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OpenQuartz: A GPLed 3D Shooter
CitizenC writes: "Most people don't really associate the phrase "open source" or "GPL" with games. However, that is just what Galbraith Games is trying to change. Today on 3DActionPlanet, Sabre takes a look at the recently released tech demo."
And maybe the graphics, in this case.
Hmm, I thought Crossfire was dead, I never saw anybody else playing it 5 years ago when I tried it out, and now look at this! Did they ever fix the keyboard repeat problem? I remember one of the biggest annoyances with the game was accidentally letting your finger rest on a key while moving in a direction and then getting a 100 moves queued up, which usually involved your running into a wall right next to one of those huge immobile wizards or something. Well that and trying to remember what key was bound to what spell.
Also, are they still sending that huge X11 window over the network for the multiplayer games? I just might have to try it out again now.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
OpenQuartz came about because shortly after QuakeForge got started, we realised we needed free content for QF to be truely usefull to everybody, and so a few people (including Seth Galbraith) hanging out in our started the OpenQuartz project, though I believe Seth had some data from before Quake was released.
OpenQuartz's point is to allow you to play quake/quakeworld without having to go out and buy quake (though it can be had at a reasonable price from http://www.hartsunlimited.com/quakofforlin.html) Sure, it's nowhere near complete, but for only a little over a year of part time development, I'ld say it's doing well.
Bill - aka taniwha
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Bill - aka taniwha
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Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Bill - aka taniwha
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Bill - aka taniwha
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Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Exactly! However, the GPL is about the protection of artwork/specifics even more so than BSD. In fact the only difference in BSD and GPL in this case would be a company that wants to improve the engine but not repay the people that brought them the engine in the first place?
If by protecting, you mean protecting your right to impose a "pay or don't play; here-today, where is the revenue in two years when your game is obsolete kind of buisness model" you can still do that on a LGPL'ed game engine. You're even encouraged to do so. How much money does a FlightGear distro CD cost again?
Sorry, your oversight was obvious to most and like shooting fish in a barrel but its a common misconception. Its communicating it effectively and succinctly that the community needs to work on. I'm practicing how to explain this kind of thing to my boss so I thought I'd try on you first. Please answer the following questions on a scale of 1-5, one being very poor and 5 being very well.
1) How well did you understand that the GPL protects rather than harms?
2) How well did you understand that BSD is a very generous liscence and is gets along very happily with the GPL (and vice versa) even though Mundie pitches conflict among them.
~^~~^~^^~~^
FlightGear is really good, the terrain mapping is excelent, and haze and clouds are looking great. You even see the correct positions of Stars and phase of the moon. They are going for FAA approval, adding support for map overlay and are network multiplayable. All they need is someone to add weapons for a combat simulator.
Search and Rescue is pretty good also as a helicopter game, but I wish it used more of the FlightGear world generation engine.
~^~~^~^^~~^
Where you say 'giving away' we say 'letting other people help you with, and letting others gain from for their help'.
This is in opposition to the lock-down, force fead buisness model that is very fragile and in the end hurts customers and sends companies *especialy game companies* into bankrupcy almost assuredly when there products obsoless, or a bigger company produces a competing knockoff and beats you down in marketing.
On the other end, the imposed barriers of entry that are meant to hedge people into your corner only stifle innovation and produce a nation of (easily beaten back) couch potatoes.
~^~~^~^^~~^
flightgear.org still works but they are (like everyone else) moving to SourceForge.
flightgear.sourceforge.net
They have good screenshots, a good manual and everything.
~^~~^~^^~~^
Get this, I get paid putting together components of Microsoft products. The company I work for has been doing it for years. Nothing we do is even worthy of being copyrighted, but becuase we know how to make it work for them we get money to develop it. Hundreds of thousands of dollars a contract.
There are many companies that do this on a daily basis. Its a billion dollar industry. Is this what you say is working for free? No, its the smart "give them everything that doesn't cost you money" buisness philosophy that makes people rich all the time. And the GPL is making coding cost as little money as possible for the best product to sell people. Thats is specificaly the buisness reason why I'd rather use GPL than MS products that I do use**. Who wouldn't be in on it?
**(Btw, there is nothing we do that we couldn't do with OSS or FSS, its just takes time to create mind-share and trust.)
~^~~^~^^~~^
Opening up the source of Quake was the worst thing that ever happened to it. Suddenly, from a few games being unplayable because of cheating, now you can't find a server out there that doesn't have people who've compiled in their own new cheats, as well as the ones that were present in the non-open-source one. And there are cheating servers as well - ones that give an advantage to the cheaters who run them.
Team Fortress Classic is bad enough now with cheaters being all over the place, I shudder to think what would happen if all those lamers could compile stuff into their clients to give them infinite armour, infinite ammo, infinite health, extra speed, automatic aiming and a really small bounding box.
I have to wonder what motivates the cheaters, but the fact is that they are out there, they use every cheat they can find, and giving them access to the source is the worst possible thing I can imagine.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
http://source.bungie.org/.
Yes, a microsoft owned game company, that actually has released one of their games to the GPL, and have continued to actively develop it.
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I post links to stuff here
There is a difference between letting the 'community' create addons, and giving away the main product, and creating the addons yourself.
And since the main product is what is the most difficult to create, I fail to see how GPL it would help the company recoup the investment (and doesn't the fact that the main product would be GPL'ed, that the addons would have to be GPL too?)
Je ne parle pas francais.
I'd hold out for a boomstick too, in case you run into anything more mobile than trees...
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Do you want to know why?
:P Lolo, i will always have you..
Because GPLed games actually have a tiny chance in hell of being ported to the macintosh.
Seriously. I really kind of honestly believe the bit about gpled games will never quite reach the quality level of commercial software, (although i have seen some damn good shareware/freeware games) but i will say this: poorly ported gpled games are much better than *nothing*.. which, as a mac os x user, is exactly what i am getting right now.
Well.. all i have to say is thank god that it's so much easier to write emulators that run on the PPC than it is the x86
Umm, but anyway. Yeh. I am pretty sure i will never see a Worms Armaggeddon for mac os x, much less Worms World Party, but although i can't play OpenQuartz either, i at least have the *option* of porting the damn thing myself. Which just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. So.. well.. THANK YOU, TEAM OPENQUARTZ!
P.S. : Sierra : Where the fuck is tribes 2?? You were promising us a simultaneous cross-platform release for awhile there!! What happened?? GRRRR!!
^_^
P.P.S. You think we could go hunt down the original creator of Scorched Earth and convince them to go GPL?
P.P.P.S. Crossfire is damn ugly. Couldn't you at least have the quality of Taskmaker? Sheesh.
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Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Well the "extremist" thing sure seems troll-like to me.
From the article:
It sounds like they aren't going to make money, because money isn't the motivation. Making the game fun, is the motivation. The developers play it.---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
As another poster said, you've got it backwards. Not only do add-on modules sell poorly for the most part, but they are also the easiest part of to come up with. I mean, take a look at places like Planet Unreal and see how everyone and his brother is making add-on modules. But how many people can write a 3d engine like the ones found in Quake and Unreal? Then look at how many companies are licensing those engines. id licenses the Quake engine for a couple hundred thousand dollars. Seriously, how many people bought Quake 2 for anything other than the nifty keen engine?
No, the trick of the client being a remote X window is long gone. It's strictly client-server now. You can even get a Windows client. (And I haven't seen any problems with key repeat, so I think that's fixed, too.)
The big problem with non-commercial games is the lack of press.
What other GPLd games are out there?
open source makes sense for games but not the GPL (unless of course you don't care about revenue). If a bsd style license would be used, game developers could choose to open source parts of the game (3d rendering engine etc.) and bundle it with their closed source game specific scripts and models. So open source the technology but protect artwork/game specifics.
Jilles
I think the biggest barrier to the development of open source games is more the lack of artwork and sounds etc.
So let me get this straight:
You're up against a bunch of evil trees, and you don't have a chainsaw?
Other relevant links (also available from Marathon):
Bungie.org
Bungie Source Code
The Marathon Story
I imagine the next question is "why did he do that?" According to him, it didnt cost much and he thought it was funny.
so, a company doesnt have to have investors and doesnt have to make a profit, it just has to be registered.
Darth -- Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
Dood, they are just extending the conflict out of the game proper into the real world. Look at it as a challenge of wits and skill ...
Have fun!
Also, more and more game development these days is artists creating art, architects designing maps, modelers creating realistic models, people writing plot and dialog, etc. E.g. Content is king. Nobody plays a crapola game just because it runs on the Unreal or Q3 engine. Just look at the popularity of games like Counter-Strike, and the high reviews of No One Lives Forever.
Game companies can concentrate on developing *content*. I think this *is* a pretty good fit. Anybody who has a cool idea for content for an engine (a "game") can get up and running cheaply. I think this will have the effect of producing more diversity and in the long run a healthier game market. I mean, really, how many Command and Conquer clones can you stand? Taking the burden of engine development of game houses might result in better (or at least original) games being made.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
"Haven't you seen how much people make mods? Since the market is spammed with mods none can charge for their work."
The market is spammed with a lot of crappy mods that take a long time to download and never really reach a stable state. There are notable exceptions of course, but I would definately rather pay $10-20 dollars for a mod created by paid artists and game designers, than waste my time downloading and trying out mods off the web. $10-20 dollars is cheap as far as games go, but then they wouldn't be investing so much in R&D for the engine, which is extremely costly.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
They will sell commercial support and consultancy. They can go to your company, check what computers the game would be the best on, sell you new hardware, build a new network infrastructure optimized for the game and sell you a new firewall which recognizeds this new protocol. Of course your employees needs to learn the new game. So the company will give curses, given by 15 very skilled professors, that know every secret of the game. When they will be back, your company can still call an hotline to ask for secrets the previous guys didn't speak about (hidden levels, secret keystrokes for unlimited life and power...) .
Then, no one in your company will be doing his real job any more. They will sell you coffee and drugs so that you can play 23 hours a day, and still be okay to do your real job 1 hour a day.
You will be charged $ 1.000.000 for this. And with the bill, they will send you a special offer to buy their next game.
This is how to make money with GPL games.
{{.sig}}
With the help of Bell Labs' Text-to-Speech project, this can be done is a jiffy!
e.g.
enforcer/death1.wav -> "arrrrrrrrrg"
enforcer/idle1.wav -> "dum de dum dum"
enforcer/pain1.wav -> "ow"
enforcer/pain2.wav -> "ow ow ow!"
id has 19 employees, give or take. I believe around 10 of them do art of some sort (mapping, modeling, skinning, texturing.)
The problem with open source games isn't the lack of people, it's the level of coordination that's required. If you're creating a map and need a custom texture, it's nice to be able to have a texture artist sitting next to you while he creates it. Ditto for modeling vs skinning. Nothing will ever beat being in the same building as the rest of the team.
As for the Copy-Protection argument, its true that companies who adopt this model could no longer offer any copy-protection, but face it, copy protection is a joke. Been to GameCopyWorld recently? All it would take is a dev shop with enough balls to stand up to their publisher (very rare).
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"After Careful Consideration, Bush Recommends Oil Drilling" - The Onion
Perhaps the game has changed under your nose, and you haven't even noticed. Perhaps the game has turned into "who can be the best hacker" instead of "who can be the best fragger". If you want hot fragging action, then play Q2 or Q3... that's what they're out there for.
When they released the source to Quake, they opened the doors to gaming challenges of the future, namely - who can write a better AI, whose bot will emerge victorious. Since this doesn't rely upon fast-twitch skills, but real coding prowsess... as a geek, how can you complain?
- passion
if you run the panaramic quake mod (posted last week sometime) with the command line "C:\Quake\panquake.exe -width 1024 -bpp 16 -winram 256 -game oq" (substituting in appropriate resolution, colordepth and ram of course)you can shoot at the tree zombies in panaramic mode (and it uses the .wav files from quake so you wont get all the error messages)
"If IE is 'just a web browser' then emacs is 'just a text editor'."
It could probably use a few 3D artists to get a few awesome levels and so forth.
If the engine is open source or free software, you can still sell the game with closed graphics, music and sound. Although this would make the entire game non-free, much of the sourcecode could be free.
As another user mentioned, you don't HAVE to make money either. Just sharing with a community that gives something back again can be rewarding enough. It depends on your priorities, but I doubt anyone can use their full-time on such a project/company.
Last point. If you're just out to make money, you should make it as proprietary as possible. And if you're the industry leader, you will make big bucks. Or else you'll go down in flames. It's a huge risk for a new company. By sharing code, you decrease the potential revenue income, but you increase the value to everyone - including yourself. For instance: It's a BIG value to _everyone_ that anyone can use Emacs anywhere in the world, on almost any platform. However, I doubt the creators have gained much _monetary_ value.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Hillarious :-)
On the more serious side, when they take breaks from programming they can enjoy other GPLed games that others have made, get new bug-reports with fixes and updates or just chill out with the community. No GPL-programmer has ever said they were in it for the money. (I hope for their sake)
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
What is holding OS gaming back? I mean really? Its not the lack of an engine or coding base. There are already a number of engines available that could do the job like CrystalSpace and the Quake 1 engine. Its not the lack of gifted programmers. OS has those too.
The thing that is holding OS gaming back that game creation is a manufacturing process and OS development is a service process. How many programmers created the Quake III? Not that many. How many artists, 3d modelers, sound editors, level designers, and writers (ok maybe not writers :) )created Quake III? A freaking huge number thats what. The engine is not the problem, its a relatively small part of the development pie. What we need are more artists and level designers to contribute to the projects.
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
Wow... look at those words fight each other!
I think the title of this story is misleading; they are using the already GPLed Quake 1 engine. They are "just" replacing the restricted content (models, textures, maps, sounds) with their own.
This is pretty good though; something like NPRquake released the other day could be released as a full package, instead of requiring you to own the original Quake (which, if you don't have it already, is pretty tough to find).
Is this supposed to be serious or are you just trolling?
Great; now distraught parents will be claiming that video games turned their children into homicidal lumberjacks.
And if you really want to not play with cheaters, find a server that really frowns upon cheaters, and kicks them off quickly.
Except in reflex games such as the Quake series, it's hard to tell naturally good players from players using some of the better borg proxies. See also the discussion in Asus and cheaters.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Last time I looked there were over 2300 open source game projects in sourceforge.
Maybe the mods think any word against "open source" is a troll, but the above post is correct. The production of a game involves a lot more than software. As a matter of fact, many game companies use third party libraries for their games. Which brings us back to the point mentioned in the other post: someone may release a game using GPL'ed software, where the game data is not "free" in any sense. It's just like using a GPL'ed editor to edit a text. The editor being open source doesn't mean the edited text should be.
The guy at spiderweb games, a shareware company that is apparantly releasing their Exile series on linux, created the fairly successful "Blades of Exile" game that allowed the community to build its own adventures. I'm not sure if it was as successful as he had hoped, however, because I think his later games are unmodifiable,.
There are certainly dozens of professional games that have similar communities--there are hundreds of scenarios available out there for Age of Empires/AOK, and there must be thousands available for Quake/doom/etc.
In fact, there are many games out there that become much greater because they have a community developing the games. The success of these games might have more to do with the people writing their own scenarios and modifications than in the original technical or marketing activity of the original designers. I would think that in many of these cases, the wide-spread availability of novel free scenarios has increased the profits of these companies, rather than diminished them.
I wonder how long it will take before Apple's legal team springs into action over this name? :)
After marketing, technology is the dominant factor in a game's success. Quake 2 had no gameplay innovations. It sold on reputation and nice (brown) graphics. Thief, Thief 2, and System Shock 2 had innovative gameplay and good stories. They didn't sell, because of the low-polygon graphics.
I'm not criticizing the market or the industry (although there is something wrong with Eidos pumping millions into Daikatana while Looking Glass went bankrupt)--graphics sell. Summer movies become blockbusters on effects, alone.
Successful free software projects, like gcc, Linux, Apache, etc., have a long lifespan. The development effort remains worthwhile for years. High-tech entertainment has a short lifespan. The incentive structure for games is similar to that for movies: compete for mainstream dollars with flashy effects.
That said, I do believe there is room for gameplay innovation. The variety of a choose-your-own-adventure book would be welcome. The unpredictability of Clue would be nice: play it again and maybe it's not the butler, this time. Adventure-game conversations could go from turn based, so to speak, to real time.
> second only in difficulty to programming enterprise-scale RDBMS systems.
You mean like Mysql?
Or perhaps PostgreSQL? NASA recently gave up Oracle in favor of MySQL, if I recall correctly. Besides which, on the gaming end, I recently purchased Tribes2, but I still find myself playing GLtron and Freeciv and Nethack more than anything else.
Surprisingly enough, all those games are also under the GPL.
The difficulty of making a game engine is exactly why Free Software is an ideal solution.
In post-9/11 America, the CIA interrogates YOU!
I guess your last 3d game engine sold as well as Quake did? Look moron, just because you are a no talent idiot who got his mom's computer to post on slashdot does not mean you should tear down other people's work!!! I have worked on the Quake 1 source and it is not easy. I do not care if it is 5 years old... I would guess that you are not much older.
> Expansion packs for games are notoriously poor sellers
In fact, what he said was just that the sold better then other upgrade packs (even though they dont sells that well :), and im willing to agree. I think patches (bug-fixes) must be free of charge, while updates (new features, maps, levels etc) may be charged for.
Further, since many of those expansion packs are pretty large (full cd) its not worth downloading unless you have a cheap broadband.
Personly i dont like this business model though, i like buying things, knowing what the final cost will be. Otherwise you dont know where the bill ends...
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
What do you mean people only bought Quake2 for its engine??? I purchased Q2 for its awesome story-line, exciting plot twists and the thrill of all those suspensful dialogues. Its engine, while certainly decent, was only a minor concern to me as is the case with all other Roleplaying games. As long as the story and characters are good, well fleshed out, who cares about its engine!
:)
Oh look, purple sky...
This is a project to build multi-media to be used with the GPLed Quake Source.
The article sounds a bit mis-leading in that there is no new 'game engine' here - its an art project.
Yes, having an open game engine and addon modules is a great idea that has potential. What Golbraith Games is doing is exactly the opposite. They're making a quake mod with GPL'd graphics and models. Yeah, I guess the quake source is GPL'd too... but who wants to see the same artwork and models in 20 "new" games?
As best I can tell this is just a mod for a 5 year old game with GPL'd artwork and sound. If you're going to make an original game, you need to have original artwork and sound... so what good is this?
You have reached the final level. You will now battle the Grand Desructor of All Time . . . this feature has not yet been implemented. Please contact Galbraith if you wish to contribute.
I mean, like, trees are our friends, Man.
A respecatable company like Microfsoft wouldn't ever produce a violent game like this. It would alienate their customers and subject them to a potential lawsuit if it causes someone to act out these violent fantasies in real life
GPL developers on the other hand don't have to wory. They can claim "someone else must have wrtitten that bit".
The GPL will destroy society through violence, and MS is trying to prevent it
I'll be the life of the LAN party!
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
The total open sourcing of games would be the death knell for the industry, at least IMO.
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
Anybody care to tell me? Sooner or later the programmers are going to want to get paid. Any progamers here willing to work for free?
Both you and the earlier poster are correct. Add-on modules do sell less units than the game itself; and they are the easiest part of the game to create. I was not comparing the sales of expansion modules to the sales of a game. I was comparing those sales, to the sales of expansion modules or their counterparts in other software markets, for other types of software.
I further agree that building the game engine is the most labor intensive andtechnically difficult part of the project. I propose to gather a group of highly skilled OSS developers to put it together, with some oversight, thus defraying the costs associated with such development. Once the engine is released, move on to the development of expansion modules. As you've stated, expansion modules are simpler to create, and require less development time, for the money.
It's important also, to keep in mind that sales of expansion modules will always be smaller than sales of the game itself. For this reason, GPLing the game engine is the best choice also because it allows for penetration to the widest audience - hose of us who don't have $50 to spend on a game (from which you derive 20 hours of enjoyment), but do have $15 to spend on an expansion pack (from which you might derive 10 hours enjoyment).
By GPLing the game, you cause it to reach a potentially wider audience, thus increasing the potential audience for the commercial expansion pack, which is more cost effective for the developers, for technical and manpower reasons, and more cost effective for the consumer who wants to get the most for his money.
--CTH
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--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
Actually, Games seem to be a perfect fit for OpenSource. Open the code for the game engine, then sell add-on modules. The gaming market is one of the strongest for commercially dold upgrades. In fact it's one of the only markets where the customer base doesn't scream bloddy murder when a company offers to SELL them an extension pack for a game. It really is a perfect fit.
--CTH
--
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
www.radonlabs.de
Actually... Aleph One: The (originally Macintosh) game Marathon by Bungie, released under the GPL. Now available for Macintosh, MacOSX, Linux, Windows, and even BeOS.
Liberty in your lifetime
I dunno... Hand rollin' a Unix-like kernel doesn't sound all that 'easy' to me, or a windowing system, or an optimizing compiler, etc.
The Open Source model could work where plug-ins and levels and other non-essential parts of the game are concerned, but a top quality 3D engine by its very nature must remain propreitory.
Finally, it is abundantly clear that the BSD license would be the only sensible licence to consider for games, since if the game was released under the GPL, nobody could ever make any money out of it due to Stallman's Communism.
Check out Marathon Aleph One from Bungie. Believe it is Marathon 2 open sourced and enhanced
They started this before being brought out by Microsoft, and seem to be still doing it.
Programming computer games is hard, probably second only in difficulty to programming enterprise-scale RDBMS systems. One thing we've seen time and again is how open-source is excellent at providing tools on the scale of emacs or perl, which do a fine job at a middle-sized application, but once the level of complexity reaches a large game or RDBMS, the level of centralised control that open-source allows just isn't sufficient to get the job done. Arguably, the only reason that emacs is as good as it is today is that rms rules the roost, and emacs is effictively run as the "cathedral" of GNU.
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Everything but Z
Hey - it's a personal choice, don't knock it! Besides, many programmers make their bread and butter from commercial, closed-source code, and do free software as recreation, and to put something back into the community, from which many of them have got important solutions (roll out the usual examples - Apache, GCC, etc).
To email me, move the last four characters of my address one key to the right on a QWERTY keyboard
43rd Law of Computing: