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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?"
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.
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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.
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.
Sunset over the lake, cool mist over the bridge; A leave upon the ripples, the snow reflects its glow.
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.
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$
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
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.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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).
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.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
-dave
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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.
Since there are no quality open source applications or operating systems to date, why would open source games be any different?
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).
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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.
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
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.
Get your Unix fortune now!
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.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
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.
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!!
nos laetus epulor qui would domito nos
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.
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.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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.
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.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
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.
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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?
Hey freaks: now you're ju
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.
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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?
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?
The world's only surviving livewriter.
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.
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Unless the doom/quake mods were created after counterstrike was.
im in ur
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.
Moo.
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.
~Idarubicin
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.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
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.
"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.
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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.
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.
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
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.