How is SOM different (or not different) from what people do with PC games (mods)

[Holy_Diver]

I don't know if anyone has considered, but a SoM-like platform could actually be made using an engine like Unity. All it would take is to make a game exe core that reads external configuration files to decide the particulars of how it plays. ‎  That would certainly be easier than trying to squish SoM into mimicking a modern game engine. Unity games are far more commercially viable anything SoM will ever be and there's already a whole team of people working to make games cross-platform and fix any bugs that pop up.

To me, SoM had two things going for it, it made 1st person games, and it was considerable easier to use than any other 3D rpg makers on the market. The more complexity that gets added to SoM, the more it just becomes a pale version of other engines already on the market. It was just for making fun fan- games. SoM will never make commercially viable games simply because no one in their right mind would make a game they intended to sell on an engine which they technically have no right to distribute. As long as a game has one scrap of SoM's game.exe in it, it will never be viable to sell. And if game.exe is eventually cut out of the equation, then why on earth would you start building around SoM in the first place?

Except you'd tie your product to Unity. Yuck. And since when can you not sell you game with SOM's game.exe file?

A SOM game isn't the exe file. It's the files that make up the game. We support the exe because it's like the soul of SOM. You use it for benchmarking. But it won't be necessary. SOM is going to be around for hundreds of years. Dependence on the original runtimes will probably not even be there on the first day that SOM becomes a totally viable platform.

People working with SOM now are just getting ahead of the curb.

Game engines are a trade off between ease of use and complexity of feature set. Most amateurs would pick ease of use, whereas pros look for the advanced feature sets. ‎  I don't think an engine can or should try to appeal to both classes. You just end up being a mediocre product for both.

The truth is no one has a clue what they are doing. Video games vs. movies is pre talkies days. Until some standards emerge we got nothing.