Favorite Open/Closed Source Games

[Thetargos]

Surprisingly enough, I've encountered that actually most of these projects tend to lack not programming talent (in terms of people working on them), but artists. Particularly for a CRPG, there are lots and lots of little details that have to be visually congruent with one another a lot of effort has to be put forward to getting it right. The same goes with the sound design.

Looking at successful projects like Battle for Wesnoth is in fact inspiring, what they've managed to pull with that game is amazing. Not only is it a good game, but it has been successful at keeping people working on it interested on working on it.

Such projects are extremely hard to get right only on participants' spare time, that careful planning is of the most importance. I'd love to see such a project like a Diablo-like or NWN-like game made by the Open Source community, maybe even "sponsored" by a game-releated company (studio or publisher) to spice things up in terms of either monetary support o infrastructure or publicity or whatever... I'm day dreaming of course, 'cause "what's in it for them?", especially if the game will be Open Source and freely distributed. Ultimately what would be the pinacle of any FLOSS game is to be "ported" to one of the high profile consoles by a third party, and use some of the earnings to keep development of its "upstream" (man!, who tampered with my coffee this morning?!?!).

At any rate, my initial point was that in most FLOSS game projects, the hardest is to form a coherent art team.

[ivanovic]

There currently is some work in progress to create a 2D sprite based RPG. Some of the people behind the arts for Wesnoth did produce something for this game, too. No idea if they are still actively working on it, but at least the graphics do look promising.

I am sure they do welcome any help they can get, no matter if artists, coders or *whatever*.

Here is their site: allacrost.org

[Malikith]

Yeah art is always a issue, in my opinion though, at least with my experience with the Quake engines, 3d is easier to handle than 2d. Problem with 3d though is that you need 3d modelers, and well, good ones don't come everyday, at least in open source. I mean take a look at all the 3d open source games, I haven't seen one yet that is fairly mature that has 3d models that come decently close to a retail game nowdays (I'm talking like games from 2004 and beyond).

Now, is graphics a huge deal? No, but its my point, that its very difficult to get a large amount of talent. I guess my vision of a perfect open source development team is a team that not only is good at doing what they do, but also communicate very well with the community.

Unfortunately I'm not a coder, only things I can do with the Quake engines is create levels, but I'm not bad at it. I actually made a level Open Arena but I pulled it because I didn't like the developers very much. It was mainly due to the fact I didn't like where they were bringing the game as far as art (since I hate anime with a passion, but thats my deal), and I didn't like their attitude towards the community. I mean you couldn't even find half the developers, they were in their own private little den somewhere while the main one just sat alone in IRC.

So I guess my point is, would I ever do something like this in the future? Yeah, but I'd also want to be surrounded by the right people at the same time.

But back on track on everything, RPG's are harder to make than FPS's, which explains the large amount of fps open source games. I do see a few open source mmorpg's out, which is nice. But unfortunately I don't know if they will survive the test of time. Because it takes alot of maintenance and baby sitting and money to build a open source mmorpg. But I do hope they survive because I've had some fun with some of them.

About the Quake 3 engine, I noticed with cg_shadows 2, that there is nearly no performance impact if the shadows are viewed from a distance, but up close they cause the framerate to drop like a rock.

In my opinion, engine wise anyways, I would either use ioquake3 or the Alien Arena Quake 2 engine. Their Quake 2 engine is actually pretty good.

Hope I made sense hehe.

[rhollencamp]

if your interested in a Diablo style game, I'm actually on a team developing one (we're just getting started). Right now it's more in the planning phase, so we'd be very interested in your input as to what you would like in the game, what you wouldn't like, etc. To this end, we have a wiki (http://zomgdev.byethost13.com/wiki) and a forum (http://zomgdev.byethost13.com/forum). Don't be scared away by the free hosting, if there's enough interested generated I'll upgrade to premium hosting and buy a domain name :P But seriously, any comments are more than welcome


Robert Hollencamp
ZOMGame Studios

[orthetic]

Quake 4 and Unreal Tournament series are my favorites at the moment. I'm an old school deathmatch junkie so the team based shooters aren't really my thing.

[NeoBrain]

I liked Neverball very much and though the development on it isn't that active at the moment, it's still funny to test the svn versions
Then there's also Nexuiz which perfectly replaces unreal tournament

[val-gaav]

Now, if someone wants to take the Q3 engine and do something in the vein of NWN or similar, then I'd be tickled and perhaps even lend a little time to the venture- IF the team looks like it's going to go somewhere with the ideas that come forth from the attempt.

Well they don't use the Quake 3 engine, but the one from Cube 2 (Sauerbraten)... anyway it looks very promising and I have high hopes for this project:
http://www.eisenstern.com/

[Thetargos]

S.C.O.U.R.G.E is another game that seems to be much in the same vein as NWN. I'm not sure what engine they are using, but they seem to be doing some nice progress. A guy from the Fedora forums is working on lots of models for the game.

BTW, wasn't the Aurora engine (the one powering up NWN) originally based off the Q3A engine?

[ground-tm]

i really enjoy DOOM3.......ka boom...

[Malikith]

S.C.O.U.R.G.E is another game that seems to be much in the same vein as NWN. I'm not sure what engine they are using, but they seem to be doing some nice progress. A guy from the Fedora forums is working on lots of models for the game.

BTW, wasn't the Aurora engine (the one powering up NWN) originally based off the Q3A engine?

Are they still working on that? It looks cool, but they haven't had a news update on their site in about a year ago around this time.