Status Report From the Open Source Games Community

qubodup writes "Free Gamer, an open source gaming blog, has recently become the center of open source artists, developers and gamers. In its forums, the GPU-hungry Classical Java RPG and the Neverball-killer irrlamb have found their second home. So did sub-communities like extremist free gamers, who insist on games not only be free software but also to contain free content and want to build a knowledge base of existing free games. There are also free content artists, which address an old problem of open source games and want to supply graphics and sound for projects in need of game media."

Comments

wrong link

[Simon80]

wtf, zonk, you're supposed to be editing before you post. freegamer.net is obviously not an open source games blog. I think the submitter meant to link to http://freegamer.blogspot.com/. I have no clue how someone could screw that up though.

Re:wrong link

[qubodup]

am I an idiot? try again: freegamer.blogspot.com 'Blaming' my previous post would be a good idea..

Here is a list of great open source games...

[Anonymous Coward]

*crickets chirp*

Re:Here is a list of great open source games...

[ucblockhead]

Nethack.

Re:Here is a list of great open source games...

[Clover_Kicker]

http://www.wesnoth.org/

Re:Here is a list of great open source games...

[Bongo Bill]

The Ur-Quan Masters

Incompatibility between CC and GNU licenses

[tepples]

If I develop a game, and I want to distribute it under a copyleft license, what license should I use? Due to the lack of a native file system implementation on some platforms, the code and its related assets (graphics, sound, maps, etc.) must be combined into one executable file, but the GNU licenses appear to require that a single executable file be distributed under a single license. Licenses based on the Creative Commons Attribution License ("CC-BY") are not intended for software; instead, Creative Commons recommends GNU licenses for software. However, the GNU software licenses are not compatible with any of the Creative Commons licenses. Section 4(a) of the Creative Commons Attribution License versions 2.5 and 3.0 allow a contributor to require that downstream distributors remove the contributor's copyright notice, but the GNU licenses do not allow the removal of copyright notices. Is there a way to solve this without having to track down every single artist on Wikimedia Commons individually and ask them for waivers of this requirement?

Here's what is wrong - sucky tookits

[sofar]

these games *DIE* because the developers pick tools that nobody wants to maintain in the long run. Look at irrlamb: written in scons, needs boost. This is bound to die a quick death as a project. Java gaming? maybe, sure it is cross platform, but your app is horribly VM limited and performance will sucky no matter how you tweak. You kill your project and game by choosing the wrong development tools.

frozen-bubble keeps getting revived but in the end is not compileable with newer versions of SDL_perl. A tragedy, but I ain't gonna fix this, even if it won fancy awards.

the better the toolkit, the longer lived the project - look at the old quake engines...

I would donate plenty of money to anyone who picks a sane tookit to develop a 3D MMORPG that *encourages* development (no python, no boost, no java, plain autotools, C, no c++, SDL+GL, gtk+, no wx). Bring it on.

Re:Here's what is wrong - sucky tookits

[qubodup]

On the Free Gamer forums there is a "FOSS games targetting users with lower end hardware?" discussion and one of the members insisted that games have crappy art/gfx/snd because the dev-tools suck.. Sorry sofar, I'm pretty clueless, and don't understand: do you want library independence or, the contrary + the game written in high-level? Which tools *do* you want for a game development?

Re:Here's what is wrong - sucky tookits

[grumbel]

All thus buzz over toolkits, lack of graphics and stuff... its pointless. Those are not the problems of Free Software games, sure, they can annoy, but they also would be pretty easy to fix. They are not what makes a project succeed or not. The game design that is *BY FAR* the biggest issue. It is the lack of a team, the lack of a vision and the lack of basically everything that makes a game a game instead of just little graphic tech demo.

If you for example look at a MMORPGs, we almost had it already back then in seven years ago with WorldForge:Acorn. It might not have been the best looking MMORPG ever, it might have not been the best code base, but it was there and running. In seven years of time you would expect that it would have expanded, got polished and all that stuff. Nope, didn't happen, UClient (the 2D client running Acorn) got ditched and WorldForge seems to be toying around in 3D now. I don't really know and don't really care what they are doing right now. They simply haven't managed to get a game done in all those years even so all the bits and pieces where already there and that is simply sad. They simply don't seem to know what they actually want to accomplish. Know maybe the will come out with a playable game one day, but I kind of have given up hope.

Its really that simple, most people simply prefer to toy around instead of deliver a finished game and most 'teams' are horrible unorganized in that *nobody* knows what they are actually trying to accomplish, everybody is just pulling their strings, all in different directions and going nowhere in the end.

People always say that ideas are cheap and handle them as basically worthless, but from my experience its exactly what the Free Software world lacks. People with good ideas, who know what they want and who have the will to drive a team to accomplish that goal from start to finish.

Re:Here's what is wrong - sucky tookits

[LunarCrisis]

People with good ideas, who know what they want and who have the will to drive a team to accomplish that goal from start to finish. The other solution, of course, is to work on smaller ideas so that it takes fewer people less time to complete. Some of my favourite games could be (or where) written by a single person in some form, for example Geometry Wars or rRootage.