Just a general question. outside of, err… freedom. what benefits for let’s say, a game developer or gamers alike from an open source game?
mod development is much easier if you don’t have to reverse engineer the whole game engine
Not to mention that closed source developers have an interest in preventing third party mods development (because they can compete with the regular offering).
My favorite aspect of open-source games is that everyone involved has a good time.
I do while playing. The devs do while developing. And if the devs have a less good time every now and then, they push through that, because they want other people to have fun.
That’s just a whole load of wholesome and makes me enjoy the games a lot more.
some of the major ones are:
- modding
- porting old games to new hardware to keep them alive
- education where people can learn how the engines are made
- code reuse, open source engines can be built and extended upon allowing people to focus more on improving gameplay instead of reinventing the wheel
- ability to run games on different platforms such as Linux by leveraging community effort
Wow, I forgot the reason QuakeVR is a thing now was because of the fact It’s open source. we need more open source games!
indeed we do :)
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That kind of reminded me this question I had a while ago. While I don’t know the technicalities, I haven’t heard of anti-cheat on open source multiplayer games. that sort of makes sense as I don’t know any competitive multiplayer open source game as of yet, typically that would be a fps shooter type game. Is open source anti cheat even possible?
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How well does server-side anti cheat work?
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I never fully understood anti-cheat. If I want to play a game of chess with friends, and then we switch up the rules, that’s nobody else’s business.
I’m no gamer, so I may be talking nonsense, but it seems to me anti-cheat is best handled like any other federation - you make the protocol open (including open to cheaters), then allow people to form communities which they can gatekeep as they please. I’d like the ability to play with anyone, and define for myself what counts as ‘cheating’.
Cheating only starts to become a problem when you add competitive aspects to a game, like a global leaderboard or esports tournaments. And the competition is greatest when everyone is on the same leaderboard.
Competitive aspects can be fun to some people, but yeah, I don’t see it as that big of a deal when open-source games can’t do that as well as proprietary titles.
that’s not really cheating. that’s modding. at your own game It’s probably fine to change things up a bit. but on a level that has to do with other people, for an example esports, nobody wants a cheater.
I think they’re very awesome when it comes to game preservation. Or heck, how about genre preservation? For example, arena shooters. You would be hard-pressed to find an arena shooter that is actively played and maintained nowadays. I can only think of Xonotic and to a lesser extent the lazily named Warfork, both open-source games.
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Price
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It can be corrected, modified, maintained, ported
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err… freedom? ;)
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An open-source game could continue to live “to tell its tale” to a new generation of gamers if the original developer decided to leave the project while interest of its community is maintained. You could easily get community-supported remasters, rewrittens, ports, etc…
One big advantage is that you have less dependency. Dependency in proprietary SW/games means: You are stuck to vendor-lockin, the creator’s mercy to give bugfixes, mod-ability, enhancements, additional content, updates, follow-ups and mods.
