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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[It'sYerMam]

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

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.

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.

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.

Different Exceptions

[Snowgen]

Frozen Bubble? nah...

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

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.

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: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.

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.

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.

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?

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: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: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.

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: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.

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.

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: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!!

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: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.