Free Software FPS Games Compared

An anonymous reader writes "Linux-gamers.net has posted a thorough, although harsh, comparison of free software shooters. It compares seven open source shooter games in a lengthy discussion. Few have gone to the trouble of comparing and carefully examining the genre before. The author ranks the games in the following order (best to worst): Warsow, Tremulous, World of Padman, Nexuiz, Alien Arena, OpenArena, and Sauerbraten. In making these choices, it claims to use gameplay, design, innovation and presentation as criteria and includes a short history of free software shooters in the introduction."

It's like the games of yesteryears...

[MindPrison]

...coming back to frag you once more! I do like World of Padman...funny story, funny graphics....aw heck...funny game. Community 3d games are actually a lot more fun when they try to be themselves (original, don't have to conform to much of the real deal), look at Bz-flag....crap graphics...still fun as h*** to play and there are still hundreds of servers with thousands of players playing it.

Xinerama

[Jethro]

I have yet to see one game that works correctly on a Linux box with Xinerama. At least in full-screen more. Some of them won't even let you change resolution at all, let alone tell them to run in a window.

When they run in full-screen they tend to span the displays and have all the action right in the middle so the important stuff is split in two.

And quite a few games crash on the weird resolution.

I'm not saying I've seen Windows games work on dual-head or ever support two monitors, but at least they have the decency to just pick a screen and use that one.

Re:Free FPS Games

[LiquidCoooled]

already posted bug report, its in hand.

me: D2 Reply to hidden parent appears joined to previous thread

pudge: Yes, this is known, and we know it's a problem. We have plans to deal with it.

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1849018&group_id=4421&atid=104421 [sourceforge.net]

Three cheers for John Carmack,

[shish]

seeing as 6 out of the 7 games are Quake-based :P

It strikes me that open source has a reputation for really good code and half-assed presentation, so I wonder why there aren't many free-from-day-1 game engines :-/

Re:WTF, is it free or is it open source?

[88NoSoup4U88]

Afaik, only the source to mod the game has been released, but no GPL-ed open source release (as has happened with all the previous id software engined titles)... But I'm positive we'll eventually be able to have a peek at that too.

Back on topic, I've played most of these games (except Alien Arena), and I always found it a bit disappointing to see what people created with access to the source: In the end (with some exceptions, such as Tremulous), most of these mods/total conversions just turn out to be another deathmatch/capture the flag game, with different models, different weapons... but still basically the same game mechanics as the game it's based on.

Though I still very much appreciate their effort (who can complain when the game is free for them to download), I very much hope that there are some teams out there who want to do more than just that.

As for my own contribution to try to 'solve' this: The last two years I've been very busy refining an idea for a game; build on the Quake3 engine (more specifically, the cleaned up IOQuake3 source), where the gameplay will be totally different from what's been developed on the Q3 engine before...
Active development has just started, and it seems that we'll be able to crack out an Alpha release in three months time.

But in time, be sure to download this game [downloadthisgame.com] once we're done! :)

Re:Xinerama

[Kent Recal]

Erm, sounds like you have no single-screen modes configured.
Read up on the MetaModes option in xorg.conf.

Mine looks like this:

Option "MetaModes" "1280x1024_60.00, 1920x1200; null, 1920x1200"

And I can play ET, AA, Tremulous, etc. just fine. The second screen simply goes off when a game requests fullscreen.

Re:Tremulous second best? Hate to see the rest

[sahonen]

I played many games over a several days. I almost never saw the humans win unless there was a huge skill stack on the human side. Far more often I saw the aliens win, and occasionally a sudden death which inevitably went to the aliens.

What was the most frustrating for me was not being able to buy upgrades or evolve because I hadn't killed enough people yet. Especially at later stages in the game where practically everybody had evos and upgrades, it was incredibly difficult and frustrating running around as the weakest player in the game trying to kill players far more powerful than me so that I could get the upgrades I needed to be able to take out these powerful players. It's a chicken-and-egg problem. It's the same problem I have with counter-strike, if you're on the losing team with no money, how are you supposed to take out people with body armor and AK-47s when all you have is a pistol? This kind of problem is frustrating and I consider it to be bad game design. I vastly prefer games that level the playing field by giving players equal abilities and not penalizing teams for losing.

Re:Fun, but....

[philwx]

I know what you mean. But if you think about it, a good part of open source software is filling a "need." There is a need for a java IDE that has x features. There is a need for a full featured text editor with extra utilities for editing code. There is a need for convenience installers for linux programs. There is a need for games. Wait, what kind of games? There is where it becomes very open ended and not well defined. The passion of wanting to develop an open source application to fulfill a need does not mesh with the artistic vision of commercial game developers. So they can implement bland imitations of popular games, or games that just don't have widespread appeal. It would help if when someone was inspired to make a ground breaking game, they would say "I'm making this for linux, screw making money." After this point I'm guessing, but it seems more likely that given significant inspiration for a game, someone will go to work for commercial companies. At that point making a linux version becomes laughable among bean counters who only see numbers of customers, and don't share a passion for free software. There's probably more to it, but that is my initial take on it.

Re:It's like the games of yesteryears...

[Fred Ferrigno]

Lack of natural selection. ... Open-source projects don't depend on sales.

But they do depend on volunteer developers. Natural selection is quite obviously in effect among OSS projects, only the criteria for success is the ability to attract developers rather than users. This can lead OSS in a different direction compared to closed source. In the long run though, the difference is not that great since most developers prefer to work on projects that people actually use.

Re:It's like the games of yesteryears...

[ardor]

Natural selection is quite obviously in effect among OSS projects, only the criteria for success is the ability to attract developers rather than users.

But the consequence of failure is very different. Nothing bad happens to the developer if no one is attracted to the project. In commercial games, one flop often means the company is shut down and you lose your job.