Good/original OpenSource games don't exist ?

[benplaut]

tremulous is a wonderful game, but is easy to ruin if the team is bad.

get in a game with pros on both sides, and it rocks

[cocox]

i think the reason why there are not many open source games is the development time and teams members.... of course i know that linux/ubuntu and many other distributions have a lot of people working on it without any pay but this is for something for a plattaform use... something that u can use for you "supervivence" (if u want to call like that haha) .. a game will no help u to be alive.. just'll give u some fun so developers'd give more importance for primordial things... its my point of view

[charlieg]

It's actually from a game called 'Silent Service' which was released by Microprose (I think) years ago..think I had it on an old Atari 800XL. Good game, but its not original.

It's ridiculous to assert that because a game shares a concept it is unoriginal. Sure, there are commercial sub sims, but Danger from the Deep is it's own game, not a clone of those commercial games. It probably does take ideas and inspiration from the better aspects of other sub sims, but all games do that, even "innovative" ones; no game is pure innovation. To pigeon-hole any game that touches on an already-covered theme (essentially, every theme has been covered by a game) is to label all games as unoriginal.

Yes, there are existing sub sims. Does that make Danger from the Deep unoriginal? No.

[Footissimo]

It's ridiculous to assert...

Keep your wig on.

From what I've played of DFTD, it's very similar to SS. I loved the original and I love where they are going with DFTD. Go look at introversion's site if you want to see something more original in concept / gameplay. DFTD, original?..err not at all...good? ...so far, yes.

[B0rsuk]

Slashdot has very interesting book review. A book about Open Source game development. I'm seriously considering buying it. Another reason to check this link is plenty of insightful comments about the state and quality of Open Source games.

Andreas Beckermann is the author of Boson, an OpenGL real-time strategy game based on Qt and KDE. His experience in working on Boson really is apparent in this book. Martin Heni has written a couple of games that that are in KDE's games pack, and has won a prize for his QTopia game Zauralign.

http://books.slashdot.org/books/06/05/29/1416229.shtml

From one of comments on the book:

There are 22141 games listed in SourceForge.
Of those, 575 (2.59%) are INACTIVE,
7637(34.5%) are in PLANNING.
6022(27.1%) are in PRE-ALPHA.
4302(19.43%) are in ALPHA
4453(20.1%) are in BETA
3592(16.2%) are in PRODUCTION-STABLE
460 (2.0%) are in MATURE.

Which does not add to 100% because some games have more than two states, however it seems there is a really high trend towards "Unfinished" games. Or as I read from some game developing book, EVERYBODY can have a good game idea, but it takes some hard effort to actually implement it, and it takes really hard nuts to finish it.

My personal opinion is that if you stay away from commercial games for a while (which at the moment means 'windows'), you lower your standards and expectations. Since I removed my windows partition I realized how really hard it is to find a good linux game. I knew I could afford to go 100% linux because I'm playing Wolfenstein:Enemy Territory, and know both Enemy Territory:Quake Wars and Dominions 3 will have linux versions.

[ELD]

I don't know if anyone has said, don't wanna read through every page.

But TA Spring is open source, while not original, it is good.

[Carrots171]

Nexuiz is a good, orignial open source game. (Okay, it's an FPS, but it's not a "clone" of any particular game). Enigma is a good, original game, too. It's a puzzle game that has a LOT of levels and is really challenging. And as stated before, Vegastrike is a great original game with a randomly generated, dynamic universe.

[B0rsuk]

Nexuiz is a good, orignial open source game. (Okay, it's an FPS, but it's not a "clone" of any particular game). Enigma is a good, original game, too. It's a puzzle game that has a LOT of levels and is really challenging. And as stated before, Vegastrike is a great original game with a randomly generated, dynamic universe.

Ever heard about Quake and Marble Madness ?
For those of you who don't know, Quake/Doom multiplayer is known for its reliance on rocketlauncher-like weapons, as opposed to more recent trend to rely mainly on hitscan weapons. Most recent examples of this multiplayer style are Quake3, UT2004, Prey, Cube...
Sorry, they may be good games, but certainly not original. Nexuiz is probably the last game I would call original.
As for Enigma, I already mentioned Marble Madness, but look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyd

Description of this game reads like Enigma.
If you read carefully, you'll learn that Oxyd itself was a clone of earlier game called Esprit. How peculiar: Enigma contains levelpacks called Oxyds and Esprit. Or perhaps by 'original' you meant the Sokoban levelset ?

[ZephyrXero]

I don't know if this has been said before, but one thing to keep in mind with the topic's question is that just because a good/original game is open source, don't count on it being free of charge

I could easily see a company releasing their entire game engine open source, and including some demo levels or something, and then simply charging you to get the content (ie...levels, graphics, music, etc).

[B0rsuk]

I don't know if this has been said before, but one thing to keep in mind with the topic's question is that just because a good/original game is open source, don't count on it being free of charge

I could easily see a company releasing their entire game engine open source, and including some demo levels or something, and then simply charging you to get the content (ie...levels, graphics, music, etc).

I know exactly one game that does this with good effect: Deadly Rooms Of Death (DROD). But you have access to fully working level editor, too ! DROD is for me the best puzzle game ever made.
http://caravelgames.com

But my point is a little different. DROD was developed as closed-source software and released later. Even now DROD 3.0 development follows typical closed-source /elitist development model. It's developed with money and code (not content other than usermade) released for free afterwards.
So is OpenSource development model (I DON'T MEAN GPL LICENCE) viable at all ?
By the way: many of games already mentioned here are based on engines from released ID Software, which are now GPLed but were developed in closed-source way. (warsow, nexuiz, tremulous, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, True Combat: Elite... all use ID Software engines)
Open-source developers seem to simply lack motivation when it comes to games. They can make excellent everyday software, tools, operating systems (Even those are often funded by big commercial companies), but they don't care so much about games.
And it's extremely hard to find an artist willing to accept GPL-like licence. Artists just don't get it.