Just read the post on the announcement of the Ubuntu Gaming Team. I believe the fundamental problem of getting games on Linux is the vast disparity of Linux users that are coders versus Artists.
This hits home for me as last week I was looking at programming a game. A game is no fun to program without a quality library of media assets to work with. We obviously have the programming skills in the community. I could probably write a World Of Goo type game in scope solo in 6 months or so. But the pipeline breaks when I want to make it look good.
What did I do? Fired up inkscape and tried to draw some planes for an Air Traffic controller type game. After 3 hours or so of trying to draw a plane, it turns out I just have no artist sense for colors / shading / curves etc. My results using Blender were even worse. Currently the community artists do a great job on icon sets. If there could be an open repository of free game assets that didn’t look like they were from the 80′s this would definitely, atleast in my case, create growth in the games sector.
On a side note, last night I installed Urban Terror 4.1 and Savage 2. Urban Terror was fun to play for a bit, and I didn’t get a chance to really dive into Savage 2 yet.
Related posts:
#1 by Jared Spurbeck on April 24, 2009 - 12:00 pm
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Agreed! We need to get artists and writers interested in this whole Free / Open Source thing as well, via things like Creative Commons Attribution / Share Alike (the creative’s GPL).
Why writers? Because they create the worlds that we all want to make fanworks of, whether more stories or in-depth video games. ^.^
#2 by Jared Spurbeck on April 24, 2009 - 12:01 pm
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Er, which is not to say that I’ve never been inspired to create fanwork based on a song or a work of visual art. ^.^;
#3 by bhagabhi on April 24, 2009 - 12:22 pm
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Word! As an open source developer myself, it seems to be _very_ hard to find graphics artists who can imagine to release their work under open licenses.
#4 by tretle on April 24, 2009 - 1:30 pm
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In my opinion we need to start thinking about procedural graphics. Ogre3d had several different guys building procedural planet code but although they start off saying that the code will be released under gpl/lgpl they always changed their mind and decided to keep their work closed source or best case scenario release the code under the mit licence.
I myself am skeptible when someone releases game code under the mit licence because what that says to me is that they want other people to contribute but they also want to sell the overall product at the end.
But graphics for games is not the biggest problem in my view, it is a huge problem but I think that the biggest is the lack of animators.
The amount of work that it takes to animate a model is huge, the amount of animators which an open source project would need is too large.
This is another aspect which could be fixed in the future with procedural animation.
I have seen some youtube video’s of some guys work creating ai which can learn how to move itself without having to animate objects yourself but this is on a 2d plain.
I can see this becoming popular soon, and coupled with procedural planets it could be quite interesting, having yur model move realisticaly depending on the shape, how many legs it has, its center of gravity and the physics of the planet itself.
Things like volumetric clouds, procedural grass and trees do not need a whole lot of work from gfx artists.
But what is the biggest problem with open source gaming? The ideas themselves. 90% of open source game projects that come out are clones of closed source projects. And there are far too many unreal tournament/quake clones.
#5 by Zack on April 24, 2009 - 3:34 pm
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I really appreciate you mentioning both Urban Terror and Savage 2. I’m a newcomer to Ubuntu and a PC gamer since 95-96. I remember playing the hell out of UT back in my highschool days when it was a Q3A mod.
I’m really green to the whole open source world and haven’t had a lot of experience with stuff, but I just wanted to chime in and tell you I appreciated your comments.
Any suggestions on where to start (programming languages to learn, art tools to delve into, rss feeds to subscribe to, sites to follow, etc) would be greatly appreciated.
#6 by Klau3 on April 24, 2009 - 6:28 pm
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Inventing new game concepts isn’t that hard. A bigger problem is that people like what they know and dislike what they don’t (thats the reason why they copy so much games).
Here an idea I had some years ago for a game (quick summery):
Style:
A Combination of an RTS game and a 3D Shooter.
Game structure:
- 2 Teams
- Every team has three Generals:
- 3 Star General – decides main strategy, distribute resources, communicate
- 2 Star General – researches technology, construction & repair
- 1 Star General – order troops, reconnaissance, hacks infiltrated buildings
- Several different unit classes (storm troopers, sniper, pioneer…)
- Rank system (higher rank = more responsibility)
- Every human player leads a small soldier group of bots (except generals)
Game process:
First phase – Gain resources/information and land (scout, pioneer, sniper)
Middle phase – disturb enemy and small skirmish
End phase – big battle (one team reaches game aim – is controlling an area/flaggs)
This type of game would force the players to stick together and follow one given strategy (in a lot of games you have just a gathering of egoist running around). With the time the units would get better weapons and abilities through research (e.g. jump packs, distance auto aim, better/more bot strategies, armed drones…). As in the real army, the battle would be fought by an amount of small interacting groups. This type of game would be slower than others, but speed is not all (less speed = more strategy/communication). The other thing is, that it could be very complex without overcharge players (every one has his responsibility area/orders) and of course in the end every one can still do what they want (with the risk of loosing again an well organized enemy)
As you can see I have a lot of ideas, the problem is that I don’t now programming (will start in some weeks with C
).
If you like my idea and want know more just write a comment.
Greetings
Klau3
#7 by Debian Games Team on April 24, 2009 - 11:25 pm
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I wonder why they didn’t just join the Debian games team?
#8 by Vadim on April 25, 2009 - 9:51 am
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@DebianGamesTeam: Someone on IRC tipped me that they managed to diss both DGT and Playdeb in one sentence. They believe those efforts aren’t enough and want to start their own.
Personally, given by their attitude and cooperation, I don’t see this being a high chance of success. Will wait to see!
@OP: small tip = S2 is a melee-oriented game. So melee does more damage than ranged. Common newbie mistake is to try and shoot everything
#9 by Darwin Survivor on April 27, 2009 - 3:52 am
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I play urban terror all the time, have so since at least gutsy. I would really like to see this added to the repositories, so I don’t have to download the zip file off their slow mirrors every time I install it for someone. Savage also isn’t in the repos, though I don’t play RTS games.