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Apricot Team Selected For Fully Open Source 3D Game
crush writes "The Linux Game Tome notes that the final team to produce a fully Open Source 3D game using the CrystalSpace engine and Blender has been chosen. The project (known as Apricot) aims to produce a cross-platform, 3D game with completely Free (CCA) graphics, music and code. An important side-effect of the project is to improve open source tools for the professional game development industry."
I look forward to more 3D games on my desktop, even if this one won't be the first. (And where is the open-source bus-driving counterpart to the under-rated FlightGear?)
I look forward to more 3D games on my desktop, even if this one won't be the first. (And where is the open-source bus-driving counterpart to the under-rated FlightGear?)
A couple of interesting games with Linux support I have only found recently:
- Warzone 2100. Not as shiny as Supreme Commander, but much more involved. Great fun.
- NWN 1. Thanks to the fact that NWN2 bombed there is still a large online community.
Beep beep.
What kind of game will this be?
MMORPG?
RTS?
Turn-based? (like Civilization)
FPS?
after duke nukem right?
In other words, the projects exist. People have been interested. But for whatever reason - my bet is a mix of it being hard and developers making lousy publicists - the efforts have struggled to maintain sufficient interest and have eventually collapsed through brain drains and burnout taking out original developers with nobody to replace them.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
> So the Free Software community is going to produce another FPS.
Where did you get the idea of FPS?
"But the real start will be the first week of February. Only then real decisions will be made on game concept, game design and other targets, although we do know it'll be derived from Project Peach, furry & crazy characters in a forest."
http://apricot.blender.org/
why do you assume it's an FPS? nowhere I can find on the website mentions that.
If everything is going to be open source, why exactly does this project need funding? Are the developers going to be working on this full-time?
Just curious as to the reasons the crystal space engine was selected (as opposed to, say, OGRE).
I'm honestly not trying to troll here, but it's probably a hell of a lot easier to do those "visionary" and innovative games in a non-free context.
To use your example, Spore has been in development for like seven years and has undoubtedly cost tens of millions of dollars, mostly in man-hours of work. Do you think a free-source project could get a solid core of designers, coders, and artists to donate their time and money regularly for over half a decade with NO product to show for it, on the hope that one day it might be released and... look good on their resumes?
We've all heard the horror stories about what EA puts its employees through to get games out the door. Do you think an entire project team would put themselves through that voluntarily for NO money, or for what little money a free project could get from ads, donations, and so on?
Now, an FPS, that's a known criteria. You can set clear goals for how every little thing should work, and any "controversial" parts, like level design, are conveniently lumped into chunks that can be handled individually. (If I want to make an oddball level or character model, I can handle it on my own.) Compare that to a more experimental game like Spore, where there aren't discrete levels and the creature models are intrinsic to the gameplay.
Basically, you can have innovative, high-production-value, or free: pick two. "Innovative and free" can be managed by small teams, and "high-budget and free" might theoretically be managed by initiatives like this one with clear and easily-established milestones along the way, but to get innovation AND high production values, you probably need a level of team discipline and management that can only be established with regular paychecks to incentivize everyone involved.
The type of game hasn't been decided yet. So where did you get the idea that it will be an FPS?
Greetings,
Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
well, enough imagination for now. if you want a good open source game, you need full time developers who can work full time on it. which means you need a financial backing. (Google?)
"Why is it that only non-Free developers are giving us new kinds of games like Spore?"
Because a game like spore takes decades of man-hours to do right, and most open source developers have full-time jobs. When you pay for software - especially games - you're usually paying for a lot of thought and time from the developers/artists.
I say we build up the airports ala Second Life and party in the lounges! And, yes, you would have to actually fly to each airport and deplane in my vision.
The airports could become hubs into the cities. FlightGear has great potential to become a parallel earth so why not start populating it?
...make a killing, looting, drug dealing game for Linux?
Too much stuff from the past gets neglected.
The Pros:
There have been alot of innovative, beautiful games to come out of F/OSS:
Vega Strike
Pingus
FreeDroid RPG
TrackBalls
Nexuiz
Open Arena
Tremulous
Torcs
Scorched Earth 3D
AssaultCube
Lincity NG
Also, many DOS games have found new life as Linux games:
Quake 1, 2, and 3
Doom I, II, and Final
Descent I and II (D2X-XL)
Warcraft II *
Duke Nukem 3D
Problems:
Some games get neglected that really should not have been:
Heretic and Hexen - These are Doom Engine games, technically, there is one Engine that plays them, Vavoom, supposedly DoomsDay plays them, but in many cases their performance is really buggy.
Strife - Only Vavoom plays this.
I'd like to note that you can play Strife, Heretic, and Hexen under Wine with Randy Heit's ZDoom Engine for Windows. But thats not the same as a Native Linux Port. There used to be a Linux port of the massive multiplayer engine ZDaemon for Doom based games, but that guy announced that he hated Linux and closed off his source. He even put code in his program to prevent people using Wine to play the game, anmd said that Linux Users were responsible for DoS attacks against his servers.
Blood - This is a big one. Blood was one of the greatest games of all time. Yet there is no Engine replacement for it and it runs awful under DosEmu and DosBox. There exists a Total Remake of the Bloodbath levels called "Transfusion" but it is Quake based and is nothing like the original Blood.
Star Command: Revolution - A game So obscure I found it for 3.95 in a Wal-Mart Bargain bin
Mechwarrior 2: This game predates Direct 3D, You can't run this under Wine.
* Recently, Warcraft II support under Stratagus has suffered. Stratagus 2.1 was superior to Stratagus 2.2. Stratagus 2.1 had support for 16 players instead of the usual 8, and could do dual race computer forces. It had a level editor, and could read the native Warcraft II PUD Format.
There exists Linux Engines for:
Quake 4
Doom 3
I really think a great deal more effort should be pushed into making Windows and older Dos games accessible and updated under Linux, such as One Must Fall, and producing more original games, as it seems some Linux games that used to be full steam ahead are dying out. I'm shifting my focus in University towards programming just so I will have the technical programming knowledge to contribute to Open Source projects more than I am now. So many of the problems are things like bugs in network code, deprecated syntax, added support for additional games.
Games are where the Computer Industry goes. It was Doom that gave us the Windows Ecosystem, so it will have to be a killer Linux game that gives us the Linux ecosystem.
You need a cluster of G5's (or Cell processors) and a lot of RAM. Use whatever software you're comfortable with -- the hardware is the biggest factor here.
After all, I am strangely colored.
I know that last part of the story was meant as a joke, but... http://virtualbus.info/
(some English info at http://vbus.wikia.com/ , and the Subversion repository is at svn://prv.ilan.pl/virtualbus )
Wait a second! Isn't the next Elephant's Dream-like open animated short (originally called "orange") going to be called "Peach"?
;)
Orange? Peach? Apricot?
I call nepotism!
W
Seriously tho-- is the game related to the short?
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The one thing that needs to come of all of this is that the tools made have to be usable in a commercial setting. I'm all about free as in beer stuff, but freedom (for companies) is the more important factor here. For some reason (and I think it has to do w/ Microsoft's SDK), many companies have chosen to use Direct X, which is a huge hindrance to cross-platform gaming; those companies and their developers will likely continue to use Direct X. Convincing them to use OpenGL and SDL is a must.
A license like the LGPL would be nice; if the software isn't usable without companies having to open up their entire game (i.e., give everything away for free), where's the incentive to develop games for Linux? (I'm writing this while waiting for my turn in Battle for Wesnoth).
"You could almost look at defense of Microsoft as a form of the Stockholm syndrome." -neapolitan
I am glad to see that there is work underway to show what Linux, X/ OpenGL can do in the area of gaming. There are too few games avialable for Linux.
I do think it would be a good idea for the developers to make this is a server based multiple user game ( a virtual world), the sort where you can login and logoff but the world remains persistant. Perhaps that does not fit with the plot they have for the game, I dont know. But I do think that having more open source multi-user games is a fantastic idea can be quite a bit of fun, especially being able to interact with other users in a virtual 3D space.
I also see value in 3D chat environments based on rendered 3D landscapes and scenes, a visual 3D version of chat rooms. There was a similar system called WorldsAway on compuserve years ago, but was quite limited by the technology of the time. With todays hardware, the level of realness could be much more developed. An open source system could start an IRC-like community of visual environments.
If you go to http://peach.blender.org/ one of the recent stories is a request for feedback of what you want added or changed about Blender to improve it for game content creation.
LetterRip
http://www.blender.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12399
The official game style is yet to be announced; but I believe the team is leaning towards minigames.
LetterRip
This is a game designed by committee. If there isn't a game designer at the lead of the team with a passion for their design, then this might as well be another cookie cutter grist mill EA waste of shelf space. (Except, of course, this also isn't likely to hit the shelves.) It's nice that open source is putting together the effort to show that they can do something like this, and that it can all be free, but games aren't like other engineering projects. They require passion, and I don't see that here.
No game of value here. Thank you, drive through.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
I think 95% of the video games that have been developed since the late 90's has shown that when a game is developed for a purpose other than to simply produce an awesome game (i.e. to make a profit, etc), the quality of the game suffers. It doesn't matter that the cause may be a good one for this project, the game is still being developed for a reason other than to make a game. I doubt the game will come out very well.
I like the idea but... ...Will It Blend?
I was recently thinking about what it would take to create some sort of a system which contains a multi-user 3D world, which could become quite large, a continuous, persistant 3D world. I was looking for some possible ways to perhaps render objects more distant to the user with less detail, so the detail would decrease the farther an object is. With a very large world, one that might continue for millions of pixels, that would be rather necessary to keep resource usage down. Perhaps when the terrain is designed several different resolutions could be created, then the client could ask for a certain resolution depending on how far away the object is. As far as existing software, I am afraid I do not know of any off hand.
you probably need a level of team discipline and management that can only be established with regular paychecks to incentivize everyone involved.
Yeah well, and a few stock options wouldn't hurt either.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Read through Ubuntuforums.org and see all the people having trouble with cards that are supposed to do 3D but aren't for some reason. There are a large amount of posts.
My 1-month old new system has a VIA Chrome 9 HC IGP card. I've spent the last 2 days trying to get it to work on Ubuntu with something other than a generic VESA driver. I finally noticed VIA actually released a new driver on Dec 2007. I downloaded it and installed it. Still no 3D. After the second day of this, I said screw it and ordered an older card off of eBay that I know works because I have one in another system, but I still see people on the forums having trouble with even that card...so I'm thinking it is a crapshoot and hope I didn't waste more money.
There might be more interest in games if there was better support for video cards. Personally, I don't really mind spending two days to install a driver, because I usually learn a lot doing it. But how many people would rather spend those two days just playing the game they wanted to play?
Transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
You could try POV-Ray on a 64-bit machine with lots of RAM. Christoph Hormann has done gigantic renders of earth views with it.
"Too much stuff from the past gets neglected."
And too much of the future passes you by. Let me know when I can start living in the present.
Let me see if I understand this correctly:
You assemble a full creative team for a game and only then decide what you want to do with it?
In animation, a studio like Pixar will spend years in developing a story. Only then will it begin assembling a production crew.
Will it blend?
I've noticed that role playing games attract gamers very largely, so getting especially MMORPG's on Linux would be awesome. There are already many good FPS games on Linux, but what is needed is variety ! ... And I also hope that Duke Nukem Forever, when/if it's released, comes with Linux client :)
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The project site makes it pretty clear there's no design document for the game, no central vision of what it will be. They're going to design it once they've got the people together, so it's going to be one of those designed-by-committee games.
That way lies adequacy and weak gameplay.
Still, I wish them well and since they're off to a bad start it can only improve from here.
The comment about the Bus Driver game? Why not just download ...
Desert Bus!
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
I don't see this becoming a "game" so much as it'll be a technology demo. The same way Elephants Dream was just masturbation material for artists. There wasn't anything in the way of real story being told, unless you really reach for some meaning in it. It's 11 minutes of "That's neat", but I'm never going to watch it again like Lord of the Rings or X-Men. I foresee roughly the same thing here, a bunch of people get together to show how deeply functional each of their subsystems is. Most of the "game" won't even have a purpose other than to show you how great Programmer X did collision detection, particle physics, etc. You'll be able to spend 5 minutes shooting cannon balls at a stack of barrels and watching them smash but otherwise there won't be much to do. Maybe it's pessimistic of me, but that's been my opinion of most games over the last decade. Everyone seems to be more proud of the intricacy of their work and doesn't understand why you think the game sucks, they think you just don't "get it". It's like they spend 3 years hand-crafting a #2 pencil and when I write a sentence then throw it away they're like "Hey, that thing was a work of art! I spent 13 months renting equipment at NASA to insert the lead using a bleeding-edge particle injector!" and I'm like "Yeah, but it still had one of those hard erasers that just smears what you're trying to erase so it's no good." I really subscribe to the idea that you need a single visionary to design a game. Otherwise it just becomes a pile of interesting components but it has no gestalt form.
Here's a couple of reasons:
Design by committee isn't very compatible with radical ideas
How many FOSS game developers are there, anyway? The vast majority of games coming out from the the "traditional" game industry are cookie-cutter dross. There's hundreds of non-free companies out there and a handful that make anything interesting. The innovation percentage just isn't that large, so with very few free developers out there in the first place, you can be sure a VERY small number of those will be coming up with anything new.
Uh, Quake has been fully open source for quite a while, and still has quite a few people playing it too. Pick your flavor (1,Quakeworld,2,3...) and you can probably find one of the new clients that has shaders, bloom, environmental effects, etc. for it. Plus, Quakeworld (with CustomTF, but I'm biased) is a lot of fun.
Forgot one: motives. For a free software developer, the primary motivator is quite likely ideological: they primarily want to make FOSS software. Making a game, making a GOOD game, and finding people who are actually capable of that come, to some extent, second. Enthusiasm does not a game dev make.
The PlaneShift team would like to wish the makers of Apricot well in their ambition and wish them a Happy New Year. PlaneShift is contributing to raise awareness about Apricot and will help out the project in whatever ways we can.
Spore new? It's a compilation of classical games, how does that make it new? The only new thing about it is the charecter development system being able to make dynamic 3d models, but thats not innovation, thats evolution.
Spore is pretty "up there" but theres basicly nothing new to it. The sims was new, in that it took a casual RTG to a completely non war environment, but even then that wasn't innovation as much as evolution.
The game scene has seen alot of innovation in resent years, now it's time for evolution, and developing high quality free development tools will allow hobbyists to deliver the next wave of innovation needed in a scene where you HAVE to secure a multimillion income for any idea to get developed.
When you pay for software - especially games - you're usually paying for a lot of thought and time from the developers/artists.
But to listen to a lot of people here, the same isn't true for productivity or graphics apps (image editing in particular).
"well, enough imagination for now. if you want a good open source game, you need full time developers who can work full time on it. which means you need a financial backing. (Google?)"
Wasn't "doing it for the love" suppose to take care of issues like *cough*money*cough*? I think I liked it better when we could pretend that virtual things like game art, music, sound, and levels were valueless and therefore worthy of being put on piratebay.
Anyway what's in it (oh God there's that thinking of ourselves thing again) for Google. Besides why does Google keep having to buy everyone's respect by giving away free stuff?
The team has been chosen? By who? What for? When you read the summary only, you get the feeling that some team is going to make some game, and that a mysterious group of unmentioned persons (let's call them "they") chose them to do it, (as we can suppose) from a bunch of other competing teams who probably wanted to make that game too, but weren't good enough. And that the newsworthy part of it is that it's all going to be free and open source.
From what I read I can only suppose..
You just got troll'd!
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
"Why can't the Free Software community innovate, putting out a new kind of game where you don't just go around from room to room and blow stuff up."
A new genre is born. The First Person Monica Lewinsky.
Not sure where you got the idea from that it's going to be an FPS. As far as I know it has never been mentioned anywhere in connection to the project. Cheers, Briggs
For a free software developer, the primary motivator is quite likely ideological: they primarily want to make FOSS software.
As a FOSS dev and a member of a homebrew game making community (the GP32/GP2X/Pandora community) I can tell this is bullshit. I don't do any software/game by ideology, and I don't know a single person who does that either. All the devs I know do what they do because they're excited by creating a game, their game (although even in a community centered around homebrew most efforts go to ports and emulators) and often a contest helps motivate them.
Nobody who actually creates anything cares about the FOSS supremacy.
You just got troll'd!
Not only is the library good, but the support team is excellent. I would have never got as far as I did in my game without them. It is almost a shame that I gave up on my game. CS is just awesome.
God spoke to me.
A big problem with nearly every open game project I've followed is that their designed as open source projects, not games. Gameplay seems to take a back seat in the design process, getting tacked on at the end. Gameplay really should be the nucleus around which the project is designed and built, even the guys/girls you get involved should (ideally) be chosen based on their compatibility and commitment to the vision of the game, not just their commitment to "open source".
From the Apricot website it's rather apparent that once again gameplay is taking a back seat. 95% of the blurb is promoting it's openness - I frankly don't give a shit. I want to know what's going to set it apart from a billion and one other games? What innovative gameplay elements will feature? These are what I want to know. From their brief description, all they know is it will have furry critters, that's it. Rest to be decided later.
Open source is the perfect vehicle to play with innovative ideas, free of the chains of publishers/marketing.. yet it seems to constantly get squandered on half baked 'we can do it too!' projects. Indie (closed source) games, like Aquarius and Armageddon Empires, have shown what can be done by small teams (and one man bands) who have a passion for gaming and a clear design vision. It's about time the open scene caught on and stopped turning out half assed clones of popular games that are outclassed by ancient abandonware.
I hope something good comes of this, but won't hold my breath...
Not to mention that if Spore was open source, we'd all be playing beta versions of it right now.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
I'd really like a good Command and Conquer/Dune, and also a SimCity type game for Linux. :)
I've played Battle for Wesnoth, and Xlincity - Wesnoth, it's OK, but Xlincity just isn't quite there
Anyone suggest me any?
Get your own free personal location tracker
I contribute to the Irrlicht open source 3d engine, and the "Project Announcements" forum (along with Sourceforge in general) is littered with the corpses of abandoned projects. All of them start with a burst of enthusiasm and high aspirations, then within 6 months they're either dead or fragmented into 4 new projects, all equally doomed.
To cut a long rant short, completing a commercial-quality game today (i.e. one that people might actually play) takes 100 man years of work, and a minimum of 2.5 elapsed years. Of course, nobody actually believes that, or else community projects would never get started.
To identify the doomed projects (which is all of them), simply ask to see the design documentation. If the answer is "We'll do that later" (which it always is) then don't even waste your time getting involved. If they don't know what they're developing, then how will they know when they're done?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
That's not a useful measure. It's like saying "Most English speakers aren't good writers". True, but useless! People don't go to the bookstore and buy a bound, printed copy of something an average English speaker wrote.
I believe (where was the article?) that most good open-source software that actually gets used is maintained by people for whom that's their job. Torvalds isn't exactly working at the Swiss patent office.
I'm having trouble thinking of a significant and good piece of open-source software that I use that wasn't either commercial-then-freed, or free-then-commercially-sponsored.
Anyway, your answer doesn't answer the question. For example, Sun and Google (among many others) have released a decent body of innovative yet open-source code -- but not for gaming. Why is it that only the field of games has developers waiting 5 years to open-source their work? It can't be as simple as "money", because game companies inevitably release the engine for free, but still not the content.
(It's especially puzzling that Google is avoiding this, because (a) they love building tools for content creation and publication so people can buy their ads [so a free MMORPG or FPS engine with support for AdWords seems like a no-brainer], and (b) they've got Sketchup [though it's really only for static views, and it's not open-source], so they know how to make 3D easy. Why isn't Google pushing a billion dollars into Croquet development, or building something better?)
We already have Tux Racer. Most true gamers would agree anything more is just gratuitous.
What's emacs?
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
I suggest the tag fruit smoothie
So Skulldilocks threw acid on the schoolchildrens' faces, cause somebody from the bible told her to do it!
The wise follow a damned path, for to know is to be forsaken.
Not everyone is Pixar and can I get sources for that?
Simply unlock the commentary tracks, extras and trailers on any Disney/Pixar DVD.
You have to solve the essential problems of the story before you go into production because mistakes are too expensive to fix.
I'm curious. Where exactly did you get the idea that putting your entire team on a death march is somehow beneficial to the project?
Since we are listing inovative opensource games anyway: Sauerbraten (aka Cube 2) has all kinds of eye candy, simple gameplay (admittedly, but I like it online), is working on an RPG (not an MMORPG! don't even ask on the forums ;)) and an inbuilt level editor (even allowing cooperative editing over the internet). It has its rough edges still, but it is a really interesting (and fun to play with) project.
You'd probably hate to hear this, but maybe Bryce or Z-brush. Even then you're likely to be limited by RAM and whatever your OS can actually address.
And if the meshes work as one chunk in those cases, don't expect much in the way of speed. Slowness is to be expected when the vertex count gets into ridiculous territory.
I don't know if there's any free 3D-model browsers that work ala Google Earth, nice idea in concept though. (I'd be interested in finding such a thing.) On the other hand if it's free 3D models you're trying to find, you haven't looked hard enough.
Ultimately, I think it's because the Free sofware movement works best with an agile-type of development. Release early; release often. That doesn't work for games. So much time is spent below the ground floor that there's nothing to release for ages, and there's no buzz developed.
How can you solve this problem? The answer is revolutionary.
Put identity in the browser.
Imagine if Havok, SpeedTree, etc were open source. I would guess that the development budget for Oblivion could have saved a few million dollars on licensing fees alone. Game developers need to realise this and start contributing in ways that programmers in other industries do with open source.
They'd see big savings, since most these companies are re-inventing the wheel. I would say that artwork is more important in games now anyway and these programs are getting more and more complex as more features are demanded by the public.
You don't get to bitch when it doesn't work very well. You get what you pay for. Those $200 ultra cheap systems aren't intended for gaming, regardless of OS.
Yes. Because there are people growing up for whom OSS has always been around, and is something they really believe in, and they're willing to put the work in. People die for idealism all the time.
/it's 3:20AM here, I'm working on an open source game.
I am trolling
than elephant's dream.. or pretentious circle jerk or whatever it was called. In all seriousness, I can only hope that there are some truly good writers and designers on the team. You can make it so bright it outshines the sun, but if any of the story of the game reads like it was written by a child, and you're not making a children's game, it is going to suffer for it.
No you're not; you're posting on Slashdot!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Blender absolutely sucks. If you aren't familiar with how to use it, it is confusing as hell. I do a ton of work in 3DS Max and Maya and have tried Blender several times, and it's just plain weird. Instead of trying to do it "better" or "different", why not make a 3DS Max or Maya clone the way Open Office just cloned Microsoft Office? The truth is, 3DS Max and Maya for all their quirks are really quite good, and it's what the majority of professionals use.
The short answer, I suspect, is that the FPS is the shortest path to completion and rather all too commonly the model for the tech demo disguised as a game.
"Furries in the forest" is high-concept. "The rat in the kitchen" is high-concept. "Robots" is high-concept.
"Ratatouille" is a movie.
2 years ago I was in the same boat as you - very proficient with 3DSMax and Maya, doing high quality work for mods, and hating blender for the UI. Then as a result of my work on mods I got hired by a small game company to create models for their game. The agreement was that I bring my own tools as an independent contractor, but what I didn't tell them was that I don't own professional licenses for Max or Maya (I was just pumped about even getting the job). To avoid legal trouble, I gave Blender another shot.
At that point I said "what the hell", and then spent about 4 days times 12 hours per day just memorizing hotkeys and practicing using the interface for various standard tasks until everything was in my mind and the hotkeys were all at my fingertips. (repitition of simple tasks, analogous to the basketball player practicing free throws) It got to the point where if I even had the slightest inlking to perform an operation, magically the appropriate tool and mode was already right there on the screen, my left hand had typed the commands without even consiously thinking about it.
Now that I put in the time and did the memorization, I am actually far more proficient in Blender than any other 3d program for low to mid poly range. The Blender interface just gets the hell out of the way and lets you connect directly to what you are modeling. The right hand on the mouse is reserved for spatial tasks, while the left hand on the keyboard is controlling the tools and modifiers that are used - the mouse is never used for scrolling through menus or clicking on icons.
So, the conclusion I draw is that Blender's UI is excellent for the expert and horrible for the newbie. It's not the sort of program you would want to _learn_ 3D on, and even if you already know 3D, it will take approx 48 hours of hard work before the advantages really shine.
By "full creative team" you mean a "game studio"? Yes, that's usually how it works. No one says, I'd like to make an RPG, I should start a company to do that. The studio gets together to plan upcoming projects and says, "what are we good at?" and that's what they make.
Companies are SUPPOSED to work for the people. Their freedom is NEVER the more important factor.
### I'm honestly not trying to troll here, but it's probably a hell of a lot easier to do those "visionary" and innovative games in a non-free context.
When you are Will Wright himself maybe, if you are anybody else you will likely never get a penny from a publisher. Getting anything remotely or visionary done these days is extremely hard, no matter how you approach it.
That said, doing it Open Source wouldn't be any easier, since especially with Open Source games it is near impossible to assemble when doing something original. When you do a clone of some old classic, you can always point at that and say "Hey, thats what we want to do, come join", if you want to do something original you can point nowhere and even if you have design document, finding people that share that vision gets very hard and troublesome, since nobody really knows where the game will end up and if it will even be fun.
Ah interesting response - thanks for a thoughtful reply.
I don't think you can render that directly so easily and if you want to work with that dataset it will cause even more trouble. I would try to change it to something simpler to work with. First create a height map which only covers the lowest parts of the model. Then extract all geometry that resides atop of it. That should result in a big height map and geometry which has a lot of disjoint parts. So next I would try to segment the geometry into disjunct objects so you can use level of detail on them, using it on one object is very hard to keep continuous. Without description of what you want to do with the model it is hard to say, if that would do or not.
There are renderers which can handle those datasets, but I don't know if they are available. Ingo Wald has done realtime raytracing of a Boing 777 with 350 million triangles.
- [fta] Finally it starts! [/fta]
- What?
- The development of [fta] a smashing game [/fta]
- What's it going to be about?
- Huh?
- Like, what kind of game is it going to be?
- I dunno... It'll be a game, you know, a "game"
- Right, and how about a genre, content, idea...
- Idea? No no no, its going to be an open source game, for Linux
- Oh I see...
- Yeah, its going to have great graphics... a [fta] professional quality [/fta] (tm) game!
- Um-hum
Great post.
>I'm having trouble thinking of a significant and good piece of open-source software that I use that wasn't either commercial-then-freed, or free-then-commercially-sponsored.
Well you are right with all the big headline stuff. But one cool thing about Open Source is that there is a long tail, you will have small specialised applications, made by one person to get something done, then that is then used by a few dozen or a hundred people around the world.
My little Linux and tech blog
The type of game hasn't been decided yet. So where did you get the idea that it will be an FPS?
Free Playing System ?
Having used a great deal many 3d modeling applications, I have to say blender is the most retarded confusing backwards unintuitive interface ever devised by man. And possibly the worst ever devised in the entire universe.
I'd go so far as to say Blender's the entire reason 3d development on Linux is stilted. If XSI or Maya were cheaper, or if Blender didn't require a labotomy before using, this sort of thing would actually be fun and easy for everyone. But instead your choices are:
a) pay through the nose for something you'll probably only use a few times in any serious capacity
or
b) suffer lasting brain damage and recurring migraines until your twilight years.
Seriously, this project's FIRST AND FOREMOST goal should be making Blender usable by people who actually have spacial awareness and perception.
I think it partially has to do with the fact that games are largely disposable. They are written with a singular story or repetitive content that most people will not re-play. FPS games avoid this with multiplayer, but a good length RPG will likely only be fun the first time. Add that to the fact that there's a new engine every 5 years to utilize the greatest new feature in video cards and even projects like this will be aged by the time a project rolls around to release. I kind of wonder if Ray Tracing engines might alleviate this trend by focusing on a scalable engine that can look better as technology increases without the need of a programmer reworking engine code that much, if at all.
Also, office applications can be fairly modular and unchanging, but games are mostly planned from the ground up every time. Your likely to find a new inventory system being developed for every game put out. It may look like others, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say it was probably written from the ground up. All of them pretty much rely on containers to hold objects. The containers can be different sizes (many items for RPGs, 2-9 items for FPS, 1-3 for puzzle games, etc.) They all have display areas, content, organization (either auto or player set) and could be interchangeable for the most part, but it doesn't happen. Not only that, but character development. How many different implementations of a D&D type character system are there? You think these all use the same code? What about storyline/quest/objective components? People are worried about something that changes every 5 years instead of something that's remained pretty stale over the years, the graphics engine. But why not? This is the part everyone sees. This is how your game will be judged by many, not the way your inventory works...
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Probably your issue is the metrics you use. Maybe the same software you consider "significant and good" is considered "significant and good" by the people who have money to invest in it. But it doesn't say anything about free software not being able to be significant and good. It just says that you probably think "significant and good" free software is the one that is commercially sponsored.
I use significant and good free software that is not commercially sponsored. Blender is sponsored by people. Freemind is sponsored by
Of course, successful software will attract money, but it doesn't mean that commercial sponsorship is key to success, maybe it means the opposite.
Just because you might not have other goals that direct retribution it doesn't mean other people don't either. We've all heard the horror stories about what EA puts its employees through to get games out the door. Do you think an entire project team would put themselves through that voluntarily for NO money, or for what little money a free project could get from ads, donations, and so on? From that, I see you are not a software developer or anything like that. EA does that, because they are incompetent at managing people. Non self-imposed 60 hour weeks produce the same as 40 hour weeks, when you are in front of a computer. In creative positions, even less.
A better work environment, a nice project, and people working for a common goal, could achieve what slave workers couldn't.
Since that's almost certainly a couple of orders of magnitude more polys than you have pixels in your display, there's no point not downsampling. What you need to do is use adaptive subdivision techniques. Essentially you store a tree whose root is a massively downsampled model, and whose faces have children at higher detail. The tricky bit is working out how to handle boundaries between areas at different resolution. The approach you take there will vary according to the particular properties of your model. I've only done it before with a height-mapped world, where the root was an octahedron and each level subdivided faces into 4.
Commercial programmers can work on them as their full-time paid job while open-source people are students learning as they go or people working in their spare time. This is the problem with most open-source software, you (unfortunately) can't really expect it to be able to compete with commercial software.
So, which existing closed-source game are they going to duplicate in painstaking detail?
Games should start with a design document, not a list of technologies they plan to use.
- chrish
*yawn*
Thankfully the people in charge of Blender have the good sense to stick to doing what their users want and have come to appreciate, rather than try to copy the unintuitive, buggy, bloated pieces of trash that by virtue of having been first are now considered "industry standard" by self-proclaimed 3D professionals, who for all their artistic talent apparently are stopped dead in their tracks by the prospect of having to learn a new user interface.
Seriously, stop this. It won't happen, and for good reason.
Imagine if Kennedy, in his 1961 State of the Union address, said he was going to invest billions in forming a massive group of scientists and engineers, and get them to do "I dunno, something cool." You think it would have resulted in a moon landing?
Imagine if an entrepreneur went to an investor asking for startup funding, with a beautiful Powerpoint showing innovative new organizational charts, an efficient supply chain, and a great advertising theme. "What are you going to make?" "I dunno, something cool."
If you want to make a great free-software game, come up with a great game idea first, and then gather some free-software resources to make it happen. Planning the administrative and legal issues before coming up with a product concept is the fast-track to mission failure.
You're on the right track. Lots of people have already put a lot of thought into achieving this. You could design models at different scales. You can do a trick where you make a model at different scales, and use a higher-detailed version to generate bump maps for a lower-detailed version. I think this is pretty common nowadays, but I don't know what the technique is called.
However, you don't need to do it manually. There are a number of general techniques that you can use for dynamically controlling how detailed your models render. Some are quick and dirty, like turning faraway models into sprites, others are fancy and complicated, like foveated 3d model simplification. Google "level of detail" and you're probably only a few clicks away from something you could use.
How dare you be so modest!! You conceited bastard!!
I suppose that this is sheer fun for the people involved and that they are more than willing to donate their free time to the project. I think the quality might be higher since the participants self-select themselves into this. You're probably not going to put out junk if you're not 100% committed to this.
In the long-run this may make game development cheaper for everyone (developing countries?) and I think it would be cool if we saw many new innovative games as a result.
So, what you're saying is it's the Vi of 3D modellers. :)
Let me see if I understand this correctly:
You assemble a full creative team for a game and only then decide what you want to do with it?
Well, yeah, because the goal here is different from the goal of somebody like Pixar.In animation, a studio like Pixar will spend years in developing a story. Only then will it begin assembling a production crew.
In this project one of the important goals is simply that of going through the process of writing a game using these tools. It's a shake-down. That's the whole point, so that comes first. Choose the technical challenge, arrange the team, and then figure out what shape the work will take.
Bow-ties are cool.
Even more when there is no authority (and pre-fixed deadline), the committee is small and composed of passionate people. On those circunstances, a committee can design even better things than a lone individual, and through a much funnier process.
Rethinking email
Unlike applications, but like game mods open source game projects are a dime a dozen. Also, like mods very few of them get to a point where they can be released and even fewer are actually fun to play. Call me when it's actually done.
Check out k-3d sometime :)
Hm. And what OS do you run? On what CPU, with what chipset, on what motherboard? And what car do you drive to work? And what kind of power source does it have? Geez, what do you turn to open your door when you leave your house?
You know what, you're right: let's just not let anyone make anything that is similar to anything that anyone else ever made. All you have to do is build the first time machine and then send us back to the stone age, where we'll stay until the end of time.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Convince developers and graphics card makers to stop developing for DirectX and abandon a closed model (like DirectX) and you're on the road to success.
You should expect to pay around that just for a video card to play games on. *All* PC's sold these days have "3D support", but that doesn't mean they're powerful enough for anything more than web browsing.
$200-$300 will buy you a mid range current generation video card. It won't buy you anything approaching a "hardcore" card. Your $35 ebay card cost a lot more when it was new, and current. You can get decent older generation cards if you look, but you have to remember their driver development was subsidized by their release pricing.
Yes, any system you pay $273 for new is shit. The manufacturer isn't going to bother writing any more than the absolute bare minimum drivers it has to to sell it (don't count on any updates), and certainly no one is going to go out of their way to write free drivers for them.
Again, you get what you pay for.
Oolite is good, but the chief maintainer quit and 1.65 is getting long in the tooth. I couldn't get the hang of Vega Strike. Nice background stills, but nothing of the feel that the Elite family of games gives. There's nothing quite like mashing up a tech 1 anarchy in a beat-up spaceship with a trusty military beam by your side. And front. And back.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
This technique is called mipmapping and has been around for over two decades, though it wasn't in widespread use in games until much later.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mipmap