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.

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: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.

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: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.

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.