So, inspired by the Paradox-posting in here the other day, I decided to pull up good old Victoria 2 again. "Surely there are some people out there still making mods for this game", I thought to myself.
And then, after a little bit of aimless internet searching, I found this.
Project Alice.
Project Alice is an open-source recreation of Victoria 2, with a few changes like no 3d models(because of copyright issues) and modern performance improvements. Most of the biggest mods have compatibility patches so you can use them with Alice, and it also is supposed to have working multiplayer which is FUCKING NUTS to me. Apparently it was a long time project that got reworked after Victoria 3 sucked. It's In 1.0 already, the open source stuff has people frothing at the mouth over it, so it runs and plays. Lots of weird fonts and UI, but overall pretty fucking good considering the short timeframe and the size of the project.
But that's not the most interesting thing going on here.
Alice's development has been embroiled in weird internet shenanigans, leading me down a bizarre rabbit hole of back-door development drama! (get it cause alice in wonderland haha)
Apparently, there is a SECOND open-source version of Victoria 2, called
OpenVic. And the lead developers of these two projects (Alice's head dev goes by schombert, and OpenVic's dev is a streamer who goes by Spudgun) worked on the same project together for a little while, calling it OpenVic2. And they split up VERY quick, with OpenVic 2 being renamed to OpenVic and schombert using his previous solo work to create Project Alice. And now, they make pissy posts about one another on various sites such as reddit and Discord, with the other devs screenshotting them and throwing them around after the fact!
Sorry for the wall of Imgur posts and links in advance, they're breaking when I put them in spoilers
This one was posted by Spudgun's reddit account called "Mountandthrowaway313":
Which, when you go through the account, you find more imgur screenshots of schombert (some of which are apparently cherrypicked):
Here's some of the more entertaining reddit blurbs:
Argument 1
Argument 2, Spartan322 is also a OpenVic dev btw
"Does it run on Mac?"
"You're really going to start this 'people's front of Judea' beef?"
Argument 3, this one is probably the most entertaining one.
________
So, yeah. TL;DR, there are two versions of open-source Victoria 2 out there on the internet. From what I've seen so far, they have their own use cases.
OpenVic: Changing multiplayer to be more stable/easier, runs on Mac and Linux more reliably, slower development.
Alice: Already mostly finished while having original Vic 2 style multiplayer, runs at hyperspeed, much better mod support for now.
Thought this one would be interesting for some of you guys. I'm not going into it any further unless one of the devs becomes a V-tuber.