Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on February 02, 2006 12:06 AM
The biggest hang-up for a lot of open source games is the vast amount of art work that needs to be produced for a game. In some ways, this is reflected in the games which could be considered to be complete, like foobillard, where there is a finite amount of work required.
There is also the question of technology. Things right now are starting to look better on this front - there are engines like Crystal Space and OGRE which offer a good mix of features and building blocks for new games. The id software engines for Quake 1,2 & 3 are also a good starting block for some developers. The ODE and Bullet libraries offer good physical simulation libraries.
Applications like Blender are also advancing rapidly, allowing models to be built more easily, more effectively and even tested in the built-in Game Engine.
Over time, I hope that a body of Creative Commons artwork will emerge that will allow new developers to pull in art elements into their projects to get projects rolling a little more quickly. I don't think we'll ever see Open Source games having the massive new artwork productions of the commercial games but I also don't see this as a problem if extensive libraries of prebuilt models arise for people to use and adapt.
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I am more optimistic ...
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 02, 2006 12:06 AMThere is also the question of technology. Things right now are starting to look better on this front - there are engines like Crystal Space and OGRE which offer a good mix of features and building blocks for new games. The id software engines for Quake 1,2 & 3 are also a good starting block for some developers. The ODE and Bullet libraries offer good physical simulation libraries.
Applications like Blender are also advancing rapidly, allowing models to be built more easily, more effectively and even tested in the built-in Game Engine.
Over time, I hope that a body of Creative Commons artwork will emerge that will allow new developers to pull in art elements into their projects to get projects rolling a little more quickly. I don't think we'll ever see Open Source games having the massive new artwork productions of the commercial games but I also don't see this as a problem if extensive libraries of prebuilt models arise for people to use and adapt.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
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