Monday, January 18, 2010

New Forums on FreeGameDev

We have recently been given a space on the FreeGameDev Forums, which is a much better place for community discussion than our current forum page. You can check out our new forums there at this link.

Aside from a more standard and useful forum approach - subforums, topics, etc. - it also makes a lot of sense for us to do it on FreeGameDev, because we share their approach about combining free and open source software with gaming. Gaming is, sadly, one of the last areas to which open source has not yet made a big impression. Most game engines are entirely closed source, and in fact many games also run entirely on locked-down hardware (consoles).

But that isn't how things need to be, and I predict they will change. The are reasons that led to our having open source operating systems, web browsers, web servers, and so forth, that are either better than or equivalent to competing closed source products, and those reasons are essentially the same in gaming.

So, having forums as part of the FreeGameDev Forums makes a lot of sense, and I hope it will lead to more interaction between Syntensity people and other open source game creators.

Thanks to the FreeGameDev people for agreeing to host our forums there!

2 comments:

  1. Congratulations on the new forums! I have not had a chance yet to say I am impressed by this technology, you certainly chose some of the better tools and engines around and combined them in a performance-safe way.

    Yes, the current state of opensource gaming is very low, to be honest I would say that no opensource game has never made an influence on gaming. A huge part of it is probably that 99% of the opensource community are programmers, not artists or game designers, or people with high-knowledge of narrative writing. Although oddly, the freeware community has less of a focus on its technology and has created some generally interesting experiments in gameplay, and some times, but rarely, in narrative (Although, games with experimental narrative come along once in a blue moon in all areas of games, Free or not). In my opinion that is the current problem, not enough people in the opensource community study and try to perfect their knowledge of design, too caught up in the technology (See, Nexuiz, Sauerbraten, XreaL) or too focused on being a game that already exists (See OpenArena, or just about every Opensource FPS, since they all try to be Quake).

    In my opinion, the best path to take involves the community doing two things, it needs develop a fast enough, flexible enough, and easy enough to use game engine, where one can create content fast, and start game-design competitions, giving people themes and restrictions, some stock art if they choose to use it, and try to get a big group of people taking risks and making interesting new little games in a small amount of time, that could then be picked up and polished out by the opensource community if they enjoy it.

    I believe Intensity/Syntensity is getting close to that technology, the true test is if you can get that community.

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  2. @Spummy:

    Thanks, and I agree with your analysis of open source gaming - very well put.

    - kripken

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