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Games Entertainment

OpenQuartz: A GPLed 3D Shooter 97

Posted by michael from the killer-trees dept.
CitizenC writes: "Most people don't really associate the phrase "open source" or "GPL" with games. However, that is just what Galbraith Games is trying to change. Today on 3DActionPlanet, Sabre takes a look at the recently released tech demo."
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OpenQuartz: A GPLed 3D Shooter More

OpenQuartz: A GPLed 3D Shooter

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  • Re:Other GPL games (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The big problem with non-commercial games is the lack of press.

    And maybe the graphics [real-time.com], in this case.

  • Hmm, I thought Crossfire was dead, I never saw anybody else playing it 5 years ago when I tried it out, and now look at this! Did they ever fix the keyboard repeat problem? I remember one of the biggest annoyances with the game was accidentally letting your finger rest on a key while moving in a direction and then getting a 100 moves queued up, which usually involved your running into a wall right next to one of those huge immobile wizards or something. Well that and trying to remember what key was bound to what spell.

    Also, are they still sending that huge X11 window over the network for the multiplayer games? I just might have to try it out again now.

    Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
  • here [quakeforge.net]. Or any of the other quake source ports (no links handy, and I'm biased anyway (I'm a core developer of the QuakeForge project:)). While there's no current news, the project is anything but dead, we're just too busy coding to post news :P

    OpenQuartz came about because shortly after QuakeForge got started, we realised we needed free content for QF to be truely usefull to everybody, and so a few people (including Seth Galbraith) hanging out in our started the OpenQuartz project, though I believe Seth had some data from before Quake was released.

    OpenQuartz's point is to allow you to play quake/quakeworld without having to go out and buy quake (though it can be had at a reasonable price from http://www.hartsunlimited.com/quakofforlin.html [hartsunlimited.com]) Sure, it's nowhere near complete, but for only a little over a year of part time development, I'ld say it's doing well.

    Bill - aka taniwha
    --

  • QuakeForge [quakeforge.net] is looking for macintosh developers: it's just about the only popular platform we don't support :(. If you, or any other mac developers are interested in helping us, please get in touch with us in #quakeforge on irc.openprojects.net or quake-devel@lists.sourceforge.net [mailto].

    Bill - aka taniwha
    --

  • So open source the technology but protect artwork/game specifics.



    Exactly! However, the GPL is about the protection of artwork/specifics even more so than BSD. In fact the only difference in BSD and GPL in this case would be a company that wants to improve the engine but not repay the people that brought them the engine in the first place?

    If by protecting, you mean protecting your right to impose a "pay or don't play; here-today, where is the revenue in two years when your game is obsolete kind of buisness model" you can still do that on a LGPL'ed game engine. You're even encouraged to do so. How much money does a FlightGear distro CD cost again?

    Sorry, your oversight was obvious to most and like shooting fish in a barrel but its a common misconception. Its communicating it effectively and succinctly that the community needs to work on. I'm practicing how to explain this kind of thing to my boss so I thought I'd try on you first. Please answer the following questions on a scale of 1-5, one being very poor and 5 being very well.

    1) How well did you understand that the GPL protects rather than harms?

    2) How well did you understand that BSD is a very generous liscence and is gets along very happily with the GPL (and vice versa) even though Mundie pitches conflict among them.


    ~^~~^~^^~~^

  • FlightGear is really good, the terrain mapping is excelent, and haze and clouds are looking great. You even see the correct positions of Stars and phase of the moon. They are going for FAA approval, adding support for map overlay and are network multiplayable. All they need is someone to add weapons for a combat simulator.

    Search and Rescue is pretty good also as a helicopter game, but I wish it used more of the FlightGear world generation engine.


    ~^~~^~^^~~^
  • Where you say 'giving away' we say 'letting other people help you with, and letting others gain from for their help'.

    This is in opposition to the lock-down, force fead buisness model that is very fragile and in the end hurts customers and sends companies *especialy game companies* into bankrupcy almost assuredly when there products obsoless, or a bigger company produces a competing knockoff and beats you down in marketing.

    On the other end, the imposed barriers of entry that are meant to hedge people into your corner only stifle innovation and produce a nation of (easily beaten back) couch potatoes.


    ~^~~^~^^~~^
  • flightgear.org still works but they are (like everyone else) moving to SourceForge.

    flightgear.sourceforge.net

    They have good screenshots, a good manual and everything.


    ~^~~^~^^~~^
  • Get this, I get paid putting together components of Microsoft products. The company I work for has been doing it for years. Nothing we do is even worthy of being copyrighted, but becuase we know how to make it work for them we get money to develop it. Hundreds of thousands of dollars a contract.

    There are many companies that do this on a daily basis. Its a billion dollar industry. Is this what you say is working for free? No, its the smart "give them everything that doesn't cost you money" buisness philosophy that makes people rich all the time. And the GPL is making coding cost as little money as possible for the best product to sell people. Thats is specificaly the buisness reason why I'd rather use GPL than MS products that I do use**. Who wouldn't be in on it?

    **(Btw, there is nothing we do that we couldn't do with OSS or FSS, its just takes time to create mind-share and trust.)


    ~^~~^~^^~~^

  • GPLed multiplayer? (Score:5)

    by ptomblin ( 1378 ) <ptomblin@xcski.com> on Friday May 18, 2001 @05:07AM (#214220) Homepage Journal
    Opening up the source of Quake was the worst thing that ever happened to it. Suddenly, from a few games being unplayable because of cheating, now you can't find a server out there that doesn't have people who've compiled in their own new cheats, as well as the ones that were present in the non-open-source one. And there are cheating servers as well - ones that give an advantage to the cheaters who run them.

    Team Fortress Classic is bad enough now with cheaters being all over the place, I shudder to think what would happen if all those lamers could compile stuff into their clients to give them infinite armour, infinite ammo, infinite health, extra speed, automatic aiming and a really small bounding box.

    I have to wonder what motivates the cheaters, but the fact is that they are out there, they use every cheat they can find, and giving them access to the source is the worst possible thing I can imagine.

  • http://source.bungie.org/ [bungie.org].
    Yes, a microsoft owned game company, that actually has released one of their games to the GPL, and have continued to actively develop it.
    ---
  • There is a difference between letting the 'community' create addons, and giving away the main product, and creating the addons yourself.

    And since the main product is what is the most difficult to create, I fail to see how GPL it would help the company recoup the investment (and doesn't the fact that the main product would be GPL'ed, that the addons would have to be GPL too?)

  • I'd hold out for a boomstick too, in case you run into anything more mobile than trees...

    Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!

  • I. Am. Ecstatic. (Score:4)

    by mcc ( 14761 ) <amcclure@purdue.edu> on Friday May 18, 2001 @08:01AM (#214224) Homepage
    Do you want to know why?

    Because GPLed games actually have a tiny chance in hell of being ported to the macintosh.

    Seriously. I really kind of honestly believe the bit about gpled games will never quite reach the quality level of commercial software, (although i have seen some damn good shareware/freeware [ambrosiasw.com] games) but i will say this: poorly ported gpled games are much better than *nothing*.. which, as a mac os x user, is exactly what i am getting right now.

    Well.. all i have to say is thank god that it's so much easier to write emulators that run on the PPC than it is the x86 :P Lolo, i will always have you..

    Umm, but anyway. Yeh. I am pretty sure i will never see a Worms Armaggeddon for mac os x, much less Worms World Party, but although i can't play OpenQuartz either, i at least have the *option* of porting the damn thing myself. Which just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. So.. well.. THANK YOU, TEAM OPENQUARTZ!

    P.S. : Sierra : Where the fuck is tribes 2?? You were promising us a simultaneous cross-platform release for awhile there!! What happened?? GRRRR!!

    ^_^

    P.P.S. You think we could go hunt down the original creator of Scorched Earth [classicgaming.com] and convince them to go GPL?

    P.P.P.S. Crossfire is damn ugly. Couldn't you at least have the quality of Taskmaker [happypuppy.com]? Sheesh.

    ...
  • Well the "extremist" thing sure seems troll-like to me.

  • From the article:

    And remember if you don't actually enjoy the demo, you're wasting your time sitting around and complaining, because you could spend time contributing to the project and trying to make it better.
    It sounds like they aren't going to make money, because money isn't the motivation. Making the game fun, is the motivation. The developers play it.
    ---

  • Opening up the source of Quake was the worst thing that ever happened to it. Suddenly, from a few games being unplayable because of cheating, now you can't find a server out there that doesn't have people who've compiled in their own new cheats

    The only reason for this is that Quake started out as closed source, combined with being based upon the security-through-obscurity approach. Had it been open source from the very beginning, cheating would be impossible.

    So your point is both good and bad. Opening the source to some games will increase (but not actually enable, since the potential was already there for hackers who like to disassemble) the cheating in some games. But it will also completely prevent cheating (i.e. really make it impossible) in other games, since those games will be designed on principles such as "trust no one" and "security through obscurity doesn't work" and other popular mottos.


    ---

  • Re:Open Source and Game Software (Score:5)

    by kaisyain ( 15013 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @05:26AM (#214228)
    As another poster said, you've got it backwards. Not only do add-on modules sell poorly for the most part, but they are also the easiest part of to come up with. I mean, take a look at places like Planet Unreal and see how everyone and his brother is making add-on modules. But how many people can write a 3d engine like the ones found in Quake and Unreal? Then look at how many companies are licensing those engines. id licenses the Quake engine for a couple hundred thousand dollars. Seriously, how many people bought Quake 2 for anything other than the nifty keen engine?
  • No, the trick of the client being a remote X window is long gone. It's strictly client-server now. You can even get a Windows client. (And I haven't seen any problems with key repeat, so I think that's fixed, too.)

  • Other GPL games (Score:5)

    by crow ( 16139 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @05:00AM (#214230) Homepage Journal
    On a related note, Crossfire [real-time.com], a multi-player RPG just released it's 1.0.0 version. [Yes, it's GPLd.] It's been playable and in development for many years.

    The big problem with non-commercial games is the lack of press.

    What other GPLd games are out there?

  • open source makes sense for games but not the GPL (unless of course you don't care about revenue). If a bsd style license would be used, game developers could choose to open source parts of the game (3d rendering engine etc.) and bundle it with their closed source game specific scripts and models. So open source the technology but protect artwork/game specifics.

  • Lack of artwork and sounds (Score:5)

    by hammy ( 22980 ) <hamish&hbarney,com> on Friday May 18, 2001 @05:13AM (#214232) Homepage
    I think the biggest barrier to the development of open source games is more the lack of artwork and sounds etc.

  • Did I mention the evil trees? (Score:5)

    by Webmonger ( 24302 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @05:23AM (#214233) Homepage
    So let me get this straight:
    You're up against a bunch of evil trees, and you don't have a chainsaw?
  • One of the most enjoyable 3D shooter games I've ever played was Marathon [marathon.org], which, as I understand it, is now in some form of open source. If anybody is interested in working on an awesome open-source game, I think Marathon is one of the ways to go!

    Other relevant links (also available from Marathon [marathon.org]):

    Bungie.org [bungie.org]

    Bungie Source Code [bungie.org]

    The Marathon Story [marathon.org]

  • this isnt necessarily true. I have a friend, for example, who registered a business for a project he and a couple other guys were working on. The company has no investors, doesnt really have any employees, and makes no money. it's just an 'official' company under whose name they built their project.

    I imagine the next question is "why did he do that?" According to him, it didnt cost much and he thought it was funny.

    so, a company doesnt have to have investors and doesnt have to make a profit, it just has to be registered.


    Darth -- Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre

  • I have to wonder what motivates the cheaters, but the fact is that they are out there, they use every cheat they can find, and giving them access to the source is the worst possible thing I can imagine.

    Dood, they are just extending the conflict out of the game proper into the real world. Look at it as a challenge of wits and skill ...

    Have fun!

  • Re:GPLed multiplayer? (Score:3)

    by jmauro ( 32523 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @05:30AM (#214237)
    Cheaters will exist whether or not they have direct access to the code. Some people even go through the byte code in order to gain an advantage over everyone else. The need and processes to stop cheating need to extend beyond releasing the code or not. To stop cheating things like public key cryptography and trust management must be employed. Binaries my be signed so one can trust where the binaries are coming from and that they have not been modified, same with the servers. Cheating serviers / players need to be identified and keys revoked. This will help place a dent on cheating, source has nothing to do with it.
  • Also, more and more game development these days is artists creating art, architects designing maps, modelers creating realistic models, people writing plot and dialog, etc. E.g. Content is king. Nobody plays a crapola game just because it runs on the Unreal or Q3 engine. Just look at the popularity of games like Counter-Strike, and the high reviews of No One Lives Forever.

    Game companies can concentrate on developing *content*. I think this *is* a pretty good fit. Anybody who has a cool idea for content for an engine (a "game") can get up and running cheaply. I think this will have the effect of producing more diversity and in the long run a healthier game market. I mean, really, how many Command and Conquer clones can you stand? Taking the burden of engine development of game houses might result in better (or at least original) games being made.
  • "Haven't you seen how much people make mods? Since the market is spammed with mods none can charge for their work."

    The market is spammed with a lot of crappy mods that take a long time to download and never really reach a stable state. There are notable exceptions of course, but I would definately rather pay $10-20 dollars for a mod created by paid artists and game designers, than waste my time downloading and trying out mods off the web. $10-20 dollars is cheap as far as games go, but then they wouldn't be investing so much in R&D for the engine, which is extremely costly.
  • They will sell commercial support and consultancy. They can go to your company, check what computers the game would be the best on, sell you new hardware, build a new network infrastructure optimized for the game and sell you a new firewall which recognizeds this new protocol. Of course your employees needs to learn the new game. So the company will give curses, given by 15 very skilled professors, that know every secret of the game. When they will be back, your company can still call an hotline to ask for secrets the previous guys didn't speak about (hidden levels, secret keystrokes for unlimited life and power...) .

    Then, no one in your company will be doing his real job any more. They will sell you coffee and drugs so that you can play 23 hours a day, and still be okay to do your real job 1 hour a day.

    You will be charged $ 1.000.000 for this. And with the bill, they will send you a special offer to buy their next game.

    This is how to make money with GPL games.

  • Netrek can still be cracked. I hear it's already been done. It's the same argument as copy protection. If you give the users the key, in any form, the users can find it and use it for their own purposes.
    ------
  • wouldn't his eventually evolve into the coolest 3d shooter ever? just imagine:

    cheater 1: HA! no one beats me with my 60 rounds/sec homeing laser.
    cheater 2: take a peace of my remote controlled 10 Megaton jumping landmines.
    cheater 3: just finished the infrared-guided-fly-through-the-walls-fragmentatio n-penguin.
  • There's an entire GPL game company, according to this [slashdot.org] slashdot article.
  • A list of .wav's they're looking for is here [planetquake.com].

    With the help of Bell Labs' Text-to-Speech project [bell-labs.com], this can be done is a jiffy!

    e.g.

    enforcer/death1.wav -> "arrrrrrrrrg"

    enforcer/idle1.wav -> "dum de dum dum"

    enforcer/pain1.wav -> "ow"

    enforcer/pain2.wav -> "ow ow ow!"

  • It depends on the market. In the wargaming and hardcore TBS sectors, for instance, there are many gamers NOT addicted to glitz. Both _Space Empires 4_ and _Combat Mission_ were done by small developers, and both are highly-praised products that have far more gameplay than, oh, full-motion video. Both succeeded. _TOAW_, while not by a 'small' house, is another example of a game for which flashiness is irrelevant, because the focus is on the system and scenarios.

    Now, it may be easier to ignore FMV and so forth in the strategy market than in other sectors -- but it should still be possible. That's especially true for a small house where you don't have the overhead of much larger HR, marketing and so forth.
  • I'm reminded of Netrek, where only the trusted compilers have RSA keys used when compiling the official versions of blessed (legitimate) clients, which are then used to answer verification challenges from the servers.

    Hence, if you want to use an augmented Borg client, you need to use a server configured not to use the crypto. One could probably edit the Quake client to use the same system to verify the server type and warn the user if it came from an untrusted source.
  • id has 19 employees, give or take. I believe around 10 of them do art of some sort (mapping, modeling, skinning, texturing.)

    The problem with open source games isn't the lack of people, it's the level of coordination that's required. If you're creating a map and need a custom texture, it's nice to be able to have a texture artist sitting next to you while he creates it. Ditto for modeling vs skinning. Nothing will ever beat being in the same building as the rest of the team.
  • There is a way to balance GPL and profit for games. Your point is that DESIGNING a game is a very costly and difficult process. In that case, game companies would profit from selling the design of the game (levels, art, sounds) and making all of the game engine Free. No one can seriously expect to compete against Unreal or Quake in terms of engines, but a GPL'd engine shared by many companies would certainly put up a fight.

    As for the Copy-Protection argument, its true that companies who adopt this model could no longer offer any copy-protection, but face it, copy protection is a joke. Been to GameCopyWorld [gamecopyworld.com] recently? All it would take is a dev shop with enough balls to stand up to their publisher (very rare).

    -------------------------

  • which game (Score:3)

    by passion ( 84900 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @07:23AM (#214249)

    Perhaps the game has changed under your nose, and you haven't even noticed. Perhaps the game has turned into "who can be the best hacker" instead of "who can be the best fragger". If you want hot fragging action, then play Q2 or Q3... that's what they're out there for.

    When they released the source to Quake, they opened the doors to gaming challenges of the future, namely - who can write a better AI, whose bot will emerge victorious. Since this doesn't rely upon fast-twitch skills, but real coding prowsess... as a geek, how can you complain?

  • if you run the panaramic quake mod (posted last week sometime) with the command line "C:\Quake\panquake.exe -width 1024 -bpp 16 -winram 256 -game oq" (substituting in appropriate resolution, colordepth and ram of course)you can shoot at the tree zombies in panaramic mode (and it uses the .wav files from quake so you wont get all the error messages)
  • Anybody looking to contribute to a (L)GPL 3D engine might want to look at Crystal Space [linuxgames.com]. I've been following it for a year or so and it seems to have slowed down a bit. But overall it appears to be a feature-rich, highly organized engine (plug-ins, all known 3D effects, scripting (in many language), cross-platform, CVS tree, etc).

    It could probably use a few 3D artists to get a few awesome levels and so forth.

  • If the engine is open source or free software, you can still sell the game with closed graphics, music and sound. Although this would make the entire game non-free, much of the sourcecode could be free.

    As another user mentioned, you don't HAVE to make money either. Just sharing with a community that gives something back again can be rewarding enough. It depends on your priorities, but I doubt anyone can use their full-time on such a project/company.

    Last point. If you're just out to make money, you should make it as proprietary as possible. And if you're the industry leader, you will make big bucks. Or else you'll go down in flames. It's a huge risk for a new company. By sharing code, you decrease the potential revenue income, but you increase the value to everyone - including yourself. For instance: It's a BIG value to _everyone_ that anyone can use Emacs anywhere in the world, on almost any platform. However, I doubt the creators have gained much _monetary_ value.

    - Steeltoe
  • Hillarious :-)

    On the more serious side, when they take breaks from programming they can enjoy other GPLed games that others have made, get new bug-reports with fixes and updates or just chill out with the community. No GPL-programmer has ever said they were in it for the money. (I hope for their sake)

    - Steeltoe

  • What is holding OS gaming back? I mean really? Its not the lack of an engine or coding base. There are already a number of engines available that could do the job like CrystalSpace and the Quake 1 engine. Its not the lack of gifted programmers. OS has those too.

    The thing that is holding OS gaming back that game creation is a manufacturing process and OS development is a service process. How many programmers created the Quake III? Not that many. How many artists, 3d modelers, sound editors, level designers, and writers (ok maybe not writers :) )created Quake III? A freaking huge number thats what. The engine is not the problem, its a relatively small part of the development pie. What we need are more artists and level designers to contribute to the projects.

  • Most people don't really associate the phrase "open source" or "GPL" with games.
    Even less would they associate GPL with a Scrolling Game Development Kit [sourceforge.net] written in Microsoft Visual Basic! ;-)

    Wow... look at those words fight each other!

  • What this really looks like (Score:4)

    by Tom7 ( 102298 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @05:16AM (#214256) Homepage Journal
    I think the title of this story is misleading; they are using the already GPLed Quake 1 engine. They are "just" replacing the restricted content (models, textures, maps, sounds) with their own.

    This is pretty good though; something like NPRquake released the other day could be released as a full package, instead of requiring you to own the original Quake (which, if you don't have it already, is pretty tough to find).
  • Is this supposed to be serious or are you just trolling?
  • OK, fair enough. I'm a dumbass. It's Friday afternoon and my brain's stopped working.
  • Great; now distraught parents will be claiming that video games turned their children into homicidal lumberjacks.

  • And if you really want to not play with cheaters, find a server that really frowns upon cheaters, and kicks them off quickly.

    Except in reflex games such as the Quake series, it's hard to tell naturally good players from players using some of the better borg proxies. See also the discussion in Asus and cheaters [slashdot.org].

  • Most people don't really associate the phrase "open source" or "GPL" with games

    Last time I looked there were over 2300 open source game projects in sourceforge.

  • As I mentioned below, sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net] has thousands of open source games, as well as a lot of other software.
  • Maybe the mods think any word against "open source" is a troll, but the above post is correct. The production of a game involves a lot more than software. As a matter of fact, many game companies use third party libraries for their games. Which brings us back to the point mentioned in the other post: someone may release a game using GPL'ed software, where the game data is not "free" in any sense. It's just like using a GPL'ed editor to edit a text. The editor being open source doesn't mean the edited text should be.
  • cheating = fair use ?

    I'm guessing English isn't your first language.

  • This project (I couldn't determine if OpenQuartz was a company or not) reminds me of many shareware and pay-for gaming communities that seem to succeed. For instance, Dink Smallwood [rtsoft.com] (now given away free) was a Zelda-like game that you could play in about 10 hours, and had some slightly annoying interface issues. Most games like this would appear and disappear without much noise, but the author released some tools for creating modifications, and there are now 50-100 "d-mods" that individuals have developed, keeping this Win95-era the game alive for years.

    The guy at spiderweb games [spidweb.com], a shareware company that is apparantly releasing their Exile series on linux, created the fairly successful "Blades of Exile" game that allowed the community to build its own adventures. I'm not sure if it was as successful as he had hoped, however, because I think his later games are unmodifiable,.

    There are certainly dozens of professional games that have similar communities--there are hundreds of scenarios available out there for Age of Empires/AOK, and there must be thousands available for Quake/doom/etc.

    In fact, there are many games out there that become much greater because they have a community developing the games. The success of these games might have more to do with the people writing their own scenarios and modifications than in the original technical or marketing activity of the original designers. I would think that in many of these cases, the wide-spread availability of novel free scenarios has increased the profits of these companies, rather than diminished them.

  • ...since the main product is what is the most difficult to create, I fail to see how GPL it would help the company recoup the investment (and doesn't the fact that the main product would be GPL'ed, that the addons would have to be GPL too?)

    The point is that this project is apparently cutting the company out of the picture. Its already clear (as per my above post) that a gaming community can support and sustain itself once a base system and tools for creating new scenarios are out there. Now, with a free base system and high-quality artwork and sounds available, there is no need for a company--the community can design, develop, and play their own games without the intervention of a corporate entity.

  • Re:GPLed multiplayer? (Score:3)

    by clare-ents ( 153285 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @05:27AM (#214267) Homepage
    Don't trust the client.

    You should treat all data from the client as untrusted - you should store the entire game-state on the server and only send display information to the client. Then, no matter how badly the client is hacked, they can never do more than display additional information [e.g. transparent walls hack].

  • The other part of the cheater problem is that since there is no client verification, legimitate players get branded as cheaters because they are doing too good.

    I just hate being kicked out of a game because I'm getting kill after kill. "Kamikaze is a cheater." Gawd, its a phrase that I hear all too often, and I hate it. At least PunkBusters [punkbusters.com] is headed in the right direction.

  • I wonder how long it will take before Apple's legal team springs into action over this name? :)

  • game technology changes too fast (Score:3)

    by _|()|\| ( 159991 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @06:55AM (#214270)
    Games seem to be a perfect fit for OpenSource.

    After marketing, technology is the dominant factor in a game's success. Quake 2 had no gameplay innovations. It sold on reputation and nice (brown) graphics. Thief, Thief 2, and System Shock 2 had innovative gameplay and good stories. They didn't sell, because of the low-polygon graphics.

    I'm not criticizing the market or the industry (although there is something wrong with Eidos pumping millions into Daikatana while Looking Glass went bankrupt)--graphics sell. Summer movies become blockbusters on effects, alone.

    Successful free software projects, like gcc, Linux, Apache, etc., have a long lifespan. The development effort remains worthwhile for years. High-tech entertainment has a short lifespan. The incentive structure for games is similar to that for movies: compete for mainstream dollars with flashy effects.

    That said, I do believe there is room for gameplay innovation. The variety of a choose-your-own-adventure book would be welcome. The unpredictability of Clue would be nice: play it again and maybe it's not the butler, this time. Adventure-game conversations could go from turn based, so to speak, to real time.

  • > second only in difficulty to programming enterprise-scale RDBMS systems.

    You mean like Mysql [mysql.com]?

    Or perhaps PostgreSQL [postgresql.org]? NASA recently gave up Oracle in favor of MySQL, if I recall correctly. Besides which, on the gaming end, I recently purchased Tribes2, but I still find myself playing GLtron [sourceforge.net] and Freeciv [freeciv.org] and Nethack [nethack.org] more than anything else.

    Surprisingly enough, all those games are also under the GPL.

    The difficulty of making a game engine is exactly why Free Software is an ideal solution.

  • I guess your last 3d game engine sold as well as Quake did? Look moron, just because you are a no talent idiot who got his mom's computer to post on slashdot does not mean you should tear down other people's work!!! I have worked on the Quake 1 source and it is not easy. I do not care if it is 5 years old... I would guess that you are not much older.
  • >> The gaming market is one of the strongest for commercially dold upgrades
    > Expansion packs for games are notoriously poor sellers

    In fact, what he said was just that the sold better then other upgrade packs (even though they dont sells that well :), and im willing to agree. I think patches (bug-fixes) must be free of charge, while updates (new features, maps, levels etc) may be charged for.

    Further, since many of those expansion packs are pretty large (full cd) its not worth downloading unless you have a cheap broadband.

    Personly i dont like this business model though, i like buying things, knowing what the final cost will be. Otherwise you dont know where the bill ends...

  • What do you mean people only bought Quake2 for its engine??? I purchased Q2 for its awesome story-line, exciting plot twists and the thrill of all those suspensful dialogues. Its engine, while certainly decent, was only a minor concern to me as is the case with all other Roleplaying games. As long as the story and characters are good, well fleshed out, who cares about its engine!

    :)

    Oh look, purple sky...
  • This is a project to build multi-media to be used with the GPLed Quake Source.

    The article sounds a bit mis-leading in that there is no new 'game engine' here - its an art project.

  • Yes, having an open game engine and addon modules is a great idea that has potential. What Golbraith Games [planetquake.com] is doing is exactly the opposite. They're making a quake mod with GPL'd graphics and models. Yeah, I guess the quake source is GPL'd too... but who wants to see the same artwork and models in 20 "new" games?
  • As best I can tell this is just a mod for a 5 year old game with GPL'd artwork and sound. If you're going to make an original game, you need to have original artwork and sound... so what good is this?

  • Open Source games? (Score:5)

    by micromoog ( 206608 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @05:46AM (#214278)
    You have reached the final level. You will now battle the Grand Desructor of All Time . . . this feature has not yet been implemented. Please contact Galbraith if you wish to contribute.
  • I mean, like, trees are our friends, Man.

  • This is the problem with the GPL (Score:4)

    by 91degrees ( 207121 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @05:05AM (#214280) Journal
    I suddenly realise why MS are so anti-GPL. Its not because of their business model at all. Its just that the GPL encourages violence.

    A respecatable company like Microfsoft wouldn't ever produce a violent game like this. It would alienate their customers and subject them to a potential lawsuit if it causes someone to act out these violent fantasies in real life

    GPL developers on the other hand don't have to wory. They can claim "someone else must have wrtitten that bit".

    The GPL will destroy society through violence, and MS is trying to prevent it

  • You could probably improve the situation with some creative checksumming. I don't mean just checksum the whole client, that's too easy to get around. I'm talking about requesting a checksum of bytes x through y of the client, periodically throughout the game. Then any cheater has to at least have a copy of the valid client for a start.

    Or only transmit player actions over the network. The only cheat possible there is "cyborg" players. (course that takes more processor time)
  • The GPL isn't very appropriate for games, and I doubt open-source games will ever become popular outside of a small group of diehard Linux extremists. The reason for this is that in order to make a sucessful game today, you need to put a LOT of effort into it. In order to create a high quality, playable game in todays market, you need hundereds of developers, several years, and the budget of an average hollywood motion pictures. There aren't that many companies who have the infrastructure to back up such a production, and those who can, sure as hell aren't going to throw millions of dollars as well as thousands of development hours at such a project and then turn around and give it away for free.

    I'm not trying to argue against free software, I think it's a Good Thing (tm), but designing a game from the ground up, (or in this case, simply modding the Quake II engine) is not an undertaking that can be accomplished as a hobby in one's spare time. The open-source model is simply not suited for such a task, and until someone figures out how to at least recoup all the money that was put into the development of such a game, the major game companies are going to be sceptical about undertaking such a project.

  • Right.

    But he was trying to say that in this case, you can't trust the server. If your complying client connects to the cheater's specially compiled server he'll be able to to cheat regardless, even if he too was running a complying client. For example, the server could recognize his ip and give him infinite ammo.
  • ...that I can download the source, hack it to give my personae super powers, compile it, then invite everyone to play :)

    I'll be the life of the LAN party!

  • You sir, are simply wrong. Expansion packs for games are notoriously poor sellers. If you released a totally open game for free, invariably someone would develop free addons in their spare time. These may not be up to the same quality of a commercial release (maybe they would, not the point), but the price would increase the demand for freebies, while these commercially developed addons would flounder.

    The total open sourcing of games would be the death knell for the industry, at least IMO.

  • Anybody care to tell me? Sooner or later the programmers are going to want to get paid. Any progamers here willing to work for free?
  • I saw it was a company, ie business. That means they have investors. Sooner or later the investment is going to run out and some sort of revenue stream has to be established. Does this mean that an open source game is you buy the game and pay for the patches to fix the bugs. Where a regular game is pay for the game and wait for the patch.
  • Both you and the earlier poster are correct. Add-on modules do sell less units than the game itself; and they are the easiest part of the game to create. I was not comparing the sales of expansion modules to the sales of a game. I was comparing those sales, to the sales of expansion modules or their counterparts in other software markets, for other types of software.

    I further agree that building the game engine is the most labor intensive andtechnically difficult part of the project. I propose to gather a group of highly skilled OSS developers to put it together, with some oversight, thus defraying the costs associated with such development. Once the engine is released, move on to the development of expansion modules. As you've stated, expansion modules are simpler to create, and require less development time, for the money.

    It's important also, to keep in mind that sales of expansion modules will always be smaller than sales of the game itself. For this reason, GPLing the game engine is the best choice also because it allows for penetration to the widest audience - hose of us who don't have $50 to spend on a game (from which you derive 20 hours of enjoyment), but do have $15 to spend on an expansion pack (from which you might derive 10 hours enjoyment).

    By GPLing the game, you cause it to reach a potentially wider audience, thus increasing the potential audience for the commercial expansion pack, which is more cost effective for the developers, for technical and manpower reasons, and more cost effective for the consumer who wants to get the most for his money.

    --CTH

    --

  • Open Source and Game Software (Score:4)

    by hillct ( 230132 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @05:04AM (#214289) Homepage Journal
    Actually, Games seem to be a perfect fit for OpenSource. Open the code for the game engine, then sell add-on modules. The gaming market is one of the strongest for commercially dold upgrades. In fact it's one of the only markets where the customer base doesn't scream bloddy murder when a company offers to SELL them an extension pack for a game. It really is a perfect fit.

    --CTH

    --
  • www.radonlabs.de
  • "Most people don't really associate the phrase 'open source' or 'GPL' with games"

    Actually... Aleph One [bungie.org]: The (originally Macintosh) game Marathon by Bungie [bungie.com], released under the GPL [bungie.org]. Now available for Macintosh, MacOSX, Linux, Windows, and even BeOS.

  • I dunno... Hand rollin' a Unix-like kernel doesn't sound all that 'easy' to me, or a windowing system, or an optimizing compiler, etc.
  • It is clear that the average 12-year old kid playing games does not care about open source. In fact, its fair to say that Open Source as a model simply fails where games are concerned. The amount of investment required to produce a top quality video game is now about the same as to produce a Hollywood movie.


    The Open Source model could work where plug-ins and levels and other non-essential parts of the game are concerned, but a top quality 3D engine by its very nature must remain propreitory.


    Finally, it is abundantly clear that the BSD license would be the only sensible licence to consider for games, since if the game was released under the GPL, nobody could ever make any money out of it due to Stallman's Communism.

  • Perhaps he's ...gasp! not that!...."joking"?
  • what would happen if all those lamers could compile stuff into their clients to give them infinite armour, infinite ammo, infinite health, extra speed, automatic aiming and a really small bounding box.

    This seems like a problem you're going to encounter eventually in any system requiring so much trust of the client. The solution you're inevitably going to have to arrive at (with Open Source or hacked Closed Source code) is not to trust. Networked gaming systems should put more verification in the server, or in a distributed case, require other clients to verify.

    As for the hacked servers... Well, avoid them?

  • First off, hundreds of developers is silly, most gaming companies have less than 20.

    Anyway, the Linux kernel has also been a lot of work, and had much more developers than any game that I know of. The problem with games is that it's much more unclear what the goals are. Kernels should be fast, reliable, and support all kinds of hardware, but what's the goal of a game? People will never reach any kind of consensus.

    However, a GPLed 3d engine (ala quake3) might work a lot better as an open source project.

  • if it causes someone to act out these violent fantasies in real life

    Lumberjacks are EVIL!

  • Cheating has always been a part of gaming. Isn't that a 'fair use' of the game you've bought? You're not selling your cheats, and you're not claiming the original game as your own. I think cheating is the same as making MP3's out of all the CD's you own. Sure, I don't like playing with cheaters because it reduces the fun factor because there is no longer skill involved for the one cheating, but I don't think you should be revoking the ability to play the game just cause you figured out a way to cheat. And if you really want to not play with cheaters, find a server that really frowns upon cheaters, and kicks them off quickly. You can play with your tight knit circle of friends, and the rest of us can play with a bunch of other people from around the world. No big deal.

    Having said all that, if your post was meant as humor, I do get a chuckle out of it when read with that in mind. :)

  • The amount of investment required to produce a top quality video game is now about the same as to produce a Hollywood movie.

    But maybe not as difficult. Chris Roberts did a great job with the Wing Commander games, but when he made the Wing Commander movie... ouch!
    -----------------

  • Just look at the current open source fiasco. People where supposed to make their income from service and support. Take away the VC money (in the long run the company must survive on its own) and the income from those companies are worse than poor and this will continue to be the case.

    If that money is supposed to be for salaries the software industry will soon have worse than poor salaries for its hired people.

    Haven't you seen how much people make mods? Since the market is spammed with mods none can charge for their work.
  • How many mods and expansions are commercial today? Not many...
  • i'm not sure what other high-tech (3d action etc..) games there are but freeciv [freeciv.org] is a clone of civilisation (with multiplayer etc...) that's been going for many years.

    i was angry:1 with:2 my:4 friend - i told:3 4 wrath:5, 4 5 did end.

  • Re:Other GPL games (Score:4)

    by mod you later ( 326902 ) on Friday May 18, 2001 @05:22AM (#214303)
    but the point of the gpl means that if you can do better, you're welcome to!

    i'm not just saying this - if you really think that you can do better, then do it - or modify the existing graphics. i'm not sure if the gpl explicitly covers the game data as well, but people with this kind of open source mentality would probably be very thankful of any input that you care to give... assuming it's positive too ;)

    i was angry:1 with:2 my:4 friend - i told:3 4 wrath:5, 4 5 did end.

  • Check out Marathon Aleph One [bungie.org] from Bungie. Believe it is Marathon 2 open sourced and enhanced

    They started this before being brought out by Microsoft, and seem to be still doing it.

  • Crossfire, Hmmm... and some one hmm.. the gfx stinks. Sorry!
  • Programming computer games is hard, probably second only in difficulty to programming enterprise-scale RDBMS systems. One thing we've seen time and again is how open-source is excellent at providing tools on the scale of emacs or perl, which do a fine job at a middle-sized application, but once the level of complexity reaches a large game or RDBMS, the level of centralised control that open-source allows just isn't sufficient to get the job done. Arguably, the only reason that emacs is as good as it is today is that rms rules the roost, and emacs is effictively run as the "cathedral" of GNU.
    --
  • Hey - it's a personal choice, don't knock it! Besides, many programmers make their bread and butter from commercial, closed-source code, and do free software as recreation, and to put something back into the community, from which many of them have got important solutions (roll out the usual examples - Apache, GCC, etc).

    To email me, move the last four characters of my address one key to the right on a QWERTY keyboard
    43rd Law of Computing:

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