Snowboarding Soul Ride Engine Goes GPL

TuringTest writes "LinuxGames reports this news update at the Soul Ride game site. Soul Ride is a snowboarding game with real character physics, and its engine is now released under GPL and available for download. You may see its beautiful screenshots until it gets /.ed. Note that only the engine is GPL'd, not the artwork and data. Can you imagine a GPL game with the Fellowship of the Ring crossing the Caradhras with these graphics?" I hope this release spawns a Linux-friendly snowboarding simulator -- Soul Ride is limited to Windows (9X, NT, 2000) for now.

Released? Really

[Anonymous Coward]

from sourceforge:

Latest File Releases:
This Project Has Not Released Any Files

A bit precipitice, are we?

Hmm

[stratjakt]

Open Source game engines are all fine and good with me, but have a good hard look at the game before you go praising it.

I'm pretty big on snowboarding games, and this isn't a very good one. A terrible one, to be more precise. One of those cheesy OpenGL "render the entire gameworld as polygons and let the video cards horsepower deliver the framerates because its way easier than only rendering on-screen action"

I'm sorry, but those screenshots look like ass. Even by first-gen voodoo graphics standards. The game engine might be a good learning tool, but I doubt it will spawn the killer-gaming-app-for-linux.

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

The graphic engine is acutally quite nice.
You can set a fixed framerate, and the terrain changes to meet your demands.
You are right that the graphic sucks, and the gameplay is nonexistant.
But hey - how much can you expect from a commercial...

Tenebrae

[labratuk]

Can you imagine a GPL game with the Fellowship of the Ring crossing the Caradhras with these graphics?

What would be even nicer would be a totally GPL game based on the upcoming Tenebrae 2.0 [sf.net] engine.

What would be really nice

[stratjakt]

"Note that only the engine is GPL'd, not the artwork and data."

3D engines really aren't the time-consuming part of creating a game. It would be nice to see some 'open sourced' player models, motion captures, sound effects, musics, etc, etc..

I know there are a ton of people versed in 3D modelling out there. Perhaps they can offer up some of their 3D 'doodles' to the OSS community for use in games. Maybe a sort of BSD/GPL liscense for artwork/data?

these graphics

[frovingslosh]

Apparently the these graphics link is bad or has been taken down. I've played the game (on Windows) and I'm not all that impressed with the graphics. One thing you quickly notice is that all the trees are cheap 2-d cheats and keep the same "front" towards you as you move past or around them. It's fine that the engine is being GPL'ed rather than lost, but it still remains for someone to do something good with it. And if , as someone else here said, it gives the hardware the whole world and relies on the hardware to sort it out, then I don't expect it's going to be very useful in a lot of cases (the software I used did seem to limit how far I could go without good reason, I expect this is why).

Another cool thing they've done....

[AugstWest]

...is they've modeled real mountains into the game. That's something I've *always* wanted to see in a snowboarding game.

They've done Stratton [soulride.com], Breckenridge [soulride.com] and Jay Peak [soulride.com].

Re:Screenshots listing

[jbn-o]

http://www.soulride.com/products/screenshots/soulr ide_screenshots.zip [soulride.com] might be convenient too. The parent directory http://www.soulride.com/products/screenshots/ [soulride.com] is interesting as well.

Re:Graphics not that amazing.

[Xeger]

The difference is that your old 486 landscape generator used voxel terrain. Voxels are a great way to fool the eye into thinking its looking at a detailed, textured solid surface -- but they stink if you want to interact with the terrain, or rotate the camera, or do pretty much anything other than pan around.

Compare this to Soul Ride, which uses an implementation of ROAM (rigorously optimized adaptive mesh). While it isn't quite cutting-edge anymore--the original ROAM paper was written a few years back--no other published game that I know of has used it yet.

ROAM allows arbitrarily detailed terrain. It represents the terrain as a quadtree -- a space which is subdivided into four parts, each of which is subdivided into four parts, etc ad infinitum -- and by intelligently collapsing and expanding quadtree nodes based on the distance from the viewer to the terrain.

For you, this means that the hillock in front of your nose will look perfectly smooth, and the jagged peak in the background will also look perfectly smooth, and each of them will only use as many polygons as it needs to maintain the appearance of smoothness. That translates to a vastly improved framerate for you, and better memory usage to boot.