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

[Mailaender]

Doesn't that beg the questions: why develop Windows-only tools for a multiplatform game/engine in the first place?

The Command & Conquer modding community only had their ancient unmaintained proprietary game engines and stuck with it so their toolings while advanced back in the days are stuck in the Object Pascal and SVN era http://www.ppmsite.com/?go=shpbuilderinfo&classic=true

OpenRA started out as a re-implementation or open source game clone and it has only been a few months since support for later games of the series like Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 started to mature.

[anda_skoa]

A few reasons, the first is the level editor was Windows only, along with most of the other tools and Freespace 2 started life as closed source.

Ah, I see

The Command & Conquer modding community only had their ancient unmaintained proprietary game engines and stuck with it so their toolings while advanced back in the days are stuck in the Object Pascal and SVN era http://www.ppmsite.com/?go=shpbuilderinfo&classic=true

Too bad, but that least it explains this disconnect.

OpenRA started out as a re-implementation or open source game clone and it has only been a few months since support for later games of the series like Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 started to mature.

Ooooh!
I am a great fan of OpenRA but I was always missing RA2. Very nice!

Cheers,
_

[Dragonlord]

What a carp-shit articles is that again... oh yeah... it's "him" writing it, that's explaining all. If you look only at ego-shooters and complain about open/free software games you are off the mark quite a bit. The interesting part there is "outside" ego-shooters but that's a field Micheal doesn't know about anyways. Just because it is not included your your "apt-get" or "emerge" or whatever doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Besides the main problem is the community (like this one here) not the indie devs.

Now just something about this wrong comments from the last page about "artist agnostic" or "programmer friendly". These so called "artist" based projects are crap. Graphics are all nice and dandy but if you have only graphics and your code/script sucks (aka "no" interesting game mechanics, interaction, AI or story) then this is worthless. Code ability comes before artist ability. Without a solid base your artist work is useless. Unfortunately majority of projects today are artists projects copy pasting lame unity sample scripts (not that you could do much more of value there anyways) enriched with Graphics that are so boring and lame people start to equal indie game deving with lame artist projects.

[DMJC]

Dragonlord, I suggest you go look up SEXP programming and how FRED 2 works before making uninformed comments about the programming process from an artist perspective. You can write all the C++/Python mission scripts you want but a game will still have a shit story if it's just random encounters with no depth to the plot. I've done all the background work in C/C++/OpenGL/SDL as well as learning 3d studio max, maya, caligari truespace, gimp, photoshop, krita etc. Without the art tools these projects die. Mostly it's not even the lack of art as in graphics that kills these projects. It's the lack of Art as in story writing and mission creation that kills it. A Freespace 2 mission editor artist doesn't need to know #include <stdio.h> int A; etc etc to make a level. They just need a very basic if/else/while knowledge to script certain timed events, as well as howto click on the screen to add a ship to the level. The game's AI takes care of the rest.

The learning curve for editing on most open source games is insane to expect the average person to understand/learn. Most open source games already have decent programming in them, but the lack of level creation tools is killing them.

Look at Neverwinter nights, on Linux, you couldn't run the Aurora toolkit for it, so it basically died as a game. (Yes it was closed source, Xoreos is actually fixing this, albeit 10 years after the game's servers went cold.)

Tux: A Quest for Herring (3d mario style platformer): Almost impossible to edit, again abandoned.
There's a lot of games like this, great concepts good code (mostly) but noone can create new content without an intimate source-code level knowledge so the games just wither and die. Without new levels or new stories being added over what the programmer/creator can or would make.

[blackiwid]

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.

yes that was one of the reasons I quit playing true combat elite, it was absurd the game itself so the 1000 times bigger IP was opensource but the mod was closed source. The cracy thing is they earned never 1 Cent of it, and will never, except maybe 1 2 banners on their website, but it had big big disadvantages and no advantage to not opensource it.

1. it was impossible for others to port it to another game/engine-base
2. there wer bugs forever that never got fixed, because the 1 or 2 devs that had source access did not care or had no time for it.
3. the development was very slow, over years nothing changed.
4. of course integration of propriatary software that was very popular under linux because the base game was opensource at some point, and at least working under linux before that, was less good than a opensource game would have been.

[blackiwid]

The #1 problem of open sourced games is, that you can't get enough devs. Nobody is getting paid, so finding free time is difficult.
Most only have 1-3 people...the lucky ones have more.

you have some wrong ideas of opensource, yes most opensource games till now dont want your money, but you can sell em and you can forbit/sue people for "piracy" if they upload and download the whole playable game with the artwork. Quake 4 as example got opensourced, but you cannot download legaly the whole game from any website.

So there is nothing that hinders you to develop a big big "AAA" Game and release it as opensource and sell it like every other proprietary game. The only small advantage proprietary games have is that you cant put in hard DRM like in starcraft, but even that get pirated if the interest is high enough, look at the free Wow servers.

Especialy for games that are not 99% multiplayer focused with focus on the story/artwork/content, opensource is no limitation in selling copies, in the opposite, it would be a big point in the featurlist, the mod community would explode and you would sell MORE copies.

Heck I would not even wonder much, when Valve would release HL3 under GPL. that would be good promotion for linux, and they would loose nothing. I guess the engine itself would maybe the bigger problem if you want to sell that.

[Space Beer]

I would just like to mention one new opensource game, built on opensource engine - Limit load

http://www.limitload.org

[blackiwid]

In an open source project, everyone would know everything about everything in the game world before even starting playing, which would essentially kill any interest in the game.

Sorry I cant see here your point, each game these days are complete walkthrough in 24 hours or so on youtube, if you want to take the suprise from you spoilers are availible for every proprietary game, too.

[oibaf]

Well, I think the value in open source gaming is in fact keeping old titles working. Look here for a list of examples that make sense.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catego...le_source_code

Some wikipedians should update this page, a lot of games are missing.

[blackiwid]

Open Source gaming sucks because Linux/Open Source programmers won't make tools to edit their games, they are too busy trying to cram new lighting models and algorithmic features into their highly derivative engines rather than making tools to let people tell stories. Making games is about telling stories using computers, the more accessible you make the storytelling to laypeople, the more games/content/contributors to Open Source games we will get. /RANT OVER

Even one tool you mentioned is blender with its own engine that goes in the direction you are asking, I agree to a certain extend to your point.

But on the other side, what have we on commercial games 99% bad or more or less the same story telling bad games for windows. So in general less games with bigger modding communities I would like more. this mass production for windows lead to garbage quality, like you get cheap mass china production in big masses but you dont get quality out of it.

And the few real pearl somehow dont happen, ok mirrors edge 2 will come, but late, but prey 2 as example as one of the most wanted games for me ever, did get canceled. instead wie hav 15 fiva 85 games.