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Advanced Open Source Engine Based On Quake 3
An anonymous reader writes
"Phoronix is running a news story about the XreaL project, which its lead developer claims is the most advanced open-source game engine. XreaL is based upon the vintage Quake 3 engine, but it has been rewritten over the course of many months such that it no longer resembles the original id Software engine. The XreaL engine has its renderer written entirely in GLSL with compliance toward the OpenGL ES 2.0 specification in mind, but it supports the new OpenGL 3.0/3.1 specification and is able to take advantage of its new features. XreaL has also added an HDR pipeline to its engine and on modern hardware is actually GPU — not CPU — bottlenecked. XreaL can also load game content from Unreal Tournament 3. This engine, which is described to be as powerful as what can be found in Doom 3 or Call of Duty 4, is written entirely with free software. The XreaL project has created plug-ins for Maya to broaden their game development capabilities."
"basics such as dynamic shadows"
That's basics? Wow, times change fast these days, even I can remember the time when "dynamic shadows" weren't basics but rather bleeding edge, something you'd need a killer machine for to pull off at all. Maybe 'cause it ain't been a year ago or so.
You know what "basics" too many games lack these days? An interesting concept, some originality, replay value and generally something that makes me want to play them. If you can put that in a game, you can keep your eye candy. Eye candy is like new car smell. Yeah, it's nice, but it wears off too quickly and after it's gone, you only get to see that you have, essentially, the same crappy game that you didn't want to play a year earlier already.
If this means we have now a good FOSS engine at our hands that allows the development of games without first forking over six digit sums and thus being pressured to deliver something "mainstream digestable" (read: uninspired copy of something that sold well), we might get to see a few daring new ideas.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What's funny is that it's all there. You have a ton of people who love to be creative, draw and model. Various pages dedicated to displaying your art are proof enough. You have equally many people who enjoy coding. Linux alone works as a proof for that, together with the lot of FOSS that's readily available and of high quality.
Yet for some odd reason they don't "find" each other. FOSS games are usually mediocre. And I wonder why. FOSS software does not have to hide behind commercial software. Hell, some is better than its commercial counterparts! "Free" art (from music to animations and even movies) is by no means worse than commercial art. Especially true when it comes to music IMO.
Why does the combination not work out?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why does the combination not work out?
C. P. Snow's The Two Cultures. Each needs to make overtures to the other.
I know some artists who tried this out, only to find themselves in a failing project.
The way to go is to create some prototype with placeholders as game art. Something that can be demonstrated to artists. This attracts a lot more people than a paper with fancy ideas. However, guess what - most of the time, the paper with fancy ideas is presented. No wonder the experienced artists stay away (unless they get paid).
Also, most projects don't have something resembling a lead designer; instead, one of the programmers is the lead. This is a bad idea, since the designer is the one who cares most about the "big picture", the overall design. The lead designer is the one who takes care of keeping things together and coherent. This is a full-time job, and often underestimated, especially by open-source game projects.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
The biggest problem in the OSS gaming world is content, that is, graphics and sound; for every programmer we need 5 artists at least.
Game companies usually employ a lot of skilled artists, but their content is closed as hell and is soon forgotten once the game becomes obsolete.
What if we could allow those companies to use this engine without publishing the source and modifications, which normally would be a violation of the GPL license, but arranged in a way they give in return the use of their art only in OSS games?
No, that would be because open-source games tend to have poor artwork, horrible animation, tediously derivative gameplay and level design, and no plot.
For some reason, people with talent in these areas and an interest in giving their work away for free tend to concentrate on making mods for commercial games. Perhaps it's because they want their work to be free-as-in-beer rather than free-as-in-copyleft.
I won't disagree on the code-is-art front; I've done enough programming to know there is a near-infinity of ways to solve a problem, and an art to picking which one to use!
Visual artists stand on the shoulders of other artists too; we constantly steal from each other (or are influenced by each other - same thing, really *grin*). We need each other's critique, we need each others' lessons. We don't rely on each others' work quite as directly as a programmer - I can as easily sit in a cafe and draw in a sketchbook as I can do it here at home with a ton of reference and inspiration in reach. But I wouldn't draw the way I do without having had them in the past.
Young artists also tend to be insanely paranoid about ART THEFT. We tend to see our art as this super-precious excretion of our SOUL and there is no WAY we'd let just ANYONE play with THAT. And again - this is the culture surrounding the core skills. This is what we're taught as we decide to become artists. A scarcity culture.
People will download huge torrents of comics while being worried someone will steal their precious, precious (derivative) creation. One foot in the post-scarcity world where stuff is infinitely duplicatable once it's digital, one foot in the scarcity world where every item is as valuable as the time you spent, because you can only sell it once... but programmers have a culture that came out of the science world, which is all about sharing information, and was shaped by the incredible ease of sharing bits.
egypt urnash minimal art.