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Examples for ioquake3
Examples for XreaL
Examples for Cube 2
Examples for Irrlicht
Examples for Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine
Examples for Crystal Space
Examples for Blender Game Engine
Examples for Panda3D

It's quite obvious that all of these engines are much more advanced than Darkplaces. Darkplaces doesn't even do basic stuff like HDR lighting, DOF or parallax mapping. You could reproduce most effects in Darkplaces with shaders in ioquake3, which is basically just a cleaned up id Tech 3 engine. Then there is the issue of poor performance in Darkplaces...

The Blender Game Engine is actually quite suitable for an introductory game design course, and it has two completely free books written for learning it, plus a huge number of example games and scripts. Almost all of the logic can be scripted with 'logic bricks' (a minor amount of simple python scripts are needed for some typical behaviours).

http://download.blender.org/documentation/gamekit2/
http://download.blender.org/documentation/gamekit1/

Also see Yo Frankie - which shows what a team can accomplish in a short time

http://www.yofrankie.org/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7RRaEvWqJc

Blender itself is now quite easy to create game assets in, and works well as a level editor.

The Game Engine is not exactly cutting edge, but then cutting edge isn't of much benefit for learning game design.

(We discussed the beginnings of this project in 2007.)

Well, that is incorrect. You've linked to an article about Peach and Apricot projects, both of which were completed.

This is a seperate, 4th project, Durian (Orange being the first)

Hi,

you've skipped one of the more powerful and flexible free game engines available - the Blender Game Engine.

See an example of its usage here - http://www.yofrankie.org/

LetterRip

The GP Metaarticle is wrong.

1) Frequently, the best and most successfull games our at least their proofs-of-concept don't come from the industry anymore, but from the modding community. In fact, the modding community is such a powerfull force in gaming you *must* play ball with it, if you want to be taken for granted. However, the modders, being passionate freebee providers themselves, have considerably different ethics on some issues. In ways they are even more pragmatic than the OSS vs. FOSS crowd. And they have to be, as they have a completely different goal, which is: Building good games. Duh. Right now, Valve and the Source engine are pulling over quite a few of the modders, for the simple reason that they have one of the best engines.

2) The best people built games primarly because it's their passion, not because they are paid. However, these people want to build games, and not have to dick around with XFree86 crap with problems which, believe it or not, that sorry excuse of an operating system called Windows solved something like 2 decades ago.

3) As with #2, game builders want to build games. They want a working production pipeline. As long as that is virtually non-exsitant on OSS, they won't use OSS. Plain and simple. Cudos to the Blender team for hacking away at this problem one step at a time. However, modders use free versions of Softimage or Maya or UT Editor to build their stuff, and they quite frankly care squat wether it's FOSS or not, as long as it gets the job done.

And last but not least: Good software takes time. From an non-expert end-user standpoint, Linux is barely stopping to suck with Ubuntu 8.10 - and only if you don't want plug-and-play your printer or want to play games that don't run on Wine without a hitch. AFAIAC, Gnome & Nautilus has just stopped sucking a few months ago (I like(d) KDE/KUbuntu much better before) and one-stop zero-fuss printing as in Mac OS X will probably take another year or two until the vendors finally catch on. The very same goes with games.

And lets face it and be realistic: The first thing you want out of the way is your grafics layer, and that has been sucking long enough with XFree86 (Yeah, I know, neat networking, whatever, XFree fanboy, screw you, that's a total non-issue nowadays). Since that appears to be out of the way and desktops are rapidly maturing left, right and center all over the OSS community it is now moving to productivity apps. And AFAICT only now are Evolution and KMail slowly closing in on closed source apps in the field. (Allthough I could be wrong, the KMail crew could still be flat out lying about their ability to provide viable working mail encryption, as they have done for many years).

Once that is all aside and the more complex apps required for multimedia are nearing their true 1.0 release in the OSS community and we finally get a FOSS 3D game engine and a 3D production pipeline that doesn't suck by todays standards, we will see games pop up left right and center as the modding community joins the FOSS fray. And we all will be blown away by the quality they bring to the table. The gaming industry will be hit just as hard as other software fields and will have to adapt with pay-for-content or simular strategies.

Bottom line:
If you want to know how the future of FOSS gaming looks like, check out the modding community. And yes, it's a 120% Windows world right now. And, yes, believe it or not, for its very own very good reasons too. ... (I can't believe I just said that.)

How about Yo Frankie? The new game made by the Blender team: http://www.yofrankie.org/

Oh shit, better tell blender they can't sell GPL games. awww.. damnit! It's too late!

I don't know about the pinball thingy, but generally, in the UK, you can see all the TV you want on iPlayer or any of the major and minor channels' own players - or just download Miro and thereby take part in legal, CC licensed or public domain video torrenting so as to watch whatever you want that's not spoonfed by media companies.

Same goes for online music - you can listen for ages on jamendo, last.fm or magnatunes, and an ever increasing number of net labels on archive.org etc, without ever so much as a sub-subpoena. Creative Commons music is now so varied and widespread that I don't see a reason to have to steal.

But for games? I guess games are still an area where there will be piracy... Open source and CC just aren't there yet (with big 3d flashy games, not the huge amount of simpler open source games around), although the guys at Blender are taking some first steps: http://www.yofrankie.org/

Ale