Open Source Games or the Lack of Them

Wed Sep 23 16:28:57 IDT 2009

Shlomi

Excellent analysis. Right on.

I will add one more point from personal experience.  People buy games with
their eyes.  A couple years ago I was experimenting with Croquet and Small
Talk (both OSS tools) for a virtual world application and I had the
opportunity to learn more about Microsoft DirectX

Being a major game developer - Microsoft developed DirectX with the needs of
high performance 3D graphics/game developers in mind.   DirectX and XNA Game
Studio are tremendous productivity boosts to game developers - Microsoft
understands what developers need and also the extreme importance of how good
the graphics need to look

I suggest comparing the open source Croquet project with any  DIrectX
project - Croquet looks pathetically primitive and clunky by comparison.

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Danny Lieberman
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2009/9/23 Michael Ben-Nes <michael at epoch.co.il>

> For years I been waiting to get the same Windows gaming experience from
> Linux.Sadly the gap is just get wider over time and I don't think the
> increase will reverse it self in the coming years.
>
> Lucky us technology change rapidly and my expectation is that in the coming
> years gaming / application will be streamed to our computer from near
> by libraries.
> So putting it simply you will have at your disposal the choice of games /
> application of every OS. What at least render the lack of games on Linux.
> Here is pick to a possible future:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-w56hQxmnY
>
> As for the Opensource concept, I can only hope that in the coming years
> companies will benefit by using the opensource model. That might give them
> the ability to harness the community to add extra feature to their games.
> There is also the question if the result of this workflow will be better
> games ( Sell more ) or like the result of the wiki book ( lame content ).
>
> Cheers,
> Miki
>
> --------------------------------------------------
> Michael Ben-Nes - Internet Consultant and Director.
> http://www.epoch.co.il - weaving the Net.
> Cellular: 054-4848113
> --------------------------------------------------
>
>
> On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 4:50 PM, Shlomi Fish <shlomif at iglu.org.il> wrote:
>
>> Hi all!
>>
>> Someone emailed me in private and said that "you don't want to mention
>> open
>> source gaming. It's a sad joke." and other stuff like that. I'd like to
>> mention some reasons for why I think this is largely the case.
>>
>> Reason: Proprietary Games are OK.
>> -----------------------------------
>>
>> If you read Joel on Software's
>> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FiveWorlds.html , you'll see that
>> commercial games play by different rules than what Joel calls "shrinkwrap"
>> software, which is software (whether open-source or proprietary) that is
>> distributed or used in the wild by many different people. A game must be
>> perfectly right the first time, most games are failures, and generally
>> games
>> require much more effort than just coding the engine.
>>
>> Richard M. Stallman was quoted as saying that "game engines should be
>> free,
>> but approves of the notion that graphics, music, and stories could all be
>> separate and treated differently (i.e., "Non-Free.")":
>>
>> http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/09/191257
>>
>> Since a typical game nowadays costs a lot of money to develop, and
>> requires
>> the collaboration of many people, it seems unlikely that we will see many
>> open-source games that are up-to-par with commercial offerings. When we
>> work
>> on FOSS alternatives to commercial apps: Firefox, Thunderbird,
>> OpenOffice.org,
>> Inkscape, GIMP, Audacity, etc. we can expect the first versions to have
>> some
>> bugs and that some features will be missing even in the contemporary
>> versions,
>> because either they don't matter much to people or because we will
>> eventually
>> catch up with them. But we cannot afford to do it in most games.
>>
>> My hope is that eventually either game engines would indeed be open-source
>> or
>> at least close (because the amount of work done on the engine is minuscule
>> in
>> comparison to the rest of the game) so they can be ported to Linux, or
>> that at
>> least game companies will start supporting Linux better once it gains
>> marketshare, or that wine, cedega, etc. will allow better support.
>>
>> Reportedly, Blizzard has been using GNU/Linux internally to develop their
>> games (World of Warcraft, etc.) and test them, but has not released an
>> official version for Linux yet, or supports it.
>>
>> Reason: Graphic Artists are unwilling to contribute
>> -----------------------------------------------------
>>
>> For some reason or another it seems that talented graphic artists do not
>> volunteer to contribute to open-source/open-content, whether games or
>> other
>> software. You can see some discussion of it here:
>>
>>
>> http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/fortunes/shlomif.html#third-sharp-perl-reich
>>
>> And scrottie later continued it in this blog comment to a post "where a
>> graphic designer expresses moral outrage at being asked by Google to
>> contribute design work to Chrome in exchange for thanks, not money"
>>
>> http://use.perl.org/~scrottie/journal/38916<http://use.perl.org/%7Escrottie/journal/38916>
>>
>> While there are probably fewer professional graphic artists than
>> professional
>> programmers (since many classes of programs require very little graphics
>> design), I still think that a much smaller percentage of them contribute
>> to
>> open-source than programmers.
>>
>> I don't know which percentage of programmers contribute to FOSS on their
>> free
>> time, and there was something that people asked after the 2001-2002
>> recession,
>> when many programmers became unemployed, why we don't see a flood of
>> Israeli
>> programmers to FOSS projects, where they can gain some esteem, experience,
>> knowledge, and also have something to do in their free time. Nevertheless,
>> there are still enough programmers to make a difference and to even pose a
>> significant competition to commercial offering.
>>
>> I don't know the reason why graphics artists are so reluctant to
>> contribute.
>> But I think we can just assume that there are probably not enough to
>> donate to
>> even one large scale open-source game, not to mention that there are many
>> fractured efforts for creating such games which fight for attention of a
>> limited mind-share.
>>
>> Reason: Web-based games are posing a significant competition:
>> ---------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Recently I've noticed that there many good games on the web: in Flash, in
>> JavaScript, etc. See for example: http://www.brainbashers.com/ . These
>> games
>> are not as rich as the ones sold in stores or that run from the local
>> computer, but they are still pretty nice with attractive graphics and
>> usable.
>> As a teenager with a DOS computer, I used to play mostly puzzle games and
>> adventure games, and then could feel empathy and sadness having read this:
>>
>> http://www.logicmazes.com/s7g2k/video.html
>>
>> So playing these great web games, I've been feeling that it's a new
>> renaissance for such relatively low-budget, not too high-quality but
>> otherwise
>> great playability games. Most of the people who make these games probably
>> don't get rich, because the web has a very low revenue model, but I think
>> the
>> fun is the important factor here.
>>
>> There was also an xkcd about it:
>>
>> http://xkcd.com/484/
>>
>> Summary
>> -------
>>
>> In short, I don't see the situation with open-source games improving in
>> the
>> future, because there are good reasons for it not to. However, what can
>> improve is the availability of non-free games on Linux and other free OSes
>> and
>> compatibility with Windows-based games. Some hard-core Windows gamers may
>> also
>> opt to dual-boot, use WINE, or use other solutions if only to gain the
>> other
>> technical and ideological advantages of Linux.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>>        Shlomi Fish
>>
>> --
>> -----------------------------------------------------------------
>> Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
>> Why I Love Perl - http://shlom.in/joy-of-perl
>>
>> Chuck Norris read the entire English Wikipedia in 24 hours. Twice.
>>
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