List of technical informations on Open Source games

List of technical informations on Open Source games

Postby Trilarion » 06 Aug 2019, 23:17

Hi, I'm creating a list of technical informations on Open Source games and put it in a Git repository on Github. The more than 500 entries are in text format and easily editable by everyone. A dynamic HTML table of the entries is created from the data. It allows search and sorting. For all the games there is a link to the game homepage, the full entry and the sources. Partly there are platform info or build info. I plan to add more games and fill in more info but it's quite some work.

In the search for open source games I should also carefully go through all the featured projects here. And the list, even though it is rather more technical, is similar to the Libregamewiki and maybe there is a chance to fuse the games data sources.

I converted old cvs and svn repositories of long inactive projects to Git and put them on gitlab.com/osgames. Feel free to look around and/or continue with them. Maybe some of them can be brought back to life. If you seriously intend to do so, it would be nice if you could drop me a note (here or on the Github project page) so I can update the status.

I hope that was useful. Any help, suggestions for additions, etc. is welcome.
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Re: List of technical informations on Open Source games

Postby Andrettin » 07 Aug 2019, 05:57

That's a nice initiative, Trilarion! And I'm happy to see you here (I remember you from the Imperialism remake effort)!
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Re: List of technical informations on Open Source games

Postby Trilarion » 07 Aug 2019, 09:17

Hi Andrettin, nice to hear from you. If you want, you can check the entry for Wyrmsun and tell me if something can be improved. Are there official build instructions?
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Re: List of technical informations on Open Source games

Postby drummyfish » 07 Aug 2019, 09:59

Very interesting! It reminds me of osgameclones, but this is all just libre games, right?

In which case however you should remove some games such as Planeshift, which is proprietary. Also e.g. Freedoom lists code license as BSD, but its actually the media license.

EDIT: Okay sorry, seems like it's not just strictly libre games. In this case I'd suggest a field that would allow to filter out only libre games.
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Re: List of technical informations on Open Source games

Postby Trilarion » 07 Aug 2019, 12:38

The code needs to be under an approved open source license, the artwork can be anything. I try to also track the license of the artwork/content.

A field filtering only libre games should be doable. I put it on the TODO list.

Thanks for the info on Freedoom.
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Re: List of technical informations on Open Source games

Postby drummyfish » 07 Aug 2019, 16:16

Thank you as well :-)

Another thing that comes to mind is platform -- is your database limited to PC games? There is quite a huge number of games for libre consoles such as Arduboy and Gamebuino META, a lot of which are completely libre and can also be played on PC via emulators which are also free. AFAIK LGW and OSgameclones don't include these, probably because they are usually pretty simple 8 or 16 bit games, but still playable on PC using FOSS emulators. Some are pretty awesome though, and could serve someone as a base for a PC port. If you aim for a big DB or want something extra against LGW or OSgameclones, check them out. Here I copy paste my favorite links related to these consoles:

{l Code}: {l Select All Code}
    - http://uzebox.org/wiki/Games_and_Demos                    UzeBox games, all seem to be GPLv3
    - http://legacy.gamebuino.com/wiki/index.php?title=Games    Gamebuino Classic (B&W) games
    - https://gamebuino.com/creations                           Gamebuino META (color) games
    - https://community.arduboy.com/c/games                     Arduboy community forum, many small FOSS games
    - http://arduboy.ried.cl/                                   Erwin's Arduboy game collection, tagged libre games
    - https://talk.pokitto.com/c/programmers-talk               Pokitto games
    - https://tinycircuits.com/blogs/games                      Tiny Arcade games
    - https://gbhh.avivace.com/games                            open source games for GameBoy
    - https://tic.computer/                                     TIC-80 FOSS fantasy console (sadly not so many FOSS games)
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Re: List of technical informations on Open Source games

Postby Lyberta » 07 Aug 2019, 20:29

Deleted.
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Re: List of technical informations on Open Source games

Postby Trilarion » 07 Aug 2019, 23:05

Can it sort/filter by license and/or programming language?


Yes, but the search is rather simple, it just checks all the words in search against the content of a full row. You could for example search for "C++ GPL-2.0 strategy beta" and would get matches with these words disrespective of the column in which they appear. But that's not optimal either.

As for the idea to include games running on libre consoles, I like the idea. I will have a look at the links in the next days.

If someone is interested, there is also a statistical summary. C and C++ are used in 50% of all projects, Java and Python in 10% each. GPL 2/3 licenses cover 60-70% of all cases, MIT 10%. Typical dependencies are SDL (for C, C++) and pygame for Python.
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Re: List of technical informations on Open Source games

Postby Andrettin » 12 Aug 2019, 19:47

Trilarion {l Wrote}:Hi Andrettin, nice to hear from you. If you want, you can check the entry for Wyrmsun and tell me if something can be improved. Are there official build instructions?


Thanks for creating an entry for Wyrmsun there :)

There are build instructions that contributors wrote, and which have been added to the Wyrmgus repository:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Andre ... ntu_16.txt
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Andre ... bian_8.txt

Regarding the entry, the asset license you give for Wyrmsun in the entry is not quite correct. A good deal of the music and sounds are from Wesnoth, but none of the graphics are. The overwhelming majority of Wyrmsun's art is licensed under the CC0, not the GPLv2. Perhaps a more accurate description would be "CC0 and GPL-2.0 (depending on the asset).
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Re: List of technical informations on Open Source games

Postby Trilarion » 14 Aug 2019, 10:22

Andrettin {l Wrote}:...Thanks for creating an entry for Wyrmsun there :) ...


I updated the entry. You seem to be very active currently with Metternich/Iron-Barons. That reminds me on Imperialism. I must check it out.
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Re: List of technical informations on Open Source games

Postby Julius » 14 Aug 2019, 11:37

How about including a Docker file reciepe for reproducable builds?

https://sweetcode.io/using-docker-repro ... ironments/
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Re: List of technical informations on Open Source games

Postby Trilarion » 13 Nov 2021, 23:48

Sorry for the intrusion. Two years ago I posted first about my list of open source games (open source code base, assets can be free or non-free) and now I finished a web rendering of the information which is visible at https://trilarion.github.io/opensourcegames/. It features still the dynamic HTML table, but also static lists of all included games as well as filtered pages by genre, supported OS, programming language or for example most stars on Github. The entries also feature references to other games used as inspirations as well as a field for developers of that game. Inspirations and developers also have the ability to reference back to associated games.

The number of included games is still growing with more than 1300 open source games entries by now and while it's somewhat different from for example Libregamewiki or opensourceclones, they together hopefully form a valuable resource. That's why I'm writing this post. As always I'm open to all feedback.

Btw. I'm still working on the Docker file. It's on the (relatively large) TODO list.
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Re: List of technical informations on Open Source games

Postby Julius » 14 Nov 2021, 03:20

Pretty impressive work!
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Re: List of technical informations on Open Source games

Postby dulsi » 14 Nov 2021, 16:36

Looks like it is missing some games available on Fedora, Legend of Edgar, Shippy 1984 and Seahorse Adventures for example. Looks like some entries are old as well. I looked at Story of a Lost Sky. I don't think the source code is available any more which is too bad. Anybody have a copy?

On libraries, I recommend adding my libgamerzilla. You can find some more games on my github/gitlab.

I do love lists like this. I often find games I didn't know about.
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Re: List of technical informations on Open Source games

Postby bzt » 14 Nov 2021, 18:52

Awesome list! Thank you! Would it be possible to visually distinguish discontinued projects from the actively developed ones? Also adding a few more screenshots would be really nice.

Cheers,
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Re: List of technical informations on Open Source games

Postby Trilarion » 14 Nov 2021, 20:54

dulsi {l Wrote}:Looks like it is missing some games available on Fedora, Legend of Edgar, Shippy 1984 and Seahorse Adventures for example. Looks like some entries are old as well. I looked at Story of a Lost Sky. I don't think the source code is available any more which is too bad. Anybody have a copy?

On libraries, I recommend adding my libgamerzilla. You can find some more games on my github/gitlab.

I do love lists like this. I often find games I didn't know about.


Thanks to all for the replies. Yes, it's true, there are surely many games still missing. I will put the ones mentioned by you on the backlog, which is still quite large. The source code of Story of a Lost Sky might indeed be lost. I still need to check it and then maybe ask around (some people might still have it). Otherwise I would just remove it from the list. Other sources I tried to preserve on put on Gitlab, but that doesn't always work out.
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Re: List of technical informations on Open Source games

Postby Trilarion » 14 Nov 2021, 20:56

bzt {l Wrote}:Awesome list! Thank you! Would it be possible to visually distinguish discontinued projects from the actively developed ones? Also adding a few more screenshots would be really nice.


There is a small visual indicator (a sun or moon) for active vs. discontinued and in the index pages there is "inactive since ..." but that could probably be stronger. Screenshots is an ongoing project, however, since the main focus is on technical info, I decided on not more than three screenshots per game (and no videos). For that one would simply visit the game home page.
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Re: List of technical informations on Open Source games

Postby bzt » 14 Nov 2021, 22:54

Trilarion {l Wrote}:There is a small visual indicator (a sun or moon) for active vs. discontinued and in the index pages
Hmm, I can't see those, here's a screenshot. I'm using Linux, Firefox 93.
For me, there's no visual difference between "A Planet's Revenge" (which is an abandoned, unfinished project, so not really fun to play) and "Abuse" (which is a mature, finished and playable game). Yes, I can see the small comment that they are both inactive, but there's nothing to hint me that Abuse is not discontinued, rather it is only inactive because it's mature and already bug-free. You know what I mean? Maybe I should have asked different visual for mature games, I guess?
Trilarion {l Wrote}:Screenshots is an ongoing project, however, since the main focus is on technical info, I decided on not more than three screenshots per game (and no videos).
That's cool! I think your limitations are reasonable, but IMHO you should aim at having one screenshot per game at first. That's still quite a task, but would increase your site's value by a lot. For example, I've clicked here and despite all of the details there I couldn't tell what the most interested me: what kind of game that is (strategy could be RTS, turn-based, Starcraft-like small battle field based or Civilisation-like world-sized 4X etc.).
Trilarion {l Wrote}:For that one would simply visit the game home page.
Yeah, the point is I only want to leave your site if I like what I see on the screenshot :-)

Cheers,
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Re: List of technical informations on Open Source games

Postby Trilarion » 15 Nov 2021, 22:25

bzt {l Wrote}:
Trilarion {l Wrote}:There is a small visual indicator (a sun or moon) for active vs. discontinued and in the index pages
Hmm, I can't see those, here's a screenshot. I'm using Linux, Firefox 93.
For me, there's no visual difference between "A Planet's Revenge" (which is an abandoned, unfinished project, so not really fun to play) and "Abuse" (which is a mature, finished and playable game). Yes, I can see the small comment that they are both inactive, but there's nothing to hint me that Abuse is not discontinued, rather it is only inactive because it's mature and already bug-free. You know what I mean? Maybe I should have asked different visual for mature games, I guess? ...


The visual indicators (moon and sun) are unfortunately only visible on the entries pages themselves. On the overview/index pages they translate to inactive (moon) or active (sun) but active itself is not written. Everything not marked inactive is assumed to be active. Additionally there is mature (round nice experience) and beta (not very nice experience if any at all). Both these can be combined where again "mature" is not spelled out on the overview pages but simply everything not in beta is considered mature. Additionally, everything that is neither inactive nor in beta (the games that are already good and likely well supported and possible with future support too) are printed in bold. The philosophy behind that is: go for the bold entries first, every non-bold entry comes with some sort of caveat (in beta, not actively developed anymore). Maybe that's not the optimal way to do that.

Surely there are also errors contained in the list. Sometimes projects start to become active again and beta is likely in many cases quite a stretch (especially if there are no binary releases available and you would have to build the project first before evaluating it). The exact border between beta and mature is also a bit fuzzy. If projects use semantiv version I typically take version > 1.0.0 as mature and version below as beta.

Because it's so subjective and because it's not the main focus, I try to map activity to only a few variables (beta<->mature, active<->inactive) with (mature, active) the default value if nothing is printed. Maybe games that are mature, but inactive like Abuse could be printed in bold too (after all maybe there simply may not be anything to improve anymore on them).

Inactive is defined as 1-2 years without any source commit at all, so that is quite hard to achieve even in maintenance mode. In the end, it's all a bit arbitrary.

Regarding what kind of game is "Seven Kingdoms: Ancient Adversaries". Yes, screenshots would help but even the website there doesn't feature any screenshots (I would need to download the game, install it and make screenshots before) and even Wikipedia only has coverart from the game. For me to produce only one screenshot of it would take at least 10 minutes. With hundreds of games still to go, you can figure out how long that would take. Keywords are easier to add and kind of describe the game too. I added real-time and would like to add more, but also there it becomes kind of subjective. Some games have aspects of real-time and turn-based strategy and so on... I would say that Seven Kingdoms could be said to be a base-building game (similar to Dune) but would others agree.

Maybe a "..is similar to.." field would actually make even more sense than the "inspiration" field.
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Re: List of technical informations on Open Source games

Postby bzt » 16 Nov 2021, 14:12

Trilarion {l Wrote}:The visual indicators (moon and sun) are unfortunately only visible on the entries pages themselves. On the overview/index pages they translate to inactive (moon) or active (sun) but active itself is not written. Everything not marked inactive is assumed to be active. Additionally there is mature (round nice experience) and beta (not very nice experience if any at all).
Maybe making those indicators visible on the overview/index pages would be a good thing.

Trilarion {l Wrote}:The philosophy behind that is: go for the bold entries first, every non-bold entry comes with some sort of caveat (in beta, not actively developed anymore). Maybe that's not the optimal way to do that.
Nope, I think that's a good idea, bold meaning playable games. I just think the critera for bold should be a little bit different, to include games like Abuse too.

Trilarion {l Wrote}:Because it's so subjective and because it's not the main focus, I try to map activity to only a few variables (beta<->mature, active<->inactive) with (mature, active) the default value if nothing is printed. Maybe games that are mature, but inactive like Abuse could be printed in bold too (after all maybe there simply may not be anything to improve anymore on them).
Yes, I think so. If the indicators were added too, then making mature but inactive games bold too is not going to be a problem imho.

Trilarion {l Wrote}:Regarding what kind of game is "Seven Kingdoms: Ancient Adversaries". Yes, screenshots would help but even the website there doesn't feature any screenshots
Note, 7kaa was just a random example. I know it's hard to get a screenshot, that's why I've said it would increase the value of your site by a lot.

Trilarion {l Wrote}:For me to produce only one screenshot of it would take at least 10 minutes. With hundreds of games still to go, you can figure out how long that would take.
Yes, but you're not alone :-) That's the beauty of Open Source. You can make it a goal to have at least one screenshot per game, and let contributors help you with that.

Trilarion {l Wrote}:Maybe a "..is similar to.." field would actually make even more sense than the "inspiration" field.
Maybe, but I still think a screenshot would be much better. An image often tells more than thousand words.

FYI, I think your list is really awesome, with a lot of well-though data collected. I'm just trying to help you increase its usability by suggesting a few changes in the design to represent those data better. Your approach to design is not what a new visitor typically looking for (they are asking questions like which games are playable? What kind of game is this? etc.) I believe with a minimal visual modifications your list could answer those questions better, meaning your list would stand out from other similar lists in usability by a lot (it is already the most comprehensive list I've seen so far, and already has all the necessary data). I mean, take a look at LibeGameWiki and focus on its design. There you can see at once what kind of game it is (category like in your list, but also thanks to the screenshot), whether it is active or not (just the date, your solution with icons is better). The only problem with LibreGameWiki is that it has far less entries than your list.

Cheers,
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Re: List of technical informations on Open Source games

Postby Trilarion » 18 Nov 2021, 17:37

bzt {l Wrote}:...
FYI, I think your list is really awesome, with a lot of well-though data collected. I'm just trying to help you increase its usability by suggesting a few changes in the design to represent those data better. Your approach to design is not what a new visitor typically looking for (they are asking questions like which games are playable? What kind of game is this? etc.) I believe with a minimal visual modifications your list could answer those questions better, meaning your list would stand out from other similar lists in usability by a lot (it is already the most comprehensive list I've seen so far, and already has all the necessary data). I mean, take a look at LibeGameWiki and focus on its design. There you can see at once what kind of game it is (category like in your list, but also thanks to the screenshot), whether it is active or not (just the date, your solution with icons is better). The only problem with LibreGameWiki is that it has far less entries than your list. ...


Thanks. Your feedback is of course most welcome and made me think more about these topics. The layout can surely be further improved and for people wanting to help I can surely compile and advertise a list of tasks that are relatively easy to do, like gathering screenshots. On the other hand, based on experience I think that realistically a screenshot for every game will take a long time even with help which may or may not come.

Btw. I'm also actively synchronizing content between LibreGameWiki (LGW) and opensourcegameclones and a few other sites and even wanted to scrape debian games but haven't gotten around to it yet. LGW is very good at providing free text about a game (more than I would ever want to have), but for example the way to write out programming languages or code licenses is not very standardized there. In principle I have nothing against simply linking to LGW game entries wherever possible.

I will just continue slowly but steadily with the project and see where it leads me.
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Re: List of technical informations on Open Source games

Postby bzt » 23 Nov 2021, 01:30

Hi,

First I've thought that you have a screenshot url in the entries, but then I saw you actually have a copy of the screenshots in your repo. So I've put together a small script for that.

1. download it from the attachment
2. rename to osg_screens.sh (seriously, why can't I attach a small plain text file with .sh extension?)
3. put it into your "code" directory

Running it will download screenshots for games starting with a letter A or B (at least for those where the homepage had a screenshot). It took me about one and half an hour to collect these (ca. 100) URLs, hope it will be useful. I wrote this script in a way so that you can easily expand the list. It also resizes the screenshots to 128 pixel height, keeping aspect ratio and encoding as jpeg.

Cheers,
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Re: List of technical informations on Open Source games

Postby bzt » 23 Nov 2021, 17:23

Update: I've added screenshot URLs for games starting with letter C, D, E, F and G. Now nearly 300 URLs in list.
I've also modified the imagemagick arguments a bit, because some homepages have only animated gif screens, now it handles those as well.

That's 7 letters, 19 more to go. I estimate checking the homepages for a letter takes about 45 minutes, so it would take about 14 hours for one person to finish. This is perfectly doable on a weekend I guess, or for two people working one hour a day at a lazy pace it would take about a week. Doesn't sound that bad. But I'll keep collecting the URLs whenever I have the time.

BTW, may I ask why did you exclude FlareRPG from the list?

Cheers,
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Re: List of technical informations on Open Source games

Postby Trilarion » 30 Jan 2022, 11:40

bzt {l Wrote}:Update: I've added screenshot URLs for games starting with letter C, D, E, F and G. Now nearly 300 URLs in list. ...


Hi Bzt,

Thanks for the work. I finally came around incorporating the screenshots. The part that took most of the time was checking for duplicates because I had also added screenshots from other sources in the mean time. However your work helped me a lot. I don't really need the imagemagick script part (using a Python script for that). There are now around 700 entries with at least one screenshot (~50%). If you want to further help and provide more screenshot urls, I promise I will include them. Just a list as the existing one you attached (entry name - some tabs - screenshot url) would be perfect.

The best would be to concentrate on entries not having screenshots yet. For example simply go to https://trilarion.github.io/opensourceg ... mes/H.html and exchange letter H with whatever you desire and then look for entries without screenshots and then go their webpage and look for suitable screenshot URLs.
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Re: List of technical informations on Open Source games

Postby bzt » 30 Jan 2022, 19:26

Trilarion {l Wrote}:Hi Bzt,

Thanks for the work. I finally came around incorporating the screenshots.
You're very welcome! And that's awesome!

Trilarion {l Wrote}:The part that took most of the time was checking for duplicates because I had also added screenshots from other sources in the mean time.
That shouldn't be an issue at all, because my scripts checks for the existing screenshots, and only downloads the missing ones.
Trilarion {l Wrote}:However your work helped me a lot. I don't really need the imagemagick script part (using a Python script for that).
Ah, ok, now I see.
Trilation {l Wrote}:There are now around 700 entries with at least one screenshot (~50%). If you want to further help and provide more screenshot urls, I promise I will include them. Just a list as the existing one you attached (entry name - some tabs - screenshot url) would be perfect.
I've thought that you would want to use the list in another script, that's why I've written it in a way to have a tab separated "database". I'm glad it turned out to be useful to you! And yes, I'm willing to help you more if I have the time. Sadly right now I'm very busy with finishing TirNanoG, but I'll make time for this soon.

Trilarion {l Wrote}:The best would be to concentrate on entries not having screenshots yet. For example simply go to https://trilarion.github.io/opensourceg ... mes/H.html and exchange letter H with whatever you desire and then look for entries without screenshots and then go their webpage and look for suitable screenshot URLs.
That's exactly what I've done :-) However my biggest issue was figuring out the internal id of the games, the one that you're using for the filenames. Any suggestions on how to get those easily?

(Usually it's simple, problem starts when there's an acute, quote, hypen, colon, dot or other special characters in the name. So far I've listed entries on another tab, but github only displays the first 1000 entries, so this solution is uncomfortable, problematic and won't work at all after 'O' for the last 1/3 of the list).

Cheers,
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