XreaL: The Most Advanced Open-Source Game Engine?

[deanjo]

Yeah, isnt it ironic that most artists, who should be the "out-of-the-box" thinkers, side most of the time with the old, trite, closed-source, look but dont touch, business model from the old music/movies industry pioneered in 1966? And OTOH, most programmers, more techincally oriented, tend to prefer a freer model.

I don't think it's ironic at all. Many of those artists went to school and need income to pay for their tools and to make a living. Gotta put food on the table after all. It's not like there are a great number of employers that say "we want to to create creative content and put it out for the masses and we will pay you to do it."

[xav1r]

I don't think it's ironic at all. Many of those artists went to school and need income to pay for their tools and to make a living. Gotta put food on the table after all. It's not like there are a great number of employers that say "we want to to create creative content and put it out for the masses and we will pay you to do it."

Dont the open source developers need income to pay for their tools, make a living, and put food on the table after all? I dont think theyre all living off charity. Why cant free-software / open source business model apply to the creative content making workers? Something like the Creative Commons. Dont all artists know the internet, and webbrowsing? In the CC site, there are examples of musicians that put their songs there, and give freedom to anyone to remix their songs and put them under a similar CC license. Why can't most game asset artists do that too?

[Dragonlord]

Well, I've talked with tr3b, the main developer (the only one too) of Xreal, and from what he told me, Xreal has native support for md5 model format, has superior graphical quality than doom3 had, and has much less overhead than quake4-doom3 had, among its features. One of their biggest problems with showing off Xreal's features is precisely because they need good quality art assets to be able to display their engine's awesomeness.

So your "awesomeness" and "l33t-er than all others" is only in the graphics department? Great to see another engine focusing only on graphics and forgetting anything else. Glad I'm not one of those and am interested in "real" next generation development which try to push things forward instead of stagnating on graphics only.

Funny though how that graphics ( and I mean the renderer _not_ the artwork ) isn't that awesome after all. I've seen much better and more advanced ( BGE for example ) than that. Somebody needs to look around a bit it looks like

[xav1r]

So your "awesomeness" and "l33t-er than all others" is only in the graphics department? Great to see another engine focusing only on graphics and forgetting anything else. Glad I'm not one of those and am interested in "real" next generation development which try to push things forward instead of stagnating on graphics only.

Funny though how that graphics ( and I mean the renderer _not_ the artwork ) isn't that awesome after all. I've seen much better and more advanced ( BGE for example ) than that. Somebody needs to look around a bit it looks like

WEll, tr3b is mostly a technical guy, and he's about the only person working on Xreal, so I suppose its focused mostly on graphical l33t-ness. I dont think he would be against it if someone would step in and work on the creative side of it, nonetheless.

[deanjo]

Dont the open source developers need income to pay for their tools, make a living, and put food on the table after all? I dont think theyre all living off charity. Why cant free-software / open source business model apply to the creative content making workers? Something like the Creative Commons. Dont all artists know the internet, and webbrowsing? In the CC site, there are examples of musicians that put their songs there, and give freedom to anyone to remix their songs and put them under a similar CC license. Why can't most game asset artists do that too?

Sure they do, but I bet for every 1000 opensource developer employers there is 1 creative works employer, if that. While code can be used in various forms across various projects, creative assets can usually be only used once in a profitable form. Like it or not, profitable opensource development is usually powered by corporations. Starving artists went out with the 60's and early 70's, along with flower power, free love and Nixon.

[Duo Maxwell]

The main problem is that most artists "don't get" opensource, and in particular they especially "don't get" working for free, their idea of success centers on getting a paying job at a studio, so they only look at free projects as a possible stepping stone to a studio job, and tend to ignore them even for that.

Not all artists are that way, but the vast majority are.

So other than MMOs (where the product is really the service and the content could be free software) I don't think we'll see that happen on any big scale - and I wouldn't hold my breath for any MMOs doing that.

I didn't say anything about mmos, we can't even get something like a final fantasy, breath of fire, chrono trigger, star ocean, style single player rpg.

How about a game engine based on Never Winter Nights where we can have an easy to use model maker to make our own small games and upload them to a central site. This would of corse have t e made simple enough for anyone to be able to pick up and use since the most artistic people may not have the highest level of technical skill.

I'm not much of an RPG player, but have you seen Planeshift?
That looks like a pretty good open source MMORPG project.

Planeshift is an unplayable turd, or at least it was the last 3 times I tried to play it. The few other players are never any help in getting any clue as to where and what you're supposed to be doing.

What I don't get is why an open source group can't pull off a game while a small team of 8 are able to pull together a free to play mmo for windows and linux thats in multiple languages. I'm talking about Regnum Online. Sure the story is spotty and the english is a bit brken, but it there and the game is quite playable, if a little boring due to the amount of grinding you have to do in order to hold your own in PvP combat.

There is a way to make money off of open source games, source the engine code but hold the art and charge for that much at least. I.E. get a decent mmorpg story writen and charge $5 a month for it to pay for servers and full time devs and artists, invite the players to donate bits of content under creative commons if you mut to further extend the game.

[deanjo]

There is a way to make money off of open source games, source the engine code but hold the art and charge for that much at least.

I've been saying that for years, engine is free, creative content is on a pay basis.

[Duo Maxwell]

I've been saying that for years, engine is free, creative content is on a pay basis.

I'm wondering if the fsf is planning on trying to buy another game ala Ryzom, maybe they'll get lucky this time around instead of getting outbid.

But really, we need an engine and tools system for a way for the community to build it's own games. make an updated version of Neverwinter nights, an updated version of the 2d fighter maker maker Mugen, a 3d version of the same would also be nice. Write it all to be completely portable and release it all to much fanfare on all platforms on all the gaming sites and /. type news sites you can find to get as many people playing as possible.

It's really not that hard people, just have a little imagination. Go play Metal Gear Solid 3 or 4, tom clancy's rainbow 6 vegas and stalker shadow of Chernobyl if you want to make an fps game, see that you don't have to just rush around in an arena trying to get frags.


here take a look http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyMEjwz_qT0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNRqwZU918Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P18CLNaJ3Q

Open source games don't need to be of that quality and detail, at last not any time soon, but the devs should really be playing these types of games to learn about what the current game mechanics are headed towards. the old I can run and jump like a gazelle while carrying 3 tons of gun ad ammo while taking more hits to kill then a naval destroyer isn't all that fun anymore, especially since that type of game has literally been done to death.

It' still the same old run and shoot it was 15 years ago, just with better graphics. These days gamers want to be more stealthy and put in immersive worlds that can scare the shit to of you.

[xav1r]

Starving artists went out with the 60's and early 70's, along with flower power, free love and Nixon.

That sentence made my day.

While all evidence seems to point to that view, I don't believe that the only way for creative works artists can only follow a stricly closed, old-style music/movie industry format. The biggest example i can think of is the Creative Commons, true, most of whats there isnt really known beyond the online world, but, you know, maybe there IS a market that's more vibrant, dynamic and wanting to spend $$$ from the likes of Digg, del.i.cio.us, msn spaces, and the blogs of the planet. Does every work of art have to be on late night news, and on the supermarket magazine ad space?

[dmj726]

I have been observing and considering the state of native games on linux for some time. Here are a few observations I've made along with a list of ideas I have that might be helpful.
Observations

1. There are few native commercial or commercial equivalent games for Linux.
2. Most of the open source games for linux *look* old. They might be good, fun games, but the archaic graphics give a bad first impression.
3. Most of the quality games for Linux are also available for Windows and other platforms. Most platforms concentrate a great deal on "exclusive titles." When Loki went out of business, they said that porting was the worng strategy: Loki's Draeker: If I had to do it over, I'd create Linux native games
4. Some Linux games manage to get a good community going, but there are many evolutionary dead ends in open source gaming. This is no different from the proprietary world, but the proprietary world has managed to compensate for it through various techniques for managing risk and maximizing profit on the successful titles.
5. Most titles are very niche specific and often attempt to create an equivalent of an existing proprietary game on another platform
6. A lot of games have less than AAA quality artwork, which often looks like an afterthought.

Thoughts and a possible solution
Open source excels in creating quality software that fulfills a general purpose. Linux is not an operating system for a specific computer or purpose. It is a general operating system that is more or less easily tailored to a given environment or purpose. It also evolves over time rather than being replaced with the "next generation" OS. Open source is about not needing to reinvent the wheel (even though we do that a lot). Game engines are like Linux if they can become many different things and can evolve over time. We already have the source to engines that are specific to FPS games, which also happen to be popular amongst gamers at large, so open source developers make Quake clones.
What open source needs is a general engine with good level editing/scripting tools. This would serve as the basis for open source games in different genres. By using a common engine, the basic rendering infrastructure and so forth wouldn't need to be reinvented for every project.
There would need to be one or two games that act as flagship projects using this image, much in the same way linux did in the early days of "Open Source" (ala 1998). The projects themselves would need to be of high quality but carefully designed to be small enough in scope and make maximum use of the code and assets created for them. They would also need to offer something new, not a gimmick, or some little gameplay element, but something that hasn't been done before and that plays to the strengths of the open source process.
In addition, these projects should accumulate a number of art assets and gameplay funtionality that future projects can use with the engine.
Basically, OSS needs to jump start a network effect. Network effects and the lack therof have been limiting linux gaming for years. Hopefully we can use open source its advantages to jump start the process.
I have some more specific thoughts on how one would accomplish this if anyone is interested.