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?)

Comments

Good games I have been playing on Linux

[Realistic_Dragon]

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.

Re:This project needs funding?

[LetterRip]

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? Full time artists and full time developers are going to be funded for both Blender and for CrystalSpace. These projects (Orange, Peach, Apricot) serve a few purposes - to prove the quality of these particular open source tools for professional usage (ie pulling together very high quality art work, game assets, game design and logic, and game environment in a very short period of time) and as a major side benefit provides excellent functionality for the current and future users of both projects (ie Blender has had huge leaps in functionality improvement during both Elephants Dream (Orange) and during Rabbits Revenge (Peach) as the artists wishlists were met by both the developers paid to work for the project and the rest of the Blender volunteer team).

LetterRip

Re:Why crystal space?

[Jorrit]

One of the goals of the Apricot project is to modernize the Crystal Space engine. This includes probably the following features that we will implement or improve:

• New render system with better support for render to texture (allowing things like HDR, Bloom) and shadowing techniques.
  
• New skeletal animation system with support for vertex weights.
  
• Support for tree generation and imposters to allow for big outdoor levels.
  
• Continue working on the Bullet physics plugin.
  

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,