FOSS and Game Development: the Problem

[RealNC]

You're mixing things up. Nobody said they'll have to work for free. They should work normally, but using Open Source development model. Nobody from big players ever did this, but it's probably because they have specialized teams that don't need some random volunteers help. My point is Open Source development models isn't worse than proprietary one in games development.

You're joking, right?

[DMJC]

FOSS game development doesn't work well because of the central idea behind game development. It's a top down process. There's an overall director, an art head, a sound head etc. They set the art style etc, and then the entire team works to that end. FOSS tends towards whatever bob joe is interested in on the day. That's how you get games like vegastrike where the engine is coded 99% by one guy, who writes a pretty advanced awesome engine, but then the art is all hodge podge with massive variation in quality. With no real way to enforce quaity of content or even standard of content it just sort of disintegrates off. There's also the problem that a lot of open source developers think they should be targetting older hardware, when it takes 3-5 years to fully develop a game. They should be aiming for computers that haven't even been made yet with regards to art detail etc. t's only $500 to buy a modern i7, motherboard, ram. $200 more throws a video card in on top. Even some of the best work I've seen in the open source landscape, like SJBaker's Tux a Quest For Herring, and Tux Kart, suffered from gameplay issues because the developer couldn't or wouldn't work in a team with other people. It's a shame because some of those concepts were awesome. I think for the forseeable future though FOSS is going to be stuck remaking existing PC engines as it's the area where FOSS seems to do quite well. Remaking/reimplementing an existing game removes the art problems and has a clearcut goal to reach for. OpenMW will probably become the most played open source RPG, as I suspect will the NeverWinter Nights engine remake project.

[Eduard Munteanu]

FOSS game development doesn't work well because of the central idea behind game development.

I don't necessarily disagree, but we could be overemphasizing the importance of this when there's a really obvious lack of manpower and resources for free game development.

[DMJC]

There is no free artist shortage, just look at mod teams. The real question is, why aren't they targetting open source engines? 90% of mods suck/die etc. but that 10% is pro quality work, and that is what the foss game devs need to attract and retain.

[benmoran]

I posted this before, but I think Desura is going to help bring the FOSS engines and mod teams together. The Desura guys own ModDB, after all.

There are already a handful of FOSS games on Desura, but unfortunately mods are not yet supported on Linux. It seems like the majority of modders are on Windows anyway, so just getting the FOSS games on there is a good start.

[crazycheese]

Single player "anti-cheating" is impossible. There is no difference between "cheating" and "playing and winning a modified version of the game". The concept of cheating as I see it only really applies to multiplayer games. At which point the game server can always be the trusted 3rd party, ensuring all actions are legal.

Yup. Not aware of anyone that really tries to stop it, either. There's some arguments to be made that single-player cheating devalues Achievements and Score Leaderboards, of course. Those arguments are not made with much conviction, though.

UAA. Works. VAC? Punkbuster? Do not.

I disagree with everything written in the article.

Point nr 0. I don't quite understand the reason behind your discussion. Try going to MSDN and start talk "windows is dead end and you should go develop somewhere" - you will be banned. If you up to developing games, you should be up to searching methods to succeed in your goals. Not arguments to justify the laziness. You don't need discussion for that, just sofa. You want to start opensource game or just talking?

Point nr 1. You are talking how good GCC is, but still only good at compiling, yet you are not talking about which things and how it compiles. This is like saying every game is about reaching goals and even today after two decades of gaming it is still about reaching goals with sticks.
Point nr 2. Every game is quite different, so is complexity and so is approach. When wrong approach is applied the project dies, regardless if opensource or commercial. Find correct financial model for your project and you are done! More people are aware and appreciate your project, more money and development possibilities.
Point nr 3. By far not every position in commercial project is occupied by professional, by far not everyone is working full-time and by far not everyone is paid or paid good. Where do we have this nice article about 0.3$/hrs foxconn engineers?
Point nr 4. Find me source code of 20 year old game commander keen while I show you modern doom-based engines (game from same developer that was opensourced because he was free to decide).
Point nr 5. Hollywood is not THE source of 1A home video, hollywood is by FAR not best, hollywood AS SINGLE dictates completely weird technology and laws to WHOLE WORLD. Personally Im not ready to kill my rights to watch Tom Cruise home-made video. I can show you my home video for 40$ per copy too. If hollywood dies, I won't care. They are highly cult-of-personality based conglomerate with films featuring no actual content, besides FX.
Point nr 6. I find AlienArena to be by far more fun than UT.

[crazycheese]

I posted this before, but I think Desura is going to help bring the FOSS engines and mod teams together. The Desura guys own ModDB, after all.

There are already a handful of FOSS games on Desura, but unfortunately mods are not yet supported on Linux. It seems like the majority of modders are on Windows anyway, so just getting the FOSS games on there is a good start.

Desura is awesome. Not only they jumped into inventing, rather than following; they jumped into completely new market. They have my respect!

[kraftman]

You're joking, right?

No, why?

Cakes are delicious. Ten characters limit passed.

[kraftman]

IMO, high quality graphics is sorely missing from free games. I think that's one reason the FOSS community prefers to focus on some genres more than others. For all we know, we could have some excellent free MUDs, but that's not something a gamer usually considers a top-notch game. And in the end it makes sense if you think about it, quality content can provide a sense of immersion.

There's also one thing I forgot to add. If we compare big game companies development power (plus graphic artist, sound creators, story makers etc.) to some hobbyist Open Source projects it looks there's huge difference in their potential. Big game companies are like Linux while small hobbyist groups are like DOS - and it's manpower that makes difference not development model (just in this example it's partially development model that brought so many devs to Linux, but ignore this).

[blackiwid]

I support a bit this point that the opensource community have it more difficult to bring out top games out espacialy ones that look as good as the current windows-games.

In my opinion there are some reasons for that.

1. Manpower: game projects in this dimensions are very big, so you have to have much manpower for a long time.
2. Moneyproblem: I made with some guys a kind of good game as diploma thesis its a caraoke game so that was our first game so there was other problems too (with different code quality bringing together and managing such big codebase) but after the studies-time was over, the today hard fight for a job had begun for us all, so if you then work full time with forced overtimes only your idealism or your interest in making a game that you want to have for yourself or much possitive feadback can drive you further, even more worse is it when you are in my state unemployed for years I drivted up in depression.
3. tools: I just made for fun to test the blender game engine a tictactoe game, I must say, this blendertool-integration of a engine with the gui and the python api there to make games also you can make games without even programming with python is a bit gain for linux game development, no the focus goes to people who can make good models and animation the programming is now the minority part, in the past ( I made the other game with python-soya ) where >90% of the work was coding. Thats now a big step for game developers and I think we will see some more games in the future, that are more detailed in graphics physic-emulation ...
4. getting together a team with same goals, for comercial games the goal is clear earning money, and with that its a better base, at this point I dont see how opensource games can make enough money to live from that, so it must be a hobby in this end-time of economic failure there is not so much people who have good jobs and can think about expressing themselves.


most linuxers who are not totaly noobs who only use libreoffice for their work, are programmers, I dont see that much modelers, maybe we would need a foundation that would pay some money for projects so that at least all costs for servers or some test-hardware would be paid for.

Its also a question how good new payment modells will work in the future if services like flattr would start to work not only for a hand full of people/projects there would come something out rolling, alternativly if we would get out the basic income grant, we would see also more projects and better ones, because people work better if they are not forced to force or beg other people to pay for their living. Intrensic motivation work better, some people can bring both motivations together but most are hindered by the money-income-flow-management duty to get really creative.

Creativity cant be forced, it comes if you let it come and have a good environment, its like someone force you with a gun to sleep, you can maybe pretent to sleep but you will not sleep because of the fear, even if it would be rationaly a good thing for you to sleep because then you would not be killed, logic in fear is not there.