Rich: Do you have much interaction or collaboration with any of the other Open Source gaming communities? Aviv: We’re kind of in the middle between the Indie game world and the Open Source software world. We don’t quite belong to either culture entirely. We certainly invite more projects to reach out. Perhaps we can find new ways to collaborate. We do believe that a large part of the code that we developed can be used for other projects. But at the moment we’re more focused on developing 0 A.D. to completion, and writing a lot of code and implementing a lot of features that are specific to 0 A.D., than implementing general solutions for all sorts of games.
2012 February the 6th was the 10th birthday of Frozen Bubble's first release. The development was started in november 2001 by "ayo", amaury and Guillaume Cottenceau, members of the MandrakeSoft team (Mandriva nowadays).
Frozen Bubble is a beautiful game inspired by Puzzle Bobble (published by Taito in 1994 , also called Bust-a-Move). The game has nice graphics and music (from matths alias Matthias).
Frozen Bubble level editor for Android
Development has stopped in 2008, but Frozen Bubble and its ports still enjoy high popularity, especially on the Linux and Android platforms. A Java port also exists. Only the first version is available for Windows.
A (video) podcast show called FLOSS Weekly interviewed Crystal Hammer of Stunt Rally about the project in their issue #202.
I only recently discovered the vast spaces of open source and Linux podcasts. If you know of open source games podcasts, please let us know in the comments! :)
My name is Artem (KroArtem in IRC) and I wanted to post an article here almost for a year. Nowadays I have an opportunity to do this. Let me introduce myself: I'm studying at St.Petersburg State University, Faculty of Applied Mathematics and Control Processes, trying to become a programmer and a mathematician :) In my spare time I like to test some linux games, report bugs, give feedback, translate them and so on. Actually this is the way I've met SuperTuxKart developers. Today I want to obtain an interview from them.
Firstly, let me remind you what SuperTuxKart is. SuperTuxKart is a kart racing game that features free software mascots, has a cartoony style, includes different game modes and supports multiplayer (split-screen). You can visit STK's site and receive some more information about the game.
SuperTuxKart's new track, Blackhill Mansion
Secondly, I want to name our beloved developers and contributors: Joerg «hiker» Henrichs, Marianne «Auria» Gagnon, Magne «Arthur_D» Djupvik and Jean-Manuel Clemençon aka «samuncle». Please note that there are some more contributors but unfortunately I didn't manage to contact them. I think 4 people would be enough for the interview, though :)
I've prepared some questions and sent them via emails and here are the results:
FG: Please say some words about yourself/your job.
Arthur: My name is Magne, and I am an avid fan of SuperTuxKart. I'm interested in computers, music, animated cartoons and of course games.
Auria: My name is Marianne, I work mostly as a developer for SuperTuxKart. I am going to complete my computer science studies at university in the coming months.
Hiker: I've studied computer science in Germany, and am now working as a consultant for the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. I help them using their supercomputer for their operational and research numerical weather and climate predictions.
Samuncle: I like drawing and hiking. On the professional side, I am currently studying telecommunications to become technician.
FG: Explain in a few words how and when did you join STK's team?
Arthur: Well, I had been playing the game's predecessor TuxKart as one of the few 3D games my computer could handle back in the day in Linux. Later my brother said a fork of the project had appeared in the repositories, so I went on to install STK 0.3. I was impressed by the changes, and decided I would try to follow the project's mailing list. Of course, I couldn't manage to keep quiet, so I engaged in discussion and asked questions, and got always nice, friendly answers back, which made me want to stay with the project and get involved where I could.
Auria: I liked kart games like Mario Kart. So many years ago I downloaded STK - version 0.3 I think. However this old version had major issues; so I decided I might as well do small improvements, like replace the then cylindrical lighthouse with something better, etc. And a few years later here I am, core developer :)
Hiker: I discovered TuxKart as part of a suse Linux installation, and soon found that a 'Game of the Month' had started intending to improve TuxKart. That project had basically been abandoned (due to some disagreements between the original developer and the GotM-team). A fork was created to save their work, but the project was dead. I basically picked up the project from there, fixed the bugs and performance issues, and did a first playable release of STK. Then I was hooked on ;)
Samuncle: Initially, I wanted to propose ideas that could help improve the graphics. I liked STK but I thought we could do better visually.
FG: Say what role do you have in the project? (Leader, package maintainer, etc)
Arthur: I mostly test and give feedback on the project, report bugs, write updates on our blog, and make some trivial changes now and then, mostly graphics related.
Auria: I am a core developer to the game itself, and occasionally work on 3D modelling. I am second only to our benevolent dictator Joerg :)
Hiker: I am one of the two project leaders.
Samuncle: I work on the graphics of the tracks. I build new tracks from start to end, or I improve existing tracks. I use mainly blender for the 3D, gimp for textures and mypaint for drawing.
FG: Why do you work on this project?
Arthur: Because I like the game, and because it's a very unique project in the world of Free software. It's an arcade racing game with only mild cartoon violence, and it has a very distinctive gameplay. Most other Free racing games are more realistic and doesn't have a cartoonish theme. Also because the developers are very nice people, and the community as a whole is good to be in.
Auria: I like kart games, I like programming, I like the STK team.
Hiker: Originally my main motivation was to give something back to the open source community by fixing the performance problems STK had after the GotM project. But then I got interested in the game, and still have some ideas I might want to implement once I have an engine with all features I need. Additionally I hope that STK might serve as a teaching tool as well, it would be easy for schools to pick up and perhaps use STK in their lessons.
Incidentally, the fact that it is like Mario Kart was never a point for working on STK - I had never played any kart game till two years after I started working on STK (and people kept on telling me: "It's like MK", so after a while I decided to have a look).
It also keeps me entertained on my way to work, since I mostly work on the train on my way to work :)
Samuncle: Because I would like supertuxkart to have nicer-looking graphics. Along the way, I also use this as an opportunity to learn blender and another tools. It's also fun to play a game you contribute to.
FG: Are you satisfied with existing development? Do you think STK needs more contributors/testers/artists?
Arthur: I am satisfied with the direction of the game, I only wish things would happen faster! But for that to happen, we need more people to help contribute. So if you have something you think would add to the game, please come forward with your skills, or just your ideas (though we get millions of those, and usually fall short on man/woman-power). Programmers and 3D artists are especially welcome, but as said everyone can get involved as much as they want to. And we're all a friendly bunch, so getting involved isn't hard. :)
Auria: We could certainly use with a few more developers and artists :) the networking feature, for instance, is often requested and help would be welcome in making it come
Hiker:r: Well, the team could certainly be bigger, with atm two code developers and about two regularly contributing artists many things take much longer than necessary, or need to be postponed till later. But the team itself works quite well together, so I am quite happy about this.
Samuncle: I think a network mode is what STK lacks most, so if someone could work on this it could help get things moving forward.
FG: How do you see STK in the future?
Arthur: I see it as an even greater game, with more fun, more polish and a larger community, and also an online multiplayer community. In short, I think it can only get better from here. :)
Auria: As any open source project, it's very hard to see the future. Let me just say that I would like STK to grow with a solid set of nice-looking tracks, improved AI and better single player mode as well as multiplayer.
Hiker: By switching to a more modern graphics engine we have opened the way for much better looking tracks, and slowly we are replacing older tracks with newer ones. Support for networking will certainly give STK more appeal to a wider audience. By then I hope to find some time to implement more game modes to make STK a more unique and interesting game, and less of a 'copy' of other kart games.
Samuncle: Hmm, I don't really know ^^ I would like it to be more cohesive (not less fun though), that there is more unity (between tracks, most notably). I would not be against reducing the number of tracks to improve their quality (because maintaining a world takes time)
FG: What do you think is important, what do you like / don't like in stk's development/community/etc.
Arthur: The important thing is to have fun, and stay cool. We are blessed with very stable project leaders, who have been pushing the game forward for many years. So even though I'd sometimes wish development would be faster, it's important that people do things in a tempo they are comfortable with, and don't burn out. Also, there are more important things in life than STK, but I do say it has made mine a little richer. So if you like the game, feel free to register at our forums, join the mailing list and IRC and take part in the discussions. :)
Auria: It's important and very welcome to get help with testing, especially when betas or release candidates and released; translations are also very important. The less fun aspect is managing everyone's expectations, people have many ideas of what they would like us to code for STK but it would take 10 of us to do it all :)
Hiker: In contrast to commercial game design we have only limited influence on the 'style' of tracks, since especially the kart and track design is done by various artists, mostly following their own taste. We nevertheless try to maintain the vision where we want STK to be at. With the addon-server we luckily have now the option to publish karts and tracks that might not fit in the main game for everyone to download. It of course means that Auria and myself sometimes have to be the (hopefully) benevolent dictators, but I think that is very important in order to keep STK on track.
The most disappointing point is that we often get people interested in helping to develop STK, but they then disappear leaving a less than half finished mess of code behind. I guess many people overestimate their available time, or underestimate the complexity of STK.
Finally I want to say that we're waiting some new and interesting additions, like Overworld, a big track from where the player will start his journey, or... but hey, feel free to follow SuperTuxKart updates via forum, blog or mailing lists! :)
My name is Antoine and I’ve been a devotee of this site and the Linux Game Tome for years. Now I have the priviledge to contribute back an article. Thank you qubodup for helping me out with this article. I love open source games, but I have a particular soft spot for those that allow creativity and collaboration from their users. Imagine if there existed an open source, and therefore completely editable, game engine with as much content as Morrowind’s fans have created available for it? As many of you are aware, there are currently fan projects working to extend the life, reach, and functionality of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind far beyond what’s possible using Bethesda’s Construction Set modding tools.
Can you guess which screen is rendered by what engine? :)
About Morrowind: Morrowind is an enormous proprietary game loved by fans for its atmospheric and immersive world filled with bizarre giant mushrooms, homes built into giant vines, and barren wastelands. However, it was plagued by software bugs, had many elements that were half-baked in their execution, and its game engine took poor advantage of GPUs. Some of these problems fans were able to address with unofficial patches and mods, but others could not be solved without changing the actual game engine.
When I found an open source reimplentation of the Morrowind engine I had to become involved. I’m very new to the group, but I’m helping out the PR team. However, just days after finding OpenMW, I discovered two more such projects existed, with rumors of a fourth. Mark Siewert of The Crystal Scrolls (and soon OpenMW), said the multitude of projects are a testament to the interest people still have in this game’s strange world. Indeed, look at the massive undertakings of fan projects like Tamriel Rebuilt, MGE XE, MGSO, or type in on YouTube “Morrowind 2011” or “Morrwind 2012” and you’ll get a sense for the countless hours fans continue dedicating to improve Morrowind a decade after its release.
I spoke with the developers of the different engines about their projects to get an idea of what their development status is, what their goals are, and how they’re accomplishing them. A quick disclaimer; you need a legal copy of Morrowind to use any of these engines for playing Morrowind. You can get one from steam (it goes on sale every couple of months) or by purchasing one on ebay.
OpenMW began in 2008 by Nicolay Korslund, it uses ogre3d, bullet physics, OpenAL, OIS, NifLib, and MYGUI. Nicolay stepped down as project lead last year and was replaced by the developer Marc “Zini” Zinnschlag and is joined by many great developers.
Project Aedra, was started by Tom Lopes in 2009. It employs NifLib, Bullet Collision, Quake 3 Arena for "pmove" character controller code, and the FastLZ library.
The Crystal scrolls was started by Mark Siewert in 2007 and it employs the Crystal Space 3d engine.
So what do these projects have in common? Well, they are licensed under some form of the GNU GPL license, written in C++, and aim to have all the features of original Morrowind, including compatibility with all official and unofficial expansions and plug-ins (and those based on external programs such as the Script Extender). Their individual goals are listed below.
Additional Goals:
OpenMW
Project Aedra
The Crystal Scrolls
Allow greater modification: change game rules, create new spell effects, etc through scripting.
Fix system design bugs, like the "dirty" GMST entries in mods, and the save game "doubling" problem
Post 1.0:
Improve the interface and journal system
(possibly) improve game mechanics, physics, combat and AI
(possibly) support multiplayer
(possibly) improve graphics to use more modern hardware
Be blindingly fast
Multi-thread support
Multiplayer support
Modern graphics engine
Upgraded physics engine
Upgraded AI
Fix bugs in Morrowind (mostly related to data merging)
Add many functions of FPS Optimizer including a fix for the world map
Support for multiple .ini files, with each capable of overwriting some of the default settings.
Post 1.0:
Support for external tools that modify the Morrowind.exe like Morrowind Script Extender
Multiple world spaces like in Oblivion (would reduce mod compatibility issues)
Features:
OpenMW
Project Aedra
The Crystal Scrolls
Windows
Done
Done
Done
Mac OS X
Done
-
-
GNU/Linux
Done
Wine
-
Game launcher
Done
-
Planning
Console
Nearly
Nearly
-
HUD
Early
Partial
-
Render Interior
Done
Nearly
-
Render Exterior
Partial*
Nearly
Done
Sky Rendering
Early
Done
Partial
Day/Night Cycle
Done
Nearly
Partial
NPC Rendering
Nearly
Partial
Done
NPC Animations
Nearly
-
Nearly
NPC Dialogue
Nearly**
-
-
Sound effects
Partial
Done
-
Music
Done
Done
-
Object Collision
Partial
Done
-
Object interaction
Nearly
Nearly
-
Water Layer
Nearly**
Nearly
Partial
Scripting
Nearly
Partial
-
Multiplayer
-
Early
-
Plugin Merging
-
-
Planning
Graphical Replacer Support
Done
Done
-
Multithread Stream Loading
-
Partial
-
Hardware Animations (Shaders)
Planning
Partial
Nearly
Load Doors
Done
Done
-
Render Particle Effects
-
Planning
-
Read Scrolls and Books
-
Done
-
Menus
-
Partial
-
Ground Blends
-
Early
-
Distant Land
-
Partial
-
Journal
Partial
-
-
Nearly** = Code is in the repository, but not in the latest release.
Partial* = Code is in repository, but likely to not be activated in a release for quite some time.
- = No code or planning done yet, or possibly not intending to include.
When is your next release?
OpenMW: No exact date, but we are on the verge of our big 0.12.0 release.
Project Aedra: One was just released. The latest download is r163.
Crystal Scrolls: After recently returning from an unexpected and prolonged hiatus, I released a new snapshot two weekends ago.
Project Aedra: Everything (in no particular order); scripting, multiplayer, key binding, animated textures, GUI, conformance (tweaking every little thing to be the same as in Morrowind), ground blends, bug fixing, animated skins, distant Land, 3D SFX, and shaders.
Crystal Scrolls: I am going to join forces with the OpenMW team and help them in getting their own project out of the door. While I will still continue developing this project, I also want to see one of the many Open Source Morrowind projects completed. And from my point of view, OpenMW is likely to reach maturity first. I am planning to do more work on things that do not depend on the renderers, so this should be of use to OpenMW as well. Concerning Crystal Scrolls 0.3:
Plugin/Mod support. Possibly with a launcher which lets you disable/enable plug-ins
Support for original save games (it's no that different from plug-ins).
Object interaction. This will enable many additional features, such as picking up objects, entering internal cells, and more.
How big is your team?
OpenMW: We have eleven active developers (with varying degrees of involvement with OpenMW) and five people working on things like package maintenance, public relations, and website administration. Our team list is here.
Project Aedra: 1 person, me!
Crystal Scrolls: Myself.
How can people contribute?
OpenMW: If you are skilled with C++ or have game programming skills please register at our forum, look at the version 0.13.0 thread and find an unassigned task, assign it to yourself and get started. Also we want people with fast computers and video editing skills to record demonstration videos for Youtube. We hope that releases post 0.13.0 will be playable enough to necessitate many bug testers. If you are learning how to code, download and have a look at OpenMW.
Project Aedra: I'm looking for C and C++ game programmers with prior experience who can help program.
Crystal Scrolls: There are many ways to help out. Now that rendering and animation is mostly out of the way, it is feasible to start implementing more features. My primary goal for 0.3 is to add plug-in/mod support, and object interaction, but one can easily imagine things that are not blocked by this feature: sound, the console, scripting, etc. So if you want to help, install the program and find something that is missing and that might not depend on plug-in support or object interaction.
There you have it folks; three projects sharing a lot of common ground, but with some different goals and feature sets. Which is the best? That depends on who is asking. I suggest trying out all three every six months or to see how their changing and defining their own style. No doubt they will influence each others development with ideas and solutions. It is very exciting that Mark Siewert is joining the OpenMW team. Here’s to open source, games that facilitate creativity, and the preservation and improvement of games for posterity!
Global Game Jam 2012 is over and you can find all the by-nc-sa-licensed games here. We talked to the organizers about allowing free (as in freedom etc.) licenses and got some positive replies, but in the end it was too short a notice.
We ask you now to write a short message to GGJ, asking for the inclusion of further licenses, for example a GPL+CC-BY-SA combination for GGJ 2013. Also feel free to discuss this in the comments.
If you participated in GGJ, we would like to encourage you to release your games under free licenses in addition to the required nc license.
EGP February 2012
Speaking of jams, the 7day-jam-during-one-month by Experimental Gameplay Project is "Infinite Worlds" for this month.
STK Overworld
As recently announced, one of the new features in SuperTuxKart 0.8 will be an overworld-connected challenge system.
Durk Talsma: AI programmer
Flight Gear's blog released a new interview. You can find the other interviews so far linked in this post.
Bits & Bots is a real-time puzzle game about figuring out the codes to moving robots around and get them to their targets most efficiently. It comes with binaries for 32/64bit Linux and Windows. Gpl code, by-sa art.
Goblin Camp 0.2, probably running some fancy tileset
Piles replace Stockpiles. Everything is allowed and containers get automatically shuffled to where they are needed.
Diseases will weaken and eventually kill your population if you don’t do anything about a growing population.
Migratory animals will sometimes cross the map
The spawning pool expands and spreads corruption in a smoother way, it’s improved from the abrupt way it was before.
Cowardly creatures can now also panic if they encounter another panicking creature
Death messages have been improved to give a bit more information, and a bit of variety has been added to them as well.
Constructions strobe under the cursor now, to better visualize where one stops and another one begins.
Portable mode. Just create a file named goblin-camp.portable in the directory where GC is installed and it’ll store all the files it needs in a sub-directory in that folder, instead of in the operating system’s default folder.
Skeletons no longer bleed and other assorted bug fixes.
BASE Pro is a Windows-only base jumping simulation game. Its community and news can be found on this forum.
Community member LedInfrared got the hang out of gameplay video recording and shared videos of STK and Xonotic on this YouTube page, including download links to original video material!
Stuart Buchanan: FlightGear contributor
FlightGear's news section has seen quite a high activity lately, including three interviews:
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.
About public domain: There is no PD statement in Jason's code as far as I can tell but I was told via email that it is PD. UPDATE: fortify dependency has been removed. 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 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.
Avoision and Falling Blocks Game 2 were reviewed 5 weeks ago in the Simple & Polished post and I got curious about the perspective of a small-foss-games developer (the interviews we have had so far were rather with big project developers). Their developer Jared "Deraj" agreed to a short interview.
Hey Jared! Where are you from? How's the weather? What do you do in life?
I'm from Washington (USA). Right now, it's cloudy outside, but somewhat warm (considering it's winter here).
I work in software development for a large technology company.
Did you create Radius Engine as a first step towards a game you want to make or was it more of a programming exercise? What is the next step? Adding engine features?
The Radius Engine as it exists today is indeed a stepping stone towards my eventual goal of creating an extensible scrolling shooter ("shoot 'em up"). Avoision and Falling Block Game were both games I wanted to create, but they were also both attempts at ensuring that the Radius Engine has the features I'll need down the road.
Additionally, the entire process was a great learning experience for me (e.g. I had never really written audio mixing or collision detection code before).
Did you ever contribute to any foss game projects?
Other than the ones FOSS games I've created, I think my only (very minor) contributions have been to a (formerly?) defunct emulator many years ago. Does moral support count? :)
Sure does! Ever heard of LÖVE? It's a 2D Lua-based game engine. Did the knowledge of LÖVE affect Radius engine development in any way?
Unfortunately, I had not heard of LÖVE back when I started working on this project (originally in 2003, but then I started over in 2008), but it looks like a great engine with a permissive license, simple programming language (Lua), and comprehensive feature set.
Having recently completed two games using a simple OpenGL+SDL+Lua game engine (Avoision and Falling Block Game), I can safely say that LÖVE sounds like a great idea for a game engine (and one that I need to look at more closely).
What are the chances of you abandoning Radius and becoming a LOVE2D developer? (Completely hypothetical :) )
Heh, interesting question. Given that I haven't had the time to fully dig into LOVE2D, that's a tough call to make. I'll certainly look into that since it looks like LOVE2D is fairly mature already.
How come Avoision and FBG2 have such smooth controls? Lucky shot or days of tweaking?
Both :)
Do you have a laid out plan for making progress towards your shmup project?
I have goals in mind (namely extensibility/modding), but only a very rough plan. Since I'm mostly doing this for fun, I tend to work on whatever seems fun/interesting at the time.
According to FOSS game developer and Lips of Suna project lead Ari Mustonen (aka Nekotaku, amuzen) the answer is the perfect, intelligent, witty, dungeon crawler. As luck would have it he, along with the Lips of Suna dev team and supporters, have set about the monumental task of realising this vision, reaching a major milestone yesterday with their 0.2.0 release.
For players, Lips of Suna, or LoS as it's known, is a cooperative online, persistent dungeon crawler/RPG, with deformable terrain, procedurally generated dungeons,seamless gameworld, actual player skills instead of leveling, and witty storyline giving the the player and any friends online the opportunity to do battle along side the world's five races as they descend into the depth of the dungeons of Suna to save their world. Unlike a lot of other RPGs/FPS of various flavours success will really depend on knowledge, cooperation, strategy as well as skill.
The Freegamer team caught up with Nekotaku yesterday:
FG: The obvious question, of course, is why FOSS?
Because it's fun and convenient. The FOSS game development circle is somewhat small and fragmented but that and people generally being friendly and open-minded makes it easy to get into it. You only need to play by the few simple rules and you're a respected member of the community. You can host your project for free on a number of open source development sites, you can borrow useful code from incredibly many projects, you sometimes get free coverage on some popular sites, you can get lots of new users with next to no extra effort by getting packaged by Linux distributions, and so on. All that just because you're FOSS. It's a great choice for a hobby project even if you're not into the ideology itself, I think.
FG: LoS has gone through a lot of changes and re-iterations over the years, what is your overall vision for LoS; what would you like to achieve and how has this changed from the original vision
The grand vision when we started the project was to develop a manga style cooperative multiplayer RPG that had no experience levels or other character progression mechanisms. We wanted to have fun time making a game that one can pick up at any time and play with one's pals or some random people without having to worry about being rejected due to not being in the same level with others.
I think that the core concepts still stand strong but the details were horribly blurry for the longest time. The grand vision itself is easy to set in stone but guessing how things will fit the big picture and work together in the more detailed level is challenging. Quite a few smaller ideas have been amended on paper as it has become evident that they won't work as is. There have also been several occasions when an idea already being implemented, despite sounding good on paper, turned out to be so infeasible that it required major changes or had to be ditched entirely.
FG: You have implemented a lot of rather cutting-edge technologies in the LoS engine; how has surfing the cutting edge treated you so far and what new tech would you like to see gain traction?
I'm not sure if any of it is really that bleeding edge. The graphics code is probably the closest to it, though since the graphics hardware I target is already one generation behind the capabilities of the graphics card I have, it hardly feels like that. Most of the things in other areas have been done before too by other games.
Lots of things I did were new to me, though, and I had lots of fun researching and testing them. Especially in graphics programming, the newer things tend to be very easy to use, to the point that I actually regret not going for OpenGL 3 earlier. For example, implementing hardware accelerated skeletal animations only took one day to get working. There's a number of nice features that help you speed up the graphics code while actually making it simpler.
I don't know if other projects should bother much with the fancy new technology. On the other hand, when you have modern graphics card, it would be nice to have games with pretty graphics but on the other I'd rather like to see games focus on the basic gameplay and the content rather than some engine features. However, if you're interested in the new tech, I think it's not a bad idea to dip into it a bit, learn something new in the process, and implement a couple of things that your game can use.
FG: What is your vision of the future of FOSS gaming? Where would you like to see it go, and where do you think it will actually end up?
I'd like to see FOSS games explore difficult and controversial subjects more instead of obsessing over moral and political correctness. I think one of the great things about games is that you can experience harmful and disgusting things without real harm. However, FOSS games offer nothing to people who crave for such experiences since it's all but impossible to even find a character who says "fuck" or to hear a dry mention of sex, much less to see the real deal.
I think FOSS projects generally have a great sense of professionalism and want to look very organized and serious. The ideas tend to be traditional and tame most of the time as well. Even though I'd like to see fresh and radical ideas for a change, I doubt it's ever going to be commonplace. People make the kind of games they like themselves and organize their projects to benefit their own needs. Career motivations and maintaining a neat public image of oneself are big factors so it takes a lot of courage and nerve to radically defy the status quo.
FG: LoS has a rather... unique... sense of art direction. Are there any specific inspirations design wise in that regard, and how do you think it has affected the development process?
The project was founded by two regulars of a tiny anime and manga community so the choice of art direction was pretty obvious back then. We never concerned ourselves about whether the mainstream would like the style and what they'd say if they didn't. It's just me now but I still don't let the external pressure limit the artistic freedom.
Actually, there's no external pressure to speak of. Everyone in the FOSS circle is so timid that you can go for years without anyone being able to find the words to bluntly say that nudity and panties offend or intrigue them. As long as you have thick enough skin to ignore the regular trolls, you could easily be even more blatant without any meaningful consequences.
Over time, the art direction has been affected a bit by a couple of other games, such as Oblivion and its mods. It's eye-opening to witness someone make the skimpiest armor and others not only not complaining but rather endorsing it hundreds of times and downloading tens of thousands of times. I think people with a more adult taste are a legitimate target audience for a FOSS game, and an easy one even since there's no competition at all.
FG: LoS has it's own custom written 3d and game engine, whereas there are loads of open source engines of all shapes and forms already in existance. Why did you choose to go this route, and would you do so again if you where to begin a new game project?
Learning new things as I develop is a big factor to me and graphics programming has always intrigued me. I think the biggest reason why I chose this route was the educational aspect. Researching all the new techniques and learning the ins and outs of different rendering techniques has indeed been a lot of fun. Studying and testing all the different things took quite a lot of time but the 3D engine code itself is only a bit over 9000 lines of C code currently. Writing that with the knowledge I have acquired wouldn't take very long so I think it'd depend on circumstances whether I'd write my own engine for any future project or if I'd use an existing engine.
Using an existing engine isn't always so easy either. If you have a very specific list of requirements and some of them are less common ones such as dynamically changing terrain, heavy use of paged geometry, and modifying meshes on the fly, it's hard to tell if any given engine will fit your needs and if it doesn't, how easy it'll be to add the required features. Other factors such as uncertain requirements, ease of integration, quality of documentation, complexity of the code base, and so on can also significantly impact how well the engine will work for you.
I use quite a few libraries already, though. ENet for networking, SQLite for saving and loading data, and Bullet for physics, for example. The smaller libraries are easy enough to use but Bullet is giving me a lot of trouble and I'm afraid that doing things such as collisions responses for the terrain properly would require doing something unsupported such as implementing your own collision shapes. It's quite a pain and terrain physics are quite broken as the result.
I don't think there's one right way to sort out the engine. If you think that you'll have more fun if you write the engine code yourself and you'd like to take the time to write an engine that solves the problem well, write it yourself. If you don't have interest in engine development and don't mind some rough corners getting on the way of development of the actual gameplay and content of the game, use an existing engine or glue several libraries together to make one. Whichever route you take, it'll still take several years to complete an ambitious project, I think.
FG: Terrain deformation, has become fashionable, through Minecraft's arrival (1 million units sold and all that).. We understand that LoS will feature deformable terrain, but work was done far prior to the Minecraft craze. What were your inspirations and in what areas in the game is terrain deformation used?
I think Nethack was the original source of inspiration. The idea was to support mining in a similar fashion, but in 3 dimensions, to allow players to move more freely and gather resources in interesting ways. Since then, Dwarf Fortress has done good job at utilizing the third dimensions and, judging by gameplay videos, Minecraft seems to have a lot of interesting ideas too.
I think 0.2.0 is the first time LoS has had any real success with voxel terrain. The previous iterations had serious scalability and usability issues but it's finally getting to the point that you can have a full-sized map without the game crawling to halt, and you can do something useful with it. Getting it to work has been quite an exercise of trial and error and finding compromises and it still isn't quite there yet.
FG: You and other projects such as 0ad have chosen to get playability and enjoyability in sooner rather than later. What are the advantages and do you reccomend adjusting development cycles for all FOSS projects?
This may be an accurate statement in the grand intergalactic scope but from my point of view it took a long time until the actual playable bits started to emerge. I feel that LoS is actually the opposite since it wasn't much more than an engine technology demo until late last year, which is when I decided that the internals were good enough to be able to support the game. I think it'd be more accurate to say that LoS has simply chosen to get playable.
However, I do think that you should aim for playability as soon as possible, especially if you want to have contributors or have existing team members and you want to keep them around. If you're already working alone and don't have a lot of faith in your recruitment skills, it might be the same to get the most disruptive internal changes out of the way now when no one's around to get affected by them.
The timing can vary but you need to decide at some point that you're making a game rather than an engine, a technology demo, a portfolio or something else. Some genres are more forgiving about it than others but I think that at least content heavy game types and games with complex game mechanisms will never get done if you don't consciously start focusing on content and gameplay. RPGs are particularly nasty in that respect since with the engine alone you just have a fancy walking simulation and the interesting stuff is all content and intricate game mechanisms put together.
FG: 3 years of development is a long time, and you were involved from conception through the hard initial periods of coding without much in the way of tangibles to demonstarate and gather contributions with, through to to geting to the stage where the project is taking off. You would undoubtedly have garnered some insights on avoiding the slings and arrows of FOSS development. Any tips for FOSSers at the beggining of that journey?
This is probably the most useless tip ever but projects die when they're killed. I'd say the biggest factor determining how successful your project will be is how much and for how long you work on it. An hour or two of useful work per day with no end keeps the project healthy and eventually leads to success, whereas affairs with the opposite sex and other real world phenomena increase the chance of failure.
.
Now, following from that, I think that you as the developer are the primary audience of your own game. If you design the project so that you will love to work it for years to come, it's more likely to be a success than a project that's designed to appeal to the largest possible audience but the developer isn't ecstatic about it. This is because the former will probably finish whereas the latter will likely die when the developer loses interest.
FG: Who would you like to thank?
#freegamer for wasting so much of my time with all the interesting discussions and for allowing me to waste your time with random status updates and pointless rants
The LoS development comminity is a very accesible place with no formal obligations or requirements where people can come and contribute with feedback, 2d/3d art, music, scripts or code in whatever areas of the game they feel like. So head over to their forums, and visit their wiki.
A new version of MegaGlest will be released sometime today! Once it is head over here to download it! A short changelog can be found here.
MegaGlest is a relatively recent fork of the quite well known FOSS Game Glest, which ceased development some time back. Now that Megaglest has taken up the development, things have advanced quite quickly (in contrast to the other promising Glest fork GAE) and Glest now finally has the long deserved cross platform multiplayer and a proper master-server with a games lobby! Furthermore Megaglest includes all the factions known from the Megapack before, bumping the total number up to 6.
And believe it or not, qudobup and me tried to play a round (extreme n00b alert :D ), which we recored and commented here:
For this Megaglest special we are also lucky to had the chance to make a short interview with the two main heads behind this Glest fork.
FreeGamer: For a start, could you please give us a short introduction into your team structure and what your motivation was to fork Glest in order to make Megaglest?
titi: Well teamstructure is... I started and Softcoder joined :) I have been working on glest mods for 2 years now because I like the game and there was so little content available back then. For Megaglest I also do some programming, but Softcoder writes more of the code than me.
Softcoder: But we also have contributions from time to time from others (like the GAE team).
titi: Concerning our motivation, I think we both work on glest because our kids like it :) Right from the start my children were involved in Glest modding. For example my son made nice tileset and helped me with my first mods; especially the Indians (as in native north Americans / the editor ;) ) we made as a coop production!
Softcoder: Yes titi & family are the heart of the community! But my boys also made a number of factions. Elimnator and Tiger are big into mods, and call their mods vbros packs :)
FreeGamer: Interesting to see that FOSS game development can really work as a family hobby! Not really the typical cliche of the lonely bed-room programmer in his teens ;) But lets move on to the next question: Glest is for sure heavily influenced by Blizzard's Warcraft3, and thus caters to a similar type of gamer. Have you though about bringing some of the popular elements from that game over to Megaglest? Examples would be hero units, and of course the later added game-play modes like DOTA and Tower Defense.
titi: I think we both don't even know Warcraft3 :) I didn't played many RTS games up to now... well I think I played something called Dune2 on the Amiga before ;) Actually I'm more a FPS player.
Softcoder: I'm not a gamer at all. But yeah, the forums are filled with people who ask for features from those games. In short we will therefore likely bring lots of features that people like from there into MG.
titi: Personally however, I don't like all this special hero feature people talk about. Things get too complicated with this, and I think these heroes kill the usual RTS fun. But there are some fun ideas we will follow for sure :) But I see Glest as its own game; I don't want to build a Warcraft clone. Concerning DOTA, well I guess HON is much better then we can ever be :) But there are mods who do this and when they grow we will support them if it fits to the game itself. Right now we have the current RTS game type in focus, however.
FreeGamer: Ok next question: Megaglest seems to have evolved out of a number of independent factions and tile sets, so the overall game design is lacking a bit. Are there plans to take a more "tighter grip" in order to get the balancing etc. right? Or do you consider Megaglest more of a "playground" and let someone else develop a "pro-mod" for balanced multiplayer?
Softcoder: I think the answer is a challenge of the community and the age groups. Many young people are working on techs, factions, maps etc, but we might need to be more careful to keep "themes" together. So we try to only allow consistent content as part of the shipped product.
titi: Well there are the Tech and Magic factions from the original glest, but the rest was basically made by me. It is something what I called Megapack before. But I learned more while doing this and so they look a bit different :)
FreeGamer: What I actually meant was not the art style but the game balancing and game design. Are there plans to restructure the factions, maybe limit them to 3 or so to be able to get balancing right?
titi: I think the balancing is quite good! Ok, some are better some are not so good, but thats like the players. It is meant like that, good players choose bad factions bad players choose good factions. But what's good or bad depends on the map too! But I discuss with others in the forums and hear what they say... especially beginners always say this or that faction is too good, but after a while they often come to the conclusion thats its not as they thought :p
Softcoder: I also think the base MG install has that, e.g. a core game-play with good balancing. It is the add-ons etc... that create the "playground".
titi: But for me competitive game-play is also not really the focus. I want to make a game thats fun to play, not competitive! Especially coop gaming against the computer is a big part of the fun playing MG.
FreeGamer: Ok lets move on: With the current release focusing on getting the multiplayer working correctly (and hopefully getting a big enough online player-base), what are your future plans regarding the single-player part? Do you plan on implementing a campaign editor in the already much improved level editor?
titi: Well for me the next focus are graphical improvements. We need better terrain splatting (made by the gfx card), more lights and so on. And we will start to put in lots of new features once we proofed to be stable in multiplayer :)
Softcoder: I think its hard to answer! There are TONS of great ideas in the community, we will talk with our community and see what things are most desired. My focus is more for making my boys happy :) We want MG to be 'mega-fun'!
FreeGamer: Ok so what about editing & modding? Right now the units are rather limited in their special abilities. Do you think stuff like (air) transporters, non attack magic spells, stealth mode etc. (insert other cool units features from Starcraft/Warcraft) could be easily implemented? Or is that already possible with scripting, but not done yet?
titi: I wrote so many wiki entries , made so many forum posts to let people know how to mod glest, I think its quite easy now. The special unit abilities not implemented yet however, but when we think it is fun we will think how hard it is to do and then we do it :)
Softcoder: We plan to add many things like this, but slowly so that we don't lose stability and keep people happy. One example... we added better network play, masterserver AND cross platform play all in this last round of beta! That was TOO MUCH! But things will get done (faster if we have more help) just at its proper pace.
FreeGamer: We already had some remarks on the technical side of things, but lets get back to that again: The Glest engine sure looks a bit dated by today's standards... do you have plans to upgrade the graphics engine to support shaders and such?
Softcoder: Yikes! We agree with you! But I think we have to give hats off to Martino and the rest of the original Glest team that a game written in 2005 still is acceptable today!
titi: We need more speed and many of these features will bring us better speed and better graphics, since the GPU will do alot of the work.
FreeGamer: Ok, but to extent that: with normalmaps and such it often looks more realistic in style. Do you want to go more in that art direction, or stay with a more comic style?
titi: Normal maps are not the main priority, there are other more needed features. And normal maps need new textures, and that is really a lot of work :) So for now we are looking into things that can be done with mostly code which is easier to do.
FreeGamer: So but what weight would you give the development focus right now... more towards improving graphics, or more toward extending game-play?
titi: Both :) But we try to make small steps.
Softcoder: Game development is totally new for me (and Linux programming is fairly new), so priority also depends on how long it takes to learn and do it right! MG is my first graphics code ever, and also and my first Linux open source project.
titi: It is all new for us, no one of us did something like this before. I even learned C++ in the beginning of this year for this project! Same with php, the masterserver is the first thing I ever wrote in php.
FreeGamer: Well I think it turned out pretty well so far never the less :) I think this concludes our short interview. Thank you very much for answering our questions! Ahh, last but not least: Do you have anything you want to tell your players and/or our blog readers?
Softcoder: Yes, our #1 goal for MegaGlest is 'FUN'!
titi: Please come and play MegaGlest ;)
A short introduction into Glest modding
(Mega)Glest has an incredibly easy modding setup. Almost everything in the game can be easily changed with simple XML files, and the 2D map editor is very easy to grasp. Especially with the recent usability improvements in Megaglest (and included Linux editor binaries) it is possible to create a simple but nice map in a matter of minutes!
Edit: I was made aware that those editor improvements come mostly from the GAE project. Very good additions!
(Ok this was not done in minutes :p It's one of the new 8 player maps that come with MegaGlest)
But luckily all these editing features are also very well documented in the Glest wiki.
Last but not least, all single-player and co-op scenarios can be fully scripted right in the XML files with lua, a pretty powerful yet easy scripting language commonly used in computer games. Sadly it is not possible to create full singleplayer campaigns yet, but lets hope that gets added soon too!
So you move around in procedurally generated mazes in real-time, shoot enemies, pick up stuff and change between levels. Sounds like.. 
The game costs at least $1.75 because it's pay what you want + fees.
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.
After making the video, I realized that playing on higher (lower?) levels (levels?) is amazing fun and reminds me of 
