Free Software FPS Games Compared 194
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."
Lies (Score:5, Funny)
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Not in my experience. There are a bunch of CTF maps that are usually full of people.
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There. Fixed it for you.
Re:Lies (Score:4, Informative)
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Yes, about the secrets. I even know the release date of shareware (12/10/1993). I know too much.
It's like the games of yesteryears... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's like the games of yesteryears... (Score:5, Insightful)
Lack of natural selection. If a commercial game's user interface sucks, few people will buy and play it, unless its overly hyped. Reviewers tear apart the game, word of mouth names it a real stinker, it doesn't sale, developer either goes bankrupt or learns from the mistake. Or doesn't - and goes bankrupt, eventually.
Open-source projects don't depend on sales. While this allows for experimental genres and fresh ideas, it also takes away some incentive to polish the product's user interface (bugs OTOH are more likely to be fixed).
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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.
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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.
They Missed (Score:3, Informative)
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WTF, is it free or is it open source? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is free, but I don't think is open source. Maybe it is, it is based on either Q2 or Q3 engine, and Q2 engine is open sourced (or GPLed), maybe Q3 engine is as well.
But anyway, it seems as if the summary equates open source with free and free with open source.
Re:WTF, is it free or is it open source? (Score:5, Insightful)
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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 ano
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W:ET is *not* open source. (Score:3, Informative)
I know it sounds paradoxical but W:ET was never derived from GPL code (in the licensing sense) because id Tech 3 was under a closed license when it was licensed to SD (This may lead to issues with SD/Activision ever being able to relicense the source)
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Urban Terror? (Score:3, Informative)
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Urban Terror = no more bots (Score:2)
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Hell, the bots give more challenge than half the human opponents I play, and since I'm on a REALLY crappy connection since I moved out to California (Fuck you very much, Transedge!) I can't get other human players to join.
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Alternatively, it could just have been left off as it was written before UrT was released as a single (legally ambiguous, IMHO) package.
Slashdotted - No Mirrors up (Score:1)
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About two weeks ago, Joe Barr posted a feature on Linux.com titled "New Alien Arena 6.10 blows away its FPS competition" yet gave no real comparisons with other similar games. This was done in the same style as Barr's previous feature, "Tremulous: The best free software game ever?" which described Tremulous but also lacked comparisons and relations to other games. This feature hopes to be a thorough comparison of the major fr
New Sauerbraten available (Score:2)
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Also the end of the article contains the following note, "Notes: Since the original writing, Sauerbraten has released a new version that has more RPG elements and seems to make progress in being a more full-fledged game. I actually haven't had time to update the article." Perhaps I should have put that under the Sauerbraten secti
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Which you do with any versioning scheme unless you have branches. Date-based versioning doesn't describe branches at all! Also doesn't allow for major and minor versions or for alpha or beta designations, which makes it harder to decide what to install and when to upgrade.
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Somehow, I don't think you did a good job...
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Xinerama (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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There are some titles for Windows that support multiple heads: Flight Simulator X, for example.
X2 supports two monitors, but with the inexplicable requirement that your secondary monitor has to be to the right of the primary, cause they've hardcoded the screen edges for the mouse.
Then there's titles that won't run at all unless you disable one moni
Re:Xinerama (Score:5, Interesting)
Read up on the MetaModes option in xorg.conf.
Mine looks like this:And I can play ET, AA, Tremulous, etc. just fine. The second screen simply goes off when a game requests fullscreen.
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The-Cheap-And-Bored-Dept (Score:2)
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Of course not.
It's stay-happy-news from the whaa-no-new-fps-in-my-xmas-stocking dept.
(...It can get awfully lonely in this basement with no new games to distract me.)
Nexuiz, Alien Arena 2007, WoP (Score:2)
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Alien Arena: This is the first free game that I played that I actually like and would play seriously. The controls are solid and the weapons are well-balanced.
The controls (I include the UI) are only as solid as Quake 2. I normally switch weapons through the mouse wheel since it's hard to memorize the number slots for the weapons across the massive number of FPS games. In Quake 2, you only see the current weapon selection - IIRC, there may have been an icon that showed you which weapon you were switching to.
The one time I tried Alien Arena was the same time I noticed this. After playing Quake 3 and UT, this isn't a feature I can play without. In fact, I coul
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Oh well, at least you didn't try Open Arena.
What about bzflag? (Score:3, Informative)
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maybe they disagree with the 13,300 registered players that like it
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"IRC, where men are men, women are men, and 14-year-old girls are FBI agents."
Sounds like a MMORPG to me.
Three cheers for John Carmack, (Score:5, Interesting)
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 :-/
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They also have some pretty interesting and ahead-of-their-time collaborative, live level editing support.
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dim3 (Score:2)
http://www.klinksoftware.com/ [klinksoftware.com]
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To quote from the site given:
Looks like a cool project, but how well does it compile / run on Linux / Windows?
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Suggest me one... (Score:2)
(having an OSX version would help a lot too)
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FreeQuake [freequake.net], is a singleplayer, story based? well sorry, pretty much shoot them first, but what, you needed a reason?
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Not ready for the mainstream (Score:2)
But seriously, in many ways I'm surprised at the lack of progress in the gaming areas.... the games do look quite mature, but nothing comes close to Crysis. One can argue that, yes, Crysis has huge dollars behind it. But open source games should never need to reinvent the wheel... doesn't that count for something? Shouldn't that mean the games evolve constantly from the same rich base?
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I don't think games lend themselves to evolution very well. Consider the amount of money and time the commercial studios spend building new game engines virtually from scratch. Game engines tend to be engineered around specifics of gameplay, and while you can modify an engine to suit your particular game, it becomes increasingly difficult to integrate updates to the core engine. And an engine that's even just two or three years old results in a game that looks and feels decidedly dated.
The real problem th
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or alternatively accompanied by the HUGE disappointment about another overhyped game failing.
Just really look at the meat thats been shown about spore, and ignore the talk (which is all bullshit): A series of nearly unreleated minigames, where your great design of the species doesnt play any kind of role besides being cosmetic.
RTS (Score:2)
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Then Warzone 2100 (Resurrection) [wz2100.net], a revival of a great commercial RTS game that was Freed a few years ago.
Bos Wars [boswars.org] is by far the best and most polished of all the games based on the Stratagus [sourceforge.net](formerly FreeCraft) engine, but
Also, Globulation 2 [globulation2.org] is pretty fun, if a bit less deep than the others in terms of strategic options.
Finally, Glest [glest.org] is a fun from-scratch fantasy RTS game, not as polished as t
where is the innovation? (Score:2)
Few days ago (Score:2)
Surprisingly it runs on Linux and FreeBSD
and only 100MB in size.
Well (Score:2)
And still no AI.. (Score:2)
Why make FOSS FPSes? (Score:2)
It might sound like a troll, or my question might answer itself, but why bother with trying to create FOSS FPSes, considered how high the big game studios set the bar in the FPS domain? Sure, the effort behind Sauerbrauten is admirable, but what does it bring? What sets it apart from the Quake, Unreal, Call of Duty, Half-Life, Deux Ex, Soldier of Fortune series? Its price?
Here's my point : we have limited means, limited resources, there's only so much quality content we can create, FAR less than big game st
quake 2/3 cloens (Score:2)
The engine has enough stuff in it that it can bring my 3Ghz Core 2 Duo to it's knees, though.. but the art pipeline isn't near good enough to make it look like it should be doing that.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
myminicity 'spam' - off-topic (Score:3, Informative)
Good luck finding rules on where a 'player' is allowed to post the URL(s). Even more luck to you finding a 'report abuse' page or contact address. Good luck getting any response whatsoever from co
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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]
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I think that's a little unfair to say when most retail games have multi-million dollar budgets and these games are made by volunteers.
I can't guess as to whether you went to college or not, but most colleges have a competitive formula SAE team [wikipedia.org]. The team is made up entirely of volunteers, and some of the primary goals for being in such a project is to learn more about what goes into building a functional vehicle and for sheer fun -- it's
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Err no
I wish that wasn't true but it is. I'm a FOSS game developer, this month a saw a musician advertise himself on one FOSS gaming site and he was asked by at least three different projects to work for them. Programmers outnumber artist something like 10-1 or 100-1. Most of them are not Geeks or Nerds like us programmers who spend our life on the Internet. They seem to be in different communities and speak in different groups to us. Not to say we don't get along with them they are just not like us. Also
Re:Fun, but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Level design is also a REALLY tedious process. Making a good level requires replaying the level over and over slightly tweaking things to get them just right. It gets old fast, and you get really sick of the level in the process. And of course you have to deal with the issues that come up from playing the level that many times. It's very easy to memorize the level you're working on, and end up making the level way too difficult because of that.
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Oh, wait...
Re:Fun, but.... (Score:4, Funny)
Saying OpenArena "would be considered pretty good...in 1996" is like saying the SR-71 Blackbird would be considered "pretty good" in 1935.
It's such a ridiculous understatement that the only possible explanation is that you're British.
Interesting, but... (Score:3, Funny)
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Unfortunately, the same can be said of most modern commercial games as well. They've all turned into insanely expensive incremental updates on the same game play. Game companies need one of three things (and possibly all three):
1) An innovative new gaming genre along the lines of the switch from 2D to 3D. I'm not holding my breath here. Nintendo has come closest to this with the Wii controller, but this was a glancing blow, and won't las
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Sauerbraten has a custom engine.
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Great game. Just finished a round right now. Best game I've played in *years*
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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
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This isn't as much of a problem as it might seem. You can always just save money for a round, that will give you enough money to buy pretty much anything.
A bigger problem with CS is that some maps are clearly stacked in favour of one team (eg dust is a major CT map).
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Mods on crack? (Score:2)
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Mind you this was a few years back; I don't know how much has changed in that time. But NS to me took the concept of twitch reflexes to such an extreme that it was completely unenjoyable. I just read on the Tremulous forums about how their recommendation is that your mouse sensitivity should be set up so that you can do a full 240 degree spin with a single hand swipe. My god I
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The first one has a butt-ugly creature in front of Gray Plastic Tunnels (tM). The second one had the worlds edgeiest curve and gray in gray.
Looks like quake 1 in high-res...
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http://sauerbraten.sourceforge.net/newerer/screenshot_96727.jpg [sourceforge.net]
http://sauerbraten.sourceforge.net/newerer/screenshot_1931460.jpg [sourceforge.net]
http://sauerbraten.sourceforge.net/newer/screenshot_732727.jpg [sourceforge.net]
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My main wish is that the Galaxy game browser could sort servers based on the number of real players. It's annoying as hell selecting each game of 4+ "players" to see that all but one of them have 0 ping.