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Penumbra: Overture Goes Open Source
As promised when the Humble Indie Bundle hit $1 million in donations the other day, indie developer Frictional Games has released Penumbra: Overture's source code. "The code for Penumbra: Overture is a continuation of the one used for the tech demo + some addition for the not so long lived Robo Hatch project. It also contains some code from Unbirth, giving it quite some history." The release also includes the HPL1 engine. "This is engine that has powered all of the Penumbra games and it even includes the stuff used to create the 2D platformer Energetic. The engine code was started in December 2004 and was actively developed until early 2008." The repositories are available at github.
There, I said it.
People are gaga over git. You shouldn't be. Git is a decentralized vcs, which means it's easy for someone to download the source, make modifications, but keep those modifications private. FREE software shouldn't be like that. FREE sfotware is about giving back your changes to the community, to the centralized repository. Git is dangerous for free software.
I know Linus Torvaldes is your hero, but let's be honest. Before git, his rcs of choice was the non-FREE BitKeeper.
Fact: Git is bad. Use bzr or mercury if you like FREE software.
I've never heard of this game and neither the summary nor TFA actually told me anything about it. According to Wikipedia, it's a first-person adventure game with a focus on Newtonian physics, improvised weapons, and no firearms. Is it really too much effort for the person writing the summary to bother saying that?
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First of all it's great that they have done this, any contribution to open source is a nice thing to have.
With that said I question their motives it seems to me like they're using this release as an excuse to not have to provide support for their old games. Also it's not even the whole game code that is open source..
That seems to me like a big chunk of the game is missing, no AI, no GUI.. pretty much most of the "game" part.
With that said the OALWrapper does sound interesting, I may have to look into that in more detail.
Either way thanks for the code frictional games and also for making your games work on Linux. I can't wait to see what kind of games I will be able to buy from you in the future... because no one else makes linux games :(
There are different places for the Freedoms. The GPL squarely puts the Freedom with the end-user. That person will always be free to receive distributed updates to their software as long as interest and activity for it exists. Another place for Freedom is in contrast with a BSD'ish license putting the Freedom with the software itself. That software is free to use anywhere without guaranteeing the end-user receive free updates. A consequence of the software itself having the Freedom is that the end-user is not guaranteed improvements.
Shh.
These games from the Humble Indy Bundle have not been released under a free license, nor does it appear they will be. All that is being released are their engines. There are already dozens of free software game engines available with no free software games which use them.
While this is a nice gesture, and does raise some awareness for software freedom, its important to point out that the games themselves are still very much proprietary.
,learn what mistakes the accounting to the original I type this. [tux.org]? Are you
;D
~
http://www.vesq.net/
Has anyone looked at the source to figure out what algorithm they use to get the depth-of-field effect?
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Git is a decentralized vcs, which means it's easy for someone to download the source, make modifications, but keep those modifications private.... Use bzr or mercury if you like FREE software.
What's mercury? (Maybe you meant mercurial?) And both bzr and mercurial are both just as decentralized.
I know Linus Torvaldes is your hero, but let's be honest. Before git, his rcs of choice was the non-FREE BitKeeper.
And before that, his rcs of choice was none at all, because that's how much of a difference a dvcs makes over non-distributed.
FREE sfotware is about giving back your changes to the community, to the centralized repository.
Free "sfotware" doesn't exist. Free software is about giving your changes back to the community however you want, including not at all if you so desire. If I want to fork and develop on my own, in private, it's going to be very hard to merge that stuff back if I use svn. If I use Git, such private branches might be contributed back one day, and much more easily.
Oh, and you're offtopic. Guess what: It's free software now, so if you're that terrified of Git, go fork it in svn. See if anyone cares enough to follow you...
Oh, that's right, you're a hypocrite -- you won't use svn, you'll use bzr or hg, which function exactly like git, only slower.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
As a counterpoint, I'd just like to weigh in with my opinion that the second and third in the series are rather disappointing. I kept playing because the plot was, indeed, engrossing. There is no question there: they've absolutely nailed the video game "port" of a good Lovecraft story. There is no doubt that they are worth the price; however, I felt a bit cheated with the sequels. The plot begs you to continue, but the gameplay becomes a tedious challenge instead of a nerve-tingling joy. Overall, the series succeeds on the strength of its plot, despite gameplay; whereas the first entry masterfully combined them both.
Part two, Black Plague, replaces a menacing enemy with an outright frustrating one, and its puzzles begin to wear thin. The horror in the first part, Overture, comes from a series of uncannily well-executed escalations: at the moment you are finally exasperated from running from an enemy, circumstances turn in your favor. As you acclimate to this, another enemy is introduced requiring more adaptation. This staging was nothing less than a stroke of genius.
In contrast, for the entirety of Black Plague you are completely defenseless. This would be OK were it not for the scripting/AI of your sole enemy. Occasionally you may even need to engage and run away from an enemy since they are blocking a goal. Repeated ad nauseam, this is not scary; it's just annoying. These frustrations are also present in Overture, but as an exception. In Black Plague they have become the rule.
Likewise the stealth-orienteering of Overture has been mostly replaced by puzzles which are either insulting straightforward or require rather silly, contrived solutions in the spirit of Sierra games (although simpler). Certain sections require the use of a (filth-encrusted) gas mask which serves, gameplay-wise, only to make life more difficult by obscuring your vision. Again, this is neither challenging nor scary; it's just annoying. To add insult to injury, your character has in his inventory a bottle of alcohol and a rag which cannot be used to clean the damned thing; you see, they are for use in a puzzle later on. Further, as in most physics-puzzle games, the promise of "multiple solutions" reminds one of the hillbilly bar in Blues Brothers which played both kinds of music, country and western. Indeed, one may cross an obstacle using either a stack of crates or a stack of barrels.
With the final entry of the series, the developers seem to have finally accepted defeat in the combat/stealth genre; it's a pure first-person puzzle-platformer which, to put it mildly, deviates somewhat radically from the spirit of the first two and borrows quite a bit from the spirit of Portal (to which there is a bit of an homage in the second level), as a somewhat deranged alien intelligence guides the character through a sequence of tests. At least it's passable gameplay, but the gameplay and the plot have at long last become totally orthogonal.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
I now have to decide whether to waste my time searching and googling about this game because I don't know what it's main genre is. Source code is source code, but people have got to know for what kind of games. I don't want source code for a RTS if I'm developing an FPS. I did see "it even includes the stuff used to create the 2D platformer Energetic.", so that's a start. I've always wanted some 2D platformer code.
Got my Humble Indy Bundle just the other day... it was off my radar for some reason, but a fellow game developer pointed it out to me. I was impressed with not just the collection of games, but the pay-what-you-want system that allows you to split your contribution between the developers and a couple of charities in whatever ratio you wish. On top of that, the games are pretty fun. I am really enjoying World of Goo! Glad to see that the developers are open-sourcing their code, and hopefully inspiring some other young developers to take a look at the code and try their hand at the fun and rewarding world of game development.