Feb
03

Actually creating a 'Shared World'

Once again my post will be influ­enced by m64’s blo­g­post, this time around it’s more about what was said on #free­gamer at freen­ode (IRC) about the named post.

‘Shared Worlds’ might be a dif­fer­ent thing to dif­fer­ent people, but here it’s all about shar­ing assets, his­tory (I won’t say story) and contributors.

There are some obvi­ous prob­lem with making/creating this ‘shared world’ without think­ing; here I list the things that pops out of my mind:

  • A lot of effort before any­one use it, if any will — wasted time for all
  • Hard for people to con­trib­ute to a world that is “non-existent”  no bound­ar­ies will lead to an unat­tract­ive bloated world
  • Will­ing con­trib­ut­ors without a com­mon goal, leads to end­less discussion

How can we rem­edy these prob­lems before they occur?

There are some as easy solu­tions as there are prob­lems; One is to use a pre-existent world, from let’s say a game that is FOSS and don’t have any con­nec­tion to a closed/owned world, the big­ger the game is the bet­ter. A prob­lem here could be cur­rent lead man­ager not agree­ing with this idea, to me that hangs on com­mu­nic­a­tion. So go out and find one for us!

Another way would be to set out from the real world, and adding some spice to it. Ima­gine tech­no­logy advances stooped in the early 1920, Titanic (still a boat) got to its des­tin­a­tion, the Eif­fel tower got blown away by gnomes who sud­denly appeared from below.. (this could go on). But this ‘solu­tion’ only solves the num­ber two prob­lem lis­ted. On the other hand it will solve any legal har­ass­ment, depend­ing in what we spice it up with. Any thoughts on this is greatly appreciated!

A way to simply solve the last of my lis­ted prob­lems is to get hold of a strong-willed lead, someone or someones who can hold fast to a vis­ion, pure blood into that, and make other people interested/fascinated. Is there a bet­ter way to make all who want to con­trib­ute, work toward a sim­ilar of not same goal?

Sim­ilar pro­ject that already are out in the wild got mentioned

They don’t really cut the cake but they are worth research: Biggest and best of the men­tions comes first Angels Fall First (AFF) — To me it is Star Wars and Star Trek sans ali­ens and Hol­ly­wood cliché, to bad this is not truly open for us. Second is the Tux world — to me this hardly even makes it to this list as it is some­what lack­ing in ingredi­ents, even white the aid of freedroid.

I almost for­got, go post your thoughts on the fgd forum too!

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Jan
31

Freegamer Community

I’m con­tem­plat­ing how to make a big spark­ling return to the ehh blog world(?) of Open Source Game Devel­op­ment. Why not a sum­mary of things hap­pen­ing in the community?

Game devel­op­ing with m64

m64 aka the inside man, is writ­ing a very inter­est­ing blog, he talks at large about most things that is inter­est­ing in my opin­ion.  In this post he talks at large about one very inter­est­ing topic “shared worlds”,  and in a way it go along sim­ilar lines that I have pre­vi­ously explored. I have long been think­ing about why the Open Source Gam­ing Scene have not come up with any­thing like Fire­fox and Open Office. And just like m64 writes it’s about pro­jects aim­ing at big com­mer­cial style games that needs loads of assets from 3D mod­els to music. And with that the pain­ful real­iz­a­tion that there are not enough good artists around the FOSS scene.

I also think he have hit the nail on this one too, cre­at­ing a universe/world that many games can use. The trick here is to make pro­ject lead­ers and developers under­stand that you can tweak the shared objects indi­vidu­ally to archive the glor­i­ous ‘unique’-stamp that they all seem to stick too. If you are inter­ested in this please by all mean head over to m64’s blog and read up.

Sind­willer – the space cap­tain or space sim­u­lator man, on how to make a (space-sim) game fun.

Another inter­est­ing blog that recently sur­faced from the FGD-forum is Sind­willers rgame blog, if you want to make a space-sim game that will be fun and not like the other ones already around, I think you bet­ter have to read some of what he have to say about these kind of games. Or bet­ter up head over to the IRC chan­nel #free­gamer at freen­ode and hit him hard.

Timong – Dev turned com­poser, money raiser

Here is a real gem, Pal Zoltan Illes (sounds like a com­poser right?) have released his second jcrpg soundtrack. Which to my ears sounds truly fant­astic in a game like jcrpg. If he man­age to get the dona­tions in he will even drop the nc part in the cre­at­ive com­mons license which will turn this cool soundtrack very free.

Head over and donate or just listen to the fine tunes.

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