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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
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.
Check out these screenshots. Lots of polygons and the FPS is good even on old hardware.
Seriously, sometimes reality is better.
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!
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.
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
But adapting the terrain is childs play, basically a:
if frameratethreshold
render(smaller_mesh)
else
render(bigger_mesh)
end if
but there's no BSP-tree type ways to clip everything outside of the viewport. It processes every triangle in the 'world' for each frame, whether it's onscreen or not.
That is to say, it says:
draw(everything)
instead of
figure_out_whats_onscreen
draw(whats_onscreen)
My point is that this is just engine just draws a bunch of polygons. No cool special particle effects, no nifty vertex shaders or pixel shaders. No bumpmapping, environment mapping. No nothing. Just a bunch of triangles. As far as something to base a real game on, it's behind even the Quake engine.
Anyways, it's still good to see people willing to give up their source, even if it's value is nil.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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!!!!
To whomever takes over development of the engine: Please, please, please, do not fill it with frickin' penguins everywhere.
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.
Here is a description of the engine.
Clearly you're not drinking enough Mountain Dew.
I'm curious: Does the Bill Gates in your world of fiction send one of these memos
In my wee world Bill Gates cheats at cards, steals candy from children and pees on the toilet seat.
Thanks for asking.
Trolling is a art,
The difference is that your old 486 landscape generator used voxel terrain. Voxels are a great way to fool the eye into thinking its looking at a detailed, textured solid surface -- but they stink if you want to interact with the terrain, or rotate the camera, or do pretty much anything other than pan around.
Compare this to Soul Ride, which uses an implementation of ROAM (rigorously optimized adaptive mesh). While it isn't quite cutting-edge anymore--the original ROAM paper was written a few years back--no other published game that I know of has used it yet.
ROAM allows arbitrarily detailed terrain. It represents the terrain as a quadtree -- a space which is subdivided into four parts, each of which is subdivided into four parts, etc ad infinitum -- and by intelligently collapsing and expanding quadtree nodes based on the distance from the viewer to the terrain.
For you, this means that the hillock in front of your nose will look perfectly smooth, and the jagged peak in the background will also look perfectly smooth, and each of them will only use as many polygons as it needs to maintain the appearance of smoothness. That translates to a vastly improved framerate for you, and better memory usage to boot.