Terrain Editing in WorldForge

Self-built fort in WorldForge

The trend of environment shaping has reached WorldForge. The building seen above is one static model piece though.

Terrain Molding in WorldForge

This video makes me dream of an open source Populous3-like. :)

Techne, Aviation & Airrace slash community-funded game development

Billiards, a Techne game

Techne is a simple real-time physics engine.

Aviation

Aviation is a simple flight sim framework.

 Airrace

And then there's Airrace.

Airrace is a proof-of-concept Application written on top of Aviation implementing an air race game where the player has to pilot a light-weight aircraft through a track consisting of pylons or air gates. Although its written as a test of Aviation and in order to promote its development, it's still a full-fledged game. Currently there are 7 training courses and 5 race-tracks but adding more is a piece of cake.

We seem to be talking much about funding lately on this blog.. Well here's another one: the developer of all these wrote "an idea about a community-funded game development project but as this probably sounds like a cheap scheme to profit out of free software please consider reading the full text for the rationale behind it."

The author speaks of open source games and their origins, of game production methods and the dilemma of game dev versus engine dev (milk vs. cow).

I think I should quote the (quite long) core message:

I'm therefore proposing the following: I'm starting a fund-raising campaign with the purpose of allowing me to work on this project full-time. The original idea was to quit my job if enough funds could be raised to sustain me for a certain period of time, say a year although the game should take far less that that time to become playable. Still the devil is in the details which include documentation, thorough debugging and different game modes and these take time as well. Anyway I'm currently unemployed now so the plan can be simplified. If enough funds can be raised I'll continue working for as much time as possible on the game full-time. The goal will be networked gameplay and various modes such as duels, dogfights and bomber escort missions. I'm very open to suggestions of course, these are just some preliminary thoughts. If funding goes better than expected everything apart from the minimum I need for myself will be directed towards hiring other people fore side tasks. This may include artists and web-developers for the game GUI and pages. If funding fails I'll just create the core technology as I've done until now and move on to the next project. This is the only alternative if Techne is to be developed further. I just hope temporal restrictions will allow at least that.

I like the idea. But it lacks a progress bar. A.. donation widget.. wait, let me run Inkscape..

A donation widget idea (source)

Inside a Star-Filled Sky (Public Domain For-Pay) + Video Review + Jason Rohrer on open source

Inside a Star-Filled Sky (IaSFS? InaStFiSk?) is a game. And art. [You want a game?=art discussion? Go to page 9! ;)] This art runs on OSX, Linux and Windows.

So you move around in procedurally generated mazes in real-time, shoot enemies, pick up stuff and change between levels. Sounds like.. GoblinHack so far (the graphics are softer though).

But.
The mazes are people.
Or pixelated monsters for that matter. Or upgrades.
You control a thing inside another thing. the thing is a maze.

The game costs at least $1.75 because it's pay what you want + fees.

I was lucky to get Jason to answer two of my questions.

Q: Is IaSFS in the public domain?
Jason Rohrer: Yes, it's all in the public domain (which is why no license file is included).

Q: Why do you release your games as open source? Why does open source matter (to you)?
Jason Rohrer: I release all of my work as open source because there's no reason not to.  People mostly "hide" their source code out of fear, but I think that fear is unfounded.  In the game world, releasing source code is almost unheard of, except for decades-old abandonware projects.  Long ago, I used to harbor the romantic hope that some other coder would benefit from reusing or at least studying my source code.  But over 12 years of releasing all of my source code, that has happened only rarely.  Instead, the main benefit has come from making my work as portable and as long-lived as possible.  Binaries break eventually as platforms change, and they cannot be repaired.  A source distribution can survive and remain functional much longer.  My passion for open source has transitioned from idealistic to pragmatic over the years.

IMHO Jason is a very interesting guy to listen to [video search "Jason Rohrer"].

About public domain: There is no PD statement in Jason's code as far as I can tell and the game code contains (depends on?) the non-free fortify.

I could upload the game and share the link. It'd be legal. I would feel guilty though. So instead I offer you my help at buying the game if you can't use the payment method available. If you can transfer to a German bank account or are located in/near Berlin, Germany, contact me and I'll buy the game for you if you somehow give me the money you want to pay.

I guess we need screens...

Enjoy! It's from the official gallery!

I guess a video can't hurt (I'm probably wrong)...

Enjoy the video! (F-Word Warning!) +1 and I commented it! (Here's another by me, without comments but boring gameplay)

If you have problems with video/flash/youtube... youtube-dl!

After making the video, I realized that playing on higher (lower?) levels (levels?) is amazing fun and reminds me of Meritous. Meritous is a hard punisher though. In (In a) Star-Filled Sky is is awesome getting destroyed in all these amazing ways just to get destroyed in even more amazing ways few seconds afterwards and sometimes even get to destroy something in amazing ways by chance or even skill! Awesome.

I really need to hear people's opinion about 1. this game 2. this payment model.

Dev-Corner: the challenges of developing long, plot-heavy FOSS games

Xenogear: Fighting Elly's Gear

Xenogears is one of my favorite games of all time. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, it was a Japanese RPG for the Sony PS1 in 1998. Not everyone agrees that it was an amazing game, but it's undeniably one of the longest, most plot-heavy RPGs ever made, especially given the fact that most of the plot is in the form of the main story line as opposed to random side-quests that have very little to do with the overall goal. Xenogears is particularly interesting in that each time you play it through, you'll pick up more and more little plot details that you missed the first time around. This is because not only does it have a massive main plot, it also has a massive back story spanning several thousand years, which is only really revealed in small details that are only apparent once you're already familiar with the main plot.

By this time, some of you are probably wondering why I'm raving about a proprietary console game on a FOSS gaming blog. Well, there's another interesting fact about Xenogears that makes it very relevant to the topic of developing games with long, linear plots: it was never really finished. There's all sorts of speculation as to why this might have been; my own pet theory is that upper management decided they'd been waiting too long and paying too much, cut the project short, and told them to shove it out the door as-is. This becomes very apparent when you reach the second half of the game -- it goes very abruptly from a deep, plot-heavy game to an irritating scene where they briefly summarize massive amounts of plot that would have added about thirty to fifty hours of gameplay, before finally releasing you back out into the world to do a few last quests and fight the final boss.

So Xenogears, the Unfinished Symphony of JRPGs, is as example of two really important points:

• It's difficult to predict the real scope of a project until after you've already committed to it, and...
• Even big teams with large amounts of money often have trouble finishing ambitious projects in a timely fashion.

Painfully, these issues apply in even greater force to non-commercial game projects (a category that the vast majority of FOSS game projects fall into). On average, FOSS developers tend to have less time and be less reliable than people working on large, proprietary, commercial projects. This isn't because they're less reliable people in general, but because they're real people with real day jobs who are largely doing their FOSS coding work on a volunteer basis. Hence, developers and artists tend to come and go, and even when they're with the project for a long time, they tend to have a wildly variable amount of time that they're able to devote to it, depending on what else is going on in their lives. As such, maintaining a level of coding an artistic consistently equal to that of a large, heavily funded project is a tremendous challenge, because in general you're working with smaller units of work from a much larger team.

So as I see it, if we as FOSS developers want to create the sort of plot-heavy games that I'm referring to (be they JRPGs or whatever else), the odds are stacked against us from the outset. So here's what I'd like to discuss:

FOSS software development undeniably has certain strengths that closed development lacks -- the sheer volume of ideas, as well as the fact that, since FOSS development is primarily done on a volunteer basis, you aren't limited by time or budget in the traditional sense -- your project can continue as long as people remain interested and dedicated, and there's no one in upper management to tell you it's time to throw away your efforts. With this in mind, I'd like to pose some questions for everyone, and hopefully get some discussion going:

• How can we, as a community, apply these strengths to the sort of project that requires a large development team and a grand, unifying vision?
• How do you go about convincing a large number of people to join an ambitious project? As someone who has been following FOSS game development for quite a while now, overly ambitious projects tend to make me very skeptical. How do you overcome this skepticism and convince people to help you out, if you're dealing with the sort of project where it's not practical to start small?
• Once people are on board, how do you keep the quality consistent? How do you keep a ton of people interested in working on a grand plot line that's already been fleshed out essentially from start to finish? FOSS developers need (and deserve) to give input to the projects they're helping with. How do you maintain a vision while simultaneously leaving room for input?
• One bit of advice I find myself giving out over and over is not to be too ambitious to start with. Sometimes, though, you need to be ambitious in order to make a project work. How can you divide things up in such a way that you can be ambitious yet still start small enough to get your project going?

Anyway, I'm serious about these questions. I've been giving ambitious projects (not a particular ambitious project, but rather the idea of them in general) a lot of thought lately, and I'm hoping that maybe we can put our heads together as a community and come up with some sort of strategy for tackling them.

I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Peace,

Bart K
Founder, OpenGameArt.org

When three became two - Glests Uniting!

So, to all those familiar with the Glest project...

Not familiar? Glest is a popular 3D RTS that wowed the Free gaming scene with it's high quality graphics and polished gameplay back when it was released in 2006.

...it has evolved into 3 distinct codebases, with differing features:

• Glest
  The original Glest, which is barely developed any more and suffers from significant issues that will likely never get addressed, and lacks many features compared to the continuations.
• Glest: Advanced Engine aka GlestAE
  A community-led continuation of Glest by adding features and rewriting significant portions of the Glest codebase.
• Mega Glest
  With frustrations growing about the lack of stability of early GlestAE work, and the length of time between releases, a prolific modder started to add key features such as improved multiplayer, a 'mega pack' of mods (which inspired the name), and port useful changes back from GlestAE - the result was MegaGlest.

For some good videas of both forks, go to player UltiFD's youtube channel.

My impression of the different development approaches for MegaGlest and GlestAE is that MegaGlest development is driven by a "whatever works" mentality to make rapid improvements and bring more features to players. GlestAE development seems to be based on a much longer term outlook, with most work being fairly significant in nature and few basic improvements.

Where are they now

Both MegaGlest and GlestAE have remained much lower profile than perhaps the efforts of the developers have deserved. Whilst Glest remains popular, and enjoys many downloads due to high Internet profile, there is no mention of MegaGlest and GlestAE on the homepage and only people diving into the forum will discover them.

Lacking features and stability, players who fall away after trying Glest may have stuck around if they encounter MegaGlest or GlestAE, but they are unlikely to ever try them. Hopefully this will change now MegaGlest has an amazing website and will start to gain an Internet profile of its own.

Another issue is the increasing amount of time spent porting improvements between the two forks.

A further issue is that, since GlestAE has features that MegaGlest doesn't (and, to a lesser degree, vice versa), there is an increasing divergence in the modding communities.

Glest forms to join forces?

Well, the story may yet have a happy ending. After a brutal conflict, with bloodshed, riots, toppled dictators, eathquakes and... wait, I'm looking at the wrong screen...

After much pressing by Internet trolls and well wishers, it seems that a joining of efforts is in the offing.

Even if the efforts do merge, they may still remain separate entities. Reading through the post, there's talk of official liasons between the projects and all sorts. It seems a bit more complicated than you might expect.

There's even a distant hope that the resultant efforts of the GlestAE/MegaGlest merger may result in Glest 4.0 if the community finally takes over the now-abandoned Glest project.

In Other Glest News

Glest forks (MegaGlest, at leasT) now can have cliffs! This opens up a lot of possibilities when it comes to map design and gives the game a bit of vertical depth, making it look cooler (in my opinion - and I am incredibly cool).

Somebody with a peculiar middle name is making a fully-3D Glest-inspired game called GlestNG - it will use Glest assets but otherwise be completed written from scratch using Ogre3D. Will it ever become playable? Who knows, but it's intriguing nonetheless. So just when two forks merge, another project arises to take the spare seat. Hah!

A completely cool mod Annex Conquer The World (moddb) has been teasingly dangled in front of us, with acclaims already including: "Easily the best Glest mod since the original Magitech!!"

Let's hope it gets released as Free software! ;-)

Engines of War: Not dead!

I made the mistake of writing the Spring DOTA-like game Engines of War off as dead the other day; I could not have been more wrong. In case you are unfamiliar with the term DOTA-like, the gameplay basically consists of controlling a single hero "Engine" unit and battling waves of AI controlled units, as well as opposing player controlled Engines.

They released a playable alpha a couple of weeks back with a very un-TA like UI and gameplay (take that Julius :P). So yeah, check it out!

Lugaru animations, maps and skeletons are free (ShareAlike)

Remember when we talked about Lugaru getting ripped?

I just got reply (twice) from Wolfire that the licensing information described in this file is correct. [first ticket (img) | second ticket (img)]. Probably the permission was given in private conversation or in the hidden Wolfire forum.

I'm so glad they did license hard-to-recreate data as open content! Hopefully some completely free/open source project will come out of this. (There are many more steps/files to go though.)