Libre gaming, popularity and improvements
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Quoting from my reply in Modernizing the Trisquel forums:
I think 2007-2008 were the years of libre gaming (for reasons I don't know), not 2012 (year of Steam being launched for GNU/Linux). Those years, there were large amounts of players on libre games. Now, most of them left, and many important (partially or fully) libre game projects are dying off, like OpenArena and Sauerbraten. Graphics of most libre games not having improved in the slightest in 5 years is possibly the cause (there are notable exceptions, like SuperTuxKart).
Look at the Doom 3 source code release (GPLv3+) which happened in 2011 (4 years ago already): most forks are pretty dormant, and none of them focus on making a libre content replacement. In contrast, OpenArena was fully functional in 2007, two years after the Quake 3 Arena source code release under GPLv2+.
What do you think? Do you think libre gaming has improved in the past 5 years? What would you like to see improved?
My opinion would be that there are more high-quality libre game engines as ever, that are easy to use:
Phaser and GDevelop can be used to make games that run directly in the browser, smoothly. Godot games can also be exported to the browser through Emscripten.
Alternatively, slightly more hardcore engines may be used (those are usually just rendering engines):
Or Cube 2/id Tech-derived engines:
But, where are the new libre games? While a few offerings have popped up like Minilens, there is not much to see, especially in the 3D world. I'm still waiting for a realistic fully libre FPS, for instance. (I've been wanting to make one, too).
Thankfully, we have a few more or less popular libre games that seem to stay around, like Minetest or 0 A.D..
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I want goldsrc engine open sourced so I can play HL in freedom. I would be very happy if valve released it. Porting it to darkplaces would be fine too.
But it has to be faithful to the original. I want the original HL.
It seems to me that very little "new" things have happened in the libre gaming world as of late-- most libre games I can think of date back to around 2008.
The porting of Steam to GNU/Linux has probably contributed to the lack of steam.
It seems that a fair amount of people that worked on these games did so because they wanted games on GNU/Linux, not because they wanted libre games.
I think games are interesting because on one hand a game is but entertainment and so not very important. On the other hand games are what kids first see when they are introduced to computers and that makes them again important. Is there somebody who hasn't wanted to make a game themselves or made one? So I think the free software movement would do well to not overlook games.
Besides code games obviously contain media, like graphics and music. The Free Software Foundation is mostly interested in code but there are other initiatives that focus on the liberation of media.
https://libregamewiki.org/ is a repository of games that consist of free code and free media.
All in all, I think there's plenty of free code and engines out there. What is needed is artists who understand the issue and would help create libre media for the games. And of course project leaders who would put it all together.
I think they have improved well (only in the slightest)
But i think there are still problems with libre gaming.
How come some of the libre games here a blatant clones of another (Especially Minetest, How it's a blatant ripoff of Minecraft) while others are mostly original (Like 0AD)?
That's the downsides to libre gaming.
Also: Steam doesn't count. why? Because Valve will NEVER release the source code of their programs. How come you hate games that keep their source code a trade secret? (or any source code that's a trade secret BTW?)
FreeDoom (doom clone) Openarena (Q3A clone) Neverputt (original) & Skyscrapersim (also original) are some of the great libre games i have seen. I think libre gaming is great
Minetest isn't a clone of Minecraft. Minecraft fans will say this based on trivial similarities, like the fact that they're both Infiniminer-style sandbox games (yes, Minecraft was not the first game of this type -- imagine that). But the two games are vastly different in practice, and it's usually the case that Minecraft players are dissatisfied with Minetest as a Minecraft replacement.
In fact, it's really funny that you bring Minetest up as an example of libre games being "blatant clones of another", because Infiniminer, the game Minecraft copied, is libre.
is it possible to compile for gnu/linux?
Don't know, and don't really care because it doesn't seem to be in active development and Minetest is almost certainly better (at least on a technical level).
Ok, but read what i have to say below!
Hey, i used to play Minecraft a lot. Yeah, it's not libre (or gratis), But i usually play Skyscrapersim, which is libre and it also simulates elevators.
Oh, and aboput Infiniminer, at least that had some originality in it (like a team system, money, graphics, mechanics, so forth), and was the foundation for Minecaft, i think. Like what you said.
Originality is overrated. The best games usually aren't original, but are rather better executions of previously existing ideas, because the first execution of an idea almost always is flawed. This goes all the way back to the very first commercially successful video game: Pong, which came after a much less good execution of the same concept in the Magnavox Odyssey.
"Originality is overrated."
Sorry, that's bullshit. The reason why we have pong nowadays is because somebody came up with an original idea.
It's true that having the idea was not enough - we need effort and time to work it out.
Still it was the most import and valuable step. A lot of people are capable of improving it afterwards and it sure will be done by someone on the planet.
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Sure originality is very important, but I think Onpon meant to say that there are a lot of games considered universally a masterpiece and yet had no originality at all.
Take for instance Half-Life 2 - it didn't have much originality (if any) but the execution was so brilliant that it was voted game of the decade!!
And, yes I do think now that HL2 is a better game than HL1.
I'm sure that a 13 year old kiddo wouldn't hesitate to say that HL2 is way better (not just becauase of the graphics).
And HL1 was much more original: the way the story was told, the fact that you are from the very beginning immersed in first person in its World, even the cinematic cuts were in pov - remember the level when the soldiers grab you and drag you in the "squash room"? That was incredibly new (as far as I know) back then. The A.I of the soldiers, the crazy A.I of the silent female assassins (to this date the most excellent A.I I've ever seen in a game - or maybe I'm overrating it, which is probable), the level design (every level connecting to the previous one/ones). You had the feeling you found yourself in a real World! It was incredible.
HL1 is the best game ever made IMHO even if I know HL2 is technically and overall a better game. I know, I'm contradicting myself - it''s difficult to explain ..
They are waiting for you, Gordon, in the test chamber!
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Those who weren't so lucky as to play it back then when it just came out will never know how shocking and incredible this was -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUDNiyOf92o
I don't know about that. Game ideas are cheap. Ultimately, Pong comes from rich people hitting a ball across a table with books. However, the actual game that resulted is much more similar to air hockey, which has an entirely different history from Ping Pong.
Besides, if we had a perfect record of history, you could follow all of these games back in time further and further, going through the ideas copied from other games, and you would eventually come back to the kinds of extremely simplistic games young children come up with all the time. These games probably have very little resemblance to the games that eventually resulted, as well. I don't know about you, but I don't think SuperTuxKart owes its existence to a group of children who decided thousands of years ago that it would be a fun idea to all run to a designated tree and see who could make it there first. It owes its existence to the people who developed SuperTuxKart, because they are the ones responsible for the game's execution.
Maybe you play too many games that are based on a really simple concept.
Sure, the concept of "duckhunt" was "invented" by hunters, and they don't deserve a price for their creativity.
But when it comes to games like mario, i think you underestimate how much art and presentation influenced the success of the game. It's not just the mechanics of it.
And when it comes to a bit more modern games, your argument fails completely.
Look at "final fantasy", either 7 or 9.
Those are epic masterpieces mainly because of a great creative effort.
A lot of games with almost the same gameplay failed completely.
And I could go on forever: Shadow of the colossus, terranigma etc... they are all great mainly due to a creative process.
Maybe what you call "execution of an basic idea" has more creativity involved than you think.
I'm talking about ideas, not creativity. These are not interchangeable. Good ideas is only a small part of creativity. The most important part of creativity is what is done with those ideas, i.e. execution.
It's not easy to tell what game you refer to when you say "Mario". The early Mario games were all vastly different from each other and there wasn't anything resembling a familiar formula until Super Mario Bros came along. But in the case of Super Mario Bros, I can't think of any original ideas it has that are important in the grand scheme of things. When I look at Super Mario Bros, I see a lot of ideas that had already been used in other games by that point, executed in a better way. If you think an idea, rather than an execution, made Super Mario Bros work well, please tell me what that idea is.
You were talking about originality.
In my view, an italian plumber jumping on flying turtles, eating a mushroom in order to become twice as big, is an original idea.
It's not just about the very basic idea that can be original.
What you cover with the term "execution" almost certainly requieres originality as well.
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>an italian plumber jumping on flying turtles, eating a mushroom in order to become twice as big
been there, done that
> In my view, an italian plumber jumping on flying turtles, eating a mushroom in order to become twice as big, is an original idea.
Perhaps, but a Chinese lumberjack shooting jumping ants with maple leaves and eating a pancake in order to turn into a walking bottle of maple syrup is an original idea, too.
Super Mario Bros doesn't work because of the specific random nonsense it has thrown into it. If Super Mario Bros hadn't been executed well, it could still very well have been a game about "an Italian plumber jumping on flying turtles, eating a mushroom in order to become twice as big", and that wouldn't have saved it.
> Also: Steam doesn't count. why? Because Valve will NEVER release the source code of their programs. How come you hate games that keep their source code a trade secret? (or any source code that's a trade secret BTW?)
This isn't true; Valve has released source code of some of their programs under a free license.
But none of them are actual games. :)
Oh, im so sorry then.
I have only been part of the free gaming community for about 2 years now. I think game development software has been becoming more accessible lately and I hope more programmers and users in the free software community pick up game development because of it.
Free games with active development:
FLARE
Minetest
Naev
The Mana World, Evol Online
Valyria Tear
Wyrmsun
Xonotic
These games make me optimistic. We will never have the graphics of proprietary games, but we can compete with them in story, gameplay, and our unique community. As free gaming becomes larger, I think we can start competing in originality and experimentation although we aren't there yet.
Also, though turning proprietary gamers into free gamers is the best case scenario, turning free software non-gamers into gamers expands our community just as much.
I feel sadness, because:
No FPS with a campaign except FreeDoom
No sandbox RPG, but I think OpenMW will make it easier
> We will never have the graphics of proprietary games
I think most libre engines have a 3-5 year lag on graphics compared their proprietary counterparts. I'm not aware of any libre game engine featuring PBR (Physically-Based Rendering, which improves the look of reflections) or tesselation (looks better than parallax or relief mapping).
The lack of games with campaigns is no coincidence. This is because that's one of the toughest things to get done without lots of money, along with high levels of detail/immersion. Just take a look at how long the Freedoom project has taken, and Doom doesn't even have any sort of dialog!
I'm actually trying to help Naev in that area by writing a campaign for it. One advantage of Naev's approach is rather than having one big campaign, you have several small campaigns, so each person can make a pet project out of one of them at a time and is more likely to get it done. Larger campaigns require more dedication and time.
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