Open Source 3D Games

[Leo Mauler]

--- Justin Dugger <jldugger at gmail.com> wrote:

> > I just don't understand an industry that is
> > remarkably similar to requiring people to 
> > upgrade their cars just to be able to play 
> > a new music CD in their car CD player.
> 
> Oh, I very much agree that PC gaming is in a 
> serious decline.  The battlefield 2 syndrome 
> (you could probably attribute that to a more
> popular game, if I could figure out which one) 
> is very detrimental sales.  So much so that 
> when Microsoft presented the X-Box as a PC
> developer friendly platform, many left and never
> looked back, and others just decided to half-ass 
> the PC platform for a fistful of dollars more.  
> Thief 3 would be an excellent example of such
> shennanigans.

Yes, I'd have to agree that Gaming Boxes have really
killed the PC Game market in a serious way.  It seems
like the game developers now tell us to either buy a
Game Box or make our PCs into the equivalent of Game
Boxes.

I miss the good old days, when the PC Platform was the
middle ground: a game could be played on only ONE type
of Game Box, but also on the PC.  Or that you could
expect a game which was only available on ONE Game Box
to eventually make it onto the PC Platform (such as
the Final Fantasy series).

> But I've not seen many open source games that are 
> of high quality, that even comes close to five 
> years ago. Most of the ones that are, come from 
> the results of a single guy working hard to clone 
> a game he liked before (crack-attack, wesnoth,  
> armegettron).  Partly, game authors on the PC need 
> to start looking towards smaller, simpler games
> than the massive 'partake in a joint operations
> military strike, fighting from base to base in a 
> set of vehicles in the dusty dunes of Iraq, working 
> your way up from soldier grunt to squad leader to
> divisional commander.' They're massive undertakings
> that rarely win back their investment, and they 
> begin to all sound alike.

PopCap Games and all the PopCap Clone Companies that
have sprung up are doing just that, creating smaller,
simpler games  and using that old-time system of
crippled (but not too much) shareware to sell their
product.  

They aren't open source (though I've seen a freeware
OSS clone of PopCap's original Bejeweled, called
"Jools"), but their shareware model seems to be the
way to go.  Or perhaps a Transgaming Cedega model to
make money: source code is free, binary builds require
a subscription fee to download.


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