The reality of open source games

Star Ruler 2's an open source(d) game that's on Steam and that people can still purchase for money that goes to the original devs. It's amazingly moddable (the AI and GUI are both completely written in the extension language, for example) and people still mod it.

Tragically unpopular though.

I asked him once, he's fine with the game being commercial as long as the source code to the engine is Free (libre). So for example Doom which you have to pay for, but can get the source code to the engine is fine in his eyes.
Donations are hard, you are competing with pretty much every game out there. As someone has said, porn games seem to be working well with the donation model, but only as long as you can satisfy some weirdos' fucked up fetishes. Probably the best thing to do would be to just make a commercial game with a Free engine.

opensource old games, forget about making anything new, not worth the hassle of opensource development clouding your creative control.

the "good open source" game library consisting of flash-game level shooters, shitty mariokart and minecraft ripoffs

Quake and Doom are not open source
they were developed as closed source in commercial private company, developers were paid, someone managed the production. later they released source code. this was not open source development

Open source donation-ware pedo game when? I'm in. who else?
if we won't have real company they won't be able to close it or sue it

let's make a game about child fucking. or first you pick up kid, try to not scare it away, then slowly work to have it open it's holes for you. pedo-adventure game. or maybe just child fucking simulator?
I'll start by downloading CP and watching it to see how the game should look and how the gameplay should work. post some CP links to help me if you can

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I'd just like to say that RMS played doom.

stallman.org/archives/2005-sep-dec.html#07 December 2005 (People who play violent video games)

I wanted to send a mail to RMS to ask him what he thinks about games with free engine but nonfree data (like classic DOOM), but I do not have time to engage in a conversation with him, although I know he normally answers such kind of emails.

But in one of his articles on video-games at gnu.org he links to a website warning that nonfree game data can actually contains nonfree software: gnu.org/philosophy/nonfree-games.html

this is funny
I wonder if RMS ever fucked a child and if he could review it just like he review playing doom

also would like to see Terry A. Davis review playing doom or fucking a kid

github.com/ca3games/Godot

I need opinions on my github licence, bros.

put a pair of tits in it and thirsty&lonely nerds will donate. Or maybe try to make a game that's actual of value and not an embarassing cash-grab. I think people would support that out of sheer astonishment.

how to email RMS to ask him what he thinks about pedophilia and child pornography?
kids should be open and shared, not proprietary in hands of wealthy jews. everyone should get the chance to ejaculate inside tiny horny hot little girl

also, if child pornography is produced for free, using your daughter, then distributed for free on Tor and Torrents, does RMS support it? it is in line with Free software and Open source philosophies
maybe cameras that record sex with children should be open source and open hardware, though?

or even better, pretend to be a female developer, show "your" sexy photos and videos

they wouldn't. if you made game of actual value and sold it commercially you could earn 50 times more than from donations

ehh, I feel the market is pretty dead now for creative input. It's all about connections and PR. Trying to make it with videogame development is like trying to start a band. Sure, you might make it without connection and all that shit if you're talented and lucky but it's more than likely that you won't, even if you're reasonably good at it.

If people would actually read the shit that is on his website they'de realize what a huge autist he is.

I think he would say it's OK as long as it was (0) mutually consensual, (1) recorded using free-hardware running free-software into a free video format, and (2) freely distributed under a gpl-compatible copyleft license.

stallman.org/archives/2003-may-aug.html#28 June 2003 ()

I wonder if RMS ever fucked

Etterna Online is open source.

...

allegedly (some user on some imageboard so take it with a metric ton of salt), he used to bang a few hippie commie chicks back in the day

It's open source? Where can I download it (the source, of course)?

What kind of time do you need to write an email? Are you a slave in a coal mine who gets three minutes off per day to swallow his daily food ration or what?

Anyway, I asked him (see ) and he's fine with those.

Cataclysm: dark days ahead.

You leftists are always funny.

gnu.org/software/repo-criteria-evaluation.html

Having private property =/= allowing unregulated Jewish market corporatize everything

As with all games: If they get popular enough.

There's a myriad of renpy (porn) games on Patreon that make good money, and those are sorta-open by default.

There's also the model where the code is open, but the assets aren't. See Ebony Spire.

GAAS and GAAP are both the only way to get developers to actually work on video games, and those methods are both proprietary.

Corporations are not private property, idiot. Incorporating a business is socialising it by definition. There should be no such thing as "publicly traded" companies in a free market. Also, implying the market has no regulation just proves that you haven't studied this subject enough; the regulations already in place exist to prop up corporations and create unfair disadvantages for private businesses and the self-employed.

corporations != foundations, idiot.

Lmao wtf

UT99 and UT2004 came with their own editors and most of the game was built using UnrealScript. Maps came in uncompressed form and you could do whatever you wanted with others' maps. You could learn from them or build upon them, courtesy excluded. Lots of mods came from the UT games, most notably Killing Floor. Carball was another, which Rocket League is very heavily based off.
Game modding is dead now. Games don't come with editors or even let you edit maps if you do come across editing software. Packages are cooked which prevents you from editing them. In UT4 the developers conveniently broke the functionality which lets you uncook packages. Most, if not all dependencies in a map are baked right into the map, instead of having mostly shared packages. This means mappers are mostly forced to use their own shit instead of what came with the game. To add insult to injury, a modern production-level map can be larger than 300MB. 50 decent-quality maps and that's already 15GB.

No.
You might get a dollar every few years.

Open source games exist to sit as thumbnails in online galleries and get laughed at for being so shit. Nobody will bother carving your shit when they could just as easily take a big fat stinking shit of their own.

Yeah, because they give you morons the engine to make your shitware in. They actually provide a service people think is worth money.

Yes, it is worth it. There are lots of great open source games I've enjoyed.

You can make money on open source via crowdfunding

Stop trying to make money of your "creativity", and get some real creativity. You will never accomplish shit if it's for money. If you want money, go suck dick in an office like everyone else or find a smart way to get money. Make art on the side, don't sell it.

Teeworlds is rock solid. Not really aesthetically but neither is any modern game. More in terms of engineering.

based

asset encryption was done on purpose, probably because publishers.

can still be extracted. bigger issue is accessing it in the first place because most UE games don't support modding to begin with.

depending what and how you open it up you can easily sell open source games. quake etc was only open source for the code, not the assets itself (which got pirated then anyway, but that happens even without open source, so it's a moot point).

OpenTTD is very old and has countless mods available.

For this method, I'd recommend something like dividing your game into a demo and then the rest of the game. For example if your game is a game with a significant story plot, you could divide the game into chapters. You'd release chapter 1 as a fully polished game and using that as a demo to introduce your audience to the rest of the game.

If the tools are easy too handle, if the game is popular and if you provide them with a platform that is easy to access with filters like (most downloaded) then yes.
RMS as always said that making a living for you work is ok, he's done it himself by selling copies of emacs.
Unlikely. The gaymen community is retarded as hell and if you let it be accessible in the gratis way they'll say.

Here a model that you can do and also respect the freedom of your customers.
Sell your services. What does that mean ? Well to the contrary of a donation where you aren't forced to do shit and if you scam your whole userbase they can do shit.A service is a legal contract (depending on the country you live in) and they become officially your customers instead of random citizens that give you something. You have of course your obligation towards them (depending on country/contract). But you have a steady flux cash each month instead of once every time your mentioned somewhere.
You can for example propose them to buy 2 years of service at 5$ per month which is 120$ for two years.
You would need 240 people to get minimum wage (depending on your state/country) and if you do a good job more people will come and more people will stay. You have to be good a PR and be good with your code and make regular updates of what your doing. Also you need to limit the amount of cash that you'll get not only for tax reason but also because if you receive 8K per month and that nothing proportional to that money comes to affect your work/game/code then people won't understand why throwing more money at it doesn't work and they'll go away.
That way you can effectively make a living out of your work and make free/libre software if you get enough people to back you up. If it get popular and get a lot of cash influx (too much for you) you can even make your own entity and pay other freelance to make things happen.
I recommend using liberapay.com for donation/payment.

You can charge for open source games. You don't need to just have a donation button. Nothing is actually against the terms in GPL as long as you provide a copy of the source when you make the sale.

Why would anyone buy it from you when they can download it for free somewhere else?

The same applies to current proprietary games. You can pirate them, you know? Some people don't pirate due to fear of malware, or some people don't pirate out of convenience. Whatever it is, all you need is to find a way to make your full games not end up in some distro's repos, which you can do by giving them paid official servers if your game has online, or by making art assets proprietary (which is what Doom and Quake did, and it's something RMS doesn't mind as much because he believes art should be free but not necessarily libre, hence why his photos and slideshares use the CC non-derivative clause)

I bought a copy of Morrowind specifically because of the OpenMW project. The source code must be available with the game but the artistic works doesn't need to be freely shared.

Then don't put it up for download for free (gratis)? Open Source and Free Software do not mean freeware.

This. When it comes to proprietary software people all of the sudden act as if the license alone prevents all types of coying. I used to pirate quite a lot when I was a kid, but I stopped because quite frankly it was not worth the hassle. If a game developer thinks they need to shove DRM up my ass and nickle and dime their customer, then the game is not even worth my time, let alone my money.

I actually bought Barony in part precisely because it is a commercial Open Source game. These people deserve money and promotion more than the rancid AAA shit.

Honestly, In regards to my earlier post (>>1075041), I think education is the answer to really get the word out about this kind of technique. I talked to a few game devs about going open source, and they either had no clue they could do this (charge for open source stuff and just have the art be licensed) or they were under the impression that free software was the same as open source development (they had to actually set up a github and allow people to make pull requests with shitty code).

Sure, you won't save AAA games by telling them this. The only developer that might have ever been close to doing that is id, and we all know that will never happen again. Big companies treat the GPL like the plague. A lot of indie devs just don't know about this, though, and would probably we willing to release source if they knew it wouldnt actually change anything.

just charge for the binaries for brainlet gamers

...

Most roguelikes are Libre. Nethack's pretty good.

Ever heard of Xonotic?

Doom 1 and 2 were freeware, they were only OSSed after cresting in popularity. That was also only the game engine, all the assets were and continue to be paid only.

Stallman, you've been saying this for 50 years and still no one believes it. Just because you don't label it so, doesn't mean it isn't a donation in everything but name.

An actually viable business model, stockholme source.

What ever happened to it? I played it a ton back in the 1.1 days.

No, they weren't. They were shareware: the first episode is freeware, the rest of the game you had to pay for.

clone=bad.
No it's not. It's literally bait and switch gamble.
The software needs proprietary software to work. It's under GPLv3 but if you need visual studio to compile it then they failed to respect the users freedom it.
2d=bad

Realistically, fully open source your games are doom to fail unless you have other way of funding it.
I guess the codes and underlying system can be open sourced, but the assets, names, story, characters and etc should be legally copyrighted. That way you proved that your game is not full on botnet trojan horse while you get to protect your projects and sell it. Copycats can only fork the game and have to make bootleg assets themselves.

Episode 1 for Doom and Heretic were shareware, and that's really it. The rest at best had a small playable demo of a few levels (Hexen, Strife). Doom II didn't even have that.
But... Chex Quest was 100% free and had all the Ultimate Doom levels and even most textures and sprites in it! You can actually make yourself a nearly full UD IWAD by creative use of deutex with chex.wad and doom1.wad (the shareware episode).

Attached: Chextr_041.gif (720x852, 123.51K)

If you write a contract, you also need to limit the amount of time you spend per customer, otherwise you'll have to do fulltime work if a single guy pays you.

False. The requirement for free software is the freedom to study and modify the software. Access to the source code is a precondition for this. Overture's source code is available for the users of Overture to study and modify. This is no different for a free software game that's written in Unity. The game may rely on a non-free engine but the game code itself is free. It's the user's problem if they want to change the build system to some other build system.

Wait that was actually a thing that happened?

I'm currently writing on a ncurses game in lua/luajit. I use ne as a text editor and luacheck as lint. I'm writing the entire thing on an A20 board, connected to a 12 inch 800x600 screen. The setup consumes about 8-9W while working on it. I might eventually make a fake-text interface in löve or SDL. This is all entirely possible and the machine is fast enough for the task.

Current game "developers" are brainlets that don't know how to do something if they can't click it together in some fancy GUI. They're even worse than webdevs, some of them can at least write a few lines of code without having a visual representation of what they're doing. Their lack of talent and understanding makes them easy prey to companies that lower the bar of entry with proprietary solutions. All these complex, proprietary engines are a antithesis to FOSS, not only because of the fact that the engines are non-free, but also because their complex and often production pipeline that depends on proprietary software doesn't make them open to easy changes, even if the game code outside the engine is free and open source. This also doesn't only apply to games. If you can't pick a simple, free editor and make the changes you want in a reasonable way and recompile, it's essentially non-free.

0. AD
Battle for wesnoth
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
Endless Sky
Freeciv
Hedgewars
HyperRogue
Moria
NetHack
OpenTTD
Open Arena
Open RA
Shattered Pixel Dungeon
SuperTuxKart
Teeworlds
Xonotic

Open source with proprietary assets:
DROD series
Mari0
Seven Kingdoms
Spelunky

Yeah, the Chex Quest devs worked directly with the UD IWAD, and simply replaced whatever resource lumps they needed to in there, rather than creating a PWAD file. Then they bundled a modified doom.exe (renamed to chex.exe) that loaded the IWAD they had renamed as chex.wad. They only modified the IWAD header string to "PWAD", but if you simply change that to "IWAD", then you can use it like such
The game startup messages:
prboom v2.5.0 (prboom.sourceforge.net/)M_LoadDefaults: Load system defaults. default file: /home/fox/.prboom/prboom.cfg found chex.wadIWAD found: chex.wadPrBoom (built Feb 25 2016), playing: The Ultimate DOOM
Does pic look familiar? I took that after selecting "episode 4 - thy flesh consumed" from the main menu in PrBoom.
Now the Chex Quest devs did actually make a lot of changes and limitations to their chex.exe build, which are described by Chocolate Doom's author, since he did some work to get his port to behave (almost) exactly like the chex.exe. This is the comment section at the top of his chex.deh file:
# This is a dehacked patch for emulating the chex.exe executable that# comes with Chex Quest. It is generated from automatic scripts used# to compare chex.exe with Final Doom's doom2.exe. The purpose of# this patch is to allow Chex Quest to be played accurately with# source ports; it will not work with Vanilla Doom and DOS dehacked,# as some of the string and cheat replacements are longer than is# possible with dehacked.## Because of the limitations of dehacked, it is not possible to# completely emulate chex.exe merely with a dehacked patch. Although# this patch takes care of the majority of the changes necessary, the# following changes are also necessary to accurately emulate chex.deh:## * Monsters should not drop ammo# * The game should end after the fifth level, instead of the eighth.# * The episode selection screen should not be displayed.# * The level warp cheat should always warp to episode 1.# * The automap should show the level name for the episode 1 level,# eg. the displayed level name for E2M3 is the level name for# E1M3.
But anyway, yeah almost all the Ultimate Doom resources are present in the chex.wad file, and most of what isn't can be found in the shareware episode. The only parts I'm aware of that would be missing are the cyberdemon sprites (and maybe his sound effects too), so you'd have to replace that one monster and that's basically it.

Attached: doom00.png (1024x768, 107.28K)

it's not even finished and it barely has any mechanics. it's an rts with only 1 base, where you chase a deer across the entire map for food, and half the units dont even work yet.

literally fucking trash. it's like the poor man's, poor man's shining force.

it's a copy/paste of quake 3, so of course it's good

it's missing a lot of the little things that make civilization decent (civ still isn't a good game) but it's alright for about an hour or two.

the rest look terrible. you couldn't pay me to play some piece of shit racer called "super tux cart".

Attached: 45557f6a9005d120f506ca06db03c6c09bb4918962408d045a5a361d88394dd6.gif (500x295, 868.26K)

Translation: I'm too lazy to try the games or do any research so I'll just call them terrible to pretend that I have an argument.

i'd rather keep playing aeon genesis smt, thanks. convince me otherwise or stay mad, i'll be here playing good games made 4 decades ago that beat anything open source ive tried.

You're right about the contract, but you're complicating they way to count the hours and what the customers are paying you for.
You need to establish an amount of time of work per week be it 40/45 hours. I also suggest that you should provide proof of that work via live stream your workstation or live stream camera of your room.

As for what your customers pay for they agree to pay you and in exchange you spend time to develop a named video game.

As for the amount you want or need, you need to know first establish what kind of project and then estimate how much time you need with a certain amount of manpower you have.
After establishing the amount of people needed you need to establish how much your salary will be each month.
That way you can estimate how much contributors you need if they pay you a sum of money per month.

If you have an overflow of cash I suggest to spend it in training courses or to hire other freelances to enhance you or/and your teams coding skills. There are a lot of people
If I had to suggest someone it would be greg young he's good and does that.
vimeo.com/108441214

Cataclysm DDA is also a good one. It's a post-apocalyptic roguelike and probably the most complex one (real complexity, not 2391983913891 sorts of leather BS) I've ever seen.

If you want to be a good game developer, have fun developing the game. Don't plan it with the idea of fleecing some stupid nerds on patreon while offering the game for free. All free games that stuck with me were a labor of love.

It is, it barely even compares to what it's trying to rip, quake and UT go laps around it in terms of quality.

What is xonotic
what is open spades
what is supertuxkart