Comments on: Gaming on Ubuntu / Ubuntu Gaming Team

By: Darwin Survivor

Darwin Survivor — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 07:52:26 +0000

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.

By: Vadim

Vadim — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 13:51:41 +0000

@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

By: Debian Games Team

Debian Games Team — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 03:25:44 +0000

I wonder why they didn’t just join the Debian games team?

By: Klau3

Klau3 — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 22:28:46 +0000

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

By: Zack

Zack — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 19:34:42 +0000

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.

By: tretle

tretle — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 17:30:30 +0000

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.

By: bhagabhi

bhagabhi — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 16:22:41 +0000

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.

By: Jared Spurbeck

Jared Spurbeck — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 16:01:53 +0000

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. ^.^;

By: Jared Spurbeck

Jared Spurbeck — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 16:00:43 +0000

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. ^.^