Good open source game

Does it look and feel a little like Age of Empires II? That's because 0 A. Though objective-based game modes exist, it's mainly about fragging killing your opponents. And if you're competitive, you'll love the global stats leaderboard.

Armagetron Advanced is a multiplayer 3D clone of Tron. You drive around on a "light cycle" that leaves a wall trail, and your goal is to get your enemies to crash before you do. It's simple but fun, and three game modes spice it up even further. Battle for Wesnoth is a turn-based strategy game that combines resource management with tactical combat.

It's played on a hexagonal map, and there is an RPG element as units can level up and grow stronger. Despite boasting simple game rules, it's surprisingly deep. The game also has a built-in map editor and the ability to create custom content e.

You can create add-ons using a mixture of Wesnoth Markup Language and Lua. Unlike most roguelikes, CDDA doesn't have a specific goal for you to attain. Survival is key. Like most survival games, you're battling the elements of life alongside the zombies and other terrifying beasts. That alone grants CDDA incredible depth as well as a replay value that will keep you coming back for more.

There are, however, several replacement tilesets that make the quest through CDDA a little easier on the eye. The best part of DCSS is that it maintains the insane gameplay depth that roguelike fans love, but delivers a much more newbie-friendly experience due to its emphasis on anti-frustration design principles.

There is a learning curve, but it's well worth the effort. You can even spectate other DCSS players in real-time! How cool is that? To learn more about where this genre came from, see our write-up on the evolution of the roguelike genre.

Endless Sky is a free, open source space exploration game. It is a remake of the now ancient game, Escape Velocity, but offers similar sandbox space trading and galaxy exploring simulation as Elite: Dangerous or Star Control.

Endless Sky includes an extensive single-player campaign, side-missions, shipbuilding, and, of course, intergalactic space battles. FreeCiv is an open source clone of Civilization II, and that's only because it started way back in You can play in both single-player and multiplayer modes, and we highly recommend using the web client.

The coolest thing is that FreeCiv has a "Longturn" mode, where players take one single turn every day. It also supports a "Play by Email" mode, which is great when you want to play your turns as available. Freedoom is an open source clone of Doom. The source code for Doom is open as well, but the assets like graphics and sounds are still licensed.

Freedoom aims to create the free content portion that would allow the game to become "truly" open source and free. FlightGear is an open source flight simulator that was built originally as an alternative to Microsoft Flight Simulator. Many would say that FlightGear is the best free flight sim currently available, receiving favorable reviews across major gaming publications. FlightGear includes live weather patterns taken from METAR data, meaning you can find yourself in the middle of a storm if you don't check your maps before departing.

Unreal Engine 4 supports all the things you're looking for, though I don't think you'll really need to dig into the engine source code itself. Maybe take a look at Godot. It's rather new, but it's cross-platform, free, open source. Clean UI. Features and tools seem plentiful.

I've only tinkered with it to check it out, but the documentation seems solid and the interface is relatively intuitive. Log In. Sign Up. Remember me. Forgot password? Don't have a GameDev. Sign up. Email Address. Careers Careers. Learn about game development. Follow Us. You can take the code for an algorithm, improve it, and use it to solve a problem.

You will just have an odd piece of music that sounds like a poor version of the original. Could this be developed more efficiently as an open source project? The artists at iD software put hours of work into creating and testing each and every room, pipe, box, or bloody corpse in Doom 3. Now, just like testing each spreadsheet function, the artists must continually test each room in the game to make sure textures line up, the scripted actions trigger, the difficulty is appropriate, and so on.

A spreadsheet developer can release a new beta version to testers every week to get feedback on how well the new functions he has implemented perform for the users. The users appreciate the progress and and application becomes more valuable to them with each release. A game instead becomes less relevant with each minor release. The user pool has experienced it and has already moved on. The developer gets very little benefit from users contributing back to the project because most users do not stay interested in the project for very long.

Doom 3 was quite playable half way through its development cycle. That means with two years of full-time development left, in an open source world, players would already be playing it. Two years is a long time in the gaming world. It would be very hard to keep any sort of public interest alive with weekly test releases where the only change might be that a weapon was tweaked, a room was added halfway through the game, the lighting was adjusted, or load time was slightly reduced.

That would be like expecting the general public to sit through the same movie every week for two years as the editing was tuned and small scenes were gradually added. Not only would the audience not enjoy it, they would also be likely to riot after about six months of showings. The other main advantage of open source is the ability to build on existing code and art. Now imagine that the developers for our open source Doom 3 can take the art from Doom 2 to use as a base for Doom 3.

In fact, the only area of game development where reuse is a major advantage is the ability to use an existing game engine. But most closed source developers already do this. Some might argue that the rise of the Creative Commons Share Alike license in the art community might create a pool of art and music that open source game developers can draw from.

At a high level, that is true. But almost all games need music, sound effects, and art custom designed to fit the needs and overall feel of the game. Otherwise, the end result will be a game that looks and sounds like a hundreds of sound clips and pictures put into a blender set on puree. So does Open Source make sense for games?

World-class game development is hard and getting harder every day. Open source development has many advantages over closed development in many cases. However, these advantages become largely null when developing cutting-edge games. As a result, it is very difficult to finish such a large undertaking using the open source development model.

Closed source development also has many advantages. Among those is the ability to attract high-caliber individuals and allow them to focus directly on a project for two or more years at a time, without worrying how they will pay their bills. The level of talent may be very high in the open source community, but most individuals can not afford to spend two years without interruption on one project without compensation, especially one that has a very short useful lifespan when completed.

It is important to weigh the advantages of each model of development before choosing how to approach a particular project. In many cases, an open source approach may yield many gains, but high-end game development is generally not one of those cases.

Where does Open Source fit in gaming? Of course there are exceptions to every rule. And that is exactly where projects like this have succeeded wildly. You can also include the entire multi-player Game Modding community in this category. That is a great example of playing off of the strengths of open development, while avoiding many of the pitfalls.

It is also possible that someone might come along and turn the open source development system on its head. One attempt that comes to mind is the HappyPenguin Game of the Month model. Each month, volunteers take an existing open source game and try to flesh it out into a finished product as quickly as possible. While this is a new idea and success has been mixed, projects like this might eventually stumble on a development model that works.

Special thanks to Shane Rimmer for suggestions and proof reading. Nethack beats anything the world of closed source has to offer. For these reasons I think OSS will come to rule the world of gaming. Gaming is rapidly becoming commoditised, unoriginal, and little fun. OSS it excellent and focusing on fun, and will catch up with the rest in time.

Then gaming will be yet another victim of the success of OSS. Is this some sort of preemptive strike against OSS games or something? So yes, your right. I think from your point of view you are correct. OSS will come to rule the particular world of gaming you enjoy — text based dungeon crawls. It already does. However, this article is specifically about the world of high-end games and I think that is the area where OSS does not make sense.

Nethack is great for what it is —my husband loves it too— but it is like trying to learn VIM or Emacs. Most open source games are just games, designed by amateurs, who just learning some C and some SDL programming, or who just want to re-implement a game they loved once in their Amiga or their Windows PC.

Market-quality games DO become harder and harder to develop every day because of the complexity in the AI and graphics. OSS can never —ever— beat a good commercial game that took years to make for a closed team working full time together, every day and researching on the same time for better algorithms. Where is DungeonKeeper or SimCity etc?

Says you. Stick to nethack and hearts and leaving the gaming to the people who still enjoy it. The Linux kernel? Plus, I was really thinking longer term.

You use your off the shelf 3D engine, you have an off-the-shelf genre, and so on. Commercial games can maintain a lead up to now purely because games depend on pushing the technological envelope much more than eg a wordprocessor or VCS system does. The games of this year have to be slicker and faster than the games of last year, and that requires enromous investment in new technologies every release cycle that only commercial companies can afford, at this pace.

I think the bottom is falling out of the games market, simply because that progress is unsustainable. DOOMI was much, much more impressive and jawdropping than what went before. DOOM3 is like what went before, but a little slicker. Add to that the dearth of decent, groundbreaking new ideas in the gaming world, and enough time, and I forsee a situation where OSS can indeed catch up very well with the world of commercial software, simply because the technological lead will no longer be relevant, and time will allow many of the exciting projects in OSS gaming today to mature, and mature, and mature..

The author of the article and everybody else seems only talking about shooting games and similar ones. I agree that for those games the OSS may not be the best model, but there are other games.

For example, consider flight simulators. There are a lot of them and they are very good. Just to list some:. Thing is, the author of the article is right. It takes a large team a long time to create commercial grade games. That is why the open source model relies on a community effort and in some cases such as Wesnoth and to a lesser degree Vega Strike this has happened.

The more people that are aware of the open source model, then the more people that will attach themselves to communities and improve games that they like. It rocks! I actually have noticed something. Being in college in the CS dep, the people who want to make games and are big gamers tend to use windows and know very little about how their system works.

They are usually very inventive and with the training they get I have no doubt they will be excellent game designers, but they are just not playing in the same arena as most of the OSS people. Likewise, most of the OSS people I meet are not big gamers and have pretty much 0 interest in devoting their time to creating a really great game. But in any way, games are different than system software.

System software does not change as much as 3D algorithms and 3D hardware do. To create a modern game, you need all the latest and greatest knowledge and beta 3D hardware and lots — I mean lots— of good testing.

To create a modern OS, you just need an i and some freely available code from research OSes. It also requires people with different skills than just coders: artists, level designers, pro testers. If you notice something about all the big successful OSS games, they have one thing in common, and that thing is strategy. Freeciv, Nethack, and Battle of Wesnoth are all strategy games, and only the last has any kind of story.

Thus, with a game that can and should be played many many times, then the OSS model works, as users will stick around. However, if your game is based off of one story line, yes closed source will fail. And on another, slightly related point, OSS is very good for making engines and the like, and providing the framework. Thus the Doom3 people would have just had to write a great story wrapper around a already great OSS engine that is used in a great many games. None of you understand the author I am afraid.

All: I think that OSS games lag behind as well because the quality OSS games that exist lbreakout2, frozen bubble, bzflag are less about technology and more about fun, whether or not they are copies of earlier games, I really do.

None of these working specifically in concert with the others. A gaming development community that places a premium on glitz and glamour will only come into being the way the Linux base came into being: by gradually picking up steam and getting set of useable tools in place to help along the way…. It has been completely remade into 3D with OpenGL graphics.

It features beautiful water, destructible terrain, and mutliplayer online and LAN gaming! There may not be any truly FOSS games out there that can compete with commercial titles, but there is a HUGE modding community which I believe fills the void quite well.

Where are the good closed source games? I think I can count all the good ones that have come out in the past several years with 2 hands, and sorry.. If you try to model the commercial method of game development, yes its true it would be hard to do open source games.

If you have something you would like me to add here, let me know. If I have time I can likely whip up something quickly. Anything added to the git will fall under the same terms, meaning you have just as much freedom and risk with using them. Edit: Error no longer occurs, however whenever I open a file it just takes me to the default screen.

Awesome work my guy! This can really inspire more people to be devs. Nice work. And thanks so much for the amazing response everybody! In addition, the open source files link as of the making of this reply has clicks! Hope to see some amazing new developers come from this.