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Hackers, Slackers, and Shackles
blacklily8 writes "What is the future of free software development for games? Is it possible? Will the games ever equal or surpass their proprietary competitors? Why should we care? After thoroughly researching the free and open source software model, and interviewing both indie and free software game developers, author Matt Barton decided that the future is indeed very bright. Stallman is quoted here saying that game engines should be free, but approves of the notion that graphics, music, and stories could all be separate and treated differently (i.e., "Non-Free.")"
on how you look at it.
nethack has always been superior in quite many aspects when compared to commercial games, partly because no commercial game can take that kind of risks in pissing off the gamer.
'free' games can continue to fill the niche segements pretty well.
and then there's the 'simple arcade rehash' genre - free games fill that tremendously well as clones of classic arcade games has become easier and easier to write as years pass.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
stallman wants all code to be free... but he wouldn't mind music and art to be non-free?
in what way does a coder differ from a graphics artist? according to stallman's views, should a graphics artist not be able to freely obtain the art of a game so he could modify it, without having to pay for it? after all, that is what he demands of software. it has to be free so a coder is free to change it without having to pay for it. does he have double standards?
note: i like free software, but i don't feel that every piece of software that i use should be free. i just think it's a little bit odd that stallman is using double standards.
It's hard to have a Free game which matches the quality and depth of today's main commercial offerings due to the need for artists and other such people who (for whatever reason) are less keen to do hobbyish projects.
I think the only way that this is going to start is if developers put together good graphics engines, up to the standard of the latest offerings from Id and the Unreal guys, and have commercial developers work from these as a base rather than licencing from the commercial vendors. With the GPL-licenced Quake engines we are already some way there, but of course they are (as they come out of Id) already a generation or two behind and need some work to get them up there.
There's also the problem of convincing the commercial development houses that having their game code source available (which would be necessary for GPL compliance) won't hurt because the art and other content will be the product. The main show-stopper here is that you can't really do copy protection in an open-source product, and right now every commercial offering has copy protection.
Won't simple economics dictate that one person will not spend a good portion of his life working on games, when he could be working on games for money? That will ensure that people have to pay for good(more complicated) games, and compensate these people for the staggering amount of effort that must surely go into designing a good game.
Quoth the server, "404."
The gaming industry is in many ways very similar to that the film industry sans the overpaid actors.
This leads me to think that we'll have a similar trend in games in the future as we do in films today. The industry will be splitt between high-budgett, spectacular games such and Halo 2 and Doom 3, while a smaller market of independent films will emerge created by people who feel that games can be an art form, and not just entertainment.
I know there are small independent game conferences allready, but we still do not have anything like the independent film festivals which help get the films out to their audience.
As for licenses, I agree with Stallman in that the game engine, which is more cases can be thought of at generalized software should be free, while the artistic part of the projects need to be considered as custom work and could remain non-free.
-- Leo Utskot
From the article: "In short, "open sourcing" projects like Half-Life 2 would likely lead to much better games, which would result in much better sales and happier end-users."
This is like saying GM should open-source the blueprints for all their car engines. It's ridiculous. Valve put untold millions into HL2 development, and there's absolutely no incentive for them to just open the source, and there's a strong disincentive: if they were to open it, everyone could just build a highly competitive game on top of it without paying a cent. And what's gonna pay for the programmers? The original game's sales? Will they be high enough given the man-hours that went into the engine, especially since the new competing games would likely cannibalize the sales of the original game?
The HL SDK already opens up most of the engine (sans some of the graphics and networking, I believe), and budding game programmers can cut their teeth on that (that's how Counter-Strike came about). But since it's still copyrighted, and the new game requires licensing with Valve, which helps them recoup the costs of developing it in the first place, and fund the development of the new engine.
To ignore the economic constraints of development is breathtakingly naive.
My other car is a cons.
Writing software that balances several competing resources is engineering.
I think that some software can be artistic in the sense that it is written creatively but that has nothing to do with it being a "balancing act between competing resources".
Instead, you go play something fun.
Nethack has no visual appeal. No music. A shitty interface. It's "depth of gameplay" consists of getting killed over and over until you learn about all the things that can kill you.
It's a huge investment with no payoff. If you want to enjoy the sense of accomplishment you get from doing something hard and tedious (the ONLY appeal of Nethack), go and learn something useful.
If you want to play games and have fun, there are a thousand better ones out there.
Hmm, it seems to me that if you look at the game modding community (such as Half Life modders, UT modders, and so on), there are lots of people who can generate pretty good looking models of weapons and players, generate new maps, and so on. It seems like coding is the difficult thing to do.
If I use a fly swatter instead of bug spray to kill a bug, does it make the bug any less dead?
Just because programmers are involved in making games doesn't mean that models for OS or Application Software translate over. It's like saying that because I draw art at Marketing Inc. in Illustrator, game artists should use Illustrator too. I mean, what's the difference? We're both artists making art, right?
There are lots of reasons why gaming in the Open Source environment doesn't work at the moment.
* The people making the games are programmers. Now, this isn't a bad thing - programmers just want to have fun too. However, it does mean that even basic game design concepts like iterative design, balancing or positive/negative feedback gets ignored in favor of "I need to implement OBB collision" or "I need to port this to an OS other than Linux so that the mainstream will actually play it". Nothing wrong with that from a programmer perspective, they're fun challenging programming tasks. They just aren't "Make the game fun and iterate on the design" tasks, which should be someone's priority when making a game.
But I hear you yelling "The whole point of Open Source is that anyone can join in! Designers can just jump in anytime and work with a team of other Open Source developers on SourceForge!"
Well...
* The budding designers who want to design can't, because there isn't an engine for them. I wanted to make a quick prototype of a game idea that I had. I looked around, and every engine was either too simplistic, BASIC based and kludgy, complete engines with too much overhead for prototyping, or graphics engines with great 3D rendering but no consideration for actually Making Games.
Having said that, I know some friends who are making just this - the game engine for designers who care more about iterative design than specular lighting. I'll put my 0.02c on them being insanely successful when it gets announced/released.
* I don't care if your game is Open Source or not. Seriously. There's no benefit to me as a player. Just because you've made some racing game with a penguin, I should proclaim you as the second coming of Miyamoto?
No.
How about this? Instead of sitting on your asses and preaching, how about you take a leaf from the books of people making successful mods for FPS's, and assemble a decent team first.
How about you write a design spec, prototype the game, then once you've iterated over the design until the game is fun and you have a team of artists, programmers and content creators, you go through and implement your planned game?
How about once you've done that, you get some external people to iterate over it some more, then announce that you have a game? Then, if it's a good game, people will declare it's awesome, and you can be a successful game developer first, OSS poster boy second.
From the consumers point of view, the lowered barrier to entry would be a great thing, but might be what would scare off existing companies from participating. But they'd probably be able to keep indy games, even of a high quality, restricted to a niche market due to their superior marketing muscle and ability to invest in things like "name" voice talent, more artists, professional writers, etc.
So many ways to die suddenly and unexpectidly.
Some of the other replies seem to be trying to give you advice on how to "win" at the game. I'll offer a counter-proposal: You basically understand the game already. The game isn't really played in the context of the execution of the nethack binary on a computer. The game is actually acquiring arcane knowledge to forstall death. The knowledge acquisition part of the game is played on Usenet, message boards, IRC, and Slashdot. It is possible, theoretically, to acquire the arcane knowledge via trial and error in the game, but this is so time-consuming that no sane person would try it. Examining the source code to the game, contrary to some people's opinion, is not cheating. It is merely another option in the game to acquire the arcane knowledge required. Also, it won't entirely help you, since there's some randomness to it.
The whole game, ultimately, is a metaphor for the life of a hacker. The hacker acquires arcane knowledge (either by learning from a master, trial and error, or inquisition). He uses the arcane knowledge to advance himself in life through his career. Ultimately, he either dies or achieves independance and can retire.
It's more complicated than that, of course, but that's basically the jist of it.
My other first post is car post.
There's just one fundamental flaw with your supposition. There are game engines that are free (F/OSS), and "effectively" free (Commercial games with editors). The barriers to entry couldn't get much lower.* The problem everyone's dancing around is the acknowledgement that it's the artistic element that's missing from F/OSS games. Not a technological one. The next step is reconcilling the OSS philosophy with the artistic philosophy. And if all the talk around here represents out there? Then it never will be completely resolved.
*The only one that's high is developing game engines from scratch (as opposed to modifying preexisting ones).