Lately, I've become very interested in the GNU project and have been thinking about how this can be applied to the development and release of games. I have seen a few open source games that I've been very critical of. There's quite a few problems I've thought up in terms of the long term development of open source games. Here's a few of them: 1) Lack of consistency in terms of style, ie, art. When you have 100 artists working for free compared to 10 paid artists who have an art director, it would probably be very difficult to maintain a constant style and level of quality in the game assets. 2) No capital. Most likely, no one is going to be throwing much money around to get things done, and this has its obvious downfalls when you compare it to paying someone to get someone done the right way and on time. 3) Multiplayer support. If a game is open source, then preventing people from cheating in online games because very difficult. This was the case when John Carmack released the source code for Quake. The online Quake world nearly disintegrated because there were so many people using the source code to cheat. I have a few questions that I think people might be interested in. I'm wondering what people think about open source and free game development in general, but aside from that, I'm wondering what kind of measures can be made to enable a widely used open source multiplayer game as cheat-proof as possible. Thanks!

Quote: Original post by Surt Undrum
3) Multiplayer support. If a game is open source, then preventing people from cheating in online games because very difficult. This was the case when John Carmack released the source code for Quake. The online Quake world nearly disintegrated because there were so many people using the source code to cheat.

This really wasn't the case. I was a *massive* fan of quakeworld and it took a lot of effort to wean myself off it. I'm scared to even try playing it again actually, for fear or rekindling an old flame :)

Anyway, I played it many years after the source code was released and the amount of cheating was negligible. Any cheating that I did come across was really obvious (e.g. aim bots) and people that cheated only did so because they weren't very good in comparison to the people that had been playing the game for 5 or 6 years already. I usually played on servers in the UK and mainland Europe but occasionally in the US and Russia. It was the same everywhere.

Open sourcing the game actually prolonged its life I think, due to new clients such as zquake, mqwcl and fuhquake enhancing the network code and so on. I remember I was still playing it after Doom 3 came out (2004), about 5 years after the source code was open sourced (1999). 5+ years is an eternity in gaming.

All this is anecdotal of course as I can only vouch for one game. But I wonder if you know the problem to be as big as you say, or if you are merely speculating?

I'm merely speculating, because I can imagine that it certainly has been pulled off properly because, but I'm not too tuned in on exactly what sort of measures needed to be made to make sure that it worked.

Quote: Original post by Surt Undrum
1) Lack of consistency in terms of style, ie, art. When you have 100 artists working for free compared to 10 paid artists who have an art director, it would probably be very difficult to maintain a constant style and level of quality in the game assets.

The same applies to code quality... I've seen a couple of projects in which keeping the workforce was the major issue (let alone producing the results).

Quote: Original post by Surt Undrum
2) No capital. Most likely, no one is going to be throwing much money around to get things done, and this has its obvious downfalls when you compare it to paying someone to get someone done the right way and on time.

I've seen some very good artists providing work for free in the past. Said so, yes, it seems that one should lower its expectations when dealing with free stuff.

Quote: Original post by Surt Undrum
3) Multiplayer support. If a game is open source, then preventing people from cheating in online games because very difficult. This was the case when John Carmack released the source code for Quake. The online Quake world nearly disintegrated because there were so many people using the source code to cheat.

It did? I don't quite think it gone that way.
Ah yeah, QuakeWorld rocked!

Quote: Original post by Surt Undrum
I'm wondering what kind of measures can be made to enable a widely used open source multiplayer game as cheat-proof as possible.

The main issue to me is detecting see-thuru cheats, I think the rest would probably just take some validation (which admittedly results in HUGE amounts of CPU being spent essentially for nothing).

Moved to the Lounge.

I'm of the opinion that a true 'Open Source' game is a bad idea.

When it comes to open source / community driven code, I believe that only works when a clear-cut problem or tool is needed (calculator app, browser, heck even an Operating System). If it's a problem that has a pretty clear and logical technical solution- that's a better candidate for open source.

A game is different since it's a 'work'. Yes, the graphic / sound / network engine code could work alright open-source, but the game assets don't really work like that. When it comes to non-technical assets-- such as music, animations, models, design and balance-- that's a subjective world and consistency and coherency are lost when there are too many cooks in the kitchen.

A game can look pretty, have cool sounds, and solid game play. But if it doesn't 'flow well' or have the same art direction-- it's jarring.