There are basically only two packages which are taken seriously in 3D modelling for games, Maya and 3D Studio Max. Maya is available for Linux,
but costs more than a house. 3D Studio Max has most of the market because it is so much less expensive, and it is nearly impossible, and probably not desirable to persuade 3D Studio users to use anything else.
When it comes to attracting 3D artists to Free Software or Open Source projects, the problem is even harder. Most artists have little understanding of the hacker ethic, and are protective of the copyright on their work. However, you should not be disheartened. I have very little artistic talent, but have found that
I can create quite passable looking models using Blender. Blender is quite widely criticised for its interface, but I found that the interface is extremely powerful once learned, and is no more difficult to learn than vi or emacs. Any capable coder should have no problem with it once they get past the initial frustration.
If you develop a game using SDL and if required OpenGL, then it will run just fine on Windows, probably faster than it goes on Linux. Windows
has better support for accelerated 2D graphics
and the OpenGL drivers are much better supported
by the manufacturers. There are very few reasons for using unportable OS features as SDL can do all the tricky cross platform stuff for you, and is available for every platform under the Sun.
Read my post again. Sure the payoff is huge, but
you don't get the payoff until you release, so
until you release all you have to build the game is the initial investment. Game companies seem to be unable to raise an initial investment big enough to make the game really ready for release.
Funcom have demonstrated that in keeping with
the history of MMORPGs, it is not possible within
the current economic model of game development
to ship a complete working game. Every MMORPG has been plagued with a disastrous launch, and each one has had to spend its first months trying to get the code into shape, and the game balanced.
The reasons for this are many, but the first is simple. MMORPGs are extremely complex, and the cost involved in developing one are higher than game companies are willing to invest. The rest is more complex. The scale on which they operate is certainly an issue. It is obviously really hard to accuratly test how the servers, and ultimatly the clients are going to behave once the system is loaded up with tens of thousands of players. You can try and simulate it all you like, but you can't be sure that the simulated players are behving anything like real ones would. There is only a very limited extent to which you can predict the behavoir of crackers, but we all know that they will be there. From those intent on getting that extra bit out of the game by finding loopholes in the system, to those who want to try and bring the servers down by any means at their disposal.
Now I come to the WorldForge bit. This is an area where I think Free Software or Open Source can really work. By developing a system under constant scrutiny we can ensure that the technology is resistant to crackers and cheaters by design, and bugs in fundamental code can be eliminated early on. By releasing very early code as simple games, like our Acorn effort, accurate metrics can be obtained on how well the code scales, and directions which don't scale can be abandoned early on. But one of the greatest gifts we can bring here is patience. We really can keep on working on this until it really is ready. We don't have to promise ship dates, or meet the demands of the marketing department.
By building a generic system, and careful use if licensing we are creating software that real game companies can use to generate real revenue, without the enormous expense of developing and testing a huge codebase on their own. Who knows, maybe one day most MMORPGs will have the WorldForge logo in corner.
Using libraries to add functionality to applications is essential. There can be little doubt here. It is easier, more robust, and better practice to use the standard implementation library for a piece of functionality than to attempt to re-write that functionality for yourself. However there are some important basic principles that must be understood when writing application to use, and more particularly developing shared libs.
In development of any code project, there will be times when the codes design is undergoing rapid change. In the case of a library this means that the API will be constantly changing. In a closed source environment this does not cause too many problems because noone ever sees this code. In a cooperative Free Software project, the source to a library is always available, so there is a temptation for the application developer to use a development version of a library to get a certain feature. This is the beginning of the road to hell. It is essential that applications never have stable releases that depend on development libraries. I remember some years ago when gtk+ 1.1
was being developed towards 1.2, and many application developers were chasing the development branch because they wanted the features it had. The result was chaos. It became nearly impossible to install many combinations of gtk+ applications because they all required different versions.
On the library development side there is a need for a great deal of responsibility. Library developers need to learn about, and really understand library interface versioning. The interface version of a library is completely different from the release version number, and it is used by the runtime linker to ensure that it is safe to link a binary to library at runtime. With properlly managed interface versions it is quite possible to have many different incompatable versions of a library installed and available for runtime linking. GNUlibtool has some excellent support for library interface versioning, and the libtool documentation contains some excellent documentation on how to correctly assign interface version numbers to a release.
Large numbers of libraries can be managed effectively, and cleanly as long as these principles are understood by both library and application developers, and good practice is followed.
What language did you run it through as? I ran it through and the two sentences you ask about came through as "Gratis limitless access to the Internet." and "1 YEAR OF GUARANTEE".
Whether you choose to buy direct from the company that created the distribution to ensure they make the most money possible from your purchase, or buy from a reseller is up to you. Either way there are advantages for the Linux movement. Increasing the number of boxed copies sold at retail encourages retailers to stock more Linux software, and improves the image and viability of Linux. As I said in my initial post, buying something physical is not your only option. Reputable Linux companies offer support contracts and services you can buy, which can be very useful.
Donations do not really help anyone, other than filling short term gaps in cash flow. If companies start acting like charities, then the business world will treat them like charities, and ignore them.
There are plenty of ways for free software companies to provide a mechanism for you to give them money, and to my mind simply asking for donations is not only crass, but it undermines the concept that they are a viable company.
If I want to give money to a free software company I will do so by buying a boxed version of their product, a support contract or something similar, and I expect any reputable company to suggest this as the best way to give them money.
Even the free software foundation who are charity
recommend that the easiest way to make a financial donation is to buy books, clothing and CDROMs from them.
A major Linux company asking for donations damages their image, damages the image of the Free Software movement, and should not be encouraged. If you like Mandrake and want to support future development, buy a copy, even if you already have one you downloaded.
In Ultima IX (which I loved, though I know everyone else hated it) you could kill LB by
putting rat poison into the bread making machine in the real world, making poisoned bread, taking in through to Britannia, and putting it in LB's private dining room. I think I first saw this one
on
Spanky's, though I am not sure who reported it first.
While this article contains no real news for anyone who is a regular gamer or techie, the
existance of the article is itself interesting.
Has an article on online games of this depth been published in a non-technical maganzine before?
Its good to see such a well written and balanced article written on a subject that quite frequently gets mistreated or grossly misunderstood by journalists. With the huge
number of new MMORPGs in development, are we
about to see the genre trully come of age?
Regular readers of threads relating to online gaming will recognise me as a developer for the WorldForge project,
reported here recently. I believe that online
gaming is an area which stands to benefit a great deal from Open Source methodologies. There huge ammount of effort involved in creating an MMORPG has had its casualties, most notably UO2, but the commodity that is being sold to the user is not the software itself. It is the service, for which a subscription is payed. It is quite clear that the software itself is can be free, and benefit from code sharing, peer review, and all the other advantages of open development, without damaging the revenue model. There are of course the issues of game exploits by modifying the source, but that is being well enough debated elsewhere.
I have been programming for programmings sake
since I was 12 years old. Thats 15 years. If you want to insult me for it, please do so directly, and don't hide behind euphemisms.
If you are talking about Atlas as a low level protocol for passing structured data across the network, then I agree that it is simple, and if
this was the case then our work on Atlas would
be complete. However Atlas is much much more
than this. The Operation and Entity hierarchies that Atlas defines together with the planned ability to query this hierarchy dynamically at runtime mean that Atlas is a long way from completion. I curious about your assertion if "gross misuse of templates". As far as I can see the use of templates in Atlas-C++ is light and entirely apropriate. I am not defending my own code here. I did not write it, I just maintain it.
If I wanted to write a game, base it on what players wanted, and release as soon as it was ready, then I would program games for a living. That does not mean it will never be playable, though it may mean that many people won't find the games that I am involved in designing fun. Other people who have similar interests to me will.
The type of game I want to create however is not going to have much effect on WorldForge as I am only once coder in the dozens of coders, artists and designers who work on WorldForge.
I am very disappointed that this post got moderated down. SmokeSerpent's criticism is accurate. Yes, I have spent too much time accuratly modelling digestion of food, and probably made too much of an issue of it in that last set of release notes. Ironically enough your comments on teeth have got me thinking about modelling that.
Thankfully we now have entering buildings working, although its not as smooth as I would like. Believe it or not 3D collision prediction algroithms, and portals are much harder problems than the relatively simple arithmetic involved in working out how much weight an animal gains as a result of eating food.
Perhaps people are two quick to judge negative
comments as flamebait, but maybe that's because only a few of us really now how acurate your comments are
Okay, I'm several days late, but sometimes I come across posts I just have to respond to.
I have been the maintainer of Atlas-C++, the successor to an old product called libAtlas to which I presume you are referring, for several months, and the stable release of this code builds in less the 1 minute on my PIII 700, and currently builds on any compiler since egcs 2.91.
It is true that our devel tree, and I think the initial stable version required a bizare compiler, but this is no longer the case.
Any experience C++ developer will tell you that although the binaries seem to be huge, most of that will disappear if you strip it, and the actuall binary size has very little effect on the memory footprint. Its mostly debug data.
As for evangelism, I think we all recognise that Atlas is not ready for widespread deployment, but complex protocols and their implementation takes time and lots of testing to get right.
Someone needs to recognise that the fun of a game is not in the programming, it's in the playing!
Perhaps this is the case for you, but it is certainly not true for everyone. I gain much more enjoyment from programming games than I do from playing them, and I only really play games that I find interesting from a technical point of view. Gaming for gaming's sake holds little attraction for me.
I must admit to feeling quite optimistic about this whole thing, from reading the details on the Nokia site. They say they are planning to open the hardware specs, and I can't really see how they could be planning to prevent hacking if this is what they end up doing.
I posted a message here is response to the announcement of the Indrema console all those months ago, expressing my doubts about the future of the machine, but at they same time saying that if it did fail, I would make damn sure it was not because I did not support it. I tried to support it, but it failed anyway. I feel so much more optimistic about the Media Terminal. They have something that actaully looks like a working prototype, rather than just a mockup. They have actuall hardware specs which fit with the photographs of the back of the prototype. They have documentation for their IO API, and a developers site with real information on it. Most importantly of all perhaps they are a decent sized company with the technical and financial clout to build a machine that works.
I just can't wait to get my hands on one. Looking forward to having a WorldForge demo running on the beast before the end of the year.
I am currently managing to spend around 30 to 40 hours a week coding on WorldForge, while still holding down a good job. This may seem quite sad to some people, and yes, it does seriously restrict my social life, but it is simply not true to say that you need to be supported in order to work seriously on a project.
My SO can hardly support herself, nevermind me as well.
The problem with this project, and indeed most Open Source gaming projects, is that it becomes too easy for people to cheat. As opposed to, say, the kernel of Linux, where every change must be poured over by the Kernel Keepers (tm), in this game, somebody could commit a CVS change with nobody knowing the difference.
Actually we have very good CVS discipline in the project. Each part has a clearly defined owner, and commits that are made with the owners consent will not be accepted, though this has not yet been a problem as far as I am aware. There is only one component of WorldForge that has as many as 5 people working on it, and that is the next generation server. As for closed source, I think most of us have idealogical objections to that.
We have looked at the articles written by Theo and co. over at OpenBSD and will be looking at applying these review methodologies once are code is a little further along, and more functional. Maybe we are never going to be as secure as OpenBSD, but we hope we can be secure enough to run a decent game.
Our security model is based on a totally untrusted client, which is the only sane approach possible, and we hope will keep the number of possible exploits down, maybe even lower than proprietary systems which trust the client.
Just because our code is Free does not mean that once we have major game servers online we will not be charging subscription. It is my view that we will have to charge subscription. This is one of the most common misconceptions about the project. Another one is that we are just building one game. We are not. We are building a system that can be used to create as many games as you want. We hope that in the future commercial games companies will be able to build game worlds using out technology, much in the same way as companies like RedHat build operating systems using Linux and GNU software.
Where in his entire discussion did it say that it was going to be lisenced under the GPL, all he said was that it was going to be open source
You misunderstand my point. My point is that if I have a game that is written under the GPL, and I want to make it available for free for the Indrema, will I be able to do so without a clash occuring between the GPL, and the certification agreement with Indrema? Presumably if I get it certified, I will have to agree not to distribute the certified game for money, and require this of anyone who downloads the game, which will voilate the GPL on the game.
In fact the first clause of the Open Source Definition specifies that an Open Source license must allow commercial distribution, but that is irrelevant to my post.
I have decided that as an Independant Linux games developer, I am going to do everything I can to see to it that the Indrema succeeds. A stable binary target that we can make release for, with a Free OS is great, and I am determined that if it does fail, it will not be because I did not help.
However, this does not mean that I don't have any reservations about the Indrema. I posted a while back on another topic on the subject of the highly dubious business models under which most console manufacturers operate. I don't mean that it is dubious in the business sense: obviously it is not as the industry appears to be extremely profitable. I refer to the level of control console manufacturers exert over the software that is run on their machines. It appears that part of the reason that Atari failed was their unwillingness to use such morally dubious marketing practices on their consoles. (I know there are other reasons why Atari failed, we don't need to go into it here). Basically no console manufacturer is able to sell the hardware for a reasonable price because the competitors will undercut them, and then make the money back by levying a charge on any game sold for that platform. Games that have not been certified are not permitted, and Nintendo have made this hold up in court in a case which I understand was brought by Atari.
When I first heard about the Indrema I was concerned how an Open gaming platform would survive in a market like this. As I dug deeper into their website, and then read the above Q&A, I discovered that they too have realised that this is in the case, and in fact are planning to use the same practices, all be it in a slightly more benevolant form. I assume game certification is going to be enforced by using some kind of encryption scheme, so that consoles will only run games that have been digitally signed, or even encrypted by Indrema. We read above that freeware games will be eligable for certification at no cost, but I am interested to know how well this will fit with the fact that the GPL explicitly permits commercial distribution. In fact, a GPL program cannot legally be distributed under any terms that forbid commercial distribution. Will Indrema be able to make this work? Can they come up with a certification scheme that will allow GPLd games to be certified without undermining their business model?
As a central member of the WorldForge project this issue concerns me. In particular, part of my responsabilities to the project include putting together releases of our Acorn game, and in this situation it is my responsability to make sure that the entire release, which currently stands at about 27megs, is all correctly licensed, and all the source code that is required by the licenses is also included.
It would also therefor be my job, if I wanted to make Acorn available for the Indrema, to make sure I was not violating the trust of the other developers by breaking the GPL.
I really hope that Indrema make it, and create a console that I can create code for without causing any major moral dilemas, but we need to keep a close eye on what they are doing. Make sure that if you are interested, you are there on November 8th to make sure the Free Software community, and Indrema can work together, and do great things.
In the end I would like to see a market where the hardware can be sold, at a profit, on its own merits, and this sort of control is not necessary, but this is still a long way off at best.
How about Dreamcast? You can develop for Dreamcast without using any leaked or proprietary information at all -- just reverse-engineered stuff. Start here.
From a brief glance this looks interesting. I will dig in later, but for now it will have to go into book marks. Most of our current code is SDL based so we would need to port that first.
We are still faced with the problem of media. Is it possible, or even legal to create media that will run on a stock DreamCast? I expect that anyone who has not signed any kind of agreement cannot technically be stopped, but I don't think that will prevent SEGA from getting litigious.
Please don't use SVGAlib to write this sort of code. It is the wrong solution to almost any problem. Persuade someone to port SDL instead.
I have been following the Indrema news fairly closely, hoping that we will be able to put together a WorldForge client package for it, but until the rest of the consoles drop the morally bankrupt licensing arrangements that developers have to conform to, we are not going to be able to release a Free Software MMORPG client that consumers will be able to use on their Playstation/Xbox/Gamecube.
In a sense I think this particular war has already been lost. All the companies that allowed free access to their platform have now left the scene due to the lack of control they had on the quality of the games available, and their inability to compete with consoles sold as loss leaders. Does anyone see a bright future for Open console gaming, or are we doomed to put up with expensive licensing agreements, closed hardware and closed markets?
I want to play this kind of game. I would $PAY$ to play this kind of game.
You said you would pay to play this kind of game. Are you prepared to work to make this kind of game a reality? If so read the post by Bryce a short distance up about WorldForge.
Don't worry if you are not a programmer, or you think you would have difficulty finding some area to help. We need people of all walks of life to build the ultimate massively multiplayer online gaming engine. One of the areas we are currently desparate for help in is creating animations of characters. The recent release of blender at no cost makes this in ideal opportunity for any of you with a bit of an artistic flair to make a really useful contribution to the game. Anyone who has experience of creating models or skins for Quake should excel in this area.
Keep an eye out over the next few days for the announcement of our first ALPHA release of our next demo game. This is the game we demoed at LinuxTag recently, and is already almost playable.
At the WorldForge project, a large MMORPG project with over 50 members, we have found that the biggest barrier to creating games with a competitive look and feel is creating the media. Getting coders is not too hard, though we are always on the lookout for new recruits, but finding talented artists, particularly animators, who have time to contribute to an Open Source project can be really tough.
All are hopes are currently pinned on blender becoming Open Source this summer.
Slashdot Mirror
There are basically only two packages which are taken seriously in 3D modelling for games, Maya and 3D Studio Max. Maya is available for Linux, but costs more than a house. 3D Studio Max has most of the market because it is so much less expensive, and it is nearly impossible, and probably not desirable to persuade 3D Studio users to use anything else.
When it comes to attracting 3D artists to Free Software or Open Source projects, the problem is even harder. Most artists have little understanding of the hacker ethic, and are protective of the copyright on their work. However, you should not be disheartened. I have very little artistic talent, but have found that I can create quite passable looking models using Blender. Blender is quite widely criticised for its interface, but I found that the interface is extremely powerful once learned, and is no more difficult to learn than vi or emacs. Any capable coder should have no problem with it once they get past the initial frustration.
If you develop a game using SDL and if required OpenGL, then it will run just fine on Windows, probably faster than it goes on Linux. Windows has better support for accelerated 2D graphics and the OpenGL drivers are much better supported by the manufacturers. There are very few reasons for using unportable OS features as SDL can do all the tricky cross platform stuff for you, and is available for every platform under the Sun.
Read my post again. Sure the payoff is huge, but you don't get the payoff until you release, so until you release all you have to build the game is the initial investment. Game companies seem to be unable to raise an initial investment big enough to make the game really ready for release.
Funcom have demonstrated that in keeping with the history of MMORPGs, it is not possible within the current economic model of game development to ship a complete working game. Every MMORPG has been plagued with a disastrous launch, and each one has had to spend its first months trying to get the code into shape, and the game balanced.
The reasons for this are many, but the first is simple. MMORPGs are extremely complex, and the cost involved in developing one are higher than game companies are willing to invest. The rest is more complex. The scale on which they operate is certainly an issue. It is obviously really hard to accuratly test how the servers, and ultimatly the clients are going to behave once the system is loaded up with tens of thousands of players. You can try and simulate it all you like, but you can't be sure that the simulated players are behving anything like real ones would. There is only a very limited extent to which you can predict the behavoir of crackers, but we all know that they will be there. From those intent on getting that extra bit out of the game by finding loopholes in the system, to those who want to try and bring the servers down by any means at their disposal.
Now I come to the WorldForge bit. This is an area where I think Free Software or Open Source can really work. By developing a system under constant scrutiny we can ensure that the technology is resistant to crackers and cheaters by design, and bugs in fundamental code can be eliminated early on. By releasing very early code as simple games, like our Acorn effort, accurate metrics can be obtained on how well the code scales, and directions which don't scale can be abandoned early on. But one of the greatest gifts we can bring here is patience. We really can keep on working on this until it really is ready. We don't have to promise ship dates, or meet the demands of the marketing department.
By building a generic system, and careful use if licensing we are creating software that real game companies can use to generate real revenue, without the enormous expense of developing and testing a huge codebase on their own. Who knows, maybe one day most MMORPGs will have the WorldForge logo in corner.
Using libraries to add functionality to applications is essential. There can be little doubt here. It is easier, more robust, and better practice to use the standard implementation library for a piece of functionality than to attempt to re-write that functionality for yourself. However there are some important basic principles that must be understood when writing application to use, and more particularly developing shared libs.
In development of any code project, there will be times when the codes design is undergoing rapid change. In the case of a library this means that the API will be constantly changing. In a closed source environment this does not cause too many problems because noone ever sees this code. In a cooperative Free Software project, the source to a library is always available, so there is a temptation for the application developer to use a development version of a library to get a certain feature. This is the beginning of the road to hell. It is essential that applications never have stable releases that depend on development libraries. I remember some years ago when gtk+ 1.1 was being developed towards 1.2, and many application developers were chasing the development branch because they wanted the features it had. The result was chaos. It became nearly impossible to install many combinations of gtk+ applications because they all required different versions.
On the library development side there is a need for a great deal of responsibility. Library developers need to learn about, and really understand library interface versioning. The interface version of a library is completely different from the release version number, and it is used by the runtime linker to ensure that it is safe to link a binary to library at runtime. With properlly managed interface versions it is quite possible to have many different incompatable versions of a library installed and available for runtime linking. GNU libtool has some excellent support for library interface versioning, and the libtool documentation contains some excellent documentation on how to correctly assign interface version numbers to a release.
Large numbers of libraries can be managed effectively, and cleanly as long as these principles are understood by both library and application developers, and good practice is followed.
What language did you run it through as? I ran it through and the two sentences you ask about came through as "Gratis limitless access to the Internet." and "1 YEAR OF GUARANTEE".
Whether you choose to buy direct from the company that created the distribution to ensure they make the most money possible from your purchase, or buy from a reseller is up to you. Either way there are advantages for the Linux movement. Increasing the number of boxed copies sold at retail encourages retailers to stock more Linux software, and improves the image and viability of Linux. As I said in my initial post, buying something physical is not your only option. Reputable Linux companies offer support contracts and services you can buy, which can be very useful.
Donations do not really help anyone, other than filling short term gaps in cash flow. If companies start acting like charities, then the business world will treat them like charities, and ignore them.
There are plenty of ways for free software companies to provide a mechanism for you to give them money, and to my mind simply asking for donations is not only crass, but it undermines the concept that they are a viable company.
If I want to give money to a free software company I will do so by buying a boxed version of their product, a support contract or something similar, and I expect any reputable company to suggest this as the best way to give them money. Even the free software foundation who are charity recommend that the easiest way to make a financial donation is to buy books, clothing and CDROMs from them.
A major Linux company asking for donations damages their image, damages the image of the Free Software movement, and should not be encouraged. If you like Mandrake and want to support future development, buy a copy, even if you already have one you downloaded.
In Ultima IX (which I loved, though I know everyone else hated it) you could kill LB by putting rat poison into the bread making machine in the real world, making poisoned bread, taking in through to Britannia, and putting it in LB's private dining room. I think I first saw this one on Spanky's, though I am not sure who reported it first.
While this article contains no real news for anyone who is a regular gamer or techie, the existance of the article is itself interesting. Has an article on online games of this depth been published in a non-technical maganzine before?
Its good to see such a well written and balanced article written on a subject that quite frequently gets mistreated or grossly misunderstood by journalists. With the huge number of new MMORPGs in development, are we about to see the genre trully come of age?
Regular readers of threads relating to online gaming will recognise me as a developer for the WorldForge project, reported here recently. I believe that online gaming is an area which stands to benefit a great deal from Open Source methodologies. There huge ammount of effort involved in creating an MMORPG has had its casualties, most notably UO2, but the commodity that is being sold to the user is not the software itself. It is the service, for which a subscription is payed. It is quite clear that the software itself is can be free, and benefit from code sharing, peer review, and all the other advantages of open development, without damaging the revenue model. There are of course the issues of game exploits by modifying the source, but that is being well enough debated elsewhere.
I have been programming for programmings sake since I was 12 years old. Thats 15 years. If you want to insult me for it, please do so directly, and don't hide behind euphemisms.
If you are talking about Atlas as a low level protocol for passing structured data across the network, then I agree that it is simple, and if this was the case then our work on Atlas would be complete. However Atlas is much much more than this. The Operation and Entity hierarchies that Atlas defines together with the planned ability to query this hierarchy dynamically at runtime mean that Atlas is a long way from completion. I curious about your assertion if "gross misuse of templates". As far as I can see the use of templates in Atlas-C++ is light and entirely apropriate. I am not defending my own code here. I did not write it, I just maintain it.
If I wanted to write a game, base it on what players wanted, and release as soon as it was ready, then I would program games for a living. That does not mean it will never be playable, though it may mean that many people won't find the games that I am involved in designing fun. Other people who have similar interests to me will.
The type of game I want to create however is not going to have much effect on WorldForge as I am only once coder in the dozens of coders, artists and designers who work on WorldForge.
I am very disappointed that this post got moderated down. SmokeSerpent's criticism is accurate. Yes, I have spent too much time accuratly modelling digestion of food, and probably made too much of an issue of it in that last set of release notes. Ironically enough your comments on teeth have got me thinking about modelling that.
Thankfully we now have entering buildings working, although its not as smooth as I would like. Believe it or not 3D collision prediction algroithms, and portals are much harder problems than the relatively simple arithmetic involved in working out how much weight an animal gains as a result of eating food.
Perhaps people are two quick to judge negative comments as flamebait, but maybe that's because only a few of us really now how acurate your comments are
--Al Riddoch - WorldForge Acorn coordinator
Okay, I'm several days late, but sometimes I come across posts I just have to respond to.
I have been the maintainer of Atlas-C++, the successor to an old product called libAtlas to which I presume you are referring, for several months, and the stable release of this code builds in less the 1 minute on my PIII 700, and currently builds on any compiler since egcs 2.91. It is true that our devel tree, and I think the initial stable version required a bizare compiler, but this is no longer the case.
Any experience C++ developer will tell you that although the binaries seem to be huge, most of that will disappear if you strip it, and the actuall binary size has very little effect on the memory footprint. Its mostly debug data.
As for evangelism, I think we all recognise that Atlas is not ready for widespread deployment, but complex protocols and their implementation takes time and lots of testing to get right.
Someone needs to recognise that the fun of a game is not in the programming, it's in the playing!
Perhaps this is the case for you, but it is certainly not true for everyone. I gain much more enjoyment from programming games than I do from playing them, and I only really play games that I find interesting from a technical point of view. Gaming for gaming's sake holds little attraction for me.
I must admit to feeling quite optimistic about this whole thing, from reading the details on the Nokia site. They say they are planning to open the hardware specs, and I can't really see how they could be planning to prevent hacking if this is what they end up doing.
I posted a message here is response to the announcement of the Indrema console all those months ago, expressing my doubts about the future of the machine, but at they same time saying that if it did fail, I would make damn sure it was not because I did not support it. I tried to support it, but it failed anyway. I feel so much more optimistic about the Media Terminal. They have something that actaully looks like a working prototype, rather than just a mockup. They have actuall hardware specs which fit with the photographs of the back of the prototype. They have documentation for their IO API, and a developers site with real information on it. Most importantly of all perhaps they are a decent sized company with the technical and financial clout to build a machine that works.
I just can't wait to get my hands on one. Looking forward to having a WorldForge demo running on the beast before the end of the year.
I am currently managing to spend around 30 to 40 hours a week coding on WorldForge, while still holding down a good job. This may seem quite sad to some people, and yes, it does seriously restrict my social life, but it is simply not true to say that you need to be supported in order to work seriously on a project.
My SO can hardly support herself, nevermind me as well.
Actually we have very good CVS discipline in the project. Each part has a clearly defined owner, and commits that are made with the owners consent will not be accepted, though this has not yet been a problem as far as I am aware. There is only one component of WorldForge that has as many as 5 people working on it, and that is the next generation server. As for closed source, I think most of us have idealogical objections to that.
We have looked at the articles written by Theo and co. over at OpenBSD and will be looking at applying these review methodologies once are code is a little further along, and more functional. Maybe we are never going to be as secure as OpenBSD, but we hope we can be secure enough to run a decent game.
Our security model is based on a totally untrusted client, which is the only sane approach possible, and we hope will keep the number of possible exploits down, maybe even lower than proprietary systems which trust the client.
Just because our code is Free does not mean that once we have major game servers online we will not be charging subscription. It is my view that we will have to charge subscription. This is one of the most common misconceptions about the project. Another one is that we are just building one game. We are not. We are building a system that can be used to create as many games as you want. We hope that in the future commercial games companies will be able to build game worlds using out technology, much in the same way as companies like RedHat build operating systems using Linux and GNU software.
Where in his entire discussion did it say that it was going to be lisenced under the GPL, all he said was that it was going to be open source
You misunderstand my point. My point is that if I have a game that is written under the GPL, and I want to make it available for free for the Indrema, will I be able to do so without a clash occuring between the GPL, and the certification agreement with Indrema? Presumably if I get it certified, I will have to agree not to distribute the certified game for money, and require this of anyone who downloads the game, which will voilate the GPL on the game.
In fact the first clause of the Open Source Definition specifies that an Open Source license must allow commercial distribution, but that is irrelevant to my post.
I have decided that as an Independant Linux games developer, I am going to do everything I can to see to it that the Indrema succeeds. A stable binary target that we can make release for, with a Free OS is great, and I am determined that if it does fail, it will not be because I did not help.
However, this does not mean that I don't have any reservations about the Indrema. I posted a while back on another topic on the subject of the highly dubious business models under which most console manufacturers operate. I don't mean that it is dubious in the business sense: obviously it is not as the industry appears to be extremely profitable. I refer to the level of control console manufacturers exert over the software that is run on their machines. It appears that part of the reason that Atari failed was their unwillingness to use such morally dubious marketing practices on their consoles. (I know there are other reasons why Atari failed, we don't need to go into it here). Basically no console manufacturer is able to sell the hardware for a reasonable price because the competitors will undercut them, and then make the money back by levying a charge on any game sold for that platform. Games that have not been certified are not permitted, and Nintendo have made this hold up in court in a case which I understand was brought by Atari.
When I first heard about the Indrema I was concerned how an Open gaming platform would survive in a market like this. As I dug deeper into their website, and then read the above Q&A, I discovered that they too have realised that this is in the case, and in fact are planning to use the same practices, all be it in a slightly more benevolant form. I assume game certification is going to be enforced by using some kind of encryption scheme, so that consoles will only run games that have been digitally signed, or even encrypted by Indrema. We read above that freeware games will be eligable for certification at no cost, but I am interested to know how well this will fit with the fact that the GPL explicitly permits commercial distribution. In fact, a GPL program cannot legally be distributed under any terms that forbid commercial distribution. Will Indrema be able to make this work? Can they come up with a certification scheme that will allow GPLd games to be certified without undermining their business model?
As a central member of the WorldForge project this issue concerns me. In particular, part of my responsabilities to the project include putting together releases of our Acorn game, and in this situation it is my responsability to make sure that the entire release, which currently stands at about 27megs, is all correctly licensed, and all the source code that is required by the licenses is also included. It would also therefor be my job, if I wanted to make Acorn available for the Indrema, to make sure I was not violating the trust of the other developers by breaking the GPL.
I really hope that Indrema make it, and create a console that I can create code for without causing any major moral dilemas, but we need to keep a close eye on what they are doing. Make sure that if you are interested, you are there on November 8th to make sure the Free Software community, and Indrema can work together, and do great things.
In the end I would like to see a market where the hardware can be sold, at a profit, on its own merits, and this sort of control is not necessary, but this is still a long way off at best.
From a brief glance this looks interesting. I will dig in later, but for now it will have to go into book marks. Most of our current code is SDL based so we would need to port that first.
We are still faced with the problem of media. Is it possible, or even legal to create media that will run on a stock DreamCast? I expect that anyone who has not signed any kind of agreement cannot technically be stopped, but I don't think that will prevent SEGA from getting litigious.
Please don't use SVGAlib to write this sort of code. It is the wrong solution to almost any problem. Persuade someone to port SDL instead.
I have been following the Indrema news fairly closely, hoping that we will be able to put together a WorldForge client package for it, but until the rest of the consoles drop the morally bankrupt licensing arrangements that developers have to conform to, we are not going to be able to release a Free Software MMORPG client that consumers will be able to use on their Playstation/Xbox/Gamecube.
In a sense I think this particular war has already been lost. All the companies that allowed free access to their platform have now left the scene due to the lack of control they had on the quality of the games available, and their inability to compete with consoles sold as loss leaders. Does anyone see a bright future for Open console gaming, or are we doomed to put up with expensive licensing agreements, closed hardware and closed markets?
You said you would pay to play this kind of game. Are you prepared to work to make this kind of game a reality? If so read the post by Bryce a short distance up about WorldForge.
Don't worry if you are not a programmer, or you think you would have difficulty finding some area to help. We need people of all walks of life to build the ultimate massively multiplayer online gaming engine. One of the areas we are currently desparate for help in is creating animations of characters. The recent release of blender at no cost makes this in ideal opportunity for any of you with a bit of an artistic flair to make a really useful contribution to the game. Anyone who has experience of creating models or skins for Quake should excel in this area.
Keep an eye out over the next few days for the announcement of our first ALPHA release of our next demo game. This is the game we demoed at LinuxTag recently, and is already almost playable.
At the WorldForge project, a large MMORPG project with over 50 members, we have found that the biggest barrier to creating games with a competitive look and feel is creating the media. Getting coders is not too hard, though we are always on the lookout for new recruits, but finding talented artists, particularly animators, who have time to contribute to an Open Source project can be really tough.
All are hopes are currently pinned on blender becoming Open Source this summer.