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Apricot Team Selected For Fully Open Source 3D Game 214
crush writes "The Linux Game Tome notes that the final team to produce a fully Open Source 3D game using the CrystalSpace engine and Blender has been chosen. The project (known as Apricot) aims to produce a cross-platform, 3D game with completely Free (CCA) graphics, music and code. An important side-effect of the project is to improve open source tools for the professional game development industry."
I look forward to more 3D games on my desktop, even if this one won't be the first. (And where is the open-source bus-driving counterpart to the under-rated FlightGear?)
I look forward to more 3D games on my desktop, even if this one won't be the first. (And where is the open-source bus-driving counterpart to the under-rated FlightGear?)
Good games I have been playing on Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
- Warzone 2100. Not as shiny as Supreme Commander, but much more involved. Great fun.
- NWN 1. Thanks to the fact that NWN2 bombed there is still a large online community.
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based on quake 2 engine, but created for old xcom fans
non-3d, there are some other nice games - liquidwar and koules are two simplistic, but quite innovative and addictive games. too bad koules has not been updated in a while and its network support is very, very limited.
openttd is very great and replayable, though i never managed to fully understand semaphores
there are also some commercial games, notably
The problem (Score:2, Insightful)
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Also needed - better video card driver support (Score:2)
My 1-month old new system has a VIA Chrome 9 HC IGP card. I've spent the last 2 days trying to get it to work on Ubuntu with something other than a generic VESA driver. I finally noticed VIA actually released a new driver on Dec 2007. I downloaded it and installed it. Still no 3D. After the second day of this, I said screw it and ordered an o
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Actually, I purchased an Everex gc3502, which is basically identical to the 199.00 Linux computer they are selling at Wal-Mart, only mine had a gig of RAM and Windows Vista on it, instead of 512MB and gOS (Linux), otherwise it is identical. And I specifically purchased it because I wanted the extra RAM, to make a dual-boot system out of it (for the experience), and because I figured it shouldn't be too hard to find drivers for
If you buy cheap hardware (Score:3, Insightful)
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Or good management, and a team consisting of members that are aware that he/she has to take full responsibility for their expertise.
This would mean that everyone has a perfect grasp of the goals for the game, and each member's individual input is used to slowly clean up and refine the initial idea(s).
This also means that each member does its own research (based on some rough layouts in the gamedesign docume
Great fan of FlightGear myself (Score:5, Funny)
The airports could become hubs into the cities. FlightGear has great potential to become a parallel earth so why not start populating it?
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There are Open Source games out there, but... (Score:5, Informative)
The Pros:
There have been alot of innovative, beautiful games to come out of F/OSS:
Vega Strike
Pingus
FreeDroid RPG
TrackBalls
Nexuiz
Open Arena
Tremulous
Torcs
Scorched Earth 3D
AssaultCube
Lincity NG
Also, many DOS games have found new life as Linux games:
Quake 1, 2, and 3
Doom I, II, and Final
Descent I and II (D2X-XL)
Warcraft II *
Duke Nukem 3D
Problems:
Some games get neglected that really should not have been:
Heretic and Hexen - These are Doom Engine games, technically, there is one Engine that plays them, Vavoom, supposedly DoomsDay plays them, but in many cases their performance is really buggy.
Strife - Only Vavoom plays this.
I'd like to note that you can play Strife, Heretic, and Hexen under Wine with Randy Heit's ZDoom Engine for Windows. But thats not the same as a Native Linux Port. There used to be a Linux port of the massive multiplayer engine ZDaemon for Doom based games, but that guy announced that he hated Linux and closed off his source. He even put code in his program to prevent people using Wine to play the game, anmd said that Linux Users were responsible for DoS attacks against his servers.
Blood - This is a big one. Blood was one of the greatest games of all time. Yet there is no Engine replacement for it and it runs awful under DosEmu and DosBox. There exists a Total Remake of the Bloodbath levels called "Transfusion" but it is Quake based and is nothing like the original Blood.
Star Command: Revolution - A game So obscure I found it for 3.95 in a Wal-Mart Bargain bin
Mechwarrior 2: This game predates Direct 3D, You can't run this under Wine.
* Recently, Warcraft II support under Stratagus has suffered. Stratagus 2.1 was superior to Stratagus 2.2. Stratagus 2.1 had support for 16 players instead of the usual 8, and could do dual race computer forces. It had a level editor, and could read the native Warcraft II PUD Format.
There exists Linux Engines for:
Quake 4
Doom 3
I really think a great deal more effort should be pushed into making Windows and older Dos games accessible and updated under Linux, such as One Must Fall, and producing more original games, as it seems some Linux games that used to be full steam ahead are dying out. I'm shifting my focus in University towards programming just so I will have the technical programming knowledge to contribute to Open Source projects more than I am now. So many of the problems are things like bugs in network code, deprecated syntax, added support for additional games.
Games are where the Computer Industry goes. It was Doom that gave us the Windows Ecosystem, so it will have to be a killer Linux game that gives us the Linux ecosystem.
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Don't forget BZFlag [bzflag.org].
Re:There are Open Source games out there, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
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You had me nodding all the way, and you have to end your post with such a misinformed line. Doom came out way before Win '95 and didn't do zit in creating any ecosystem; Microsoft's marketing was immensely more important than any DOS/Windows game. And why should people switch to Linux merely for a game that will probably be ported to Windows if it's successful by any rate?
Don't get me
Open Source Bus Driving Simulator (Score:3, Informative)
(some English info at http://vbus.wikia.com/ [wikia.com] , and the Subversion repository is at svn://prv.ilan.pl/virtualbus )
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timothy
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Apricot, eh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Orange? Peach? Apricot?
I call nepotism!
W
Seriously tho-- is the game related to the short?
Re:Apricot, eh? (Score:4, Funny)
This should be server based multi user (Score:2)
I do think it would be a good idea for the developers to make this is a server based multiple user game ( a virtual world), the sort where you can login and logoff but the world remains persistant. Perhaps that does not fit with the plot they have for the game, I dont know. But I do think that having more open source multi-user games is a fantastic idea can be
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Also post your wishes for Blender at Peach site (Score:4, Informative)
LetterRip
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LetterRip
Oboy. (Score:2)
No
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Re:Oboy. (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with you, the game is probably going to be crap. But even if they had a better than average chance of making a good game, it'd probably be crap, since most games are crap.
From what I see, the point of this game is to demonstrate that an OSS toolchain is a viable solution for game design. If they can create a game that works mostly and has reasonable gameplay, they will have accomplished the goal. If the game is lacking in the concept department, most people who make the decision to create a game will be able to see that although the game isn't vey good, the platform seems to work well enough to use as a foundation. If it ends up being a good game, it's a total home run, since they get free publicity.
I'm surprised that as a gaming professional, you don't see the possibilities here. I'm in the silicon design industry and if someone wanted to demonstrate chip design using OSS tools, I'd be mostly unconcerned about the final product.
The reality is that vendor tools are a serious pain an the ass. They are usually broken and support is mostly useless. Our internal tools are not much better as far as bugs, but since we have the source, there's at least some chance of getting it working in a reasonable amount of time. If someone demonstrated the 90% of what we needed was OSS and it had some miles under it, we'd be all over it.
That said, I'm sure they still have an uphill battle to achieve even a modest success, but I don't think it's hopeless.
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What a surprise, one random guy on slashdot who's never published a game thinks he sees something that nobody else, including the people who successfully do this for a living, sees. Why do people like you never know about Occam's Razor? Is it more likely that everyone on SlashDot, including people who do this for a living, are the people missing the point? Or is it more likely to be you?
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Greetings,
Design by Committee Equals Bad Game (Score:4, Insightful)
That way lies adequacy and weak gameplay.
Still, I wish them well and since they're off to a bad start it can only improve from here.
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The project site makes it pretty clear there's no design document for the game, no central vision of what it will be. They're going to design it once they've got the people together, so it's going to be one of those designed-by-committee games.
The team has been in discussion for a month or two and have another month they can use for discussion before they come together in Amsterdam. Project Peach isn't 'design by committee' so I sse no reason why Apricot would be. Also both the artwork, and the snippets of story that have come thus far from Peach have been excellent, so I don't have any fears that it will be low quality. Also since Apricot is going to be based on the Peach assets it will have a built in characters and back story which will co
Bus Driver? (Score:2)
Desert Bus! [wikipedia.org]
Technology Demo (Score:4, Insightful)
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They constructed the arenas to highlight each system, but usually it was for cinematic or atmospheric effect. The play, as the saying goes, is the thing. Still, a really good level designer can make you happy to drool over a new feature for a minute or two in between reloads.
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This is why everyone quotes from The Incredibles and Rararouille and no one remembers Robots five minutes after they've left the theater. You need a director with a strong creative vision, a story worth telling, someone who knows exactly where he wants to go and how to use the tech to get there.
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Also one of the other important goals of this project is to improve the game pipeline for Blender and Crystal Space and to serve as a tutorial for game developers who want to use that pipeline.
Greetings,
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Honestly, I don't even know at what point OSS has failed to attract game developers. Maybe it's that the available learning resources aren't well maintained
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Greetings,
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That might very well be, but that really isn't a problem. The goal here isn't to make the best game ever, but to make a game, to demonstrate that the toolchain is usable and to improve it where needed, so that you or somebody else can use it to maybe one day make the best game ever with it.
Blender got a lot of improvements over the course of Elephants Dream and I bet it will be the same with this game.
Quake (Score:2)
Awful summary (Score:2)
The team has been chosen? By who? What for? When you read the summary only, you get the feeling that some team is going to make some game, and that a mysterious group of unmentioned persons (let's call them "they") chose them to do it, (as we can suppose) from a bunch of other competing teams who probably wanted to make that game too, but weren't good enough. And that the newsworthy part of it is that it's all going to be free and open source.
From what I read I can only suppose..
Crystal Space ROCKS! (Score:2)
Gameplay? (Score:2)
From the Apricot website it's rather
Command and Conquer/Dune and SimCity (Score:2)
I've played Battle for Wesnoth, and Xlincity - Wesnoth, it's OK, but Xlincity just isn't quite there
Anyone suggest me any?
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It's little nuggets of info like this that make it worth wading through the trolls/flame fests, etc
I hope this will be better (Score:2)
Gah! Why oh why Blender? (Score:2)
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bass ackwards (Score:2)
Games should start with a design document, not a list of technologies they plan to use.
Bassackwards mission design (Score:2)
Imagine if an entrepreneur went to an investor asking for startup funding, with a beautiful Powerpoint showing innovative new organizational charts, an efficient supply chain, and a great advertising theme. "What are you going to make?" "I dunno, something co
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Re:Do we really need more FPS? (Score:4, Informative)
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Where did you get the idea of FPS?
"But the real start will be the first week of February. Only then real decisions will be made on game concept, game design and other targets, although we do know it'll be derived from Project Peach, furry & crazy characters in a forest."
http://apricot.blender.org/ [blender.org]
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Let me see if I understand this correctly:
You assemble a full creative team for a game and only then decide what you want to do with it?
In animation, a studio like Pixar will spend years in developing a story. Only then will it begin assembling a production crew.
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Not everyone is Pixar and can I get sources for that?
Simply unlock the commentary tracks, extras and trailers on any Disney/Pixar DVD.
You have to solve the essential problems of the story before you go into production because mistakes are too expensive to fix.
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"But the real start will be the first week of February. Only then real decisions will be made on game concept, game design and other targets, although we do know it'll be derived from Project Peach, furry & crazy characters in a forest."
Let me see if I understand this correctly:
You assemble a full creative team for a game and only then decide what you want to do with it?
In animation, a studio like Pixar will spend years in developing a story. Only then will it begin assembling a production crew.
Well, yeah, because the goal here is different from the goal of somebody like Pixar.
In this project one of the important goals is simply that of going through the process of writing a game using these tools. It's a shake-down. That's the whole point, so that comes first. Choose the technical challenge, arrange the team, and then figure out what shape the work will take.
Re:Do we really need more FPS? (Score:5, Insightful)
To use your example, Spore has been in development for like seven years and has undoubtedly cost tens of millions of dollars, mostly in man-hours of work. Do you think a free-source project could get a solid core of designers, coders, and artists to donate their time and money regularly for over half a decade with NO product to show for it, on the hope that one day it might be released and... look good on their resumes?
We've all heard the horror stories about what EA puts its employees through to get games out the door. Do you think an entire project team would put themselves through that voluntarily for NO money, or for what little money a free project could get from ads, donations, and so on?
Now, an FPS, that's a known criteria. You can set clear goals for how every little thing should work, and any "controversial" parts, like level design, are conveniently lumped into chunks that can be handled individually. (If I want to make an oddball level or character model, I can handle it on my own.) Compare that to a more experimental game like Spore, where there aren't discrete levels and the creature models are intrinsic to the gameplay.
Basically, you can have innovative, high-production-value, or free: pick two. "Innovative and free" can be managed by small teams, and "high-budget and free" might theoretically be managed by initiatives like this one with clear and easily-established milestones along the way, but to get innovation AND high production values, you probably need a level of team discipline and management that can only be established with regular paychecks to incentivize everyone involved.
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Yeah well, and a few stock options wouldn't hurt either.
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I'm curious. Where exactly did you get the idea that putting your entire team on a death march [wikipedia.org] is somehow beneficial to the project?
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Yes. Because there are people growing up for whom OSS has always been around, and is som
Re:Do we really need more FPS? (Score:5, Funny)
No you're not; you're posting on Slashdot!
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When you are Will Wright himself maybe, if you are anybody else you will likely never get a penny from a publisher. Getting anything remotely or visionary done these days is extremely hard, no matter how you approach it.
That said, doing it Open Source wouldn't be any easier, since especially with Open Source games it is near impossible to assemble when doing
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To use your example, Spore has been in development for like seven years and has undoubtedly cost tens of millions of dollars, mostly in man-hours of work. Do you think a free-source project could get a solid core of designers, coders, and artists to donate their time and money regularly for over half a decade with NO product to show for it, on the hope that one day it might be released and... look good on their resumes?
Apricot is a effort to improve free 3d tools. Some people invested money, and some developers will work and get paid, among other things because it _will_ look good in their resumes to have worked here, and probably because they want to, and like the idea.
Just because you might not have other goals that direct retribution it doesn't mean other people don't either.
We've all heard the horror stories about what EA puts its employees through to get games out the door. Do you think an entire project team would put themselves through that voluntarily for NO money, or for what little money a free project could get from ads, donations, and so on?
From that, I see you are not a software developer or anything like that. EA does that, because they are incompetent at managing people. Non self
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Greetings,
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The short answer, I suspect, is that the FPS is the shortest path to completion and rather all too commonly the model for the tech demo disguised as a game.
"Furries in the forest" is high-concept. "The rat in the kitchen" is high-concept. "Robots" is high-concept.
"Ratatouille" is a movie.
Re:Do we really need more FPS? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because a game like spore takes decades of man-hours to do right, and most open source developers have full-time jobs. When you pay for software - especially games - you're usually paying for a lot of thought and time from the developers/artists.
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How can you solve this problem? The answer is revolutionary.
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>I'm having trouble thinking of a significant and good piece of open-source software that I use that wasn't either commercial-then-freed, or free-then-commercially-sponsored.
Well you are right with all the big headline stuff. But one cool thing about Open Source is that there is a long tail, you will have small specialised applications, made by one person to get something done, then that is then used by a few dozen or a hundred people around the world.
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I'm having trouble thinking of a significant and good piece of open-source software that I use that wasn't either commercial-then-freed, or free-then-commercially-sponsored.
I think this happens because you create a false free-commercial dichotomy. Free software does not cease to be free, because it is commercially sponsored.
Probably your issue is the metrics you use. Maybe the same software you consider "significant and good" is considered "significant and good" by the people who have money to invest in it. But it doesn't say anything about free software not being able to be significant and good. It just says that you probably think "significant and good" free software is the
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So the Free Software community is going to produce another FPS. Well, maybe that will make Free Software look like it's got it together, able to coordinate the efforts of many volunteers for a quality product.
Actually it is not planned to be a FPS according to Ton (leader of Blender and the projects) , "[W]e will re-use the peach project assets [] so it's not likely to be a FPS".
http://www.blender.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12399 [blender.org]
The official game style is yet to be announced; but I believe the team is leaning towards minigames.
LetterRip
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Design by committee isn't very compatible with radical ideas
How many FOSS game developers are there, anyway? The vast majority of games coming out from the the "traditional" game industry are cookie-cutter dross. There's hundreds of non-free companies out there and a handful that make anything interesting. The innovation percentage just isn't that large, so with very few free developers out there in the first place, you can be sure a VERY small number of those will be coming
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Everyone wins (Score:2)
This would benefit commerical game developers greatly as well as hobbyists.
Imagine if Havok, SpeedTree, etc were open source. I would guess that the development budget for Oblivion could have saved a few million dolla
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http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/apricot-open-game/ [blender.org]
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I don't know; it'd be easy to say that open source != free, but that'd be both glib, redundant and not answering the question I guess. Perhaps there's the wages/salary/remuneration for the developers or maybe there's some resources need paying for? Whether a CVS repository server or some licensing fees to access...something or other?
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I don't know; it'd be easy to say that open source != free, but that'd be both glib, redundant and not answering the question I guess.ething or other?
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"At the end of July 2008 the game will be launched. The team members will get a great studio facility and housing in Amsterdam, all travel costs reimbursed, and a fee sufficient to cover all expenses during the period."
Obviously, this requires funding. The funding's coming from sponsors (see web site) and profits from the DVD sales. The DVD, as noted in the forums/site, will include all sorts of great documentation and information about what went on and stuff.
And from the forum:
"T
Re:This project needs funding? (Score:5, Interesting)
LetterRip
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That means that the game will have funny & furry animals, and play in an outdoors environment.
This probably means an adventure/platform style of game, or maybe it's going to be like mini games or party games. The Apricot team will have - within above constraints - the full creative freedom in designing the game concept and game play.
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It will be an Open Source game. Didn't you read the title ?-)
Seriously, thought, I'm getting a bad feeling about this. There is a considerable risk that the game will simply be a glorified tech demo, like Elephant's Dream [elephantsdream.org] was. This didn't really matter for the film, since you can just switch back and admire the surreal world and effects; but it will matter for a game, where you'll have to interact and participate. A game must be more than just a bunch of random ideas thr
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How about any big 3D feature studio? Sure they might need to identify some supplemental tools (or some custom plugs/scripts) to work with Maya, but it's not like they're going to even think about throwing out all their existing too
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It's written somewhere on the project page. Buried in a response to a comment.
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They really should have used Ogre.
Re:Why crystal space? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm of course biased as I'm the project manager but I believe that the strongest point of Crystal Space is it's modularity and extensibility. It is because of that that we will be able to move into the future and we will do so with the Apricot project.
Greetings,
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LetterRip
companies work for YOU (Score:2)
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I don't think you can render that directly so easily and if you want to work with that dataset it will cause even more trouble. I would try to change it to something simpler to work with. First create a height map which only covers the lowest parts of the model. Then extract all geometry that resides atop of it. That should result in a big height map and geometry which has a lot of disjoint parts. So next I would try to segment the geometry into disjunct objects so you can use level of detail on them, using
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long rant short, completing a commercial-quality game today (i.e. one that people might actually play) takes 100 man years of work, and a minimum of 2.5 elapsed years. Of course, nobody actually believes that, or else community projects would never get started.
Your typical 'open source game' is an all volunteer effort with rarely anyone having project management skills, nor has anyone on the team typically completed a previous large scale endeavor. Also they tend to not have anyone who is able to contribute full time.
Apricot has Ton and Jorrit who are the leads of Blender and Crystal Space respectively, both (and especially Ton) have a great deal of experience with accomplishing major projects. Elephants Dream, and now Peach, already show Tons leadership skill