Open source video games

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2007)

Open source video games (short open source games) are video games which are open-source software. Open source games, which are free software and contain free content are free games. Many of open source game projects are created by programmers in their free time and coded from ground up.

1 Background
2 Toolsets
3 References
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Background

Open source games are largely volunteer driven projects, principally the realm of hobbyists and enthusiasts. As such, open source games are often ports of older games to different operating systems or games much smaller in scope than current proprietary games, often having inferior graphics and audio. Many open source game projects are never completed. With proprietary games getting more advanced and expensive to produce, open source games rarely, though with notable exceptions, compete with their proprietary siblings.^[1]

One example of an open source game is War§ow, which is based on an open source engine (a derivate of the GPL-ed id Tech 2 but has non-free content.^[2]

Some open source games strive to be free games but lack the manpower to replace media content that is not available under a Free Software license, such as Sauerbraten and Scourge.

Other games are simply reimplementations of an old commercial game and as such require the original commercial game media to play them, such as D2X-XL^[3] and OpenTyrian^[4].

[edit] Toolsets

One of the challenges to building high quality content for games is it 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.