Status Report From the Open Source Games Community 81
qubodup writes "Free Gamer, an open source gaming blog, has recently become the center of open source artists, developers and gamers. In its forums, the GPU-hungry Classical Java RPG and the Neverball-killer irrlamb have found their second home. So did sub-communities like extremist free gamers, who insist on games not only be free software but also to contain free content and want to build a knowledge base of existing free games. There are also free content artists, which address an old problem of open source games and want to supply graphics and sound for projects in need of game media."
wrong link (Score:5, Informative)
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Here is a list of great open source games... (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:Here is a list of great open source games... (Score:4, Informative)
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No... it's under sporadic and infrequent development. Actually, that's being charitable. Seems like the only update since 2004 is a file name change.
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Not to mention all the extensions, mods etc. still in active development.
But active development isn't the point. The point is that lots of people still actively *play* nethack.
Re:Here is a list of great open source games... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Other great OS games I've found are Vega Strike, (Elite/Privateer style space flight) and Frets On Fire. (Guitar Hero clone)
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hell, you could even ADD a cheat key!!!
now it is time for a shameless plug : http://www.xhrit.com/zp3/ [xhrit.com]
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I like neverball... (Score:2)
Consider an FPS, actually. You could have a game with really "easy" controls, like an auto-aim. We call that an aimbot, aka, CHEATING.
Or, you learn the controls you're given, and you find that it's not just the controls that make the game hard. It's the game itself -- in Neverball, it's the physics of momentum in a world where it's easy to fall off the edge.
By the
Incompatibility between CC and GNU licenses (Score:3, Interesting)
If I develop a game, and I want to distribute it under a copyleft license, what license should I use? Due to the lack of a native file system implementation on some platforms, the code and its related assets (graphics, sound, maps, etc.) must be combined into one executable file, but the GNU licenses appear to require that a single executable file be distributed under a single license. Licenses based on the Creative Commons Attribution License ("CC-BY") are not intended for software; instead, Creative Commons recommends GNU licenses for software. However, the GNU software licenses are not compatible with any of the Creative Commons licenses. Section 4(a) of the Creative Commons Attribution License versions 2.5 and 3.0 allow a contributor to require that downstream distributors remove the contributor's copyright notice, but the GNU licenses do not allow the removal of copyright notices. Is there a way to solve this without having to track down every single artist on Wikimedia Commons individually and ask them for waivers of this requirement?
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> "it's unfair to take others' free work and glo
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That said, I would tend, if possible, to steer clear of assets that are GPL'd. The concept of GPL'ing a texture or clip just doesn't make a lot of sense, and it indicates the creator either blindly slapped GPL on without thinking, or it "inherited" the lic
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I rather doubt that including a GPL'd asset into a JAR would or could trigger any kind of requirement, since it really is "mere aggregation", as much as packing them into an ISO image for a distribution would be. The JAR *is* the filesystem in your case.
From the GPL:
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Since you are only packing the files into the executable due to hardware limitations this is really no different then a
The safest
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Take Linus Torvales' approach. He simply defined exactly what types of combination he would consider to be aggregations and which wouldn't. If you package everything in a .jar file, then append a clause to the GPL license stating that for the purposes of the GPL, only things in the 'bin' directory are covered.
I have a couple questions about your proposal:
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If my program includes libraries written by other people, do I have authority to do this?
You probably don't (although the Linux and OpenBSD communities are hashing out the details of this even as we speak), but you do have the ability to clarify that your use of GPL or CC licenses in your works does not "contaminate" code or media that were originally issued under some other license. You can read Linus' exact thoughts on the subject here: http://kerneltrap.org/node/1735 [kerneltrap.org]
Practically, how do I manage the case where an author of something in the CC licensed portion of the Collective Work invokes the copyright notice removal clause?
Let's see...
If You create a Collective Work, upon notice from any Licensor You must, to the extent practicable, remove from the Collective Work any credit as required by clause 4(c), as requested. If You create a Derivative Work, upon notice from any Licensor You must, to the extent practicable, remove from the Derivative Work any credit as required by clause 4(c), as requested.
I'd say that you delete the licensor's name from every file that you distribute. If you make old versions ava
Here's what is wrong - sucky tookits (Score:4, Insightful)
these games *DIE* because the developers pick tools that nobody wants to maintain in the long run. Look at irrlamb: written in scons, needs boost. This is bound to die a quick death as a project. Java gaming? maybe, sure it is cross platform, but your app is horribly VM limited and performance will sucky no matter how you tweak. You kill your project and game by choosing the wrong development tools.
frozen-bubble keeps getting revived but in the end is not compileable with newer versions of SDL_perl. A tragedy, but I ain't gonna fix this, even if it won fancy awards.
the better the toolkit, the longer lived the project - look at the old quake engines...
I would donate plenty of money to anyone who picks a sane tookit to develop a 3D MMORPG that *encourages* development (no python, no boost, no java, plain autotools, C, no c++, SDL+GL, gtk+, no wx). Bring it on.
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one of the members insisted that games have crappy art/gfx/snd because the dev-tools suck.. Sorry sofar, I'm pretty clueless, and don't understand: do you want library independence or, the contrary + the game written in high-level?
Whether or not the program is written in a static language compiled to native code, a static language compiled to a virtual machine, or a more dynamic language, has 0 to do with art/gfx/snd. What we need are some design documents for what would constitute good tools to develop art/gfx/snd, beyond just "GIMP and Audacity".
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My ideal toolset is something like OGRE + OpenAL + Bullet or ODE: wrapped up in a small, fast, C++ core with a stable Python API. Lay down some sane code style rules, and you can write the vast majority of a complex game in Pytho
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You can do OO in C++ too, but it takes even more serious discipline than doing OO in C.
-Don
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Really? Then Python is almost as fast as C++. Java 1.5 isn't anywhere near as slow as it was in the 1.1 days. A well-written Java 1.5 program is only about 10% slower than a well-written C++ program.
No argument there. If you choose Java, you basically have to do everything in Java or Java-interpreted script languages. Python with C/C++ libraries looks like a natural
Re:Here's what is wrong - sucky tookits (Score:5, Insightful)
If you for example look at a MMORPGs, we almost had it already back then in seven years ago with WorldForge:Acorn. It might not have been the best looking MMORPG ever, it might have not been the best code base, but it was there and running. In seven years of time you would expect that it would have expanded, got polished and all that stuff. Nope, didn't happen, UClient (the 2D client running Acorn) got ditched and WorldForge seems to be toying around in 3D now. I don't really know and don't really care what they are doing right now. They simply haven't managed to get a game done in all those years even so all the bits and pieces where already there and that is simply sad. They simply don't seem to know what they actually want to accomplish. Know maybe the will come out with a playable game one day, but I kind of have given up hope.
Its really that simple, most people simply prefer to toy around instead of deliver a finished game and most 'teams' are horrible unorganized in that *nobody* knows what they are actually trying to accomplish, everybody is just pulling their strings, all in different directions and going nowhere in the end.
People always say that ideas are cheap and handle them as basically worthless, but from my experience its exactly what the Free Software world lacks. People with good ideas, who know what they want and who have the will to drive a team to accomplish that goal from start to finish.
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In seven years of time you would expect that it would have expanded, got polished and all that stuff. Nope, didn't happen
Amen, brother! Have you ever heard of Todd McFarlane or and Eric Larsen? Back when Image Comics got started, most of the founders preached these grandiose ideas about what they would be doing with their new company. McFarlane stood out by saying that his plan was to get an issue of Spawn out every month, on time, period. And he did. If you look at Image now, only two of the original comics survive, Spawn and Savage Dragon. They were the only ones not plagued by missed schedules and late shipments. W
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I agree completely. Follow through is the single most important thing you can have as a creator, regardless of your medium. In regards to game development, the real trick is finishing a project before you start the next one. It doesn't matter if you have a vision in which the One True Game is laid out before you. Finish your current project, within it's original scope first.
Anyone of a certain level of intelligence can learn to write code. The real test is
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What exactly makes C sane compared to C++ when in comes to game programming?
Not specifically for games programming, but for long-lived toolkits.
.dll)
For example, lets say that we implement a toolkit for NPC behaviour. If we implement it in C we get certain benefits that will not be available with C++:
1. It will be portable to more platforms
2. It can be distributed in binary system libs (.so,
3. It can be used from almost any programming language
For #1 above, sure C++ is almost as portable as C, but C still cannot be beat. For #2, it is certainly possible to ship C++ wri
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You can easi
Re:[AC]Here's what is wrong - sucky tookits (Score:2)
Granted, and such a person would run into problems in any programming language, which is what I was trying to say. The results might not be as insidious, but the problems would still exist.
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1 is a non-issue, really. I've written tons of code (graphics and simulation, OpenGL/C++/STL, plus some open source packages) using a good portion of the STL and haven't run into problems on either Windows or Linux. No #pragma's, no #ifdef WIN32. And you aren't limited by #2 to C funcionality but you have to provide appropriate interfaces to the programming language in question - so yes, if you are talking C, you have to be careful how you construct classes and provide wrappers for templates. You can easily interface with Java, Python, Lua, any .NET language (if that's your cup of tea), and many others. Yes, C can access C++ code and classes if you are a good programmer and (1) careful in the initial coding and (2) provide wrappers for templates. (I've done this before, applying modern c++ libraries to c code almost as old as I am :) )
I'm not even sure where to begin ... Can you provide a small example in C accessing
the following C++ code:
How about accessing class members? Classes with multiple-inheritance, getting the construction/destruction correct? Classes that overide operators? Hell, you cannot even access plain functions (as C++ implementations do rather complex name-mangling) without implementations providing some help, nevermind accessing overloaded f
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1. Portability is simply not an issue here. Which plattform suitable for games does not have a modern c++ compiler (speak: gcc)? Embedded platforms and very old workstation plattforms are really not much of a concern when it comes to games
2. and 3. Yeah well, this are valid concerns if you want to make very general libs. But we were talking about a game - not about a library. And when doing a large project like a mmorpg (which is very large!
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Wait what? You started off good but then you said "no c++". The large majority of the game industry uses c++. I can understand arguments trying to say c is better or some such but certainly c++ is a "sane" choice.
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If all they have is the C language, they can do some damage (stray pointers leading to some heap corruption, spaghetti code etc.), but
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Yup, but Stroustrup also covers the STL.
C++ can be very useful if you have tight control on the project, can enforce interface guidelines, coding style etc. etc. but in an almost "free-for-all" OSS project, it's just too dangerous to use.
Then why do so many open source project use it? OpenSceneGraph, Qt (and virtually all of the gui toolkits),
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Now try a collaborative project, like Crystalspace. I have observed the project for about 5 years, and the C++ induced complexity made me cry.
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My point with Qt is, that, there are many projects using it, despite the fact it was written in c++. KDE, for example.
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I don't write games professionally, but I know a lot of people who do. I can tell you C++ is all over the place, as is boost. In particular, boost provides an implementation of TR1 which you can use on any compiler. Also off the top of my head, Eve (which is almost a 3D MMORPG) uses Python and seems successful for it, so I'm suprised you are so against it.
Also, using plain autotools? I assume you'd want this game to run on windows, seeing as that is th
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there's a native gtk+ implementation for windows, and pretty much any platform
the wx toolkit is extremely unstable. try compiling wx applications on a slightly-different distribution. remember the unicode mess? While the idea of wxwindows was good (portability), the implementation is horrible, and only suitable for binary-form distributions. Anyone doing development (i.e. compile) on Wx will get hung on the spaghetti of build requirements. The latest WxWindows often
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What are you talking about? Haven't you heard that Quake II, written in Java, can run flawlessly on a machine that's a mere 5 times more powerful than the the original required? And any day now we'll have the hardware to run a Java version of Quake III! What more do you want?
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Depends on what you want. The very excellent game Puzzle Pirates [puzzlepirates.com] uses Java Webstart. But if you want the most advanced pixel shading stuff in your game, Java is not for you. Although in that case, perhaps Open Source development isn't for you either.
Yes! Let's ignore 10 years of progress! (Score:2)
Java itself is open source, so you can tweak it if you have a problem.
Besides, this has been discussed to death, and I seem to remember the conclusion is that Java can be fast, and that most of the reasons people don't like it for game development are purely academic. For example, complaining about a "stop-the-world" garbage collector -- I believe newer VMs use a generation