Slashdot Mirror
Snowboarding Soul Ride Engine Goes GPL
TuringTest writes "LinuxGames reports this news update at the Soul Ride game site. Soul Ride is a snowboarding game with real character physics, and its engine is now released under GPL and available for download. You may see its beautiful screenshots until it gets /.ed. Note that only the engine is GPL'd, not the artwork and data. Can you imagine a GPL game with the Fellowship of the Ring crossing the Caradhras with these graphics?" I hope this release spawns a Linux-friendly snowboarding simulator -- Soul Ride is limited to Windows (9X, NT, 2000) for now.
Hobbit-feet should easily handle the job!
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
they use shields, and go down stairs.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This is insane. Slashdotted before the first comment. Or did the server fall of the 'board? :P
from sourceforge:
Latest File Releases:
This Project Has Not Released Any Files
A bit precipitice, are we?
Open Source game engines are all fine and good with me, but have a good hard look at the game before you go praising it.
I'm pretty big on snowboarding games, and this isn't a very good one. A terrible one, to be more precise. One of those cheesy OpenGL "render the entire gameworld as polygons and let the video cards horsepower deliver the framerates because its way easier than only rendering on-screen action"
I'm sorry, but those screenshots look like ass. Even by first-gen voodoo graphics standards. The game engine might be a good learning tool, but I doubt it will spawn the killer-gaming-app-for-linux.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The perl script seems to overworked/nonfunctional, but you can view a slideshow of screenshots at: http://www.soulride.com/products/screenshots/scree nshot01.html.
yeah, except those files available for download dont exist yet.
nice pics tho
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I would of preffered it in color tho
Check out these screenshots. Lots of polygons and the FPS is good even on old hardware.
Seriously, sometimes reality is better.
That was a damn impressively quick slashdotting.
from sourcedforge...
Latest File Releases
This Project Has Not Released Any Files
A bit precipitice, eh?
From: Bill Gates
to: DirectX_Devel
ALERT! - VERY IMPORTANT - ALERT!
There has been a GPL game engine released! Consider it your top priority to make our next release of DirectX incompatible with this new viral-licensed package.
Long live Me,
-Bill
Trolling is a art,
Point your WGET (to mirror) at
http://www.soulride.com/products/screenshots/imag
Soul Ride is limited to Windows (9X, NT, 2000) for now.
Gee, that's funny. I guess the Linux version that I've been playing for the last two months has just been a warped dream. Maybe not?
Cat, the other, tastier white meat.
Lets hope the engine gets more FPS than the webserver can take hits...
Easy guys, I put my pants on one leg at a time. The difference is after I put on my pants I make gold records!
Is everything properly 0x'd?
I'm sorry, but those screenshots look like ass.
This saying baffles me. "Looking like ass" could be good (J Lo) or bad (Goatse guy).
Sorry, but "look like ass" conveys no information.
Can you imagine a GPL game with the Fellowship of the Ring crossing the Caradhras with these graphics?
What would be even nicer would be a totally GPL game based on the upcoming Tenebrae 2.0 engine.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
I've been playing it for over a month. You can use the virtual resort data files. You might need to use windows to unpack them.
Me too. This is exactly the killer app Linux needs to fully make it onto the desktop. Just last week I was telling my grandmother she should install Linux, and I told her about OpenOffice, Mozilla, KDE, etc. But when she asked "is there a snowboarding simulator?" I knew I wouldn't be winning her over to the Linux side.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
I especially like that it uses a real physics model (I find most snowboarding games too arcade-y), but this raises a big issue...won't it now need to be overhauled to incorporate the recent revelations about a constantly expanding universe, etc?
OK, call me a Karma Whore, but here's a link to another page with screenshots from the game:
This announcement seems a little premature seeing as there haven't been any actual source files submitted to sourceforge yet. Screenshots are fine and good, but where's the source?
Yeah, now Legolas doesn't have to board across pesky stairs and orcs anymore, he can have real CGI snow!
i.e. good fscking luck.
It's cool that the engine is gpl'd (think we'll ever actually see a really good game using it?), but the screen shots for this particular game don't look that great to me. It looks like something from 1999. The terrain looks decent, but the character is god-awful looking. Really generic and jaggy.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Guess I know what the next version of Tux Racer is going to look like..
"Note that only the engine is GPL'd, not the artwork and data."
3D engines really aren't the time-consuming part of creating a game. It would be nice to see some 'open sourced' player models, motion captures, sound effects, musics, etc, etc..
I know there are a ton of people versed in 3D modelling out there. Perhaps they can offer up some of their 3D 'doodles' to the OSS community for use in games. Maybe a sort of BSD/GPL liscense for artwork/data?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Those of you drooling for a screedshot in wide-screen mode, browse over to here
I hope that this particular game is only a hastily thrown together demo of the basic functions of this engine, hopefully this will support much prettier textures. As it is, this looks like a playstation 1 game to me.
First Rule of Open Source Club is: You Do Not Tell Other Open Sourcers What to Code.
Second Rule of Open Source Club is: You Do Not Tell Other Open Sourcers What to Code.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
To whomever takes over development of the engine: Please, please, please, do not fill it with frickin' penguins everywhere.
so now we just need some fifteen dedicated programmers to make it Linux-friendly too. Couldn't they hve GPL'd some staff too?
You think so? I doubt very much Thatcher Ulrich would code a new crappy engine, when he could use his famous (at least among those who keep up with such things) Chunked LOD algorithm. Thatcher released a sample implementation a while ago on sourceforge with source for linux and windows.
The chunked LOD algo is capable of using HUGE datasets (eg 285MB in the demo). Unlikely then that he's doing a "render the entire blah blah" thing...
You obviously know very little about graphics programming and more importantly have spent zero time investigating your claims.
Fair enough if you don't like the screen shots, but you really can't put down the engine, or it's programmer. Thatcher Ulrich is one of very few professional game programmers who publishes (both source and papers) his CURRENT algorithms (eg not 5 year old ones like Carmack). He invented the (also famous among people who know) "loose octree" method of spacial partitioning.
Can you imagine a GPL game with the Fellowship of the Ring crossing the Caradhras with these graphics?
I have a hard time imagining it beyond a half-hearted Sourceforge project with a couple lines of Perl.
http://www.google.com/search?as_q=screenshots&num= 10&hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=& as_oq=&as_eq=&lr=&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_qdr=all& as_occt=any&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=soulride.com&saf e=images
has got all the pix from soulride.com
Apparently the these graphics link is bad or has been taken down. I've played the game (on Windows) and I'm not all that impressed with the graphics. One thing you quickly notice is that all the trees are cheap 2-d cheats and keep the same "front" towards you as you move past or around them. It's fine that the engine is being GPL'ed rather than lost, but it still remains for someone to do something good with it. And if , as someone else here said, it gives the hardware the whole world and relies on the hardware to sort it out, then I don't expect it's going to be very useful in a lot of cases (the software I used did seem to limit how far I could go without good reason, I expect this is why).
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
...is they've modeled real mountains into the game. That's something I've *always* wanted to see in a snowboarding game.
They've done Stratton, Breckenridge and Jay Peak.
Here is a description of the engine.
Sirius Cybernetics Corporation is here already? I was expecting that to happen only after 200 years. What's going on? Somethings's fucked with the damn wormhole. Gotta get it fixed. Goddammit.
Can you imagine a GPL game with the Fellowship of the Ring crossing the Caradhras with these graphics?
Yes, I can, and it's awful.
These graphics remind me of an old landscape generator I had back on my 486. It generated a plasma-looking sky and a 3d landscape you used your mouse to fly over.
Big whoop, but I guess it's cool that the engine was released.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
In any case, speaking as a developer of games, you can be sure I'll _never_ release anything into the GPL. Not so much because of politics but just because I can't stand the attitude of the GPL zealots who whine and moan about everything.
this may be a good direction to go for game developers. if they release they engine under the GPL it allows community input, and may get some interesting things done.
and releasing the data files commercially is not that bad. it might give game develoers more of an incentive to make a good plot (first person shooters) so that people would want that added material.
Forbidden
/products/screenshots/screen.pl on this server.
You don't have permission to access
Im currently doing some work with the Quake II engine. The one thing I've really been missing is better terrain rendering. Boxes and Pyramids can only be fun for so long. This engine seems to have more advanced terrain rendering than Quake II. Interesting indeed.
No, I didnt bother to do any real 'research'. The game looks and performs like brute forcing of polygons.
So I might be wrong, but if he's doing quadtree or any other type of BSP-based culling, it sure doesn't show.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I'm curious: Does the Bill Gates in your world of fiction send one of these memos out every time id Software publishes a new game and releases the engine from two games back under the GNU GPL? We've already got Doom, Quake, and Quake II under the GPL.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I lived in Vail last season. I "only" rode 50 days, but many of my friends did 80-100 days. So we were basically working and snowboarding. And when the day was over and we were just hanging out in someone's apt? We were probably playing SSX. Reality is fun, games are fun. Not mutually exclusive.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
But when she asked "is there a snowboarding simulator?" I knew I wouldn't be winning her over to the Linux side.
Then what about Tux Racer? Isn't Soul Ride the second GPL snowboarding game posted to Slashdot?
Will I retire or break 10K?
This game has been released/available as a download for the past 3 days.
Or did Slashdot wait three days so that Soul Ride fans could download the package before Slashdot users DDOS'd the server?
Will I retire or break 10K?
they use the handrail!
Now there's a good reason to choose your release licence - the "take my ball and go home" rationale.
Choose the licence that makes sense for you and the people who'll be using your software. Yes, many people are whiners. Get over it, or you automatically become one yourself.
another good news indeed for the opensource movement indeed, for sec. i thought it was Doom 3 engine under GPL.....
That they'd had enough Slashdotting of the screenshots page!
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Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
The game engine has been ported to Linux, and was released with an addon pack called "Virtual Jay Peak" a while ago. The engine plays the normal game just fine. I compiled Soul Ride for Linux just yesterday with no problems at all.
Let's see graphics like that, then I will be impressed.
This looks like a old MS flight sim with a snowboarder instead of a plane.
Can you imagine a GPL game with the Fellowship of the Ring crossing the Caradhras with these graphics?
Unfortunately, yes.
Y2K Compliant since the late 1890s
Yes, in the real world people do take their ball and go home, happens all the time, usually to people who already have balls, so it's no big deal, I think the above AC doesn't have any or he wouldn't have posted.
Code is free when the programmer want's it to be.
That wasn't a landscape generator, it was the easter egg in Excel
Banaaaana!
well its a good thing nobody cares about your games!
Thanks for reinforcing his point.
I hope this doesn't go the way of Tux Racer, which was initially GPL and had a large community providing support and ideas to the lead developers. Then Sunspire Studios turned around and took on a closed license.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I agree with some of the above posters. I don't think the graphics are all that impressive, though I have to say that they DO look better than 90% of the linux games we have now. Any code coming over to our side is better than nothing, and maybe someone will look at this code and say "hey, I can use this to /insert really cool statement here/"
maybe
Check out my sysadmin blog!
Try this link.
me loves snowboarding. however, me is broke with no car and lives in the city. mountains are hard to come by. me also sits in front of my computer alot. hence me would love to sit in front of my computer doing something i love, while doing something else i love. (i.e. snowboarding while computing) me thinks this would be a great idea, and an awesome project for someone.
In the whimsical fantasy world of Tux Racer, the player's character itself is the board.
The point of games that attempt to represent reality to some extent is that a novice player can leverage his instinctive knowledge of reality (e.g. what's gravity, what's momentum, etc) to create a base on which the player can devise initial tactics. Even Tetris does this to some extent, leveraging the player's experience with jigsaw puzzles. However, making a game's world model too accurate destroys the psychological escape factor of the game.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Yeah every time I go boarding I launch myself 20 feet in the air and do a 720 backflip.
I've been trying to do this in the game (a free Linux demo for the Jay Peak mountain got released a while ago) too, and I end up landing on my ass pretty much every time. Seems realistic enough to me!
And then I launch over a 300 foot vertical drop and hit the ground running without being phased.
Nobody said it used a real biology model!
If you think GPL is bad for a couple of GPL zealots, i think we don't your work.
--The Te of Piglet by Benhamin Hoff
> I hope this release spawns a Linux-friendly
> snowboarding simulator -- Soul Ride is limited to
> Windows (9X, NT, 2000) for now.
Uh.. first of all, Soul Ride was GPL'ed at least a week ago. I downloaded it several days ago and have been playing it happily... IN LINUX.
Soul Ride was ported to Linux before it was even GPL'ed. Do slashdot editors even check the stories that they post?
Jeez, how hard is that? You got something for Christmas from that relative you barely even see, do what I told my son. Even if you don't like it, this person went to some effort to do something nice.
Wu-Tang Name: Half-Cut Skeleton Get your own Wu-Na
The game probably looks bad because coders aren't artists. Somebody had to do model those graphics, and I bet you they weren't a professional 3D modeler.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
..are always like this. Skiiing, boarding, biking, whatever, I'm always catching this HUGE air and coming down softly and in control.
Real life is something different though....
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
In any case, speaking as a developer of games, you can be sure I'll _never_ release anything into the GPL. Not so much because of politics but just because I can't stand the attitude of the GPL zealots who whine and moan about everything.
But you will happily read, learn from, and/or use the code written by others and released to the public?
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Now everything that's missing is that the game can be used with a "snowboard controller" such as the playstation one or the the xbox one
Sure, they're not usb yet, but that is a smaller problem...
Great to see a snowboard game for Linux. I am very excited.
Don't bite the hand that feeds you
*clicks "available for download" link at Slashdot* "This Project Has Not Released Any Files" Gee, thanks for the link, guys.
I hope this release spawns a Linux-friendly snowboarding simulator -- Soul Ride is limited to Windows (9X, NT, 2000) for now.
Actually it is available for linux.
Download it from soulride.com!
have you even bothered to check the cvs repository? it's completely loaded with files.
even i saw that, and my eyesight is awful.
A still working URL for the screenshots can be found here
You mean like SSX on the Playstation II?
Yep, they are in one of the shortcuts on the Hawaii track. Penguins. Not quite filled with frickin' penguins, but they are there. Both original SSX and SSX: Tricky have it.
The first time I saw them I was seriously baked and, well... (I mean how can you do anything involving a Snowboard without weed? Well, unless you are Canadian and it is the Olympics...)
Well, luckiliy we do not need you at all. Everything you do will be forgotten eventually. If you had gone GPL, your code would have lived on.
thanks for contributing noting (in this respect) to humanity.
If you think this engine was neat then check out Blueberry3D. It's also a terrain engine but it works on fractals instead of meshes. So you don't need a gigantic mesh database which you then cull or use LOD on. Instead you generate all of the terrain from fractal seeds.
There are a few movies you can download from their site and they are quite impressive. Particularly the trees IMHO. (Which look very real, even close up.)
Try reading the docs.
./soulride DefaultMountain=Jay_Peak Fullscreen=0 OGLModeIndex=9
Running it under 32-bit gfx makes it look much better (on Linux).
From the readme-linux.txt
* OGLModeIndex -- these are the options:
0: 320, 240, 16
1: 640, 480, 16
2: 800, 600, 16
3: 1024, 768, 16
4: 1280, 1024, 16
5: 320, 240, 32
6: 640, 480, 32
7: 800, 600, 32
8: 1024, 768, 32
9: 1280, 1024, 32
So, running it as:
#!/bin/sh
worked wonders for me. Hey, it's not perfect, but it's another free diversion doing anything really productive!