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Publishing free software video games

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Re: Publishing free software video games

#71

Post by feoren »

User23 wrote: post #59

One interesting thing is the FSF’s principles have absolutely no problem with a free engine and paid assets. They explicitly say they have no position on artwork and I’d say art, sound, level design, and so on all qualifies as artwork. That arrangement looks like a good one to me. It leaves plenty of room for the seller to make money while respecting user freedom. And every case I know of where a mod community thrive…

> They explicitly say they have no position on artwork

Right, the FSF has always had the view that software developers are the only creative professionals who must be shamed for not releasing their hard work for absolutely free. Authors are allowed to hold copyrights on their books, artists on their paintings, musicians on their music; but programmers? Fuck them if they even THINK about trying to maintain control of their creative outputs -- they're clearly evil. J.K. Rowling is allowed to make money on Harry Potter, but you're not allowed to copyright your code.

And can it with "but these 47 people in history have all managed to make a livable income from consulting based on their open-source work!". That's just more of you telling me how I'm supposed to live. I don't want to make money helping incompetent companies install the software I wrote. I want to make money in proportion to the value I add to the world.

Re: Publishing free software video games

#72

Post by pixelbath »

schemescape wrote: post #3

> The Quake engine was also released under the GPL, and went on to be highly influential, serving as the basis for dozens of games, including time-honored favorites such as the Half Life series. Large swaths of the gaming canon were made possible thanks to the generous contributions of free software game publishers. This seems misleading. Half-Life was released in 1998, but the Quake engine's source code wasn't relea…

Your presumption is correct. Valve was working directly with id Software after licensing the (still closed-source at the time) Quake engine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoldSrc

Re: Publishing free software video games

#73

Post by tsimionescu »

zirgs wrote: post #29
tsimionescu wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The new trend however is to close games down, DRM, “life service”, fewer possibilities and very strict IP implications on derivative work (we own everything you create etc.) I don't know of any popular game that didn't have DRM and didn't have very strict IP implications on fan content (say, after the early 90s maybe?). It's not like the teams behind the original DOTA or CS or TF ever made money selling those, and…

Every single game that's available on GOG has no DRM. Including very popular ones like Cyberpunk 2077 and the Witcher series.

Sure, but GoG is a relatively new player and an exception in the market. Not to mention the vast majority of those games have had DRM removed by GoG, they originally shipped with it - including Cyberpunk 2077 and the Witcher games where this was done to prevent pre-release leaks.

Games much, much older than GoG used to have various ways of doing DRM, though to be fair some were laughably easy to bypass (codes printed in the manual and such).

Re: Publishing free software video games

#74

Post by feoren »

noduerme wrote: post #35

>> But my code is embarrassing! This has always been the first reason I haven't open-sourced some of my code. The second being that it's also totally useless, and lots of people could write it better.

It's honestly crazy to me that people would downvote you for expressing this. I think it's an extremely common hang-up among lots of programmers and it's an important thing to talk about. I don't understand how it improves the discourse, when someone says "I'm embarrassed", to say "well FUCK YOU for being embarrassed! Get the fuck off Hacker News!" Downvoters, you're making the problem worse. I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish.

Re: Publishing free software video games

#75

Post by brohee »

TheMode wrote: post #23

What we need are programs compiled down to some minimal instruction sets, simplifying the implementation of custom vm able to run such software. The source does not mean anything if there is no working compiler, or if the compiler doesn't support your new shiny platform. It is the same for servers. Having the source for a whole hosting service depending on some specific hardware doesn't matter. If we decide to truly…

SCUMM VM is now like that, plenty of Point and Click games https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm

Re: Publishing free software video games

#76

Post by tsimionescu »

uzerfcwn wrote: post #70
tsimionescu wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The new trend however is to close games down, DRM, “life service”, fewer possibilities and very strict IP implications on derivative work (we own everything you create etc.) I don't know of any popular game that didn't have DRM and didn't have very strict IP implications on fan content (say, after the early 90s maybe?). It's not like the teams behind the original DOTA or CS or TF ever made money selling those, and…

>I don't know of any popular game that didn't have DRM and didn't have very strict IP implications on fan content (say, after the early 90s maybe?). It's not like the teams behind the original DOTA or CS or TF ever made money selling those, and would have likely been blocked even if they tried. Warcraft 3 (2002, 2003) was infamously lax on IP, leading to e.g. several big DotA clones that employed the modders (Dota2 f…

League of Legends never stepped on Warcraft trademarks as far as I know, even though they were a clone of DOTA. Valve and others battled it out legally with Blizzard over the DOTA name and eventually won, but this was definitely not Blizzard's intention - and of course they didn't use any Blizzard-created art in the final game.

Note that I don't think anything in the W3: reforged terms of service would prevent a new game being created based on a W3 mod, it would just prevent it from using the same name and art as the mod. This is exactly what happened to all other successful mods, with Dota2 being pretty much the sole exception.

Also, Riot mostly proved that you don't actually need the artwork or names to be massively successful - you just need to recognize a good idea and be the first to market with a polished implementation of it.

Re: Publishing free software video games

#77

Post by User23 »

feoren wrote: post #71
User23 wrote: post #59

One interesting thing is the FSF’s principles have absolutely no problem with a free engine and paid assets. They explicitly say they have no position on artwork and I’d say art, sound, level design, and so on all qualifies as artwork. That arrangement looks like a good one to me. It leaves plenty of room for the seller to make money while respecting user freedom. And every case I know of where a mod community thrive…

> They explicitly say they have no position on artwork Right, the FSF has always had the view that software developers are the only creative professionals who must be shamed for not releasing their hard work for absolutely free. Authors are allowed to hold copyrights on their books, artists on their paintings, musicians on their music; but programmers? Fuck them if they even THINK about trying to maintain control of…

>

I suppose you’re not a big fan of right to repair either then?

Nobody is forcing you to write or use free software. However, freedom is intrinsically valuable, and there’s a huge difference between being able to control your own computing hardware vs reading second rate children’s books.

> I want to make money in proportion to the value I add to the world

That’s a pretty thought, but nobody does. Perhaps you should revise your expectations to be realistic?

Re: Publishing free software video games

#78

Post by feoren »

Zambyte wrote: post #38
noduerme wrote: post #35

>> But my code is embarrassing! This has always been the first reason I haven't open-sourced some of my code. The second being that it's also totally useless, and lots of people could write it better.

I genuinely do not understand this mindset. How will you get better at writing code if you never get feedback about how your code would be better?

Do you realize how genuinely awful most people's advice is? Most people parrot off a poorly regurgitated version of whatever they read in the latest fad software engineering book, regardless of whether it's even applicable to your situation or not. Go read the Software Engineering Stack Exchange to see this, and realize those are generally much better than random advice. Good advice requires a deep understanding of the problem and the tradeoffs involved; random people online just aren't going to spend that kind of time and effort unless they're a serious co-contributor to the project. That makes their advice worse than worthless -- actually harmful. Like intentionally introducing design-by-committee to your project.

And that's only the ones who are actually acting in good faith! There are plenty of people engaging in bad-faith "contributions" to open source as well.

Re: Publishing free software video games

#79

Post by TheMode »

anthk wrote: post #65
TheMode wrote: post #23

What we need are programs compiled down to some minimal instruction sets, simplifying the implementation of custom vm able to run such software. The source does not mean anything if there is no working compiler, or if the compiler doesn't support your new shiny platform. It is the same for servers. Having the source for a whole hosting service depending on some specific hardware doesn't matter. If we decide to truly…

No. As long we have gcc/clang and SDL/GL/Vulkan, games will be portable to anything.

Raw assembly is theoretically portable as well, why do you want the source?

My problem with these is that they are cross-platform only as long as the maintainers decide they are, you aren't gonna write a vulkan software impl from scratch if the platform doesn't come with one.

Now you can argue that this is all very unlikely, but you have to agree that this is no archival. At some point the project will become unusable because of all the automation code it depends on. Binary search will outlive it.

Re: Publishing free software video games

#80

Post by JohnFen »

progval wrote: post #14

This is targeted toward "securing your game’s legacy", but it seems to be missing a crucial part of some games: servers. When games have a required online component, servers shutting down are the most likely reason the game becomes unplayable, more than the client not working on current platforms. So another option that could be added to the list would be to make the server free software (or at least share its binari…

> When games have a required online component, servers shutting down are the most likely reason the game becomes unplayable, more than the client not working on current platforms.

This problem is why I don't use software -- including games -- that requires access to a server somewhere.

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