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BZFlag goes Platinum
morrison writes "A little over four years after moving to SourceForge at a current rate of several hundred downloads every day, BZFlag has finally "gone platinum". With over 1,000,000 SourceForge downloads, BZFlag looks to be the third game (following Tux Racer and StepMania) to go 'sf platinum'. While this doesn't include the many tens of thousands distributed prior to the project's migration to sf.net during the SGI days, it's a momentous occasion for open source gaming regardless."
How is this momentous? It's a free game. It's small. People play it at work. If it generated any sort of income for the creators, it would be momentous for them. But for the whole open source movement? Please. The only thing the top downloads shows is that people would rather pirate good windows games than bother downloading free mediocre games.
schild
editor, f13.net
I sure hope the gameplay is good, cause the graphics look like they date from the 80s Era. Sure, graphics ain't everything and its a major achievement for the open source gaming community... but couldn't they hire an Open-GL guy / artist? 6 polygons trees... and the tanks themselves look like LEGO blocks.
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If it generated any sort of income for the creators, it would be momentous for them.
It's a big resume booster for the maintainers.
"Closed" games can afford touches such as artists and writers. In theory I have to applaud the OSS developers for having the chutzpah to take on such an dauntingly hopeless task as making an OSS game; but the quality speaks for itself.
Before someone decides I'm an anti-OSS troll, let me say that OSS has made some wonderful servers and if it weren't for the free tools I'd have never been able to try my hand at programming. It's as simple as the fact that quality art and quality writing don't grow on trees...as we can plainly see.
It takes $$$ and lots of it to create a Halo, a Counterstrike or a Sims. That's just how it is.
Wake me up when we have OSS games with 1'000'000 downloads every few weeks or even every few days and that probally short after the release, not with games that are a decade old or older. As long as it is something that is only happening every few years and with rather ancient games its actually not much a good sign for OSS gaming, not even much of a start. Especially when the quality of OSS games still is rather low, no matter how good the gameplay is of BZFlag, nethack or any other OSS game actually is, the overall impression of the games is often rather low[1]. Nobody can tell me that under all the 1'000'000 downloaders there wasn't a single artists which would have been able to produce better art and improve the overall look of the game a lot. So either the tools for creating art are missing, the project coordination is flawed, the game isn't good enough that anybody cares enough to improve it or maybe those Linux folks are really a whole bunch of non-artists types, but maybe its just that OSS model of games isn't all that much attractive to artists who knows.
Overall OSS gaming still has a long long long way to go, 1'000'000 downloads might sound nice, but don't really tell you much at all about the overall state of OSS gaming.
[1] "low" as in "I have seen better art on my C64", not as in "can't compete with latest multimillion dollor blockbuster game"
Isn't this what people with ugly girlfriends tell themselves to make themselves feel better? "Sure the hot chicks are hot and look great, but they re all dumb I'll get bored with them. On the other hand my ugly girlfriend has a personality and I won't get bored with her." Nevermind the fact that there are plenty of great looking games/women that can look amazing but are also fun to play with. Blanket generalizations like this are pretty ignorant.
Nevermind the fact that there are plenty of great looking games/women that can look amazing but are also fun to play with.
Bullshit. I'm lucky enough to be engadged to a girl who's smart and pretty, but it's taken me a decade of looking to find someone like that. Being intelligent, or rather just having a strong curiosity about the world around one is incredibly rare among males. As rare as it is there, among females it tends to crop up even less often. The reasons are debatable, but look at almost any field of intellectual pursuit and women are going to be outnumbered by a huge margin. After that, take into account how rare above average looks are, and the additional probality that someone with them isn't going to push themselves any harder than they have to. The end result is very, very slim pickings when it comes to girls who are both hot and smart. I think anyone who says otherwise has very low standards in one, or both, of the criteria.
"Sure, this game may not want/need wider adoption - but attacking anyone who doesn't love the project seems pretty symptomatic of 90% of all Open source projects."
/dev/null is for. Take it from a long-time musician: any time you do something in public, some wise-ass is going to yell "YOU SUCK!", but two years later when you're the next big thing they'll be saying "I was there back when...". OSS advocates need to exercise greater maturity in this regard: software isn't disposable pop music, its the basis of business infrastructure worth billions of dollars, and making an impact in this world takes a business-like attitude rather than the "I'll take my ball and go home" approach we see far too often.
This is true. Look, if OSS is to progress beyond the interested amatuer phase (that is, actually be adopted by governments and business so we can all benefit) the chip on the shoulder has to go, and developers will have to start thinking in terms of what other people might want from the word go.
Of course that isn't easy, considering the needs of others might be put a dent in some egos and it involves extra work, but you can't realistically expect everyone to have to learn coding in order to adopt your product. Microsoft wins* in the public mind because they do market research before offering a product, include features that the clueless ask for, and provide it in a neat little (ok, big) bundle that even a retarded monkey can install. Remarkably little OSS matches Microsoft's for sheer convenience (gaaah! I can't believe I wrote that!); until this changes, it will be the fringe dweller.
Some developers are terrific, and if asked will either add a feature, or explain politely and logically why a feature won't be included; this professional attitude is highly commendable (hi, Murat!). There are a lot of mindless comments (this topic contains quite a few), but that's what
In short: the customer is always right, which is why OSS has no customers, because for OSS the developer is always right. See the problem?
And yes, BZFlag's graphics are primitive by today's standards, but then the game play of most FPS games is hardly any different (run around, shoot, pick up weapon, shoot some more), so without new graphics there's nothing to sell. I regard the continuous need to spend $XX on new software (+$XXX on suitable graphics card) to be little more than a con perpetrated by lazy game designers attempting to hide their lack of original ideas. At least BZFlag isn't pretending to be new, or asking for money for the same old game...
*Not that I use any of their bloated, buggy rubbish.
Realistic/good graphics add to the fun by making the game more believable or immersive. It's a lot more satisfying to blow up a tank with a gout of flame, black smoke and mangled bits of tank flying around than to watch, say, a brown box disappear. Or turn into 6 brown rectangles.
Graphics ADD to the fun. They don't create it, but real people often value graphics about as highly as gameplay, so if BZFlag wants to be a "momentuous" project, they need to start thinking beyond those people stuck in the 90s.
im in ur