Is Open Source An Advantage For Game Developers?

chas7926 writes "OSNews.com is running an article that claims that the open source development model is not a very effective way to develop high quality games. Even the exceptions are not much of a threat to major label products. Does open source development only make sense for products like web servers and operating systems?"

Comments

Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[tgd]

I mean its a pretty slick polished game, but its a direct knock off of a game thats been around for ages.

No creativity in game design, just in artwork.

I've seen a lot of slick opensource games (Super Tux is really coming along, too), but they're all derivatives or direct clones of existing games.

Where is the real creativity?

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[gowen]

Where is the real creativity?

Good question. I think the problem is that an open source project has to be self starting to the point where it'll gain a critical mass of developers.

For an original game, that means you'll need a good idea (pretty rare in itself), a rudimentary (or better) engine -- that you'll have to code yourself, plus sufficiently well designed graphics and sound to get people interested.

That basically requires four separate skill sets, whereas writing a web server etc, needs at most two of those, and probably only one. And if you can't get your critical mass of developers, you're just another semi-abandoned sourceforge page.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Cylix]

Woah there thunder....

It's not like the gaming industry has been terribly innovative in itself either.

In a very real sense, they are all incredible knock offs of each others products with a wee bit of modification.

Hell, the top games in the industry are merely there to act as a advertisement to sale their wonderful new engine.

The whole arguement is senseless anyway. There is no true difference between an open source and a closed source creation of a game. Depending on the project size, you may need a few people or a team of individuals to handle the task.

The difference in the end being, one project may or may not have been made by professionals and the other project was indeed created by professionals. The added bonus is the open source project has freely available code.

Some of the greatest games we have seen to date were not made by professionals. Remember, Counter-Strike is just a modification and was made by some people via the free Half-Life SDK.

Again, it's a senseless arguement, the developement cycle can be nearly the same with an open source project. They imply there are strict management stereotypes which are followed when a project is not created outside of the work place.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[kahei]

See, when _I_ pointed this out in a previous article, _I_ was immediately modded through the floor by the 'Open Source IS CREATIVE IT JUST IS BAD MAN GO AWAY' crowd, so much so that I required several week's rest on a quiet Greek island before I could resume normal activity.

Whereas _you_, by way of contrast, are at +4. ;_; _so_ unfair.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[generalpf]

It's not like the gaming industry has been terribly innovative in itself either.

Uhhh, Frozen Bubble is an almost *exact* copy of Bust-a-Move. The gaming industry is at least more innovate than *that*.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[j-pimp]

For an original game, that means you'll need a good idea (pretty rare in itself), a rudimentary (or better) engine -- that you'll have to code yourself, plus sufficiently well designed graphics and sound to get people interested.

Well Carmack has release the engines for Doom, Quake, and Quake II. Granted their not state fo the art, but I still enjoy a good game of Doom deathmatch. Also look at all the features that are supported by doom these days. OpenGL, mouse look, jumping (from a standstill), and more. Sure most of the creative doom and quake mods are simply counterstrike clones, but they are perfectly good engines that you could make an original game with. The diversity of games cloned with the4 engines prove that.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[TopShelf]

You'd think they would have instead used one of the all-time classic computer games instead. Yes, it has drawn elements from prior games, but the depth, creativity, and endless playability of Nethack makes it stand out whether considering open or closed-source games...

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[gowen]

Carmack has release the engines for Doom, Quake, and Quake II...most of the creative doom and quake mods are simply counterstrike clones

Right. Giving the developers an engine and an idea ("clone counterstrike") reduces the needs from four to two, which is why we have got these games. And creativity in the FPS genre is pretty thin on the ground. "Thief" is the only one that added much in the way of gameplay since Half Life.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Junks Jerzey]

It's not like the gaming industry has been terribly innovative in itself either

The difference is that companies in the game industry don't attempt to directly clone existing games. They get very heavily inspired by existing titles and copy lots of features from them, even using a popular game as a prototype, but they don't simply attempt to write an exact version of a game right down to the name. You see this all the time in hobbyist game development.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Threni]

> Where is the real creativity?

We're talking about the games industry here. Same answer as if you'd asked about the music industry - somewhere else. There are new games, but in the same genres. The first game(s) in a genre are important - all the rest are just mutton dressed as lamb.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[SQLz]

but they're all derivatives or direct clones of existing games.

I've kinda felt this way about the past couple years of commerical games too, especially for the PC. Of course, we've had a few originals but since Half-Life, there hasn't been a title in the US except maybe BF1942 and UT2004 that has not bored me to tears. I'm an FPS guy so I don't know what has been going on in the RPG/RTS world.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Chris_Jefferson]

Wait there a second!

There is a HUGE difference between "copying ideas from another game" (which is what most people do) and trying to copy a game right down to the fine gameplay details (frozen bubble)

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[dup_account]

The article assumes that the only objective is to write a complete game, from scratch. The other way to look at the problem is to consider building the tools... Then people can come along and use the tools to build games. Maybe a group can add artwork to the mix, that kind of thing. There seem to be a few projects building engines, and layers. And people have started to build games on top of these.

I think that game mods, and level builders is the way to look at it. The original company built the engine, and others use it to make their own games. Same with OS development.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[jadenyk]

Uhhh, Frozen Bubble is an almost *exact* copy of Bust-a-Move. The gaming industry is at least more innovate than *that*.

You mean like Grand Theft Auto -vs- Driver, Max Payne, True Crime, etc... And GTA was probably a pretty damn close copy to something else before it. There hasn't been any true creativity in a long, long time... And unfortunately, this statement isn't only true for video games.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[tgd]

Must be the piles of credibility my uber-cool four digit UID gives me. :)

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Anonymous Coward]

Endless playability... until you die for the seventh time and realise that games which don't let you save your progress are NOT FUN unless your time is so worthless that starting over doesn't count as a major setback.

Nethack is an in-group game. It's aimed at nethack players. I'll put it this way: my mom currently plays Freecell. There's a chance she'll enjoy Frozen Bubble if I ever get round to introducing her to it. The probability of her enjoying Nethack is roughly equivalent to the probability of the next pope being a lesbian.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[daVinci1980]

It's not like the gaming industry has been terribly innovative in itself either.

Yes, I can see where you're coming from. There definitely haven't been any innovative games created by professionals. Definitely not Commander Keen, The Sims, Doom, Quake, Battlefield 1942, Deus Ex, GTA3, PopCap games, Everquest... Nope, none at all.

There is no true difference between an open source and a closed source creation of a game.

Did you read the article? He points out some very important differences. Let me add another: code control. I don't want people whom I don't know poking around in code that they don't necessarily understand. I don't want people who don't understand data structures trying to add 'features' to my code. Games push the limits of your CPU and GPU all the time. You don't want to do that because of inefficiencies in the code. You want to do that because you're adding effects that people have never seen before. Or you want to make your units more intelligent then other players.

What strikes me as funny about your argument is that most of the innovation that has gone into games in the last 10 years is stuff that players generally don't even notice. Better pathfinding. Increased polygons count through more efficient storage. More textures used better. Better AI. Random map generation.

But players don't notice these things.

They just notice how this unit is similar to this other unit in this other game.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[generalpf]

Frozen Bubble is nearly identical to Bust-a-Move. They just replaced the dinosaurs with penguins.

Grand Theft Auto has several differences from Driver et. al. If those "clones" were as close to GTA as Frozen Bubble is to B.A.M., you can bet damned sure there would have been a lawsuit.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[johnnyb]

For those interested in NetHack, but who don't want to do it text-based, here is Falcon's Eye - a 3D perspective version of Nethack (it's 2D, but w/ a 3D perspective). Much more enjoyable gameplay.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[abandonment]

open-source is completely viable for the game industry - in fact if the industry is to survive in the future beyond one or two massive 'mega-publishers' (like EA owning criterion & renderware etc), the rest of the industry is going to HAVE to shift to open-source to defend themselves against these massive companies.

much like how linux gained it's foot hold in the webserver & OS market. the game industry is just a bit further behind the curve.

how much longer will 'indies' (ie small non-publisher-affiliated dev houses like id) be able to compete against the mega dev studios like rockstar or EA? it's coming to the point where the return on investment is becoming too high, most companies simply can't even enter the market because of the cost of entry.

if you can suddenly shave off $250,000 + off of your startup costs (by using an open-source engine as opposed to licensing the tech), or more (as opposed to developing the tech from the ground up, which could cost millions), why wouldn't developers want to go the open-source route?

the main issue at this point is publisher resistance. publishers are the 'old school' business-mindset like the RIAA and the MPAA - they refuse to acknowledge that open-source exists and that it might be useful to their businesses.

in the game industry, it's all about the IP - if you own the IP then you can make money, whereas publishers look at open-source and are just scared away because of the simple words 'open source'. it implies to them that they don't control things...

It all comes down to the licenses and misconceptions about the requirements of those licenses.

GPL is the death of any game-related project for example. It is the kiss of death to a game library or toolset.

publishers have to know that they can close the source of the product, even for a short period around the release date (that crucial 3-5 months after release) so that they can make their money back...then once the game is out and 'old news' then they are more open to releasing code into the open-source field again.

Open source is slowly creeping into the industry, more from the toolset and libraries side of things, slowly sneaking in from the sidelines. Recent games like chrome used open-source physics engines (ODE), Id releases their old tech as open-source, but this doesn't really count because no one has ever used a gpl'd license and actually released a product with it afterwards...see my above comment about the gpl regarding that...

i personally feel that it's only a matter of time. we were at E3 last year and had really good responses from everyone we spoke with and have been making some great inroads with universities and other schools looking to work game developing into their courseware.

so, yes there ARE projects out there that are 'self-starting' and have been around for several years...it's just a matter of time until the rest of the industry notices and starts paying attention.

1. they laugh at you
2. they ignore you
3. they fight you
4. you win.

so far we're on step 2 - we've been laughed at, we are currently being ignored, next phase is the most interesting, when the 'old-school' mindset tries to drag it's heels avoiding the inevitable.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[timts]

current games are no longer something one person can write in a few weeks, it's like a movie, many people need to work on it, with high budget, for years.
well, just like those independent movies, open source game will have its place, but we still see "major" ones are not being open source/independent.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the big deal with Frozen Bubble anyway? It kind of sucks because it's so short. I mean Snood is much, much, much, much better. FB is good, but it just doesn't last. Is there any way to download new levels for Frozen Bubble?????

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[dasmegabyte]

That's because any hobbiest clever enough to come up with a great, original idea is also clever enough to try and get paid for it.

If you write something completely commercially unviable, like a direct clone of a game that's been out for thirty years, you almost have to give it away.

Back in my emulation days, crummy emulators were almost always free, while the really great ones (Magic Engine, for example) were shareware. When the crummy ones got to the same level of greatness, many of them would turn commercial, too. A community is a great thing if you don't have the knowledge or time individually to create a polished product...but if you create something new and fantastic and desirable on your own, you may as well ask for money. It's the eternal trade off: do you accept the burden of responsibility with a little cash, or do you give up reimbursement in exchange for the technical assistance of the community?

There's also the issue that many creative people are more interested in creating then dealing with the technical hassles often associated with OSS. I've noticed that the average shareware game for the Mac is prettier and more innovative (in terms of interface, usually) than the average Windows game. And I've never seen a Linux-only game I was interested in playing (Angband and Nettrek excepted, but only due to nostalgia)...the ones I've played were visually flat and uninspired.

Of course, the development of cross-platform game environments could change all that. If you can develop a game that looks good on a mac but will run on Linux/Windows/etc, why the hell not do so?

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Igmuth]

Yes, you could save $250,000 if you are reusing existing tech, but if you are going to be the one to push the envelope, instead of rehash existing things, you are going to lose money to people not licensing things from you.

This is assuming you have some method of getting the majority of people to buy the game instead of copy it, say by using "closed source" artwork or somthing. (I say majority, since there are going to be people who will copy it anyway, as they do many games in todays market)

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Myolp]

Where is the real creativity among every other open-source product? Most opensource applications and systems I've looked at are either immitating an existing product (e.g. OpenOffice) or implementing a well known architecture (e.g. databases, web servers etc.). Some open-source projects are innovative, but these are mostly results from academic or corporate research (e.g. WWW).

I think most of our creativity goes into our work, and our open-source project on the side gets whats rest after a long days work...

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Matt Ownby]

Doom and Quake both came out well before Half Life (and thus, before Counterstrike). Therefore, the doom and quake mods you are envisioning are not counterstrike clones. If any similarities exist, it can only mean that counterstrike is a clone of the earlier mods.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[MrAndrews]

But I think the point of this is that it's not the tools that are the problem: there are great open-source engines out there that will improve slowly over time as with any lively project... it's the creation of a game itself (on a case-by-case basis) that isn't viable in a traditional open source environment. Rather than slowly chipping away at a project over a few months or years, you need to slog away intensely - and very likely in secret - so that your end result is worth playing.

I don't know that it's necessarily true, though. I'm starting to think that a "walled garden" approach might be best... keep particpation limited somewhat, and keep the product hidden from the public until it's done, and then release the source. Is there anything inherent in open source methodology that would make this impossible, or is it just that the current perception of open source doesn't involve walled gardens?

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[arose]

Forget "Frozen Bubble", what about "Battle for Wesnoth"?

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Anonymous Coward]

Make your own, lazy bastard.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[icc]

For an original game, that means you'll need a good idea (pretty rare in itself), a rudimentary (or better) engine -- that you'll have to code yourself, plus sufficiently well designed graphics and sound to get people interested.

At least for the game engine, we have Crystal Space

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Anonymous Coward]

Commander Keen: Super Mario Bros for the PC.
The Sims: Dollhouse simulation.
Doom: A leap in technology not gameplay.
Quake: See Doom.
Battlefield 1942: Counter Strike meets WWII.
Deus Ex: System Shock.
GTA3: Crossover from everything.
Everquest: = Ultima Online = MUD.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[ajs]

I would have cited Wesnoth, GLTron and .

What's interesting about that list is not only that they're all great open source games, but also that they're cross-platform!

Life is good for open source gaming.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[ajs]

Doh.. that's Neverball. Me and my penchant for not previewing! ;-)

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[It'sYerMam]

Unless the doom/quake mods were created after counterstrike was.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Red Alastor]

There is a difference between open source and closed source games. Open source ones tend to have a higher replay value. There is no incensitive to develop an open source game where the players will play once and will play once and get tired of it.

That makes puzzle (frozen bubble for instance), Real Time Strategy and the like very appropriate but story driven like most RPGs that you only play once and never touch again innapropriate.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[drzhivago]

Innovative and creative doesn't mean 100% unique.

I think that all the games listed are innovative and creative in some standout way (except Keen).

Doom had multiplayer which none of its forebears had.

Quake was the game that drove 3D hardware acceptance.

BF1942 and Counterstrike are only similar if you say they are FPS games. And BF1942 has vehicles. If you wanted to say "BF1942: *** meets WWII", use Tribes instead of Counterstrike.

GTA (yes, even the first 2) took different genres and made games that are greater than the sum of the parts.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[david.given]

There's three huge problems I've got with Frozen Bubble.

Firstly: the UI design isn't great. In particular, the two little widgets that tell you what colour of bubble you're going to fire now and next. The now one is part of the graphic design for the launcher, which deemphasises it. This means that your attention is drawn to the next one instead. I can't count the number of times I've fired a bubble into the wrong place because I've been looking at next instead of now.

The levels don't ramp very well. The difficulty remains, on average, the same all the way through. This means that there's never any feeling of getting somewhere.

And, the big one: not enough music. What music there is is great. But there's just one track, that gets played over and over and over and over again until you start going insane... either it needs a decent playlist, or else it needs a track that loops properly so it isn't quite so obvious when it stops and restarts.

But apart from that, it's a pretty nice game. <flame>Even if it is written in perl...</flame>

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Idarubicin]

1. they laugh at you
2. they ignore you
3. they fight you
4. you win.

Although I don't mean to pick on the parent poster specifically, I see this line of reasoning (paraphrasing a popular quotation) quite often applied to open source software.

We would all do to remember that being laughed at or ignored is not necessarily an indicator of guaranteed future success. Sometimes people ignore products that are genuinely hopeless, too. Perhaps there are some types of software development that genuinely don't lend themselves to a full-on open source apporach.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[An Onerous Coward]

Yeah, open source projects have long been hampered by the fact that project leaders cannot control who puts what into their code. For example, one time in 1997 after a vicious flame war between Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman over the relative merits of the Linux kernel versus Hurd, Stallman went in and rewrote the TCP stack so that it dropped all packets from kernel.org. It took Linus months to figure out what was going on. They all had a good laugh about it.

Dude. If you don't want people messing with your project, don't give them CVS commit access, and ignore unsolicited patches. Result? Complete control over your code.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[abandonment]

this is exactly what we have been noticing as of late.

the sheer amount of art resources required simply means that you MUST have some kind of funding or resources available to get a commercial-quality game title completed.

what the game industry is completely ignoring is that they could 'jump start' that process by a period of several years by using existing technology as a starting point.

this is the exact reason that companies like ibm, novell and the film industry have begun major initiatives towards developing open-source as the foundation of their businesses.

they are in the business of selling consumer products (ibm->hardware, movie industry-> films), not develop software, exactly the same as the game industry.

the only companies that benefit from the current 'license the big commercial engine for EVERY RELEASE WE EVER MAKE' trend are the big engine companies -> ie epic, unreal, criterion (now ea)

the rest of the industry has to play the never-ending game of catch up, just to get into the ball game...

what if the smaller developers banded together to create the tools - the game engine is the commodity, it shouldn't be the 'make or break' the company decision like it is currently.

>>Yes, you could save $250,000 if you are reusing
>>existing tech, but if you are going to be the
>>one to push the envelope, instead of rehash
>>existing things, you are going to lose money to
>>people not licensing things from you.

did the game industry bash valve for 'rehashing existing things' with their quake2 modded engine?

does every single unreal engine developer get blasted for 'rehashing' unreal? (they should perhaps but that's another discussion)

this is a stupid argument. every game ever made is 'rehashing' concepts previously created in other games. if you are creating the entire game content for your game (art assets, animations, bitmaps, etc), then how is it rehashing?

if the INDUSTRY as a whole can spend 6 months enhancing the engine for your game's specific requirements, AND these changes benefit the entire industry, then PERHAPS the game industry as a whole can actually make progress, instead of simply rehashing the same concepts...

considering that it takes a serious AAA developer 12-18 months (using an existing engine) to get a game to release stage (and this is optimistic), why would they NOT want to know that when they get to the point of starting a new project that not only are all of their updates and enhancements now available, but there will likely be a large number of OTHER improvements and enhancements that the rest of the industry has contributed as well...

as well, how does open source prevent you from licensing your custom version of the engine? the entire 'linux industry' is built on this exact concept.

a second point is - if you are a small indie developer that is 'betting the company' on your next game, you have 2 options currently:
- completely reinvent the wheel, which will likely take a period of 2 years or longer and millions of dollars

OR

- license your engine from one of a few big middleware companies, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars PER title.

hence why EA just bought criterion. they spend millions a year licensing renderware over and over for every single title (well not every title in EA's case, but for most developers it is), at some point there is no point licensing, might as well just buy the company.

enter open-source into the mix.

instead of having to desperately fight and scramble over the little bit of IP and the brutally short period in which said IP is valuable...which for the game industry tends to be a period of about 3 months, if you are lucky.

then there is the fact that the oh so valuable IP in games, over which such idiocy as the half-life2/doom leak caused such huge uproars...if these developers were using open-source engines, this would have never been an issue.

the art content (ie the 'brand') becomes the value, NOT the commodity (the game engine).

it's only a matter of time before the rest of the industry realizes what the big IT and film companies already have - open source just works.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[ahdeoz]

By Half Life, I assume you mean Wolfenstein 3D. Or that you are 5 years younger than I am.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Hatta]

This article is just silly. The best game ever written, nethack, is open source. It is descended from rogue, but that like saying Deus Ex is just a ripoff of wolf3d. The sheer sophistication of the gameplay dwarfs any game I've ever played. Each game is its own epic with novel challenges that can be solved in unique ways. It really allows for creative thinking, which you never see in games.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[17028]

"If you can develop a game that looks good on a mac but will run on Linux/Windows/etc, why the hell not do so?"

Support, I'd say. Supporting all the crazy PC configs under Windows is one thing, where there's a huge market to compensate for the hassle, but doing it under Linux is another matter entirely. Mac is a lot easier, so I'm with you on that one. If you could just say "you're on your own" to the Linux users, that'd be one thing, but if you're selling a product that's not really feasible.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[ahdeoz]

If better AI results in worse gameplay, then I don't want to be good. The ghosts in pac-man are smarter than the bad guys in every FPS I've ever played.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[ahdeoz]

Nethack has terrible playability. I'd rather go through Rogue again.

Playability isn't infinite randomness. It's what Super Mario Bros. has that Commander Keen didn't. It's what Spear of Destiny had that Doom didn't.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[KDR_11k]

Didn't Catacomb 3d come out a bit earlier?

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[KDR_11k]

did the game industry bash valve for 'rehashing existing things' with their quake2 modded engine?

For the record, Half-Life was derived from Quake 1, not 2.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Anonymous Coward]

well said!

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Yep. It's like crank science -- as Carl Sagan said, "They also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[abandonment]

doh, bad memory...invalid page fault...

even so, my point is still valid, was valve derided for using an even OLDER engine than the (at the time) current wave of tech (ie quake 2)...

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[dasmegabyte]

Well, I kind of figured the game environment would find some way to abstract the hardware to the point that supportability of any particular platform wouldn't an issue. Imagine a Java-like virtual machine designed for fast execution of floating point math, vector/SIMD processing and fast direct OpenGL/SVT/OpenAL execution...

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Anonymous Coward]

Weren't we shooting people long before that?

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[fondue]

"if you can suddenly shave off $250,000 + off of your startup costs (by using an open-source engine as opposed to licensing the tech), or more (as opposed to developing the tech from the ground up, which could cost millions), why wouldn't developers want to go the open-source route?"

Please show me where you can obtain a commercial quality console or PC game engine and tools for free.

"the main issue at this point is publisher resistance. publishers are the 'old school' business-mindset like the RIAA and the MPAA - they refuse to acknowledge that open-source exists and that it might be useful to their businesses."

This is completely false. Publishers want a saleable product. They would be more than happy to invest in a project that used existing o.s. tech if it meant they didn't have to sink millions into an unproven team/design. Witness the widespread uptake of the Unreal, Id, Havok and Renderware (etc.) technologies.

Publishers are simply not being approached by developers using open source engines or tools because no suitable ones exist to make modern games.

I think that ultimately Open Source is viable for the games industry, but the development cost is very steep and likely to remain so for a while yet. If we consider how long Mozilla took to get going even with huge resources, and that the browser is a (comparitively) stationary target, we have to consider that Open Source games development may never close the gap. Although on the positive side, the useful advancement of graphics and physics tech for games could be argued to be slowing down.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Minna Kirai]

It's what Spear of Destiny had that Doom didn't.

Spear of Destiny sucked compared to either the original Wolfenstein3d (which at least had novelty) or Doom (which had variety, atmosphere, and enough AI to be outsmarted)

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[DirePickle]

Did you just say that Doom and Quake mods are Countrstrike clones? I... brain hurt...

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Anztac]

But this isn't how open source works! We don't get one genius that can code a whole engine, game and graphics at once, that's not how any game works.

There's a reason that all the greatest games are $50 (besides marketing.) It's beace it requires a massive coordinated effort to produce these games, some people like Id, Valve, EA, etc make the engines and have the money to hire all the graphics artists game programmers, level designers, sound effects, etc to get the game out before the engine is out of date!

Open source can't compete on these grounds. The reason that web servers and similar programs work so well on linux is that they've followed the unix progression.

The UNIX ideal is that you make programs to do a very specfic, specialzed job, really really well. And then, you can combine these specialized jobs into more sophisticated systems, but you never just build one general purpose program from scratch and have people use it. That would be duplicating code.

Luckily, this has been slowly happening in the F/OSS community. I was elated when I read on here about NovodeX, the Open Source physics engine. Awesome! Now every time someone wants to make a 3D shoot 'em up, they don't need to take a class in physics and figure out how the hell to do object colisions most efficently. This is the UNIX mentality. Now we can have people focus more on the graphics side of things.

The advantage of Open Source is that it builds exponentially. Now we have this physics engine here, and maybe people will use it. If they tweak it, test it, bug-fix it, they give back to the community. As more people use it, it gets better, as it gets better, more people use it. Pretty soon you have game developers having a viable alternative to Havoc.

So what is my advice? If you're thinking about writing a game, start off and see if there's components that might work to your advantage... perhaps pair the NovodeX with a free source graphics engine and the tweak them both.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Anztac]

Another consideration. Any time a corporation puts money into tweaking an egine that they purchused, that's money in the toilet. After their game, they can't sell the engine to anyone, and the have to buy a new liscense next time. With F/OSS when you put in effort it reciprocates because it makes the code that much more usable and attracts others to using it.


and oops, that was meant to be because above. =/

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Edgewize]

No, Valve wasn't derided over their engine choice, because they did quite a bit of hacking on it. The overall architecture may be borrowed from Quake, but the Half-Life renderer is significantly better than the original. (I am not sure, but I believe that Valve also had access to the Quake 2 engine source, though they did not base their game around it.)

The Half-Life netcode is also vastly improved over Quake's, and patches have kept it on par with the industry's latest multiplayer games.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and as Carmack himself stated right here on slashdot, the Quake III source code will soon be released aswell.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[airjrdn]

The UNIX ideal is that you make programs to do a very specfic, specialzed job, really really well. And then, you can combine these specialized jobs into more sophisticated systems, but you never just build one general purpose program from scratch and have people use it. That would be duplicating code.

Hence the reason there aren't any say...different distributions of Linux. I see what you're saying. O_o

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[17028]

You can make games in Java and Flash right now, but there's a reason most developers don't. If you want to be somewhat technologically up to date with your game, which granted, not every developer needs or wants, you have to stick with something high performance.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Gooba42]

If there is a parallel I'd say it's the CLI vs. GUI stuff. It's taken a relatively long time for the Open Source community to start producing really good GUI interfaces and programs. It's not that they haven't been producing very good software all along. It's that they focused very tightly on producing the very effective, tried and true CLI apps. The game development process is arguably similar.

In Open Source gaming we are now recreating the tried and true games and building a certain skillset and developer base. When these people are sufficiently proficient or even bored with re-creating is when they can and will move on to pushing the envelope. They will scratch their own itches the way CLI development did and eventually get around to scratching other peoples' the way GUI development did.

In the end, games aren't fun only based on novelty. Recreating some very good games of the past is a worthy end unto itself. There are plenty of "out of print" but incredible games out there which are lost in the scramble for the "Next Big Thing" in commercial game development.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Ohreally_factor]

I think you're on to something here. Part of the problem is that game development overlaps at least as much with film production as it does with software development. Sure, it's possible to create an "open source" film, but are there many that are going to watch it?

Development of OSS tools for game development is where the action will be. Don't expect the big game development companies to open source their leading edge engines. That would just be giving up their competitive edge. The only way we'll see something like that is if an OSS engine exceeds anything the proprietary developers are doing. Then it would make sense for them to actively contribute rather than exclusively work on their own thing.

Furthermore, I think that the itch that gets scratched by OSS in software development gets scratched in the gaming world with game architectures that allow mods and extensions.

And one last thing. If an original OSS game ever becomes wildly successful, it will be because it is being lead by a Steve Jobs type, someone with a powerful RDF, the right combination of charisma and manipulativeness (i.e., management skills) and the single-minded vision of an auteur. In other words, a colossal asshole.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Madax]

Well its not free, but $100-$395(depending on Liscense type) is about as good for any commercial game.

http://www.garagegames.com/pg/browse.php/

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Dwindlehop]

Multiplayer games use a client/server model. Any Joe Schmoe can take your open source game and modify it to produce cheats. In fact, they routinely do. BZFlag, an open source tank game, has all sorts of problems with cheats.

http://www.bzflag.org/wiki/KnownCheats
http://w ww.bzflag.org/wiki/SubtleCheats

Some are due to their partitioning of the game simulation between clients and server, but some (like aimbots) are almost impossible to eradicate. Id games which have been open sourced famously have this problem as well.

For single player games, this isn't a problem. For performancer reasons, almost all multiplayer games will have this problem. There is no easy technical solution.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[valkraider]

Please do not port software to Windows!

It is this that makes me want to not support this guy or his game.

For one, I use Mac OSX. For two, some people don't *like* having to tweak their computer to get it to run(ala Linux). For three - some people HAVE to use Windows (for work or some lame reason like that...). For four - no one doubts the merits of Open Source until they go on tirades like this one.... It's like extremo Democrats who protest violently - they only ultimately hurt the cause.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think what it comes down to is a matter of content vs. programming. Open-source suffers for content and polish, always, because it's still a programmer-dominated phenomenon; artists do contribute, but many are uninterested or unaware and do not provide the support needed. Corporate projects, of course, have cash to offer, which allows them a wider range of approaches.

This also explains why many open-source games fail, and the ones that succeed are clones; it's easy to clone content, but it's hard to create the original thing.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[abandonment]

it's in my forum sig

http://www.realityfactory.ca

we might not be doom3 or farcry quite yet, but those kinds of engines are only required for a very limited set of games that also require massive investments in art resources (ie fps type games).

features include:
- normal mapping, compressed textures, fullscreen anti-aliasing, etc
- bumpmapping (embm)
- other 'shader effects'
- configurable weapons systems, hud systems, conversation & message systems
- interactive, dynamic scripted camera systems
- scripting language with over 600 scripting commands exposing the engine internals to the designer
- art pipeline tools VERY similar to quake3/half-life2/doom3 - you can use quark/worldcraft/etc for your editing/texturing

like i said,the tools are out there, the community acknowledgement and support might not be.

our engine was developed by about 3-4 programmers over a period of several years.

if we had serious (ie commercial) developers contributing even 1/10th of their time to providing enhancements or improvements to the engine, this would progress even further.

the engine is being taught at several colleges as part of their game design courses (including several taught by myself) and more than a few universities are looking at the engine for their own game design coursese.

the options are out there, if you choose to look.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[abandonment]

forgot to mention:

- MIT license
- printed manuals (for those that like them)
- CD distributions, commercial support
- has been featured in 5 or 6 different 'make games' books published by different companies, including Clayton Crooks most recent 'awesome game creation no programming required', which has 3 chapters covering RF.

features in the wings:
- realtime physics system (integrated, just not exposed to the non-programmer/designer types)
- enhanced terrain system (again the code is in the engine, it's just not exposed to the designers as much as it could/should be).
- more advanced shader support, support for the newer shader models etc...

so don't tell me the tools don't exist because it's a flat-out lie.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[severoon]

I think you're definitely on to something here...building the tools can work, building a game is less likely.

Here's why I think that's the case. A good game, such as Spiderman-2 or Doom or Half-Life, all require the vision of a particular person or group or people. OSS, by its very nature, seeks to put everyone's contributions not only on equal technological footing, but on an equal creative footing as well. The fact is, for most games, the creative aspects should be limited to a select few. Which select few? Well, business gets this wrong a lot too and the game fails...but at least business organizes to put a select few in charge creatively. With OSS, it's open for anyone and everyone to step in and make their contributions. People whose contributions are disregarded are simply going to leave the project, meaning that it will languish and die on the vine. In business, the paycheck keeps 'em crankin'.

So you can see how this is lagging way behind the other kinds of apps if you consider that many use OSS somewhat naively. Despite the anti-Socialist (and correct) argument made my OSSers about free-as-in-speech-not-as-in-beer, many developers accept that as a theoretical notion but warp their minds to understand that they have equal footing in every respect as everyone else on OSS projects...this is most naive developers expectation going into an OSS project. And this is, in a big way, OSS's original motivating force. Think of Stallman's purpose--he wanted to be able to tweak the code produced by other labs and businesses for his own needs...and now apply that to the gaming industry. If you're using a business or research application, you can simply ignore the features that others have added that you do not require. A game, on the other hand, is an enveloping experience and anything that takes out of that experience lessens the overall impact of the game.

That's not to say all OSS must be done naively, though. It simply needs to adapt a bit. My approach would be to assemble a team of OSS developers with a business-like structure...this guy's the creative director, this guy's the artist, etc. The power of OSS here is that any "guy" will do in any particular capacity given that he has the talents, so one may leave and be replaced by another (asking several to work together, though, as on business apps, is where the problems come in). Once the vision of the game is hammered down to a specific few that have signed onto the overall creative direction of the project owner, the rest of the work can be split up and farmed out to OSS people.

A slight paradigm shift might be in order for this type of game development, too. If an OSS project incurs expenses, I see no problem with simply listing those expenses on the website and releasing the game as a low-cost, for-profit product until the budget is paid back. Then, OSS it. I'm sure that some will figure out a way to apply the we-provide-code-free-but-services-cost-money approach to gaming (I'll probably receive replies that this type of game already exists, maybe like the Sims or something), and then you won't even need the for-profit stage to recoup losses. One of the big factors preventing a lot of OSS development, as I see it, is the fear that losses cannot be recouped. Why doesn't OSS start a mini-movement to get participation in a self-regulating patent/copyright system? You create an app, count up the expenses associated with that app, and then create a license that requires you to open source it once those expenses are recouped? Needs work, but the seed of a good idea perhaps.

The problem with an idea like OSS is that it's too revered. The difference between ideas and beliefs is that ideas can change and adapt to new requirements. Beliefs cannot change without mitigating explanations and some loss of face. OSS is a good idea...it's time to evolve it.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Cylix]

I did make one mistake...

I had meant to say, the gaming industry hasn't been terribly innovative itself lately.

Yes, Commander Keen, Doom and Quake were all great technological innovations. Keen had excellent side scrolling. Though really wasn't it Wolfenstein which really broke the FPS genre? Doom was simply another technological innovation and again with Quake. We added slightly more levels of depth which nearly the same level of play.

I'm not quite sure how BF1942 becomes classified as an innovation. It was a good engine, with lots of players and some nice vehicle code. All of which had already been done. I think you are confusing popularity with innovation.

In fact, the only one on your list I'll dare grant you is GTA3, but really that was just a pretty version of GTA.

Evercrack is just a MUD with a graphical layer on top.

I have no idea what PopCap games are.

We seem to be argueing different points though and as such I'll return to the original point.

The entire OSS vs closed software development model is still senseless. It's an arguement developed profession station alone. In the end it's an odd motto to live by, "Our way is better because we are paid."

You are certainly correct most players don't pay attention to polygon count or monitor speeds as play progresses. They aren't aware that the code has been optimized or the coders took time to use those SSE pipelines they paid bookoo bucks for.

This is highest horse to ride I'm afraid, simply being angry players don't understand the things they can't see nor were ever told about. However, what tends to count more in terms of innovation points, original gameplay and not simple rehashes of aging models.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Minna Kirai]

For the record, Half-Life was derived from Quake 1, not 2.

Wrong. Half-Life was based on the Quake2 engine, even though the developers had already made substantial mods to a Quake1 baseline prior to Q2's release.

You can verify this yourself by scanning an original install of Half-Life for function names from quake2 code, such as this file.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[geminidomino]

Theif was awesome, but don't forget Deus Ex. The engine allows for character skill growth and variable story arcs. A nice touch.

Other than that slight oversight, you're right. An FPS is an FPS these days. =\

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Minna Kirai]

Id games which have been open sourced famously have this problem as well.

Uh, Half-Life was never opensourced, and Counterstrike certainly had that problem!

Arguing that open-source makes online cheating easier is basically a red herring. It does reduce the technical skills to produce a client-side cheat, but that doesn't matter much, because the majority of cheaters are just running patches written by someone else anyhow.

The only approach that proprietary shooting games have today isn't really satisfactory either. They contract to Evenbalance to produce new cheat-detection code faster than the cheaters can keep up.

Licenses like the GPL interfere with that technique, but are not totally incompatible with it.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Bri3D]

Of course opensource is going to be the only way to go. One engine for each genere except sports is the way to go. What makes a game fun? Not exactly the engine-take FPS for example. You jump, you shoot, you drive. Once your engine does that with some good graphics, it's done. Then comes CONTENT. Content is what makes a game. Within 10 years, I see DirectX/etc. as becoming an engine, not just a base platform. Because the engine is basically done now. Sports is the only exception really. Because it is team-base and you need to see+control a whole team, the control STILL needs refinement. They're almost there, but not quite.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember when Wolfenstein 3D came out. I am probably at least five years older than you. And I don't think that Wolfenstein 3D and Half Life are even comparable. Wolfenstein 3D bored the hell out of me where as Half Life sucked me into its world like no game had (or has since) done for me.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and as Carmack himself stated right here on slashdot, the Quake III source code will soon be released aswell.

YHBT.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a horribly formatted rant, sorry, I'm forced to use Lynx right now :)

"That's because any hobbiest clever enough to come up with a great, original idea is also clever enough to try and get paid for it."

Many, many innovative single- or dual-developer softwares. It's not like every programmer says, "Well, my work's NOT INNOVATIVE ENOUGH, can't sell it, BSD License it"

Charging for everything you can is a common mindset in the USA, I guess, but greed and creativity/success aren't always related. Lots of poor / middle class folks are greedy shitheads, and yes, a few incredibly rich folks are not hogs who think with their wallets. Thank Bob.

"If you write something completely commercially unviable, like a direct clone of a game that's been out for thirty years, you almost have to give it away."

Right, look for shareware Windows tetris clones, or other old-game ripoffs for sale. Tons.

"Back in my emulation days, crummy emulators were almost always free, while the really great ones (Magic Engine, for example) were shareware"

iNES (the first good nes emulator, but not the best for very long), no$gmb (if the situation hasn't changed since I checked) and Magic Engine are the only times I've seen anything close to the situation you're describing. These days, jeezus. Look at ZSNES -- always good, now DAMN good, and went from freeware to GPL. FCE Ultra, best Linux NES emu, GPL (used to be some other noncommercial use license, before that freeware) and NNNesterJ/NesterJ/Nester (best NES emu avaliable IMO, windows freeware, open source); Nesticle (kicked iNes's ass back in the day, always freeware). Don't use emulators as an example; MagicEngine is the exception.

"A community is a great thing if you don't have the knowledge or time individually to create a polished project ... but if you create something new and fantastic and desirable on your own, you may as well ask for money"

You discount all the innovators who for whatever reason don't choose proprietary -- for moral reasons; because their business plan doesn't emphasize software sales; when they wouldn't have the money to market this innovation ; when it's used to 'make a name' ; generosity / altruism ; ego. And then others.

"There's also the issue that many creative people are more interested in creating then dealing with the technical hassles often associated with OSS." You forget that OS X has something to do with OSS; you forget that DEVELOPERS create the interface (and I'm not sure I like the idea of nontechnical developers), and there are such creatures who are both technically-minded and creative. Actually, many writers can feel quite at home with a text-based system like Linux with its word-based CLI interface; a visually-oriented creator would probably enjoy and be more efficient with the Mac GUI interface. But both Linux and Macs can be both CLI and GUI OS, with varying quality.

Actually, I have always believed that games would be the final (and permanent) home of commercial software when the world uses OSS on most computers at last. There are more reasons to stay commercial here; for one, there's not as much altruistic motive, as a game doesn't "help" anyone much; also, games are a vastly different type of market (to a point, you can never have enough -- one office suite works until you need new features or won't work for you anymore... possessing one RPG won't keep consumers from buying another, unless they don't have enough disposable income ATM. Games take a lot of beta testing and debugging; there's also lots of content creation or licensing or subcontracting. That either takes a lot of time or a lot of money. And with the exception of really good and useful engines / devel tools, a company can't reuse much from others' work even if they want to, except for content, which is expensive and probably copyrighted. Yeah, I'll be buying Linux games, shareware or commercial, whenever they're released, as long as they

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[jonwil]

You can completly Open Source a game and still make $$$ off it by having "closed" content (art, levels, sounds etc)

I guess the biggest problems publishers have with Open Source:
1.You cant copy-protect something that is Open Source
2.Publishers who think that Open Source == Open Content
3.The worry about someone taking their hard work and using it for a different game (or a Total Conversion)

It is more than possible to have an Open Source game with "closed" content and still make big $$$, its just that the big publishers dont realize this.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[hyc]

"...so that your end result is worth playing" ??

You guys all seem to think that first-person shooters with new never-before-seen surprises around every corner are the only formula for making interesting games.

What ever happened to games that actually focused on *game mechanics* and skill? When Pong was invented, all the graphics effects you were ever going to see were right there on the first screen - no surprises, no easter eggs. Just pure game play. And people played it. For countless hours.
Almost every game that followed for the next decade or so was like that - improving the graphics and sound was nice, but the critical ingredient was always the actual gameplay. That seems to be sorely lacking these days.

It seems to me that now is the perfect time for the open source model to blossom in this industry, because there are already mature game engines out there. Rather than focus on story-oriented games that are only interesting one time through, people just need to get back to creating games where the game play takes center stage. A good story makes a nice backdrop to set the stage, but it shouldn't overshadow the play of the game itself.

If your game isn't worth playing any more because its secrets are suddenly public knowledge, then I think your game was never worth playing in the first place. But if you make a game that's challenging and fun to play even after you've heard the story and learned all the secrets, then you've got something.

Environments like MUD have a great potential here, but I think they also prove that not everybody is creative enough to create an interesting game setting. Still, the fact that the tools exist now means that there's no technical barrier to creating a fun game.

A lot of games today have a tight script and a single story line. Once you've worked your way through it once, there's nothing left, it's "solved" and done. But nobody says it has to be this way. You should be able to create a game with no script at all, where you just drop into a world and can follow any path you choose, and every path is different. Today's video games with their incessant scrolling, pushing you ever forward toward the Boss at the end of the Level are just silly. The formula is too rigid and too tired, it's just one step removed from watching a movie where you have no interactive powers at all.

The game engines and other tools now exist in open source to enable someone to create a really great, long-term enjoyable game. People just need to wake up and do it, and open source collaboration is the perfect approach to creating something open-ended like this.

I'm reminded of the Adventure Shell, a Unix command shell modeled after the original text adventure. Instead of writing the next Apache or Samba, someone needs to start writing the next Adventure, and get other contributors to toss in their ideas. Fancy graphics and sound don't make a great game. Ideas do, and nothing enables the advancement of new ideas like open source devlopment.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[jdowland]

In addition, there are some routines in there which make it run really slow on old hardware. It demands the full resources of my (450mhz / 512mb) which I find a little extreme for such a simple game.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Merk]

And in the end he won.

*grin*

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but DOOM didn't follow an open-source development model. DOOM is abandonware, not OSS. DOOM was developed using a standard commercial business model (it was published using a slightly odd model - shareware - but the development was all old-school). And finally, the only part of DOOM that's open now is the source code. The source code is not DOOM. DOOM is the source code plus assets.

That's the problem here. A web browser has assets in the few dozen (icons, mainly). A web browser pretty much is its source code. But a game is far more than just its code, which is why the OSS model fails to cope so abysmally.

I'm surprised there's even debate on this subject, it's so damned obvious.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Anonymous Coward]

the 'old-school' mindset tries to drag it's heels avoiding the inevitable.

Get over it. There is nothing inevitable here. Games cost such a vast amount of money to develop that buying an engine is an entirely marginal cost. Free engines will not make the indie games industry competitive unless customers suddenly decide that 1995-standard games are acceptable again, and that is simply never going to happen unless EA, Sony and Nintendo all go bust overnight. The indies aren't going bust because they have difficulty writing or paying for engine code. They are going bust because they cannot compete. Now you might think that "competing" means having the same engine technology as EA. No-one else in the industry thinks this way any more. Competing means competing on content not flashy pixel shaders or special effects.

Who exactly has the "old-school mindset" here? You're trying to solve the last decade's problems. The games industry isn't the film industry, and it's going to take more than putting a camcorder in everyone's hands to make indie development of large games viable.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed so. Steps 1, 2 and 3 happen for both genius ideas and crackpot ideas; step 4 then becomes "you win" or "you lose" and only history can tell.

What I want to know is why is it Slashdot, and the OSS crowd in particular, use this kind of illogical nonsense. It's clearly a psychological thing - "us vs the world" - but it makes smart people look like idiots.

Re:Why is Frozen Bubble used as an example?

[jadenyk]

I believe someone already posted this, but it's fitting:

"Their song goes dun dun dun dun-duh-duh-dun, duh dun dun dun... Our song goes duh dun dun dun-duhduhdun, dun duh duh dun... It's really different."

FOSS developers don't tend to be gamers

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody ever consider that? FOSS is about scratching an itch, the drive to solve a problem. Gaming is about recreation. After an hour of Vice City you're ready to work again. I think it's for the same reason we don't see that many open-source films or CD's.

Re:FOSS developers don't tend to be gamers

[Nos.]

But at the same time, there's the mod community that does produce open source work for a lot of games. I guess this could be called scratching an itch as well, since they see something lacking in a game.

Re:FOSS developers don't tend to be gamers

[MankyD]

Perhaps true, but that's not the point of the article. The author is trying to point out that, even with a dedicated open-source development effort, the development model or open-source can't drive an 4 year, 80 hour work week for a game that will only have a year or two of play time.

This is certainly no knock against open-source development, just a statement of the current state of things.

Chicken and Egg

[Analogy Man]

If enough of the big names went the open source route they would benefit from best in class architecture components. The key though will remain in:

Generating Eye Candy

Good game play

Considering all the enthusiastic LAN Party / Overclocker / Case Modding folks out there I would think Linux Distro's would appeal to them. The challenge is having the return on investment for the very labor intensive bits.

Re:Chicken and Egg

[Tim C]

If enough of the big names went the open source route they would benefit from best in class architecture components.

You mean like the Doom 3 and Unreal engines? They're not going to be open source until their respective developers judge that they have earnt all they can from them in licensing fees. Those earnings, incidentally, are already factored into the general budget for a big name game. I'd be surprised if long development time games like Half Life 2 and Doom 3 actually made much of a profit just on the retail game sales; I'd imagine that a fair chunk of it comes from licensing the engine.

The trouble with open sourcing the engines is that you can no longer charge those licensing fees, yet you still have to expend the time and money to develop the engine in the first place.

Re:Chicken and Egg

[Anonymous Coward]

1. The trouble with open sourcing the engines is that you can no longer charge those licensing fees, yet you still have to expend the time and money to develop the engine in the first place.

Depends on how you licence the code you open source. It can have a 'must contact us for commercial use' clause -- where a price for the engine could be charged.

Everything else you wrote I agree with.

Re:Chicken and Egg

[ThaReetLad]

I think the major problem with open source games is that the OSS payment system for developers of being paid for support just isn't going to work when a game has to be polished and perfect in terms of UI before it will sell. Given that the majority of game development these days is artwork, level design etc rather than actually game engine, a system where graphics engines were open sourced but the rest of the stuff remains copyrighted seems possible. On the other hand gaming is a cut throat business and the major players are not going to give their rivals a helping hand, and why should they.

In the end I think the current system works well for games. Major labels share in house, and possibly engines for big money to other companies, but in general they compete to push the boundaries of what is possible.

I suspect that if games were OSS based that we would still all be running on 486's and hardware 3d would never have taken off.

Face it, games are to the computer hardware industry what porn is to the publishing industry. The dirty little secret that is the driving force behind new technology.

Re:Chicken and Egg

[hrm]

The trouble with open sourcing the engines is that you can no longer charge those licensing fees, yet you still have to expend the time and money to develop the engine in the first place.

I disagree with that. It is quite possible (and dealt with in a gazillion different OS licenses) to distribute source for free, yet require license payments if said source, or a derivative thereof, is used in a commercial offering.

In fact, I would argue that due to the extremly high visibility of game engine software (as opposed to, say, the exact roots of source of firmware in a network hub or something like that) it is quite unlikely that any half-major developer can successfully "sneak" the code in his own product without you noticing.

Of course there's the possibility that the competition will use the source only to steal the good ideas from your work, in which case you don't get paid. But for that we'll soon have software patents so you can protect the ideas too. See how software patents help open source? (quickly ducks)

Re:Chicken and Egg

[fucksl4shd0t]

The trouble with open sourcing the engines is that you can no longer charge those licensing fees, yet you still have to expend the time and money to develop the engine in the first place.

I think this statement pretty much proves the open source development model. ;)

You see, the reason the situation is as you've stated is because each game design company is having to make a new engine from scratch. Because the technological advancement involved in making a game provides a more marketable edge on the game itself, and the engine. If the engine were open sourced though...

Then everybody making a FPS could use the same engine. Now, instead of everybody having to write their own special engine, they could take the same basic engine, fork it to make their own technological advancements, and then maybe merge their code back, or something. At that point, sure, they lose licensing revenue from the engine, but they gain the ability to cut a certain amount of development from the game.

That would force them to focus on gameplay, story, and so forth. There wouldn't be any more "No plot, just kill everything" games whose only purpose is to sell the engine that drives it.

Aaa, I've lost track of what I was saying. Sorry.

Re:Chicken and Egg

[mahdi13]

Ever hear of the Torque Engine? It is an open source game engine that Garage Games has available to license.

You can not release a game based on this engine unless you pay them for the license. It is possile

Re:Chicken and Egg

[squiggleslash]

I'm hoping we're talking semantics here, but when you write:

I disagree with that. It is quite possible (and dealt with in a gazillion different OS licenses) to distribute source for free, yet require license payments if said source, or a derivative thereof, is used in a commercial offering.

I'm hoping you mean "is used in a proprietary offering". This is certainly the case, the most famous example being Trolltech's QT.

However, an offering can be commercial and open source. A company making money from, say, online play, might be perfectly happy with an entirely open source game, depending on the nature of the game and the number of "secrets" that'd have to be shipped with it.

Re:Chicken and Egg

[falkyrian]

I'd gladly pay for a game on Linux. The importance here is having the Open Source base for Open Standards in graphics design. With true portability these games can be sold on multiple platforms as well. Linux is a great O/S for business, web, DB, and scientific applications. It has not shown itself to be a very good graphical environment for desktop users. Sure the movie studios use it to creat good movies but that is with propriety engines. Linux needs solid support behind graphics developement and some mechanism for getting developers to use it more. OpenGL has been around for a while and is used by some developers like ID but in general most have gone the easy route of DirectX....why? The obvious answer is the Windows desktop market share. The Linux community needs some mechanism for generating enthusiasm for commercial gaming on its desktop. Games will sell Linux to the average person WAY more than a Word clone. Hope it happens someday as the only reason I have a Windows box around anymore is for gaming:-)

Re:Chicken and Egg

[Senzei]

The problem with that is that there can probably never be a "One Engine to Rule them All". It just does not work that way. The doom 3 engine is capable of things that the engine used for Battlefield 1942 simply cannot do(full dynamic lighting for example) At the same time the BF engine can do a lot that doom 3 may not be able to do (large open areas with lots of vehicles)

The point is that you are not going to see one engine that can do everything that everyone wants anytime soon. Even if everything is based from the same engine you will see so many variations of it to fit a specific need that trying to call them all the same engine is almost pointless. I agree that more standardization would be great, it would especially make the task of modding for any new games much easier. I just will not be holding my breath for it to happen.

Re:Chicken and Egg

[Ollierose]

I'd say that this was an ideal place to apply the clauses in the GPL regarding source distribution. Instead of shipping the source with the app, stick a mail-in coupon into the box saying that the person can redeem this for a source CD at $FIXED_COST. As the majority of users probably won't care too much about having the source code, such secrets wouldn't be distributed to the majority of users.

Of course, the cheats (to take FPSes as a typical example) would be among the groups which request the source, to add their l33t wallhacks and so on.

Re:Chicken and Egg

[Anonymous Coward]

Not with the GPL:

"To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all."

Re:Chicken and Egg

[eugene ts wong]

At that point, sure, they lose licensing revenue from the engine, but they gain the ability to cut a certain amount of development from the game.

The amount of time spent developing isn't nearly as much as you'd like to think. The loss in revenue from opening the source would almost always be more than the savings from opening the source.

Re:Chicken and Egg

[PitaBred]

Patents != copyrights. The license covers copyright, not patents.

Re:Chicken and Egg

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course there's a lot of time in development for these engines. This is also where Open Sourcing projects can really help companies. Companies can, as they have in the past, open source a project so they can cut costs of a team of 4-40 programmers, artists, scripters, designers, audio specialists, etc. working double or triple shifts. As a result all of that time and effort that goes into research, development, and implementation of a new engine comes at a much lower cost. The developers who are just getting started get to learn from the experiance and are also able to breathe innovation and fresh ideas into the industry of cloned clones. The company gets a more diverse set of ideas from a much more diverse and potentially expanive and more work at considerably less cost. The price? If you don't have a well thought out licence agreement all of the hard work can be turned against you by your compeditors or some third party. Open source is great for everyone, but one must tread carefully upon the border of freedom and self-protection.

Re:Chicken and Egg

[AvitarX]

Especially for a company like ID. All their customers buying (renting) the DOOM/Quake engines will save lots of money, but now ID needs to develope the engine and put out great games. While the competition only needs to put out the games.

If everybody was making their own game engine every time Open Source would make a lot of sense, but as it is in game engines there is tremendous code reuse anyway.

And unless Carmack could get a Doom foundation going it is an incredibly unproffiable business

Re:Chicken and Egg

[patternjuggler]

The trouble with open sourcing the engines is that you can no longer charge those licensing fees

Quake is available as open or closed: "For teams that dont want to operate under the GPL, were now offering a "non-GPL" QUAKE engine license for a flat fee of $10,000 per title". As long as you own all the source, you can license your stuff under as many licenses as you want, for pay or not.

Completely open MMPORG - including "cheats"

[davejenkins]

I once had an idea for an MMPORG, where the code was completely open-- obviously, some people would write hacks, cheats, and other tools to stay ahead. Others would write patches to disable the patches from the first group. Still others would buy and sell all these add-ons to the game...

Then I realized it had already been invented in 1969 by some CompSci geeks based on some theoretical work at the RAND corporation...

Re:Completely open MMPORG - including "cheats"

[teromajusa]

Actually MMPORGs are pretty much the only genre of game that the points brought up in the article don't apply to. MMPORGs are long lived, have tons of replay value and don't need cutting edge technology (The most popular MMPORGs today are by and large still the first ones released). There have been attempts to build open source MMPORGs, but so far not much to show for it. Still, I think the problems are more a lack of focus than than anything else.

Re:Completely open MMPORG - including "cheats"

[Anonymous Coward]

PlaneShift (www.planeshift.it) is a very promising open source MMORPG. Their third tech demo is on its way Real Soon Now and should show that a fully fledged MMORPG is quite possible given a team dedicated enough. Here's to hoping we can all prove the article writer wrong. :-)

Open-source art

[Anonymous Coward]

The article makes a good point that good art must be original and can not be generated by modifying older art.

To make open-doom you'd also need open-source zombie models, open-source hell-growth textures and open-source moaning sounds.

Re:Open-source art

[Anonymous Coward]

open-source moaning sounds? I want to moderate THAT project.

Re:Open-source art

[Analogy Man]

Never underestimate the energies and interests of a devoted group of fans of a game! This is not exactly Doom 3 level material, but a budy of mine on the other side of the pond has started an open source graphics forum for a shareware strategy game

With no compensation beside the enjoyment of the graphics and the games folks will do quite a bit.

Re:Open-source art

[Anonymous Coward]

and boy, are the graphics there UGLY.

no offense to your buddies, but reusing some pd startrek models and rendering them without textures into a background of shitty stars doesnt make for great game graphics. and graphics is the #1 thing you notice in a game.

Re:Open-source art

[Anonymous Coward]

To make open-doom you'd also need open-source zombie models, open-source hell-growth textures and open-source moaning sounds.

Don't forget open-source gravity and open-source physics. Nature only gave us the binaries to those...

Re:Open-source art

[Analogy Man]

The game in question is not your basic FPS. The graphics could be eliminated completely and the game would still be fun. It is a strategy play by mail and takes months to play a game. Not some people's cup of tea, but maybe for others.

The point is that those with an interest in something will throw themselves into an effort.

Re:Open-source art

[grumbel]

I don't think that point is true, after all artwork is not that much different from code. Sure if you want it all 100% original, you might need to generate huge parts from scratch, but you don't need that in most cases. Commercial games have used sounds from sound-collection cds for quite a while, textures can also often get reused without to much problem, a brick wall stays a brick wall, grass stays grass, clouds are clouds, no matter of the type of game. A model of the golden gate bridge could be usefull for quite a few games. Sure for some games you want a specific style and you need to create huge parts from scratch, but for many games, especially those that mimik the real-world more or less having a library of available 3d models and textures at hand helps a lot.

Its basically the same with code, I can not just pick some random piece of code and magically reuse it in my app, in most cases the code reuse is limited to some pretty small parts. The only larger areas where code reuse takes place are libraries which are specificly designed for reuse.

Re:Open-source art

[melted keyboard]

...and open-source moaning sounds.

My wife and I could generate some good open-source moaning sounds, but I'd be afraid that Dr. Dre would steal the samples for a new song.

Freeciv is a good example, isn't it?

[nayigeta]

I think Freeciv is a very good counter example.

However, I do agree that open source model does not encourage games that are graphic intensive that involves a lot of artwork.

Re:Freeciv is a good example, isn't it?

[Cat_Byte]

FreeOrion is another one. I was disappointed when they decided to put the starlanes in that everyone hated in Master of Orion 3.

Re: Freeciv is a good example, isn't it?

[Black Parrot]

> However, I do agree that open source model does not encourage games that are graphic intensive that involves a lot of artwork.

Which could be a potential plus, since game companies, like Hollywood, have been focusing too much on effects and too little on substance.

Re:Freeciv is a good example, isn't it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really, since it is mentioned in the article you didn't read.

Re:Freeciv is a good example, isn't it?

[RAMMS EIN]

Freeciv would be a better example if one could negotiate with the AI. This has been a feature request for years, and last I checked it was still not implemented.

Besides, Freeciv is a very obvious and uncreative copy of the original Civilization. This is not bad, but it's not showing the open source model works well for games. At best, the open source model works well for cloning - this is why we have Freeciv, Stratagus, desktop environments that mimick Windoze, and MS Word and Office clones. Heck, even GNU/Linux is a UNIX imitation.

There is also original development, but it tends to produce only very simple or even proof of concept things - which is not even bad in a world where bloatware is the standard.

Re:Freeciv is a good example, isn't it?

[meringuoid]

However, I do agree that open source model does not encourage games that are graphic intensive that involves a lot of artwork.

But hey, we do have six hundred and forty-seven variants of Angband, two hundred and thirty-eight variants of NetHack, and nine thousand three hundred and twelve Tetrises.

And did anyone ever catch that wumpus?

Re:Freeciv is a good example, isn't it?

[luugi]

RTFA. Freeciv is mentionned in the article.

Re:Freeciv is a good example, isn't it?

[bagel2ooo]

This is one of the reasons I have been hoping for an embracing of GPL and/or similar licenses for purposes other than code. GPL'd art, music and the like. I know there have been steps in this direction but I'd like to see a full on trek down this path. :)

Re:Freeciv is a good example, isn't it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did everyone hate everything about Master of Orion 3? I know I did.

Re:Freeciv is a good example, isn't it?

[smallfries]

I think that the article makes a good point - that it is hard to evolve something that is based on one-time play-through value - but then tries to paint all games with too broad a description. Some types of games get better with each repetition - I've played Civ in its incarnations on and off for about ten years - and these games would work in an open-source development model. What about nethack or the various empire type strategy games? GTA is a game that people would have kept coming back to as it was improved and features added. It is only the linear style of story-driven games that would have problems in being developed incrementally...

Re:Freeciv is a good example, isn't it?

[Cat_Byte]

That was one of the biggest disappointments in a game ever for me. I played 1 all the time, still play 2, and was upset with 3. There is a loooooong list of things i hated about it. I'm bad with names (especially alien) so when I had to vote, I didn't know what race I was voting for/against. I hate starlanes. And I REALLY hate not being able to control production. I couldn't even get it to build a damn colony ship.

Re:Freeciv is a good example, isn't it?

[perrin]

Freeciv would be a better example if one could negotiate with the AI. This has been a feature request for years, and last I checked it was still not implemented.

It is implemented in the cvs version and will be coming out in the next release.

Besides, Freeciv is a very obvious and uncreative copy of the original Civilization.

We were the first out with multiplayer civilization. In a number of areas, the commercial civ games cloned us!

Different Exceptions

[Snowgen]

Frozen Bubble? nah...

My Exceptions would be BZFlag, Battle for Wesnoth, and FreeCiv.

Re:Different Exceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

Quake. Quake1 is still alive due to advances made with the source that was released (ie ProQuake).

Re: Different Exceptions

[Black Parrot]

> Battle for Wesnoth

Casual site visitors should note that the actual game looks much nicer than the screenshots would lead you to expect. This is a very polished (and fun) game, though still in pre-release v.0.8.3.

Re:Different Exceptions

[jellybear]

Don't forget Cannonsmash, the best table tennis simulation I've yet to see.

http://cannonsmash.sourceforge.net/

Re:Different Exceptions

[theKinkyRabbit]

Those games are strongly inspired, or even remakes, from already existing titles, but I agree that the the fun and addiction they provide is well worth a little lack of creativity or professional look.

And as an added bonus, let me mention Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe (main page down, unfortunately, but the files are there :)

Re:Different Exceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

Eggscuze me? You make an exceptions list and leave out Neverball?

Shame on you.

Re:Different Exceptions

[tepples]

Isn't Neverball just Super Monkey Ball with a different engine and different maps?

Re:Different Exceptions

[ageitgey]

Frozen Bubble? nah...

My Exceptions would be BZFlag, Battle for Wesnoth, and FreeCiv.

I used BZFlag and FreeCiv as the two exceptions in the last paragraph of the actual article. Did you read it? :)

Adam Geitgey

Re: Different Exceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, it's a really nice game.

I've been playing for months, there are lots of available campaigns with nice story-lines, and multiplayer is also great :)

Re:Different Exceptions

[The Famous Brett Wat]

• FooBillard - OpenGL pool/snooker with stunning good looks
• Scorched 3D - OpenGL turn-based tank shooting game

Both are currently available in Debian/testing.

Re:Different Exceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

Neverball definitely looked interesting.

Downloaded it for Win32, it refuses to run if I don't have mscvrt71.dll

Google, google. Oh, this is .net version 1.1. 23 megabytes of crap.

I'll pass.

It might not be open source...

[vasqzr]

When companies like ID release the 'game source' (not the actual engine code, but the code to the game) it helps mod makers, and ultimately gets more people to play the game, especially in it's modified form.

Eventually they released the source to games like Wolf3D, Doom, and Quake but that doesn't really hurt them. Heck, the Quake source code was stolen from Crack.Com where Dave Taylor was doing a port, and that didn't seem to affect them much at all.

Re:It might not be open source...

[ricotest]

Open source still works on the coding front. How about Crystal Space which supports everything from portals and volumetric fog to XML levels and ODE-based physics?

Level design can be done the same way. Something like CUBE's multiplayer, online level editor would allow anyone to drop by and improve the levels.

But unlike a general purpose application with obvious goals, games are carried by the vision of one or two people usually - and the essence of 'collaboration' is marred by this leadership. Usually everyone ends up with their own idea for how the game should develop, and without the monetary incentive or a healthy relationship, random groups of skilled coders or artists can easily fail to produce anything. Which explains all of those empty Sourceforge projects.

Well yeah

[RsG]

Open Source coding versus proffesional coding is kinda like distributed computing versus a supercomputer. What people fail to recognize when promoting Linux is that it's chief competetor is a corporate giant that has stagnated. In game develpoment, where there is strong competition, the proffesionals are actually making the most of their budgets. It's no surprise that the Open Source alternative have trouble competing; they're up against the best rather than up against a corporate monoculture.

Note that this isn't an attack on Open Source; there are many things it does well. But like distributed computing it takes advantage of a squandered resource that's already there (spare cycles = free developers). Against an effecient supercomputer (dedicated developers) it can't compete. Whereas agaisnt a _broken_ supercomputer (Microsoft), it can.

Just my 0.02$

Re:Well yeah

[MyDixieWrecked]

That's why shareware games generally do a lot better. Writing a game take a LOT of work, especially when it comes down to polishing it and making it original. If you're gonna develop a game that's going to compete against the big boys, you've gotta be very quick so as to keep up with technology.

If it's gonna take you 3 years to put out just a beta of your game, you're gonna fall behind.

Although, opensource mods for Q3A or Unreal are generally a lot better because it requires a HELL of a lot less work. the game's engine is already there, and if you just use the 3d engine to make a totalconversion, you're gonna have a much better product in a much shorter period of time than coding the thing from scratch.

i'm surprised that there's not more opensource initiatives dealing with mods. Especially since you can now you can pick up Q3A for 10$ in bargain bins.

Re:Well yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

First off, there are plenty of developers that write or work on open source projects professionally. Second off, it is impossible to take anything you claim seriously because you don't have any evidence, and can't spell.
You are wrong and stupid. Welcome to slashdot.

Re:Well yeah

[Chatsubo]

Hmmm, it looks as if the engine is not the issue here, but that the real problem is the creative content. So how would this help?

You can also take this a step further, by using a opensource engine and then building your game on top of that, instead of a commercial one. That way resources are efficiently spread. One team of people dedicated to writing a mostly-generic engine, and others dedicated to building games on top of this.

But once again, these are the very people that we seem to be lacking in numbers.

Re:Well yeah

[MyDixieWrecked]

I'm surprised that no one's made any decent generic game engines. I mean, making an OpenGL wrapper that's geared specifically towards games with pathfinding code and decent classes for managing stuff. Maybe some AI...

Creative content is AN issue (and yeah, it's pretty big), but it's not really THE issue. I mean, look at all the game mods that are out there. There's an insane number of mod teams that are putting out pretty good free mods. although, they, too, are all just remakes of other things.

ie: ooh, another counterstrike clone. oooh, another capture the flag mod. ooh, a dragon ball Z total conversion!

People need to get more creative with their mods. Just changing the models and graphics for a game doesn't really make a new game.

QuakeRally and Natural Selection are two pretty creative mods. And that one that I just saw that involved a birdseye view where you kill infected people looked neat, too.

In fact, one thing that I think would really help opensource game development would be an engine with a license that allowed commercial games. If one of the big boys adopted an opensource engine to build their game, and it became a commercial success, that could really push amateur game programming more into the mainstream and attract more talented artists.

GIMP also needs to be polished up a bit more. Its text handling and mouse tracking still aren't up to par with photoshop let alone even OSX's built-in graphics functions.

Re:Well yeah

[NutscrapeSucks]

What people fail to recognize when promoting Linux is that it's chief competetor is a corporate giant that has stagnated.

This statement would have been a lot more insightful if you were aware that Linux's chief competitor is actually Sun Solaris (and other System V UNIX) and not MS Windows...

(while you can complain about Windows, its hard to argue that it sat completely still like Solaris has for the last decade+.)

Re:Well yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

"If it's gonna take you 3 years to put out just a beta of your game, you're gonna fall behind."

I don't know if this statement is true.

Having the most recent eye-candy is certainly nice, but graphics have come so far that I don't believe you need to be cutting edge to provide an involving game experience. If a good game came out as a mod of the unreal tournament game (the first one!) I'd be cool to play. A game's graphics don't really NEED to be any better than that.

Re:Well yeah

[RsG]

I think the reason nobody has made a "generic" engine is simply because Moore's law would render it obselite in a few years. Consider the vast difference in technology between Doom and Half Life, and then between HL and Doom 3. Similar creative content (well, ok practically the same bloody content - originallity is the exception not the rule) yet the game engine and gameplay have advanced considerably as a direct result of advancing technology. Unless the generic engine was _very_ advanced, to the point where Moore law won't give us anything better, the game(s) wouldn't compete with more recent titles. Licened engines are ususally state of the art when released, and used in "generic" titles three years later (I mean comercial titles like Soldier of Fortune, not mods in this case).

Re:Well yeah

[dasmegabyte]

To make a game these days, you need an engine, content, and a set of tools to make the content work with the engine.

Open source mods only need to make the content, which makes them much easier to negociate than writing a game from scratch. They also don't have to DESIGN the engine or the tools or the interface for either, something OSS (without commercial support) has classically had difficulties with.

Re:Well yeah

[RsG]

Ok point taken, but I was looking for an example of open source versus corporate monoculture (which is misspelled in the grandparent, d'oh!). Linux/Windows is one that everybody on /. knows already. My point was only that game development is not dominated by a single stagnant company, and consequently is harder to compete in.

Re:Well yeah

[RsG]

Ok, maybe I'm feeding a troll, but what sort of evidence do you want exactly? Point out something that needs to be clarified or proven, don't just flame.

Yes developers do work on open source professionally, but game companies have a _much_ larger budget, and consequently a definite advantage.

(Oh, and I'm aware of the GP's spelling. Fuck it, life's too short to get your testicles twisted over spelling.)

Re:Well yeah

[meringuoid]

"If it's gonna take you 3 years to put out just a beta of your game, you're gonna fall behind."

I don't know if this statement is true.

It's entirely false.
-- 3DRealms

Re:Well yeah

[chromatic]

I'm surprised that no one's made any decent generic game engines.

I'm not. I think before you can write a generic game engine, you must have at least one game running. See Programs suck; frameworks rule! for more on this.

Re:Well yeah

[MyDixieWrecked]

good point.

It's very true, you've got to actually use your framework for something that you intend for it to be used for. You can't write some big generic game engine without also making a big game that utilizes it fully. Having a pile of example minigames helps for learning the framework, but you don't really know how well everything falls together until you actually use every last scrap of code that's in the framework and push it to its limits.

Re:Well yeah

[chromatic]

It's easier to design well an API and library if you're using it and can improve it as you go along. Even more than that, though, it's much easier to design a nice framework if you refactor it out of two or three applications that use it. Otherwise, you run the risk of designing things you'll never need, making the easy things complex, and turning hard things into impossible things.

Re:Well yeah

[dcam]

Maybe this is just me, but I get the impression that Open Source is at its best when it comes to writing code (ie engine + tools), rather than content. I'm not sure that this makes it more likely to have open source games/mods.

Maybe for some games and not for others

[thepoch]

Maybe OSS makes sense for some type of games, but not for others.

It probably makes sense for the big, endless/open-ended, MMORPGs, which people would want constant updates in features, stability, characters, etc.

It doesn't seem to make sense for games like Minesweeper though.

Here's another exception:

[immel]

Check out BZflag. I play it myself and have found very few glitches or anything. And it's cross-platform, so I have no problem finding others to frag.

Of course, there is no single player mode and it has nowhere near the eyecandy of closed-source shooters, but it is a notable exception.

Re:Here's another exception:

[Anonymous Coward]

D'oh! This is gonna get modded as redundant because I missed the previous post by 1 minute.

Who cares about profits?

[Anonymous Coward]

Open source would be great for game developers -- charge $70.00 for someone elses time and effort.

This is why companies love OSS -- they get kids to do the work for them for free the re-sell it. IBM, Dell, etc. are all riding Linux to huge server profits due to lack of licensing fees. Way to go OSS community.

"One play" games are the problem here.

[Chemisor]

According to the article, the reason is the transient nature of modern games. Once you've finished it, it is not worth playing again. That is, IMHO, the main reason why the gaming industry is struggling; all they do is create ten million dollar movies for one-time entertainment. What we really need is more simulation games where the process is more important than the content. Take Civilization, for example; it is old, but still very playable. (I have upgraded to CTP these days though) This sort of game never gets old because it is new every time you play it. Now, if only CTP had a better AI...

Re:"One play" games are the problem here.

[syrion]

The game industry isn't struggling. At all. Recently Interplay has gone under, and Acclaim is bankrupt, and Atari looks shaky, but these are by no means general indicators of weakness in the market. Think of it as the "crap games tax."

Re:"One play" games are the problem here.

[Aggrajag]

Maybe you should participate in the development of the free CTP II to get the better AI. And I think they even have a working Linux version. I use only the Windows version so I'm not sure how playable the Linux version is. http://apolyton.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?forumi d=213

hm

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagreee. All the free mods out there show that an open source model, with no profit incenetive, can make some of the best artwork and game design. And the open source community is capable of making a good 3d engine. All thats left is someone to put the pieces together, But open source develpers are more importantly working on things needed, such as web broswers, word proccessors, etc.

Re:hm

[black mariah]

Given that the most successful mods are programmed, designed, and built by a small group of people I fail to see how this in any way relates to OSS.

Re:Costs

[tc]

There are no "DirectX royalties". It's just like any other Windows API.

The only downside to using DirectX (which comes with a very mature SDK, samples, docs, and helper libraries these days) would be if you cared about porting to non-Microsoft platforms. This is, of course, a real consideration for some, but certainly not for all.

its the media

[i88i]

Sharing the code is all well and good, and it probably does help in many respects, but to compete with the big games these days, you really need to get a lot of talented artists, modelers and the like Then you need to get a good designer, and a musician or two, mappers, writers etc etc.
good games dont start and finish with the code.

Re:its the media

[patternjuggler]

The art assets are very labor intensive, and and very strongly coupled to the game they're in- which is why the industry, especially the smaller outfits, need more open-source libraries, engines, and so forth to take care of the non-art aspects. And they need more and better open-source tools in which to create the art with. That way they can concentrate on the art that really differentiates their product and not re-invent the wheel with everything else.

ryzom

[LousyPhreak]

i cant remember how 'open' this game is but i remember that atleast a great (if not all) amount of code is gpl'd by nevrax.

besides some balancing issues in the early beta (when i played it) it seems to become a really great game.
(the open beta just started on 30th august so maybe ill check back soon)

What DirectX Royalties?

[Anonymous Coward]

To my knowledge there are no royalties or fees required to use DirectX in a product.

quite true !

[phreakv6]

very true... the main reason i think is coz a game is not very usable until it reaches the final stage hence there are less hackers interested in working on it.. but if its a product like an instant messenger.. we have a basic product with basic features on top of which hackers would implement features like archiving,adding a new protocol,new buddy icons etc. thereby making a better product... its only the hacker-attractive products that become very successful open-source projects.Check out the top 10 in sourceforge and you will know what i mean.

Re:quite true !

[Bastian]

Not to mention that coding a game for the heck of it doesn't offer the same rewards that working on a utility does. If I build a web browser, my knowledge of the internal workings of the software doesn't hurt my ability to use and enjoy the software.
On a (large) game, though, I already know the solutions to all the puzzles, and the path through the game, and everything. It's the mother of all spoilers. This removes one of the fundamental things that open source depends on - that folks will stick with a project for a long time because they benefit directly from the success of that project.
This incentive can even work for small to medium-sized puzzle or strategy games with a random element, like Tetris, because there are no spoilers, anyway. But big commercial games involve lots of puzzles and surprises, lots and lots of playtesting for balance, and a lot of input from level designers, artists, etc.

The latter group is composed of people who are computer savvy, but not necessarily hackers. These people are already in short supply in the open source community (documentation, anyone?). As for the programmers, the spoiler factor plus the amount of time you spend refining combines to make it really hard for them to keep their interest up enough to stick it out for the long haul.

After all, a quick peek through Freshmeat suggests the problem isn't the number of ambitious game projects that get started, it's the number of ambitious game projects that are completed.

You can't open source everything...

[Anonymous Coward]

The main reason is because developing a game seldom means rolling your own everything. Dozens of proprietary tools are used in the development process and simply can't be open sourced. Havok for example had parts of their source leaked when portions of the HL2 source was stolen. This was a bad thing for valve, and a bad thing for Havok. But that's just one example.

Contents-driven development

[News for nerds]

Today, rather than in hardcoded programming source code, heart of games gets more and more outsourced to script, texture, polygon model, FMV, and so on done by artists - which can't be Open Source in its nature. You may ask Creative Commons License for such artworks, but I don't think it can be generarized and viable for games, let alone GPL among Open Source licenses.

Re:Contents-driven development

[mausmalone]

As a game programmer, I'm not too keen on the GPL. I find it a little too confining. Sure, I could use some code I got from an example somewhere, but it's GPL, and if I use that as a template, my work becomes a derivative work, so it's all in the GPL. I understand and respect the GPL, but I also don't necessarily want all of my code to be a part of it, so I often am discouraged from using and GLP'd code to learn from because I don't want to have to distribute my code.

And for those of you who would scoff me for not developing open-source, please take note that I respect the GPL and do my best to abide by it at all times. That means that if I don't want to contribute, I be very sure not to draw from GPL'd items. And my interpretation of "using" source and creating a "derivative work" is usually more strict than others. I could say that because I'm only using the algorithm and not the source that I'm safe, but I know that even if it's modified, that's not my code and I feel terrible redistributing it and claiming it as my own.

Why not!

[HungSoLow]

I don't think gaming is much different than servers and OS's.

It all comes down to what will make a product more stable, user-friendly, enjoyable and replayable/upgradable. Open source does exactly this, so why not start open-sourcing popular games?

Oh... right... money grubbing CEO's.. One can only dream!

Re:Costs

[kb]

DirectX ... ROYALTIES?

What exactly did I miss here?

kb
game developer
who never had to pay anything to MS so far for using Direct3D

Settlers of Catan

[saladyears]

Sea3D is an open source version of Settlers of Catan that is 100% free, has ELO ladder rated matches, 3D graphics, 1000+ active users, and really nice artwork. I think certain genres are more suited to open source games. FPS and RTS are not in that list. Board games clones can probably cut it, though.

Re:Settlers of Catan

[festers]

And the author of Sea3D is a heck of a nice guy, too. :)

Soo..

[noselasd]

People are going to mention a heap of games now.
Frozen Bubble, Freeciv, neverball, Torcs, Battle for Wesnorth, cube etc.

Ok, those are nice and fun games. But,save perhaps a few simulators,
they are rather simple games. Simple but fun.

Where are OSS games like Knights of The Old Republic, Ratchet and Clank,
Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. I like such games, never seen anything
open source remotely like it.
That's the kind og games we're talking about.

Re:Soo..

[theKinkyRabbit]

>Where are OSS games like Knights of The Old Republic, Ratchet and Clank,
>Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. I like such games, never seen anything
>open source remotely like it.
>That's the kind og games we're talking about.

Well, if you offer me a large amount of money and all the ressources I need, I'll be glad to start coding. Oh, and throw in some people to help me while you're at it. Around 50 should do it. Of course, I should charge for the product once it's done, to pay you back.

OTOH, if you only let me use my spare time and personnal ressources, I cannot guarantee the same quality, but it will probably be free in the end. I'm a generous guy, you know.

Re:Soo..

[noselasd]

Congratulation.
My point exactly.
Game developemnt is hard, it takes _alot_ of resources other than plain coding (mappers,animators,modellers,sound recordings, etc.).

Re:Soo..

[theKinkyRabbit]

Oh? Well my bad, then.
I thought you were asking a question when you wrote "Where are OSS games like (...)". In the end, we agree. Let's rejoice in harmony.

Re:Soo..

[noselasd]

;-) Just trying to get people to think abit, since there seems to
be alot of people here and at osnews almost outragous about the idea that opensource doesn't/can't produce games.

Re:Soo..

[Chris Burke]

Which is why open source development would work for commercial developers.

The really time consuming parts, the parts that wouldn't benefit from being "open source" yet are absolutely critical to having a game in the first place, are what justify commercial development.

The article asks the question "is open source development a good model for games?", but it seems to have been morphed into "can hobbiest free software developers on SourcForge produce the next Doom 3?" The answer to the latter question is obviously not. But that doesn't reflect what open source development would mean for the commercial community.

To me the best example of an OSS game would be nethack. None of the need for art that holds other OSS games back, and it thus is simply at the top of its class.

Re:Soo..

[3riol]

Well, the Open Source model is definitely not adapted to that kind of development, being geared more towards long, gradual fine-tuning of software which will be in use already from the alpha / beta stage onwards. That of course favours re-implementations of other, established games, because they have clear specifications, and there's no time pressure - people who still want to play a good Civilisation clone could hardly care less about how dated its graphics are, compared to balanced, involving gameplay.

Cutting-edge artistic effects are naturally not in the same category, if you want to compete with companies throwing enormous amounts of money and man-hours at intensive development of engines, and with legions of professionally trained artists. And ask any amateur game developer about how hard it is to find artists willing to work on their free time...

Which isn't to say it can't be done: French company Nevrax http://www.nevrax.org/ developed the NeL engine for their MMORPG Ryzom, and have released it as GPL. And the game certainly does look impressive, but the game and art remain proprietary (and mono-platform). Again, open-source seems to be favoured for infrastructure and technical projects.

Re:Soo..

[Chris Burke]

Game, and all other pure "shrinkwrap" box) developers, make their money by keeping the source (and other IP) closed.

They still could, as the "other IP", a.k.a. the content, would still be proprietary and still would comprise the majority of the value in the game. The main reason to keep the code closed is due to the substantial cost of developing or aquiring it. For developers who don't license their own code, this wouldn't involve changing business models at all.

If there were true benefits to going opensource, then the software houses would do it.

"If it was worth doing, it'd have already beeen done" is logically equivalent to "if it hasn't already been done, it isn't worth doing", which is nonsense. You could just as easily have said, circa 1998: "If there were true benefits to open source development, then system vendors like IBM and Sun would do it".

As was discussed in another thread, there's a chicken-and-egg problem here. It'd clearly be ludicrous for Id to distribute the Doom3 engine as GPL code tomorrow, because they have a huge investment in it. For another developer starting from scratch, they could develop their own engine, buy Id's, or use an open source engine. If the open source engine is good enough, it could save them a lot of money and time(= money) to modify it for their needs. That "good enough" game engine needs to be there first, just like Linux needed to be there before IBM would start funding OSS OS development. But once there, there are obvious benefits for anyone more interested in making and selling a game rather than a proprietary engine.

collaborate on technology

[_|()|\|]

The gist of the article is that games are too short lived to benefit from a collaborative development model: by the time you get out of alpha, everyone will be bored with the game. However, the technology underlying Unreal, and other engines, has evolved over the course of several games. Thus, projects like Crystal Space, ODE, Blender, and SDL are ideal for advancing a game development platform. To some extent, a library of content could also benefit from collaborative development, but serious projects wouldn't likely use it past the prototyping stage.

Story-based games, especially, deserve to be presented in a final, polished form. For that reason, I would not expect it to be released early and often. There is also a question of artistic integrity. Game designers, amateur and professional alike, have strong ideas. Can they share authorship with some dude on the Internet?

These kind of discussions...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is an endless discussion, only time will tell. It is just useless to make such theoretical discussions about what will ever happen or about the potential of this or that system.

Unfortunately OSNews has a bad reputation in always bringing up such kind of discussions, which always ends in flamewars and trolling. Please let us be smarter than them!

Re:These kind of discussions...

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately OSNews has a bad reputation in always bringing up such kind of discussions, which always ends in flamewars and trolling.

Yeah, especially when the main troll (Eugenia) comes into the discussion. Watch her pretend to have gaming industry experience.

Updates

[lachlan76]

OSS games would release much more often than a closed source company - gamers have to keep up with updates.

And who wants to patch and recompile their favourite game every weekend?

Re:Duh.... it's the content not the machine

[RichM]

True, but the open source model is perfectly suited to the actual game engines. You could have a system similar to Mozilla Firefox (the runtime environment) and then people would come along and make their own games our of it by creating content (like the extensions).

MUD

[Anonymous Coward]

MUDs have been open source since conception, and frankly there are some great ones out there. The trick with open source gaming is to create a game that PLAYS well, because, as others have mentioned, hobbiests can rarely compete with the volume and quality of art/music that a comercial game developer can. But come up with a good library for AI tactics in a turn based strategy game, or a fast algorithm for shot intersections for a 3d shooter, or any code that is reuseable independant of the graphics (which get upgraded insanely every time around) and you've got the makings of a real chance for open source games.

Re:MUD

[Mind Booster Noori]

Just let me add that almost all multiuser games and virtual reallities exist thanks to MUD's.

And don't forget, MMORPG's are MUD derivatives...

If there wasn't opensource, we would probably still playing non-multiplayer games.

MMORPGs are computer games that trace their roots to non-graphical online MUD games...

two games as counter-point

[Anonymous Coward]

Rogue and (it's descendent) Nethack.

Neither have the fancy graphics, but for amount of hours spent (wasted) and general challenge / gameplay I think they are hard to beat.

And remember, in 'scoring mode', Nethack does not have any "saved game" so if you die the game is over. It's quite an accomplishment to actually finish the game. How far would you get in Doom 3 if you had to restart from the beginning everytime you died? Note that in Doom 3 (and all modern games) the map is constant; in Nethack levels are generated every time to start a new game.

(And if you want graphics there are mods on Nethack (and others) that add GUI interface. IMHO a good game is still good even if it's done in ASCII. Graphics should only be necessary to add to it.)

Re:two games as counter-point

[TykeClone]

I like the Angband tree of nethack.

Re:two games as counter-point

[Anonymous Coward]

Rogue and Nethack are good but nonstandard examples... they are closer to board/dice/card games than FPS/RTS/modern genres -- and among board/dice/card games, Open Source is a proven format, so it isn't unusual that it's a useful method of development and testing.

It's quite an accomplishment to actually finish the game.

It's not that much of an accomplishment, really. Ascending a character is pretty easy - playing a Valkyrie is like playing in "easy mode". And once you've successfully ascended one character, no matter what the class, the game loses most (if not all) of its challenge. The fun part about Nethack is learning about Nethack.

Once you've ascended 3 or 4 characters it gets really tedious. Most hard core Nethack fans have to resort to applying weird and arbitrary conditions to their ascensions to make them interesting enough to pursue.

You can instantly drain any fun you'll have from Nethack just by reading the latest spoiler files thoroughly. If I read the Strategy Guide to Super Mario Bros. 3, or DOOM 3, they still remain fun. Something to chew on.

Re:two games as counter-point

[Anonymous Coward]

"Pretty Easy?" Damn.

Re:two games as counter-point

[Greyfox]

I always thought Diablo was a rip-off of Moria. Xpilot and Xtrek have been around at least as long as PCs have had graphics much less games. Writing games is a lot of work and it doesn't seem to be as sexy as it used to be. Back when video games were innovative, pretty much all of us prepubescent dweebies wanted to take up programming for the same reason -- to write games. Now it seems like it's more rewarding to work on more pressing problems.

Open Source for creative projects?

[l4m3z0r]

I think it comes down to Open Source not translating well to purely creative projects. Games, Movies, Music etc. In a system where the best technical solution reigns supreme open source works beautifully. I think the reason why we don't see very many creative open source games is simply because of differences in tastes regarding a new game design. In a controlled closed-source company someone can make a decision and force coders to work on it even though many of them would rather do it differently. When you put the storyline and game design in the hands of coders who will ultimately argue over it and not resolve anything(there is no right or wrong here unlike in technical problems) you will get dissillusionment and eventual disbandment of the project. Cloning a older game is much different however, all the creative is decided upon and people who love that came come together to (re)make it.

Re:Costs

[julesh]

Err... DirectX is a free redistributable. There are no royalty costs involved in using it.

Game Engines

[MrWim]

I could concieve of a market for open source game engines seeing as many game developers release thier engines a few years down the line from their product. Games (with the exception of games by id software) are all about the gameplay experiance, story and to some extent graphics, but mainly in a textures, etc. sense.

There could be many advantages to a widly commercially used game engine that is open source including saving money for all those developers who just licence engines off other software houses including cost, familiarity (engines always need a bit of tweaking), high levels of optimisation (because everyone (i.e ati and nvidia) can chip in faster code for running on their particular chipset

Game software houses release a lot of game logic source already, and often it is the engine that they havn't put their life into.

A disadvantage of this however would be it would be easier for people to design cheats, etc. Like when the q2 engine was released. Stronger anti-cheating measures would have to be put in place which perhaps would have to be closed-source

I can't really see the entire process becoming more open as people really like the anticipation of waiting for a game and small bits of info leaking out every so often. Also people have enough problems with game piracy as it is without a full and legal version of a game being able to be downloaded for free off the internet before it hits the shops.

Also a more open process might make the strong creative process more difficult as it is easy for a group of 10 people in the same room with a whiteboard to communicate effectivly and for everyone to know thier roles and responsibilities, unlike in the open source world.

So in summerised engines: yes! Whole game: No! Change in developlment process: No!

Re:Game Engines

[Junks Jerzey]

I could concieve of a market for open source game engines seeing as many game developers release thier engines a few years down the line from their product.

Replace "many" with "a select few." Really, how many game companies have released the source to their earlier big hits? You can count them on your fingers. And of course this only applies to PC games, not consoles (which is where most of the huge hits are these days).

Most stuff is created by need...

[Kjella]

...and games are mostly entertainment. Yes, there are some games that have been built up by many small contributions, but most games (at least 3D) need to have one "set" of anything to work.

One set of models, textures/bumpmaps, sounds, animations and background, all made to fit together and work in an engine. For entertainment, it is a lot harder to get the proper team together and make that push.

I think particularly the engine-specificness is a killer. If I designed this über-cool monster with this and those textures, triangle counts and what not, it would have very little reuse if there suddenly was a new engine which could do twice the pixels, and with some new rendering features. You'd probably be back at square #1 with the concept art.

Kjella

Maybe not Open Source, but Community Source

[nb caffeine]

The problem with straight open source is a lot of people would spend time digging through the engine, trying to figure out how it all works, and never really improving on the idea. I like the idea of "Community Source" (like what garagegames does, though i dont think they call it by that name) Basically, most improvements are available within the community, who are all making games. The great thing about GG is that at the same time everyone is both helping each other, and yet each others competition. Again, this could work with open source, but the good thing about garagegames is that there is a $100 cover charge to get in, so you need to be at least a little serious.

Not impossible, but...

[Phoenix-IT]

Games have specific requirements in development that other types of software do not. Applications and O.S. are typically being improved well beyond their initial release with new features, etc. Games are usually a closed-ended design with specific goals in the mind of the creators. There is a point where the general game play and plot is laid out and the designers must decide that they have hit the cut-off point for adding new features and abilities. Massive forking and diverse feature development wouldn't help a game at this point, it would just delay the release date into infinity.

Game development requires the designers to decide exactly what the game is going to be and do before the software development process begins. This very idea doesn't seem to click with the open source development model very well.

I could be wrong and I'm not an expert; but until I see something with the fit, finish and cohesion of commercial games like Doom 3 and Half-Life (1 or 2) to come out of the open source community I'm not going to bank on it.

Re:Not impossible, but...

[tepples]

There is a point where the general game play and plot is laid out and the designers must decide that they have hit the cut-off point for adding new features and abilities.

Then why does Konami keep updating Dance Dance Revolution, originally from 1998, with new songs? And what about the Madden series?

Re:Not impossible, but...

[Phoenix-IT]

Well, I was not talking about ALL games... Just most games... MMP games are also constantly evolving.

Re:open sores is a failed business model

[julesh]

Open source is not a business model.

How many

[Laser Lou]

high-quality AAA titles are available? To me, having lots of expensive technology and artwork does not make the derivative games we see in the store high-quality.

Re:How many

[black mariah]

Name an OSS game that isn't derivative.

Re:How many

[arose]

Spacewar :-D

Quadra

[Anonymous Coward]

Play Quadra (http://quadra.sourceforge.net/). It rules !

Re:Duh.... it's the content not the machine

[noselasd]

With the posibillity of ending up with a _huge_ engine, that tries
to do just about anything, thus beeing big, overly complicated, and
often a bit slow. Crystal Space is getting there(as in huge) now, and
yet it hasn't one of the nicest thing an engine needs, which is good
iterfacing and converters for content creation.
Someone should perhaps convince garagegames to opensource their Torque
engine, it's really nice ;)

Graphics, gameplay

[Anonymous Coward]

People do need pay to develop games.
This requires people to actually buy games.

This however does not say that it should be impossible to develop good opensource games. Opensource projects tend to take longer times, and are not filled with "ugly hacks". You should all know how many "just get it working NOW!" theres in todays games. Some games to use BSD types licensed stuff internally. Like scripting engiens and stuff.

Whats missing from opensource games, are that when the game becomes "ready" then the graphics and gameplay already feels old.

Opensource need to attract more people intressted in graphics and sound before a serious attempt of a game can be realized.

artists

[rayde]

i think one of the big advantages corporations have over the OSS writers is that these companies can afford to hire top quality artists to accompany the coders.

while open source programmers are certainly capable of the technical aspects of a game, it is in the overall presentation that is lacking. For example, there aren't going to be too many people willing to write an entire musical score to accompany a OSS game, nevermind having an orchestra perform it.

since open source generally means "in the programmer's free time" and "with basically no monetary resources to aid development" don't expect a game with the presentation values of Doom or Half-Life.

Re:artists

[black mariah]

This is in no way offtopic and is in fact the entire crux of the argument AGAINST open source game development. You simply can't find good artists or musicians willing to work for free. On the rare occasion you do find a good artist working on a mod, he's typically one of the project heads. Getting someone to come into a project is almost impossible.

The parent is entirely right. You can't expect commercial quality games from OSS development. By the time the game is done, the bar for 'commercial quality' has risen two notches higher.

Re:artists

[swillden]

You simply can't find good artists or musicians willing to work for free.

This is an interesting statement, given the historical stereotypes of artists and musicians. My impression has always been that there are loads of people out there with significant artistic/musical talent, but who are unable to turn it into a profession, and loads more people who manage to do it professionally, but only by doing commercial art/music, which has to be just about as unsatisfying to them as writing reports is to a programmer.

Is it really the case that there are no good artists or musicians who would work on something like that for the joy of creating something? Or is it just that the artistic, musical and programming communities don't intersect enough for the people to find each other? Or is it that the art and music worlds haven't caught onto the possibilities of on-line collaboration and distribution?

Dunno.

Re:artists

[kiljoy001]

I agree, but I also want to remedy this, (I am trying to learn C just to create games). I would PAY AN ARTIST, someone good, someone that no one knows, (think deviant art) to do art work for my game. Pay them something like one grand for the whole job. See if it that turns some heads ...

Re:artists

[black mariah]

Is it really the case that there are no good artists or musicians who would work on something like that for the joy of creating something?

No. The artists I know that are involved in game development do freelance work in their spare time. I don't know of any coders that work freelance the same way.

Or is it just that the artistic, musical and programming communities don't intersect enough for the people to find each other?

There you go. What little interaction occurs has typically been in the demo scene.

Or is it that the art and music worlds haven't caught onto the possibilities of on-line collaboration and distribution?

It's more difficult to collaborate musically online. When you're talking about moving around a few hundred megs of sound files you end up running into problems.

Digital artists are needed

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't have a real hit game without a decent graphics/sound. Creating artwork for a game requires more time, effort, and skill than coding game engine. It's easy to spend some hours a week on Open Source coding but you need much more than that to make quality art.
Consider also fact that contrary to code artwork is not reusable in most cases. Every time you have to reinvent the wheel.

Re:Digital artists are needed

[BenjyD]

I wouldn't say that creating artwork is any more difficult *to an artist* than coding is to a coder. I just think that not so many artists are either aware of or prepared to work for an open source project.

Re:Digital artists are needed

[grumbel]

Artwork is as much reusable as code, sometimes completly, sometimes with modifications, sometimes not at all. If I want to write a spreadsheet the Apache source code won't help me much, if I however want to modify Apache it will help me a lot, same is very true for games, if I just want to write a series of new levels for my favorite game it will of course help a lot if I have a library of textures and 3d models available for reuse.

Re:Digital artists are needed

[HerbieStone]

Creating artwork for a game requires more time, effort, and skill than coding game engine.

I'm both a coder and I also like to draw. (http://madmike.ch) There is no implicit higher complexity into drawing compared to programming. Both will need some skill and some dedication to learn the proper ways.

The Problem is a (digital) artist will need to have some sense of how art works on a computer. How his artwork will look like on a screen and how to create art directly on a computer. You won't want to draw with a mouse.

As a sidenote, I couldn't get my wacom to work with the a 2.6 kernel as of now :-/

Re:Digital artists are needed

[dasmegabyte]

Of course artists aren't willing to work for an Open Source project. The whole point of OSS is fostering a community and right now the community isn't attracting a whole lot of artists.

But it's getting better. There are many areas of OSS that are steadily attracting creative people because of the flexibility they offer -- programs like Blender and packages like Postnuke have fewer hassles than comparable commercial offerings, even if their interfaces aren't up to par. Remember, artists don't mind working hard for little money (anybody who's ever cleaned an airbrush or developed a photograph knows what I'm talking about), they just aren't likely to do so unless they care about the cause.

Want some beautiful Open Source games? Attract game artists with flexible and powerful open source tools that do something NEW -- not merely clones of packages they already have (*cough* The Gimp).

Re:Digital artists are needed

[arose]

I have no problems with my Genius Easy Pen, then again, I would trade that for any Wacom, even if it would be problematic to set up.

Re:Digital artists are needed

[TerrapinOrange]

Want some beautiful Open Source games? Attract game artists with flexible and powerful open source tools that do something NEW -- not merely clones of packages they already have (*cough* The Gimp).

Err.. what sort of something new? When was the last time Adobe or Macromedia created something new?

The whole digital image manipulation market is very well established, and revolutionary advances occur very rarely. Gimp is full of neat little features that photoshop doesn't have, many of which undoubtedly are completely original ideas. However, it's impossible to compete in this market without producing a tool that is similar to photoshop in many respects, simply because, as the market evolved, that's where it went. Could you explain to me how an image manipulation program that wasn't like photoshop would even work?

Re:Digital artists are needed

[dasmegabyte]

When was the last time Adobe or Macromedia created something new?

Are you serious? Adobe CS had at least a half dozen new features I can't do without now that I have them, none of which The Gimp has (support for XCF and other raw formats, automatic histogram duplication, colour map adjustment (make photo A's colors and intensities look like photo B), layer composites, etc). Sorry if these don't seem earth shattering, but they cut down on workflow and make nice images quicker.

The only exclusive features the Gimp has are "terrible interface which puts all the menu items on all windows, even where they don't make sense," "crashing randomly without saving changes first," or maybe "console you don't want and can't close without closing the program which also doesn't save your work or give you the option to not close everything." The drawing and path features aren't photoshop like, but they're still clones (of similar features from CorelDraw and FDP). About the only thing original is Script-Fu, and I don't know what the fuck that is.

There are good image manipulation programs that aren't Photoshop like -- IrfanView and iPhoto are both good, so's the software that comes with the Sigma SD-9 -- but I don't have a problem with a program choosing to use a layer interface or a toolbar. I expect that. I also expect an effective graphics program might try and implement some features that artists, photographers or designers would want -- and the Gimp doesn't do that. Instead, it is a program aimed at people who want to make a bunch of ugly embossed buttons very quickly.

doom bad example

[Anonymous Coward]

I think some of the point they missed are that games are an extremely restrictive environment. Nothing happens in the game unless it is planned to perfection with testers moving animation points on enemies just to scare the player in the right position.

The challenge since 1995 with the mainstream rise of 3d environmental games was to create "a game where you can do what you want and go where you want" this is all well and good, but utterly useless when trying to create a concise game. Believe it or not this issue is one of the hardest to educate people that are new to video games development.

Level editors rarely appear in games, most of the time because the feature never gets used by players and because of the unknown additional development time.

However what sense does it make giving away the levels where users can create their own games when the developers (or more importantly the marketing dept of a publisher) can push to use the same technology themselves and market a new game.

Developers themselves sometimes use an 'open source' system to develop their games, tying several projects together into one engine, except the code won't leave the software house. EA is THE prime example of the open-closed source development that is taking control of the video games market (what % of games are made by EA?). Time for an open source render engine?

Not true

[alex_tibbles]

It's just less incremental. All sample-based music builds on parts that already existed and makes a new work. Original != not generated by modifying older art. It's not much different to talking about influences, just more direct.

Flightgear

[managementboy]

Did everyone forget Flightgear (http://www.flightgear.org/)?

From the Homepage:FlightGear is an open-source project. This means as long as you abide by the terms of the GPL license you may freely download and copy FlightGear. Anyway can have easy and open access to the latest development source code. Being an open-source project, we have made our file formats open and easily accessible. We support standard 3d model formats and much of the simulator configuration is controlled through xml based ascii files. Writing 3rd party extensions for FlightGear (or even directly modifying the FlightGear source code) is straightforward and doesn't require a large amount of reverse engineering. This makes FlightGear an attractive option for use in private, commercial, research, or hobby projects.

FlightGear is known to run on Windows, Linux, Mac OS-X, FreeBSD, Solaris, and IRIX platforms allowing the user run on their platform of preference.

Re:Flightgear

[Animats]

Have you ever actually tried FlightGear? It's painful. Far worse than Flight Simulator. Maybe half the cockpits actually work. Sometimes the artificial horizon ball goes floating around the cockpit. (Somebody did their transforms in the wrong order.) And there's a wierd "turbulence" effect when you cross from one scenery region to another, because the scenery loading concurrency was botched.

Re:Flightgear

[t35t0r]

But Xplane blows away flightgear (and msfs2k4) :(

Re:Flightgear

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody know why these problems haven't been fixed yet?

Too many cooks can spoil the broth...

[Anonymous Coward]

I love open source as a development model, but I'd never use it for a game because it follows the "too many cooks" rule. Whenever you're making a game, you need a small team who knows how to communicate and work with eachother very well. If you don't you'll have art that looks vastly different level to level, and have difficulty following the storyline. Another problem with an open source game would be the arguements where the game could go next, and then it all goes to hell.

I really hope some wonderful group will form for the sole purpose of making linux games, and develop it under a closed model, as that's the best way. After it's done, release it under the GPL. Hooray!

Opensource Games...

[NaiLZ]

...fall into the same paradigm as the old saying "too many cooks".

If you develop a large scale game in an open source enviorment you run into the problem of too many people having too many conflicting ideas. This would lead to either an overly complex game or a game with an infinite development time(see DNF and TF2).

Re:Opensource Games...

[Creepy]

That is a management problem, not a development problem. The person(s) in charge of the project should set targets and try to meet them in a timely fashion. Vegastrike has made massive strides since I worked on it (I think it was .1) and looks far better, though I haven't tried it in about 2 years, but was well managed from what I remember. Flightgear also was, but I only submitted bug reports to that one ;)

Valve.. hah

[telemonster]

I heard the people at Valve aren't impressed with Open Source. (I own a game that is constantly broken because of their Steam advertisement distribution system, so no, I'm not a Valve fan).

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since there are no quality open source applications or operating systems to date, why would open source games be any different?

Games are one of the few exceptions

[Hoplite3]

...to the open source model. Games are the ultimate commodity software. Some might have lasting appeal, but most people are looking for a new game every 3-6 months. It's not like a word processor, where the old versions are good and the newer ones questionably better. Old games can lose their sparkle. Novelty is very important.

Certainly some games are exceptions, true classics that will stay forever. But these are more like movie classics than software classics.

Parts of games could easily be designed by open-source cross-company teams. Engines are good candidates. But artwork? Dialog? Plot? No, this sort of content should be developed closed source. I'd rather be "tyranized by the author" when it comes to games. I don't want 1000 geeks tweeking the storyline. I want one person to set out a vision.

Is Open Source An Advantage For Game Developers?

[RAMMS EIN]

Of course, open source is an advantage for game developers as it is for other developers. Freely available components speed the development, and allow you to focus on the things that make your game different, rather than struggling to match your competitors.

It is a good observation that there are very few good large open source games. I think the reason is simple: OSS depends on developer interest, and developers get demotivated after a while. This is why we have many good but simple games (e.g. the KDE games), but few large games.

There's a wider issue

[Morgahastu]

OSS just isn't popular for consumer software - save a few exceptions.

Yeah right. Nethack again....

[imsabbel]

The same old shit everytime linux & game are in one sentence: Graphics is bad, modern games are for noobs and idiot, ect....
Yeah, i played angband and adom a lot, but in the end its nothing else then the simple most stupid "kill, get xp, kill, get xp, get item, kill..." repeated since 1978. No innovation (oh, wow, you can play a TOURIST class. he has a camera. WOW) and no gameplay appeal for anyone who doesnt have his free time to burn (like a typical geek).

Re:Yeah right. Nethack again....

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't say that graphics were bad, just that the article seems to emphasize the graphics and music take a lot of resources in a new game. Besides, are modern games any different? How are the Jedi games and "City of Heroes" different? You gain experience, find / earn / steal money to get better stuff, go around killing / fighting / helping, etc. How is Doom 3 different then the original Wolfenstein? How is "City of Heros" different then "Ultima Online"? Are there really any original games? RPG, FPS, turn-based (Civ) and real-time based strategy. Besides those, what else is there?

Doom 3 has awesome graphics but the entire game is simply one long corridor. Quake 3 is in a similar vein.

Now look at "Return to Castle Wolfenstein": it uses the Q3 engine, but the game play is awesome (the enemy AI is very good, relatively speaking). Graphics / music can add to the atmosphere of a game, but it is not the be-all and end-all of it. Even games like the Ultima series are still very playable now. The graphics / sprites may look hokey compared to today's texture, but the challenge of finished the main (and sub) quest is no less now then it was when the game was released.

Textures can always be improved over time to handle better graphics, but once you've coded in gameplay / AI / the engine you're pretty much stuck with it.

Re:Yeah right. Nethack again....

[Anonymous Coward]

Arn't you playing video games because you have free time to burn?

Re:Yeah right. Nethack again....

[Kiryat Malachi]

Simulations (airplane, car, ship, etc.)
Sports games (hey, you may not, but I like them)
DDR/karaoke type games
Tetris
MMOs aren't really any of the 4 you listed above (maybe FPS, but not really)
Puzzle games like Myst
Graphic adventures

There are probably more, those were just off the top of my head.

Re:Yeah right. Nethack again....

[ironfroggy]

Games an art form which I expirience for the expirience. Free time? Hell, I never have time to play games. I cancel plans sometimes so I can make the time to fit them in, just like deciding against seeing a friend because I just have to see that great new Kevin Smith film. Also, take a look at http://www.ironfroggy.com/content/73 for my thoughts on all this. too much to put here, but I think I debunk most this guys crap points.

work for 20 months, play for 20 hours

[ammoQ]

The main reason why people work for OSS projects is that they (or the one that pays them) needs the resulting software. Looking at "world class games", most of them mean lots and lots of work for a result that lasts for 20 hours; after that, you are through. Why would anybody want to work for free on such a project? Most successfull OSS games are eighter simple, a challenge to make or funny to play for months or years, which means multiplayer in most cases. While CS is probably not genuine open source, it's a good example of a game the could be made by the community.

A nice 3D MMORPG

[eldacan]

Planeshift
GNU GPL (mostly)

Games are not tools.

[deragon]

When business and people contribute to web servers and operating systems, its mainly because they expect something in return. They use these free tools for generating business. They reduce the cost of development of the tools they use to generate $$.

But with a open game, there is no business to be done. No $$ is returned. This is why we probably will never see IBM and the likes contributing to an open game. The only exception I could forsee is that an online game could be free, but subscription to servers would be charged.

Sure there are some developers which on their free time develop open games. Thats why there are a few. But because there are practically no developers payed by companies to develop open games, there are simply less effort going into open games than in web servers and operating systems.

Re:Games are not tools.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a good point and it leads to where open source is useful in games...game creation tools.

The article's main point was that creative art doesn't lend itself well to open source and that games don't have a long enough shelf life. But the tools that are used to make games, graphic libraries, networking libraries, sound libraries, UI libraries, etc. are re-usable from game to game. A good example is the Torque Game Engine put out by http://www.garagegames.com/. It's not free, but it's only $100 and the money gets you all of the source code and the ability to contribute patches to the engine. The community is constantly adding functionality and documentation and the open source collaboration makes the game development life cycle go much quicker.

Every game that is worth a crap needs to do something new and different that other games haven't done before. By using open source tools and engines programmers can concentrate their time on doing those new things and pushing the envelope.

Sorry for the anonymous post, I'm waiting to get my password back from /.

Re:Games are not tools.

[MobyTurbo]

But with a open game, there is no business to be done. No $$ is returned. This is why we probably will never see IBM and the likes contributing to an open game.

Here's an example of IBM contributing to an open source game.

The saga of ryzom is GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

The saga of ryzom is probably going to be one of the best MMORPGs available (launched around in sept 20), and the code is GPL (a FSF Europe member is even working in this company)

Everything!

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything should be open source! I'm really anxious to work on the first open source Spy Plane!

Al Gore still?

[ImaLamer]

How can this be rated funny?

Everyone should know by now that Al Gore didn't say he invented the Internet. (Just as we all should know by now that a Beowulf cluster of anything is cool.... we've imagined it. BSD is dead and goatse.cx is the worst thing we've seen)

Vinton Cerf even gave a good portion of credit to Gore:

"During my service in the United States Congress I took the
initiative in creating the Internet." We don't think, as some people
have argued, that Gore intended to claim he "invented" the Internet.
Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as
Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect
on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore
was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people
were listening. We feel it is timely to offer our perspective.

As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high
speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and
the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected
official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have
a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and
scholarship.

Re:Al Gore still?

[orasio]

Q: How can this be rated funny?
A: Everyone should know by now that Al Gore didn't say he invented the Internet.

That's why, in my twisted mind, I thought it was funny, but it seems mods don't like twisted humor.
If you take into account that "Funny" doesn't give you karma, you can understand that "Funny" posts are just trying to be humorous, and not looking for mod points, and there's no need to be offended by them. Maybe I just tried to make a joke and you didn't find it funny. Maybe you should have understood that it was a joke, because it was
Especially, if he had actually said that he invented the internet (he said he took the initiative in creating it, a mistake, but not by far) , the joke would have died ages ago. I find it funny because it's a stupid comment to make. Alright.
Maybe I'm saying this in the wrong room.
Ok.
I'll leave.

Re:Al Gore still?

[ImaLamer]

no, no no...

I'm sorry man.

It just seems that I deal with a lot of people that truely believe he said that. As a liberal first, and anal retentive second... it starts to bother me.

Shouldn't have jumped down your throat.

This, btw, is my first slashdot apology (I believe) since I started here long ago.

Or good open source code favors developers

[jaaron]

In answer to the main question, "Does open source development only make sense for products like web servers and operating systems?" the answer is, "No, not only, but definitely mostly." In other words, open source makes the most sense for infrastructure like projects -- servers, operating systems, programming languages and frameworks. It makes the least sense for end user projects like games, educational software, and office suites.

You hinted at the heart of the issue: Who write open source software? Well, developers of course! And for whom is having the source open and free most advantageous? Developers, of course! My non-programmer friends and family don't really care about source code, but I do. And despite all the open source software I use, the only times I've ever really used to source was when I was programming. That is, I was using the infrastructure code such as a Java library from Apache Jakarta or tweaking some PHP or Python code for a wiki I wanted.

The most successful open source and free software projects are those that are directly used by developers -- where developers are the end user. This means things like web servers, languages, operating systems, libraries, etc.

Bruce Perens once even said it here on Slashdot (can't find the link at the moment) but open source development tends to favor software which can be developed incrementally. This isn't especially true of games. Games moreso than any other software product are a media production like a movie or book. It just doesn't fit with the open source development model as well. That doesn't mean that it can't work, but that the best and most successful open source tools will be those that are closest to the source of free software -- developers.

Re:Or good open source code favors developers

[tcopeland]

> It makes the least sense for end user projects

Very nicely put.

FWIW, I think some projects blur the lines a bit - for example, a BitTorrent client is an end-user project, but it can be developed incrementally and it can be handy the help system administrators and developers to reduce bandwidth usage.

Re:Or good open source code favors developers

[acidtripp101]

I don't know how accurate your comments are.
Big time game manufacturers have been making games for YEARS, or at least employing people that have.

I remember how excited I was when I got opengl acceleration to work... earlier last year. It's gotten MUCH better, but it's still one of those things that's inconvienient. And to be honest, I STILL have problems with it every kernel upgrade (the radeon 7500 has had a bug in the kernel driver for AGES... it's a known bug, and it just takes getting a cvs snapshot of the dri tree to fix... but seriosly, should I really have to do that EVERY kernel upgrade?)

A lot of posters have pointed out that once ID stops making a lot of cash from Doom 3, they'll just sell the engine to other developers (who don't have the skill, time, or budget to make one at the same calibur).

In my oppinion, once the open source community gets even a decent engine out (OGRE looks REALLY promising) the people with great game ideas, will have a great foundation to start from. Chances are, if someone has a great game idea, they probably won't be able to program a great game engine (before anyone comments, I'm just saying that the two are rare traits, so to have both is a statistical fluke), so having a first class engine out will help tremendously.

For example, look at what SDL did for the 2D linux gaming experience... EVERYONE uses it. Could those same people that use it have coded it? Probably not.

Give it some time...

Re:Or good open source code favors developers

[True Grit]

Bruce Perens once even said it here on Slashdot (can't find the link at the moment) but open source development tends to favor software which can be developed incrementally. This isn't especially true of games.

Bingo. This also explains the success of NetHack, as that game has been a kind of "work-in-progress" effort for about 20 years (going back to Rogue), and I mean that in a good way, i.e, they hit on a fun game and continued to refine it over the years. Any game that leads to this kind of humor has got to be a classic!

Getting back on topic, while F/OS isn't likely to overthrow the game companies, I am hopeful that one day some company will risk trying a hybrid method. A game where the "engine"(1) is released as OS (but not Free as in the GPL, because the company has to be able to incorporate changes from the game's OS community back into their commercial offering), but the game's content, both graphics and audio and plot-line, characters, etc, etc, are still controlled by the company. The company sells it as a normal game, but because the engine is available as source, modders and tinkerers can get involved in a way they haven't yet been able to. The company benefits because it effectively has a lot of its customers doing bugfixing and improvements to the game, while the hackers benefit by being able to tinker to their hearts content, and trying different approaches/rules/algorithms if they don't like what the original developers did. Also if the engine is open-sourced, it is less likely that the game will end up "dying" on its customers (disappearing when the company that made it stops work on it). It depends on the nature of the game, of course, unlike a lot of this thread, I am not really talking about FPS games, so it probably won't work with all types of games, and established, ie, rich and industry-dominating, companies won't ever try it, but as someone mentioned, the small startups are finding it harder and harder to break into the industry. Maybe one of them will be the one to try a hybrid approach.

(1) the core functionality that many people want to have access to when it comes time to tinker with or mod a game. This may or may not include the AI or multiplayer sections of the game's code. It depends on the nature of the game.

Re:Or good open source code favors developers

[WoodenBoy]

A game where the "engine"(1) is released as OS (but not Free as in the GPL, because the company has to be able to incorporate changes from the game's OS community back into their commercial offering), but the game's content, both graphics and audio and plot-line, characters, etc, etc, are still controlled by the company.

What, you mean like the Nebula Device?

Re:Or good open source code favors developers

[True Grit]

Sorry, about not responding earlier, was in the middle of playing with different browsers and "dropped" this one.

No, what you linked to is another 3D game engine, when I used "engine" I was using it in a more generic way. As I said in my post, I wasn't really referring to 3D FPS games.

A theoretical example of my idea: A turn-based strategy game (using either 3D or 2D), where the multiplayer code (if its a multiplayer game), the game's AI (for single player), all its audio/visual content, and the game's storyline/background/plot is kepy proprietary, but the engine, the core of the game (play mechanics and UI), is open, and the proprietary code interfaces to it thru a clean, flexible API (with the idea to making it easier to make changes in the core without breaking the other stuff - granted, this will always be a tightrope walk).

This wouldn't be a truly F/OS game of course because the company would still hold rights to the game's story-line and graphics, etc, the game's "open core" by itself wouldn't be useful, but it would allow players to modify the game in ways that are currently impossible with conventional closed-source games.

OSS will change gaming. Just not yet.

[Qbertino]

Modding is a standard thing in Multiplayer FPS games. As soon as there is a feasable OSS game engine (cristal.sf.net are working on a nice 3d engine for starts) and the first artists start rolling out models and textures modding will become the standard procedure and give the industry a hard time.
And don't forget: Computer Games are a highly competetive thing to be dealing with. There's no monopoly that can get away with selling crap, like with Office Software or operating systems.
We're just going to have to wait a few years more.

Re:OSS will change gaming. Just not yet.

[black mariah]

The problem is, there will NEVER be a 'feasible OSS game engine'. The engines that are out there now are on Quake 3/Unreal Tournament graphical levels. The only OSS engine I know of that even uses DirectX 9 features is Tenebrae, and that's based on QUAKE code.

Worldforge

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned worldforge yet (worldforge.org). Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, since it has a glacial development pace that makes Debian look fast by comparison.

Re:Oh please!

[aelbric]

Perhaps the reason that the "...vast, vast majority of Open Source users and developers *ARE NOT* gamers..." is because the general quality of Open Source games relative to commercial products blows.

It's been said before and I'll say it again and again until OSS developers understand it:

ENTERTAINMENT SELLS PLATFORMS.

If you want wide adoption of Linux or any other truly open source platform. You MUST MUST MUST get joe six-pack to buy into it and most people don't care about computers for anything other than entertainment. Once this happens, then businesses will begin to adopt OSS on the desktop because their users will already be familiar and their training costs will be lower.

All this BS about who can and can't have certain software because of this or that restriction, the GP (general public) not only doesn't care they don't even want to care. If a Linux platform is created that allows end users to:

1. Listen to CDs
2. Get on the Internet.
3. Watch video clips.
4. Do their personal finances.
5. Capture and email pictures to Grandma
6. Capture and work with video.
7. Sync their iPods, IPaqs, Palm, or *insert other device here*
8. Play Games they are familiar with (FPS, RPG, MMORPGs, RTS, "the Sims" *shudder*)
8. Play games with 3D acceleration

out of the box with no hassles, THEN the GP will buy it and not until. Once the GP buys into it then your pool of available talent increases dramatically and companies will invest in improvement. And not only that, if it is compelling, the public will PAY for it (Profit!). If given the choice of a yearly/monthly subscription rate or being able to tar/rpm/apt/etc to install software, the average public will pay every time if its quick and painless.

Now some distros have been doing a good job. I just installed Mandrake 10 for the first time and they almost have it right. I love OSS and am reasonably familiar with how the major environments work, but even I have my limit. It should not take me 30-60 minutes post installation to get most of the features I've listed above.

Ah well, I'll continue to use Fedora on my servers and Mandrake as my desktop until someone gets it right.

Look at that Karma burn!!

Poor analysis

[wowbagger]

Let me recast this article into a different problem domain to highlight the flaw in the analysis:

The open source development model will never be useful in the cellular telephone market, because a) lots of work are needed to create a phone, b) speciallized skillsets (RF design, signal processing, protocol) are needed, c) large amounts of testing are needed.

Now, does that mean that no open source is used in phones? BZZZT! Wrong. Some phones are using Linux as the kernel.

My point is that while we aren't likely to see a DOOM III level game emerge completely from the FLOSS community, we WILL see FLOSS being used in games - Vorbis for game music comes to mind.

So FLOSS *IS* a competitive advantage for games as it is for ALL software - it is just not the whole story.

Re:Poor analysis

[delire]

precisely.. i wrote about this in the topic 'karamba' below..

Re:Poor analysis

[grumbel]

The article focused on OpenSource games and game content itself, not on OpenSource use in games, little but extremly important difference.

Sure using Ogg/Vorbis instead of MP3 saves you a few bucks in licensing, thats why Ogg/Vorbis is good for game developers, it however won't have any impact on the license of the game itself, the game will still be closed source as always.

Isn't this fairly obvious...

[Ohz]

Open Source development is far better suited to cloning existing games (Bubble Bobble, Civilization) than creating an original title.

Without a strict and painfully detailed design document, any original open source gaming project will end up as more of a patchwork quilt than a tapestry.

Re:Isn't this fairly obvious...

[tepples]

Without a strict and painfully detailed design document, any original open source gaming project will end up as more of a patchwork quilt

I thought Nintendo's WarioWare proved that a patchwork quilt can still be great fun.

Why must the games be open source'd?

[AWhistler]

I do not care if Doom3 is open source or not. I am willing to pay iD for Doom3. I just want a version of the game to run on my Linux box. If that means I have to have a specific distribution, I could probably live with that. If that means that the Doom3 CD is a stand-alone CD that boots up and runs Doom3, that's fine (Hmmm...turn a PC into a real game console).

If the only reason they don't make games for Linux is because they're scared of open source (read: no profits, and opening up proprietary code), that is a pretty lame reason not to do it, IMnsHO. Just make a closed-source version of the game that I can run on Linux...that's all I need to get me to stop using Windows and switch to Linux permanently (i.e., no dual boot).

I'm already using OpenOffice, Mozilla, and other open source software in Windows as it is. The only reason I don't switch to Linux is the games!

Re:Why must the games be open source'd?

[kjones692]

This is off-topic but go to www.winehq.org if you want to use Linux for any Windows applications including games.

Re:Why must the games be open source'd?

[grumbel]

### I do not care if Doom3 is open source or not. I am willing to pay iD for Doom3. I just want a version of the game to run on my Linux box.

You pretty much answer your question yourself with that. Open Source doesn't matter much for the development of the game itself, but it matters a lot for the bugfixing and porting, without OpenSource people either can't do it at all or only with serious additional work. That said companies will of course not go OpenSource since the benefit such as a Linux port are of course extremly limited compared to the losses (no money on licensing the engine, easier cheating, ...).

Re:Why must the games be open source'd?

[AWhistler]

That wasn't my point.

Just like Microsoft developed Excel and Word for the Macintosh, it could release Office for Linux. Yes, I know that will never happen and OpenOffice makes that a moot point anyway, but that is the best example to illustrate my point.

Develop and support the game using the same business models being used today (closed source), just write a version for Linux. Why must a game/application be open source just because it is supposed to run on an open source operating system? The only difference is that the company takes the responsibility of supporting it instead of the open source community supporting it.

Here's a short answer...

[Slime-dogg]

I believe that the same principle that applies to OS computer utilities can apply to games. FOSS utilities usually covers those things which are a foundation to build upon, the OS, the desktop, the wm, the web servers. They are foundations for the commercial league to build their own stuff on.

In games, this can/should apply to the engines that are used. Why not open source (LGPL) the engine, then allow many game companies to contribute to it. They could then come up with their own non-free stuff (levels, textures, story, dialogue, sound, action scripts, etc.) for a full sized game. It seems to me that the majority of the work on these newer games is not on the engine, it is on all of the artwork and design that make up the game.

This leaves the OSS community with the option of coming up with their own stuff, and give them the ability to create a game that could be on-par with games like Theif, Deus Ex 1, and Doom 3. I believe that J. Carmack follows this to an extant, the Quake engines were GPL'd.

A couple of geeks in their basement...

[gregor-e]

Most open-source efforts can be (and are) started by a couple of dedicated geeks with some spare time. Modern game development requires a staff of dozens just to get a decent engine, tools and prototype hacked together. And these aren't generally your corporate drone type developers and artists, either. For the most part, they're rabid game fanatics who think nothing of sacrificing what may pass for their normal life on the altar of 60+ hour/week crunch time schedules that go on for months. They also spend a lot of time in each other's faces, coordinating how all the bits go together. Full-cycle title costs run into the millions of dollars. It's kinda like asking why there are so few "open-source" spaceflight companies.

We can still see some good open-source opportunities for smaller platforms, like cell phones and PDAs, but the odds of an open-source title becoming a blockbuster console or PC title are practically nil. It just requires too much dedication and coordination of too many resources, which, in an open-source world, are geographically spread out so much that high-bandwidth, in-your-face coordination just can't happen.

Now, if someone were to sponsor an X-prize like contest for open-source gaming, we might see some action.

Re:Costs

[pchasco]

I have three words for you that will solve your little cross-platform dillema: SDL

Re:Duh.... it's the content not the machine

[Anonymous Coward]

I still hold that content creation is the key point.
It's now pretty cheap and certainly easy to get a reasonable digital audio studio. Why aren't "open source musicians" destroying the music industry by giving away tons of free music? Big music is destroying themselves by producing junk. There are bands that do distribute locally/cd-baby/etc but they are still exchanging the content for money. There is nothing wrong with providing content that's good enough to cause people to pry open the wallet. For most of the world providing salable content is either difficult or impossible.

To try and drive the thread back to the original story, I throw out the following:

Actually dreaming up games it not easy. Dreaming up the details is much much harder.

no OSS films?

[DrSkwid]

okay, it's a bit tricky to have all your pre-edit artwork lying around for someone to edit into their own film but independent film-making is *very* alive and well.

Here's just one festival

You can easily find plenty more, even in your local area there's probably a film making scene.

My views

[Anonymous Coward]

As a develoer of a mod ranked in the top 3 non-Valve HL mods by players (According to Steampowered status, it varies) there is a lot of issues that you are of concern in a non-commercial game.

The number one issue without question is talent. Getting talented team members is a very tricky business and depends upon a number of things,

1) The basic idea behind the game
2) The skill of the team working on the game
3) Currently existing content

You will not attract talent if the first three are not up to their expectations. Talented people will only work for a game they think they will enjoy, with other talented people who have already produced some quality content.

Now that might sound somewhat cyclic (You need talented people to get talented people) but it's very true. When money is not involved the currency is skill, which is why I think the most important thing is that the mods leader has a skill beyond being 'Ideas man'. Good example being CS where the two guys practically made all the content themselves which then attracted the talented mappers.

Internet Gaming Began Open Source

[smack.addict]

Internet gaming was born out of Open Source development before there was a such thing as the FSF or Open Source (TM).

Muds (wikipedia) are the precursers to modern Internet gaming, and most of them were built under collaborative, open source licenses.

I think the Open Source is the ideal model under which to build a massive, scalable multi-player system that requires collaboration for a variety of reasons. You just need a solid architecture at the base to enable it.

Re:Internet Gaming Began Open Source

[smack.addict]

To add a little bit more onto my original thoughts...

As far as where Open Source does not work, I cover that in a blog posting on my web site. I don't think these apply to gaming so much.

FOSS is motivated by selfishness

[Anonymous Coward]

There really is no practical or compelling reason to license under an FOSS license if one doesn't anticipate needing help from others when creating the source. Which is almost always the case with the 'source code' of creative works (the manuscript).

culture

[threep]

I think that you have to look at the culture of game developers. For the most part, games are developed for Windows, on windows. Generally, windows programmers protect their source code like their first-born. Unix hackers grow in a culture where sharing is considered the "right thing to do."

IMHO, this is the biggest reason that there are no big time open source games. Games are not part of the Unix business.

As long as we're plugging OSS games...

[Xaroth]

I thought I'd toss in a quick mention to my personal favorite, StepMania. It's reached a level of maturity such that there is a group that's turning this into an actual arcade game .

There aren't many other OSS gaming projects that can claim that. (Though, they're doing the same with this one. They've got one of these at the Mall of America, even.)

Yay Open-source turned viable business model! (Well, as viable as the arcade scene is these days...)

Marketing!=Game

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because the big houses have millions of dollars to spend on marketing and shine does not mean they make better games. Sure, FOSS games often times are near-line to propriatary games, but FOSS apps are too. The games are near-line to the most popular titles, and generaly cater to the audience that loves the game and wants to play with it on more levels than the propriatary model allows them to. Just becuase they do not have the media attention, or shelf space, does not mean anything else about the game. FOSS games have attention where they need to, with their community, same as FOSS apps.

Re:Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, that's three letters there bub, not words. Unless, of course, the Queen's English counts the letters in an acronym as words, then please excuse this ignorant colonial.

Re:Development model?

[black mariah]

Incorrect. Open Source and Free Software are both methods of development that involve the use of permissive licenses to propagate community interest. GPL is a license, Free Software is not.

Please, if you're going to troll, at least be *slightly* factual about it.

Cost.

[SatanicPuppy]

Especially with shooters and strategy games, the game engine is the most important, and most expensive, piece of development. Relicsencing that engine to other companies is an important source of revenue. Obviously it would be incredible if they open sourced it as well...

Still, game companies end up in the toilet so often, I can't think they could easily toss the unique part of their work into the public domain and not suffer for it financially.

I think this would be a good place for 5 year software patents or something, because I think these things SHOULD end up in the public domain, eventually, but the originating company should be free to make a profit on it in the meantime.

Just my opinion.

Re:Cost.

[johnnyb]

"I think this would be a good place for 5 year software patents or something"

AHHHH! NOOOO!!

_Patents_ prevent people from building the same thing from scratch, cleanroom, by themselves. If you build software A and I build software B completely independently, but you patent software A, then I can get fined for any similarities between B and A. NOT GOOD.

Now, copyrighted works _do_ eventually go into the public domain. The problem is that software copyright is annoyingly long. 75 years is it now? 10-15 years would be a good copyright term for software I think.

Re:Cost.

[KrackHouse]

I'm working on a driving simulator. We've using OGRE as our 3D engine, SDL for input, ODE for physics and we're making a lot of progress. I think a lot of people are reluctant to use 3rd party libs because they want all of the glory if it is successful. We're also making it cross platform because while a lot of people hate MS it's no reason to deny a game to the masses. Regarding innovation. No driving games have been released like MS Flight simulator because there are no flying championships and new pilots every year. Developers just rename the drivers, polish the graphics and re release the same product for $40 every year. We're trying to create a driveable encyclopedia of cars and racing history. This will never be commmercial because it would be the last driving simulator ever made and that's not good for business. I think once more people get their PCs plugged into their HDTVs open source gaming will explode. Imagine getting all of the roster updates for your favorite sport automatically instead of having to hack the system or buy next years version. I think a lot of the future Open Source games will incorporate bit torrent clients for content sharing, updates, etc.

Re:Cost.

[AHumbleOpinion]

I think a lot of people are reluctant to use 3rd party libs because they want all of the glory if it is successful

No it is a genuine risk for your project to be dependent on a 3rd party library. If it is an established and well regarded library than it is a very low risk. If the library is also under development then it is a high risk.

Re:Cost.

[KrackHouse]

Good point, we did excessive planning before we wrote any code. In fact we had a raging debate. The developer of OGRE, our graphics engine even pitched in his thoughts about the issue on our forum.

Maybe planning is the problem with most open source games. We went into this project knowing it would be a painful, difficult process and accepted that before hand. It's not all fun and games but it is a heck of a lot of fun.

Re:Cost.

[BennyB2k4]

Some links: There are a few open source games in development out there that are using the combination of these two OGRE (Open Graphics Rendering Engine) http://www.orge3d.org/ ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) http://www.ode.org/ SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) http://www.libsdl.org/

Re:Cost.

[Minna Kirai]

Especially with shooters and strategy games, the game engine is the most important, and most expensive, piece of development.

Wrong wrong wrong. Especially wrong for strategy games!

The most important thing for strat games is balanced, fun gameplay, which is quite difficult to create. Next most important is art quality. Look at Blizzard's Starcraft and Warcraft3 products. Do you really think it was the engine that let them dominate the market?

You're wrong for shooters too. The typical budget breakdown is spending $300,000 to license an engine, under $200,000 to tweak it, and then $2,500,000 on art and level design.

Re:Cost.

[danalien]

nice *racing d00d, myself*

but, since you state "will never be commercial" , I can't for the love of me figure out why you haven't tried to improve an existing project doing a racing/car-sim? Why have you chosen to "re-invent the wheel"? ... of say, Racer

/* From my POV, you aren't that much into "ooh oohh, our engines is so much better then yours"-cockfight (these weird Big Business Players are) - but more into a "Creating Game Content"-approach instead - why I find it odd that you've decided to 're-invent' an engine of your own, instead of going with something allready _proven_ to be a worthy engine. That's all.*/

PS, and did I mention, it too is cross-platform?

Re:Cost.

[KrackHouse]

We looked at the other projects out there (including Racer) and we looked at what we believe is the best way to create our vision. It would have taken more time to re-engineer a fork to our liking than to start fresh. That said, we are using ODE just like Racer is but we plan on having a much more advanced suspension system than is currently available in Racer. I think there aren't many cross platform games because it's harder to do it that way. Our current revision compiles and runs on Linux and Windows. Haven't tried Mac yet but theoretically it should work.

Re:Cost.

[TrancePhreak]

Write once, fix code three times, debug three times. That is the cross platform way.

Re:Cost.

[pfafrich]

I'm working on a driving simulator. .... We're trying to create a driveable encyclopedia of cars and racing history.

This type of game might just be where the open source movement comes in. A good niche market, and more to the point creating an environment for other hobbyiest to share their work. Makes me think of my past life as a model railway enthuist, it would be great to have system where I could build my own model of the "flying scotsman" and share it with other likeminded folk. Theres a whole geek army out there who would like to do the same. Maybe its a CPAN for model railway fans.

Forget trying to make the next killer game, go for your obscure interests, the corperates have not got the breath for that.

Re:Cost.

[danalien]

ok.

I guess we've to let 'Miss Time' be the wise fortuneteller, won't we?!

c'ya in a year or so :-)

After market

[Outsider_99]

I think opensource does help games with the "aftermarket". Look at games like Quake1, Quake2, Doom1, Doom2, Duke3D etc etc. All of them have beed opensourced and people have improve them after their life time.

I think game developers can take the "updated" versions of their games and see what the community has done to them, and may be get ideas from them.

I like the idea of the Quakes being opensource, its nice to play a super version of games you used to play.

"There is no true difference"?!?

[het3]

"There is no true difference between an open source and a closed source creation of a game." This is an admission that there is no true difference between the cathedral and the bazaar, for any project, which I don't think you intend.

The advantage OS brings to a project is that of many eyes all looking at it, testing it, and improving it. The thing a game often requires is novelty of experience, even the superficial novelty of a cheap knockoff, and this is not something that the OS model can permit: either your community is looking at the project in development, or it's not. If it's not looking at your project, OS is offering you no advantages whatsoever, while offering several disadvantages. If your community is looking at it, there is no novelty, and the game will have no excitement for anyone involved when it reaches completion, if ever.

Games that are truly replayable are open-sourcable, which is why the mod community for FPS games is almost exclusively multiplayer: multiplayer game designs don't rely on pre-created content for novelty, they rely on players. FreeCiv is a fine game for OS, because it's a well-understood game design, relatively undemanding of the hardware, and is very replayable; it is almost unique among single-player games in its level of replayability.

FOSS doesn't discourage creativity, just earnings

[Morgaine]

Where is the real creativity?

It's a good question. Maybe creativity and earnings go hand in hand, in the sense that a lot of creative people want to make money from their creativity.

FOSS encourages creativity because it makes creating programs easier, by basing them on the open work of others. The trouble is, FOSS massively discourages earnings, because if you invented something that sells well then you would instantly have a pile of competitors selling the open code that you just developed. Under those conditions, you can't even get venture capital since you can't guarantee to pay back loans from software sales.

This makes people who want to cash in on selling a lot of copies at high prices (which scales excellently) stay well clear of free / open software, and among those people there will be a proportion of the most creative ones too. It's no good suggesting "Go make money from support" because support scales appallingly badly compared to replicating code, as it requires people-time and labor is fantastically expensive.

There probably isn't a way around this, since GPL-type licenses massively support the rights of redevelopers and don't help protect the original inventor's development investment at all. It's the price we pay for being able to use other people's sources.

Nope, it's the $$$

[goldspider]

"...you really need to get a lot of talented artists, modelers and the like Then you need to get a good designer, and a musician or two, mappers, writers etc etc."

And in most cases, all of the above cost lots of $$$. Without the money, the best you can hope for is a sound concept.

HL2

[muftak]

What about half life 2?

Don't break what isn't broken...

[pandrijeczko]

A lot of people in this topic, so far, have looked only at modern PC computer games like Doom 3 without considering the wider picture.

For starters, look at the games available on the Gameboy Advance and mobile phones. Most of these games are equivalent to the Amiga/Atari ST/PC games of the mid to late 1980s - all that's really changed in the mobile gaming arena is miniaturisation. However, this demonstrates a continuing demand for those older games - hence the likes of Manic Miner, Speedball 2, etc. appearing on the Gameboy Advance.

Retrogaming also is filling a need for those who want to play some of those old games again, through emulation and remakes. The advantage here is that the copyrights for many old games is so tied up in knots (due to company mergers etc.) that this area is ideal for Open Source games programmers to take advantage of because games are usually small and many, of course, are released into the public domain anyway.

Finally, there's the Open Sourcing of older games allowing programming groups to improve older games, remake game engines, etc.

From my perspective, I'm happy to continue paying for the PC games that I do play and the only reason I keep a couple of Windows installations handy is to play these on, networked with a few buddies occasionally. If commercial games were released on Linux then, yes, I could save a few gigs of hard disk space and ditch Windows for good - but the games will still look and play the same and I wouldn't expect to pay anything less for them.

However, I get as much as a buzz these days out of Space Invaders running in MAME, Lords of Midnight on a ZX Spectrum emulator, the occasional text Infocom text adventure or Speedball 2 in WinUAE or on my trusty Amiga as I do from Doom 3 or Unreal Tournament.

Plus, if I ever fancy something different to play, I can always go trawling the Web for a new emulator or some free games...

Open source games currently fill a need but there's no way FOSS can displace the huge development budgets given to modern commercial game releases, end of story.

However, for me, it's great the way it is currently because I can pick up the latest PC release at the local computer store or jump back and forth through my quarter century of games playing whenever I like.

Art versus utility

[Anita Coney]

Both software and music are copyrightable. Both can be considered products. Both could be created with teams of no-talent hacks, e.g., Windows and Brittany Spears. Both could be created through amazing creativity, e.g., BeOS and John Coltrane's "Blue Train."

My gut instinct tells me utility products are better created by committees and large groups. Utilities are designed to do x, y, and z. Those goals can easily be divided between groups and worked on in a linear process.

Creating products that touch you, impact you emotionally, i.e., art, is not easily created by large groups. It is generally considered that group-think mentality ruins movies and music when suits start making decisions about song ideas, scripts, and casting.

Thus, it is my humble opinion that open source is better suited for creating utility versus art. And since a great game is more art than utility, open source is not well suited for games.

Re:Duh.... it's the content not the machine

[ThaReetLad]

I'm not sure. There is massive competition in game engines and they are often closely guarded secrets. You might be able to argue that OSS for engines makes sense for the end user, in terms of getting lots of different games, they would still cost a large amount for the artwork and level design and you'd just get a bunch of expensive clones. I think that healthy competition and a large number of different types of game drives the games market. You've got Simulations, FPS, MMORG, tactical shooters, real time and turn based strategy, all of which need to be driven forward in gameplay. I don't think OSS is the way.

Copyright

[tepples]

All sample-based music builds on parts that already existed and makes a new work.

The community can't make sample-based music because sample-based music relies on evoking the connotations of the original work, which requires the original work to be well-known, and all the well-known samples are locked up at the labels behind proprietary all-rights-reserved licenses.

Re:Copyright

[alex_tibbles]

"The community can't make sample-based music because sample-based music relies on evoking the connotations of the original work, which requires the original work to be well-known, and all the well-known samples are locked up at the labels behind proprietary all-rights-reserved licenses."

No, sample-based music does not need the original work to be well known. (It does not even need to use samples from existing music). Eg De La Soul - ever heard of The Turtles?, Public Enemy, Mechanics of Destruction, negativland. Sample-based music that isn't just using a catchy sample to bootstrap some appeal is common enough, and some of it is very good. Such music can use samples of arbitrary things (including other music) effectively as new instruments.

Re:Copyright

[tepples]

sample-based music does not need the original work to be well known.

I guess I was confusing it with the work of Sean "P. Diddy" Combs. It appeared you had something else in mind.

negativland

Didn't Negativland's big hit sample a U2 song without permission, and wasn't this U2 song on the Top 40 at one time?

Still, how can a sample-based music recording artist talk the incumbent owners of copyright into granting permission to use decent libraries of complex samples (that is, not just horn samples, drum samples, or anything else that one would normally think to put in modplug to build traditional music out of)?

Re:Copyright

[renderhead]

...ever heard of The Turtles?

Hell yes, I've heard of The Turtles!

Oh, you meant the band? Well I've heard of them too, and most likely, so have you.

Re:Copyright

[alex_tibbles]

negativland's most famous (notorious) record featured samples of outtakes of a radio DJ, and a screwed-up cover of an old U2 record.

"Still, how can a sample-based music recording artist talk the incumbent owners of copyright into granting permission to use decent libraries of complex samples (that is, not just horn samples, drum samples, or anything else that one would normally think to put in modplug to build traditional music out of)?"

Good point. I think that a solution might involve these 2 good ideas (not mine): an equivalent to covering rights, where anyone can cover anyone's music, as long as they pay the writer's portion of the royalties, so that anyone can sample anything and pay some portion of royalties; if a recording goes out of print (ie unavailable) copyright should revert to the artist.

You might like to listen to this (which is an example of the type of sample-based music you initially mentioned).

Re:Chicken and Egg (timing the learning curve)

[Anonymous Coward]

There is always a delay between development targets and quality applications (18+ months).

Years ago the development targets for doing 2D GUI application development on GNU/Linux were anemic. The development targets improved. Examples were disseminated and understood. Articles were written. Closed, proprietary blockages were cleared. Now there are plenty of unhindered developers armed with the necessary tools and knowledge. The applications are arriving. The only FUD defense left: NDAs, copyrights, patents.

3D and sound are next.

Re:Costs

[black mariah]

SDL fucking sucks. It's slow and buggy as hell. Cross platform shit is still shit.

The main point is how do I make money at this?

[ibullard]

I think a lot of people are missing the main failing point for OSS in game development.

The arguement for making money on Open Source software is by providing a service modifying and maintaining the software for clients. That falls apart for games. A shipped game is a completed project (patching jokes aside) that usually costs millions of dollars to make. If you give away everything at the end of development, how do you make money? There's no companies or people with enough money that will pay you to modify the game. Hell, people play the game for just a few months and then move on.

There's no way to make enough money on an OSS game to create anything but shareware or a labor of love.

No Business Case?

[Kumiorava]

Basic problem is that games cannot be developed incrementally like web browsers. If I release a game and it's not finished odds are very low that someone else would get excited and help me in finishing it. In some other areas a program with limited functionality can provide useful application to many, especially if its free -> save several $100.

Another big obstacle is resources, good games needs good artists and good sound designers. Open source developers rarely have social groups large enough to include like minded artists, 3d designers, musicians and game designers.

Of course certain type of games can be open source and I would really like to see some kind of expanding/gradually improving game that is totally open ended. Kind of like MUD, but something much bigger. Let me know if there is something like this in progress.

Atte.

Re:No Business Case?

[NBarnes]

It could even be pointed that that MUDs are, in many cases, the perfect example of games that DO succeed with an open-source model. NetHack, similarly.

However, something like a Doom 3, Half-Life 2, or Madden 200x simply can't be made by 8 programmers working part-time. It's not that games qua games requires art, modeling, etc, etc, but those games are simply ones that cannot, at this time, work as open-source projects. But the entirety of gamesdom is not represented by Id, Valve, and EA Sports.

By saying things like 'good games needs good artists and good sound designers, Kumiorava defines his problem space away from the strengths of open-source game development. So it's inevitable that any games I could name that use an open-source development model will not compare well. But, none the less, there are plenty of people that would rather play NetHack than Doom 3.

Re:Oh please!

[gnuLNX]

I sure wish that I could argue with you, but you are right. I have been using Linux almost exlcusivly for about 6 years now. I watch others try and make the switch and they are just mad because something doesn't work the same way it does in windows. Well you know what...the problem is two fold.

1) It isn't windows, but people don't want to re-learn a software application that is only going to do exactly what the old software did...it is frustrating to them...hell it was frustrating to me at first.

2) We need something that is as the parent said entertainment based. Install linux and Bam. Java works, macromedia, flash, e-mail, internet, games, it all has to just work. No exceptions...no failures. It has to work the first time and everytime after that. No unsupported video formats, no unsupported video cards, All sound cards must work and all sound file formats must play. Installing something new has to be GUI based and it has to involve 1 click...do you want this feature...yes or no. Oh and it has to work...always without failure...no dependancy issues...they have to be resolved behond the scenes and they always have to work.

I love linux and open source software and could personly care less if Joe six pack ever uses it. But if we are going to have that discussion then we have to be honest. People will not put forth the effort to re-learn somthing unless it does something new and better....always without failure.

Just my worthless 2 cents.

No one mentioned this yet...

[jlseagull]

...but Liberated Games has a listing of games that have had their source code released free to the public.

I've compiled Alien vs. Predator 2 from source after playing around with the AI to make aliens smarter. The really cool part is while the human and Predator characters have an AI governed by a well-defined set of propositional logic statements, the Alien code is absolute spaghetti, all procedural logic. The only way I figured this could happen is if the humanoid characters were programmed, but the Alien was evolved. I think, at the least, that releasing the source for games that were formerly closed allows development of open-source addons.

However, I've played FreeCiv as an exploration of whether it could be used in an educational setting, and it just seemed too modular and stiff. Civilization's interface, though dated, is much more interactive and slick.

Reuse and repurpose

[tepples]

If I designed this über-cool monster with this and those textures, triangle counts and what not, it would have very little reuse if there suddenly was a new engine which could do twice the pixels

Then there'd be twice the monsters! A new engine that can push more polygons transforms a shooter model into a sim model.

Re:Costs

[pchasco]

You're entitled to your opinion

Re:Oh please!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes your reply is worthless, because you talk about yourself mainly, and your point is the same old tired 'people just need to learn' that Linux fanatics have been using for the last 10 years.

Re:Development model?

[tepples]

At least I found it obvious that by "Open Source development model" the article's author referred to the bazaar that opens up after a critical mass of developers have joined a free software project.

Re:Costs

[pchasco]

Well, I appologize. It was sort of a failed attempt at being clever.

There are strengths

[gymsocks]

Open source development has one primary and awesome strength- creating stable, reliable programming. This process is slow, but that's the trade-off for stability. It's extremely useful for software that needs to be done once, right, and will be around for a long time. Things like operating systems, programming tools, server systems (email, web) and fundamental office systems, like word processing.

Games do not need this strength. They need to be quick to development and often have a short lifetime. If there's a bug in a game release for, say, playstation, you're not going to take the time to release an updated version of the game. We'll all have moved on by then. So why would you go through the effort to run it through the open source mill? You're just wasting your time.

Re:Oh please!

[colinleroy]

If you want wide adoption of Linux

Who told you 'we' do? Lots of kernel developers disagree

You mean "single player games"

[tepples]

You mean content-consumption games, which are usually single-player or at best cooperative. There do exist games whose goal isn't to "beat" the game (that is, consume all the game's content). See also tackle football sims, tetramino games, WarioWare multiplayer, fighting games, dance sims, or any game that goes back to the good old days when a game's goal was to beat your old score or to beat the other player.

Open source works for cloning

[Anonymous Coward]

"At best, the open source model works well for cloning..."

I think that this statement may be the key. Everyone working on an open source project needs to be able to self-direct a bit. To that end they need to have a conceptualization of what they are building. That's fine when you're working on Linux and you know you're making a file system, or a kernal module or whatever.

A game - both in genre and in visual aesthetic - is much less defined than an operating system. Or a webserver, or MSOffice clone, or whatever.

Re:Open source works for cloning

[Anonymous Coward]

We see the concept of a file system as well-defined only because people spent decades trying out different ways of arranging data storage and the user- and programmer-visible interfaces. In other words, a file system is only a clear concept insofar it is a clone of an existing design. Not very different from game development after all, is it?

Drivers preclude live CDs for 3D games

[tepples]

I could probably live with that. If that means that the Doom3 CD is a stand-alone CD that boots up and runs Doom3, that's fine (Hmmm...turn a PC into a real game console).

Good luck trying to get accelerated video card drivers onto a live CD. Early PCs were game consoles, as a developer could rest assured that every PC had a CGA in it, and all CGAs had the same hardware registers. Nowadays, every video card is different, and many video card makers publish crap drivers if they public Linux drivers at all. Besides, what happens when the next video card comes out, and all the drivers on the live CD are for older video cards? Are you going to expect the user to load a driver onto a USB memory card?

Re:Oh please!

[bubkus_jones]

"1. Listen to CDs"
Done

"2. Get on the Internet."
Done

"3. Watch video clips."
Done

"4. Do their personal finances."
I'm pretty sure this is done, too

"5. Capture and email pictures to Grandma"
Done

"6. Capture and work with video."
I'm not quite sure on this one, at least for home users.

"7. Sync their iPods, IPaqs, Palm, or *insert other device here*"
Done

"8. Play Games they are familiar with (FPS, RPG, MMORPGs, RTS, "the Sims" *shudder*)"
Probably the most 'lacking'

"8. Play games with 3D acceleration"
Done. I've played Unreal Tournament, America's Army, Tux Racer, Operation Flashpoint (via WINE) and a few others in Linux with 3D acceleration.

Out of the box? I needed to install jpilot for my Palm. The rest of it was done during install.

Libranet Linux (a.k.a "Debian that works", in my experience)

The impetus for development is steeper

[192939495969798999]

For an OSS game engine to be successful, it would have to have some really innovative stuff. I.E. render faster, better, bigger than ID's products, or at LEAST as good. Plus, you have to invest in the graphics, etc. It is not as easy as connecting up some plugins and creating a product... if the game is similar to others, and not hugely fun to play, it will be very quickly ignored by everyone on the planet. Maybe if more graphics people gave away their work... but that's much harder to come by than OSS. You could always ask me to do some art, but even I can't imagine not charging SOMETHING for it.

Re:The impetus for development is steeper

[NewStarRising]

" but even I can't imagine not charging SOMETHING for it." You easily grasp the concept of Open Source computing, and even free-as-in-beer code, but struggle to comprehend free-as-in-beer art? Many artists I know are willing to donate pieces for free, especially if they think it will get them noticed. Whether I can persuade them to design something specific to my project rather than their own ideas is a different matter.

Re:The impetus for development is steeper

[norkakn]

really innovative stuff. I.E. render faster, better, bigger than ID's products, or at LEAST as good

_This_ is why OSS games don't work. (-: OSS could have a minor hit with a game that is addictive as crack, but decent graphics. Not Doom 3 hit, but tyrian or commander keen type hit. Making it pretty really isn't that important

commercial game life spans

[ColonBlow]

If an OSS game could be made that is truly competitive with a commercial version, it's lifespan could be remarkably longer than one for a commercial game because it could be part of a distro and I'm sure would have a much more rabid fan base since the Linux game landscape is so relatively barren at those levels.

True true.

[SatanicPuppy]

Sorry. I've got 2 patent chips on my shoulder, and that's the other one. One: they last too long. Two: they lock out reverse engineering.

I don't know. We need some serious reform.

Re:True true.

[ahdeoz]

Pragmatically, that's a reason to go with patents. They're only 17 years. And they don't disappear, they're freely available. I actually support software patents. Take RSA encryption. It represents years of work by several geniuses. But anyone can reverse engineer it in days. And it didn't really pay off for at least 10 years. They deserved that patent.

Direct3D tax on new PCs

[tepples]

Google can tell you more about DirectX royalties.

You claim you "never had to pay anything to MS so far for using Direct3D". If this is true, then you're a dirty pirate.

And how would you run the DirectX game that you've been developing if all you have is a Mac?

Re:Direct3D tax on new PCs

[julesh]

[Parent equates windows tax with a DirectX royalty that would be charged to a game developer]

Fine. But this applies to any game that is developed to run on Windows, and is not DirectX specific. Sorry to burst your bubble, but Windows is the most popular platform (other than consoles) for gamers because most games are released first (and frequently only) under Windows. Therefore, as a game developer, it makes a certain kind of sense to primarily target Windows... therefore the 'tax' is already paid, so what does it matter which library you're using?

Re:Direct3D tax on new PCs

[Watcher]

I've been around here long enough to know not to bring facts into a discussion, but I will anyway. I'm boneheaded like that.

royalty: A share of the profit or product reserved by the grantor, especially of an oil or mining lease. Also called override. (from dictionary.com)
Hmm, interesting, you're claiming the "windows tax" is a royalty. Now, the last I checked (and I'm a professional developer), we pay a flat licensing fee for the OS and development tools to Microsoft, just like everyone else who pays for software (and any company that doesn't pay for the commercial software they're using to do business deserves whatever happens to them). We don't pay any additional fees for revenue or profits generated from the use of that software. You are confusing a cost of doing business that is little different from paying for the chairs your programmers sit in with a cut of the gross or profits, which is what a royalty is.

Neverwinter Nights model

[PIPBoy3000]

One of the more interesting games as of late is Neverwinter Nights. The core game engine is closed source, but the code for the campaign itself is completely visible. That means mod builders could poke around, play with the code, and do what they want with it.

I think this is going to be a fairly typical approach in the future, where the core game engine is off-limits to tweaking, but people can use the "official campaign" as a learning tool to see how the professional developers put it together.

Why they don't bother with linux/oss

[wheelgun]

They're targeting the largest group of people who play games. Most gamers use Windows. And those linux users who do play games usually know enough about computers to set up a dual boot OS system.

Games is one reason why I keep a Windows XP partition on my PC. I guess WINEX is nice for people who don't want to do a full install of Windows, but I prefer the convenience of playing a game in the OS for which it was originally targeted.

Linux doesn't support my Minolta film scanner either, but that is another story...

Re:Costs

[tepples]

DirectX is a free redistributable. There are no royalty costs involved in using it.

Can your end users easily install DirectX_Setup.exe on CrossOver Office? Or do they have to pay Microsoft royalties?

You're asking the wrong question

[argoff]

It should be. Does a proprietary model of software and business make things that have an entertainment value more important than things that have a pratical value?

Answer

[CrazyJim1]

Creativity is exhausted. Theres only so much you can do on the screen. Back in the 80s it was thought the possibilities are endless, but we know now that everything is converging on 3d simulating the real world then adding fantasy on.

I've developed games independently, and almost had the first MMORPG ever released. I've spent over 6000 hours coding games, and open source DOES help... The problem is that open source isn't mature enough yet to get over the hurdle of in house intellectual property. CrystalSpace is a good 3d tool, but it needs to mature before amatuers are making marioworld64 clones.

Re:Answer

[StalinsNotDead]

Why doesn't somebody make a game based off of a fictional game?

Like "Maze of the Minotaur" (or whatever it was called) that was made by the Riddler on Batman: the Animated Series.

Re:Answer

[DrCode]

How about games based on historical events (like one where you survive the French Revolution) or on novels?

Seems to me that the apparent lack of creativity is just a marketing decision, in that first-person shooters and sports games have the greatest sales potential.

Re:Answer

[kisrael]

Why doesn't somebody make a game based off of a fictional game?

Someone implemented "emulators" of Degenatron gmaes based on the sketchy descriptions in the "radio ad" in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City...pretty cool idea...

Coverage of Open Source gaming

[AntonyBartlett]

I'm an FPS guy so I don't know what has been going on in the RPG/RTS world.

And I feel like I don't know what is going on in the Open Source gaming world. Is it me, or does it get very little coverage on Slashdot? - not that I'm critising Slashdot as it has plenty of other things to cover, but does anyone have any suggestions on where to look. When I've Googled, I've generally turned up the pages for individual projects, rather than news sources.

Re:Costs

[Halo1]

At least the titles from PomPom Games use it. Of course, I can only judge by the Mac OS X versions, but at least those work fine. Since most of the work is done by the OS and hardware, I'm not sure how SDL could really slow down things a lot (they just offer a uniform interface afaik).

Misunderstood what the article said anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

The article wasn't saying "developing games on opensource is bad" the article was saying "open source games aren't practicle". In other words, the game itsSELF being open source (some poeple are also confusing this with free and that's simply just not the case).

Seems to me that whoever wrote the article needs to rethink alot of the wording and be a bit more direct on what EXACTLY it is they are trying to say. It appears to me that they are talking about the actual code of the game (since they mentioned doom and quake being gifted) and not the game actually being released to RUN on OpenSource software.

Once again, this is a /. twisting of words. I would really like it if I didn't HAVE to read all the articles posted to find out what was really said/meant for once.

Open source gaming, the next killer app?

[Baseclass]

Perhaps the open source community needs to focus more on originality than eye candy to be successful in the gaming scene.

A killer game would do wonders for Linux.

<dreaming> What if a company like id or Valve decided to release their newest FPS exclusively on Linux. Imagine how many people would install Linux for the first time just to play that game. Let the Windows developers do the porting for a change :) </dreaming>

Since that's probably not gonna happen, I think somebody really needs to come up with something totally original.

Cheating would be an even bigger problem

[Matt Ownby]

Once I got my hands on the Quake 2 source code, I started tinkering around with it and quickly realized how easy it would be to modify the executable to auto-aim for me ("aimbot"). Then I began thinking of how hard it would be to detect a hacked client on a legitimate server.

Admittedly, most of the quake2 cheats used some kind of proxy that modified the network packets as they came from the client, before they got to the server.. but this method required time to reverse engineer as well as the uncertainty from the cheat author as to whether the server really didn't detect his cheat or merely ACTED as if it didn't detect the cheat.

I know that security through obscurity is frowned upon, but having totally open source code for games makes cheating that much easier.

As a professional game developer....

[Chris Carollo]

...I don't see how you could make a AAA title without being face-to-face with your coworkers. Every project I've worked on has featured (at least) daily meetings and discussions about game design, or gamesystem design, or how designers want something exposed to them, or any number of other issues. We're consantly sketching and scribbling on whiteboards and bouncing ideas off each other, and even then, lack of sufficient communication has been an issue in every project as well.

Every off-site contracter we've used has also been problematic. Trying to communicate via email or IM is unreliable, syncing builds for folks on DSL or cable modems can be painful, and having to deal with a problem they introduced and we have a deadline looming is horrible.

Maybe there's a process that would work for the Open Source community -- I don't know, I've never done large-scale OS development. But unless there are some magic tools out there, I'd be very surprised.

Re:As a professional game developer....

[grumbel]

I second that, getting anything about the game design communicated is quite difficult, Wiki's help a lot and so does IRC, but its still extremly difficult to get an idea across the internet, especially if its not something that has already been done a dozens of times. Mailinglists are, at least for me, rather useless to get any of the details communicated, they work however reasonablly well for an overall roadmap, but discussions about details always end up in week long flamewars, since nobody really understands what the other mean.

After all I think thats one of the reasons why cloning or at least 'heavy inspriation' of older commercial titles works reasonablly well, since with them you can always just point at the commercial title and say "Do it like them" and people have a fair chance to know what you are talking about.

Re:As a professional game developer....

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoever wrote this article about open source not being an advantage to gaming has no knowledge of game development. One of the most important tools a game developer has is to quickly fabricate tools to handle the various formats used within a game. Tell me how this is done without OpenGL- most tools utilize OpenGL to some degree. If Q3Map and GTKRadiant were never open sourced we would never have Q3Map2. Since the author of Q3Map2 is working on Doom3 and the author of the dumb article is not working on anything that indicates to me which is more useful- costing yourself out of the game (literally) or working towards the continued efforts of open source. I believe that the term "Open Source" itself is beginning to show its age and this is where the problem lies. Open source or not ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.

Re:As a professional game developer....

[grumbel]

The article is about using Open Source license for the game and its content itself, its not about use of Open Source libraries in commercial game development, which is of course rather clear that it can be usefull there (ie. use ogg for free instead of paying mp3 licensing fees, advantage of OSS is clear there).

Because OSS also means "free as in beer"

[Anonymous Coward]

i think one of the big advantages corporations have over the OSS writers is that these companies can afford to hire top quality artists to accompany the coders.

It's worth noting exactly why this is so. The OSS community is fond of saying "free as in speech, not as in beer", but the effect of having to show your source code means that you can't sell a ton of copies for high profit because anyone else can take the code that you are obliged to provide and instantly set up a rival sales site, despite having done no real work, or give it away for free.

As a result, the "free as in speech" turns into "free as in beer" as well, and because of this you don't generate the funds to pay your graphics and sound artists. There's no way around that.

its all about moneh

[Stanneh]

seriously how many peaple do you think will buy a top game for a linux platform i grant you a few thousand but its just easier for the bigger game companies like EA and Rockstar to make their games purely for the windows platform things get ported then if their worth the hassle as for being original it will take 1 big hit on linux to sell it just look at what GTA has done for the ps2 in the past

Hobbyist Issue

[CrusadeR]

I think the article would be a lot more accurate if it replaced all instances of "open source" with "hobbyist", as they're not totally interchangeable terms. Any project being done in the developers' spare time is going to hit this problem of time constraints on content creation (it was *the* major issue that was discussed at the QuakeCon mod roundtable), and although the vast majority of game projects using the open source model are indeed hobbyist, a commercial developer creating a game full-time isn't going to magically see their content creation timeline get longer if they use open source (such as Saga of Ryzom, whose developers open-sourced the game's engine before the game has even shipped). Moreover, a lot of modern commercial game projects use open source projects such as OpenAL or Ogg Vorbis without seeing their dev cycles balloon (id's Robert Duffy even mentioned Ogg as saving them time on DOOM 3).

Doom3 - why this article is completly wrong.

[Jacek Poplawski]

1) Enter Doom3 directory
2) Find file pak000.pk4
3) Open it with unzip ("ENTER" in total commander)
4) Enter "script" directory
5) Open any file inside
6) Count number of bytes in text files

Huge part of Doom3 is Open Source. Article is wrong, because it confuses Open Source with Free Software. Doom3 is commercial project, huge part of Doom3 has its source open.

Re:Doom3 - why this article is completly wrong.

[andfarm]

source that you can look at != source you can legally modify and redistribute ("open source")

Where does Open Source shine?

[argent]

There are areas where the Open Source development model really shines. Where there's a lot of customers who can contribute to the code, it's a clear winner. Where the hardest parts of the job are things that average competant programmers can contribute to, it can be a win even when there's not a huge customer base. Where the customers include a few people with deep pockets who can pay for the stuff that programmers aren't typically good at, and are aware that it's in their interest to have an open product, it can be a big win... though once the program's "good enough" there's a tendency for the sugar daddy to cut the purse strings. Finally, there's no-longer-profitable products where a lot of the non-programmer work has already been done that get thrown over the wall to the Open Source world... this is where you get your Open Office type schemes.

But where the majority of the customers aren't coders, there's a significant benefit to work from non-programmers, and the work is basically entertainment so there's no chance of a "sugar daddy" if you're not doing something the NEA thinks is important... it's hard to see where there's a way to generate the revenue to complete the job using the open source model.

Delta3D Open-Source Game Engine

[osb1842]

To all the game developers reading this thread, here's a link to the open-source game engine
we are developing here at the MOVES Institute in Monterey, CA (of America's Army fame):

http://www.nps.navy.mil/cs/research/vissim/Engine/ enginemain.html

...and the source:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/delta3d

We are shooting for a 1.0 release in December, but the majority of features are already complete.
A number of in-house game-like simluations have already used it with great success. Happy coding!

-chris osborn

Re:Delta3D Open-Source Game Engine

[norkakn]

Wow, thank you greatly

I'm looking to do a very simple game for myself as a hobby and this fits what I need perfectly. I was going to use something very outdated before I saw this. I doubt I"ll ever create anything worth releasing, but you just greatly aided my learning, which is the goal anyways (-:

Re:Delta3D Open-Source Game Engine

[osb1842]

No prob, please don't hesistate to post any bugs or feature requests on our sourceforge page.

Thus chicken and egg.

[Chris Burke]

It would clearly be very foolish for id to release the Doom3 engine now, while it is still state-of-the-art, as software libre. That would be taking their years of development work and the huge technological advantage it has given them and simply handing it to their competitors.

However, imagine a software libre game engine that wasn't developed by a single company. The investment in development effort is distributed. Each one benefits from the work of the others. Each company could release their own changes to this engine without handing away years of development work.

Fundamentally, the game engine code is there to expose the content of the game. It enables the modellers, the artists, the mappers to express their ideas. New features in the engine are driven in large by the desire to express new ideas.

The GPL would work fine for such an engine. Remember, the GPL doesn't require you to release code unless you're releasing binaries as well. While developing your new enhancements and more importantly the content, your competiors would not benefit. Once the game is released, they would see those enhancements, but would then have to incorporate them into their own products and create content that uses those features (the most time consuming part). You still get a competitive advantage, just for a limited time. And this is a two-way street, of course. That's the whole idea -- you save by only having to develop the new code that is needed for your particular game's content.

Thus I suggest the answer to the question "can open source work for game developers?" is "definitely yes", while the answer to the question "should a game company with an engine switch to open source right now?" is "probably not". It really isn't that different from the software libre poster child, Linux. Can open source work for OS vendors? Of course it can, reality says so. In 1992, should the OS vendors have released their systems under the GPL? No. But just like with Linux, if and when we see software libre engines that are at or near state of the art it would begin to make much sense for game developers to use it for exactly the same reasons it makes sense to use Linux.

YAWOSGWNSA

[Cigarra]

(Yet Another Why-Open-Source-Games-Will-Never-Succeed Article)
Every once in a while we get this Prophets Of The Obvious' kind of articles, to tell us what we already know. And i mean, five years ago this was probably true, but now, with games like Counter Strike, Age of Empires series, Blizzard's *craft series and many others having such a long (for games) lifespan, it is quite obvious that MULTIPLAYER games behave just differently than your average adventure game, in the way that the "replayability factor" is much higher, thus keeping the players' interest in new releases, patches, etc., always up. And guess what, this guy from the article up there just *ignores* this fact. Which, i think, is exactly the point to have in account when talking about OS gaming.

Games aren't all programming

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the work in creating a game is content. Generally you have a small group of developers designing the game engine and tools, and you have a crapload of content artists. You need people to record sounds, storyboarders, modellers, producers, etc etc... This does not fit the open source model.

It's like asking, "Where are the Open Source movies like Saving Private Ryan? Clockwork Orange?, etc".

Open Source hobbyists are never going to produce a big fun title that lots of people will want to play.

Whiskey Tango Hotel are you thinking?

[InThane]

This is /., we don't read the stinking articles.

Community Development, but not Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing that I've noticed is that many of the best games are not due to the exceptional work of the developer, but instead are due to the extensibility of the development tools used to make the game (Half-Life -> Counter Strike, Warcraft III -> DOTA, Quake III -> Rocket Arena, etc.). There are thousands of individuals who contribute their time and talents to creating mods and total conversions of games using free, but not open, development tools. Much of the game industry understands this, and focuses on providing the most effective development tool, letting the users create and adapt their own content from the default game that ships. Quake III is one of the best examples of this, the game itself is little more than the engine that runs it. If the open source community wants to leverage the potential of the mod community, create the kind of development tools that they can't ignore, and (the harder part) use those tools to create a shining example of a game worth playing. Better yet, make it a game worth modding.

Different life cycle

[cschmidt]

Games have a very different life cycle than other software. A title really only has one major release, then gets shelved, as opposed to the iterative cycle of Apache or Linux.

My brother worked at a Sony-contracted shop and said that one of the steps in the release process was to profile the code and convert the heavily-used blocks into assembly. After the translation to assembly the code was downright unmaintainable. Not really what you want in an open source project.

Games w/ OS included?

[hughjack]

What if developers started writing and shipping games that were preinstalled on a bootable CD using something like Knoppix?

Consistant Environment

[Anonymous Coward]

I need an environment that is distribution independant. A place where I can get access to all the hardware(read only for HDs). Maybe a plugin for gstreamer, a place where I can program once and once only for all Unix machines. Then I will show you games and creativity, then I will show you proprietary and Open source games. Create the environment, the tools will follow and you will have what you seek

Re:Costs

[dasmegabyte]

You missed the fact that the OSS community learned its marketing tactics from their hated enemy. So expect volleys of FUD and unsubstantiatable claims.

Minolta Film Scanner (Offtopic)

[Anonymous Coward]

Hamrick Software ... Download VueScan 8.0.14 now, by clicking on: Mac OS X Windows Linux. ... It is available in English, German and Japanese. Purchasing VueScan. ...
www.hamrick.com

VueScan is a great piece of software. It runs great on Windows and GNU/Linux (including RH). Recommended.

Re:Minolta Film Scanner (Offtopic)

[valkraider]

I second the VueScan recomendation. It is very good software, well worth it's price.

Re:Oh please!

[swillden]

Once the GP buys into it then your pool of available talent increases dramatically and companies will invest in improvement.

Can you support this assertion, because I don't see why it's true.

Having millions of non-programmers using the software won't add appreciably to the programming talent pool. It will probably provide more bug reports, which is good, but will also dramatically lower the average quality of bug reports, which is very bad.

And how will having millions of desktop users convince companies to invest in improvement of F/LOSS? Companies aren't going to invest unless they have a reason to. I can see how it would make sense for hardware manufacturers to invest in writing Linux drivers, like they currently do for Windows, and I can see how it would make sense for software makers to invest in supporting their software on F/LOSS platforms, but it's not at all clear what would motivate them to invest in improving the platforms.

Changing the topic a little, I often see posts that seem to presume that Linux needs to grow market share, that the lives of current Linux users will somehow be better if more people are using it. Maybe I'm dense, but I don't see how market share growth would really help current users of F/LOSS, other than slightly-improved hardware support (Linux hardware support isn't bad now) and maybe availability of commercial software titles (which mostly don't matter to me now, since there are Free equivalents for most everything I need).

Not that millions of desktop users is a Bad Thing, but I don't really see why so many people automatically assume it's a Good Thing, much less a goal to be worked toward.

Not so much for games, but tools

[upsidedown_duck]

It is an order of magnitude easier to develop a fairly high quality game due to OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL, Blender, Gimp, etc., all of which are either entirely open source or significantly so (e.g., Mesa and DRI). With these tools, better games on a lower budget are inevitable.

Re:Oh please!

[Alioth]

It should not take me 30-60 minutes post installation to get most of the features I've listed above.

OK, let's compare installing Windows XP with Fedora Core 2 here (I choose FC2, because I installed it over my XP partition last night).

Installing Windows XP:
0. Insert disk. Wait for it to churn. Let it reboot (automatically). Enter language and network settings.

So now it's installed. This is what has to be done next.
1. Install service packs/security fixes (3 hours, but unattended).
2. Log in when it's done. Download and install latest NVidia drivers (10 minutes).
3. Download and install drivers for my HP printer (10 minutes).
4. Install sound drivers.
5. Install commercial DVD playing software (10 minutes, including fiddling to make it see the DVD drive which for some reason it didn't by default).

So Windows has already taken 3 hrs 20 minutes after installation. It WON'T sync with iPods/iPaqs by default until I:
6. Install some software to do so (depending on the device) - probably 10-15 minutes.

With Fedora Core 2.
0. Install FC2. One reboot.
1. Double click on the little red exclamation mark to fetch updates (45 minutes but unattended).
2. Install NVidia drivers. (10 minutes - no reboot required).
3. Discover I don't have to worry about the printer because the FC2 installer picked it up.
4. Install two RPMs (one for Xine and one for libdvdcss) to play DVDs (10 minutes).
5. Copy (no, not re-install) - just copy because there's no registry madness - the game I was playing on RedHat 8 (Return To Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory).

The thing is OSS gets held to a higher standard. Most people never install Windows or the drivers because it all comes pre-installed. If you actually install Windows XP from scratch, it really is no easier than a recent desktop Linux distro, and takes considerably longer due to the size of the security updates - which only cover the base OS.

On Windows, I would now have had to install all the other things (an office suite for example) that just come by default with a good desktop oriented Linux distro.

If you're installing both OSes from scratch - and therefore comparing like with like - you'll find it's considerably more effort to get a useful Windows install - I wager to get all those features you're after, even ignoring the time to patch the OS so it won't get owned in minutes, you'll spend at least half an hour installing drivers and rebooting. The last Windows XP install I did (for work - build an image for a fairly standard PC, with no unusual hardware) was well over half an hour installing drivers just to make the basic hardware - the ethernet card (not detected by Windows XP), the video card (a common as muck Intel chipset that comes with most business desktops - not detected by XP), the sound hardware (again, very common sound hardware - but not detected by XP) and mainboard chipset (a standard Intel chipset - not detected by XP!). The Knoppix disk I use to run our "factory" disk ghost imaging of the 70-odd machines we're deoploying on the other hand recognises all of this hardware. Linux has supported the hardware in these boxes (with the exception of the Broadcom ethernet hardware) for years. Of course, the normal user doesn't see this because they buy the machine with Windows XP pre-installed from Hewlett-Packard.

The irony is the fact that Linux supports so much hardware out of the box and Windows doesn't is partly because manufacturers don't support Linux, therfore the community has to write OSS tools for syncing with Palms and phones and printer drivers - and as these are OSS too, they get put on the Linux distro install disks so they are there ready for you on a default install, whereas with a fresh Windows install you're having to go through a pile of driver CDs to make your devices work because Microsoft doesn't have the freedom to put this on their XP installation disk.

There are many criticisms that can be

Open source "hackers" aren't good enough

[Animats]

As Jonathan Blow puts it,

• A programmer just isn't going to be competent in a modern game without a decent grasp of basic linear algebra, 4D as well as geometry in 2D and 3D. We often use 4D representations for basic operations (4D homogeneous coordinates for general linear transformations, and the quaternions to represent rotations5) so the ability to reason about higher dimensions is extremely useful. Basic calculus is necessary for all kinds of simulation and rendering tasks. For many rendering tasks, signal-processing mathematics is very important--both linear signal processing as well as the murkier study of spherical harmonics. For any kind of sophisticated simulation, you'll want experience with numerical analysis and differential forms. For networking, information theory and the statistics behind compression and cryptography are necessary to build a robust system.

  A good engine programmer should have working familiarity with a great many algorithms--so many that attempting to list them here would be silly. The most necessary algorithms perform tasks like spatial partitioning, clustering, and intersection and clipping of geometric primitives. Most algorithms will be mainly focused on one task area, like rendering or physics, but these algorithms are often very deep and take a while to master. For years we have been mining academic research to find and modify appropriate algorithms. However, a game engine must meet soft realtime requirements, and most academic work in the relevant subject areas is geared toward batch computation. (Most of the past research in graphics has applied to offline cinematic rendering. Most physics algorithms are unstable and can fail outright, which is solved in a batch setting by tweaking the initial conditions and trying again. These algorithms do not adapt successfully to a soft realtime setting.) As games are now starting to be taken seriously by the academic community, this is beginning to change, but most academic research is still pointed in directions that don't do us much good. So, creating a technically ambitious game engine will often require a substantial amount of original research.

Hacking isn't enough any more. You need theory. Lots of theory.

Game development has some really smart people. I've met some of them. The best theoretical work today is being done in game development. Game AI is better than academic AI, and it's gaining.

Re:Oh please!

[Anonymous Coward]

that might have been true in 1986 when Joe Six-pack architect started to use his PC in his business. or JSP Accountant.

but now, computers are ubiquitous in business, and business apps are everywhere, not just lotus 1-2-3 anymore. computers are now just a tool for business, and if linux can demonstrate superiority, it will be adopted.

Walmart won't choose linux because their employees might happen to have one at home, like they'd give a shit. they'll use it if their IT dept or hired consultancy tells them it's best for the specific things they want to do.

in fact, it's so totally untrue that really you have no excuse for believing it. the world has moved way on.

Could OSS work for a MMORPG?

[kenjib]

MMORPGs avoids one of the factors that make OSS less useful for game development. With MMORPGs you have a large and dedicated user base that will play the game consistently over a long period of time. These games can also develop incrementally with the addition of new features, graphic updates, areas, quests, etc. In addition, these games have a much longer lifespan than most other games. How many users does Everquest still have?

What would happen if a MMORPG was open source and had the kind of user-generated content ethos that is more common with MUDs?

Game Depth and Replayablilty are the solution

[Anonymous Coward]

The point I took from the article is that people don't play a computer game for long enough.

This is not the state for non-computer games, however. See Football/Basketball, Poker, Chess, Golf etc. Any one of these games may occupy the freetime that an average individual spends on ALL of computer gaming.

Why? Because a modern commercial computer game is designed like a movie. You watch it once, then you've seen it. You watch Psycho, and then you know how it ends. Sure, watch it again if you're a big fan, but while you may see a few new things there is nothing that will happen that wasn't already there. It's the same with HalfLife. And that is the triumph of the computer game industry - keep people buying new games.

"Game Depth" and "Replay-ability" are the two issues. Content increases play time linearly (or slower), but game depth and replayability increase play time exponentially.

Game Depth is the existence of multiple levels of mastery.
Replayability is when the course of events is not the same from game to game.

Some examples -
Chess has depth
Fisher-Random Chess is an effort to increase Chess' replayability
Football has depth and replayability.
Solitare has replayability but not depth.
Tetris has some depth and some replayability.
Mahjong (tile matching) has replayability but not depth.
Half-Life has neither replaybility nor depth.
Reading a book has neither replayability nor depth.

Don't get me wrong - these two aspects don't automatically make a good game. And a game without either can still be enjoyable. (half life ruled!) But for OSS to improve the "Time Invested":"Time Used" ratio of computer games to make them more attractive OSS projects these Depth and Replayability are the key.

I would suggest an OSS fighting game. My room mates and I spent much longer than the lifetime of the Dreamcast polishing our Soul Calibur game to a level of refinement I have not seen outside our old apartment. Soul Calibur had Depth - the moves were well balanced and fighter interplay was complex. It also had Replayability - the number of fight combinations increased rapidly compared to the number of fighters.

I hope my anon. comment doesn't languish at 0 for ever - I would like to see these aspects developed in either OSS or Commercial software. Some 'meatier' games would be a lot of fun. But while it is in OSS interest to develop these aspects it is in the interest of Commercial software to continue as they are - making games that get played and then discarded in favor of buying the next new game.

Adam T.

Industry has Open Source Games Beat for Now...

[CodeBuster]

The problems faced in game development are very similar those seen in compiler development. There are a relatively small number of people in the industry who have practical experience in developing code generators and game engines, both of which are still somewhat of a black art. If you want to learn what it is that they know, their trade secrets if you will, then you must presumably spend at least as much time as they did learning (there are millions of man hours of development experience collectively in the top echelons of the game industry) or be lucky enough to serve as apprentice to one of the great developers (sort of like the Jedi training in Star Wars). The end result of all of this is that the game industry, or at least the part that actually makes money, has a very high barrier to entry and the firms that occupy that space have no interest in helping their potential competitors, even open source projects, seriously compete with their products. I decided not to go into the game industry for this and other reasons when I completed my computer science degree, although some of my friends did. A couple of them succeeded, but from what I have heard of their experience the life of a grunt game developer is difficult at best. The competition is incredibly fierce, the pay is not spectacular (especially for junior developers), and nobody cares that your last game was the biggest seller of all time; they want to know (the publisher) what have you done for me lately? The point of all of this is that open source projects will probably have to go the re-learn the secret knowledge route much as they had to do with cryptography. In the long run the open source people may make some valuable contributions, but in the short run there is nothing that the open source community can do with game development that the industry gurus cannot do ten times better. If you enjoy game development then by all means make it your hobby and go open source with your projects, you will probably be having more fun than most people who do it for a living anyway.

Technology Driven Development and Open Source

[Shihar]

It is a cute idea, but the simple fact of that matter is that games are still very much technology driven. The Quake engine was wonderful in its day, but I would be very depressed if game developers were still using it. I don't doubt for a second that this would produce better plots, greater creativity in using the engine, and better game play, but it would still mean that the graphics would suck. Quake 1 will never be a beautiful is FarCry.

I think the biggest problem with open source in gaming is that making a game is a job. Sure, some people make some great mods, but making an actual engine is a job. It is a very long term project that will take many man hours and the hard work of many people. The best way to do this is to get all the people you need together in one place and pay them to stay there and work on it until it is done. Then, once you have the final product, sell the hell out of it and do everything in your power to keep the competition from copying what you just did. If they want the source, they can fork over some cash.

Personally, I don't think we will ever see much mainstream open source activity until one of two things come to pass. Either computers will stop getting faster (doubtful) or computers will be so powerful and intelligent that anyone could make a game simply by describing it. Either way, I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for that day.

Re:Technology Driven Development and Open Source

[fucksl4shd0t]

It would help if I hadn't lost track of what I was thinking. Maybe I should go to bed. ;)

Anyway, if you look around at the open source games that are there, you'll find certain patterns repeated. The games are generally small, become playable very early in life, and easily expandable. In some cases, they're not even easily expandable (Armagetron, anyone?), they're just good games. Frozen Bubble is expandable, and reuses all the same graphics over and over. The card games are all small and simple, and so forth.

This model doesn't work for large-scale games precisely because the games don't get particularly playable until they're almost complete, and by then you've invested four years of your time into it only to find that the technology you were aiming for it to run in is now obsolete, and nobody wants to play the game because it's too old.

So, to solve this problem, a couple of game engines per genre of game would be needed, with lively development that keeps them up with the latest technology. That prevents the engine itself from becoming outdated.

As you and other folks have pointed out (which I already knew anyway, and the article mentions, and so forth), developing the engine isn't the bulk of a gaming project. Story and multi-media are the biggest parts of the project. So each engine would need a standard way of representing the story and use standard ways of dealing with multimedia (that's graphics, music, and sound effects, in case you're wondering) so that the writers, musicians, and graphic artists can use their fancy RAD tools to design the stuff. And we'll just assume there would be reusable components (there would, and we can debate that all day long, but they're reusable the same way libraries are now, pieces that need to be assembled into something useful).

So we're talking infrastructure that won't appear overnight, certainly. There's no silver bullet that "If Carmac develops Doom 400 from the ground up as open source all our woes are over". It's a large problem, and it's getting solved piece by piece, as with any large problem.

But when/if it gets solved, the focus on games will be solely gameplay, nice graphics, and nice sounds/music. Technology will take a backseat because it would be assured in the engines. But everything else has to be open source as well for game design to become open source, you can't just say "open source" and only be talking about the engine, you have to be talking about the art, music, and story also, otherwise what you said in your post will always be true.

The strength of open source in applications has always been about reusable components, so it's actually fairly obvious that to make open source game development work you have to reduce games to a series of reusable parts that require a minimal amount of assembly to facilitate maximal development. (Jesus fucking christ, I didn't know I could speak corporatespeak!)

wrong market

[Anonymous Coward]

Open source is a by product of the service industry and academia. The only tangent with games and service might be networked games but from what I know they have not been that succesful. So, in this case, there is no profit center to back up your development costs. I don't see academia subsidising an industry completely.

If everyone pooled their resources and used a handful of engines via open source then the resulting games would be like wonderbread quality and limited in the same ways.

To complicate this case more, games are about 90% production these days. That means more mouths to feed. It happens that those artists are not as ideologically driven as open source advocates and simply need the money. You know starving artists. Everyone wants the big budget block buster game. $$ has to come from somewhere.

As far as innovation, the industry has been very innovative. When people in graphics are as excited as they were in the 70s then you know there is some type of innovation going on.

I think open source will have a marginal effect. For example, using an open sourced xml parser for example. Utility code etc. But the core of game developement will be a handfull of developers. And each game is a unique piece of art. ( not wonder bread )

OSS sucks for games...

[Anonymous Coward]

Even moreso than it sucks for UI design. Mark this a troll if you want, but in general it's true.

A game needs to "feel" fun. Much the same way a GUI for an OS needs to "feel" consistent. OSS still hasn't found a way for this to happen as well as others (notably: Apple).

Also, there is no innovation in OSS games. OSS is generally cloning other software and in some cases making it better. In order to get developers on board, you need to convince them it's a good idea. It's often hard to get people on board to games that they don't know are going to work out in the end.

Games are kind of like movies. You can have the greatest ideas and developers and infinite resources, but sometimes they just don't work out. (Daikatana, Duke)

Re:Costs

[julesh]

My end users (who have Windows 2000 or XP, as that is the required minimum system I develop for) have already paid Microsoft royalties[1]. Therefore running the DirectX setup that I am permitted to redistribute to them costs them nothing.

[1]: Or they're happy with their pirated versions. If that suit's them, I'm not complaining, because it doesn't cost me anything.

Re:Oh please!

[gnuLNX]

Interesting...after the first sentence I didn't even mention myself again....and I don't think that I ever implied 'people just need to learn'

Perhaps you should re-read what I said.

Re:Oh please!

[Anonymous Coward]

"2. Get on the Internet."
Done

Not for everybody ... Installed mandrake 10 over the week-end and still fighting to get my modem to work ...

Another issue...

[fitten]

Another very strong issue in this is that many games have to develop at breakneck speeds in order to be "first on the market" before a rival releases something similar enough that when people play that game, your game is too similar to warrant buying for a different game experience. This ends up with the situation mentioned in the linked articals... you have to have a dedicated bunch of developers and artists who can spend 80 hours per week for years at a time, potentially, in order to get the game out the door before someone else scoops you. Making modern games is a huge investment risk. You put a *lot* of money up front paying for the developers and artists with the hopes of getting some return on it when it is released. To be competitive in that market, you have to be able to make sure that you can make ends meet for the duration of the project and that requires payment up front for salaries and folks purchasing the product when it is released. Neither of which typically would figure into the F/OSS model of software.

Business models

[danila]

Open Source in game development needs valid business models to prosper. Currently OSS companies can make money mostly on support, which is not a valid option for games - even commercial companies don't provide much in terms of support and not much is needed anyway.

One way to charge people money is what already is used to combat piracy - online play. If a company would be paid for maintaining servers, it may reliquish the code control and lean towards open source. One example is Second Life, which, in a sense, is a successful open source game.

As for the mainstream singleplayer games, the problem is that most of the effort goes into art and design, where you can't find enough qualified volunteers and where distributing work is more difficult (as well as version control).

This isn't to say that opening the source is impossible, but a different approach is needed. If we want to see companies actively using OSS as a development model and not just throwing bones to the community (by releasing the source several years after game release), the model should provide some benefits to the developers without taking too much control away from them.

Companies may look more favourably at sharing code with a limited number of partners and with certain non-competition (time-limited) clauses, instead of open sharing with the world via GPL.

karamba

[delire]

Adam is right in assuming that on a per-game basis there are difficulties, but he makes several mistakes thinking they impede a future for OSGames. The Open Source model has advantaged many game development teams on the level that they aren't forced to reinvent the brick, they can use code written by someone else under a flexible license. Examples of this are really boring things like a sound manager, communications layer or texture processing tools. Tons of open libraries are used already in commercial projects for this reason: OpenGL, Python, Ruby, SDL, DevIL, OpenAL, Java to name a few. To what level of open source development is he talking about here? Secondly, whether or not they release the code for open development during the development cycle is their business, and in many cases is unwise given the possible loss of focus on s specific development project. Why would you want 500 people working on extending an engine while you were trying to make a Second Person Fish Throwing Game? You wouldn't. Instead Adam assumes that opensouce development always implies community development during the game production cycle:

"Doom 3 was quite playable half way through its development cycle. That means with two years of full-time development left, in an open source world, players would already be playing it. Two years is a long time in the gaming world. It would be very hard to keep any sort of public interest alive with weekly test releases where the only change might be that a weapon was tweaked, a room was added halfway through the game, the lighting was adjusted, or load time was slightly reduced.

I don't know why he doesn't see the alternative option of releasing the source after the game has been released, to be further developed later. This is a way of retaining control of the project, it's obligations to the inaugural release date and to the publishers. On a commercial level, what is the engine really worth? How much money can a game developer make on licensing out an engine they have made? ID software and Epic Games might be licensing their source out to developers with some success, but really no one else is (though many are trying). Looking at the list of takers for ID's Quake3 engine, few can afford, or justify, a $US450,000 ticket on the code. It is simply out of the reach for almost everyone, and those that can afford it would often rather bring their pie to the table. For this reason, Open Source game development is integral to the future of independent gaming, small teams with innovative ideas can actually afford to make a game without having to work with expensive proprietary code already rigged up for making a certain kind of game. However even large companies like Activision are recognising real advantages in releasing the source of their engine *after* the development cycle, in the interest of a community of developers freely extending the development of the engine after the market life of the project for use by the originators, or anyone else later.

"On 28 October 2003, Activision released the source code for Call to Power II. This part of our CtP2 section is dedicated to the CtP2 Source Code Project: the collective effort by the Apolyton CtP2 community to document and improve the source code of the game."

Anyway, it is really a question of critical mass in the source pool. With enough free source available (including libraries, API's and whole engine projects) to make nearly any kind of game, as is happening right now, small to medium teams can quickly develop a specific project with the primary budget being dedicated to human labour, not licenses and legatilities.

Companies like Radon Labs have really cottoned onto ths, and looking at the commercial games derived from their own Nebula Open Source game development is really working, and working commercially for the developers. Aside from the to

Not entirely accurate

[ArcWF]

Whether are not there are few major game titles built *entirely* with free/open source software, there is quite a bit of it going into parts of game engines. Case in point: we have been building our commerical game engine for some time now using several free/open source software components:

SDL (http://www.libsdl.org)
GLEW (http://glew.sourceforge.net)
ligpng (http://www.libpng.org)

The game servers themselves are running on all free/open source software:

FreeBSD (http://www.freebsd.org)
Apache (http://www.apache.org)
ACE (http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE.html)
TAO (http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/TAO.html)

Likewise we have been building the engine using free/open source software tools on free/open source software operating systems:

GCC (http://gcc.gnu.org)
GNU Make (http://www.gnu.org/software/make)
Bash (http://www.gnu.org/software/bash)
GDB (http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb)
DDD (http://www.gnu.org/software/ddd)
Gentoo Linux (http://www.gentoo.org)
MinGW & MSYS (http://www.mingw.org)

Finally, we are planning to release much of our own software infrastructure as free/open source software. Thus saying that the open source development model does not make sense for game development is not entirely accurate.

Arc

Why I don't develop open source games

[edbarbar]

I develop software that I don't use, mostly software for embedded devices. What's the value of me developing software?

value="money/etc I get paid" + "fun algorithms" + "accomplishments of doing new stuff"

After all, I could be a manager or something else if I wanted to, so I add in coding (nerd) fun.

What's the value to me of developing a game?

value="fun algos" + "accomplishments"

I can easily buy high quality games (much cheaper than developing them), and for the most part they actually have more of what I want than I could imagine, or what I imagine is technologically not practical.

In other words, there is much less value to me todevelop open source game software than to write cool software for which someone is actually willing to pay me.

Unless there is something really missing in a game that I want, or until there is a Micro$oft of game vendors for me to hate, there really isn't enough value for me to develop open source games.

Lots of reasons why games are different

[JohnFred]

1> Sheer quantity of units shipped.

It's not uncommon to need to sell a million worldwide in order to make a decent profit, because marketing and development costs are colossal, and getting larger.

2> Code is only a fraction of the input.

You need buckets of art, and sound. Artists outnumber coders on a big commercial project by as much as five to one.

3> There's no working business model that links up to the open source approach.

How do you sell a service related to a game? What is "support" in this context? You can sell subscriptions to MMORPGS - someone is trying. You can sell nice game packages with "feelies" ala Infocom. Neither approach seems particularly advantageous business - wise.

4> The good platforms are closed.

You can't develop anything Free as in Speech for the XBox or PS2 by their very nature, and these are the most
Things that could happen that might help:

1> A linux distro aimed specifically at game developers. Something that has Nvidia / ATI video support out of the box, a good collection of game libs and tools.

2> A focus on tools for content creation. Blender is nice, but can't we improve on packages like Maya or Max? Can't the Open Source community come up with applications that makes modelling the things we need for games - landscapes, interirors, vehicles, characters easier, the way plugins for Max and Maya often do? Or apps that use procedural techniques for generation of this content? If I was starting an Open - Source game related company tomorrow this is where I'd start.

3> A "games" version of sourceforge: one that can not only be used to manage and pool code assets but art and sound assets, too and attracts artists, audio guys and designers.

4> Some genius coming up with a viable business model for a game that the source is publically available to.

MMO

[Kenard]

Most games don't hit critical mass until it's too late to do anything to the code (other then mods).
The only place I see Open Source games as a effective option is in massively multiplayer games. They tend to focus on security and go through an iterative process more then your average game, which is the strong sute of Open Source.

Open-Source Star Control Games

[youBastrd]

Really good open-source games do exist. Take the Star Control series, for example. Gamespot calls Star Control 2 one of the best games of all time, and lo and behold, it's available as open source as The Ur-Quan Masters.

While we're here and on-topic, have a look at Star Control: Timewarp. Also open source and in the Star Control universe, it's got some cool new ships and innovative features.

Creative dissonance.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Bruce Perens once even said it here on Slashdot (can't find the link at the moment) but open source development tends to favor software which can be developed incrementally. This isn't especially true of games. Games moreso than any other software product are a media production like a movie or book. It just doesn't fit with the open source development model as well. That doesn't mean that it can't work, but that the best and most successful open source tools will be those that are closest to the source of free software -- developers."

While this is true. As pointed out earlier OS excels in infrastructure. So OS can come up with some good infrastructure for those who do create games. We have game engines. We have a 3D modeling chain. We have sound. Looking at this guys Blender gallerie. You can see what we DON"T have, and for which the OSS model doesn't fit.

The Obvious Answer

[cephyn]

There is one obvious game genre that lends well to Open Source models: MMORPGs. These are games with LONG interest times and thousands of geeky people playing it, many with too much spare time. It is also a game genre that, even in closed source, is undergoing constant incremental updates. I think well organized communities could easily make a solid, innovative and awesome MMORPG.

The problem of course, is the costs of bandwidth and server space needed.

Re:The Obvious Answer

[shapr]

IPv6 has both multicast and QoS that would help with this, and distributed hash systems like Chord, Bamboo, Pastry, and Tapestry could give you a system that doesn't have servers, but instead works like a low-bandwidth peer to peer MMORPG.

Creative and worthwhile ideas do exist, but who has the money to take a year off work to code them up?

Re:The Obvious Answer

[cephyn]

college students. they have too much free time on their hands as it is.

Re:The Obvious Answer

[MMaestro]

Actually there are some 'open' (but not open source) MMORPGs like Second Life which allows players to create and then implement said content into the game. Despite this the game hasn't exactly been dubbed an 'Everquest-killer'.

If 'open' games like this can't cause some serious breakthrough, on what grounds can you say that an 'open source' MMORPG would succeed?

Re:The Obvious Answer

[cephyn]

One game isn't exactly a very good sample size is it? think of the unsuccessful games that came before EQ burst open the floodgates. And what game has surpassed EQ since, closed or open? I'd say none -- theyre all chasing EQ.

Im not saying definitively that an OSS MMORPG *would* succeed, im saying of any game genre, its the one mostly likely to succeed under an open source model. a small distinction, to be sure, but one nonetheless.

Re:The Obvious Answer

[Merk]

You're right on both counts. It is the ideal niche for OSS stuff. It's especially true because MMORPGs are all about building worlds, and that ongoing, continuous tweaking is exactly what OSS is all about.

As for servers, I wonder if a P2P model might work, where there is no 1 central server, instead there are supernodes which pop up and down as needed. If each "village" in the world only has a few dozen people online, a typical machine shouldn't have too much difficulty being a server for that.

Imagine that though, an MMORPG with no subscription fees, where there's no need to level up quickly, where you can take the tame to roleplay. That could be a great game.

Start with GL and keep your port options open

[tepples]

But this applies to any game that is developed to run on Windows, and is not DirectX specific.

The difference being that a port to another platform becomes more cost effective if the developers wrote their engine for OpenGL to begin with. Heck, even the Sony PSP uses an API whose function names look eerily similar to those of OpenGL.

About open-source...

[DrCode]

You don't let every would-be code monkey work on your game. If you create your project on SourceForge, you get to determine who the members are, and they're the only ones who can check in changes.

Digital artists are needed-Google

[Anonymous Coward]

"As a sidenote, I couldn't get my wacom to work with the a 2.6 kernel as of now :-/"

Google the Mandrake groups. I have it working with my Wacom.

Yeah, if you want your business to remain small

[tepples]

My end users ... have already paid Microsoft royalties

Therefore, people who have not already bought a sufficiently recent copy of Windows are not your end users; they're somebody else's end users. To grow your business, you need to reach out to people on other platforms.

meta-art is the future of pop-culture

[evilmousse]

> The article makes a good point that good
> art must be original and can not be generated
> by modifying older art.

What?!?!?!
That's SO wrong. There is definetly creativity in reuse. I could list good examples of meta-art all day long.

- rap/hiphop sampling beats/lines from r&b songs
- classic rock reusing old blues riffs/lines
- blues reusing old gospel lines

- andy warhol's campbell's soup can painting
(easy example, but i wonder why ppl like it..)

- any picture made of lots of little pictures

- any fan-art, from a child's snoopy drawing
to entire star trek/wars fan-novels

- sprite-based webcomics

- the most meta comic in the world
http://www.colintheriot.com/patheticinc/
(made entirely with google'd pix, HILARIOUS)

simply put, art draws from culture, and culture draws from art. technology now approaches making it as easy to incite the original art as it is to speak its' name. we're only going to keep getting more referential.

-g

Open-source [models]

[Anonymous Coward]

"Sure for some games you want a specific style and you need to create huge parts from scratch, but for many games, especially those that mimik the real-world more or less having a library of available 3d models and textures at hand helps a lot."

Have you ever tried to create a good 3D model or a good texture? It's not as easy as you think. Good models cost.

Re:Open-source [models]

[grumbel]

Aehm, yep, of course creating good models or textures involves some talent and work, but it does not involve any need for coordinated development and thats exactlly why it would work perfectly as "Open Source" (or better Creative Commons). A good library of textures and models could be created over a long period of time without to much problems and it would help Open Source game development in general a lot, since one wouldn't need to start out from a blank sheet of paper, but could start with a room full of inventory and would just need to tweak the parts that need tweaking to fit the game.

Sure you need tools and artists who are willing to work for free, but looking around I see lots and lots of artists who work for free and do it just for the love and fun of it, nothing stops them in the long term to add some Creative Commons license to their work and give it away for others to reuse.

It's not that bad

[Jesus_666]

Unless you already have a pool of developers to work with - for example, the game I'm currently developing the network stuff for (unfortunately about the only OSS part of the game) was started by a thread in the IT section of a German gaming forum. Developers were gathered by pointing people to the thread until all positions were filled.
While most of the game will be proprietary (mostly due to the fact that the main coders couldn't find an OSS rendering engine for Delphi), I do plan on making an opensourced Linux port of the game. I will probably be able to use most or all of the resources and I can ask the original client's developers if I have questions about the its design.
So basically I have everything already laid out: There are some decent engines on SourceForge, the resources are there, the game logic itself is already done and the netcode is a dynamic library that will be portable from the beginning. And I can probably recruit one or two of the original game's coders for the port.

The point I'm trying to make is: You don't need to be able to make the entire game yourself if you know where to find people who have enough spare time to help you. Especially the techies in non-techie environments sometimes have more than enough time at their hands and are often quite willing to learn something about a certain subject if you ask them to work on it. It's a chance for them to learn about a subject they normally wouldn't have looked into due to inertia.
If you can provide an idea and know someone who can provide something else and he knows someone... you can reach that critical mass pretty fast.

BTW, the idea does not necessarily have to be good as long as it has enough hooks to let the team plug in good ideas. Our game's concept started as "Let's clone Spellcast!" and then evolved into a tournament-style thingie involving two-dimensional spells and whatnot, mostly through the concept of "Yeah, that sounds great, but how does this sound?".

I think that you need nothing but a basic concept and a few people who are willing to invest their time into it. Once you have people assigned to the various positions, they can (help you) work out stuff file formats, communication protocols, etc. If you draw your team members from a sufficiently large pool, you'll find someone for every position you'd ever need, whether it be modeler, 2D artist or coding Linux geek. (That last position is important, but then again this is Slashdot, so the position will likely be already filled in your projects.)

Re:Oh please!

[sindarin2001]

One thing that I'd like to append to the parent's post.

I believe one of the reasons that linux will have troubles taking the market is choice. For most problems, there are usually at least 3 choices for linux applications to use. Most people don't want to deal with thinking about what application they should use and how to use it. They want a homogeneous market. Now, I believe that choice is the thing that makes linux strong. I'm not locked into a certain configuration or a certain solution, but most people aren't like me. They want to be spoon-fed, and rightfully so because they have other things they should be worrying about than which application they should use to burn a cd.

Open source is good for tools, not for content

[LordZardoz]

Having and using open source tools is a good thing. However, when it comes down to the content and gameplay, you end up nearing the part of game development that is more art then engineering.

Also, game developers like to be able to actually sell stuff for the purposes of supporting them selves.

I would say that using open tools in development, and releasing the source some time after development is a reasonable approach for those so inclined. After all, user mods are quite popular.

END COMMUNICATION

Knock-off's are open sources "core business"

[AHumbleOpinion]

I mean its a pretty slick polished game, but its a direct knock off of a game thats been around for ages. No creativity in game design, just in artwork.

I apologize if this sounds like a dig but please bear with me. Aren't knock-off's what most open source projects are all about. Sometimes it's a literal knock-off, Linux/BSD being knock-off's of proprietary Unix environments. Literal knock-off as in a Unix user knows how to use the system, Unix apps generally compile and run, not literal as in source code. Sometimes it's more of a philosophical knock-off, OpenOffice for example. Here we do not have a compatibility with respect to commands, as we do with Linux/BSD to a degree, but we have a compatibility with respect to accomplishing a certain task in a similar manner. Differences tending to be minor implementation details, user perspective, not developer. Often, knock-off's are what the community asks for. "It would be great if we could get an open source version of XYZ." Given this orientation of open source I don't think that it is unreasonable to see lots of knock-offs in the gaming arena.

Also keep in mind how many open source projects start as educational efforts, someone fulfilling their own curiosity or trying to expand their programming skills. This may be more frequent in the gaming arena than say the personal finance arena. Given such a start it is quite natural to recreate something that is well known and enjoyed, and possibly well understood.

Re:Knock-off's are open sources "core business"

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, "knock-offs" are the core business of *any* area. See the constant rehashing of films scripts with slight changes -- sampling in music -- cover versions -- most software is simply a reimplementation of other apps, open source or not.

Open source is no different. There are original projects in open source, but like everything else, most of it is based on ideas from elsewhere.

boooring

[Anonymous Coward]

no funny posts here? :-)

Smaller game companies will *need* OSS

[CuteAlien]

With cost currently running away in the game industry, small companies will either supply niche markets (which are already very small) or they have to reduce theire costs by working together. Open Source is perfect for that.

Open source engines are not yet on the same level like the Doom Engine, but i can see no reason why they shouldn't mature like other os-libs did. What is left is content (which was mentioned several times already). My guess is that within the next years open source will come up with new solutions. For example AI which can extract animation and geometry data from webcammovies, basic texture libraries which are parameterized (make this skin darker, add some pimples). Also i guess that open source games will concentrate more on ideas which will capture players for a long time (simulations don't get outdated that fast).

Doom wasn't the first multiplayer FPS

[tepples]

Doom had multiplayer which none of its forebears had.

Faceball for Game Boy was a 1991 FPS with multiplayer.

Re:Doom wasn't the first multiplayer FPS

[Minna Kirai]

Faceball for Game Boy was a 1991 FPS with multiplayer.

Midi-maze for Atari was a 1987 FPS with multiplayer.

(Nonethelss, Doom was innovative)

Re:My views - see parsec.org

[Em Adespoton]

Parsec (mirror) is a perfect example of what happens when you get a group of talented people coming up with a new game idea -- they started it out as closed source freeware because they didn't want the fizzle associated with OSS games; then when it fizzled anyway, they decided to opensource it.

Now, well, it's still in progress, and there are lots of other commercial games that have caught up with it and surpassed it. I guess one of the main issues is that OSS takes time to gain momentum, and Games that are Cutting Edge have a very short life. So, OS Games have to be either knockoffs, or out of date by the time they're released; the only exception I can see is when the game is a spinoff from some other game that meets one of the above criteria.

He misses the main point..

[vhold]

Coding an opensource game is generally done by it's developers for their own fun. This notion that they are somehow naturally trying to compete with commericial games is kind of like saying that a local informal softball team is getting whooped by a major league team. They aren't even playing against each other.

How the incumbents maintain their position

[tepples]

- rap/hiphop sampling beats/lines from r&b songs
- classic rock reusing old blues riffs/lines
- blues reusing old gospel lines

- the original authors suing and winning

Because of the restrictive licenses on incumbents' works, independent parties have trouble negotiating rights to sample pop culture. Building a creative commons of samplable works available for free or cheap will take time.

DirectX not a porting problem.

[AHumbleOpinion]

The only downside to using DirectX (which comes with a very mature SDK, samples, docs, and helper libraries these days) would be if you cared about porting to non-Microsoft platforms. This is, of course, a real consideration for some, but certainly not for all.

Historically, with the exception of DirectPlay, DirectX has not been troublesome for the Mac porting community. DirectDraw and DirectSound seem to have been easily mapped onto Apple's GameSprockets, Direct3D onto OpenGL. One outfit did create a compatibility layer for DirectPlay but that was a painful effort.

Uncooperative manufacturers

[tepples]

"2. Get on the Internet. Done"
Winmodem.

"3. Watch video clips. Done"
Codec patents. DMCA/EUCD.

"5. Capture and email pictures to Grandma. Done"
Winscanner.

"8a. Play games with 3D acceleration. Done"
Winvideo-card.

Last time I tried Mandrake around the 9.1 days, it detected my ATI Radeon 9000 video card but used an unaccelerated driver, as did Knoppix. My Microtek Scanmaker 4850 scanner remains unsupported in SANE due to lack of documentation from the manufacturer. Do you claim that GNU/Linux is for new computers only?

Re:Uncooperative manufacturers

[bubkus_jones]

"Winmodem"
Some winmodems work under Linux, I don't know which ones,though. I don't use dialup. Aside from that, hardware modems can be bought for $20.

"Codec patents. DMCA/EUCD."
I've only encountered that with one DVD, and one video file (quicktime, no audio played, video was fine).

"Winscanner."
Well, I've NEVER heard that term before. and I've yet to come across a problem with any scanner I've had (not many, and mostly small-name brands).

"Winvideo-card."
Are you making these up? Jeez. An ATI card. Go figure.

Do you want to know what the problem is? Well I assume you already do, since it's in your subject line. The hardware manufacturers are the problem. They don't want to release drivers for Linux because either they think that they need to release the source (I'm assuming that they think that), or that they don't think that the users are there to warrant spending time developing the drivers.

They also don't tend to release enough documentation on the card, which would be needed for a third-party (OSS, in this case) driver to be written with all the features available.

For new computers only? Hell no.

As for the hardware problem, complain to the manufacturers about getting them to support linux, boycott them untill they do (and tell them why), or use products from a company that does support linux (like nVidia).

Support the companies that support your OS choice, so they know that their support is appreciated, and don't support the companies that won't support your OS choice.

Open Source isn't good for everything...

[ndykman]

Although it was a while back, I was at a lecture that good ol' ESR gave on Open Source and such. Games came up as an example, and ESR noted that he felt that in that case, open source didn't make much sense. The argument was a bit like games were too much like movies, in that they had a very limited shelf life (compared to things like OSes, etc.), there's no way to make money off customization, support, and the work requires too much specialized talent to take full advantage of "lots of eyeballs." He did think that maybe there was a reason to open source engines, but I don't agree with that. I think licensing source makes more sense here. Sure, they can get the source, but they can't just hand it around to anybody. Why give away the cookie store to anybody to slap together a crappy game with your engine, giving your work a bad name? You could open source it later, but by then, who would really take advantage of it?

Re:Oh please!

[gnuLNX]

Couldn't agree more. People just want it to work...they don't care what software it is as long as it is exactly like the software the learned first

What works in Open Source? Platforms.

[iav8c177s]

Every viable open-source business I can think of makes their money by providing value-added services to a _platform_, which is itself free. So the way to make the big bucks gaming is to build a colossally excellent engine, slap a great game on top of it, open the whole works after the initial buying frenzy and then either (a) sell subsequent closed-source games written atop it or (b)...sheesh, there is no (b).

Re:Oh please!

[FooBarWidget]

Installing Windows XP:
0. Insert disk. Wait for it to churn. Let it reboot (automatically). Enter language and network settings.

You forgot:
0.1: Select what to do with existing partitions.
0.2: Format a partition because you cannot install to a non-empty partition.

Especially these 3 steps are extremely unfriendly to average users.

Artwork, people!

[lifeblender]

Most games require a balanced and carefully tweaked set of code, artwork, and game rules. This means that only a few pieces of games can ever be open-source. With inovation under the hood invisible to users, and most of the guts of a game needing tweaking for every new level of CPU, it's worth it for a game company to try to outdo its competitors in that one section, too.

Different Answers to the Question

[randall_burns]

There is more to Open Source and game development than just writing games and open sourcing them:

Games can take advantage of the infrastructure that open Source makes possible.

Personally, I think we need a substantial annual prize for :
1) the best game that currently open source
2) the best game that runs on Linux _and_ has
source code in escrow so it will go open source
sometime in the near future.

This is the type of thing that would make it more sensible to use and support Open Source Software with games.

Re:Oh please!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think there is another take on this "Linux for the masses" idea. Instead of infesting the market through the home, you go through the business. The idea is that the end user has to learn something new right? What provides more motivation:

a) My home computer has all these new (linux) programs that I have to learn but I already know how MS does the exact same thing

-or -

b) The job that is paying me money wants me to learn application X?

I simplified the issue to make a point: your job saying that you need to learn how to use a program to continue getting payed is more motivation than just a pet project at home.

This also agrees with Linux's biggest selling point to corporate America: you don't have to license the OS. You still have to pay for IT, you may still need to pay for apps (when an Open Source alt won't do), but you don't have to pay the odd $US100 per computer for the OS.

My opinion is that the direction "Linux for the masses" should go is through big business. Once a user gets used to using the platform, it's easier to bring it home.

Wow! A Whole thousand dollars?

[Anonymous Coward]

how much work do you expect you're going to get for that thousand dollars?

commercial vs. proprietary

[swg101]

>I'm hoping you mean "is used in a proprietary offering". This is certainly the case, the most famous example being Trolltech's QT.

I am pretty sure that the QT license requires purchasing for both commercial products and proprietary products.

From Trolltech's site:

Use the Qt Commercial License to:
-Build commercial software.
-Build software whose source code you wish to keep private.

Re:commercial vs. proprietary

[squiggleslash]

QT is licensed under the GPL, so whether Trolltech intends this or not, you most certainly can distribute it without the QT Commercial License, whether you do so commercially or otherwise.

As an example, most Linux Distributions, commercial and non-commercial include QT as part of their distributions. This includes RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, and Linspire. None of them, to the best of my knowledge, have agreed to anything more than the GPL when it comes to QT.

I would suggest though that TrollTech almost certainly know that, and are making the common mistake of equating proprietary and commercial. In the quote you make, I'm assuming the second bullet point is refering to non-commercial proprietary software.

OSS game Mediocrity?

[handmedowns]

What about PlaneShift?

Closed Source ethics

[Paralizer]

I believe in open source, but closed source is sometimes the best way to go. As long as a company has good ethics, I see no reason why their code cannot be closed source. ID Software is a prime example. Their work is amazing, and their ethics admirable (ie, they don't stick spyware in their code and keep it closed). Once in a while Carmack decides to open the source when the code is somewhat outdated, to help reach more developers, which is great. I think companies should take a lesson from ID, they are closed source, yet they still help developers around the world.

/hijack

[Anonymous Coward]

/hijack

they're using EMACS! /vi_vs_emacs_flamewar on ;)

Algorithms or complete games?

[jbolden]

I think open source / wide sharing methods have proven themselves on algorithmic aspects of game construction. For example the alpha/beta search routines which are now standard for chess engines were developed collaboratively by lots of researches in a shared mode. As was the notion of the "opening book" and "closing book" to reduce complexity. Reversi engines have copied ideas from one another and from chess and at this point computer's are better than human players. While bridge engines have not advanced nearly as far many of the ideas here cross between engines like: notional systems, using multiple double dummy plays to evaluate possible hands, etc... Poker engines are copying from one another as well as ideas from the chess engines.

Similarly as people point out for the commercial games. Most of the ideas are copied from one another. Sharing of algorithms is the really vital part not sharing of source since the algorithms can often take 20-200x as long to write as the source code to implement them.

Playing the Open Source Game

[eetu]

I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this essay by Shawn Hargreaves yet. It may be five years old, but most of it is still relevant.

Open Source WILL Work!

[crazedlunatic]

While some valid points are made, there is a serious lack of insight into the open source world and how gaming could benefit.

The article treats game development as custom application specific development of code and media with a short product lifecycle and no reusability. That is how it is today, but Open Source could change that.

While the realm of game development has been out of reach of a single geeky individual since the "Insert favorite 6502 processor based console here" days, open source holds the key to bringing it back. The process has already begun. See:
www.ogre3d.org
irrlicht.sf.net

Note that these are engines for the advanced graphical portion of game development. There are many other open source libraries that will help with the audio, input, etc..

The key to open source game development is that the tools for developing quality games more rapidly and easier than ever before remain open source and free. Eventually new generations of tools will be built on the backs of the current generations, until we have open source tools for much easier 3D modelling and importing of scenes, audio, etc.. seamlessly. Of course you wouldn't apply open source ideas to a single application specific piece of code for a single game and expect to conquer the world with that. However, encapsulating all the state of the art and all the knowledge of current day game developers into easy to use tools following the open source model could VERY WELL be the way to go. The key to all this is for everyone to keep their ego out of it, and integrate existing open source tools together to create better ones, rather than having everyone go off and create 1000 nearly identical 3D engines.

Open source development of a specific game is NOT a good idea given the current state of the art. I will give the article that. However, open source development of platforms and tools on which to develop games more easily in the future may have some merit.

Finally - my ideas to this point have been primarily rooted in the code rather than the media and artistry needed to create a game. Until tools have gotten to the point than anyone can model 3D objects interactively as easily as playing with play-dough in real life, it will require an artist. What we need is open source artistry in conjunction with open source game programming. Why couldn't artists develop models and music and place it out there for open source game developers to use freely. Then a non-artist developer can just find their favorite open source media to throw into their game. As the tools get better, the artistry becomes easier, and eventually all will converge. At that point - artists will really be willing to give their stuff away free since it doesn't take that long anymore.

false dichotomy

[nothings]

IAAGD*. Games vs. "products like web servers and operating systems" is a false dichotomy. Joel Spolsky has identified five distinct "worlds" of software develolpment--so taking games as representative of all commercial software is quite misleading.

[*] I Am A Game Developer

OS Gaming hasn't moved much, but there is hope

[grumbel]

Looking back at Shawn Hargreaves Article on Open Source gaming things haven't changed much and probally won't in the near future, since the nature of games is just different from techincal programms that perform a more or less well defined task.

However I think one of the key points to move Open Source gaming further ahead lies in the tools, the engine and the data freely available, once we have reached a point where there is 'enough' of it available, we might see free games poping up. It won't be the hollywood blockbaster games, but it will be little short-stories and stuff which can be done by two or three persons. Some years ago you needed to basically start with a blank sheet of paper and no tools when you wanted to start a game, today we have at least a bunch of tools (Gimp, Blender, Wings3d, ...) available for creating content, in the sound area there is still much missing, but we are moving slowly forwards. We also have a bunch of libraries and engines, which while not being up to Doom3 standards, still might be enough for a homebrewn game, that said, with every game that uses them, they will of course also mature a bit more. On the content side however we are still at a very low level, however in large part that might be due to the lack of proper license and to the lack of tools in the past, thing might hopefully change a bit in the future.

Why I think it might work in the long run? Imagine in another five years we might have a repository full of 3d models, textures and sound. Now somebody comes along and wants to create a game, all he has todo is to select a collection of models and textures that will fit his story, point&click them together in some 3d editor and just add his dialogs lines to them. Some ready-to-use 3d engine will do the rest. Sure it won't look commercial quality, especially not like commercial-quality will look in five games. But a game created by such building blocks wouldn't look like it would look today, full of one-color box placeholders, but instead it would be full of well done 3d models. Sure there is still balancing and fixing needed, but those building blocks could reduce the entry level for game creation by quite a bit. It might not work for all games, but it might be still provide a good amount of entertainment. It won't replace commercial game development for sure, but it will be a good addition.

At it stands now however we have still a huge lack of manpower, not just artists, but also programmers who are able to work on a game, since even on the code side of a game, there is some kind of art involved that an average application programmer might not be able to provide. This lack of people is most likly caused by the lack of games on Linux, since those interested in game development are naturally also interested in games.

So if you are an artist or programmer who wants to move Linux gaming forward, stop complaining and do something, join projects which interested you be it games or the content-creation tools, which are at least equally important. If you don't know a project that would be worth joining, join us at the Game of the Month on Happy Penguin where we pick a game every once in a while and try to polish it, thus joining forces and focusing it on a single project for a short period of time. Don't expect to end up with a Doom3, but your contribution can make a difference and might provide the gamers with another good game.

Re:OS Gaming hasn't moved much, but there is hope

[grumbel]

Game of the Month Link got messed up, correct one is: http://happypenguin.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=21

George Clinton is ahead on the game

[evilmousse]

George Clinton (Parliament Funkadelic) was way ahead of his time. He released CDs of the drumloops, etc that make up all of his music, and provided the liscense to reuse them as part of that purchase. This is one of the main reasons we heard so many hiphop songs using his sounds in the mid-90s.

I forget who, but someone has a song called "let's get together and steal each others' songs". Willie Nelson spoke of it during his VH1 Storytellers session with Johnny Cash.

what about pygames and blender

[asapien]

Well, part of the problem is that game developers often do things quite the hard way. With something like Blender you can develop 3D games without any C/C++ hell, same with pygames (but moreso for 2D games). Personally I just spend all my time doing web programming for a living, so I don't have the time I'd like to work on free games. But with pygame you could write a free version of the game that's just the python scripts, and then use distutils to spew out a windows .exe that one could charge for. I've done one little wanky defender rip-off, btu that's it so far. I actually got invited to join the O.T.O. for the game, cause it uses Crowley as the defender character, with weird guys in chimp masks attacking.

Open Source doesn't mean you can ignore the law

[Zaphus]

We're trying to create a driveable encyclopedia of cars and racing history

Being Open Source, or not-for-profit, does not give you the right it ignore the rights of the owners of real world cars, tracks, logos, drivers, etc. Have you approached the owners of the things in your game to make sure you have the right to use them ?

There is a great deal more cost in gaming outside the sourcecode development costs and Open Source will not magically make those free.

The gaming industry pays a huge amount of licensing money for the right to make games based on real-world cars, sportspeople, movies, planes, etc. If your driving simulator becomes popular then expect a call from many different lawyers.

Re:Open Source doesn't mean you can ignore the law

[KrackHouse]

Very good question. We're going to create an encyclopedia of cars that willing manufacturers can contribute to if they so choose. If not, there is no way we can prevent people from adding cars to the game. Racer is a quazi-open source project and has hundreds of cars available for download, just not from the author of the game.

The courts have recently ruled that "peer-to-peer software developers were not liable for any copyright infringement committed by people using their products, as long as they had no direct ability to stop the acts."

If Ferrari comes after us because some guy creates a bit torrent link which contains a bunch of unofficial cars they will be thrown out of court. I've heard there is a pretty fat fund setup to help out OSS developers being pressured by leagal tomfoolery. If car manufacturers have a beef with a car they're going to have to sue individual users which will bring plenty of bad press and simply push the "content trading" underground.

Maybe if our project gets big, they'll see it as a free marketing opportunity instead of something that cuts into their revenue. I'm not exactly hopeful about that prospect though as accountants are notoriously myopic.

It's a royalty, just not expressly paid by you

[tepples]

I'm not talking about the Windows licenses that your company buys. I'm talking about the Windows licenses that the users buy just to use your program, the Windows licenses that make a computer with Windows preinstalled slightly more expensive than a computer with GNU preinstalled. This is what they call a "hidden cost" of using your program.

Start with OpenGL and your users won't have to buy Windows to run your program.

Re:It's a royalty, just not expressly paid by you

[Watcher]

No, they'll have to buy MacOSX, or buy Linux (first, not going to happen until there is enough reason to, second most end users would rather buy it so they can get support). What am I supposed to do, dedicate valuable time and resources to developing, testing, and supporting a game release for Linux when prior experience already shows that there aren't enough users willing to buy games to offset those costs? This is a business here, not a charity. Claiming that there is a "royalty" to developing a game using DirectX is a specious argument at best. I'm not paying it, and I'm not forcing anyone else to pay it. There is an up front cost, to the user, to have windows so they can use all of their software. If they don't want to play new games, or use the software they're used to, they can download and install one of many Linux distributions-just forget about anything more visually appealing than Tux Racer.

the problem with games...

[HexRei]

Part of the inherent problem would be that games are more than just processes and services, like a web server.
No one expects their web server to do unexpected yet entertaining things (unless they're using IIS). But games need to be able to do this. Secrecy, and therefore closed development, are a necessity, at least for story driven games like the recently released doom3 and the upcoming halflife 2.

For games in which there is no need for surprise, like most online action FPS, puzzle games, and games with randomized elements, open source could be a boon. But what fun would a story driven game be if the script was fully available before release?

Yes, I am fully aware that HL2's script was already leaked, but that's beside the point.

Court of Public Opinion precedents.

[Anonymous Coward]

So basically your post can be summed up this way.

1) We'll look the other way.

2) We're guessing about what a court may do.

3) We're hoping that others will cover for our mistakes.

4) We'll shame others into getting our way.

5) After all that we're hoping people will forget all the bad blood, and accept us.

Re:Court of Public Opinion precedents.

[KrackHouse]

1) It's not our job to enfoce copyright violations. That's why we pay taxes. Should we stop making cars alltogether? After all they might be used in bank robberies.

2) Here's the court decision, no guessing about it. In fact, unlike P2P software like Kazaa, we're not even facilitating the distribution of copyrighted material.

3) We're hoping people will help us out when the inevitable frivoulous lawsuits intended to scare us into submission appear.

4) Shame? I re-read my post and I'm not following you.

5) Who are these "people" you speak of? Racing enthusiasts? This, unlike commercial efforts isn't designed to make the most amount of money possible. Do I hate capitalism? Nope, I think it's the best system we available. Is capitalism perfect? Nope, hence the SEC, Enron, monopolies. Is proprietary software the best way to make software? I guess we'll find out but it sounds like you're fairly confident we'll succeed.

And finally 6)
I appreciate your attempt at a veiled threat in the form of legal action, scary stuff, especially with by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 01 at the top of your post.

Roflcopter...

[Shadow of Eternity]

As someone who has been very involved with open-source game development, i assure you that this assumption is false. Its not how much of your product peaple get that determines whether(sp?) or not its a good game, its what YOU the developer put into it. Hell man, look at Tenebrae quake, they are open source and they have what is essentially doom3 lighting in Quake ONE. We arent the shabby lot were made out to be.

It might be so

[POds]

But even if it is, the Open Source community is still improtant to the gaming community for providing those "free" libraries for game developers such as SDL,Mesa,OpenGL etc. Maybe these foundation libraries are the strength of the open source community when it comes to games? That is, providing platform independant libraries for use in commercial work? (i'm not sure aobut their licences, GPL vs LPGL?). Maybe thats where some effort should be spent, then people all around the world will start to see the fruits of the open source labour when their platform of choice has the most up-to-date games avaliable.

IMVU

[eries]

Over at IMVU, we're not exactly producing your standard game, but one of our goals is to enable anyone who knows python to create their own games with high production values, using 3D avatars and assets produced by our developers and sold in our censorhsip-free micropayment economy. We use Cal3d, osCommerce, python, debian, apache, php, BitTorrent, NSIS, and many other Free Software projects to make what we do possible. We also have created several FS projects of our own, including IM Narrator. So I think anybody who's developing software today who is not leveraging the power of Free Software is really missing out.

check out nevrax.org

[slithytove]

The very impressive looking MMORPG Ryzom is set to come out very soon and Nevrax's from-scratch feature-rich engine has been GPL from the beginning. I was involved with a game company that died, in part, because of publisher resistance to our intention of using an F/OSS engine.
Since 99.99% of the development of the nevrax toolkit** was done by employees, it has a fairly steep learning curve. If more people got interested in it and wrote some documentation (including me), I could see it being the basis for a sort of Snow-Crashy environment; a new frontier where the geeks rule.

**I called it an engine before, but its really libraries and an example game that makes minimal use of them. Nevrax got around the problems of opensourcing their game by GPLing the parts that are most useful to others and not incorporating other's contributions into their actual client which will be closed-source (AFAIK). This, of course, is not an option for a company looking to use a GPLed engine instead of writing theirs and double-licensing it. But then, such a company is benefitting from the community (nevrax is not, yet are gifting us a huge amount of high quality code).

Ogre and Friends

[Malkin]

While I feel that Open Source is often not the ideal choice for the development of one's core game systems, a game developer can nonetheless make very good use of Open Source libraries and middleware in an otherwise closed-source project. There are dozens of great timesavers out there, like DevIL, and if they aren't ideal for your purposes on a low-budget project, it is often more cost-effective to set aside a little time for one of your programmers to contribute improvements to the open source project than it is to invest in an expensive big-name product that may be overkill for your particular project.

I have to say that I am fantastically impressed with the progress that Sinbad and the gang have made on Ogre over the last couple of years. It is seriously turning into a respectable engine.

Unfortunately, for those of us in the industry, there are often factors that make it hard for us to adopt these technologies right away. For one thing, open source engines are almost always weak in artist tools and scene-building tools, relative to their closed-source counterparts. This is one gap that absolutely needs to be filled, if they're going to get professional buy-in.

The second problem is a bit harder to overcome. The simple fact of the matter is that publishing companies get warm fuzzies when they see a developer using well-known, industry-standard, big-name tools and libraries. If they hear you're using some open source library that grad students wrote, they're going to think you're a garage-operation. Thus, it can be very hard to land a publishing deal, if you go this route.

I think that overcoming the latter problem will require time and maturity. Nobody is about to look down on you if you tell them you're using Linux or Apache. They have street cred. I think that there are definitely game-related libraries that can get there, too, but it's going to take time. There are a few things that are probably there already, such as SDL.

So, keep up the good work, folks!

Games are Art

[cgreuter]

The open-source community will never produce a leading-edge commercial quality game. Period. This is because a game is a work of art, which means that one person (or maybe two or three) has to decide how everything is going to be, and that's a completely arbitrary thing that everybody still has to go along with.

See, when you're working on a typical piece of software, the ultimate goals are obvious. The program needs to be small, fast, secure, bug-free, standards-compliant, portable and maintainable. Even when you need to trade off one such property for another, everyone usually knows up front what the trade is. It's easy to tell more-or-less objectively whether a particular change is good or bad for a project.

But with a game, it's all arbitrary. Some guy has decided how it's all going to look and feel and the only way the game is going to get done is if everyone goes along with him. Money seems to be the only motivator that works because OSS developers want to work on what they think is cool and that's usually not going to be what the designer wants.

Ultimately, for a game to be coherent, everyone has to do what the designer tells them and that's far too much like real work to expected of unpaid volunteers. It's only fun if you can be a designer and that limits the team size to a handful of people.

That being said, the day may come where there's enough open-source infrastructure (engines, development tools, sound and 3D object libraries) to make it easy for that handful of people to make a high-quality game. We're getting to the point where you can't really improve the realism of a game anymore and that means that graphics engines are going to finally have shelf-lives comparable with normal software. I predict that ten years from now, there'll be an open-source game engine that everyone will use for games of that genre.

Play Through games vs Play Over and Over games

[jmcgarey]

Open source works (partially at least) because users want to scratch their itches.

If I'm playing a game that lends itself to being played over and over (bzflag) and I find a problem which shows up every time I play, then I'll be more inclined to fix it. Each time I play I will bump into the problem again and the annoyance will multiply and It will then seem worthwhile to me to fix the problem so I don't bump into it again.

OTOH If I'm playing a game that plays through only once then I'm likely to ignore the problem because the problem has only manifested itself once.

Re:Oh please!

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite right, but the situation isn't much brighter for Windows OEM installs, if you want them in a usable state. For me, that means:

0. Install from OEM CD (usually ~5 (forced) reboots), install printer drivers
1. Clean desktop
2. Remove manufacturer spyware / shareware / uselessware, remove Outlook Express and MSN Mess.
3. Clean start menus, harmonise menus/desktops across user accounts
4. Set basic UI behaviour (don't hide hidden/system files, show all extensions, don't cache thumbnails...)
And then
5. Download & install modern web browser
6. Download & install music software
7. -"- office software (or buy Office)

Which usually takes at least two hours.

It's too late

[tepples]

and I've yet to come across a problem with any scanner I've had

Tell that to any owner of a Microtek Scanmaker 4850 scanner. The 4800 series is listed as completely unsupported in SANE.

"Winvideo-card." Are you making these up?

Yes. Here, the prefix Win- denotes a computer system component whose manufacturer has denied documentation to the free software community.

For new computers only? Hell no.

When putting together a new computer, a fellow has a chance to look through the hardware and check each component against a distribution's hardware compatibility list. When replacing a computer's operating system, on the other hand, a fellow may have to replace components, and by the time he has replaced enough components, he might as well just buy a new computer.

complain to the manufacturers about getting them to support linux, boycott them untill they do

That doesn't help if I lack a job and thus lack the money to replace the components in my computer with Linux-compatible components. Should I leave my family behind against my family's express wishes in order to find work in my field (BSCS), or should I take a minimum wage job in fast food or retail?

Re:It's too late

[bubkus_jones]

"Tell that to any owner of a Microtek Scanmaker 4850 scanner. The 4800 series is listed as completely unsupported in SANE"

Well, I appologize to all the owners of that particular scanner who wished to get it running under Linux. It's nothing the Linux community can fix, and if the owners/users have a problem, they should contact Microtek and tell them that they want Linux supported.

"Yes. Here, the prefix Win- denotes a computer system component whose manufacturer has denied documentation to the free software community."

I understand the use of the prefix Win-, however, I have only ever encountered it in the form of winmodem, never before in regards to any other piece of hardware.

"When putting together a new computer, a fellow has a chance to look through the hardware and check each component against a distribution's hardware compatibility list. When replacing a computer's operating system, on the other hand, a fellow may have to replace components, and by the time he has replaced enough components, he might as well just buy a new computer."

Compatable, not new. Using compatable components, a person could install Linux on a 386. That's definately not new. I've installed Linux on Cyrix 586 systems, AMD-K6's, PII's and Celeron systems. These were new systems, used systems, refurbished business machines and a refurbished laptop, all from different (and some unknown) brands. The ONLY hardware incompatability I've come across is the winmodem on my laptop, but since I don't use dialup, I don't think about it.

"That doesn't help if I lack a job and thus lack the money to replace the components in my computer with Linux-compatible components. Should I leave my family behind against my family's express wishes in order to find work in my field (BSCS), or should I take a minimum wage job in fast food or retail? "

1) Then wait till you get money to replace the components, but when you do, choose a company that supports Linux.

2) I don't have a job, either. It didn't stop me from having systems that haven't had compatability issues.

3) Why does your family have a problem with moving to an area where you can find work in the field you have been trained in? Would this be your parents, or your spouse? If it were my parents, I would leave to get that work, because I would have spent a lot of time, money and effort to get my degree, and I wouldn't want that to go to waste.

And if it comes down to it, yes, take the minimum wage job. It's money, and you only have to take it till you get something in your field (or some other job that pays better).

Re:It's too late

[tepples]

I have only ever encountered ["Win-"] in the form of winmodem, never before in regards to any other piece of hardware.

I was just generalizing from thousands of results for "winprinter" on Google.

Compatable, not new.

In other words, you mean check eBay, right?

but since I don't use dialup, I don't think about it.

So what happens when you have to relocate to a geographic area where DSL and cable have 500 USD setup fees plus 80 USD/mo?

Why does your family have a problem with moving to an area where you can find work in the field you have been trained in? Would this be your parents, or your spouse? If it were my parents, I would leave to get that work

What steps should I take to learn how to live on my own, thousands of miles away from my parents? In addition, the Indiana vocational rehabilitation service wants me to get a job in Indiana.

And if it comes down to it, yes, take the minimum wage job. It's money, and you only have to take it till you get something in your field

Will Chick-fil-A help or hurt my resume?

Re:It's too late

[bubkus_jones]

"I was just generalizing from thousands of results for "winprinter" on Google."

Fine

"So what happens when you have to relocate to a geographic area where DSL and cable have 500 USD setup fees plus 80 USD/mo?"

I have no idea, go with sattelite? See how much a residential T-1 line costs? Do without?

I don't plan on moving anywhere without relatively inexpensive ($45 CAN, approximate, which is what I pay now)

Other than that, I'll probably just use my work internet, or see if I can get a discounted connection through them.

"What steps should I take to learn how to live on my own, thousands of miles away from my parents? In addition, the Indiana vocational rehabilitation service wants me to get a job in Indiana."

Well, I would have said live in a dorm while in college. It would give you the experience of living without parents, with the responsibilities of groceries, bills, budgeting and organization, without the worry of having to pay rent (it's paid at the beginning).

Other than that, I don't think there's anything you can do. Maybe, in the mean time, start working out a deal with the parents about paying your share of the bills, do groceries occasionally, and the like.

"Will Chick-fil-A help or hurt my resume?"

Hey, a job's a job. Work experience will be better on your resume than a big blank space.

Open Source *Middleware*

[magic]

Most of the core code in a game isn't related to content anymore-- it is middleware. Physics, sound, AI, 3D rendering, data processing, and tools are rapidly becoming off-the shelf components one can plug together to make a game.

I think that open source middleware makes perfect sense. It is reused between products and between companies. The primary consumers are themselves programmers. It benefits from

I believe this so strongly I started a project four years ago to produce open source middleware for 3D rendering in games--

G3D (http://g3d-cpp.sf.net).

It is now used by commercial game developers as well as hobbyists, researchers, and students. There are various networking, physics, and sound packages. We need more open source middleware for games, particularly on the tools side, where Blender and GIMP aren't yet sufficient alternatives to 3DS MAX, Maya, Photoshop, and level editors.

-m

Lame article

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee willikers! Must be Obvious Day at Camp Stupid!

Open source the Camera, put the film on the market

[liquiddark]

Next 10 years, bottom line is that the bottom drops out of the upward climb of home electronics. With a stable target to develop against, closed-source game engines have very few places go. At this point, we already have a dozen good OSS engines ready for use, but they're subsystem engines. Given a decade, however, it's likely that the community will have at least a few decent Facades over top to provide the world with good, solid cameras with which to shoot interactive entertainment.

Assets like art and story, on the other hand, are copyrighted works and are only susceptible to market pressures. Very few people out there shooting mass-distribution movies for free either. Doesn't seem to be boiling anyone's mind that this is the case, tho.

(nethack spoilers) Re:two games as counter-point

[Anonymous Coward]

"Pretty Easy?" Damn.

I think it was the second game after I learned about "Elbereth" that I ascended. "Elbereth" makes Nethack easy, especially for Wizards (who can acquire Magicbane easily).

If you have no "Nethack ethics" outside of what is required by the game, it's *REALLY* easy. Play a Wizard and reroll until you start with good stats and a magic marker - then write a charm monster spellbook ASAP. Easy Mode.

Games: classic example OSS limitations

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever it may be good for, OSS is essentially useless for games. In fact it is useless for virtually anything truly innovative since most people are not greasy single nerds who program for fun. Most people want to GET PAID for their work, especially when it comes to something as staggeringly expensive and complex as modern games.

If you can find someone stupid enough to invest a mil or two in an open source game then tell them I've got some prime land in the Everglades at low, low prices.

Games are in fact the reality check. No cutting-edge game will ever be built on open source. Won't happen.

Prove me wrong. Not holding my breath.