A Battle For Good Open-Source Game Graphics?

[L33F3R]

I guess this is a few pages back at this point, but have you played with TORCS at all?

played it, respect it, but dont particularly like it. Hardly considered realistic and very oldschool as far as artwork.

[Wyatt]

all these good engines. But they all FPS . this isn't a bad thing but I haven't played a realistic racing game on linux without wine.

I guess this is a few pages back at this point, but have you played with TORCS at all?

[L33F3R]

I'm not a coder and I lead OpenArena (The leader = coder requirement is a farce). I only submitted a few .patch files towards OpenArena's code. Though right now OA has only one 3d artist - and that is me. And that sucks because i've been lacking a lot of free time lately You see Free time makes the OSS world go round unless you're corporately sponsored with funding, which I don't intend to get since no monetary amount will give me 8 hours of blender fun daily.

Unfortunately the hobbyist artist scene has minimized itself to HL2 mods, UT2k4 mods (even less so) and 2d pixel art for indie hipster games. The bustling period of generous art help has ended a long time ago (2003, when Tremulous, Urban Terror and World of Padman were well far into asset production). Or they got jobs. In this economy spare time can't be spared, so don't blame them.

wth only 1? why didn't you invite good ole l33f3r to the scene?

[leilei]

I'm not a coder and I lead OpenArena (The leader = coder requirement is a farce). I only submitted a few .patch files towards OpenArena's code. Though right now OA has only one 3d artist - and that is me. And that sucks because i've been lacking a lot of free time lately You see Free time makes the OSS world go round unless you're corporately sponsored with funding, which I don't intend to get since no monetary amount will give me 8 hours of blender fun daily.

Unfortunately the hobbyist artist scene has minimized itself to HL2 mods, UT2k4 mods (even less so) and 2d pixel art for indie hipster games. The bustling period of generous art help has ended a long time ago (2003, when Tremulous, Urban Terror and World of Padman were well far into asset production). Or they got jobs. In this economy spare time can't be spared, so don't blame them.

[0.1.]

Using free assets isnt a choice, first because each game design is almost unique, perhaps I handle switching items/clothes in a different way that Scourge, for example

This is why free licenses allow modification Artists can adapt to suit needs, and modify to give uniqueness.
The purpose of my post was to encourage artists to contribute to free licensed art, not to say they were already usable as final products in your game

[L33F3R]

The bulk of them didn't leave their roots or deviated from the munchkinesque (a' la the D&D or Steve Jackson Games concept for the term...) stuff we keep seeing.

true say.

Xreal engine looks positively positive if i might say so. I think its about time i played with it

[mirv]

We're happy little vegemites as bright as bright can be...
(what I always say when people start getting riled up).

Anyway, I agree with a lot that many of the open source engines are very geared towards coders rather than artists, and this is something I realised some years back. That's why in my own hobby pet project, I'm creating an editor in tandem with an engine (at the moment its more of a playground for ideas). I'm also not interested in designing anything that's been done and so actually started playing with unique terrain texture ideas before I heard of etqw. It's been in a workable state for some time now, but is a pain to create content for (which is why I've moved back to making the tools for it again). Unfortunately, in the past when I've mentioned the word "tools" people think that it's a solved problem, and any can be used so just make an engine. That's not the best way to allow others to make content for it.
I also heartily agree with what Irritant said earlier in that game code != engine code. Just look at what people have done with the Unreal engine, and from the Quake2 engine.

And in regard to an example use of something I said earlier - Dragonlord, don't dismiss something you haven't seen

[Svartalf]

< Because coders are not very creative. >

That's not QUITE what I was going for- truth of the matter is, many coders aren't all that creative in the artistic or game design sense of the word.

If you think for a longish moment about the following remarks you made:

But it seems that FOSS games are for the most part, quake 3 deathmatch clones with similar weapons. The ones are original used to be mods (with few exceptions). Something has got to correlate with this bombardment of shoot the bot with the rocket launcher style fps games.

I think you'll find that there's a correlation- and while the original ones were mods, they found something different, and went in novel ways with differing weapons, gameplay, etc. The bulk of them didn't leave their roots or deviated from the munchkinesque (a' la the D&D or Steve Jackson Games concept for the term...) stuff we keep seeing.

[L33F3R]

It's because many, if not most, of the FOSS FPS game making crowd aren't really innovative. You're not one of them, and complaints about "yet another FOSS FPS" are not reflective of YOUR endeavors- and shouldn't be taken that way.

< Because coders are not very creative. >

That statement as we know it would be far from true. But it seems that FOSS games are for the most part, quake 3 deathmatch clones with similar weapons. The ones are original used to be mods (with few exceptions). Something has got to correlate with this bombardment of shoot the bot with the rocket launcher style fps games.

[Svartalf]

As I stated before, there have been a number of interesting projects created from id Tech that isn't FPS(UFO AI for example).

Oh, thought I'd address this remark...

Yes, there's interesting non-FPS projects using it, but it's not quite the same thing as using an engine purpose-built for more than FPS. I'm sure you could accomplish similar with AA's engine code, but you'd also be writing largely the same thing Dragonlord's working on, but with compromises to accomodate the original engine's codebase- or end up with something that doesn't even remotely resemble the original engine.