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?)
Re:Do we really need more FPS? (Score:3, Insightful)
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]
Re:This project needs funding? (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
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.
The problem (Score:2, Insightful)
well, enough imagination for now. if you want a good open source game, you need full time developers who can work full time on it. which means you need a financial backing. (Google?)
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.
Apricot, eh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Orange? Peach? Apricot?
I call nepotism!
W
Seriously tho-- is the game related to the short?
Re:There are Open Source games out there, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't forget BZFlag [bzflag.org].
Re:Good games I have been playing on Linux (Score:1, Insightful)
Obsidian really dropped the ball on NWN2.
All the stuff that made NWN so great and helped foster the community really wasn't present in NWN 2.
If ever there was a game that only needed an engine upgrade to nicer graphics and perhaps an updated D&D ruleset while keeping everything else about the game exactly the same it was NWN. Obsidian managed to get the nicer graphics part and ruleset done but totally failed to deliver anything else. If they'd have reverse engineered the user interface of the NWN game client and GM client and made a totally slavish copy that worked 100% exactly like NWN did then they'd have produced a far better game than they managed to.
If you were to consider NWN to be a Swiss army knife then NWN2 would have to be considered as a bent, rusty butter knife.
Re:There are Open Source games out there, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Technology Demo (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:There are Open Source games out there, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
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 wrong: more open source games the better. Not because they might switch users over to a different OS (yeah right), not to demonstrate the capabilities of Linux, but simply to give users of any operating system some fun. What's wrong with keeping it at that?
Re:Do we really need more FPS? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Do we really need more FPS? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Do we really need more FPS? (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
If you buy cheap hardware (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:There are Open Source games out there, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Technology Demo (Score:1, Insightful)
Elephant's Dream was an arthouse kind of short. Yeah. Big whoop. It went over rather well in the independent film theaters where it was shown -- that was its target audience. It was written by a professional writer with a good deal of experience, and there certainly was a story being told, maybe even with sugar in its porridge. If that kind of story's not your thing, fine. Go watch X-Men again.
Re:Do we really need more FPS? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 something original. When you do a clone of some old classic, you can always point at that and say "Hey, thats what we want to do, come join", if you want to do something original you can point nowhere and even if you have design document, finding people that share that vision gets very hard and troublesome, since nobody really knows where the game will end up and if it will even be fun.
Re:Do we really need more FPS? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 one that is commercially sponsored.
I use significant and good free software that is not commercially sponsored. Blender is sponsored by people. Freemind is sponsored by
Of course, successful software will attract money, but it doesn't mean that commercial sponsorship is key to success, maybe it means the opposite.
Re:Do we really need more FPS? (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because you might not have other goals that direct retribution it doesn't mean other people don't either.
A better work environment, a nice project, and people working for a common goal, could achieve what slave workers couldn't.
Re:Why crystal space? (Score:3, Insightful)
Now that I've given you the obligatory dire warning, good luck.