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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.
> 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/
I don't know; it'd be easy to say that open source != free, but that'd be both glib, redundant and not answering the question I guess. Perhaps there's the wages/salary/remuneration for the developers or maybe there's some resources need paying for? Whether a CVS repository server or some licensing fees to access...something or other?
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?
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.
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.
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
From the website:
"At the end of July 2008 the game will be launched. The team members will get a great studio facility and housing in Amsterdam, all travel costs reimbursed, and a fee sufficient to cover all expenses during the period."
Obviously, this requires funding. The funding's coming from sponsors (see web site) and profits from the DVD sales. The DVD, as noted in the forums/site, will include all sorts of great documentation and information about what went on and stuff.
And from the forum:
"The plan is to have 6 people for 6 months in Amsterdam working full time on a game."
LetterRip
LetterRip
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.
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.
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.
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!
It seems to me that you (and just about all of slashdot) are missing the point.
I agree with you, the game is probably going to be crap. But even if they had a better than average chance of making a good game, it'd probably be crap, since most games are crap.
From what I see, the point of this game is to demonstrate that an OSS toolchain is a viable solution for game design. If they can create a game that works mostly and has reasonable gameplay, they will have accomplished the goal. If the game is lacking in the concept department, most people who make the decision to create a game will be able to see that although the game isn't vey good, the platform seems to work well enough to use as a foundation. If it ends up being a good game, it's a total home run, since they get free publicity.
I'm surprised that as a gaming professional, you don't see the possibilities here. I'm in the silicon design industry and if someone wanted to demonstrate chip design using OSS tools, I'd be mostly unconcerned about the final product.
The reality is that vendor tools are a serious pain an the ass. They are usually broken and support is mostly useless. Our internal tools are not much better as far as bugs, but since we have the source, there's at least some chance of getting it working in a reasonable amount of time. If someone demonstrated the 90% of what we needed was OSS and it had some miles under it, we'd be all over it.
That said, I'm sure they still have an uphill battle to achieve even a modest success, but I don't think it's hopeless.
What's emacs?
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
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?
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.
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
No you're not; you're posting on Slashdot!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I'm of course biased as I'm the project manager but I believe that the strongest point of Crystal Space is it's modularity and extensibility. It is because of that that we will be able to move into the future and we will do so with the Apricot project.
Greetings,
Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
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.
### 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.
So you think a 3DS Max shop like Blizzard has to sit down and think if they're going to use 3DS Max for their next game or they just decide that they're going to do Starcraft 2 and that OF COURSE they're going to use the tools that they're comfortable with and already trained on?
How about any big 3D feature studio? Sure they might need to identify some supplemental tools (or some custom plugs/scripts) to work with Maya, but it's not like they're going to even think about throwing out all their existing tools for a new project.
And, as someone already said, OF COURSE you're going to use a specific tool if the whole point of doing your project is to promote a specific tool or tool chain. These guys are out to prove the viability of open source tools in fields that are dominated by closed source, proprietary tools and their 3D modeling and animation software of choice is Blender.
I finally sat down to really learn Blender this week and it's actually really, really nice. A little bit weird (coming from a background in Maya), but I absolutely LOVE it compared to something like 3DS. It's got a great range of tools (video editor, audio editor, etc) in addition to the core modeling and animation stuff and if you're looking to do any 3D work for cheap (or you just love open source) I see no reason for it not to figure prominently in your pipeline.
The Farewell Tour II
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.
I don't know; it'd be easy to say that open source != free, but that'd be both glib, redundant and not answering the question I guess.ething or other?
I count myself fortunate to have a rather large vocabulary, but I still had to read that 3 times before I realized you weren't talking about GNU libs.The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
I really hate to say this, but I would feel negligent if I did not question the wisdom of using this project to drag Crystal Space into the 21st century, when there are more up-to-date, perfectly viable, modular, extensible open source 3D graphics engines available. Ogre3D, for example, is available under the exact same license as Crystal Space, and it supports all of the features you mention, and has already been used to make commercial games. Trust me, developing a pro-quality game is a steep enough hill to climb without burning extra time and money modernizing a somewhat dusty graphics engine. Why risk the mission on that? Is this just a bad case of "Not Invented Here" syndrome, or do you really have a good practical reason to do this? I'm not saying that you should put Crystal Space out to pasture, per se, but I'm not convinced that you should be trying to do all of this at once. The single most frequent mistake made by new would-be indie game developers is biting off more than they can chew. Don't set yourself up for failure. Keep your eye on the ball.
;-)
Now that I've given you the obligatory dire warning, good luck.