Dani's Race ( Free Software Game continuing the Moria's Race movie )

Shout out to MistahDarcy for this post: https://trisquel.info/en/forum/morias-race-free-culture-animation-made-using-only-foss

This was the movie called "Moria's Race", which was done with Free Software and released under CC-BY-SA making it a Free Culture work. But the story about Moria and Dani does not stop there. "Dani's Race" is a continuation of the story, now not as a film, but rather as a Free / Libre ( copylefted ) Game.

Webpage of the game: https://blenderdumbass.codeberg.page/DanisRace/

UPBGE ENGINE

Blender ( which was used to make Moria's Race ) is one of the most well known Free Software out there. But despite this BGE ( the blender game engine ) was used so little that the developers gave up on maintaining it. The general consensus on why this engine was not used typically revolve around the fact that Blender is under the GPL. Which makes the Blender Game Engine under the GPL. And therefore the game one makes with it also under the GPL, since you need to include engine libraries for the game to run.

For a lot of people this was a problem. I think it's a good thing. Despite official Blender giving up on the idea of the game engine, a project called UPBGE didn't give up on it and continues merging new Blender features like the EEVEE real time render engine and Geometry Nodes with the BGE base. Making one of the most powerful engines out there, which just so happened to also be copylefted ( since it is a fork of Blender ).

Dani's Race is built on the UPBGE engine.

OPEN WORLD

I have not seen yet a Free Software game that was genuinely trying to compete with AAA proprietary game-behemoths. And there is a very simple reason for it. People don't have time and skill to go that far. Even the best Free Software games lack consistency in the quality. SuperTuxKart for example has some insanely good looking Karts and Tracks, combined with stuff done by beginners. Which is not terrible when the game is self aware about this kind of stuff, but it is not something that might interest people from outside of Free Software community and persuade them to take a look at us.

A sort of parallel semi-help is being provided by companies like Valve who make software that enable proprietary games to run on GNU / Linux. But there is a very big issue with that. The games are still proprietary. And therefor to actually win we need to have replacements for those games. Mario Kart can be replaced with SuperTuxKart. Minecraft with Minetest. And Quake with Nexuiz. But how about GTA 5? Is there 3D open world game with car theft and missions? Not until there was Dani's Race.

Dani's Race uses the city that we saw in Moria's Race. Which is a whole city. It's not big compared to the standards of GTA 5. But for a start. For the dipping of toes into that water, that is quite a map to drive around. More than that, with new updates, buildings on that map will get accessible and therefor the map will be detailed beyond what is possible with something like GTA.

SEAMLESS TRANSITIONS

One controversial aspect of games is the concept of a cut scene. A lot of the time this is used to load the next chunk of the game up without the player noticing. But sometimes even with cut scenes a separate loading screen is added for the purposes of loading. Dani's Race avoids both issues by making all transitions in the game seamless. If you start a mission, you simply start a mission. There is no cut scene or loading screen between what you were doing prior and the mission. And if some exposition is necessary the story beats happen directly in the world of the game.

LINKS:

Matrix room of Dani's Race: https://matrix.to/#/#danisrace:tchncs.de