OSDN | Our Network | Newsletters | Advertise | Shop     X 
Welcome to Slashdot Handhelds Security The Courts Slashdot.org Technology
 faq
 code
 awards
 journals
 subscribe
 older stuff
 rob's page
 preferences
 submit story
 advertising
 supporters
 past polls
 topics
 about
 bugs
 hof

Sections
apache
Mar 4
(1 recent)

apple
Mar 6
(5 recent)

askslashdot
Mar 6
(9 recent)

books
Mar 5
(2 recent)

bsd
Mar 4
(2 recent)

developers
Mar 6
(6 recent)

features
Mar 3

interviews
Jan 16

radio
Jun 29

science
Mar 5
(7 recent)

yro
Mar 5
(7 recent)

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Feature: Why Being a Computer Game Developer Sucks | Login/Create an Account | Top | 238 comments | Search Discussion
Threshold:
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Zork, MUD's, and Visual Rapid App Design for Games (Score:1)
by MikeFM (moc.liamhsuh@soimgom) on Friday August 20, @10:16AM (#1735716)
(User #12491 Info | http://mlug.missouri.edu/~mogmios/projects/)
I think text-adventures and text-worlds in general are still fairly popular. There are many MUD's, many types of MUD's, and many people who use them. Most of these people don't even remember Infocom and Zork, I'm looking for a PC or Linux copy of Wishbringer myself, but they still find they love these games. These games take the old stand alone text-adventures and add multi-player abilities and some even allow the player to program new parts to the games as they go along. I think this is as much, if not more, the future of games than Unreal, Quake, and Half-life.

In recent months I have done a 180 so that I now think games are perfectly suited to open source design. The majority of games use some other games engine with maybe a few tweaks to it and even new games are usually just small improvements here and there on older engines. With the engines of games as open source research is sepperate from game design and content creation which shortens the time required to create the games and empowers game players to quickly create and distribute their own games based on others. My favorite two games, Quake & Civ II, do this to some point by allowing aspects of them to be programmable and redistributed. Obviously this has helped increase the life cycle of the games as well as creating cult followings.

I am less interested in creating open source engines than open source game libraries that have virtually everything needed to quickly create a bug free game engine of my design. Prehaps even a module game engine that allows you to hook in a module to process your data files (images, sounds, scripts, etc) and then whatever modules you want for your games. A sort of Visual Game Creator. Since IMO the logic of the game should be in a script file, not inside the game executables, creating a VGC shouldn't be that hard. Pick the kind of menus you want to use, pick the type of game it is, add a few chosen extras from the library and compile. Possibly include a simple code editor for creating the default scripts and tools for importing and packaging your sounds, images, and other data. You could start by supporting the basic well established game types: text-based, scroller, card, bricks, 3D, and empire-building games and just add new types as they were invented or someone bothered to add them to the library. I think this would make Linux quickly become the OS to have the most new games coming out for it. They may not use cutting edge new engines, let Id fill that niche and release their code when they move on, but they'd be fun and stable which IMO is what matters most.
[ Parent ]
  Tcl tends to get ported to weird places like routers. -- Larry Wall in <199710071721.KAA19014@wall.org>
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2002 OSDN.
[ home | awards | contribute story | older articles | OSDN | advertise | self serve ad system | about | terms of service | privacy | faq ]