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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?"
Frozen Bubble? nah...
My Exceptions would be BZFlag, Battle for Wesnoth, and FreeCiv.
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.
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.
DirectX ... ROYALTIES?
What exactly did I miss here?
kb
game developer
who never had to pay anything to MS so far for using Direct3D
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.
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.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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.
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
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.
To all the game developers reading this thread, here's a link to the open-source game engine
/ enginemain.html
...and the source:
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
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
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.
Game of the Month Link got messed up, correct one is: http://happypenguin.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=21