New 3D Game Engine Targets Linux Gamers

[sabriah]

Unemployed artists fresh out of art school are two dozen in a dozen. There must be plenty of them willing to work for a game project under linux. Even for relative low wage. I think that for projects to be open source does not mean you cannot hire some talent to do the things that programmers are not good at. Maybe enough donatations or sponsors, or maybe in-game advertisement can be found to pay for cheap otherwise-unemployed artists?
The artists gets to pay the rent, and food, and extends his/her portfolio.

Loook at Jochum Skoglund, a very nice artist, mission designer etc, at http://www.zfight.com/ In his portfolio you see three very well made Q3 maps and a CS Bomb map. From that to do Battlefield, Ghost Recon, Terminator Salvation, Bionic Commando...

But, the point is, he probably did the first maps, just for fun. Not for money. If you do it for fun, your work ethic's intensity and drive can create miracles, like here.

[Kazade]

I do think artwork is the biggest issue to FLOSS games, but mainly because it's spread around everywhere, not that it doesn't exist.

There are loads of artists willing to create for free but there is not central repository for this artwork. We need a Launchpad or Github for textures, models, sounds, and maps.

Imagine a website where you can upload your artwork in standard open or common formats (so, for example, COLLADA, PNG/TGA, OGG) you could mark it with a license and you, or someone else, could create branches of that artwork, commit changes, view differences, tag with keywords - all the stuff we have with source code. That would be awesome.

[kraftman]

I don't know if this was mentioned here, but there's also some another Open Source engine (GPL):

http://www.cafu.de/

[L33F3R]

Those are exactly the 3 reasons why there will never be a big open source game. Let's be realistic.... artists are hard to find and generally want to be paid, time is devil, and solid reasons to work on a full finished game where development requires 3-4 years...? Nah, this won't happen.

yea its rather a shame . I can however speak of several people that would be interested in such projects if they knew they existed. 2 Groups mostly.

1. College students wanting to build a portfolio. Its rare for them to be using linux/free software as most of them only know about windows and mac + commercial software. Being involved with some of them in the past i can tell you that at least the ones that I worked with produced more then adequate work. Some of it rather astonishing.

2. The other group is the teenage hobbiest, which i once fell under. these people have only basic skills in general (although some quite decent), and will most likely leave after 2-3 weeks.

At the end of the day, you cant expect commercial quality work without paying. You do after all get what you pay for.

[L33F3R]

I don't know if this was mentioned here, but there's also some another Open Source engine (GPL):

http://www.cafu.de/

i rather like cafu myself. It has need for improvement though.

[V!NCENT]

The only, and then I mean the only problem is... time. Oh and skill but that is not nessecairily linked to floss.

HD gaming is todays standard and according to the gaming industry that is the kind of standard will most likely stay for a long, long time.

So what does floss gaming development need?

The answer to this question is simple, but not simple so easy to achieve.

there must be new tech on the block that shortens the time required to make content and make these creations unhindered by time, like nurb models, defining surface textures instead of making textured images, etc, etc, etc...

[curaga]

L33F3R, if you know how to get in touch with group 1, why not write it up somewhere like the freegamedev wiki?

[V!NCENT]

At the end of the day, you cant expect commercial quality work without paying. You do after all get what you pay for.

I do not agree. There are a bunch of totally epic, better than commercial mods out there made by people that work in the gaming industry and are making these mods because they love them.

I don't think that you can ask "Hey, wanne help us do this... thing?" and expect most of them to take you seriously. Unless you are some kind of game development teacher or something...

I think the best approach would be to make an epic prototype game demo, contact a friend who is good at game art (L33F3R you can get in touch with them right? You must have at least one friend willing to cooperate?) and dess it in some good art and then put a nice HD video of it on YouTube.

Then you can show group 1 "Hey this is what we are making in our spare time. Wanna join?" Hint them about portfolio...

[WhiteRabbit]

I do not agree. There are a bunch of totally epic, better than commercial mods out there made by people that work in the gaming industry and are making these mods because they love them.

I don't think that you can ask "Hey, wanne help us do this... thing?" and expect most of them to take you seriously. Unless you are some kind of game development teacher or something...

I think the best approach would be to make an epic prototype game demo, contact a friend who is good at game art (L33F3R you can get in touch with them right? You must have at least one friend willing to cooperate?) and dess it in some good art and then put a nice HD video of it on YouTube.

Then you can show group 1 "Hey this is what we are making in our spare time. Wanna join?" Hint them about portfolio...

The problem is not so much getting them to join, but a matter of preference... as a college student I use linux as my primary O/S with windows on a separate partition for writing papers in the docx format(yup the docx format is a requirement for one of my classes) other wise as a software engineering student I like to write all my programs in Vim and then compile with gcc...

Design students(who I know quite a good few of) tend to prefer the proprietary software such as 3ds and other design tools compared to things like blender... Many of them actually know what blender is as a lot of them have started on it before coming to college and getting access to the "better" tools... I have even talked to some of the design students about linux and a good amount have heard of it, but they LOVE their mac's...

So once again, it all comes down to their preference

[elanthis]

However, Other, far less story-based games like Tetris and Quake, do have a market too. Did you know that the best selling games are not story driven? Or, they have a setting which doesn't need 20 minute explainings.

While it's true that many popular games are light on story, they are NOT light on art, nor are they light on narrative (which is a little different than story, though closely related).

Keep in mind that many of those best sellers (like the Modern Warfare games) have HUGE marketing campaigns backing them, the likes of which Open Source games simply have never and will never have.

There's also the issue of repeated playability. An Open Source game is almost required to be one of the kind that can be played over and over with relatively little content, while a big commercial game can sink $20 million into development for a product that players will buy, play for a few weeks, and then discard at Gamestop. When you have volunteer developers, your game has to be continuously fun and interesting to keep the devs working on it and playing with it.

I also highly, highly doubt there are more than a scant handful of Open Source devs who are truly qualified game designers. This in part is why I think there are so many clones in the Open Source game market; anyone can look at a game and say, "I like that!" or "I don't like that!" but actually knowing _why_ people like certain games, how to design everything from the graphics engine to the art assets to the game logic to multiplayer to the story to the core mechanics to the menu screen to make a great game is a skill that even few professional game developers have (which is why even in the commercial world, most games are mediocre at best).

One of the problems with these projects is that the Open Source developers think that if they create some awesome tech that an awesome game will spring up around it. That isn't how it works. Yes, you can take a generic engine and build a great game on it, but that only happens when you already have a great game in the works and are shopping for an engine that meets the game design's needs. The game design, the story, the art, and the technology are all one. No single portion of the whole can be developed in isolation and then work without massive modifications. This is why even the commercial engines give source code to their licensees; those "Unreal-based games" you see aren't just a bunch of maps and scripts on top of a stock Unreal3 engine. Not even remotely. They have massive internal changes to the engine to make it suited for the actual game being made. Open Source engines can be used like that just the same, of course, but the difference here is that the people with the tech savvy to make those changes end up working on a big generic all-purpose moddable engine instead of working with a pro designer and art team and making an actual game.

The medium-sized commercial games have teams that are many times larger than the largest Open Source game project around (counting only the serious frequent contributors, not the ones who do a few small essentially-irrelevant tweaks or updates that another dev could've done in a few minutes), and they push out a blockbuster game in 1-4 years... with most of the team working 40-60 hour weeks during much of that period.

When you look at other successful big Open Source projects, you also have to remember the paid developer time factor. I've yet to see an Open Source game that has had even a single paid developer... and if you do know of one, check to see if he gets paid the salary a pro game dev would get ($80k-$120k average) and if he puts in the time a pro game dev would.

So the Open Source game market is limited to smaller scale games that are fun when played over and over and need relatively little content or major development features. A commercial success like Left 4 Dead could have conceivably be done by a fantastic Open Source team (though no Open Source team has yet come even close to such a masterpiece), but something like Mass Effect or Bioshock or Modern Warfare or Assassin's Creed or Half-Life or Fallout or Dragon Age or Super Mario Bros Wii or Resident Evil or so on are totally and forever out of scope of what an Open Source team is ever going to be able to achieve.

The other option for Open Source teams is to aim for the casual market. Look at a game like World of Goo. Only two main team members, one coder and one artist, and it is one of the best indie games ever released. It's beautiful, charming, addictive, fun, and unique. That is totally within the scope of any competent Open Source game team. The game is content-heavy, but the content is simple, and the entire game revolves around a small handful of very simple core mechanics. It is easy to build content for the game (there is a community of modders for the game) and single levels can be fun stand-alone without needing to fit within a larger picture, much like Quake levels/mods don't need to be strung together into a campaign to entertain the twitch gamers.

Unfortunately, almost all I see out of the Open Source crowd is an endless mass of Quake clones with a small handful of clones of other games. There are a few gems here and there that are truly unique, but in the end, why the hell would you want to play Maryo Ripoff Chronicles or Tux "Not Mario" Kart or Tux "wishes it was Avalanche 1080" Racer or Tetris Remake 1324 or Quake3+ when you could play a new, interesting, innovative game that has higher quality art, more refined mechanics, and an overall better experience? The clones are interesting to people who want to point and say, "I can play an Open Source game!" while to the vast majority of regular people who just want to have fun, the clones are already out of date and boring and the Open Source teams are for the most part failing to compete with even the lowest-budget commercial indie games like World of Goo, Castle Crashers, Geometry Wars, Bejeweled, Puzzle Quest, and so on.

The Open Source market doesn't need another high-end engine that will never be used for anything interesting. It needs an actual game. It needs more games like Battle for Wesnoth -- new and unique, focused not on beating id and Epic on graphics (you will never win there), but instead focused on creating something new that doesn't exist in the commercial world yet. Those kinds of games don't need high-end 3D engines, that just need clever 2D engines with a talented artistic direction. You can make 2D quite beautiful on today's hardware with shaders, high-resolution textures, and high sprite count support. That's where the Open Source market needs to go. The indie market is already there and tiny indie teams working for a handful of months are thrashing the hell out of the best the Open Source world has ever created in multi-year-long projects.