Unigine Starts A Linux Game Development Competition

[deanjo]

Just as an example of this, I just checked online and there are currently over 1000 players playing Neverwinter Nights online. Not bad for a game that came out 8 years ago (a large majority of those users are using the linux client and it's been that way for years).

[madjr]

the visuals of that engine are astonishing.

[Yfrwlf]

Go Unigine, if they make some Linux titles, that will be great.

Of course, to really spur Linux game development, improving the existing open source engines would be ideal. Game developers not having to pay anything, or paying for some support/development of a few new features here and there is a much more ideal model.

So on that note, how about a competition to improve an existing engine or create a new one nearly as good, as good, or better than Unigine's? ^^

[elanthis]

Nobody is going to make an RPG with this. Any teams that submit an RPG proposal to Unigine will almost certainly get rejected. An RPG takes a disgustingly massive amount of time, money, and talent to make compared to most other games (and those other games already requires massive teams of artists and designers on top of a strong core tech team to get anywhere).

Even short, simpler RPGs often take on the order of 4 years to make, and that's with a full-time staff of 60-120 people working well over 40 hrs/week.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love a great RPG, but it's just not realistic for a competition of this sort.

Biting off more than you can chew is the biggest mistake made by hobbyist and indie game developers, as well as student game developers. Even if you go with the assumption that a hobby game has no deadline, the reality is that as development drags on with no end in sight, the motivation and energy of the developers wanes, the interest of the community fades, and the likelihood of ever releasing a finished and playable game simply gets smaller and smaller until it hits zero.

If you've got a small team of hobby/indie/student developers, you realistically need to design a game that can be implemented by a small team of hobby/indie/student developers within about 1-2 years, tops. (And less than that if you're doing a student project or contest submission with a deadline.) That can still be a great game, make no mistake. It just won't be NWN, Dragon Age, Fallout, etc.

It may be the next Left 4 Dead or the next Mario Galaxy. Most likely, however, it's going to be the next World of Goo or the next Portal or the next Boom Blocks: all great games, but all relatively light on content and development complexity, able to be put together, polished, and released with a small budget and a small team in a small amount of time.

Most people on this forum have absolutely no idea of the complexity that goes into game development. Designing, sketching, rigging, modeling, texturing, animating, polishing, and tweaking a single high-quality character in a modern game can easily take from 1-3 months of a single artist's time. If you have a measly 12 characters (including enemies, background characters, etc.) in your game and three artists, that means you need about 4-12 months of development just for the characters. Toss in objects, environments, and effects, and you easily end up needing half a decade of work... or a huge freaking art team. Games like RPGs require just MASSIVE amounts of character art. And then of course you need all the maps, quests, stories, character interaction scripting, and the toolset development to support those features.

An indie team can reasonably make a good adventure game, good dungeon crawl (e.g. diablo or Torchlight), a simple RTS, a shooter, or a puzzle game. Intense story-based games like Alan Wake or large RPGs like Dragon Age are just not in the realm of possibility for an indie team.

Think of it like a movie. I've seen some amazing low-key sci-fi and intense drama and even excellent action films come out of indie film groups. You will never, ever see something akin to the Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, or Iron Man made by an indie film crew, though. It just isn't possible, at least with today's tech.

[Kano]

I want a 3rd person action game with sniper mode and bombing action like MDK, so how about MDK 3 then

[deanjo]

Nobody is going to make an RPG with this. Any teams that submit an RPG proposal to Unigine will almost certainly get rejected. An RPG takes a disgustingly massive amount of time, money, and talent to make compared to most other games (and those other games already requires massive teams of artists and designers on top of a strong core tech team to get anywhere).

Even short, simpler RPGs often take on the order of 4 years to make, and that's with a full-time staff of 60-120 people working well over 40 hrs/week.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love a great RPG, but it's just not realistic for a competition of this sort.

Biting off more than you can chew is the biggest mistake made by hobbyist and indie game developers, as well as student game developers. Even if you go with the assumption that a hobby game has no deadline, the reality is that as development drags on with no end in sight, the motivation and energy of the developers wanes, the interest of the community fades, and the likelihood of ever releasing a finished and playable game simply gets smaller and smaller until it hits zero.

If you've got a small team of hobby/indie/student developers, you realistically need to design a game that can be implemented by a small team of hobby/indie/student developers within about 1-2 years, tops. (And less than that if you're doing a student project or contest submission with a deadline.) That can still be a great game, make no mistake. It just won't be NWN, Dragon Age, Fallout, etc.

It may be the next Left 4 Dead or the next Mario Galaxy. Most likely, however, it's going to be the next World of Goo or the next Portal or the next Boom Blocks: all great games, but all relatively light on content and development complexity, able to be put together, polished, and released with a small budget and a small team in a small amount of time.

Most people on this forum have absolutely no idea of the complexity that goes into game development. Designing, sketching, rigging, modeling, texturing, animating, polishing, and tweaking a single high-quality character in a modern game can easily take from 1-3 months of a single artist's time. If you have a measly 12 characters (including enemies, background characters, etc.) in your game and three artists, that means you need about 4-12 months of development just for the characters. Toss in objects, environments, and effects, and you easily end up needing half a decade of work... or a huge freaking art team. Games like RPGs require just MASSIVE amounts of character art. And then of course you need all the maps, quests, stories, character interaction scripting, and the toolset development to support those features.

An indie team can reasonably make a good adventure game, good dungeon crawl (e.g. diablo or Torchlight), a simple RTS, a shooter, or a puzzle game. Intense story-based games like Alan Wake or large RPGs like Dragon Age are just not in the realm of possibility for an indie team.

Think of it like a movie. I've seen some amazing low-key sci-fi and intense drama and even excellent action films come out of indie film groups. You will never, ever see something akin to the Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, or Iron Man made by an indie film crew, though. It just isn't possible, at least with today's tech.

Well I'm not so sure about all of this. NWN for example has over 4000 community created modules to it. The key is to have good content creation tools. You have to remember that most RPG's are using their own engine and that takes a lot of time to develop so you can cut alot of those development years out of the picture using a "in the can engine". Heck even the rules for D&D have been put out on a open gaming license so much of the "balancing" of the gameplay can be based on those rules.

[EvilTwin]

Nobody is going to make an RPG with this. Any teams that submit an RPG proposal to Unigine will almost certainly get rejected. An RPG takes a disgustingly massive amount of time, money, and talent to make compared to most other games (and those other games already requires massive teams of artists and designers on top of a strong core tech team to get anywhere).

Even short, simpler RPGs often take on the order of 4 years to make, and that's with a full-time staff of 60-120 people working well over 40 hrs/week.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love a great RPG, but it's just not realistic for a competition of this sort.

Biting off more than you can chew is the biggest mistake made by hobbyist and indie game developers, as well as student game developers. Even if you go with the assumption that a hobby game has no deadline, the reality is that as development drags on with no end in sight, the motivation and energy of the developers wanes, the interest of the community fades, and the likelihood of ever releasing a finished and playable game simply gets smaller and smaller until it hits zero.

If you've got a small team of hobby/indie/student developers, you realistically need to design a game that can be implemented by a small team of hobby/indie/student developers within about 1-2 years, tops. (And less than that if you're doing a student project or contest submission with a deadline.) That can still be a great game, make no mistake. It just won't be NWN, Dragon Age, Fallout, etc.

It may be the next Left 4 Dead or the next Mario Galaxy. Most likely, however, it's going to be the next World of Goo or the next Portal or the next Boom Blocks: all great games, but all relatively light on content and development complexity, able to be put together, polished, and released with a small budget and a small team in a small amount of time.

Most people on this forum have absolutely no idea of the complexity that goes into game development. Designing, sketching, rigging, modeling, texturing, animating, polishing, and tweaking a single high-quality character in a modern game can easily take from 1-3 months of a single artist's time. If you have a measly 12 characters (including enemies, background characters, etc.) in your game and three artists, that means you need about 4-12 months of development just for the characters. Toss in objects, environments, and effects, and you easily end up needing half a decade of work... or a huge freaking art team. Games like RPGs require just MASSIVE amounts of character art. And then of course you need all the maps, quests, stories, character interaction scripting, and the toolset development to support those features.

An indie team can reasonably make a good adventure game, good dungeon crawl (e.g. diablo or Torchlight), a simple RTS, a shooter, or a puzzle game. Intense story-based games like Alan Wake or large RPGs like Dragon Age are just not in the realm of possibility for an indie team.

Think of it like a movie. I've seen some amazing low-key sci-fi and intense drama and even excellent action films come out of indie film groups. You will never, ever see something akin to the Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, or Iron Man made by an indie film crew, though. It just isn't possible, at least with today's tech.

rpg doesnt always mean something like morrowind
compared with morrowind gothic 1 was really small but just as fun
im for example part of an modteam thats working on an gothic 2 total conversion but we will move to diccuric as an platform (an hobby-rpg that uses ogre and supports linux - i know the screens dont look that great, but thats mainly because of the content and still missing shaders)
were already working like 4 years on the world (mainly me and another 3d artist) and it will be easily 4-6 years till release
and i dont see why there wount be enough motivation for this - there isnt more time than one afternoon per week if your studying or working
just my opinion
i think we will make it to an release even though untill then the graphics will be quiet outdated^^

[elanthis]

Well I'm not so sure about all of this. NWN for example has over 4000 community created modules to it.

Because they already had a huge set of art, characters, enemies, objects, sounds, effects, etc. pre-made for the game. Sure, there are community add-ons, but you don't see any mods the full size of NWN with completely custom everything (using nothing from the original content set).

You're also completely ignoring the fact that NWN took close to 5 years of development time, too. Don't for a second think most or even a third of that was just the base engine.

[elanthis]

were already working like 4 years on the world (mainly me and another 3d artist) and it will be easily 4-6 years till release
and i dont see why there wount be enough motivation for this - there isnt more time than one afternoon per week if your studying or working
just my opinion

You're making my point for me.

[deanjo]

Because they already had a huge set of art, characters, enemies, objects, sounds, effects, etc. pre-made for the game. Sure, there are community add-ons, but you don't see any mods the full size of NWN with completely custom everything (using nothing from the original content set).

You're also completely ignoring the fact that NWN took close to 5 years of development time, too. Don't for a second think most or even a third of that was just the base engine.

You require huge sets of assets to create any quality game, not just RPGs. The RPG crowd however does seem to be very community minded. While many of the modules out there do use a lot of premade assets there have also been a mind blowing amount of community created assets (one just has to take a look a NWNs community packs to see that). Another good examples of RPGs that were community driven are the many Ultima remakes.