Are Open-Source Games & Community Game Engines Fading Away?

[Kraftwerk]

Dead ? nah OGRE and Irrlicht are still healthy and alive, Crystal Space was ALWAYS kinda dead, Tesseract, Xonotic etc. move onward slow but it moves, im kinda sad no one ever cared to pimp id Tech 4 but here comes Unity, Unreal Engine and Cry Engine into play. They offer more or less proper Linux support and are very effordable for hobby game devs and indies why bother to make something complicated as a 3D engine from the scratch ?

[madjr]

I ONLY lost interest in many of these games, because none want to be on STEAM by default. I like everything to be nicely integrated, specially now that I have a STEAM CONTROLLER.

Teeworlds has many positive reviews on steam:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/380840/

many open source games that were on DESURA should make the jump.

I know I could potentially add them as Non steam games, but I just not into the hassle anymore of installing stuff or creating shortcuts manually.

If its not on the Software center or Steam I just don't bother much.

[robclark]

Phoronix: Are Open-Source Games & Community Game Engines Fading Away?

Is it just me or are open-source games faltering? While open-source, community-based games really aren't mainstream and really never took off, it seems these days there's a lack of good open-source games more so than in past years as well as diminishing open-source game engine projects...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...Game-Faltering

you did miss (as I think was pointed out in other comments) supertuxkart.. and probably some others..

I will say, as a mesa dev, open source games are quite nice for debugging/testing driver, I suppose in the same way that the open source drivers offer benefit to the engine/game devs. Maybe less of an issue for the mesa dev's associated w/ intel/amd, I suppose they have better access to the closed game devs.. I can't really say. But either way, I think it is important that along side a healthy open src gpu driver community, we have a healthy open src game community. So please support the FOSS game devs :-)

[oibaf]

Widelands and Unknown Horizons are other interesting RTS games.

And 0 A.D. has an OpenGL 4 branch: https://github.com/Yves-G/0ad/tree/OGL4

[Luke_Wolf]

Well, the problem at the end of the day is really this: the gaming scene doesn't have any sort of open source culture to it and never has. The mod scene all by itself disproves most of the comments here positing about capacity to do so. So while there's plenty of time, interest, and talent being poured into games and mods that are being given away for free, nobody is open sourcing any of it. That said I don't think there's anything to really worry about on this front because the ecosystem as a whole is becoming more open not less.

[oibaf]

Also don't forget ScummVM and ResidualVM interpreters, the latter manages some 3D games.

[L_A_G]

My personal guess is that it's a combination of two things.

First of all with all the new additions to API's and changes that require quite a lot of re-writing to take advantage of, people who work on open source graphics engines simply don't have the time to fully take advantage of them. Second of all would then be the much nicer licensing of big proprietary engines like UE (which has gone completely open source apart from console specific parts that are protected by said consoles' development licenses) have become a lot more friendly towards hobbyists. They now all have free editions and licensing deals that are ether based on a cheap subscription (Unity and CryEngine) or profit sharing (UE) rather than a big up front payment of several thousand dollars per workstation.

[F1esDgSdUTYpm0iy]

This article is a bit of a clickbait; the title is somewhat sensationalist. Regardless, I would hardly make a claim such as the one made by said article; fact of the matter is, community driven content is, if anything, becoming the norm more than it is the exception. Minecraft being a prime example. And very few commercial titles released these days do not support community created mods of any kind.

Regarding open-source engines -- There is a range of open source engines available as of today, not all of which useable obviously but then again, there are also commercial engines which are hampered by issues (Heroes of the Storm, which uses Unity, performs piss poor for me in Wine whereas Diablo III, another Blizzard title and far more complicated a title performs substantially better).

So, no, I don't really agree with the assessment that they are fading away. They could however both (open source games/engines and community driven games) be in a better shape. Then again, I would actually say that about gaming in general; most of my personal top 10 favourite titles were released 10 or more years ago and no, I am not being nostalgic, just being critical.

[peppercats]

I'd go as far to say that modern video game engines are one of the most complex pieces of software in existence and it's not surprising that no good open source ones exist when there's no real driving effort behind it. A good open source engine would need the management and developer numbers of the linux kernel in order to be competitive. I'm saying this as someone who has worked on in-house game engines(mostly optimizations, albeit its been a few years now,) and as someone who wrote a paper about the massive scale and complexity of modern video game engines.

Dead ? nah OGRE and Irrlicht are still healthy and alive, Crystal Space was ALWAYS kinda dead, Tesseract, Xonotic etc. move onward slow but it moves, im kinda sad no one ever cared to pimp id Tech 4 but here comes Unity, Unreal Engine and Cry Engine into play. They offer more or less proper Linux support and are very effordable for hobby game devs and indies why bother to make something complicated as a 3D engine from the scratch ?

OGRE and Irrlicht are not video game engines, they're merely rendering engines and still massive pieces of software.

[curaga]

There is little point in having a game be open source. As a developer, there are no reasons why I should create an OSS game. It does not increase sales, it does not bring me fame, fortune, and groupies, it doesn't affect the userbase in any non-marginal way. Yes, the game may get a port to $neverheard_platform in ten years, but that doesn't really warm my heart. Neither do I care about making more learning material, when the web is full of it already.

(empty quote to work around vbulletin eating linebreaks)

And I speak as someone who runs Free Software exclusively. Someone posted about how stories are unsuitable for OSS games, and I agree wholeheartedly. A good game needs a story, which is art only usable once. No iterations by patches, and especially no incoherence by multiple cooks.

_

As a gamer, I wouldn't gain anything by having the source to a good, story-based game. Once I've experienced it, I have no need to do so again, change it, port it, or whatever. If there is a bug, then the experience is ruined, and I'd have little motivation in hunting and fixing the bug; that's not why I play. So the ability to fix a bug is also pointless wrt story games.

Dead ? nah OGRE and Irrlicht are still healthy and alive

Eh, irr is pretty much pining for the fjords. Two semiactive devs who have time for it maybe one weekend a month. A couple active forum members including yours truly. One project posting monthly screenshots, BaW, which is incidentally closed source and has active funding.