Re: Is this list still alive?

[Josef Spillner <dr_maux@maux.de>]

On Thu 11 Jan 2001 15:35 Jan Ekholm wrote:
> Personally I'm interested in discussions about programming games, but I
> haven't seen any discussions about such topics for a while.

Well let's gonna do that.
Apart from the lack of artists (I am sure that everyone knows about it) there 
are other points to discuss why Linux games, based on free sources, seem to 
develop slow.
There are two types of games out there: Those who resulted from a rainy 
weekend and are mainly targeted on the author itself, and those who try to 
break through the frontiers and look pretty good, compared to commercial 
games.
The surprising fact is that many people prefer the simple games (*). Most 
Linux users I know of are either tied to that OS since it has been started, 
and are very happy with kind of XFRisk games; others use it because they have 
been told it is more stable than Windows, and have proven this; and only a 
small number of people wants to have big games explicitely published as Open 
Source. Only few players are interested in licenses.

The situation would change if we could provide games or game related tools 
which make the people say: "Look, I am playing an open source game and it so 
soooo cool. It even has the features X and Y which yours doesn't."

My current ambition is to help out building up an infrastructure for online 
games (project GNU Gaming Zone), and there is a strong need for games with 
multiplayer support. It's not just the games, but also the surrounding 
things. Recently I thought about a website dedicated to Open Source online 
games: Log in via HTML/PHP (whatever), click on the game you like and start 
playing. That would require a nice server policy though, as there are plenty 
of game server types out there.

Josef Spillner

P.S. (*) This is why my work on Nautix stucks, in case you wanted to know 
that.

-- 
The MindX Project - http://mindx.sourceforge.net
student - js177634@inf.tu-dresden.de
qmail - foomail@internet24.de


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