Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

If you were to create a FLOSS game, how would it be?

Collapse
This is a sticky topic.
X
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • #11
    Indeed NWN and its Aurora engine are one fabulous piece of code. No wonder it took four years into planning and coding, and one more year for the Linux version.

    I'm not familiar with such a project like what you describe, trying to implement the same idea of persistent worlds (and modules) NWN originally did in the Open Source community. The most prominent (not the only one, mind you) Open Source MMORPG game currently is Plane Shift, but this is purely On-Line (a la WoW or Star Wars Galaxies). Another great thing about NWN is that it allows you to play the single player campaign in cooperative multiplayer, adding a bit more replay value to the campaigns. Not to mention the immense amount of modules that the community produced.

    Such a model would be very hard to imitate/implement, but it sure would be a very good addition to the Open Source game library.

    Comment


    • #12
      Found the problem, the new Zoidcom 0.6.8 is messing up the program. Please use Zoidcom 0.6.7.

      Comment


      • #13
        I would like to create something of a DeusEX style game. A first person shooter with RPG-like qualities and a Cyberpunk'ish storyline.

        Comment


        • #14
          Originally posted by joshuapurcell View Post
          Great topic. Right now I only have one thing to add, and it's around the infrastructure requirements that MMO games require over and above FPS games:I'm sure many of us played or still play NWN. The game wasn't open source of course, but it did run on Linux and it still has a huge community and following to this day. One important aspect of this game was that it was possible for anyone to start their own persistent world and control that world however they saw fit. The pieces of the puzzle were there for the community to use how they wanted to, which is the whole reason why this game was so popular.

          I think the key to an open source MMO taking off is to adopt a similar gametype. This allows the open source project to only focus on making the pieces of the MMO puzzle: the graphics, the monsters, their default abilities/stats, characters, maps, etc. The community can then focus on putting everything together how they want, and then success of each persistent world will depend on the individual world's quality.

          Making these various RPG/MMO game pieces is one area that I would really like to focus on, and I'm interested in knowing if anyone has heard of such a project. I know I have some information on this subject in the form of various website links. I've also been working on implementing these various objects and their interactions in a web-based Java game that will probably never see the light of day with the way things have been going lately =( , but who knows... I may get something up within the next couple of months if I'm lucky.
          I don't know how closely Planeshift resembles that but I tend to agree on what you say. The one thing I never did like about MMOs is the fact the game time hinges around a central server. Anyone should be able to create his own persistent world and put in what he thinks is best for his own game world.

          Speaking of FLOSS game development, I was hard at work on using the Quake 3 engine to build my own adventure game alone, which was heinously difficult and the scope was completely overwhelming. I was mainly stuck with story writing and had ideas all written in. I wrote notes and comments on the Q3 engine along with some test manipulations on camera inside the code as well as changing and shifting graphics from inside the code. I lost my entire progress so there's no point in me picking it up. At one point in time I thought making an Open Source Project out of it would help realize my dream of it, but never did see any outside interest in it.

          Oh well, just thought I'd put my two cents. Nowadays, I want to focus more on finishing a story. Too much time is spent on work and that leaves me with absolutely no time for development.

          Comment


          • #15
            I think that the process should be that you should have a pretty good idea of what you want the game to be like, and THEN start coding and performing tests to see how to get an engine for your game to actually do what you want/do. I've always thought one of the best modifications to the Quake 2 engine was the one Ion Storm did for the game Anachronox. From the controls to the camera to the characters, and the world, it is amazing what they did. I've always thought that for a true 3D adventure game, that would be the kind of controls I'd like to use.

            Comment


            • #16
              Originally posted by Thetargos View Post
              I think that the process should be that you should have a pretty good idea of what you want the game to be like, and THEN start coding and performing tests to see how to get an engine for your game to actually do what you want/do. I've always thought one of the best modifications to the Quake 2 engine was the one Ion Storm did for the game Anachronox. From the controls to the camera to the characters, and the world, it is amazing what they did. I've always thought that for a true 3D adventure game, that would be the kind of controls I'd like to use.
              Yes, I did have a good idea what the game was what I wanted to do, FYI.

              Comment


              • #17
                I didn't mean to imply you didn't, my apologies if it was understood like that. I was merely commenting on the process. I'm sure that reviewing your code comments and notes on the game you might pick it up where you left

                I was trying to imply that ideally you'd have everything written down so you could avoid getting lost within your own changes and modifications and even things you note as you go ('you' here I mean it as the team or anyone involved on any project). Quoting from you:

                Nowadays, I want to focus more on finishing a story.
                Which is excellent. With a full story you get to really focus on those elements that will help you actually tell the story within the game, an aspect that I believe has been a bit unattended in some recent games, where everything seems to be "eye-popping effects" with some story (*cough*Half-Life 2*cough*)[1].

                I think it is great to know where is the game going before actually start coding, so to focus coding on the direction the game is intended to follow, and that includes the plot, as it defines so much in a game like scenery, effects, down to gameplay; not to mention level design and scripting, even the art might be defined by what the plot is about. I think in any good game design, if there's a plot involved, it should take a central part of the game development and design (not that it doesn't with some memorable games), which is why I think we've fallen short of Adventure games, they're simply too difficult to design, pity, used to be my favorite genre.
                1. The amazing physics engine was exploited to some degree for story telling, but only so much (playing with Dog, and 'teaching' the player how affect the environment and solve puzzles, not necessarily unravel the plot)

                Comment


                • #18
                  Now for some future thought. How should any game be distributed? With so many flavors of linux and so many different installer methods, would creating a livecd with a basic window manager and drivers for as many cards could be supported be an idea. I can help on some scripting of the 2 popular methods of livecd's (mklivecd and linux-live) as I helped with the mklivecd scripts on the move to 2.6 kernel and nvidia as well as the ati and I can throw in a nvidia-ati detection script that could be modified to detect other cards that basically goes to another script based upon the video card it sees then installs the correct driver. Keep me informed please as showcasing games-demo's on a livecd could be a great marketing tool.

                  Comment


                  • #19
                    Originally posted by supergamer View Post
                    Now for some future thought. How should any game be distributed? With so many flavors of linux and so many different installer methods, would creating a livecd with a basic window manager and drivers for as many cards could be supported be an idea. I can help on some scripting of the 2 popular methods of livecd's (mklivecd and linux-live) as I helped with the mklivecd scripts on the move to 2.6 kernel and nvidia as well as the ati and I can throw in a nvidia-ati detection script that could be modified to detect other cards that basically goes to another script based upon the video card it sees then installs the correct driver. Keep me informed please as showcasing games-demo's on a livecd could be a great marketing tool.
                    I think this is a great idea, especially for people who are curious how a game would perform under Linux and/or never used it before. Wouldn't be hard to pull off either. Debian would probably be the best suited for the task. Either that or Gentoo, but technically, anything would work. It is a great idea though, I'll definately have to keep that one in mind.

                    The window manager (Gnome, XFCE, or KDE, I would probably choose XFCE for a live game cd), could simply start the game up on startup. And just have some icons on the desktop for shut down and restart and the game icon. What would be even slicker is if you had the game ask where you want to save/load your game if you want to save, you can choose either another Linux partition, your Windows partition, or even a ftp. That would be sweet to have built in ftp support for save games hahaha. You'd never lose your progress in the game. Now thats revolutionary.
                    Last edited by Malikith; 14 November 2007, 10:21 AM.

                    Comment


                    • #20
                      This reminds me of the early Gnetoo's attempt at having LiveGames, basically to turn any gaming capable PC into a gaming console. As far as the window manager goes, I'd go with something slimmer than the aforementioned ones, which are more of Desktop Environments than simple Widnow Managers. Flux/Black/*box on the other hand would get the job done just right, with a very light memory fingerprint.

                      As far as installtion goes, one of the most established methods would be to use the Loki Installer, which is both convenient, and effective.

                      The only problem I see with LiveGames, is actually where to save the data, the most obvious "solution" would be to use USB drives as kind of memory units in game consoles, but in absence of one, the HDD filesystem could be used, in which case the question would then be where to save the data.

                      Comment

                      Working...
                      X