1. Irrlicht Engine View Topics

I come at this from the perspective of a frustrated gamer. I was frustrated that Minecraft never seened to develop in the direction the 'community' asked.

I am frustrated with Steam (two separate announcements that Witcher III would run on Linux, and now it doesn't and no refund for me), Frustrated with the fact that game engines basically just re-invent the wheel and we get snails pace change and advancement. FPS, RPG, and RTS games have changed little in decades apart from the eye candy. And please understand, I adore eye candy. But I guess I am just bemused that more gamers are not more like me. Which brings me to my questions.

Open source game development is apparently a huge challenge, and I am just now beginning to be interested enough in the open source games to step down from the lofty eye candy of the AAA games to see what the state of the industry is. Can someone point me to a concise explanation of what engines can do what, who is using what, and why? What are the limitations of open source rendering engines, what if anything can or is being done to connect Red Eclipse to the best Irrlicht and/or Ogre can do? Can anyone give me any clue as to how to go about fully informing myself on these issues?

I'm even having a hard time knowing whether to focus on Red Eclipse, Xonotic, or both. I guess for now I will just play, but I definitely am fishing for a way forward toward a truly competitive open source game. And there's just so much information out there it is very daunting. There's no one answer to any of those questions unfortunately. It is mostly about where you find you 'fit in' the most. In my opinion, it should be the goal of an open source developer to identify a void or something that is not getting the attention it should and then fill that gap. I did this by introducing bot AI to the Cube family of engines, as it was sorely missing from a multiplayer-only set of games.

Of course, I ended up using this in my own projects and over time I have developed a fully fledged game and community. Creating this game was completely by accident, I never set out to create it, I was simply one of those people looking to get involved with an open source project and perhaps learning from those around me who are more experienced.

My difficulties initially with the Cube community was mostly due to my misunderstanding of their view of open source. Cube and Sauerbraten, while open source, are not open commentary really (they give their source code for free but they don't really accept contributions to it other than maps/content). This is something I changed in Red Eclipse, all our content is oss-friendly, and so is our community. I couldn't really tell you about each and every engine out there because I chose my path 12 years ago. At the time I had played with Cube 1 and created a small game with my friend, then we moved on to Quake modding, after he went to university I continued experimenting until I heard about the first playable version of Cube 2.

The rest is kinda history. I didn't really choose Cube for any reason other than (1) not many people used it (2) test maps are easy to make, even for an artistically challenged person like me (3) it had voids that needed filling. It wasn't until I had learned a fair bit that I finally earned a friend in the lead programmer and he helped me take my AI to the level it needed to be for inclusion in the engine. I will tell you that using any of the Cube based engines come with their own caveats (like any engine though), they are designed for arenas and a mapper needs to know good occlusion techniques to have a well performing map. Lots of people use each engine (both public and private), so I really couldn't give you a comprehensive list either. OctaForge uses the Tesseract renderer now, and my new game Horizon is using it. Engine makers are better at making engines than games, so it has been sitting there gathering dust for a while I got everything sorted out to start a new project based on it.

Irrlicht Engine View Topics

I don't know much of what's going on outside our little corner of the open source space though, sorry. I know Sauerbraten (and AssaultCube?) gets used in ESL competitions, and Xonotic has a competitive scene too, but I focus mostly on games where the point is to have fun and we haven't really developed a competitive scene. We are a community developed game though, so anything could happen. If you have specific questions, I'll try to answer them, but really it's just a matter of finding out where you fit in and what void you could possibly fill. I think that is helpful.

I have been piddling just with basic settings and am slowly growing fonder of Red Eclipse than Xonotic, I think as much as anything, the already included parkour is appealing. My specific question I guess is this - what are the technical limitations, if any, to making the maps and models look prettier? I look at what can be done just for rendering movies with Blender and think, 'my, can any open source game engine make that into a playable atmosphere?' Can it ever approach the looks of things like Witcher III or Dark Souls III? Or is that more a limitation of the engine than of the available artists?

And what technically needs to be done to get going in that general direction? Well, Tesseract (and by relation OctaForge) is probably the better choice for advanced rendering techniques, which is why I am using it for Horizon (it's purty), but yes, getting artists is the hardest part of it all.

It's taken many of us the better part of 10 years to develop the FOSS games you play these days. It takes significant time and effort to do almost anything, so you really need to have a passion for it. I'm only now attempting a single player game because I have built up enough content and community I can transfer over from the multiplayer one, and even then it is a risky project to attempt.

There's not a lot of open source FPS SP games because it is nearly impossible to do when starting from scratch, most people give up when they realise just how much work is involved. In most games, you are really going to want good sets of models for putting in your levels. These include things like doors, desks, chairs, and other general things that fit the environment you're trying to create. You can only do so much with any mapping program. These are what add the 'flourishes' that contribute to the overall atmosphere. It also helps to have a good grasp on level flow and design, so you should always try starting out with creating basic maps and testing how you can move through them.

Ask yourself what could make the flow better, before asking what could make it look better. Gameplay is forever, but aesthetics can always be improved, you want to get people actually playing it before they can even begin to be thinking 'this is a cool feel, and I wanna help make it look better', and that is a hardest hurdle to get over for most people starting out - getting a community.

Community is everything, they're extensions of every part of you and your game and they can make or break it. Thanks again, and also for all you've done over the years to keep this ship moving. Since my main interest seems to be making things purty anyhow, it makes me feel good that one of the best things I might be able to do for the whole effort would be to start learning simple stuff like making maps and go from there. =D I'm always struck anytime I actually finish playing any good video game at the days and days it takes to scroll through all the credits. I guess that right there is probably the single biggest hurdle for open source gaming. ShaneRoach wrote:Thanks again, and also for all you've done over the years to keep this ship moving. Since my main interest seems to be making things purty anyhow, it makes me feel good that one of the best things I might be able to do for the whole effort would be to start learning simple stuff like making maps and go from there.

=D I'm always struck anytime I actually finish playing any good video game at the days and days it takes to scroll through all the credits. I guess that right there is probably the single biggest hurdle for open source gaming. Hey, no problem.

We're all here to have fun, learn some cool stuff, and make a great game, no matter how insurmountable the odds are. Good luck finding your niche:). To be honest, open source games also rarely develop 'in directions the community wants'. It is basically always a meritocracy where the game develops into the direction the main group of developers want and then a community forms with similar ideas around them. In fact I would say that many commercial games are more 'community' driven, than open sources games, in the sense that they cater to the large silent majority that happily plays the game. It's usually only a small vocal minority that feels their ideas are not taken into account. These can be lucky to find similarly minded developers in open source games, but just as likely they will face similar issues unless they become developers themselves.

Regarding eyecandy. There is a lack of good artists willing to work more or less for free on open-source games (less so in the coding sector) and the development moves usually slowly and assets that were quite good when they were first created, look outdated by the time they get implemented and then usually stay in for years as they are deemed just good enough and other parts are more urgent for improvement.

Ultimately you can only have highly stylized graphics that age slowly (but need nearly dictatorial art direction, which is difficult to do in a bazaar style development), or you have to live with 'just barely good enough' (or worse) looking games. RE is an better example of the latter:p P.S.: Also join our open-source game development forum, see signature below.