then like

Doc Searls (00:39:10):
Rebel

Jonathan Bennett (00:39:11):
Grieve all the things.

Shaughn Reynolds (00:39:12):
Yeah. Yeah. Rebel everything. If you wanna make sci-fi just Grable Rebel and Duplication <laugh> yeah, mostly just reworking old sprites and kind of keeping, trying to get everything into a more modernized, modernized category. So,

Jonathan Bennett (00:39:30):
Yeah. Has the, has the size of the galaxy in game kind gotten bigger? Is that continuing to grow as people add more star systems?

Shaughn Reynolds (00:39:37):
So, we'll say we do want to have a line eventually to how big we keep expanding the main galaxy. 'cause A lot of what we wanna do is, is for like further galaxies like that, that's, that's very <laugh>, very down the road for having more than one Galaxy. That's very good stuff for plugin content. But yes, the main Galaxy has gotten quite a few more systems to it. There's like, the whole right side of the galaxy just got a huge chunk from one of the races mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. and that, that, that's partly, that's mostly my doing <laugh>. There's, there's plenty of people who are working on their own factions that want to get them into the game as well. But it is just, it's ramped up considerably since over the two years. And everybody wants to try and grab a slice of the galaxy before it's too late. <Laugh>.

Doc Searls (00:40:22):
Yes. Well, I, we wanna get onto things like new platforms and some other questions that are sort of backing up here. But first I have to let everybody know that this episode of Floss Weekly is brought to you by Fast Mail. Make email work for you with Fast Mail. Customize your workflow with colors, custom swipes, night mode and more. Fastmail now has quick settings. From the Quick Settings menu. You can easily choose a new theme, switch between light mode and dark mode, and change your text size without leaving the FastMail screen. You're looking at quick settings will also offer options related to the FastMail screen your viewing. You can generate a new masked email address, show or hide your reading pan. Switch between folders and labels and more Choose Auto Save contacts or choose to show public images of senders from external services like Gravita sets default reminders for events.

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Jonathan Bennett (00:43:41):
Yes. So Android users, we can now play Endless Sky on Android. Can't we? Tell us about that? Yeah,

Jonathan Steck (00:43:49):
You can. So last time we were on I talked about how somebody had actually created a browser version of the game. I forget the exact link off the top of my head, but I think it was play hyphen endless hyphen sky.com and you could play the game in your browser. And somebody in the audience actually had a question of is there a mobile game or a mobile version of the game? And at the time I said no, and we're not planning on making it, although since the source is available, it's open source, somebody could actually make a a mobile game, mobile version of the game if they wanted. That's actually exactly what happened. So there's this guy called the weird nuts on GitHub and he actually made an Android version of the game. It's available on Foid store and it's, it's tailored to having a, a mobile interface. So I believe he has, I actually haven't played it myself, but to my understanding, he does tweak the UI to make it actually possible to play on mobile. Because if you're playing on a desktop or a laptop there's a lot of key bins. Now not all of them are super necessary, but I believe he's found ways to make most, if not all of them available to you even using a mobile interface.

Jonathan Bennett (00:44:59):
Yeah. so like three different directions I want to go with that. First off, we talked with the steroid folks just last week on Floss Weekly. That was a lot of fun. So it's neat to see the, the crossover there. Second, I, I have spent a little bit of time playing it and the, the work to make the game mobile friendly is still ongoing. <Laugh>, we'll put it that way. It is a very complicated game to try to do on mobile. I'm curious though, have you guys thought about trying to pull some of his changes up into the main game? Because, you know, some, some of his mobile centric changes could actually be just good UI changes for everybody. Is is that something that's being considered? So

Jonathan Steck (00:45:43):
We are kind of building a bridge between the main game and his fork a bit more here. So relatively recently during the last update, I believe I actually shouted out his game or his fork of the game in our Discord server said, Hey, I've mentioned the browser before. Well now we also have a mobile version maintained by this guy. And we also added a link to our, within our repository, to his repository when you go to create a new issue. So in GitHub you're able to have issue templates, but you're also able to say, go to this specific location for these types of issues. And we had at least one or two issues I believe that people open on our repository saying, Hey, here's an issue with the mobile version. Not even realizing the mobile version wasn't really like official so to speak.

(00:46:29):
Right. So we made it a bit more official by actually adding a link there that says, Hey, if you have an issue with the mobile version, go to this move repository. Not to us. We probably will look at some of the stuff he has though and see like, Hey, maybe we can pull this to the main game. Because I do know he's actually talked to us and said like, Hey, here's some stuff that you could do that could make my life a little easier. There probably is a bit of a two-way street that we can build there.

Jonathan Bennett (00:46:53):
So one thing that we we wanna mention is it's not on the Play Store, is it?

Jonathan Steck (00:46:59):
I don't believe so, no, because I think you have to pay to get on the Play Store.

Jonathan Bennett (00:47:03):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> there is,

Jonathan Steck (00:47:04):
There might be some licensing issues. I dunno,

Jonathan Bennett (00:47:07):
You do not have to play to, you do not have to Google play. Well there, there may be a one-time fee. But anyway there is a <laugh>, there is an endless sky on the Google Play store and it is not, you guys wanna make sure we make that clear. This is available on fdr, I'm sure it's available on GitHub as well. But if you just go to Google Play and search for Endless Sky, you get a totally different game. A platformer that is not what we're talking about. <Laugh>.

Jonathan Steck (00:47:34):
Yeah. I think we've seen that before when mm-hmm. <Affirmative> looking up Endless Sky on Google or something and see what comes up.

Jonathan Bennett (00:47:40):
Right, right. So we just, we just wanna like make sure everybody realizes that point you at the right place. <Laugh>, it's on F Android and let's, let's, let's make sure we get before the end of the show, the actual GitHub link to get to the Endless Sky Android. I will, I will get that pulled up.

Jonathan Steck (00:48:00):
<Laugh>.

Jonathan Bennett (00:48:02):
So let's see there. It's on it's on Android, it's on, it's in your web browser is it on Mac oss, Linux and Windows as well?

Jonathan Steck (00:48:13):
Yes.

Jonathan Bennett (00:48:16):
Any, any challenges with, with supporting all of those different platforms?

Jonathan Steck (00:48:21):
A lot of the challenge of that, a lot of the challenges of that was worked out by Michael back when we really started the game. We have had some issues that have been Mac OSS specific or Windows specific over the years. Mainly mainly around like displaying a window for the game. There's like certain settings that are specific to speech oss, but for the most part we don't really have issues going between the three main operating systems. The, the one concern that we actually mentioned last time and might still be a thing, is that Apple has deprecated support for Open gl. And Open GL is actually the graphics library that we use to render the game. So if at any point they can completely kill support for it, make it so that you can't even play an open GL game either. We have to port the game over to Vulcan, I believe is the, the, or the metal. I think it's the metal render they use

Jonathan Bennett (00:49:13):
Now or on Apple. Yeah.

Jonathan Steck (00:49:14):
Yeah. So either we need to have a metal version of the game or we just needed to drop Mac support entirely. I actually did have somebody I, I believe a viewer of the show messaged me on Discord last time saying like, Hey, I'm sorry to hear that you're gonna drop sport from Mac oss. I really enjoy the game, but I can't have anything other than the Mac for, for work reasons. I'm like, well, you can still play the game for now <laugh> <laugh> and, and luckily we haven't been completely shut out of the Apple market yet. So that is a concern for the future. Most likely.

Jonathan Bennett (00:49:44):
This is just kind of a tangent, but I just cannot imagine Apple actually killing OpenGL on the Mac because it's, it's such a foot gun for them. I mean, it's, it's going to kill, it'll kill gaming on the Mac. I I just can't see it happening, honestly. I iOS is there an iOS version or in the works <laugh>

Jonathan Steck (00:50:06):
No iOS version. I don't think anyone has anything in the works. So no,

Jonathan Bennett (00:50:10):
<Laugh> you, so you, you take the challenges that we just described for running something on back oss and the challenges we described for putting something on the Play store. You add them together and you multiply 'em by about 10 to 20 and that is the difficulty of getting something open sourced on iOS <laugh>. Alright. doc, do you are I think I think Doc is ready to jump back in. I hope he is. I'm so

Doc Searls (00:50:38):
Distracted by all the different things. I have a a kind of a, a mundane question. So I take it this is not your day job. Would, do you have day jobs that are other than this and is, you know, is a good answer, but I'm just wondering what you guys do with the rest of your lives.

Jonathan Steck (00:50:57):
So nobody takes any money for this game. That is something to know. Yeah, so it'd be kind of difficult to make this a day job. M c O does take donations to support a discord bot that we have for the, the server hosting, but otherwise, absolutely no money exchanging hands between anyone for this game. So yeah, this is just a hobby project for everyone involved, which at times can make it difficult to actually work with people because while people have real lives where they have to do other stuff, and sometimes people are busy for weeks or even months at a time where we just can't contact them, you kinda have to work around that at times. But yeah, I do have, I do have a day job. I don't wanna say exactly what it is, but it's in the, it's in the computer science field. I'll say <laugh>.

Doc Searls (00:51:46):
And what about you, Shaughn? So

Shaughn Reynolds (00:51:49):
I'm running a little crossroads right now. I'm trying to prepare to possibly move states or jump places, so I'm in the process of working that out right now. But,

Doc Searls (00:51:58):
So it just a follow up question. You don't have to answer this either unless you really need to be in a secret location, <laugh>, which might be kind of cool in a spacey way. Where do you guys live? I mean, approximately just can be a time zone if nothing else, but just curious.

Shaughn Reynolds (00:52:13):
I'm over in

Jonathan Steck (00:52:14):
Pennsylvania. Oh, <laugh>, <laugh>,

Doc Searls (00:52:16):
Pennsylvania. I heard Pennsylvania. Yeah,

Shaughn Reynolds (00:52:20):
He's over in Pennsylvania. I, I'm in Michigan.

Doc Searls (00:52:25):
Excellent. So, so where so we, we had you guys on two years ago, we, where two years from now, what are we gonna be talking about?

Jonathan Steck (00:52:39):
Most likely some organizational slash community changes perhaps. So something I'll note being an open source like community driven game, we say there's a lot of aspects to the development of the game that aren't strictly like, oh, here's how you know how to code. Here's the, the language that we work in. Here's our coding style. There's a lot of concern about, well, how long is it taking us to get to pool requests? What type of pool requests are getting in? What specific content is actually being merged? What, what content is being rejected? Because we do actually reject and close pool requests from time to time who feel it doesn't fit in the game. And each of these decisions generally, or maybe not generally, but from time to time you get people who are very passionate about having a feature in the game or passionate about not having something in the game and it doesn't quite go their way.

(00:53:27):
So we have to figure out how to work with that really. We haven't done the best of that in the past, I'll say, but we are working on trying to kind of put things more to stone as to what we are expecting of not only the conduct of the contributors to the game, but also the conduct of our developers and our reviewers and kind of describing to people upfront, Hey, here's what you should expect from us. Because a lot of it has also been mismatched expectations of who should be doing what. So for example, the developers, we kind of lead the vision of the game, but some people had a bit more of an idea of developers should just measure community sentiment on what should and should not get merged. And even if they themselves disagree with something, they should still merge it if enough people agree with it. Now, not, that's not to say that we are a complete tyrant and that we only ever emerge, but we feel like it. And if you feel like it, well we don't care. There is a back and forth to it. It is a a push and pull, but there is a middle ground to that that we're, we're still kind of trying to find, I would say.

Jonathan Steck (00:54:32):
And hopefully in two years we have that figured out.

Shaughn Reynolds (00:54:34):
I do wanna trail off that real quickly. That does a come into here, lemme start. Recent times there's been a lot more creators trying, wanting to work on the game and get their own, like I said, factions in. So in about two years we're hoping to get the main story <laugh> for like two more chapters of that going on. 'cause We have three different versions of the same campaign planned and we've only had the one for the longest time. That, that is kind of a, a matter of getting more mechanics in the game coding. And there there is a lot of different like, branching stories that have been added and it, it, it's turning into a balance of, okay, now we kind of start narrowing the vision back onto the main story and don't split off into 10 different other side ones. So <laugh>, hopefully we'll be doing that more next time. <Laugh>,

Doc Searls (00:55:30):
That's great. We are getting towards the end of the show and I know Jonathan has a question queued up and we'll get to that after I let everybody know that this episode of Floss Weekly is brought to you by Bit Warden, the only open source cross platform password manager anywhere. Anytime. Security now is Steve Gibson has even switched over with Bit Warden. All of the data in your vault is end to end encrypted, not just your passwords. In the summer 2023 G two Enterprise Grid report, they solidified their position as the highest performing password manager for the enterprise. Leaving competitors in the dust bit. Warden protects your data and privacy by adding strong randomly generated passwords for each account. Go further with the username generator. Create unique usernames for each, or use any of the five integrated email alias services. Transparently view all of Bit warden's code available on GitHub.

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Jonathan Bennett (00:58:28):
Alright, I'm gonna jump back in. I had a very dog chasing a squirrel moment last time I was asking questions, but I am, I am back. And I want, I wanna do two things. First off, we talked about the Android version that is on GitHub at github.com/the weird nut slash endless dash mobile. So if Foid is not your thing, you can go there and get APKs directly. But I want to ask, you know, we've got all these different platforms we support what, what's the framework that makes that possible and what language is the game written in?

Jonathan Steck (00:59:03):
So I already mentioned that the, the rendering engine we use is OpenGL, but the game is written in c plus plus. Basically just using the standard libraries from c plus plus and any of the code that Michael made. So a vast majority of the code base, at least its foundation was written by Michael years ago. I could not really answer specifics as to how he got everything working, but I mean he did. And since then we've just kind of been building on top of the solid foundation that he's made.

Jonathan Bennett (00:59:33):
So other, other than OpenGL, you don't, you don't use one of the libraries? Here's No, there's no there's no WX widgets or any, any of those other, you know, you're not using QT or anything like that to be able to go across platform?

Jonathan Steck (00:59:45):
Nope. Oh,

Jonathan Bennett (00:59:46):
That's purely,

Jonathan Steck (00:59:46):
That's c plus plus and OpenGL. We don't have any, like, we're not using an existing engine or preexisting engine. It's just our own engine. So kind of crazy.

Jonathan Bennett (00:59:57):
Yeah, that's, that is that's pretty impressive. <Laugh>, it's spelled the weird nut. Remember <laugh>. That's fun. Do you guys do you guys actually play the Android version? Have you checked it out?

Jonathan Steck (01:00:12):
I have not. I don't know if Shaughn is.

Shaughn Reynolds (01:00:14):
Yeah, I, I haven't <laugh> there, but I, I do kind of wanna download it soon, just kind of test it out, see how it goes. 'cause I, I do know it is a bit of a a lot to put into a smaller device <laugh> and try to figure out the UI for that. So,

Jonathan Bennett (01:00:30):
Yeah. Alright, so I wanna, I wanna ask one more question before I hand it back over to Doc. And I'm not sure that this one fits. Maybe maybe we, you can dive into the plugins idea. What's, what's the weirdest thing that you've seen somebody do with the game? And so maybe, maybe in this context it's gonna be, what's the weirdest plugin that somebody has made that you've seen

Jonathan Steck (01:00:52):
Replacing all of the images of ships with images of anime girls?

Jonathan Bennett (01:00:57):
<Laugh>, I

Jonathan Steck (01:00:58):
Don't remember that. I also saw one where somebody replaced all the sound effects with like meme sound effects,

Doc Searls (01:01:03):
<Laugh>. So

Jonathan Steck (01:01:05):
You can just do crazy stuff like that.

Jonathan Bennett (01:01:07):
Shaughn, any any thoughts from you on that?

Shaughn Reynolds (01:01:10):
Nothing. I, I didn't even know that was a thing, but

Jonathan Steck (01:01:16):
I've been about,

Shaughn Reynolds (01:01:16):
I can't think of anything weird. I can only think of like, people are trying to do like total conversions with like Star Wars and whatnot, but not something crazy.

Jonathan Bennett (01:01:24):
Oh, that's kind of crazy in and of itself.

Shaughn Reynolds (01:01:25):
Yeah. Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett (01:01:26):
<Laugh>

Doc Searls (01:01:29):
Yeah, anime girls creep into everything I think. They're just, there's a, a sort of center of gravity, force of nature thing that goes on with that. We're really at the end of the show, so a quick one. Is there anything we haven't asked you'd like us to have asked that you want to address before we get off?

Jonathan Steck (01:01:48):
I'm pretty happy with what we've covered so far. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>,

Doc Searls (01:01:51):
<Inaudible> guys did a great job. So last question. What are your favorite text editor and scripting language? And so that's for both of you. We always ask this stuff.

Jonathan Steck (01:02:04):
Shaughn can start. I went last time <laugh>

Shaughn Reynolds (01:02:07):
Because I already know what you're gonna say. I just use Notepad plus plus. I'm not totally in the vibe of code things I do use vs code as well. 'cause One of the other devs wouldn't stop telling me to use that. Instead of code

Doc Searls (01:02:23):
Blocks.

Jonathan Bennett (01:02:24):
<Laugh> <laugh>. So what code blocks? Yeah.

Jonathan Steck (01:02:30):
For myself also Notepad Plus Plus. Same as last time. Last time I mentioned Lua, it's my favorite scripting language. I said I would try and get a bit more into it that didn't actually work out. <Laugh> at this point I would say Python because I am actually using Python a lot for work now. I actually had to learn it for work <laugh> because, so to kind of peer behind the curtain a bit, when I got to the position I'm in now, it was a Java position. I was writing stuff in Java. But the company decided to switch over to Python because a lot of our clients use Python a lot more. And our clients have IT teams that are sometimes able to look at the code and they know Python. So we're doing stuff in Python now. I had to teach myself Python on the job basically in a span of like a week or two on my first assignment. And since then, there's some things to it that I feel like a little weird. 'cause I'm so used to Java and c plus plus and C, which is like a completely separate like section of coding languages. But there's, there's things to it I like. So

Jonathan Bennett (01:03:33):
I think Python is slowly eating the world like a Python

Jonathan Steck (01:03:37):
<Laugh>. Yep. <laugh>

Doc Searls (01:03:38):
<Laugh> first it squeezes the world and then <laugh> and then ingest it all. <Laugh> just wraps around it and does the thing. Yes. <laugh> well, you, you guys are great. And it, it is great having you on. We'll have, of course we'll have to have you back. You're working on something that actually is gonna progress. We know this. And and we have a rhythm going now <laugh>. So two, two years or less. Another

Jonathan Steck (01:04:07):
Two years will be the 10 year anniversary of the game. So that'll be a pretty good

Doc Searls (01:04:11):
Time. Oh really? Okay, well let's mark that down. So if we don't get you sooner, we'll get you for the 10th anniversary of the game. And then you'll have 10,000 people on your Discord, <laugh> probably, and, and lots of new art and lots of do the rest of it. So, and maybe you'll have me as a user. 'cause I'm gonna, I I promise I'll get to it. So thanks an awful lot for being on guys and and, and we'll see you in space <laugh> <laugh>. Thanks for having

Jonathan Steck (01:04:39):
Us. See you.

Jonathan Bennett (01:04:42):
It was fun.

Doc Searls (01:04:44):
Yeah, that was fun. That was fun, Jonathan. So

Jonathan Bennett (01:04:46):
I I, I've gotta say, and we didn't get to ask him about this. See, I now, now that now that we've let 'em go, of course all the questions I wanted to ask are coming back to mind. You don't see very many open source games particularly not open source story-driven games. And it's really fascinating to me that in the Endless Skies had so much success in, in that kind of niche where there's not a whole lot of other players. So that's really interesting. I I also think it's neat just the way that they've sort of, through patience and trial error, they've put their community together and they've, they've worked through problems like sort of the, the retirement of the original dev, like that kills a lot of projects. Mm-Hmm. And the fact that they just were patient and then went back to 'em and asked, Hey, can, can we make this happen? Patient went back to 'em again, Hey, you think we can make this happen? And and get things transferred over and got his, they got his account translated into a, an organization account. I mean, it's just a great success story where you've seen other projects fall by the wayside. So it's cool. And I like talking to these guys about stuff like that.

Doc Searls (01:05:52):
It's, it is always bothered me that the, that gaming has not been that big in the open source world. And it's so much of the gaming world is is tied up inside Microsoft and Sony and giant companies like that, where it's all proprietary and closed and fun and adventurous and the rest of it. But it's sort of like they, they get a free pass, you know, and and for being that way. And it shouldn't be that way. I mean, there should be more involvement. I'm, I, I have the same fear with ai that AI will sort of get trapped in that same, well, you gotta have a giant in order to make it happen. And I I very encouraged about some of the progresses going on in that respect lately, but it's still, it's still there as an issue. So I want to plug next week we have William kk of Apache Sea Tunnel coming up. So that is our next week show. Any, any last words before we punch out Jonathan, you got Plug Hackaday or anything else you're working on?

Jonathan Bennett (01:06:56):
Yeah, so I, I've got two things that I like to plug. The first is hackaday.com. You can follow my work there. I have a lot of stuff going on between reviews and how tos and then there's this security column that goes live every Friday. Some fun news coming on that one. We've got Zen Bleed, which is yet another speculative execution problem this time in a m d. We're gonna do a deep dive into that this week. And then of course there's the Untitled Linux Show over on Club Twit. We do weekly, we go live Saturday afternoons and it just cover the ins and outs, the news and the how-tos about Linux, everybody's favorite operating system. And that is exclusive to Club Twit members, which is about the price of a cup of coffee per month. And if you're not on Club Twit and you're listening to this show, you really need to go get on Club Twit. Join us for the Untitled Linux Show. It is a lot of fun.

Doc Searls (01:07:45):
Thank you that, yeah, this, this a this is a great show. And so again we got a great show coming up next week on Apache Sea Tunnel and we will see you then.

Leo Laporte (01:07:56):
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