Solver: The last people from your list are Activisioners, whom we indeed have to thank for their continued support to us. Speaking of which, recently Activision has given Apolyton the complete source code of CtP2. Obviously, it's one of the best things that could happen to the community, and I mean the whole Civ one, not just CtP. Can you, for starters, put up a summary of what led to code release and the general history behind it?

Locutus: I guess I could do that… again ;) Those who’ve read the feature for the third anniversary of CtP2 can probably skip this.

Of course, for every game the fan community would love to see the source code released. However, ever since Activision had officially stopped supporting the CtP2 there has been a larger-than-usual (initially) latent desire for this in the CtP2 community. In fact, shortly after Activision announced that they dropped their support of the game, Harlan posted the following remark in the CtP2-General forum: “If Activision is too cheap to properly follow through on this game, they should at least have the balls to release some or all of the coding to allow others to make the fixes they should have done.” This feeling has would stay with the community ever since.

Initially, there was no immediate need for the source code though. Sure, there were a number of bugs that the fans couldn’t fix themselves, but some could be worked around, while others could be tolerated. However, as time progressed, more and more complex and powerful mods were released by the community, that demanded more and more of the game engine. The MedMod and first version of the Apolyton Pack were (at least in some aspects) rather primitive and conservative in how they changed the came compared to later projects such as Dale’s Ages of Man! and Peter Triggs’ Call to Conquest (not to mention some ambitious projects that never really got off the ground, such as MrBaggins’ Poor Get Richer project and my own History of the World mod). Many ideas had to be implemented using the scripting language SLIC, but powerful as it is, even that has its limits. It became increasingly obvious that the changes the community desired to make required changes in the game engine itself, something which wasn’t possible without either support from Activision, or access to the source code.

So a number of people attempted to write letters to Activision and to start petitions, requesting some kind of further support from the company in the form of source code, new development tools, documentation, etc. But in the rare cases where these attempts even came so far that they reached Activision, not much ever came of them. Then, in late 2002, the Democracy Game virus infected the CtP2 community. A lot of modmaking activities were put on hold or continued on a low pitch, while everyone joined in on setting up the first CtP2 Democracy Game. It was soon decided that a recurring theme in this Demo Game would be the lemur (or ‘leemur’), the favourite animal of St Swithin and sort of a running gag throughout the history of Call to Power. Of course, the Internet is after all only a small place (Peter Triggs still had email contact with Pyaray, who was in turn still in touch with St Swithin), so it wasn’t long before Miss Leemur herself popped in to thank the community for the honour (and went on to become somewhat of an Off Topic regular for a while).

With St Swithin (or st_swithin), and later also Pyaray active on Apolyton again, it was only a matter of time before the umpteenth attempt to get the source or other resources from Activision was noticed by Mr Ogre himself, former lead programmer of CtP2 and probably the only man in the world able to help us. This attempt, started by The Big Mc, was quite a good one: I don’t think anyone was ever more persistent than The Big Mc and ever got any further. His first email was sent somewhere in March or April 2003, and he only stopped once Mr Ogre took over in July. He (eventually) managed to get one of the contact centre guys to do some serious asking around and give us some real answers (though not the ones we wanted to hear), and even got so far that a written (snail-mail) letter to the Activision legal department was being prepared by the Apolyton community. That’s when Mr Ogre stepped in, and used his knowledge and contacts to see what he could get done at his former employer. Some considerable lobbying on his behalf accomplished that he was eventually allowed to take a copy of the source code and remove all the comments from it (to avoid any embarrassment or (legal) problems for anyone involved), so that the code could then be released by Activision. After having completed this no doubt formidable task (in his own time!), Mr Ogre submitted the result back to Activision in September. A little over a month later, on 28 October 2003, Activision’s Doug Pearson wrote history by sending the code to Apolyton.

Solver: I realise that this is rather open ended... but now that the code is out, what do you think the future of CtP could be like?

Locutus: For one thing, we're now working hard on bringing out the first patch that will fix the same things that the official Activision patch fixed (due to an unfortunate mix-up, we've gotten the source code for the unpatched game), plus a huge amount of other bugs that have been discovered in the past three years as well as numerous other improvements and additions that have been on the wish list of CtP2ers for a long time. I think this is the very least that we can expect to come of the source code: a better and more stable game -- probably the game that the designers would have wanted to release had they had the time and resources (and maybe even a little bit more). Most of the most obvious bugs in the game were fixed quite fast and painless, but getting the game fully on-par with the official patch will probably take at least several more months. This because the exact changes made by the official patch are rather poorly documented and therefore sometimes very difficult to reproduce. After that, there will probably be a need for a second patch (and maybe even more after that) to further improve the stability of the game and fix newly discovered bugs, but more importantly to make some more comprehensive changes to the game, such as improved AI, more multiplayer options (such as properly working PBEM) and extended moddability. I think these were the kinds of things everyone had in mind when considering the release of the source code and I am fairly certain that all of these will be accomplished, though in some cases it might take a while.

Another important thing that might come off this project is ports of CtP2 to other platforms. Numerous people have expressed an interest in this, but although first successes here have already been achieved, it will probably prove to be a major undertaking. If this ever gets off the ground will mostly depend on how many people are willing to invest into making it possible. And seeing how small the number of decent Linux or Mac programmers in the Civ/CtP community is (not to mention programmers for other platforms), this is by no means a guaranteed success. However, the fact that CtP1 (on which the code of CtP2 is based) was ported to a large number of platforms in a relatively short period of time certainly provides some grounds for hope.

The third and final thing that the code might possibly lead to, would be a completely revised version of the game, something akin to a sequel, or at least a solid expansion pack. This is probably the ultimate dream of every CtP gamer, modmaker and everyone else involved in the project. We know almost for a fact that Activision or any other commercial company is never going to make a sequel to this game, so if there's ever gonna to be one at all, we'll have to make it ourselves. Of course, massive undertaking would be a severe understatement to describe the realisation of that dream. Although with the source code at our disposal the only limit is our own imagination (and believe me if I say there's no shortage of ideas in the community), we're still going to need a good number of designers, programmers, artists, testers, etc who are willing to invest a great amount of their time and effort. Even if we can ever agree to a single design specification at all, it's going to take friggin' forever to successfully implement the result in code and to release it as a finished product.

I fear that if we're serious about designing a sequel, we will run into the same classic problem that Clash of Civilizations and all those other Alt Civs projects (with the exception of FreeCiv) are facing: plenty of good ideas, but noone (or at least not enough people) to code them. We do of course have the advantages that we already have a working game and that we currently have a fair number of programmers working on the project (at least compared with most Alt Civs projects), but if we're talking about a full-fledged sequel we're talking about something that will take years to realize (we're all doing this in our free time after all). And it's very difficult to predict if people will still be quite as eager to help out two or three years from now -- based on what I've observed with most Alt Civs projects, I'm inclined to say no (that is, apart from the usual CtP crew who've been modding the series for years, I'm sure most of them will still be here 10 years from now if that's even remotely possible). If we ever manage to produce a real sequel that can compete with other TBS games on the market, it will quite possibly be the biggest achievement in the history of Apolyton -- and for many of the people involved the biggest achievement in their lives.

Although not all dreams are meant to be realised, that won't stop us from pursuing them.