Alan Horkan blogged about games and wondered about the relation of Open Source and gaming, and what games are available for Linux these days.

While I don't do much game development or playing much any more, this is an area I've put a huge amount of thought into. In fact, pre-Inkscape I coordinated a project to create open source games.

I believe that in theory there should be no reason why we shouldn't have open source games. If you visit the store you see how similar the games are from one to the next. Often a given game is simply a rehash of some other game concept, with new artwork and a few gameplay tweaks. Sometimes these companies sublicense the engines from other companies, but sometimes they create their own new engine (for better or worse). It'd seem like with open source, you could do even better since the engine would be freely reusable.

However, in practice this doesn't occur as much as it should. Yes, there are open source engines aplenty, but I think people underestimate the time, skill, and challenge of coming up with new art, levels, and so forth for a game. In some ways, the coding of the engine is the least of the problem; if nothing else, there are tons of volunteers available who want to code, and fewer who want to create art or design levels. One of the reasons for this is that in many projects programming is held to be a more respectible talent than art, so artists can sometimes feel like they're second class. This is a shame because in all honestly, games these days make or break on the quality of their art. A great game with excellent gameplay but crappy "programmer art" will never catch on in a big way, compared with a simplistic game with gorgeous, eye-popping artwork.

Back when I was doing open source game development, there was a major hurdle in that there were few open source tools available for artists working on open source games. We found ourselves in a troublesome situation where each artist was developing art with whatever professional tool they happened to have. Many artists could not afford the best tools so would make due with a cheap one; others would obtain a copy of an expensive tool through some other means (such as doing artwork for a company in exchange for a license), and then wish to use that hard-earned tool.

Unfortunately, this resulted in difficulty in that the artists could not collaborate or share their work. It was also difficult for developers since they couldn't re-render the artwork (since they didn't have Max or Poser or Illustrator or whatever).

Fortunately, today through Inkscape, Blender, and other projects, the situation is much better. These are actually high quality tools that some artists even consider to be *better* in some ways than the commercial counterparts. They're only getting better, and they'll never "go out of business", so if you establish your skillset in these tools, you'll benefit from this investment for many years to come.

Of course, tools alone are insufficient to solve the issues. Many game projects simply lack artists. One of the motivations I had for helping start the Open Clip Art Library was to establish a way to help address this particular problem. I would love to see OCAL become a valuable repository for game art in addition to regular clip art. This way, someone with an itch to create a game but little artistic talent could browse through the library and collect a bunch of art, render them from SVG into whatever raster format and dimensions they need for their game, and be assured that their initial release will look much better than it would otherwise.

Another issue with game development that I've noticed is that there is a huge gap in game modules/libraries. At the low end, near the hardware level, there are a plentiful number of libs like SDL, Allegro, and so forth, but at a higher level there are fewer libs. Sometimes you will find specialty libs for things like pathfinding or screen rendering.

What I think the Open Source communty needs are a rich variety of stand-alone libraries for high level game functionality. For example, imagine game logic libraries that encapsulates game rules for doing resource trading, or inventory management, or in-game unit design. This is not a unique idea; see for example gtkboard, which aims to be a standard library for encapsulating rules dealing with two-player turn-based boardgames (e.g. chess, tower of hanoi, samegame, etc.) Btw, take a look at the screenshots and recall what I mentioned about the need for artistic talent. Pysol is another example of the power of this sort of abstraction approach; they provide a general purpose library for creating solitaire card games, and as a result have gained over 200 different games.

I believe the Open Source and Open Art communities could achieve the same sort of successes as these efforts by reusing this abstraction approach, and scaling it up to implement other, more sophisticated types of games. Imagine taking a flight physics library (e.g., from ) and combining it with the shooting physics from a sophisticated FPS game (e.g. Quake 3) to produce a compelling WWII dogfight game. Or imagine taking a planetary simulator library (e.g. Celestia), combining it with the game logic from a rails-type game (e.g. FreeRails to produce a new space-themed strategic resource game.

To a certain degree, you can sense this is already happening. Browse through the game section of Freshmeat and note how many games are leveraging engines like Ogre3D, CrystalSpace, and so forth. Mercator Grid gets around the lack of art by using GIS data and NATO map symbology (yikes, looks like they're invading my hometown!

I mentioned in a prior article that converted my Mom to Linux. The machine I used to do this was my last Windows system, which I'd been holding onto just for game playing. The reason is that I no longer feel its necessary to have Windows for game playing. There are tons of pretty good open source games out there that work on Linux. For instance, check out FreeCol (a Colonization-like game), Globulation 2 (a nifty RTS), VegaStrike (a space simulation/trading game), Freerails (a Railroad-tycoon type game), Wesnoth, a fantasy strategy game, and lgeneral, (a turn-based strategy wargame ala Panzer General). Or see Glest, Cube, SauerBraten, and Nexuiz, that a couple friends strongly recommend. In terms of game availability, the Open Source community seems to have hit a golden age; there are TONS of open source games.

You'll note that many of the good Open Source games are clones of popular commercial games. I think by focusing on producing reusable game components, or making it easy to take an existing cloned game and repurpose it with different art or gameplay, the Open Source community will be able to start producing more innovative and unique kinds of games.

If you want to help push Open Source gaming further along, I think it's not too much work to make a big difference. Find a game you like and help it get packaged and added to your favorite distro. If you are good at art, contribute a logo or a replacement for their default unit or terrain artwork. Take an afternoon to contribute bug reports or patches to help improve the quality of these games. And most importantly, consider reformatting your Windows machine and put 100% of your support towards Open Source games. :-)