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Physics Platformer Gish Goes Open Source

Posted by Soulskill on from the good-stuff dept.

An anonymous reader writes "After announcing plans to go open source due to the success of the Humble Indie Bundle, developer Cryptic Sea has released the source code of 2-D platformer Gish under the GPLv2. There's a mirror on github."

14 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. Oil spill... by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 4, Funny

    Am I the only who thinks that the whole thing suspiciously resembles an oil spill?

    --
    Ezekiel 23:20
    1. Re:Oil spill... by Gothic_Walrus · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You know what other indie game resembles an oil spill?

      --
      Goo goo g'joob.
    2. Re:Oil spill... by CODiNE · · Score: 3, Funny

      Yeah, BP is real stupid, they just have to hold down the D key and the oil will bunch up and turn solid.

      --
      Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
  2. Only the engine by Jorl17 · · Score: 5, Informative

    As noted, only the engine has been open-sourced. All data (levels & gfx) are still available only upon buying. Not that such is bad, but I thought I'd share it with those idiots who didn't RTFA.

    --
    Have you heard about SoylentNews?
    1. Re:Only the engine by PatrickThomson · · Score: 4, Informative

      In further pre-empting of people who didn't RTFA, the game is already supported on PC, Mac, and Linux.

      --
      I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
    2. Re:Only the engine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      That's unfair: calling us idiots but at the same time making it unnecessary to RTFA.

    3. Re:Only the engine by Score+Whore · · Score: 2, Funny

      If you call people who don't RTFA idiots, what are you doing on /.?

      Shooting fish in a barrel?

  3. Quality code by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    The Gish source code drinking game:

    http://github.com/blinry/gish/blob/master/game/game.c

    Find a line with a magic number and take a drink.

    Warning: You will go blind in five minutes if you take part in this drinking game.

    1. Re:Quality code by DavidR1991 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Who cares how bad the code is? The game got finished. It's playable and it's fun. The end user doesn't give a toss how many magic numbers there are

      I think there comes a point in any project where you have a choice between "Make my code pretty and perfect" and "Get this fucking thing finished". This guy obviously chose the latter. Fair play to him. Also, the coding being vile gives the FOSS community something to do, if you think about it.

    2. Re:Quality code by grumbel · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Some people care about creating beautiful games, other care about creating beautiful code. The former end up shipping a good game, the later kind never gets stuff done.

    3. Re:Quality code by DavidR1991 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Games aren't the same as any other 'nontrivial software project' (and yes thank you, I have)

      Games change continually through production. Business software can do this also (changing requirements and whatnot) but nowhere near to the extent of games. Because games have to be fun. Other applications don't. What this means is that sometimes 'something has gotta give'. You cannot have a codebase that is constantly in flux and 'down with' the concept of the game and a beautiful perfectly structured codebase. The two things are diametrically opposed concepts.

      I'm not explicitly stating that a horrible codebase = more likely to finish on time. I'm saying not fixating on codebase quality when your end product is a constantly moving target = more likely to finish at all

  4. Humble Indie Bundle by SpeedyDX · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The link to the Humble Indie Bundle in this slashdot post linked to another slashdot post wherein that link to the Humble Indie Bundle linked to yet another slashdot post which finally contained the real link to the info on the Humble Indie Bundle.

    We all hate it when we have to jump through multiple hoops (articles separated into an inane number of pages, exit pages/frames, etc.) in the name of reader retention when it's done by other websites. When slashdot does it, it's just as bad.

  5. Code Quality in Games by acid06 · · Score: 2, Informative

    I don't mean to troll or anything like that (considering I think Gish is an awesome game and I've bought the Humble Indie Bundle) but... are there any indie games out there that were actually coded in a well-thought manner?

    I mean, looking at the Gish source code, it's honestly a mess. You seem to ALWAYS find stuff such as magic numbers, hard-coded level information (ala, if (level == 15) do this different behavior). I've looked at the source for other games and they all seemed to share such "features".

    Anyone knows if the non-indie titles also follow this pattern? Maybe it's just an industry thing.

    1. Re:Code Quality in Games by grumbel · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I've looked at the source for other games and they all seemed to share such "features".

      Its is just a part of doing good game design with limited time. When you could spend days coding a clean framework to integrate the special feature you want in level 15 or just a few minutes to hack it into the code, the choice is not that difficult to make. Sure its not good practice, but it doesn't really do harm either, as game specific code isn't meant to be reused and there is no value gain in coding a data driven framework for a feature that is used exactly once in the whole game.

      Its kind of like complaining that a movie set looks only good from one side, while from the other side its clear that its just painted plywood and styropor. It just doesn't matter for a game to have pretty code, when the actual game itself is good. And from those games I have seen, the good ones end up having a little ugly code, while the ones with the good code hang around in some sourceforge repository and never get stuff done.