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

[Svartalf]

With only one problem: money. If there is one thing people underestimate with MMOs then it's running costs. It just blows you away. Unless your pockets are deep or you get a lot of money from the users it's a no-go. What goes for the engine... I think there's some MMO engine out there but I can't remember anymore out of my head what it's name is.

That is what I'd found out with a pet project with some online acquaintances some of which worked for Loki Games and I was one of the ISV contacts (Mainline maintainer for the CVS repository on Utah-GLX at that time...). John "Overcode" Hall, Nicolas "Mordred" Vining, and a handful of others, myself included, tried to come up with a MMORPG when they were still a really, really new thing. Unless your pockets are deep, you won't get even started because it really IS a difficult task to accomplish a good MMORPG that can handle loads like Evercrac...er...craft or World of Warcrac...er...craft can. And this doesn't even get into maintaining the network presence.

Yes, there ARE games out there that're MMOGs and are FOSS- they're being ran by a bunch of very, very dedicated individuals. And you should be grateful to them. If they take donations to support the infrastructure and you play, you should give...

As for the engine, it's a decent enough one- and a complete one at that, being the codebase that was largely used with one of the more popular MMORPGs that started out with the engine mostly FOSS to begin with- this would be NEL, which was given to the world by Nevrax and powered the World of Ryzom. There's a couple of game engines that're sans the network stack, that if you knew precisely what you were doing, could accomplish the same results. Only problem is- it's still a painful prospect; it'd have to be a labor of love with lots of your own cash going into it or as a commercial venture where the engine is FOSS, but strictly regulated for the game, and they have to pay to play the game on the engines you provide for access to the content.

( and yes, 3 month old post... who cares... kick on the topic :P )

No biggie... It's actually in-keeping with the porting projects discussion with other threads. We need to change the rules of the game (no pun intended), just like our favorite OS has done with software development and operating systems in general. This is actually the sort of thing that would do this- but you need to keep it in your head if you go this route, it's not going to be an easy road with that path. There's others that'd be slightly easier, really.

[SarahKH]

One of the problems isn't so much the engine. Vegastrike, Fightgears and so on are really good engines. The problem is GFX and SFX. Making those high resolution textures tends to require good artists many of whom are going to want some form of remuneration for their hard work, same with SFX, using off the shelf noises and music might well incur licensing issues and such.

Of course, if you can get the team together there is nothing stopping you making the next 'Dragon Age' or such.

[Dragonlord]

I think a game alone won't help much. Granted there are FOSS engines around which are decent... but that's it: decent. I messed with a couple of them and all did not really scale well for an ambitious project. One of the reasons for the same games on Linux is that the available engine solutions are geared for mostly one game type: shooter or some RTS clone. While the mentioned shooters are nice... it's all shooters. I'm missing some different games. That is though not much different than under Windows where there is just more mass ( and mess )

[deanjo]

I think a game alone won't help much. Granted there are FOSS engines around which are decent... but that's it: decent. I messed with a couple of them and all did not really scale well for an ambitious project. One of the reasons for the same games on Linux is that the available engine solutions are geared for mostly one game type: shooter or some RTS clone. While the mentioned shooters are nice... it's all shooters. I'm missing some different games. That is though not much different than under Windows where there is just more mass ( and mess )

Very true, there are not many engines out there that push hardware to it's limits in linux nowdays. You have a bunch of ioquake games and a few alternatives. Even the more modern games such as ET : QW doesn't really push the hardware hard. Another limiting factor is the lack of professional grade artists out there in FOSS projects. It certianly doesn't look good for gaming on linux when everything out there looks like it's 5-6 years behind in eyecandy. It would certianly be interesting if something like the most recent game engine that id has or something like project offset was released at the same in FOSS form as it debuted on other platforms. You would see alot more games for any OS if only the game content was copywrite. It would allow anybody to port the engines and still allow game developers to make some moola.

[Dragonlord]

Well... such engines "are in the works" ( by the way... what are the regulations here on mentioning projects? )

[deanjo]

Well... such engines "are in the works" ( by the way... what are the regulations here on mentioning projects? )

Go ahead and mention the engine's here but as far as them being "in the works", they have been in that status ever since FOSS engines came to be. These FOSS engines have to be advance enough to attract game studio's during the present time, not 3-4 years later when it's caught up to a 3 year old commercial engine.

[Dragonlord]

Every engine has been once "in the works". You can't get a finished engine if you don't work on one, right? And who said an engine has to be 3 years old? Most engines have evolved over the course of development. I know quite some AAA engines which looked a lot "older" in the middle of their development time but they went with the time and pimped it up while they worked on it. So that's really not the problem why the current FOSS engines trail behind their AAA counterparts.

[roothorick]

I think what Linux gaming needs is a real innovation...
See, we got Tabbed Browsing before IE, we got the KDE 4 desktop that gave many great technologies (which are more or less stable), we got 3D effects of which Vista users can only dream from, etc etc.
HOWEVER, (apart from the at the moment crappy graphics and sound card support) if you look at the gaming site you can see many very small games with a handfull special ones like Neverball. Then you got the big OSS games like Nexuiz, Warsaw, Planeshift, Freeciv and so on, but these copied most features from other comercial (partly Windows) Games like UT, Civilization, Guild Wars, World of Warcraft (warsaw is a bit special through its graphics). The OSS variants of these are quite good, however, they all use a known concept and don't do much to improve that one but only copy it.
So, if I was to create a FLOSS game, I'd first take some time to really find some NEW concept, or at least wouldn't try to just copy some Windows game.

You nailed it, exactly.

An idea I've been throwing around but will likely never act on is a Metal Slug-inspired team-based FPS. The gametypes are basically lifted from UT04, but the weapons and vehicles are by and large original concepts (save for a few FPS-generic archetypes like machineguns) and the gameplay is tuned for a slower, more relaxed pace. The artistic style would be more of a slapstick, tongue-in-cheek direction, much of it parodies and exaggerations for comedic value.

Here, somebody catch!

-E- On Warsow (I assume you mean warsow by "warsaw"): Have you played Quake 3? No? All the weapons (except the pistol thing) In Warsow are lifted directly from Quake 3, just with different graphics and sounds. They even have roughly the same firing rates. Unoriginal, indeed.

[SarahKH]

Perhaps copying existing games is the right way to go, but ignoring what the big commercial houses are doing as well? After all they tend to churn out the 'commercially viable' variations on a theme (aka WW2 FPS or indeed First Person Shooters in general). But where are the Carrier Command's, Midwinter's hell even Millennium 2.2 & its sequel Deuteros? Yes, even the old point n' click adventure games.

Whilst classics, what was missing from those games that could be expanded on thanks to modern hardware (increased screen resolution, CPU grunt and RAM availability) and I don't just mean graphics? Perhaps CC with a better resource management aspect?

People still play things like Ultima 7 because they were fundamentally good games that told a good story and/or were enjoyable in the long term. I think that's what FOSS gaming needs. It's version of Ultima, it's Carrier Command... something which a) works b) is playable c) stands there and goes "You wouldn't make this, so we bloody well did it".

I mean if you could panel beat the Vega Strike engine hard enough you'd have a bloody awesome Elite/space trading game.

[admax88]

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.

Check out the worldforge project http://worldforge.org. One of the oldest open source MMORPG projects and its still going. Instead of trying to build a game, they're building a framework for making MMORPGs that others can take and make the game they want.