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Remix This Game — a Free Software Experiment
An anonymous reader writes "REMIX THIS GAME is an experimental game design contest where participants can re-mix and re-cycle my free-software self-published PC game, XONG. XONG is available under permissive licenses allowing remixes and derivative works of the code, graphics, sound effects, and music—even for commercial use. The source code license is the GNU GPL Version 3, and the media is covered by the Creative Commons BY-SA license. No special software or programming experience are needed—XONG has been packaged up so that you can just download the game and edit the graphics/code/music/sounds in place, and re-start the game to see your changes. Plus, it is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and GNU/Linux, so you can remix it on whichever OS you use, using whatever programs you like."
No special software or programming experience were used for this.
There, fixed it for you?
Now, bigger question: Who was the jackass that decided this was a good post? I've seen what Taco has done to this place, but not even he can be this incompetent.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Slashdot doesn't comment on the mod scene much because it is mostly limited to commercial software since it is mostly limited to good games. You take a game that has a solid engine, with lots of good looking assets, and then add to that the ability to customize it easily through XML or included editors or what not and you find that people often flock to modifying it. They start from a strong base, making it much easier to create a useful, fun, mod. You don't have to redo everything, the game is already good. You just, well, modify.
However, as I said, that tends to exist only in the commercial arena since that is where you find this stuff. Few, if any, OSS games are very good. That doesn't interest Slashdot so much. They don't want to hear about a Windows game that is really great and has lots of community created content as it doesn't push what they want.
So this is of interest to Slashdot because it is about OSS. Doesn't matter that the game blows, it is OSS so Slashdot likes it. So there you go, front page news for a game that is confusing as hell all because you can "remix" it and it happens to have open source.