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Anyone remember Dave Taylor, crack.com, and the now defunct Golgotha Project? He wanted to make the first commercial game for Linux, but after the dot com crash investor interest diminished quickly.

It was a nice idea, but he ran out of money after a year or so. The site is still up and they have some of the code available for download.

Dave Taylor is also the former co-founder of the now defunct Crack.com which released Abuse and the incomplete Golgotha. At UT Austin, he helped start the IEEE-CS National Programming Contest, which involved teams of college students developing and pitting AI's against each other in a client-server gaming environment created by ddt's team. Sort of an AI 'Robot Wars'. Ddt has both game development, console development AND business development experience. I rather hope this venture is more successful than his last, and I'm confident his previous experience will make it so. Having known several people who've worked for him, I would say YES, he's a great person to work for. Having known my fair share of loyal /. readers, I daresay this IS a good place to troll for people with immense programming talent, and if no previous console experience, they will likely share Dave's point of view and be able to quickly learn all they need to know about porting to a console.

Why is it that people feel the need to bitch about every story that's posted these days?

One of the major obstacles from more of this sort of thing going on is a lack of readily accessible free media sure there are a few oasis of public domain media and even fewer still examples of GPLed media. The fact remains though that there is no central repository for free media that artists can use to build on one another's works.

My interest is mostly in media that can be used for free games but any media that can be shared amongst the artistic community is great in my eyes. At any rate here are some free media resources that I've found and their associated licenses. I hope this list helps other artists and people looking for free media to use for one purpose or another:

Pixel Place - Lots of public domain images mainly intended for web site use (but you could find other uses if you're a creative thinker)

Ender Design - Public domain images mostly for web sites once again. High quality and very usable for UI graphics. The 'design sets' aren't public domain so be sure and read the license. I highly recommend this site.

The Texture Library - Public domain mostly photorealistic textures intended to be used for games (OpenGL). Very nice!

The Golgotha Project - High quality public domain music, textures and meshes! Perhaps the largest cache of freely available media in one place.

Free Game Arts - High quality media (mostly 3d meshes [MDLs] and textures) with various free licenses. The license which each model/texture is covered by is clearly stated before the d/l so be sure to read!

GNUArt - A site in french with GPLed media (mostly music).

GNUsic - A site that features a CD written by artists who have GPLed their work.

Linkware Graphics - License is called 'Linkware' which translates to free for non commercial use and no modifications allowed. Mostly music related images here. Again mainly for web sites but could be used for other purposes.

Public Domain Images - Small amount of public domain images

I am currently gathering sites with free media and sucking down their contents in preparation for WorldForge's free media repository.

Perhaps all the /.ers know of free media resources which I failed to mention here? The free media repository will have media with all sorts of licenses so don't think we're after just one type of 'free' media. Perhaps others who know of good caches with free media could share them with us here? Thanks!

-Jason

Abuse was by Crack dot Com, distributed for the Mac by Bungie. There is an x86 version (I'm fairly sure it came first.) The FAQ says that Crack dot Com was partially owned by Dave Taylor, formerly of iD. Aside from the Mac and PC versions, Abuse was also apparently ported to BeOS and Acorn. Apparently the PC version is no longer sold. I'm also fairly sure that Crack dot Com is also quite defunct.

Abuse was a damn cool 2d platform shooter though -- you controlled your character with the arrow keys, and your aim and weapon firing with the mouse. A pity it came out right when Quake (or was it Quake II) was hitting it big. For information on everything Abuse-related, check out http://www.net-mage.com/nkrell/abuse/.

crack.com/golgotha

Those are beautiful screenshots. Looking forward to the real thing. Does anyone else know of any good cross-platform games? Best one I can think of is Abuse.

Dave Taylor (formerly of id, founder of crack.com, currently at Transmeta)'s crack.com game Abuse (now open-sourced, I believe) uses LISP as its scripting/scenario engine... That was *really* cool, but couldn't survive the onslaught of the first-person shooters and real time clickfe^H^H^H^H^H^H^H strategy games during 1995 or so...

Dave Taylor (formerly of id, founder of crack.com, currently at Transmeta)'s crack.com game Abuse (now open-sourced, I believe) uses LISP as its scripting/scenario engine... That was *really* cool, but couldn't survive the onslaught of the first-person shooters and real time clickfe^H^H^H^H^H^H^H strategy games during 1995 or so...