Open source games

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section may contain original research or unattributed claims.
Please help Wikipedia by adding references. See the talk page for details.

Open source games are computer games assembled out of, and are themselves, open-source software and open content.

1 Background
2 Toolset
3 Examples
4 Copyright status
5 References
6 See also
7 External links

[edit] Background

One example from 1999 is Quake 3 Arena, which was a completely proprietary game with closed source code/engine and everything in the game (graphics, sounds, music, computer models) was copyrighted by and property of the developers, id software. In 2005 id software released both, the game and graphics engine of Quake 3 Arena under an open source license. Although the code done by the programmers was open source (an so called open source engine) the content (done by graphics artists, music composers etc.) is not, so you still have to buy Quake 3 Arena if you want to play it. The gaming community on the internet took the code and rebuilt most of the content of the original game with open content. This way the game, renamed to OpenArena, could be published as an open source game.

Compared to commercial games open source games are usually very simple in terms of graphics, sounds etc. With commercial games getting more and more advanced and expensive open source games rarely compete with their proprietary siblings.

[edit] Toolset

Another drawback was that building high quality content often requires expensive tools like 3D-modeller or a toolset for level design. As open source applications like Blender mature and professional tools like GtkRadiant are published under open licenses, this is becoming less of an issue.

[edit] Examples

Many of these projects are created by programmers in their free time and coded from ground up. A popular and successful example for open source games is Freeciv, a clone of the proprietary Civilization from Sid Meier. Nexuiz was the first 3D first person shooter that includes high quality content, comparable to commercial games like Quake 3 Arena.