A Battle For Good Open-Source Game Graphics?

[Irritant]

Insulting? You have yet to see insulting, besides if you're as old school as you claim then theres nothing anyone could be able to say to you on the "bad ole' internets" that could insult you. Or are you really that fragile as to have your e-p3|\|0? damaged so easily? I'd have figured an old salt of the internet would be made of tougher stuff then that...

It's not about hurting my feelings, you miss the point, which is, acting like a petulant child is not going to get you what you want. If you want something to be done by someone(or some group), throwing derogatory remarks at them or their work isn't going to accomplish it.

Right now I see alot of temper tantrums being thrown because the current crop of games doesn't meet what they consider to be "good". Opinions are like assholes, everyone's got one, doesn't mean anyone is right or wrong. If you really want to make a difference in the Linux gaming world, then follow this simple rule: Less complaining, more action. If you don't have the talent or ability to take action, then at least be nice to those who do

[Irritant]

@Dragonlord

"An FPS engine can't do what I want to do without major recoding because FPS is about shooting, my game is about interaction."

From the surface, you're talking more about game code than engine code.

Regardless, there is no way to make a new, original game without codework.

[Dragonlord]

You forgot hilarious easter eggs.

Definitely. Easter eggs for the win

[Dragonlord]

@Dragonlord
And what type of game do you want with this ?ber engine?

Various concepts that are not done like that often. I'm trying something different here. And no it's not an FPS and it's not about fast paced action. I know what I'm doing.

Will the engines features matter if it's YAFPS?

Yes, tremendously even. An FPS engine can't do what I want to do without major recoding because FPS is about shooting, my game is about interaction.

Do you have an idea for a highly innovative game and the skills to make it?

Yes I do.

Can you encourage others to make it?

Yes I can. But to go beyond the core team it takes some more work on the engine side. FOSS people are ( and here I'm honest and blunt ) in general very unflexible. If a solution is not tried already they are hard to jump on and especially keep focused. So the project is separated into well defined steps and recruiting is not part of the current one.

I think it is wonderful that so many FLOSS games exist, and that the engine/game developers have fun doing it. Creating a modern game is a huge task, so in that regard FLOSS games will always look/play like something a few years behind times, but as stated by others: Gameplay first.

The problem are the engines themselves. They are a barrier preventing people with ideas to do them. Only a few are skilled enough coders to hack deep into existing engines to bend them to do what they want them to do. The others are simply blocked off and neglected. If they could work with an engine that supports them by providing high quality features without paying huge bucks for them and obtaining a good work pipeline they could go on working on their ideas... working on gameplay. If the engine is a hindrance then you need to work most of the time on the technical part and not the gameplay part which is why the gameplay is often just YAFPS since that requires little planing, no design documents and no need to stray of shot-and-run gameplay. If there would be a general purpose game engine of good quality more varied games would emerge and Linux would get the recognition it needs. Since now Linux is only perceived as a wannabe gaming OS and one reason are the projects in the FOSS domain nowadays.

1) Creating content for a modern looking game, never mind a "next-gen" type game, is impossible to do with only a handful of artists working in their spare time (MOD artists reuse a lot of art assets from the main game).

It's not impossible and has been done a couple of times already. Furthermore if the engine provides smart design the workload can be lessened. It's only impossible if you don't want to.

2) If I'm going to dedicate a portion of my free time to a FLOSS game project, it MUST be a game that I enjoy immensely, that I want to see live up to it's potential, and that I can have FUN while creating content. Almost all FLOSS games could use better graphics, but not all captures me enough to help out. It also doesn't help that I don't game that much anymore as I used to...

That's the problem with the existing engines. This is why we need a good and new general type engine which does provide a simple, concise and powerful work pipeline so that creating games for artists is no more a pain as it is today but fun. Then people are also going to be more willing to help. After all for many Linux stands for "cumbersome" and the current engines do no effort to counter this prejudice.

3) The workflow must also be considered, getting content in the engine easily, create ingame effects without relying mostly on developers, maybe some sort of visual GLSL creation tool, etc.

As mentioned above: it requires an engine with a proper design made with artists in mind and not just programmers. Again the current solutions are programmers oriented and hardly usable for artists.

I agree with many that the visual representation of a game is very important today, and I would love to see a modern FLOSS game rival, say, HL2. I'm just afraid it is too much to expect, and I don't think the majority of Windows gamers will even glance at open source games on Linux. It is much more important to get studios like Blizzard and Valve on board, than to convince people to play our free, open games, made with great engines and the best art we can possibly create. Instead of competing with commercial games, we should create fun, quirky games with a unique art style, manageable by 1 or 2 artists in average. I think that is already what is happening.

It's not. The mentioned engine is already in work. There will always be people who think outside the box and look for solutions instead of fighting symptoms.

[Duo Maxwell]

Well it's not that it was made for a console, but that it's a much different CPU design, if you are writing software to take advantage of the Cell CPU it's going to take a bit of work to get it working on an i7, and the performance difference between the 2 is quite large depending on what tasks you are giving the cpu, x86 CPUs being designed for general purpose, while the Cell was designed for IBM's high end servers, the binned ones are sold off to Sony for the PS3. Really no different from what AMD does with their current cpus, they 're only making the quads and sending the ones with dud cores to be triple, dual or single core cpus depending on how many cores work properly.

I'd have tu guess that the difference between the current console CPUs and the current x86 CPUs is even larger now then the difference between the old PowerPC CPUs that Apple used to use.

[kraftman]

If I'm not mistaken, wasn't the issue with the GTA4 port mainly one of processing power? I remember reading that it just seemed to be a limitation of the x86 cpu not being able to hold up the weight of the massive city engines and all the stuff the game has going at once that the console CPUs where able to handle much better due to their design. As I remember the players usig qads didn't get the slowdowns much if at all due to having more CPU grunt to throw at the engine.

It's possible. Some time ago when new console arrived it was faster then PCs. Right now you can probably have PC which is much faster then the fastest console. The point is many PC owners doesn't have high end quad core PCs and maybe that's why someone mentioned about lack of processing power. I bet if GTA4 will be designed primary for PCs porting it to consoles will be a problem too.


It's really difficult to make a game which can compete with commercial titles. It has to be polished in every aspect, it has to be innovative and very playable. Many commercial titles which are developed for years and have big budgets are disappointing sometimes. Game reviewers are merciless

[Duo Maxwell]

So, in order to be more creative, Linux game devs should clone tired old console games instead of YAFPS?

Are you offended by the proliferation of Rogue-likes?

Eh, I was just tossing up examples of games that have shown to be still wildly popular even in their modern iterations while half asleep, chronic insomnia will do that to your mind. Go look up sales charts for top selling games on the consoles and pc for the last 5 years. You telling me we can't do ANY of that? We ren't just a few years behind, we're more like at least a decade behind in terms of overall capability.

As for the art assets, try asking the Mac users, many of them have experience with it, especially with the music end since every Mac in recen years has come with a great little app called Garage Band which is built specifically to let any idiot make music. It's pretty versitile and many of the people using it are simply giving away their tracks, it wouldn't be hard to you know, just ask them if they could license some songs nd sound effects in a compatible license to you.

As for making money, I stand by that if its your hobby to do this you should still try and milk it, you can even do it while staying true to the GPL. But you first have to make something that omeone would actually pay money for. Theres no law saying that if you make an open source game that you automatically have to make 0 dollars in the process. There is however a stipulation of you having to produce something of at least moderatly interesting quality before you can get other people to open their wallets.

Go ahead, try and find a reason why we can't get everything required for a decent game that you could actually sell, I say Phoronix should start organizing it, maybe even go and ask around the other linux gaming sites about it, hell, even the Mac ones, they're almost as hard up for games as we are so I'm sure you'll get some help from them.

Call it "Phoronix And The Quest For The $5 Game".

Its very important to recognize the little guys who dedicate there time for making little things for us to enjoy. They deserve alot more credit then they get.

However when it comes to larger projects its important to remember that rome wasnt built in a day and it wasnt built by a man and his wife. When you beat 1 of these games look at the credits, they go on for a LOOOONG time. It took 50 people to port GTA 4 to windows and it was an awful port.

I think a major project COULD be done but would take a large collective of people and some strong leadership. However i might add that the linux community is good with both of these things and even has some talent to show it off.

If I'm not mistaken, wasn't the issue with the GTA4 port mainly one of processing power? I remember reading that it just seemed to be a limitation of the x86 cpu not being able to hold up the weight of the massive city engines and all the stuff the game has going at once that the console CPUs where able to handle much better due to their design. As I remember the players usig qads didn't get the slowdowns much if at all due to having more CPU grunt to throw at the engine.

I'm not sure if you understood me. I didn't say "funny" as in humorous, I said "fun" as in it gives me pleasure to work on it. I would also request that you cease with the insulting dialog(as in referring to something as being "badly designed"). I won't continue any discussion here if the insults continue, and I think it's in the best interest of the non-developers to show a little courtesy when they are requesting of the developers.

These engines are not nearly as inflexible as you think. I've seen a variety of game types created from them that are not FPS.

Insulting? You have yet to see insulting, besides if you're as old school as you claim then theres nothing anyone could be able to say to you on the "bad ole' internets" that could insult you. Or are you really that fragile as to have your e-p3|\|0? damaged so easily? I'd have figured an old salt of the internet would be made of tougher stuff then that...

[kraftman]

So much for freedom when you have impassible barriers. It still has restrictions on what you can and cannot use with it. If GPL was more loose I have no doubt you would see great innovations like dtrace and zfs already in the kernel for example.

Sorry Deanjo, but it's total bullshit. GPL has less barriers then BSD, because you can take BSD code into Linux kernel, but you can't take Linux code into BSD kernel etc. You're talking about giving freedom to companies like apple, but GPL says - Kiss my ass. Btw. stop this idiotic dodging please.There are serious reasons why GPL doesn't allow to take ZFS or DTrace into the kernel.

In your opinion

. It barriers true freedom of what one can contribute on what terms they want. Public domain release is required for that.

In your opinion it barriers true freedom, but I'm talking about code freedom not about freedom to doing what you want with it (it's lawlessness or something like this)

The freespace license does not prohibit you in any way of making your code contributions free as you see fit.

That's why I mentioned I'm talking about overall not about FreeSpace or Homeworld.

[numasan]

Sorry, but you wrote that BBB "relied on many closed apps", when really only the audio part was done with closed apps (because it was handled outside of the production). The point being that all graphics was made with open tools, as was the pipeline. People working on open source games are not dependant on a closed toolchain. Artists wanting to contribute are not limited to commercial tools on a specific platform. That some choose to use a cracked 3dsmax, well...

[deanjo]

BBB relied mostly on open source apps. Only audio was done with closed source. There is no reason why art assets can't be done purely in OSS, except personal preference.

I realize that BBB audio was done with closed source (thus why I mentioned it). Ironically if they wanted to deal with the pain it could have been done as well with OSS apps.