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With regards to the part of the article that talks about corporate customization of games for corporate or military training, I'm surprised that I didn't see anyone else here talk about this but how about turning to the OSS world for custom game mods? cube shows great potential for modification. Nexuiz looks really nice and plays sweet. Tremulous is a great example of a FPS with non-traditional FPS rules.

I would be terribly, terribly remiss not to mention http://live.linux-gamers.net/ which I have blogged

def qsort1(list):
    if list == []:
        return []
    else:
        pivot = list[0]
        lesser = qsort1([x for x in list[1:] if x < pivot])
        greater = qsort1([x for x in list[1:] if x >= pivot])
        return lesser + [pivot] + greater

Hold your horses, E is already used in a quite good Amiga Language.

Cube and it's sequal are two great open source fps games... http://wouter.fov120.com/cube/

It seems its first application was as a nonsensical statement generator.

Anyway, the Pascal-looking Amiga E (official site) is what I figured would be hiding behind the link. It was even semi-popular for some time.

Play Cube then.

Try Fisheye Quake

Quake2 is GPL'ed
Quake3 will probably be in the near future, and has a very active community of modders/tools/information/...

Cube (and nextgen Sauerbraten) are zlib licensed:
http://wouter.fov120.com/cube/
fun for its realtime ingame editor iirc

Ogre is LGPL'ed and also very active community
http://www.ogre3d.org/ ... well you get the idea. With a bit of searching
I think you must be able to find some decent open source stuff.

"Text is better than pictures for describing anything complex."

I would say that is false. On the contrary, once a good visual representation is found, it is far more productive. "One picture is worth 1000 words" is absolutely true, just look at the percentage of people using pure text OSes, or apps.

IMHO, until now, noone has found a way to translate programming structures into sensible graphics. Certainly a one-to-one translation of "Ifs" into If blocklets is senseless; in old HTML apps like HomeSite they were used for reference purposes. Dreamweaver OTOH lets you create and represent meaningful code graphically. Same goes for macro-recording in VBA. They could not, however, represent the structures themselves; instead they let you manipulate the outcome.

The thing where text is better than pics is manipulation; one the sourcecode level everything is faster. This is why power-users prefer editing on the text level. Reading and understanding programs is however much easier graphically (think street map).

Reasons why graphical programming has not caught on:
* As stated, most programmers are powerusers and prefer text, whereas most text/pic/layout personage are not necessarily techies
* (Hobby?) programmers are to small a market. Why make a hugely complex program for some 100k customers

My .02

PS: Or maybe there just wasn't any use for VP. BTW, That Aardapple guy has a hobby of visual programming languages

Check out the Aardappel language. I think it's a very interesting, powerful language, with one major flaw: it's a visual language. This makes it so awkward to deal with that even Aardappel's own inventor broke down and created a textual equivalent language for the sample code in his PhD thesis.

Text is better than pictures for describing anything complex. We have thousands of years of experience to back this up.

C# is just one option for .NET eh?
Hmm... if only there were some other languages that could be compiled to JVM bytecode.

Modern game engine development is an enormous task requiring millions of man hours of programming effort, no argument there.

Take the square root of that.
I bet most of the work is really spent on design, graphics, testing, and marketing.

My point is that as soon as one of the big boys releases a high-powered game engine for Linux ... you will see an explosion in free games for Linux.

Just what I could remember offhand:
http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/
http://www.ogre3d.org/
http://crystal.sourceforge.net/
http://wouter.fov120.com/cube/
http://www.genesis3d.com/

Open source still works on the coding front. How about Crystal Space which supports everything from portals and volumetric fog to XML levels and ODE-based physics?

Level design can be done the same way. Something like CUBE's multiplayer, online level editor would allow anyone to drop by and improve the levels.

But unlike a general purpose application with obvious goals, games are carried by the vision of one or two people usually - and the essence of 'collaboration' is marred by this leadership. Usually everyone ends up with their own idea for how the game should develop, and without the monetary incentive or a healthy relationship, random groups of skilled coders or artists can easily fail to produce anything. Which explains all of those empty Sourceforge projects.

Wouter van Oortmerssen has created several programming languages...

Some of them were plain beauty, others had a quite small compiler, others were a proof of concept of his PhD-thesis.

Granted, none of them ever became famous, but I still miss the ease and power of AmigaE on my Gentoo box.

You think Cube 2 would stand a chance, then?

I feel compelled to mention that the author has written other engines besides cube; those can be viewed here. Oh yeah, he worked on Far Cry, too!

Check Wouter van Oortmerssen's web page and be sure to have a look at False.

Check Wouter van Oortmerssen's web page and be sure to have a look at False.

No, I think he meant this.

Find Amiga E here: Amiga E

You might be interested in some of the other graphics engines made by one of FarCry's developers: http://wouter.fov120.com/

I am just talking out of my ass, but I don't think the FOV option has anythign to do with multiheads. It's probably something more like the fisheye quake mod, where you can have a higher FOV on a single screen so you can see beside you without turning (something most humans can do naturally, although peripheral vision has it limitations), or even behind you (not natural at all).

Posted anonymously for obvious reasons...
I'm halfway through an FPS using the excellent Cube engine which will see you - the Lone White Zimbabwean Farmer - pitted against thousands of War Veterans (tm). I have absolutely no doubt that this game - which will be free (and Free) is going to cause some people complete apoplectic fits - racist, devoid of any value, unhelpful, blah blah blah

I don't particularly care. Being surrounded by a bunch of thugs and being not allowed to shoot back to defend your life and property is unpleasant to say the least. If just two ex-Zim farmers (I don't think there are any left on their own lands now) can play this game and have some fun blowing away a few "War Veterans" then I'll be happy.

I'm not sure about the game, but the Cube engine looks good. There's also the Crystal Space engine.

I'm waiting for Sauerbraten before i start getting excited. ('Oldskool' doesn't do anything for me, anyway...)

Try few free (of cost) games:

strategy

FreeCiv - new version was just released, FreeCiv is not as good as Civ3 in single player, but it's very playable in mp

TEG - if you want simple strategy (it's risk clone)

lgeneral - panzer general clone

action

RTCW ET - IMHO best team action game

Cube - simple multiplayer FPS, with nice graphics

Armagetron - 3D tron implementation

sport

CannonSmash - table tennis simulation

foobillard- billard simulation

misc

Scorched 3D - scorch (or for younger slashdot users: worms) clone

Take a look at WadC, a scripting language for building Doom levels, you filthy infidel.

It's one of Wouter van Oortmerssens many languages.

The logo is a nice little mdma e.

Or you complement it with panquake and you get no distorsion at all

There is Cube, which I think is OSS now. Its may not be your definition of 'good' at the moment, but it's definitly cool.

Perhaps you should try the Cube engine.

"For those who don't know: E is an object-oriented/procedural/unpure functional/whatever language with quite a popular implementation on the amiga. It's mainly influenced by languages such as C++, Ada, Lisp etc., and features extremely fast compilation, inline assembler, large set of integrated functions, powerful module concept, flexible type-system, quoted expressions, immediate and typed lists, parametric and object polymorphism, exception handling, inheritance, data-hiding, methods, multiple return values, default arguments, register allocation, fast memory management, unification, LISP-Cells, macro-preprocessing, a very powerful source-level debugger, gui-toolkit, library linker, and then some. (oh yes: and it was designed and implemented by me :-)"

check out this link for the E homepage: http://wouter.fov120.com/e/index.html

The article mentions three: Crystal Space, World Forge and Cube 3D.

World Forge doesn't look to be very far along. I haven't looked at Cube 3D yet. But I was impressed with Crystal Space. From the cursory look I gave it, I'd say it's between Quake and Quake 2 in terms of technology (but I might be horribley wrong). There are different types of renderers (playing a game in ASCII mode would be fun), and quite a list of features. Take a look at the screenshots to see what it's capable of - impressive, I thought.

It's LGPL, which if I understand correctly means that it can be used in proprietary commercial products. That, I think, is intriguing. That could enable very small-time developers to make simple games and sell them for cheap. (If my understanding of the LGPL is wrong, someone correct me.)

Well, why not hook up with the Cube developers?

Cool... thanks for the tip. The Cube website is Here - for anyone interested! Check it out.

Linux World review

Game homepage

It's an FPS, it currently runs on Win32 and Linux (including ppc). It's at the early beta stage (current version is something like 0.3) but already very playable, and it's been reasonably stable for me on SuSE 8.0 with the stock kernel. YMMV, obviously. It's also Open Source.

The graphics still need some work, but I'm getting up to 300fps on a 700MHz Athlon with 384M RAM and a GeForce 2 GTS, so it should run fine on all of your machines. I haven't tried multiplayer yet, so I'm not sure if that works as well as the single player.

One word, Cube.

It is free (ZLIB software licence - similar to BSD), runs on win32, linux, linuxppc, and can be played in both server and single player mode. FPS style of play, using OpenGL and SDL, it is smooth, fun, and looks great! We need more opensource games like this.

Most importantly of all, cleanup is simple, just delete the directory you unzipped the archive to, and it is all gone.

Enjoy!

- I seem to remember making some damn small Turbo Pascal .COM files. Under 4096 bytes, IIRC.

The Amiga E language (sort of a Pascal+C+whatever like beast) compiler stuffed a hello world program in 80 bytes or so. Pure executable, no external libraries needed.
The author's list of self-designed languages is definitely worth a look.

Here's one.

He did quite a lot of work on the front of visual programming and came up with a lot of programming languages which are definitely worth a look.

Check out the page: http://wouter.fov120.com/proglang/index.html.

Here's a list of Wouter's other languages.

We'll probably find out that Cube is written in False or PIG. Thats probably the reason its not open source..

And ANY language can have all of those attributes.

Of course any program in any language can have those attributes. But are you seriously arguing that all programming languages are equally maintainable or equally usable by teams? Are False or Intercal really just as easy to maintain as Perl or Python? Is csh just as easy to write a 500,000 line program in as C++?

Obviously anyone saying that you can't write a maintainable or large program in perl is overstating the case. What more reasonable people are saying is that perl makes it easy to hang yourself, probably too easy. We can all sit around and say only other programmers make mistakes and thus we don't need a bondage and discipline language but when you look at the state of the average code base that argument is hard to take seriously.

E is taken too. Its one on Wouter's languages.
See here

http://wouter.fov120.com/gfxengine/fisheyequake/

It's done by the same guy, but on a spherical geometry rather then a cylindrical one like Pan Quake.

Rate me on picture-rate.com

Check out his website -- hit the first link about languages he's designed and be VERY impressed!

Aardappel's site's here...

Not to be confused with the below URL, which is the work of another language genius :)

http://www.blitzbasic.com/

Does anyone have benchmarks for PanQuake? Post them.

2001RC46

When I looked at "Relativity" by Escher, I thought that it would be bizarre if you modeled that scene as a quake map. It's actually possible, and I think that it's interesting, if not useful or fun for deathmatches :-) .

There is a different Escher picture that is interesting to compare with the screenshot in the link: up and down.
It's not excacty the same type of distortion. Actually, I'm quite suprised Escher never used that particular type of distortion, I guess it shows that the style of art he created is by no means exhausted.

Quake's default projection makes high fovs look ugly. And you can't set the fov more than 180.
See this page for a comparison of standard Quake fov and the fisheye mod:

http://wouter.fov120.com/gfxengine/fisheyequake/co mpare.html

Y.