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.

Comments

Re:Useless summary

[Ephemeriis]

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?

The story isn't really about what kind of game Penumbra is... It's about the fact that the source code was opened up. With the source code now available, the content of the original game is somewhat irrelevant as people will (hopefully) use the code to develop their own games.

Additionally, this is not the first mention of Penumbra or the Indie Bundle here on Slashdot. One of the previous stories is mentioned (and linked-to) right in the summary.

I mean... Sure, they could have included a description of the game... And they could have provided a description of the Indie Bundle as well... And defined what Open Source means... And what github is... And maybe some of that stuff might have been useful... But at some point it just seems kind of excessive.

The story is about the code, and they provided a description of the code.

Re:Not the whole game

[Sir_Lewk]

Nice job selectively quoting to be misleading. Here is the entirety of that quote:

"It is also important to note that Penumbra: Oveture source will not run Black Plague or Requiem. AI for the infected, GUI elements, etc are all missing, but all needed to implement them is present in the engine code (in case anybody is up for the challenge)."

In other words, this is the entirety of the source code for Penumbra: Oveture. AI, GUI, etc are all present. What it isn't is the sourcecode for the next two games in the series, Black Plague and Requiem.

*Note that the art resources have not been open sourced. You should still purchase the game if you want to play it, but now you can build your own binary. This is basically what iD has done in the past with their old Quake engines.

Re:git

[Beelzebud]

I love people who rant about freedom as they try to tell other people what to do.

Re:git

[EvanED]

People are gaga over git. You shouldn't be. Git is a decentralized vcs... Use bzr or mercury if you like FREE software.

Let me translate: "Don't use git. Git is bad because it's a decentralized VCS. Use one of these other decentralized VCSs instead."

Troll.

Re:Only the engine was released

[MrCopilot]

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.

Following the ID tradition.

There are already dozens of free software game engines available with no free software games which use them.

And because of Engine only releases Open Source developers have been able to produce a host of new games. From the Quake engines alone we have Tremulous, Warsow, Alien Arena just to name a few.

Having a proven Engine under your Project allows developers to focus on Assets and Level Design and tweaking the gameplay to a much larger degree than is possible if developing the engine as well.

There is another benefit to the original developers and users in that their games survive onto the next era of computing and gaming devices.(iPhones, Androids and insert your favorite tablet device here)