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**                                                                          **
**    Arqadium's "OCo Engine": a multiplatform game engine made of FOSS.    **
**                                                                          **
**            Copyright (C) 2017 Arqadium.  All rights reserved.            **
**       Most sources released under the  Mozilla Public Licence 2.0;       **
**   See all COPYING notices and source files for details and exceptions.   **
**                                                                          **
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-----



1. INTRODUCTION

    The "OCo Engine" is a new game engine under development at Arqadium, a
software development company. While there are several other game development
suites that can do what OCo does, we would like to engineer something better
from the ground up. We also want to take advantage of our corporate backbone,
to provide a "best of both worlds" compromise between open source and closed-
source software in the video game industry. While OCo will be used with our
own titles in-house, we hope that someday it can stand as a product in its own
right.



2. "WHAT THE HECK IS 'OCo'?"

    It's a happy accident that the team decided to roll with very early on in
the engine's development - thank Microsoft Windows and its nonexistent Unicode
support for corrupting an "En dash" into the accented letters "OCo". We have
tried to reproduce this error many times, and have failed ever since then!
But it's enough - with dedication, it can be a unique and loved name and
brand.



3. PURPOSE AND SCOPE OF THIS PROJECT

    The purpose of this project is to put together a general-purpose game
engine that can target PCs, mobile and consoles in a design-once + deploy-all
development workflow. We will begin by building a foundation for 2D game
development, gradually introducing hardware acceleration alongside more niche
features, like shaders and parallelised physics.

    Eventually, we wish to expand the capabilities of the OCo Engine to
shoulder our larger project in preproduction, Project Trinity. This will
require much more investment on our part for things like real-time combat, 3D
graphics and other luxury features, but nonetheless the same philosophy should
apply just as well.



4. "WHY SHOULD I CONTRIBUTE?"

    The incentives to contribute to our projects may not be immediately
obvious to a developer. Indeed, there are even potential drawbacks to donating
your time and skill to the OCo Engine or any of our projects in general. For
the sake of clarity, we have put together a list of pros and cons regarding
public contributing:

Cons:-
 1. The obvious: you will not be compensated for your time/effort. This is
    usually the norm with FOSS.
 2. Your contributions will need to adhere to our plan and vision for the
    project; these may be highly arbitrary or debatable, but are nonetheless
    part and partial if you wish to have your changes merged into master.
 3. You are required to licence all of your code contributions under the
    Mozilla Public Licence 2.0; also see #1 in the list of pros.

Pros:-

 1. You are not required to relinquish ownership of your work to Arqadium.
    We think this is in the best interests of the freedom in Free Software.
 2. Since we operate on GitHub, your contributions can show up publicly on
    your profile. This may be useful as portfolio cred for career-building.
 3. Contributing to our FOSS projects lends you the ability to interact with
    a paid core of developers working for a for-profit company; this can lend
    much-needed "real world" credibility to an otherwise more basic portfolio.

5. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

    This README should provide a good general intro to our project. Other
things that you should read as a developer are the COMPILING and perhaps the
CONTRIBUTING files, or the COPYING file if you're into legal. There is also a
list of substantial contributors in the AUTHORS file.

    If you need to contact us, you can best reach us on our Discord guild, at
<https://discord.gg/VbJAsHX>. There are press materials on our Twitter at
<https://twitter.com/arqadium>, and our website, <https://www.arqadium.com/>.