Category: tech

As some of you may remember, over one and a half year ago I posted a list of software/hardware projects that I’m interested in. I named it “Project watcher” and some of my friends and readers followed my path. I really liked the idea, but on the other hand I felt I’m not updating the list and it may become obsolete with time.

Overall, the project seems to be my personal success. I really used it every month or two to see what’s going on there and I want to keep the project alive 🙂

Now, I’m going to prepare an update of the list, but first I’d like to summarize what happened in the project I’ve been following since  7th of March 2006.

First on the list are games:

•  TA Sprint –  it came up I didn’t follow the progress of this project to carefully. Simply, had no time to play this game. I still feel there’s a lot of potential inside and according to my knowledge progress was made from release of 0.72b into 0.75b with 4 releases in the given interval. Projects is alive and kicking 🙂
• Boson –  I really miss a good RTS for Linux (Blizzard! Open Starcraft!), so I use Boson as one of the references for “new C&C“. In 2006 Boson received two updates – 0.12 and 0.13. Unfortunately since then not much has happened. There was some planning of the campaign story line, but the last edit on their Wiki was made on April 30th, and since then  there’s not much going on. The last SVN commit was made 3 months ago. 0.13 is mostly a graphic upgrade over 0.11, the game is playable but it’s stil in it’s very alpha stage with very “generic” feeling of missions, gameplay etc.
• Attal – This was my hope for “HOMM” like game. The website is totally down now, for the whole time it was  dead and nobody updated it, but the development of the code has happened. The team (rather very small) did some coding this year, and they seems to be preparing 1.0RC release (+rewrite to Qt4 for 1.1?). The game is in non-playable state, at least for me, it requires huge update of graphics to catch up with the reality but who knows… Once 1.0 is out it may be very different.
• Planeshift – amazing project. Open source MMORPG game. They’re very active, managed to create a healthy and alive community of developers, beta testers, players. It’s an a huge pleasure to watch them growing. When I was creating first PW, it was just past the 0.3.013 release. 0.3 was a long awaited update over 0.2, huge rewrite, very needed and awaited. 0.3.x line is much more about role playing than any other RPG game I’ve ever seen. At the time there was no fighting mode at all! The game has a lot of unique concepts, like their own races, unique economy system, interesting idea of Death Real which is a separate world where you “live” once you die and can stay there or try to get back to the real world, huge, multilevel idea of Game Masters, and many more. In the time frame between last PW and today, there were many minor updates from 0.3.013 to 0.3.020, but those updates are pretty lengthy – take a look at their website to list them. Short summary is about more skins, more monster variations, better cast spellings, update to stable Crystal Space 1.0 engine, many updates to crafting system, new areas, key/lock system and tens of hundreds updates to the graphic system. Overall the game is totally playable, the world is “alive” and there’s a great future for this game, as it’s one of the examples of huge and healthy open source community and system for players. The authors are not in hurry, have time and patient, and community is happy with current state, so in result I don’t expect any stupid rush, but steady growth which will make the game better and better all the time.
• America’s Army –  unfortunately, this is a case of a regression. After many years, the game devs decided to resign from Linux version, thus I’ve been following the game progress less carefully. The game is of course free by nature (free as in beer), so you can download the latest version being 2.8.2 and enjoy if you’re Windows user. According to WineHQ AppDB it won’t run on it 🙁 I’m waiting for 3.0 release which will base on Unreal Engine 3. I still enjoy playing the game but didn’t play much during last 1,5 year.
• Glest –  It’s another interesting project. RTS by nature, it’s a bit similar in structure and model of development to Nexuiz. It’s open source, but strongly driven by a solid core team and does not depend on the community itself. It gathers the community, but it’s definitely ot “driven by” a community. Since last PW it received major update to 2.0, but later there seems to be no active development in public taking place. Such projects are usually either driven by some fundings/sponsorship or as a project for studies. Not sure which happened here, but I hope it’ll go further. The current state is that the game is totally playable, it has nice graphics, but requires a lot of polishing to grow up from the Warcraft I kind of details.
• Danger from the Deep – not much market noise created by the game, but it received multiple updates since first PW. It’s a submarine kind of game (Silent Hunter, Silent Service) By the time it was 1.0 stage, I remember chatting with it’s main dev about his plans and ideas and he was rather calm and confident about what he wants to make with it. I love such attitude in open source model 🙂 We have 0.3 version now, it’s pretty much playable and gave me a lot of joy, and there is a progress happening on the CVS.  It seems that authors are deeply interested in a realism of the game, as they really try to reproduce the “feeling” of submarine with all the details (not like Silent Hunter, where you have candylike simplification of what a submarine work is). I believe that they need a bit of cleanup in sources, which usually happens in the middle between first alpha and first stable (~0.5) cause currently it’s all flat in one directory. The game seems to have great future ahead, although I think it would be easier if they will switch to some external graphics engine instead of developing their own (leverage).
• Vega Strike –  this project was nearly dead for last 2 years, but all of the sudden, we have 0.5 beta now! Also, we have a new website and it seems that the project is alive again, I’m just downloading to test it. From what I remember about 0.4.x line it had very nice graphics, but the world felt “empty” and it was hard for starters to find out what to do. I’m going to keep observing the progress.
• Eternal Lands –  magical project. The whole development is being made behind the scene, there seems to be no elements of a normal open source project (say, news, changelogs are on the forum), it has extremely active community, similarly to Planeshift I think, and huge world. It’s very stable, the graphics are very simple (reminds me Ultima Online), but it’s totally enough to enjoy the huge, full of quests world, many guilds, fan sites and, of course, players. It’s very mature as for an open source project. It has tutorial system, leveling system, fighting, etc. everything that needs to be for a successful game. I think that if the author could upgrade graphics to 2007 standards, it could storm the gaming world 🙂 Look at main dev’s blog for more news.
• Nexuiz –  As I mentioned before, it seems to be a project similar to Glest. No major community, small but strongly devoted group of devs (friends?) and an amazing result. Nexuiz is beautiful, and very carefully detailed game that is ready to use. New releases ( 1.5 ->2.3 since first PW) are mostly for new maps and performance updates. The team seems to be working on a new game, named Zymotic,  but Nexuiz is still being developed. As always we’ll probably see it once it’s ready to use and will be able to only say “Wow!”. (I found an SVN repo for the game.It seems that it’ll use DarkPlaces engine,  the same as Nexuiz)
• Legends –  I must admit, I didn’t follow the game progress at all. It seems to be developed actively but can’t say much about it. From what I remember it has nice graphics and platform, but that’s all I know 🙂
• UFO A.I. –  This game has interesting history – the game was initially developed in close source manner, by a small group of fans since 2003. After major slowdown in development in Q4 2005, the team decided to open the game and since then the project is pretty active, with release 2.1.1 in may 2007. I didn’t play recent releases, but from what I remember from time I did, the game is very nice and really has a “heart and soul” of UFO series. CVS repo is active (last checkins from week ago) and it seems project survived well.

In a summary I’d like to categorize the games via the development model. Please consider that all the games described here are free, and all but one are open source.

“traditional Open Source model pre-1.0” –  strong role of a forum, wiki, bug tracker, low entry barrier. There’s a very thin line between users and a community.  Actually most users of the product are part of the community that follows development progress, report bugs,  take part in feature planning etc. Such model is usually pretty flexible,  and projects are very active, with new code commits every second day or so.  (UFO A.I.)
“traditional Open Source model post-1.0” – still a strong role of a forum,wiki,bug tracker, a bit higher entry barrier. The split line between users and a community is getting higher, but still the community takes a very active role in the direction of the project. There’s a thin line between community and developers. (Planeshift,Wesnoth, FreeCiv)

“silent project model” – the games that are passionately developer by a very small group of people (one or two), with low noise, low activism, very small to none community involvement. Those are the projects were the project leader is driven by the fun of game creating and while he definitely feels that he creates the project FOR users, he doesn’t need a community watching his hands and screaming his name to do his job. In such case, there may be 50 downloads per year  and very small community noise, yet the game progresses with releases every year or two and exists for, say, 10 years.(examples: Boson, Attal, Danger from the Deep, Crystal Core)

“mod model” – in such model, we have a project based on some older game, usually proprietary, where fans of the game creates a community and development group of the project. It’s usually pretty much closed, the barrier is rather high, not because of the attitude but because of lack of time and interest in getting new people involved. In such model the development happens behind the scene, community knows where, while newcomers are just a potential users, there’s no effort in trying to get their energy used for the project. (examples: TA Spring, Legends)

“semi-closed model” – in such model, there’s a group of people that have some external motivator for their work (funding, university project etc.) and have no intention in raising the team. In such model the entry barrier is almost impossible to pass, there’s a strong line between contributors and users and there’s very small “community” that is made of users who stay users. The “community” in such model is just a forum users usually who may report bugs, propose ideas or talk to each others, and the dev team will respond from time to time. It’s very near to usual closed-source gaming model of community (think: community of America’s Army, The Witcher, or most other games).  (examples: Nexuiz, Glest,  Vega Strike)

Notice,that the first two  -named (traditional Open Source) follows the Bazaar model, while the other three, may or may not use it being near to Cathedral one.

I know that some of the projects could hit a few models at the same time (Crystal Core being both, traditional OS before 1.0, and silent model, or UFO A.I. being traditional and mod model), but I tried to choose most important part of the model which seems to define other aspects of how the project is being developed.

Fair enough. In the next part I’ll present new projects from games part that I care about and will update this area.

Hope you like it 😉