XreaL: The Most Advanced Open-Source Game Engine?

[Dragonlord]

@Duo Maxwell:
It's not as easy as you think. I know this from my own experience. Freelancers ( and this are all people not on a payroll ) are to a large degree lazy bums. I have met a couple of people which could do something of quality but suddenly they disappear either with some lame excuse or no excuse at all. Most freelancers lack the fucking will and butt to sit a project through to the end and that's the major problem: no fucking strong will! That's the main problem. What people can do quickly is moaning about something not existing but when it gets down to actually _do_ something about it they just pull in their tail and try to stay as far away as possible from the those actually doing something. That's unfortunately the reality right now.

[matti3]

I don't want to burst your bubble but do you consider those generic-FPS-run-of-the-mill-quake-clone-using-ioquake-or-whatever "good"? I don't and that's not what helps Linux gaming. In contrary it kills it off since people perceive Linux then just as a copy-cat but with poor quality compared to serious titles.

I consider both Tremulous and Urban Terror to be quite good. Especially addictive

[Starclopsofish]

The BGE

Has anyone taken a look at the Blender Game Engine lately? It's seen massive improvments in the past year, and now a company is optimizing and improving it with the intention to lauch a big budget multiplatform title using the engine.

Big advantages here is that this engine is intimately integrated with the premier open source 3D application, making art creation trivial. There are (likely) a massive number of Blender artists willing to participate in free projects like this on the forums.

Here's a link to the thread:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=152782

[Svartalf]

The way I see it, multi-platform versions will always cannibalize single-platform versions, but seem easier to sell to the dual-boot crowd.

How do you correlate your position with iD's or up until recently Epics or Bioware's position on this matter. They didn't cannibalize ANYTHING and they made things cross-platform.

The only time you cannibalize things is when the people can't wait and they have an option to go get a differing platform's version and drop the native binaries on the result- and there's a publisher trying to make money off of the product and support angle of things; about like what happened to Loki with Q3:A (Loki botched a few things and delayed by 3 weeks the ship date (the silly metal tins they were going to box all the units in were locked up in customs...funny that...) and nobody in the Linux community (Save for the approximately 200 that bought on non-closeout...myself included...) waited to get the LINUX version of the thing- they went and bought the Windows SKU and "patched" it.

And now people wonder why iD won't make any more officially published titles for us...

I think fundamentally the dual-boot crowd are the problem in the equation.

I don't know if they're the problem, but they're definitely a part thereof.

[Svartalf]

@Duo Maxwell:
It's not as easy as you think. I know this from my own experience. Freelancers ( and this are all people not on a payroll ) are to a large degree lazy bums. I have met a couple of people which could do something of quality but suddenly they disappear either with some lame excuse or no excuse at all. Most freelancers lack the fucking will and butt to sit a project through to the end and that's the major problem: no fucking strong will! That's the main problem. What people can do quickly is moaning about something not existing but when it gets down to actually _do_ something about it they just pull in their tail and try to stay as far away as possible from the those actually doing something. That's unfortunately the reality right now.

<*Chortle*>

I wouldn't quite so far as describe the situation that way (But only because I'm trying to be diplomatic... )- but it's dead on what you just said there. You sure you're not channeling some of my regular angst on the subject there, Dragonlord?

[Dragonlord]

<*Chortle*>

I wouldn't quite so far as describe the situation that way (But only because I'm trying to be diplomatic... )- but it's dead on what you just said there. You sure you're not channeling some of my regular angst on the subject there, Dragonlord?

Hehe... I don't wield for no reason the user title "Linux-Dragon of quick wit and sharp tongue" ( and that was not my idea... a friendly admin gave it to me once upon time :P ). I tend to name things the way they are. Doesn't net me many friends but it's not the friendship whores that change the world but those with ambition.

[dmj726]

<*Chortle*>

I wouldn't quite so far as describe the situation that way (But only because I'm trying to be diplomatic... )- but it's dead on what you just said there. You sure you're not channeling some of my regular angst on the subject there, Dragonlord?

I'm not sure we would need all or even a significant portion of the "freelance" crowd. Open source software has tons of "free riders" and still works well. A few dozen dedicated people is worth far more than a thousand people who just whine (or WINE) all day. Granted, there are far too many of the latter, but let the group self-select the ones who are dedicated. After all, the latter would at least constitute an audience!

Of course, I would fall into the W(h)INE(r) category if I don't put my money where my mouth is and put theory into practice.

[Aradreth]

I'm not sure we would need all or even a significant portion of the "freelance" crowd. Open source software has tons of "free riders" and still works well.

Most open source software are either relatively small projects or sponsored by companies, games are slightly different as they are a massive project and have very little incentive for companies to back them. Now developers and artists still need to earn a living so will only be able to spend their free time working on the project but a lot of that time they probably want to spend on something else like with friends or family (not to mention you come home from coding to do yet more coding) so progress will be very slow. This in turn often makes people give up as they don't think it'll ever be complete so isn't worth wasting time on, and so on and so forth.

[deanjo]

This in turn often makes people give up as they don't think it'll ever be complete so isn't worth wasting time on, and so on and so forth.

In all fairness a lot of the time the projects do just die and never are complete. Just a few for example:

http://freegamer.blogspot.com/2009/03/top-10-projects-to-revive.html

[BlueKoala]

Is it because Open Source is only appealing on a large scale to the purely technical types -- the people who are more interested in code and optimizations and graphics pipelines than they are in artistry and immersion

How many artists do you know that use a Linux based operating system?

I've noticed that a lot if open source games seem to revolve around implementing features; making actual games a secondary goal.
I really don't see it as being a problem if everyone can benefit from it.

I think one thing that is missing in a lot of these projects is a good level editor and the likes. I say that from the amazing mods that are found out there in the commercial domain made by the contributing community.

I think Deanjo is really onto something. If tools were more readily available and easier to use, I bet more artists would be interested in participating. Hence having more original content as gameplay, graphic design, plot etc... to go with the technical content.