Open Source Morrowind Version 0.16.0 Released 98
An anonymous reader writes "The OpenMW team recently released a new version of their open source engine. While the project is not fully playable yet, the goal is to preserve Morrowind, provide modders a better engine and tool kit for creating their works, and make it cross-platform. Like most open source projects, they are always seeking new contributors. So, what do you think; what's the state of FLOSS games that are not first-person shooters?"
No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No (Score:3)
Best comment I've read in a while. I played a demo of arkham city the other day. I almost whipped out the credit card on the spot. Just the graphics alone made want to play it. Games like that cost 1000000x to produce versus what you can get out of some engine and a bunch of modders. It would take a dedicated small team years of hours putting together something on the level of what I played. Even linux owes a lot to significant corporate investment.
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This is true, but the art requirements for a game like arkham city are insane. Sure there are some really awesome indy games, but nothing quite like that. Fallout 3 also comes to mind. No way could a small team accomplish that. I'm not trying to diminish what people do with less, but more is always better.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
This is true, but the art requirements for a game like arkham city are insane. Sure there are some really awesome indy games, but nothing quite like that. Fallout 3 also comes to mind. No way could a small team accomplish that. I'm not trying to diminish what people do with less, but more is always better.
Depends on what you need. Neat graphics usually means heavy system requirements.
A lot of people may be fine with a game that isn't as beautiful, but can be run smoothly on their systems.
I think there's a market for both.
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True, but you still need content. I tend to play single-player games. What makes those interesting are mainly:
1. World content, story, complexity.
2. Half-decent engine including AI.
3. Graphics
If your world is interesting but you're the only thing moving in it, then that isn't useful. If the enemies are interesting but the extent of gameplay is to circle each other in the middle of a desert, that isn't interesting.
I want places to go, people to talk to, things to accomplish. All of that requires artwo
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Neat graphics usually means heavy system requirements.
A lot of people may be fine with a game that isn't as beautiful, but can be run smoothly on their systems.
I am not sure I agree.
Think of the Flash based game Mechanarium.
The hardware requirements were trivial --- the art design and execution extraordinary:
It won the Excellence in Visual Art award at the 12th Annual Independent Games Festivaland the Best Soundtrack award from PC Gamer in 2009. It was nominated for an Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction award by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences and a Milthon award in the 'Best Indie Game' category at the Paris Game Festival.
[wikipedia]
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but more is always better.
What about more Nazis? Or more Godwins?
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The former worked for Wolfenstein 3D.
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Input on a tablet (Score:2)
There are mobile/tablet games that the graphics are at least as good or better but the gameplay / AI sucks.
How much of the gameplay sucking can be attributed to not having a gamepad or any other physical keys available?
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What happened to "Less is more."?
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see "wing commander saga: darkest dawn" and "freespace open". if no one makes the games you want the fans will ultimately find a way. FOSS's problem is they are saturated with projects for quake style scifi arena shoots if they tapped dead genres instead they would have polished games out the wazzoo
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Graphics wise, I'd express my doubts that even with years, a small team would even be able to produce something that is considered graphically amazing for the time of release.
Who said anything about a small team? And in what way is this [youtube.com] not already amazing?
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It would take a dedicated small team years of hours putting together something on the level of what I played.
The parent of my post did.
Yes, what you posted does look amazing, but it is a pre-rendered movie, not a game. So it's really apples and oranges. I don't mean to demean anyone making FOSS games, I just meant to point out that making a game that looks as good as new AAA games generally takes a sizeable, professional team working full time to accomplish.
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what you posted does look amazing, but it is a pre-rendered movie, not a game. So it's really apples and oranges.
No it isn't. One is the flip side of the other. The toolchains involved are nearly identical. So is the project organization, number and quality of artists involved, social structure, etc etc etc. It's actually easier to enumerate the differences. 1) A game needs a game engine. 2) eh... it's really hard to find a second difference.
Look, it is already proven that AAA content can be created by the open community. Delivered according to a plan and on a schedule even. You just saw it with your own eyes. The onl
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As for the toolchain? No - an interactive game requires far more tools, and more specialists to create. While animators and texture artists alone can create movies, you need high skill programmers in order to create a game. It is not as simple as just "putting an engine in". An engine i
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It is the old paradigm of time vs money. With enough money, it can be done in a reasonable time frame. Otherwise, you will get a great work that take years/decades to develop, like http://ifhgame.ru/main/ [ifhgame.ru].
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What about Hawken? (http://www.playhawken.com/)
Small team, indy game, graphics are mindblowingly fantastic, even for today, and its scheduled for release Q4 '12
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While it is common to find unpolished (or more accurately, unfinished) games, there are a few that are up to par with commercial games, or nearly so.
Battle for Wesnoth especially. Also UFO: Alien Invasion, Freeciv... and I want to list Nethack and roguelikes, but that niche is intentionally unpolished.
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Some games that have, IMO, succeeded in the polish department, have done so because they by design don't require many assets or they can "borrow" from another game (commercial or not), to get them started while new content is generated . If I was to start an amateur OSS game project, I'd try to keep that in mind. A good example of the former is naev [naev.org], and of the latter, openTTD [openttd.org].
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*The game I've had the most enjoyment from in the last five years has probably been Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn... and that game could have been done on a super nintendo and not lost any entertainment value.
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Well, if you can "see" spelling errors a mail to the developers with the error and the correction would be helpfull.
Calling people who can not see spelling errors illiterate is a bit exagerating, don't you think so?
I for my part have to type this on a system where you can not activate spelling correction (no idea why), so if there is nothing red underlined I don't see errors. (My brain assembles the meaning of a word or sentence without the need to parse every single letter and without the need to know how
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As I tried to point out: it is a matter of seeing, not thinking.
I'm a whole word reader, I don't parse words letter by letter, and even if (while trying to spot typos) it simply does not work very good.
It is well known that "wrods lkie tihs" can easy be read by most people. I have to look really hard to notice those errors (in this case they are more easy to spot ofc).
OTOH lots of words are written completely illogical, why is it always instead of allways e.g.?
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
According to the project FAQ, Open Morrowind uses the original game assets. They have not created any of their own art. You need to have Morrowind installed on your computer, because this is just the engine. It will natively run on Windows, MacOS X, and Linux, and they're looking to fix longstanding bugs in the MW engine, as well as extend it. Some of the proposed extensions to the engine sound ridiculously complex and/or like they'd break the game, but it's definitely interesting. I'd be curious to see what it looks like in a few more revisions, when it's finally playable.
There are incredibly replacement textures for Morrowind and Oblivion that make even these older games look beautiful and semi-modern. I wouldn't put down the efforts of modders, though I agree that sometimes open source games have rather lackluster graphics. Part of the problem is that modders are more interested in playing polished, commercial games, which they can touch up, rather than contributing to an incomplete, open source game that has no assets at all. It's quite understandable, really, because one is a hobby, and the other is a full-time job.
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you should be able to run tamriel rebuilt on the open morrowind. http://tamriel-rebuilt.org/?p=faq§ion=0
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Cutsy sardonic title with no correct assertions made. Please try to familiarize yourself with the project before being a useless contrarian.
This is not a "FOSS" game. It is a reimplementation of the game engine that does not change any of the original visual resources. And it already looks better than the original.
Your comment is therefore irrelevant.
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
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NO olds will beat the new 'vette in anything but a straight line, but one of the old olds with a big fat big block that has had almost the cost of a corvette spent on it can probably out-drag one of the lesser ones :)
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I think the point is that all versions of the Corvette DO have a V8 engine and to most peoples thinking aren't ugly. Well, at least not fugly.
Well, I get that point... I think we've lost our way when it comes to sports cars. People are always trying to get bigger faster stronger in their cars and it's ignorant. What I want is better cleaner tighter. That's why I am restoring a 1982 300SD. Weighs 1000 pounds less than the predecessor or successor S-Class, which pays off in handling and fuel economy, mileage is better by about a sixth. Plenty of power and will run on truly marginal diesel since it's an IDI. Over 400 miles to a tank, reliably. Has p
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And what of the Mazda RX-8, Lotus Elise, or any of the various hot hatches available right now?
None of them are American, which is what I was talking about; I could have been more explicit about that.
It sounds like you want a Lotus, though, or a Miata.
I'm 6'7" so I cannot drive a Lotus or a Miata. I used to have a 1989 240SX with a 3" drop, which was an awesome car and I could run rings around motherfuckers on the twisties even though I had nothing in the engine, had done nothing for performance in fact but intake and exhaust. I got rid of it because I now live in Lake County, California, and the roads will not sustain driving a car like that. My 300S
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It runs great but scares people away.
So what? It isn't a business. They do it because they like it. Some people spend their free time watching TV, others coding games.
And graphics aren't everything. There are some weirdos that have this ridiculous idea that a good game is a fun game, good looking or not. If all I cared for were graphics I'd see a movie or go outside.
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
FOSS games tend to be coded very well but they lack polished art and game assets. It's like building V8 engine and putting it in an ugly car. It runs great but scares people away.
That's why no one plays Dwarf Fortress and the Roguelike games.
I'd rather have an interesting game with amateur assets than a dull game with slick presentation.
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Dwarf Fortress isn't open source. Picking out a few extreme examples of graphically inferior games that have a great hook that doesn't need graphics doesn't really discredit the GPs statement. It is not an unfair generalization to make that FOSS games generally lack polish and suffer as a result, either graphically or technically. This is of course mostly because they are a labor of love and not profit, but that fact doesn't change anything in the end.
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I think the whoosh should go to you, good sir. First of all, we're talking about a FOSS generalization. Using non-FOSS games as an example to break that generalization is worthless to the discussion. Secondly, games do not need high graphical fidelity to look and feel polished. Creating a crappy presentation, throwing your arms up in the air and saying "graphics aren't important" is just a terrible excuse for being lazy. There are many things that can be done to make your presentation shine even if you can'
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Is this [phunq.net] polished? Because it's coming to an open source game engine near you pretty soon. And its just part of a flood of amazing, free and open tools that are coming online right now. The time was never better to jump into Indie/open game development. If you want to help out. [phunq.net]
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How can we tell if it's polished? What the hell is it even supposed to be? There's a mailing list subscription link - to what?
I went to the main page, or what I thought it might be, and got:
Google has no info on phunq that I could find before giving up, so I decided to ask you - WTF are you even talking about? Should I have modded you +1 ZOMBOCOM?
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FOSS and the game audience (Score:2)
seems like any game that was developed under normal time lines/conditions could be FOSS as long as the code came with it....in which case it could be community maintained at that point, but was developed behind closed doors.
Most games (and a lot of software, but not all) have to have a definite goal and have to come out under a specific time-
D to C++? (Score:3)
I am very curious about the rational for why OpenMW switched from D to C++.
The FAQ [openmw.org] points to this page for an explanation, [google.com] which, at 2012-07-03 8:16 PM Pacific Time, I, an outsider to the effort, do not have access to.
Re:D to C++? (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably. Or to put it in kinder words: To appeal to a larger set of potential contributors.
Re:D to C++? (Score:5, Informative)
Or to put it in the actual words from when I was helping with this... No one actually codes in D. The founder was the only person who even knew how, let alone having a setup and compiler and everything required because there wasn't anything usable for coders using Windows. After a deluge of people asking to help the switch was finally made, which is a fantastic thing as the founder disappeared and another coder took over, and now there's an entire team.
In other words, it saved the entire project.
Re:D to C++? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:D to C++? (Score:5, Funny)
Because of the 3 guys who know D, two weren't gamers.
Re:D to C++? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because C++ is mature, capable and nearly all serious graphics toolchains rely on it.
Status? (Score:1)
>So, what do you think; what's the state of FLOSS games that are not first-person shooters?
What, both of them? I looked them up; Frozen Bubble and Tux Racer are doing just fine.
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This is great as I missed out on Morrowind the first time around, and recently bought it cheap - but I have a Mac and a Linux box. This solves trying to run the game in VirtualBox or on an underpowered netbook.
Shame the website is completely fuxxed up.
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Not seeing it (Score:2)
I love Morrowind, and am actually playing it now in a bid to put off buying Skyrim till it drops a bit (plus run quests I've never actually found before, because 'Why not'), but . . . I just don't see the need for this project.
The brilliance in Morrowind was in the writing and the plot. The engine is 'stable enough' and runs fine, they're neither improving nor planning to improve the graphics . . . I'm just not seeing the return on this.
Pug