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Ex professional game developer here. (I've shipped games on PS1, PS2, PC, Wii, DS, and helped numerous companies with their PS3 engines and toolchain. Left the professional industry in 2011 for a stable paycheck but I do my own (indie) game programming and design now, am a hardcore gamer, and help fellow game developers with advice.)

Sorry for the LONG read, but think I can lend some information that will be insightful and not inciteful. =P

> why we still haven't seen modders, foss developers and artists get together to build their own games.

We have, but on a limited scale.

TL:DR;

* Tech Hurdle
* Too many cooks in the kitchen
* Co-dependency upon the Game Engine and everything else
* Theory vs Implementation
* The "good" modders get "poached"

The LONG answer:

There are numerous reasons for this:

* Tech Hurdle

The first hurdle was the tech hurdle. Up until recently writing a "general purpose engine" was folly. Was the game 2D or 3D? If 3D, you HAD to optimize for indoor or outdoor environments for the most part with various kludges to support the other. If you notice both Unity and Unreal now offer a "2D" mode -- Unity with 2D Game Kit and Unreal with Paper2D

Examples where tech matters:

Trying to do "dense jungle environments" in a 3D shooter was basically a recipe of framerate FAIL until Crysis came along:

Doctor, it hurts when I do this.
Don't do that!!

We "solved" this problem by basically throwing more money at hardware (GPU / CPUs)

How does the engine handle the "contradictory" nature of transparency?

* Opaque objects can be rendered front-to-back using the hardware's "Early Z Test".
* Transparent objects need to be rendered back-to-front so you get the correct colors.

How does an engine handle thousands of lights?

* Deferred rending "solves" this problem but doesn't work for transparency. DOH!

People are using hybrid approaches of Forward Render vs Deferred Render. If the "big boys" are STILL figuring this out, Unity 2018.1 with their High Definition Render Pipeline (HD RP) (Preview) -- what chance does amateurs have? Yes, we see engines like Irrlicht but that is a steep learning curve for non-technical people.

We've seen SOME limited success. Back when Quake 2 was popular we Cube 2: Sauerbraten as a good example of the community coming together to produce something "good."

Open Source engines have typically performed like crap. I've posted in the past

how Mike Acton reviewed Ogre 1.9's OrgreNode.cpp pointing out its horrible design and performance.

As a result Orge 2.x game up with a gameplan -- they put together a PDF of how OOP screwed their performance over.

Turns out, Mike Acton was right. They ended up with a 5x performance increase by ditching OOP and using DOD.

How many people own Jason's quintessential engine development book Game Engine Architecture? How many understand it?

* Too many cooks in the kitchen.

C++ is "good" example of "Design by committee." Everybody has their favorite pet peeve bloating the core user experience until it is an over-engineered clusterfuck.

You'll notice that almost all of the

The AC actually brings up a good point ! Whatever happened to CrystalSpace, Orge3D and other 3D game engines?

The only one I hear about these days is the FPS "Cube" and "Cube 2: Sauerbraten"

* http://cubeengine.com/
* http://sauerbraten.org/

Embrace the future is not a good idea when it's downhill. Should I stop playing hi paced old school videogames (where incidentally gen Y is not what every other gen was, that is one step above older people) and get the cinematic pap and playing it in those closed ecosystem consoles that are prevalent today? Should I prefer digital satellite on led panels when hi def analogue sat on crt was more pleasing overall?

Gen Y should treat with respect those that outperform them, I guess?

a FOSS game like sauerbraten has the /texreduce option that let you play with blurred textures, down to monochrome textures. The game looks bad that way but your score gets better. Same when disabling motion blur. Less info for the eye to pick and the brain to filter, more reflexes.

OTOH more and more games are not about reflex and aim anymore, those are better off with more effects.

Knowing which particulars to emphasize and blurring the background is a serious issue with 3d animation, notably with tv cartoon shows.

Oddly, my immediate reaction on watching the video was the exact opposite to yours, more like "Why is this so graphically poor?".

Sauerbraten graphics are way better than this, with the sole exception of avatars. for some odd reason, Sauerbraten avatars never progressed beyond the basic ogre-like form of Cube, dunno why. See http://sauerbraten.org/ for more info and downloads and source.

But avatars aside, everything else in Sauerbraten seems more graphically polished, and it runs at 200 FPS on old hardware.

(Maybe it's just a poor Alien Arena video cap.)

Can I add Sauerbraten ( http://sauerbraten.org/ ) to that list for games. Also, as Optimism mentions lower down, the DRM-free games from Indie Royale, Humble Bundle and GOG can be bought for cheap. In the case of the Humble Bundle games, for ridiculously cheap.

All this while open source projects would be the perfect place to really shine with innovation and with something new. Why just copy, why not create something new?

First of all, I don't think few things are really new in terms of technological development. Most technology, if not all, is built upon a layer of old technology. The wheel was probably an evolution of the rolling log, a technology that nature invented. Famous computing technology examples: the Macintosh, which "innovated" on top of technologies developed at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, and Windows, which ... (you get the point).

But if by "new", you mean fairly new, then it's easy to trace the apparent lack of innovation to the shortage or more often absence of designers in open source projects. (This is something Canonical has been trying to address with projects like Unity with I'm not sure what level of success.) Designers are a necessity when dealing with graphical programs which are spatial, as against the more sequential nature of programming.

You can find lots of innovation on the console, which includes software like emacs (an innovation against the line editors of the time), the object-oriented scripting language Python, and even Unix itself. These are "old" examples of innovation, which I mention only because they are pretty well known.

On top of that the shooter games are all based on ID's engines that are many years old.

Not all open-source games are based on the ID engine. Here's one that isn't.

The open source game sauerbraten, for instance, has even more potential cheating problems. The issue is resolved by asking people to get a customized client as a condition to participate in tournaments. What the client does is thoroughly reported, anyway, there is no sneaking backdoors in. Anyway I see my prolonged boycott of evil companies is saving me some headaches.

I suspect that there is little optimization done in the world, so each cube gets two tris per (visible) face, even if it's part of a larger polygon.
So no, I don't think a new graphics card will help that much. (You should play Cube 2: Sauerbraten, anyway.)

cube2-sauerbraten might be a pretty good addition because of in-game map building mode. just disable the blood, use the nicer player models.

Yes, an FPS is exactly what you should give a four year old.

cube2-sauerbraten might be a pretty good addition because of in-game map building mode. just disable the blood, use the nicer player models.

Sauerbraten may have no mods but it`s a great FPS. After a multiplayer internet game on sauer, playing CoD makes me yawn.

When I read the headline I thought "why would anyone care?" There are plenty of good, free engines out there already.

ioquake3
XreaL
Cube 2
Irrlicht
OGRE
Crystal Space
Blender
Panda3D

And if John Carmack doesn't go back on his word, id Tech 4 will soon be free.

Cube 2: Sauerbraten lets you edit the map/level while you're playing.

Minecraft isn't the first game to work with blocks nor is this guy the first to recreate Enterprise.

Still impressive, though.

I see a double standard in the way you praise Facebook gaming while "dissing" open source games. First, you say that we should consider Facebook games as just as good as "real" games. On the other hand, you also say that "the state of open source games is not good." But for every popular Facebook game (e.g. Farmville, Mafia Wars), I can download dozens of FOSS games that are just as good or even better. So okay, maybe these FOSS games are just knockoffs of some commercial game. But aren't those Facebook games that you say are "fun to play" also knockoffs of, let's say, Sim City? Oh well, I'm logging off now and playing another round of Megaglest and Sauerbraten.

One can host Sauerbraten servers with good ping on a $20/month linode (many other vps providers as long as they are geographically near), and have plenty of headroom to host other stuff.

IMHO arcade coin-ops >> PC fps >> all the rest, so that's one more reason for me to suggest trying stuff like sauerbraten out

in the client and server open source game Sauerbraten, you can set up a server and play across europe in 50-90 ms. If the game doesn't trust much the client to avoid cheats more network load and lag than games like sauerbraten is inevitable but I'd rather risk cheaters and play smooth. YMMV

Free single and multi player 1st person shooter game with some satisfying fast oldskool gameplay. A large variety of gameplay modes from classic SP to fast 1 on 1 MP and objective based teamplay, with a great variety of original maps to play on.
Level editing has never been so much fun: a press of a key allows you to modify the geometry / textures / entities in-game, on the fly. Even more novel, you can make maps together with others online, in the unique "coop edit" mode (!)
The engine, though designed for simplicity and elegance as opposed to feature & eyecandy checklists, still competes nicely thanks to its novel "6-directional heighfield deformable cube octree" world structure that is the basis for its in-game editing. Occlusion culling, pixel & vertex shaders, very accurate lightmapping, robust custom physics system, network system, models, sound, scripting...

and cube2 sauerbraten
good networked game even if some maps will have low fps if you happen to be on low end cards (intel mainly)

The only computer game I play is Sauerbraten. I'm very much not a gamer, but I find it to be quite enjoyable to play. The biggest plus is that since most people haven't played it, when I ask people to play it, we're on pretty even footing given how little I play.

I definitely recommend it.

It sucks for me, though, I hate FPS games. For my Linux gaming I've always used emulators. Install ePSXe, Mednafen and dgen, then eat your heart out on old games console titles.

The article does not says about Cube and Cube-2 engines: an open source engine, on which Sauerbraten is based: http://www.sauerbraten.org/ Engine itself is really great and extremely simple. Check it out and go play some games.

As the original gamer generation(s) age, they have an ever expanding sense of what a videogame can acceptably look like. While a gamer of a more recent generation may (tho not always, of course, god bless them) find it difficult to make the visual transition to ye olde games, older gamers in particular often find they are as happy with decades-old depictions of a gameplay evironment as some more cutting edge.

With that in mind, may I recommend a brief smattering of games from genres or eras that we often forget:

The good old days of insane fast paced simple, straightforward multiplayer FPS, Sauerbraten: http://www.sauerbraten.org/
Incredibly deep dungeon creation/management simulation, in glorious ANSI, Dwarf Fortress: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/
Straight-up honed turn-based hack-n-slash roguelike, Angband: http://rephial.org/
Kooky realtime multiplayer roguelike dungeon crawl (yes, multiplayer and realtime) MAngband: http://www.mangband.org/


After decades of gaming, I think many of us come to realize that its the quality of gameplay that matter far more than fidelity of depiction. ASCII kobolds and twitch rocketlauncher firing FTW!

This has been on my mind over the last year, so I'm curious what insight others might have:

I've noticed a growing trend of people replacing the word "bug" with "glitch," in ever increasingly frequency. Anyone else noticed this? I am active in an open source fps (http://sauerbraten.org/), and paying attention to questions and comments by new users has really highlighted this trend. What's the cause in this shift? World of Warcraft? (Don't laugh - a game with that kind of userbase can have an impact, at the scale they operate at).

I've typed "newent" a few times, and that game looks a lot like Sauerbraten to me, but I din't see anything about Sauerbraten or Cube 1/2 in the article or on the game's page... http://www.sauerbraten.org/

Sauerbraten wins this one by far. The gameplay is addictive and the graphics are actually very good, which is something that isn't quite common in FLOSS games. God knows how many hours I've lost to this piece of software alone.

http://sauerbraten.org/

Cube or Sauerbraten. Both are FOSS. Sauerbraten is a favorite of mine - a couple coworkers and I play it at work at lunchtime. It's very reminiscent of Quake III. There's supposed to be a decent single-player campaign, and there's an RPG based on the engine, also. I've only played multiplayer deathmatch.

Free LAN Games

Wolfenstein Enemy Territory [Download]

Cube

AssaultCube

Sauerbraten (Cube2)

Urban Terror

Nexuiz

Open Arena

More First-person shooters here

Driving Speed2

Red Alert1

Command and Conquer NOD ISO GDI ISO

Singleplayer:

Super Mario War

Linux Games..

http://savage2.s2games.com/main.php
http://www.eve-online.com/
http://www.wesnoth.org/
http://www.flightgear.org/
http://www.freeciv.org/
http://www.sauerbraten.org/
http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/
http://wz2100.net/
http://www.cubeengine.com/
http://lincity-ng.berlios.de/
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/
http://www.wormux.org/
http://www.secretmaryo.org/
http://www.ufoai.net/
http://www.bzflag.org/
http://tremulous.net/
http://www.eternal-lands.com/
http://www.enemyterritory.com/

Perhaps you could stop with the "No games for Linux" BS already as you obviously have your head up your ass.

I haven't noticed a single open source game listed yet (but I haven't exhaustively searched either), so I thought I'd offer the one that's been dominating my time lately:

http://sauerbraten.org/

Sauerbraten is a fast-paced FPS with a number of game modes, maps, and a fun community of players. They typically put out a new release once every quarter, with the "Winter" release scheduled to arrive sometime this weekend. The best part for me is that I can hop online for a 15min game and I actually feel like I've played, whereas 15min spent on many commercial titles feels like not enough time spent to do anything meaningful.

This is a good list. Allow me to weigh in with a few more of my own.

• Nexuiz is a fun networked 3D deathmatch FPS.
• Sauerbraten is a great, mindless FPS for both networked and single player mode.
• You should definitely give tremulous a try. Its innovative, asymmetrical approach to team based network play is outstanding.
• You can read a review that I wrote of these games and many other FOSS projects.
• A lot of these games are on a live Linux DVD that I reviewed recently.

While we already have very good to excellent 3d games as Sauerbraten and Nexuiz, we still are behind commercial software companies in the graphical area. Many otherwise excellent games have poorly designed characters, maps, weapons etc. In the last two years the gap shrunk, but IMO more work is needed.

You should remember http://www.sauerbraten.org/ instead of cube

Aren't going to happen until artists in the medium, 'good' artists rather, decide to start working for free the same way coders do. Some artists will work for publicity alone, bu they seem to be by far in the minority.

All I can say is thanks, this link made it much easier to show my friends why they should not bother installing linux if they want to continue to game. None of those games are remotely interesting and all have better versions on the PC.

There's the OpenSceneGraph project. Not all 3D is Blender/Maya, it really depends on what you want/need to do. If we stick to the title "3D modeling", I guess even some 3D game engines can fit in! :-)
"The OpenSceneGraph is an open source high performance 3D graphics toolkit, used by application developers in fields such as visual simulation, games, virtual reality, scientific visualization and modelling. Written entirely in Standard C++ and OpenGL it runs on all Windows platforms, OSX, GNU/Linux, IRIX, Solaris, HP-Ux, AIX and FreeBSD operating systems."

First, thanks to you and Cthefuture for pointing these out.

The only OSS shooters I was aware of were Cube and its sequel Sauerbraten. Those two are interesting in that they achieve quite a lot with, technically, very little -- the spatial heirarchies they use are quite primitive, and they don't do any occlusion culling, for starters. Cube, the simpler of the two, is actually pretty cool in that it will run, and run well, on damn near anything with a graphics card. Yet it somehow feels like little more than Doom.

So I just tried Warsow and Nexuiz.

Nexuiz: It could be that this game looks great on a monster gaming rig, but me, all I've got is a 3.5-year-old Dell laptop. 2 GHz Pentium M, Geforce somethingsomething mobile (the product numbers in this industry long ago stopped meaning anything: It supports the first version of vertex shaders, and no pixel shaders. UT2004 looks pretty good, and that's about my top end). And on my laptop, Nexuiz was less-than-impressive. In terms of eyecandy-per-dollar-of-computing-hardware, I was underwhelmed. I also agree with Cthefuture that it felt like Quake2.

I was much more impressed by Warsow! It put out nice graphics at a good framerate. It felt a lot like Quake III, with many hints of UT -- but hey, I liked both of those games. Compared to Nexuiz, the "effects" weren't as great, but the quality of artwork was superior: Professional, consistent, and appealing -- and the levels looked better. Unfortunately, there was nobody online to try playing against.

While I'm talking about OSS games -- and I know I'm veering dangerously near the realm of completely off-topic; forgive me, it's cool -- I'd also endorse TASpring. It's a strategy game, not a shooter, and it is also unapologetically a remake of the commercial Total Annihilation -- but it's quite good. Unfortunately, single-player (and the interface for it) is largely neglected, and AI, last I checked, was horrendous. But the multiplayer experience, the graphics, and of course the gameplay (I know: the part they ripped off), are all quite good.

If anyone else knows of any OSS games of Warsow caliber, I'd be curious to see them, whatever the genre.

I've heard a lot of comparisons of Second Life to Snow Crash but I'm not sold yet on this step being purely progress forward. I don't even think I could think of server software that could handle all possible clients without the processing and network traffic getting exponential.

The real problem with SL is one of scalability. In the real world, we work on a combination of peer to peer and server based models; server-based because you have water, power, and communications services delivered to you; peer to peer because your house does not depend on your neighbor's house for anything, and they are effectively equal (even if their sizes are wildly disparate, for example, they both perform the same function.)

In Snow Crash, Stephenson's "Metaverse" was also a peer-to-peer network. It would seem to be highly similar to the web in some ways; links between servers, the capacity for hosting, et cetera. Of course, in Stephenson's world, cheap and plentiful bandwidth connects subscribers (in the form of L. Bob Rife's cable network.)

To make this long story short, we need a distributed architecture that allows you to host your own part of the game world. Monetary transactions between servers would occur in legal tender, and you could have any kind of currency you liked in your game world (if any.) Money transfers could be carried out through any number of services (paypal, egold, whatever.)

This permits as much scalability as you can afford. If you have the money, then you can have your "land" hosted elsewhere; otherwise you put it on your dinky little home connection and only a handful of people can connect at once. Still, this is pretty much the only way to accomplish this goal, and it keeps freedom in the hands of the people.

For a light technology demo version of this, one could add inter-server portals to Sauerbraten. In itself it wouldn't give you the full experience however, as there would be no scripting. Still, Sauerbraten is a collaborative building environment, so it would be interesting in itself.

For something a little more likely to be the future than Second Life, check out Alan Kay (and others)'s Croquet. Croquet is based on Squeak which in turn is a graphically rich Smalltalk environment. Thus Croquet is (or will be - it's in beta now) portable, consistent (Squeak has its own VM which is very consistent across all platforms) and fully Open. Not to mention, it works as I described :)

There is no open source equivalent of this stuff that I know of at the time.

Sauerbraten

Tremulous is excellent and really rather addictive, i used to be a big fan of onslaught in UT2k4 but i tend to find Tremulous more interesting.

Not sure that i'd agree with the comparison of Alien Arena 2006 to CUBE, Alien arena is quite nice to look at and a fast paced deathmatcher based on Quake(2 or 3, i forget), for some reason there aren't any good screenshots of it on the homepage so http://www.ratiatum.com/img/logiciel/502/502.jpg will give you a better idea. CUBE is mildly entertaining but Sauerbraten with coopedit is more fun.

Nexuiz does a good job with a heavily modified version of the original Quake engine as its codebase, again surprisingly attractive for such an old fashioned engine http://www.alientrap.org/nexuiz/

Warsow is fast paced Deathmatch with a twist, and quite nicely done in a cellshaded style http://www.warsow.net/

Most of those are free software, if not they're at least linux compatible. http://www.happypenguin.org/ despite looking a little dated, is still a good place to find new games.

Since Cube is not further developed anymore you might want to check out it's successor Sauerbraten

A few more for FPS lovers: Warsow Cube and its successor: Sauerbraten Of the three, Warsow is my favorite.

And personally I think http://sauerbraten.org/ looks interesting, but I've never used it.

Sauerbraten works quite well within its limited niche. It's not an engine at all but a self-contained FPS game based on a rather unorthodox but quite efficient representation which allows world building in-game. The representation can't really be changed nor extended without a major rewrite.

There's also another problem with it ... the code is written in a rather "unique" style, and that's being generous. It's hackable with care, but leaves something to be desired.

And don't bother trying to help the dev team. The leader is highly obnoxious, and all technical suggestions are greeted with foul mouthing and references to his godliness. It can be funny to watch, but you've been warned. The code is open, but the developers aren't.

• http://www.alice.org/
• http://www.ogre3d.org/
• http://www.yake.org/
• http://www.delta3d.org/
• http://www.panda3d.org/
• http://www.idsoftware.com/business/techdownloads/
• http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/
• http://www.garagegames.com/products/1