I have made a list of problems I have encountered in free software game
development.
This isn't specifically about client/server games, but all sorts of games from
card games and minesweeper type games, as well as more "gamer" type games
including rpgs, fps etc including client/server games.
Problems in freesoftware game development
This document is theresult of a long standing involvement with the free
software gamedevelopment community. Over my eleven years of experience, I
havefound the following issues with why we don’t have better freesoftware games
and overtake Microsoft and all other proprietaryoperating systems on the
desktop with our highly superior games. Perhaps these reasons each by
themselves would not doom us, buttogether they hold us back from destroying
proprietary software onceand for all. I’m not actually listing every possible
problem wecould encounter, just some of the main ones I have noticed.
1. Money andbusiness models. Proprietary software has several more mechanism
topay people to develop games than free software. Coming up with
andimplementing free software business models has been a challenge.
2. IdealogicalIssues.
While many peoplewould just be happy to run proprietary games on a free os,
many morepeople would prefer to run free software games on a free software os.
The gradient isn’t quite so black and white either, you could runfree games
with proprietary video card drivers, or work on portingfree software games to a
non-free os. Maybe the gradient itself isn’tso much the problem as the fact
that it is hard enough to find thegame you want in any category and it seems
like proprietary games ona proprietary os outnumber them all. Another side to
this is you canmake free code but non-free cultural assets. Without a real
strongfree culture movement (as strong as the free software movementenforcing
ideology,) its hard to say why you need to make the assetsfree as well other
than to include in various free software distros.
3. Technicaldisagreements. If you thought emacs and vi was a heated agreement
orkde vs gnome vs mate vs unity vs xfce vs lxde etc etc, you haven'tseen
nothing yet. Common arguments that prevent the formation andcohesion of project
teams include the following…
1. Programinglanguage
2. Build environment(ie, favorite ide, cmake vs scons vs gnu make)
3. Dependency hunt.
4. Preferreddistribution for developing the project on (its hard to get it
towork and testing on everything and then they upgrade and change allthe
libraries so you are back to square one.)
5. version controlsystem.
Etc
4. Project goaldisagreements
1. kitchen sink orlight weight.
2. Game mechanics
3. graphicsdirection
4. specificfeatures.
5. requirements forcontributions
etc
5. People worryingtheir workplace might own the software done in off hours and
afraidto approach their boss for fear of losing their job.
6. Good dedicatedsoftware developers often have obsessive personalities. They
mightdecide to quit software altogether and become a gym rat exercisefanatic
for their health.
7. Some people wouldrather draw or compose music than write software code. This
is not aproblem per ce but if they don’t sit down and code it, no amount
ofdesign documents will bring the software project to life without aprogrammer.
8. Marketing issues. Its hard to find projects to work on, know about new free
softwaregames in your favorite genre too many abandoned projects that hadsome
good code, but no one ever bothered to polish so they would beusable.
On Thursday, March 23, 2017, 3:49:03 PM EDT, Adonay Felipe Nogueira
<[email protected]> wrote:This discussion is very important indeed! Thanks
for bringing this
manifesto to attention! :)
This reminds me of an awkward situation where I was looking for some
server to play a game, Xonotic server at the time, when I was still
hopeful for some Brazilian server to exist. After looking through, I
found a server near Brazil, in the public server list, that required me
to download lots of custom server content, and then I started seeing the
file names of the character models being downloaded, and saw things like
"Mr. Burns", "Dexter", "Superman", and many other known characters, I
couldn't see them in reality because I had to leave shortly, but that
kept in my head still today. Are these servers that resort to "popular"
(non-free software, and non-shareable art) a good thing for the
movement?
When I was a gamer myself, I also saw some Minetest servers resorting to
some player "skin" mods that had characters which are possibly under
default copyright licenses (e.g.: Crash Bandicoot, Naruto, and so on).
Nowadays, I no longer play games as frequently as I did back in the days.
Respectfully, Adonay.
--
- [[https://libreplanet.org/wiki/User:Adfeno]]
- Palestrante e consultor sobre /software/ livre (não confundir com
gratis).
- "WhatsApp"? Ele não é livre, por isso não uso. Iguais a ele prefiro
Ring, ou Tox. Quer outras formas de contato? Adicione o vCard que
está no endereço acima aos teus contatos.
- Pretende me enviar arquivos .doc, .ppt, .cdr, ou .mp3? OK, eu
aceito, mas não repasso. Entrego apenas em formatos favoráveis ao
/software/ livre. Favor entrar em contato em caso de dúvida.
- "People said I should accept the world. Bullshit! I don't accept the
world."
--- Richard Stallman
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