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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?"
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?
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.
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...
davejenkins.com |
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.
Don't forget Cannonsmash, the best table tennis simulation I've yet to see.
http://cannonsmash.sourceforge.net/
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.
fifteen jugglers, five believers
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.
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
Life isn't a bitch. Life is a virgin. A bitch is easy.
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."
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?
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.
With no compensation beside the enjoyment of the graphics and the games folks will do quite a bit.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
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.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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.
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)
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.
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
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
> 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
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).
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.
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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.
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