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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.
Free games? Where can I buy them?!
My Greatest Heist - Muisc partly inspired by the unbeatable Qwantz
Just look at tuxracer. Since the company that was developing it turned it closed source nobody has continued developing it. Same goes for tuxkart.
Modern games aren't easy. We could compete in the "graphics engine" field, but that's just 1/4 of a game - the rest is the "art": graphics, music, sounds, maps..."open source" works for code, not for "art". Also, today's games are a modern thing, you can get lot of geeks that can write a SCSI driver or a compiler, but how many geeks can you find that know how to write a 3d driver or a graphics engine or maps for a 3d game? There're a few, but they're not enought. We've can write msql/ISS/oracle/icc, even mac os x alternatives, but where're those unreal/need for speed/doom 3 alternatives?
We need some kind of "open art" license or something, and people working for it.
Planeshift is a free 3D MMORPG following the idea "Free engine, proprietary (though gratis) art." AFAIK it's the only free 3D MMORPG out there. :)
The system recently reached another milestone, though it will probably remain in development for quite some time... Maybe some Slashdot hackers will help?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Independant games tend to have the potential of having far more innovative gameplay and/or unique storylines because they have the freedom to take a chance with a concept while gaming houses are generally more restricted because development costs money and publishers like to stick with safe bets.
On the flip side, dependant games(ie games developed at cost by a gaming house) will generally have superior graphics and sound because those two areas require a lot of man hours to "get right". Thus, gaming houses are better suited to coordinate efforts to supply a superior graphic experience quickly enough before the graphics become dated by hardware advances.
That said, as we slowly begin to approach the photo-realism barrier, and as the tools to assemble graphics improve, we are once again begining to turn back towards the days when gameplay and innovation were what set a game apart from its peers.
In this, independant game designers will have the upper hand, as evidenced by the current generation of "big names in the industry" all having been independant designers back during the last time graphics were less involved(80s and early 90s).
Independant game designers are on the rise again, and you can see proof in the concern the publishing companies are having as they slowly fall away, consolidate, and/or have paniced knee jerk reactions out of concern for their future(Valve vs. Vivendi, EA's buyout frenzy, etc).
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
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."
I saw this articlen tent&pa=showpage&pid=18)
(http://www.selectparks.net/modules.php?name=Co
And it seems that there is a great base available that oculd lead to wonderfull things. Crystal space (crystal.sf.net) is a free engine that appears to be competitive in quality to modern commercial engines. Go to the games made using crystal, it can be used. I should also mention cube engine (cubeengine.com) and stepmania (stepmania.com) as well as the abundance of free MMO's and VR projects.
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
Plot driven games, like movies, are something the player tends to go through once and then shelve. That doesn't seem likely to be compatible with the OSS model of incremental releases by which a package gets polished into an acceptable state. Non-plot driven games (e.g. the multiplayer modes of FPSes and other games) have better longevity but still tend to be relatively short lived.
It seems more likely that OSS devlopment model would succeed with game development libraries and engines.
While one may find the optimal pathfinding route algorithim, most game software is a balancing act between competing resources and is therefore an art. If you look at the Quake 3 engine code, there are a lot of tradeoffs between accuracy (surprisingly innacurate, actually), speed, and memory. And then there are questions like how one will spend their processor cycles... in a complicated rendering engine or raw polys? Character focused or world focused? Do you spend more Ram on Precaching or go for dynamic texture loading?
That having been said, the reason why you can't put game artists, texturers, and musicians in the same class as game programmers is because they generally refuse to work for free. While a programmer may find personal expression through a game, rare is the artist or musician who feels the same way. You can get ones who will work to make a name for themselves, or work because they like the game, but generally you don't find musicians who work on games like they compose their own songs. While working on games is personal for a programmer, it isn't so much for artists / musicians. Why do it then?
And there is no such thing as an optimal software algorithm. There are ones well suited for a task and ones that are not, but there are no software algorithims that are best in all ways.
TFA is DOA, BTW.
The ______ Agenda
I don't know Stallman's view on the matter.
But if I had to guess, I'd say: That's purely hypothetical, mind you -- I have no idea where RMS stands on the matter.
In any case, code is art, in my opinion -- code, painting, music, architecture, literature -- it's all art, art, art.
-kgj
-kgj
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.
The problem with most games is that they aren't actually games in the true sense. They are more a form of entertainment. Most people play them for the bright graphics and sound, and the immersion of the game world. Which many people, including myself, love. However, as a Wesnoth developer said "Great graphics make a movie. Great sound makes an album. Great gameplay makes a game."
As much as I love the Final Fantasy series, for example, I don't consider them "games" in the truest sense. They are wonderfully immersive stories, but that doesn't make them a game. The problem is, people are starting to really expect that out of their games. And even though Free Software developers could program a game with a much better engine, meaning it has a more challenging basic set of rules, then a Final Fantasy game; I don't think we can realistically expect free software developers to program the video and sound that people have come to expect. If you take the single opening movie from Final Fantasy VII, (a game that, at 8 years old, is ancient), I don't know how it could be put together without a lot of money.
So I think the basic place for Free Games right now is games for people who love gaming. My favorite game right now, of any type, is Wesnoth , a turn based strategy game released under the GPL. The graphics and the sound are fair, but the game play is truly engaging.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
He argues that software is useful to modify, making it different than most art and creative writings, which usually are quite personal. He does believe, however, that these non-software works should be freely distributable.
He mentions these opinions many places, for example in this interview.
(I personally agree with him.)
Aside from making out that Defender was written in BASIC, or assuming that the crowd he was writing for didn't know what BASIC was anyway, was it really necessary to embarrass himself with that whole "Big game companies never innovate" thing and then mention Electronic Arts in the same sentence? Until ten years ago EA were the best thing that had ever happened to games.
- Chris
Stallman's (commie-style ;) freedom includes "no revenue", so I'm not too crazy about it, as a developer who converts code to food and rent. But opening these game engines to plugins would make them much more popular, even offering a life beyond the publisher's product lifecycle. Much like Doom-style games got new life from opening the "level editors". As more games are networked, the game server can become the gateway for revenue, especially if Web Service APIs are signed, and require authentication, but are also open. Killer apps create demand for services, but are a development/management cost that subtracts from the profit at the server. I'd love to import my Halo2 team into Madden NFL 2005, if a programmer could write the import plugin. Open the APIs!
--
make install -not war
a lot of learning how to play nethack is to learn patience, to play 'fast'(so that it doesn't take ages) while still covering your ass 100% of the time. if you're not prepared then you will insta-die sooner or later.
first you need to get the poison resistance, reflection and such before proceeding. getting excalibur if you're lawful is an easy, cheap helper too. good ac helps too, and don't be fooled, good ac is at least -15. learn to use healing bottles to maximize your healthpoints.
don't leave anything to chance! have stashes of food, don't try every armor you get on, don't eat old bodies, keep an unicorn horn handy...
but this is exactly what i'm talking about, what kind of chances would a game have that was so mean as nethack in the real, for profit, market?
if you want to speed it up, read some spoilers. they help a _lot_, a lot more than you would gain from playing in explorer mode for years on your own.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I know that there are actually a great deal of fans of Descent 3 who happen to be coders, who would be overjoyed if Volition would open source the code.
Another free MMORPG - I played it for a while, but the economy is a bit screwy, because cactus is extremely valuable yet easy to harvest. It's fun, though - http://www.eternal-lands.com/. Oh, and don't forget about runescape... urgh.
-ReK
md5sum -c reality.md5
reality: FAILED
md5sum: WARNING: 1 of 1 computed checksum did NOT match
As an independent game developer who just released a new kind of adventure game, I disagree that art and code are always distinct. Our game introduces an incredibly accessible user interface for controlling adventure games. I personally believe that user interfaces are an art form, yet UI is ultimately expressed in code. Consider that one example of code as art.
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 how exactly is that different of when I take Firefox, name its "Grumbels Personal Browser" add some stuff to it and release? Why should I be allowed to do that with Firefox, or any kind of free software, but not with movies, videogames or whatever?
>You're not allowed to do that with Firefox, or any Free Software; doing so would be misappropriation.
Are you for real? Firefox was a stunning example of how someone did exactly what was decribed above. Someone (I don't think it was grumbel) decided that mozilla was too damn huge, and getting huger. So he decided to remove all the thunderbird extensions, the irc extensions, the huge preferences menus, etc and just bring the size down in any way possible. Eventually it was called phoenix, and given to people, without the explicit support of the Mozilla foundation. It was only after it was clear that phoenix was not only not going away, but was pulling developers away from the Mozilla effort that the foundation decided on the firefox directives. You can find similar examples, even within the GNU foundation; gcc 3.0 comes to mind as a fork that became official.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
1) Much Ado About Nothing.
2) The Tempest
3) Comedy of Errors
4) Romeo and Juliet
I was taught that there were only a few basic stories and tha Shakespeare had done them all - every thing else is just a variation on a theme, if you want to see the other four, get reading.
Sera
P.S. Or at least rent the video of Much Ado About Nothing with Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson, IMHO it is some of the best film ever made.
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
I'm surprised he didn't mention Katamari Damancy in the article. This game is probably the most innovative game of 2004, and Namco, the company that made it, isn't exactly the indiest of indie companies. (Oh, and it's for PS2, a console system.)
I'm not sure you can truly say the innovation in gaming was on the computers and not consoles. Sure, MMORPGs were on computers first (but now there's also X-Box live).. but actual multiplayer games were on consoles first!
Ethan
In the article, Stallman said "A game scenario can be considered art/fiction rather than software. So it is okay to split the game into engine and scenario, then treat the engine as software and the scenario as art/fiction."
This does NOT mean he believes the scenario can be legally protected. RMS does NOT believe art or fiction are entitled to copyright protection except under limited circumstances.
I had the chance to discuss the issue of copyright protection for art with RMS over Labor Day weekend 2004 at the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston. Also present during the discussion was Keith F. Lynch, a long-time friend of mine.
I asked RMS under what circumstances a person who creates a work of fiction is entitled to restrict its further redistribution, according to his personal beliefs. Initially, he said there were no such circumstances. I described a hypothetical situation in which a person has written down a private sexual fantasy, perhaps for therapeutic reasons, and the document has come into the possession of another person. I asked RMS if the author was entitled to limit the distribution of the document-- basically, if the person had a unique right to control copying it, the essence of copyright law.
Reluctantly, RMS agreed that such a document must be covered by a special exception to his beliefs. After considerable further discussion, he set out the terms of the exception: it applies only to creative works that are highly personal in nature and which have no value to the general public.
This position leaves no room for copyright protection for other kinds of creative works, especially including commercial fiction, video game storylines, or the images and sounds associated with video games.
In his article, Matt Barton clearly failed to comprehend Stallman's position on this issue, and has misled his readers.
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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.