Commercial game ideas that would be better as opensource projects

Game Engine Game Engine Support and Discussion
1

I was on the internet and thought, if someone brought a team together and made an open source remake of a commercial game where they could add in response to community requests, would it actually turn out better then what the commercial game would’ve become?

One example of an Open source game based on a commecial one is a remake of transport tycoon called Open TTD in which their goal is to remake the game with apparently new graphics and features and be better then the origional. I was also thinking it may be useful if someone did the same thing to Simcity and Rollercoaster Tycoon maybe not with the same name but with the same general idea. After all, the release date for the next Simcity and wether it’s even being worked on is disputed and Roller coaster tycoon has currently been feared dead when Atari went bankrupt and bugs existing since last year still hasn’t been fixed and people think it was poorly coded.

So I was thinking, if a game with the same general idea of a commercial game was made open source, would it turn out better or worse?

EDIT: Gaah! I thought this was the off topic section, someone please move it to the off topic section.

2

A remake of Sim City 4? Ouch. That would be tough.

But you have an idea as far as a remake of some classic from long ago. I heard rumors that Commander Keen was going 3D…I never saw anything after that.

That way your premise is already established and the gameplay is uniform to everyone who played the game before.

Legality? I wonder… Interesting idea though! :slight_smile:

3

I’m thinking simulations will be better off if they were remade Open source. Simcity4 I heard has had many complaints of it being a tad unrealistic.

BTW: why hasn’t this been moved to the off topic forum yet, this was meant for off topic not the game engine forum!

4

I say worse; simply because an open source project can never really compete with a commercial one. Doesn’t really matter what the idea is; a group of well payed, organized professionals, is always going to outdo a group of average skilled, part time fanbase developers. Now, if we were talking about building up on a game, that would be a different story, but doing a remake from scratch ussually won’t yield much better results.

The only way for an open source project to triumph over the commercial project is through originality. You have to make a game that is small, yet so original and entertaining gameplay wise, that the player will disregard what are ussually big signs of inferiority (bad graphics, average sound/music, lower than average AI if any, lack of exotic programming etc). Also, a game like that takes alot of thought (alot).

If your looking to make something that will be well known or even played by a significant majority, your best bet is on the flash platform. Indie game developers are actually getting payed for the flash games they make. And being a one man production crew on the flash platform is much easier, (or should I say possible?) when compared to blender.

PS: I think that this topic can stay here, since it is related (potentially) to the BGE.

5

I’ve heard of excellent quality independently made games with really good graphics so it’s not impossible. What would be nearly impossible would be one man to make a complete SimCity 4 remake (that’s better then the origional). To do that you’ll need a whole team of developers willing to cooperate. People to brainstorm ideas, people to design the graphics and animation (you wouldn’t have to do all of it if it was mainly smart code like in Spore in which case you’ll need programmers), people to do the music, effects, GUI, AI, and many things else.

Note i’ve never completed a 3D game none the less a simcity 3D game, i’m just pitching ideas around.

6

Well it’s definitelly not impossible, but it is very hard. I think that most of the problems can be centered around team organization, which is ussually a very sensitive situation on an open project. Also not to mention the difficulties of finding the skilled and dedicated individuals who would be interested in such a project, to the point where they will do it for free. So in an example, you would need a group of people with notable game design skills, all of them interested in the same type of game and completely dedicated. What are the odds?

I think that for any such greater project you would need to have “the best of times” kind of situation.

Smaller projects however are a much safer bet, since the odds of a smaller project getting finished are about 70% higher. Also these projects are ussually micromenaged, which means you only have to find either 1 or 2 more individuals to contribute, as opposed to 7, 8 or more.

This is why I believe that for the “general” open game dev community, small projects should be a priority.

7

Holy cow, I never thought I’d agree with Social on every single word, lol. Although there’s no harm in attempting bigger projects. It’s a great learning experience.

8

I say worse; simply because an open source project can never really compete with a commercial one. Doesn’t really matter what the idea is; a group of well payed, organized professionals, is always going to outdo a group of average skilled, part time fanbase developers.

I really can’t understand how you can make this statement with a straight face especially here on Blenderartists. Your statement is patently false and is clearly a joke and I find it extremely funny.

I laughed so hard my head now hurts and I need to go lay down. When I wake up I will wipe my hard drive clean of over 2GB of very capable and extremely well thought out and implemented Open source software.

I know you qualified your statement with “well paid, professionals” vs. “average, fanbase developers” but that is simply a common misconception about open source and if you would like some help I could provide you with some information to the contrary to help you make more well informed statements in the future.

9

The reason you “can’t understand” is probably because you misinterpreted my statements to be a bash against open source software in general (plz note, I was talking about open source “game development”).

Lol, it’s your software.

How can you help me stay informed about anything when you lack comprehension skills, (or maybe you just skimmed through my post, in which case I reccomend you read things more cearfully from this point on, before you respond.). I was not talking generally about open source “software”, I was giving my opinions on open source “game” development projects.

10

Lol, it’s your software.

The fact we can both laugh will bring us to a closer understanding.

Well it’s definitelly not impossible, but it is very hard.

Now you are halfway back onto my side. Please understand that I had read all the posts. And you have very valid points in the paragraphs following. In those paragraphs you clearly list and identify many of the difficulties of any project especially an Open Source one.

To me you cannot seperate the philosophy and/or process of Open Source with its application. If you do not truly believe you can overcome these obstacles using Open Source then the efforts are irrelevant as so the project.

How can you help me stay informed about anything when you lack comprehension skills

I feel you have misinterpreted my posting style. Perhaps my original post is a bit dramatic.

I submit that an original game implemented in any platform is the key. I feel a style that fits the tools is very important. My attempt at making an Open Source game is here.

Your C&C is welcome.

regards

11

Close;

I clearly identified that a commercial game dev team is better in almost all of the areas I previously mentioned, when compared to an open source team working on the same game project. The inherent difficulties of open source game development were just listed to explain the reasons behind that fact. I am aware that the difficulties can be overcome (as I said earlier the “best of times” scenario), but this is not very common in the open source game dev community, so in turn we get substandard games in an overwhelming majority of cases. Hence my statement that any game project would yield better results in the commercial sector, rather than in an open source community.

To further prove my point, I submit the current state of the industry, in which even an average game title by commercial standards, still towers over 97% of all open source games.

You responded in such an agressive manner, but you have said nothing that proves my statement wrong.

Yes you can seperate them. Actually they are seperated by default:

Whatever the philosophy may be, a process is interpreted and implemented in such a way so as to best suit the specific task. It is different for each and every different application type. According to your statement an open source word processing application would use the same process of development as an open source game; which is just not true. A different application type requires a different process, and a different set of disciplines.

The words you are looking for are “I did not explain myself properly”. Your post came off agressive and dramatic, which would be just fine if you actually posted anything that proved your statements, but you did not. This made me a little angry, so I went on to insult you with the “comprehension skills” statement; I was well within my rights, so I won’t apologize.

Yes, I have previously noted this and I agree 100%

As do I.

12

Please feel free to view the links provided below. It is hoped that many of the points you have against Open Source in general may be answered and applied to Game Development.

It will also help you to understand where many of my beliefs stem from. You can see that some of my postings are echoed in these links.

General Definition: Open Source

Software: Open Source Software

It is my goal to see an Open Source Game Development project succeed. If through this discussion I can learn more then I say bravo. In addition I will purchase “Elephants Dream” and all supporting materials to assist with this effort. The experiences of this project will help to further understand my point where one cannot seperate the philosophy and process of Open Source with the application. I may yet be proven wrong however.

As for an apology I require none. My posting intent was to raise an emotional response in a similar fashion as your post elicited in myself. Emotions can be a way to summarize lengthy point by point debates and they sure grab headlines.

An Open Source Game can compete on all levels with a Commercial/Closed Game.

13

When exactly did I say that I have something “against” Open Source in general? I just indicated the superiority of a game product developed by a commercial game dev team. I have nothing against Open Source game dev, or Open Source in general. I am just stating that open source game production quality is inferior, which is the truth.

The wikipedia definitions of “Open Source” and “Open Source Software” were never in question here. This discussion is about the comparison between commercial game production quality and open source game production quality. Comparison of factual information, not ideology. I have presented information which proves that commercial game production yields better results. You claim I am wrong in that respect, but you offer no evidence.

What do you mean by succeed? If you mean a game that reaches a level of gameplay where people find it interesting to play, that has already happened. If you mean a game that reaches todays commercial standards in every aspect of game art (aka: what the discussion is about), then I hope one day that project will succeed.

I don’t know if your going to be able to learn anything, since you are having some difficulty in understanding what it is that we are talking about.

Your purchase of the “Elephants Dream” will support independent animation, good for you. (We are talking about “Open Source Game Development”)

Your point? You never made one. You just stated that I was wrong and provided no evidence to prove that statement.

That has already happened:

The guys who worked on “Elephants Dream” did not have to write multiplayer code for their “ANIMATION”, or do any of the other 1000 things that are a part of the “GAME” development process. IT IS A DIFFERENT PROCESS FOR EVERY APPLICATION TYPE.

As with everything else, you have offered no proof to indicate that I am wrong on that.

I am starting to suspect that you are not reading my posts.

  1. You are not entitled to an apology.

2)Lengthy point by point debates are the debates that go into detail and come closest to the truth of the matter, because they examine it in depth. Also, when a person you are debating with does not seem to comprehend your statements, you find the need to repeat them, and that adds on to the lenght.

3)Your emotions are for yourself; when you are talking about factual information you need to be clear, detailed and make statements which you can actually prove.

Now all you have to do is prove that.

14

I say worse; simply because an open source project can never really compete with a commercial one.

I have presented information which proves that commercial game production yields better results.

  1. A group of well payed, organized professionals, is always going to outdo a group of average skilled, part time fanbase developers.

  2. The difficulties of finding the skilled and dedicated individuals who would be interested in such a project…for free.

  3. I think that most of the problems can be centered around team organization

  4. You would need a group of people with notable game design skills, all of them interested in the same type of game and completely dedicated.

  5. I submit the current state of the industry, in which even an average game title by commercial standards, still towers over 97% of all open source games.

I hope I have not missed any of your opinions on why commercial game development is superior to open source game development. Providing the links in my last post is an effort to establish an understanding of Open Source and then to apply that to game development. Although the application to game development is not specifically discussed I will leave that as an exercise for you to ponder.

I believe these links along with the additional resources on those pages is strong evidence in support of my case. Because I do not wish to post them individually on this forum does not diminish the evidence presented.

Please consider the following additional quotes and links to articles which help me to provide evidence in favor of my position. You may be supprised to find infromation that may support your case as well. Please feel free to use additional links to support your case as you have not yet provided outside sources to support your position - which would make it an opinion.

What struck me as odd is that your points/opinions quoted above apply equally to Open Source as well as Commercial/Closed Game Development. Perhaps you will begin to see that neither is inherently better or worse than the other. We are slowly coming to an understanding on why I disagree with your position.

“Projects flourish when you have a number of talented individuals coming together with common interests. These interests can be artificially created by paying them (commercial software), or out of interest/common problems (open source).”

“Once a company has decided to adopt an open source development strategy, planning and implementing the open source release is the next challenge. Proper planning, guidelines and grassroots publicity can often make all the difference in how successful an open source project is, particularly in terms of creating a community of developers and users.”

Richard French

“People think just because it is open-source, the result is going to be automatically better. Not true. You have to lead it in the right directions to succeed. Open source is not the answer to world hunger.”

  • Linus Torvalds

From what I saw of development in the OSS environment (Midnight Commander and Northern Captain) and in the Windows environment (FAR and Windows Commander) there were no significant differences in quality between the best OSS versions and the best commercial versions.

I hope you found these thought provoking.

regards

15

You really need to “read” my posts. Please go back and read what I stated about open source “game” development having an entirely different process. It’s a different process for each application type.

Ok, now that you have read that, take a look at your quotes.

They are not specifically about game development, and therefore shed no light on the matter that we are debating here. There was nothing in those links that proved me wrong.

You can’t just go and generalize things.

I assumed that the situation was so obvious, that it required no support links. But since you can’t seem to grasp the concept:

http://www.elderscrolls.com/games/oblivion_overview.htm
http://www.ghostrecon.com/us/ghostrecon3/index.php

You can go here and see many more:

http://xbox360.ign.com/

Now, to prove me wrong would require you to supply a link to an open source game that reaches those standards, and as far as I know there is no such game, therefore I am right and you are wrong.

It is that simple.

Whatever the potential of open source game development, right now it is so far below the commercial standard, that this whole debate seems kinda silly. There really should be no debate, since commercial superiority is so obvious.

CASE CLOSED.

16

Ok, come on. I am all for open source, and love the 1 or 2 decent open source games that I have on linux. But any halfway decent commercial game takes 100 people working on it for 8 hours a day for 1+ years. Open source will not be able to touch (good) current commercial games until we can get a team of 100 developers and artists working on something that much. The problem is, everyone has a day job, so at some point, your project has to be secondary. It’s not just financial incentive that keeps people going on projects - a lot of people have a sense of work ethic, and working in a company can give you that synergy and drive that is hard to get when working with people you don’t even know.

Now I think if you are aiming for a 10 year old or more commercial quality game, that might be possible. But if you look at stuff coming out now it is getting rediculous to even attempt it. There is a REASON commercial games cost millions of dollars to make! Money talks, and if you set your sights to high one of these things will happen: everyone will do some work then see how much more work they have to do and give up, or, the project will take so many years that by the time the game is “finished” everyone will complain at how old it looks. Or you keep updating it to fit technology and never finish.

If you keep your game reasonable, it is possible to have a commercial quality open source game, but you need to aim for something that’s doable. A really good shoot em up for instance, or a simplified sports game. You need a good plan. You need a good core team. Working with random people from the start is not a good idea, because it will be hard to keep everyone on the same page.

When Doogs and I put Crescent Dawn single player aside to work on a multiplayer version, we made some serious decisions about various things in order to create a project we might have a chance of finishing. It is considerably toned down in MANY ways from our original single player plans. The only thing about the game that’s more complex than the first project is the fact that it’s multiplayer. And we are planning on selling it. We’ve put in too much work already, and to complete it is going to take many countless hours more. With a few more people it would probably progress a bit faster, but we worked on the single player game for 3 YEARS and we have gotten further in 6 months with our current project.

There are many open source game projects out there. It would be much better for the community to join one than to start another, because what open source games really needs is not more projects, but more finished games :slight_smile:

Your original idea shows merit - would an open source version of a commercial game be better? Well, lets look at the MANY MANY examples of open source versions of commercial games! Doom, Descent, Duke Nukem, Freespace, Quake, etc, etc, etc. Yes, the open source versions ARE better! Because the developers had the commercial base, the hard work, already finished to build off of. The community is able to focus on adding cool new features, rather than just get something running. Look at the mod community. A lot of mods are open source, and many more are just done by small teams. A lot of mods are better are almost as good as the original game. Mods for Neverwinter Nights FAR surpass the first campaign that came with the game.

So yes, open source versions of commercial games can be better. But if you don’t have a base to start from, it will take much more work, and depending on what you are actually aiming for, has a high chance of failure.

17

Excellent post saluk, I agree 100%.

I think that honeycomb will now realize why his views were wrong.

PS: saluk> Good luck on Cresent Dawn. I looked at the screen shots and they look great.

Keep it going.

18

I had thought that an understanding of what Open Source actually is would aid this discussion. I have provided many links in an effort to assist this understanding. One must understand Open Source before one can APPLY it to game development. So take the definitions one at a time and then create your own third one specifically to game development.

“Open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product’s sources.”

“Open source software refers to computer software available with its source code and under an open source license. Such a license permits anyone to study, change, and improve the software, and to distribute the unmodified or modified software. It is the most prominent example of open source development.”

I modified this last one to help you understand.

“Open source game development refers to games with its source code and artwork available under an open source license. Such a license permits anyone to study, change, and improve the game, and to distribute the unmodified or modified game.”

I do not recall any of the information in the links stating that Open Source is developed without compensation to the programmers, artists and others working on an Open Source project. This is a very common misconception about Open Source and is most likely the keystone to your arguments. Remove this and your archway tumbles down. Access to source code and artwork creates this misconception by allowing acces to those who contribute to a commercial open source project “for the love of the game”.

It is now clear that whether a game development project is Open Source or Commercial/Closed Source has no bearing on the quality of the game. The real issue is any game development needs dedicated talented individuals working towards a common goal assisted by proper planning and management.

saluk is really spot on with his post except perhaps he too was under the same misconception as you that Open Source = Unpaid Developers.

Believe it or not but I have plans about to be set in motion that will lead to the the development of a commercial open source game and yes … with paid developers and artists.

regards

19

Ok, lets try this again. <frustrated>

Honeycomb, buddy, all of that doesn’t matter, because everything that you just said was never a part of our discussion.

The discussion was based around weather or not an open source project can reach the quality standard of a commercial project.

The answer is no, because:

A) There was never such an open source game.
B) There isn’t one now.
C) It doesn’t look like there will be such an open source game any time soon.

O, and also getting a few people on a payroll isn’t the only difference here. It’s getting “alot” of people on a payroll, and not only that but it’s also being multisponsored and dishing out the cash for the development hardware and not to mention the development software.

In other words: it’s not simply a matter of breaking open your piggy bank and making a dream team. (not to be ofensive, but only children would simplify things in such a way)

Long story short the commercial game dev sector is running circles around the open source game dev community. They have the access to the hardware and the money to buy the software along with a couple of different teams all working on various disciplines such as sound, writing, AI, graphics, physics, networking and so on. It’s a much more complex system than you can imagine.

As, I said before the only way you can prove me wrong, is if you post a link to an open source game which competes with todays game standards. and you can’t do that, hence the debate is over.

I mean at this point it’s almost like you are trying to convince us that grass is blue.

You just don’t understand do you. Ok, look, ill make it very simple and to the point.

A)Profesional game dev companies require enormous resources, to keep coming up with better technologies, to make better games.

B)The enormous resources that are required to produce a commercial quality game require a very, very, very large investment. (im talking about the kind of money that you don’t have, so I just burried your project with this statement alone :rolleyes: )

C)(Now the key part) The game companies are able to make this required investment, because the investment is expected to return a profit (no games sold = no profit = no game).

D)Game dev company is now able to take the money earned, enhance their tools, hire more people, and invest in another game project. The loop starts again and gaming evolves by a degree.

(Revelation, or at least it should be by now) If money was invested in a commercial team, and the game is made open source, instead of being sold, THE LOOP FALLS APART. Money is simply wasted, there is no return, no evolution and there is no longer a team. (funny thing is: considering that a standard commercial team is so large as to even have third parties invest in it, you might actually owe money at that point <would be dependant on contract>.)

At this moment I have proven that all your arguments are essentially flawed. There is simply nothing that you can say at this point to supress anything I have said. It’s crystal clear, and there should be no confusion.

20

Ah, hehe that was what I thought too.

Yeah then it is possible. Take the newest Half life game for example. There was a thread not too long ago (hmm… and if I’m not mistaken, by Social himself) about using the HL game engine, lol. Apparantly you buy the game and the source is included along with it. So in a sense it was a commercial open source game. But it really all depends on the definition of opensource. Granted they let you have acess to the code for free, if you wanted to make your own game with that same source you’d still have to pay a fee. However, for mods and what not no fee needed I think.

Jason Lin