A question on Adventuron license

Hi all,
not sure is the right place to ask, but i’ve a question regarding license agreement of Adventuron.

The pharse “Adventuron’s engine / generated HTML gamefiles are not licensed for commercial use.”

So, if i create a game with Adventuron tool, i cant sell it right (for ex. with a mobile App)?

Thanks, and sorry for my bad english :slight_smile:

It’s for non-commercial use only currently.

Part of the reason is that it’s simply not ready for anything approaching commercial use and I don’t want the system to gain a bad reputation (until it is). The scrolling is janky, the animations are non existent, there is no auto map, the soft keyboard integration is terrible No gesture support, poor visually impaired accessibility, and more. Adventuron on desktop is acceptable now, but mobile users have very high standards, and Adventuron does not currently meet those standards.

It’s simply not ready, especially on iOS where web applications are absolute second class citizens and they have zero control over the software keyboard. I have blogged about multiple years of pain in developing parser games on mobile browsers. One issue on Apple is that the software keyboard assumes that every text widget is in a form, and displays a panel for navigating form widgets above the (already massive) software keyboard, this leaves a tiny amount of space for the game itself, and it also looks TERRIBLE. On Android, if the app is a native app, the app can control the software keyboard autocompletion bar, but if the app is a web app, then a massive autocompletion bar (that is not plugged into the games vocabulary) appears above the keyboard. If I wanted to have contextual auto-completes, they would need to appear above non-contextual auto-completes. Mobile browsers are an absolute mess. Switching off the autocomplete bar is possible on some Android devices but not on a per app or per web domain basis, so if Adventuron needs to disable the OS software keyboard autocomplete bar, it needs to request the user of the phone disable them completely for all apps - which is a non starter.

I wish I had connections in Google and Apple to resolve these problems, but alas I don’t, and alas Google and Apple both have OS specific hacks to stop proper integration with autocompletion bar or autocompletion suggestions.

The only way it would work on iOS is via an iOS/Swift wrapper on a webview, which in my view is utterly appalling, and would require me buying Apple hardware and paying over a hundred dollars a year to them for the privilege. Apple seems to be purposefully downgrading the web app / PWA experience, and I feel completely helpless to do anything about it. Adventuron games on iOS remain sub-optimal.

I know that any kind of possible monetization (or future monetization) is kind of unpalatable for a genre that is effectively commercially dead, but I’m leaving my options open for now. I can guarantee that the regular version of Adventuron will always be free for non commercial use, and I’m hoping one day to open source it too.

Currently authors either make free games with Adventuron, or they make their game available for free with a donations button close by, but commercial games with Adventuron at the moment is a complete non-starter whilst the mobile landscape is a complete mess.

I’m sorry if this isn’t the answer you are hoping for.

5 Likes

Due to global lockdowns, millions of people are now forced to contemplate the world through desktop monitors once more. And in some quarters mobile apps are viewed with suspicion.

Maybe it’s a good time to reconsider the Adventuron experience without the assumption that the player is using a small-screen mobile device?

5 Likes

Does anyone really play parser games on a mobile, except in extremis? Trying to type commands into a tiny virtual keyboard is to add another layer of fiddly frustration to what is already a fairly fiddly and frustrating genre of game.

It does work and I have enjoyed certain games immensely on mobile but it can never really truly be one size fits all.

Hi all,

I noticed that for example the game Rite of the Druid (ZX Spectrum Next/DOS/MSX2) has been developed with Adventuron and DAAD Ready. While it’s a free game to download, there is this option when you start download:

“This game is free but the developer accepts your support by letting you pay what you think is fair for the game.”

So, I guess this kind of “support” is still perfectly ok, it’s not considered to be commercial use in the sense stated in the Adventuron license agreement.

1 Like

I’d say that’s acceptable under the Adventuron licence, as I understand it. Provided there’s no actual paywall standing between the player and the game I don’t think a voluntary donation could be considered a commercial exploitation?

I mean, anyone would be perfectly free to send me a huge sack of banknotes in gratitude for the opportunity to play one of my excellent Adventuron games (actually a priceless experience) and I’d happily accept without too much fear of breaking the licence terms. Come to think of it, I’m mildly affronted that such a thing hasn’t happened, yet. There’s still time.

@adventuron will no doubt pop up and correct me if I’m wildly off the mark; it’s his thing after all.

2 Likes

Yes, that’s what I thought also about this. And same thing here, still waiting for the first sack of banknotes to arrive :upside_down_face:

1 Like

In this case, although Adventuron was used to develop an original prototype playable version of the game, it’s not actually used in the finished product. You’re not playing an Adventuron game; the game runs solely on the DAAD engine. (There is a separate issue with the DAAD MSX2 interpreter, which is a recent creation and has its own terms of use, that authors would need to bear in mind in commercial projects).

4 Likes