Phoronix:"Open Source Games Faltering?"

[Julius]

Interesting editorial here:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page= ... -Faltering
(Yeah I know, that this is partially a typical Phoronix click bait )

What are your thoughts on this? I have my own ideas, but I would like to hear your's first

[andrewj]

As for engines I think the Phoronix guy is right, stuff like Unity is "free enough" that nearly nobody is crying out a truly open-source game engine, so programmers don't have the itch or incentive to work on one.

The last engine to be open-sourced by a company was (I believe) the Doom3 engine, which was used 11 or so years ago for the Doom3 game, and is not only out-of-date compared to contemporary engines, but also is limited in what you can do with it (by that I mean it is good for indoor corridor shooters, bad for anything with large spaces especially outdoor areas).

As for games, I think asset creation (of modernish FPS standards) has become too burdensome for hobbiest developers to create on their own in any realistic timescale. No open source game can attract dozens of skilled artists (modellers, mappers, etc) to create assets of the same quality as modern FPSes. And I guess many artists are turned off when they see games with 10 or 15 year old graphics fidelity and would not be inspired to contribute.

Neverthess I am sure people will continue to make *decent* open source games. Hopefully everyone else can lower their expectations a bit to enjoy them

[Julius]

Art requirements certainly is an issue ('realism' has become too time intensive, and 'stylized' is often difficult to do with multiple contributors), but I don't think that is the main issue. In fact the pool of more or less usable/adaptable art assets has increase a lot over the recent years (with the rise of OGA, Blendswap etc.) but they are hardly used.

Anyways... looking forward to more opinions on this

[Akien]

The last engine to be open-sourced by a company was (I believe) the Doom3 engine, which was used 11 or so years ago for the Doom3 game

Just skimmed through the article, but hello? Godot engine? Torque? There are many other options for open source games than using an old idTech engine to make an FPS or everything from scratch with SDL

Godot engine can very well compete with Unity and its community development pace is incredible, it just needs some time to get some actual commercial and open source games released as it's only be "known" to the world since the open sourcing 1½ years ago (and mostly since the 1.0 release last December).

[andrewj]

Indeed Torque is one, but I believe Godot has never been used to produce commercial 3D games.

[jcantero]

Larabel also only understands games from a benchmarker point of view (part of his business). He seems to think that the quality of a game is measured by the number of millions of triangles that it can push to the GPU, even if it's boring to death.

[Vandar]

[double post, deleted]

[Vandar]

Neverthess I am sure people will continue to make *decent* open source games. Hopefully everyone else can lower their expectations a bit to enjoy them

There is the retro-gaming scene, and emulators of old systems are still going strong, so there are people who do not need top-notch graphics to enjoy a game.

Personally, I think it is better for a project to attract a small group of devoted people instead of a large amount of people who are only remotely interested or who will be gone again in a few weeks.

Larabel also only understands games from a benchmarker point of view (part of his business). He seems to think that the quality of a game is measured by the number of millions of triangles that it can push to the GPU, even if it's boring to death.

Reading the article, I'm also under this impression. There is a sentance, that makes me think, he rules out all 2D titles by default, because of "too old school" - regardless of the gameplay, and content, not as in graphics content, but as in ideas which the developers put into the game.

[Andrettin]

Larabel also only understands games from a benchmarker point of view (part of his business). He seems to think that the quality of a game is measured by the number of millions of triangles that it can push to the GPU, even if it's boring to death.

Yes. IMO that alone makes his argument moot, since there's a lot more to a game's quality than how photorealistic its graphics are.

[Julius]

Obvious problems with the source of this editorial aside, I do think that the overall idea has some merit.
(As so do 61% as by a Phoronix poll: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n ... nhill-Poll :rolleyes: )

I see two issues behind this decline in project contributions or new (somewhat successful) projects started:

1. (more minor) Other games on the main platform of FOSS games (Linux) distract the audience away from FOSS games, but not so much the main creators. But creators are motivated by an audience and outside contributions are more likely (as few and far in between as they usually are) for games that have a larger audience.

2. The main reasons is the Indie boom and apocalypse we are currently experiencing. Before many people were modding games or making FOSS games to get some credibility for a job in the games industry, but a few years ago this changed and everyone started to believe they can make a profitable indie game in their basement. Obviously this isn't true and maybe 1 in 10 released Indie games barely break-even and much more probably failed before their release. More and more people are realizing this right now, but during the boom this drained away a lot of potential FOSS game contributers and now the "indie apocalypse" is leaving a lot of very disillusioned and bitter Indie developers behind (with no financial resources left and very little motivation to do any more work for "nothing").

TL; DR: It comes down to basic human psychology... lure someone with a dream of becoming rich fast and you get some pretty bad outcomes for most of them and their surroundings...

Edit: About retro games and 2D games etc.: Yes there is a tiny niche for some FOSS games there, but it's impossible to compete with nostalgia coupled with the highly polished commercial games of the 1990ties, thus I don't think "retro" gamers have much interest in FOSS games.

[Danimal]

Art requirements certainly is an issue ('realism' has become too time intensive, and 'stylized' is often difficult to do with multiple contributors), but I don't think that is the main issue. In fact the pool of more or less usable/adaptable art assets has increase a lot over the recent years (with the rise of OGA, Blendswap etc.) but they are hardly used.

Anyways... looking forward to more opinions on this

As a somewhat regular art contributor to those sites i must say that picking up one of those models and getting them game ready is pretty boring and burdersome, i can understand why mostly no one wants that part, creating them is far more fun and fulfilling than making them usable. Blendswap is a good example of that, lots of beautiful showcase models that are barely usable.

The models are there, the motivated people to work on them and sharing later are far and apart...

This made me remember about that time i tempted myself to help with Ufo:ai, that game is a perfect reflex of all this thread; graphically outdated, small community even thougt is pretty well known, mostly abandoned in the inside once you know it, most of the "newest" post in the art section are years old; i got discouraged pretty fast after i met its real status. Worse, they cant still compare to any of the original xcoms in fun even after more than 6 years active.

[Julius]

Ah, no... I think Ufo:Ai and other similar 'old' projects (Vegastrike, Summoning Wars etc.) suffer from engine cruft and lack of tools. This was/is a big problem for older open source projects that were based on hardly existing platforms and then no-one ever wanted to do the non-fun parts of writing tools etc.
This is certainly a problem for some FOSS games, but overall it does not explain the decline of interesting new projects or the lack of new 'highlight' FOSS games.

Edit: I agree on 3D art on Blendswap etc... definitly not 'game-ready' for the most part. But so are your own creations at first. No way to avoid doing some of the ugly work

[Andrettin]

Ah, no... I think Ufo:Ai and other similar 'old' projects (Vegastrike, Summoning Wars etc.) suffer from engine cruft and lack of tools. This was/is a big problem for older open source projects that were based on hardly existing platforms and then no-one ever wanted to do the non-fun parts of writing tools etc.
This is certainly a problem for some FOSS games, but overall it does not explain the decline of interesting new projects or the lack of new 'highlight' FOSS games.

I'm not really sure that is true, though, that there is such a decline. Ten years ago, the situation was (in my view) rather worse; one had far less FOSS games to play. Both Wesnoth and 0 AD were very much at their infancy, and not nearly as playable and polished as they are nowadays. Today, we have not only those, but also OpenDungeons, Endless Skies, and many others.

[Vandar]

Around 1995 I was quite intrested in Linux, and I remember that the archive CDs had quite some games on them. But many were text-based games from earlier unix environements. Roguelikes had a tradition already back then. Muds, also Crossfire, an early graphical multiplayer game.

The question is, how many of those games you'd count as quality games. uMoria for example was quite fun to play, addictive even, but without a graphical interface, nowadays only very few people will consider it a serious "game", although it surely is, from the insides.

PS: This till doesn't say that there is a decline or not, I just wanted to point out that in early Linux times there were already a good number of games, just very different in presentation from what we think of games these days, because graphical interfaces were uncommon and expensive at the time these games were made, and many had text-based UIs because of that.

[Duion]

Obviously the writer of this article did not know of Uebergame, the new next gen ueber-revolution in free open source gaming.