Humm and Strumm Game/Game Engine looking for contributors

Humm and Strumm Game/Game Engine looking for contributors

Postby PatrickNiedzielski » 20 Jun 2010, 22:10

Hi everyone,

This is a direct copy-and-paste from Gamedev.net, because I like the template they use/require. I hope it has all the information you want.

Team name:
The Humm and Strumm Free Software Project

Project name:
Humm and Strumm Video Game/Game Engine

Brief description:
Humm and Strumm is a 3D Adventure Game for Unix and Windows. Two players collaborate either at the same computer or over a LAN network as the main characters, Humm and Strumm, who are trying to prevent the evil Dr. Geoff from taking over the world. Humm and Strumm is very cartoony and non-hardcore, but our goal is to have a spectacular game, with as good graphics and audio as we can get them. However, we want to be scalable, so as to run on older machines, too.

Target aim:
Free Software project (GPLv3 and CC-BY-SAv3), freeware program.

Compensation:
No pay, working only as a hobbyist team.

Technology:
Humm and Strumm is a C++/ECMAScript game for Unix platforms and Windows. We aim to write code as cross-platform as possible, so code should be able to run on most any system, any OS, any processor. All our libraries are open source--OpenGL, OpenAL, zlib, libpng, and so on. Well, and the WinAPI...but there isn't too much we can do on that... ^_^

Talent needed:
Currently, we are working on engine programming and fleshing out the game design document.

While we still need to do some of the basics, we are looking for the following skills:
  • Concept Artists: Concept art adds some great depth to our design. While I can create some concept art, my priority is in development of the engine.
  • Developers: Programmers with any experience in networking and audio are needed. We have a little more work to do on the basics of the engine, but most of this should be done in a release or two.</li>

Team structure:
Myself (Patrick Niedzielski): Basic Utilities, ECMAScript Interpreter, Game Design
Ricardo Tiago: Math/Geometry System

Website:
Here is our main site:
http://hummstrumm.blogspot.com/
This website contains links to all of the major parts of the project, available on the navigation bar at the left. I'd like to point out a specific page that gives some more information for contributors and potential team members.

Contacts:
Myself (Patrick Niedzielski): PatrickNiedzielski AT gmail DOT com
Ricardo: RTiago AT gmail DOT com
Public Mailing List: hummstrumm-user AT googlegroups DOT com

Other communication methods can be obtained upon request.

Previous Work by Team:
This is our team's first project together.

Additional Info:
You can find our (incomplete) design document here.

You will need a Google account (either a GMail or a normal email-based account), because we use Google services extensively (Google Code, Blogger, Google Groups, and others). I'm sorry, I know some of you dislike Google, but they provide free services of relatively high quality.

Humm and Strumm also has a tag mode, in which players engage in a competitive game of school-yard style tag, with a knockout style elimination method. Up to four computers can connect via a LAN. One computer is chosen to control the AI characters. Up to eight characters (AI or player characters) can play in the game, so a network connection is not required to play.

Feedback:
EMAIL, for requests to join.
REPLY, for any and all other comments or questions.
Please no flames. (^_^)=b

Cheers,
Patrick Niedzielski
freeSoftwareHacker();, a blog about Free Software, music, and law.

Humm and Strumm, a Free Software adventure game in psychedelic and humorous world.
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Re: Humm and Strumm Game/Game Engine looking for contributors

Postby Julius » 21 Jun 2010, 00:04

Hmm I might be wrong, but it seems like you might be asking for contributors a bit too early. Usually you should have at least a game prototype with some replacement graphics running before anyone will take such a request seriously.

Good luck with the project though, seems to be an interesting concept.

P.S.: Rather than writing you own game engine, have you considered using an existing one? Trying to implement everything from scratch is usually the number one reason why game projects never even reach alpha state ;)
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Re: Humm and Strumm Game/Game Engine looking for contributors

Postby alapshin » 21 Jun 2010, 17:18

I suppose that Julius is right.. Implementing everything from scratch (with a lot of requirements concerning OSes, platforms, portability and so on) may be too difficult to reach the final release (or even beta quality).. I am supporting some similar OpenGL-based engine and probably it contains general classes / algorithms that may be useful for your game / engine. For example, debugging system may be used (or some part of it) if you haven't implement your own yet.. And good luck with your game!
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Re: Humm and Strumm Game/Game Engine looking for contributors

Postby PatrickNiedzielski » 21 Jun 2010, 23:09

Julius and alapshin,

Thank you for your replies and interest in the project! I'm glad to know that people like the idea for the game.

The reason I started from scratch in creating this as both a game engine and a game was twofold: partly, I wasn't satisfied with the designs and of other Free/Open Source Software engines I found, and partly as a learning experience. Many other engines are not exactly engines, but rather graphics systems. It requires hacking together several separate libraries to get the right result. these libraries could benefit from a unification via a game message system, main loop, and scene management system. (Not to mention a unified API.) Take, for example, 3D sound...it makes perfect sense to integrate this with scene management on the same level as the graphics system. The same is true of both input and network systems on the messaging system. While this could all be made with a wrapper system, they tend to be clunky. In designing the engine ourselves, we are able to unify all the subsystems efficiently and cleanly. Furthermore, we have some ideas pertaining to multithreading, graphics, and messaging that we believe may help our engine's efficiency.

Alapshin...I looked through your engine briefly, and, though it is only for GNU/Linux, there are some nice algorithms that I may like to "steal" for my own engine. If you don't mind. :P

Thanks again,
Patrick Niedzielski
freeSoftwareHacker();, a blog about Free Software, music, and law.

Humm and Strumm, a Free Software adventure game in psychedelic and humorous world.
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Re: Humm and Strumm Game/Game Engine looking for contributors

Postby alapshin » 22 Jun 2010, 10:30

Patrick,

Use anything that fit your needs, that's GPL :) And in case of questions / proposals / ideas feel free to contact me via e-mail or this forum. I am still working on this engine so if there is any general class or subsystem that I can add in it and you may reuse it in your engine as well I may implement it. This approach may reduce your workload and let you focus on the game or other part of your system (sound, network).

btw, is there a lot of things that does not satisfy your requerements in the engine I am working on (except portability)? I am not good at sound & network, but OpenGL is the thing I know well enough so I suppose that I am able to provide graphics engine for your needs. I have suspended Windows port because there was no need in it, but HLD diagram for the porting is ready and you may found it at the site. If you are interested in using whole graphics engine I will go ahead with it and you will get OpenGL-based engine that needs no special libraries / dependencies, just only X11 and OpenGL headers. And hence this will get you spare time to work on other subsystems or the game. I asked about it because I feel that engine you would like to implement may be very similar to what i have now.. May be I am wrong, so that's ok if you will use some part of my engine to develop your own. :) So, good luck and I hope to see your game soon! :)
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Re: Humm and Strumm Game/Game Engine looking for contributors

Postby PatrickNiedzielski » 22 Jun 2010, 16:55

Thanks alapshin,

Ricardo Tiago, my codeveloper is in charge of the graphics and math system. I will relay your offer to him. His email is above, if you wish to talk to him directly. We love any help we can get, but we may want to implement most of it ourselves (for the fun of it, or otherwise). You would have to contact him on this. I am sure, though, that he will like having some reference source code to look at and possibly take from. Thanks for the generous offer!

Just as a note, since our engine is multithreaded in specific way, we need to talk to the graphics system through a sort of metacommand interface, not through function calls directly. This will probably be a layer in front of the graphics subsystem. I have not looked closely at your engine, but I am confident that we could work that out.

Cheers,
Patrick
freeSoftwareHacker();, a blog about Free Software, music, and law.

Humm and Strumm, a Free Software adventure game in psychedelic and humorous world.
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Re: Humm and Strumm Game/Game Engine looking for contributors

Postby alapshin » 22 Jun 2010, 17:08

Patrick,

Why do you need multithreaded access to a graphics system? There is only a few multithreaded engines (may be only a couple) even among commercial engines that are able to use graphics system in several threads and get some real use from it. And I know no free engines that access graphics system in several threads and make use of it.
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Re: Humm and Strumm Game/Game Engine looking for contributors

Postby PatrickNiedzielski » 23 Jun 2010, 00:14

Hi alapshin,

Our physics steps are not framerate dependent; so we split the graphics system off on a separate thread. We've also an interesting way of threading in entities. We have the same number of main threads as there are processors on the system. Entity updates are distributed over these, and through a combination of a smart messaging system and a little cheating to make sure that some things happen after others (we have to tell the rendering system of the new update after the updates have actually happened and other things like that), we are able to put the entitiy updates completely in parallel. It does get more complicated than that, but that is the basic idea. The graphics system itself doesn't have to be multithreaded internally (actually, we loose efficiency if it is), the graphics system is split off on its own thread, receiving metacommands from a multithreaded system. You can read more about our plan for multithreading the game loop on our IdeasSandbox wiki page.

Cheers,
Patrick
freeSoftwareHacker();, a blog about Free Software, music, and law.

Humm and Strumm, a Free Software adventure game in psychedelic and humorous world.
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