SF CC Awards '08

[Rotonen]

http://sourceforge.net/community/cca08-finalists

This just confirms my view that the state of open source gaming is indeed quite sad in general.

Two playable and/or somewhat deployment ready projects there in my mind: Ur-Quan Masters and ScummVM. (Into this category would also go DOSBox, which has already been used in Sierra repacks of classical adventure games, AFAIR.)

A few nice, somewhat easy (alternatively: three star programmed and difficult) to implement engines exist in the scene too. Although the ones with a maintainable and easy to approach codebases tend to lack in performance a lot. Especially the java engine seems dubiuos, even though I have to admit I have not seen it in action. I have also not experienced Irrlicht and it would seem promising by description. I really wonder what dropped Panda3D out of the finals and got Crystal Space in. I have to assume Planeshift fans to be responsible. (Our fan domain is also probably responsible for our finalist position too. In my opinion we are 2 or 3 years early for this. Either we just have a lot of fans or then the scene is still wearing diapers and we are pioneers in the field.)

To get back to the non-performant and easy to approach engines: This is fine for time killer games in which you lazily click around with your mouse or use simple directional input and what is displayed is not complex. For games of commercial production quality we'd need a somewhat standardized engine solution instead of most projects having their own in house developed engine. This easily leads into frustration with the engine not progressing, the games getting abandoned unfinished. With a decent engine for a few different purposes this stress would be relieved and game design groups could actually go straight into implementing their visions.

Mumble has a lot of latency and sound quality issues which makes it useless for competitive gaming, which appears to be the market it's aiming for. Even for a casual conversation it's mostly like trying to talk to a cartoon frog mixed with some Rice Crispies served with milk. The sustained audio stream is quite nice, but the beginning and end is bad and it loses the original voice and nuances quite bad. For short aural messages (usually needed when gaming) it's quite inferior to commercial solutions like Ventrilo (GSM codec, so they did not do the work, but they made a piece of software which works as a total). I really hope it'll be usable some day.

UFO: Alien Invasion is far from a full playable experience. I do have some hopes for it developing into something, which can support a really nice and competitive multiplayer scene with ladders and leagues. The single player should also be quite nice.

Nexuiz is yet another "yay we got to play around with Carmack's code and made yet another Quake 3!" type of a project. They should even try with the content. (Yes, it's hard to develop upon something which was already quite perfected down to gameplay balance. Especially the network code is a piece of art, which is probably the only thing I'd take from the Q3 codebase myself.)

AssaultCube is kind of nice, but suffers from leaving the player a feeling that even if you do exactly the same thing twice, it does not consistently lead into the same result. This is really bad if you are aiming for a competitive multiplayer scene to develop around your game.

With these shooters around, I can only wonder where is Warsow? It took an element of gameplay from the original Q3 codebase which was thought to be a bug and unwanted feature by the original developers and developed the entire gameplay around it. It should push itself into a more twisted direction, though. The movement system is really fun, the netcode works like a Soviet train toilet (cannot go much more failsafe than that), but when it comes to actual core gameplay, as in the weapons and their balance, they've just taken Quake 3 straight with new weapon graphics and sounds. They should at least try to make the weapons look and feel different, even if the balanced gameplay elements (damage, speeds) would remain the same.

XBMC does run on the XBox, but what does it do in this category? I guess the rules should be tightened a bit for next year.

Finally, where is Wesnoth? I'd also like to see Hero of Allacrost pop up there next year. Mostly due to my pixel fetish.

As the final bait I'm going to throw into this discussion, I'd like for the votes of developers to have more weight or at least have a separate category. The results would be quite interesting to see.

[Bjørn]

It's hard to say what "Best project for gamers" really means, but at least it doesn't mean "Best open source game". Crystal Space and OGRE aren't actually games themselves but just engines, so in their case it really means "Best project for game developers". Taking that into account, I think it's not really a problem that TMW is still far from what we'd like it to be.

I do fully agree that the current state of open source gaming is quite sad. Hopefully TMW is one of those projects that will eventually show the potential for community developed games, but we'll all have to put our shoulders under it to make it happen.

[Superkoop]

The XBMC won the best project for gamers category...what a joke.

[GonzoDark]

The XBMC won the best project for gamers category...what a joke.

please post a link, thanks.

// GonzoDark

EDIT: found it : http://sourceforge.net/community/cca08/

[Platyna]

I have no idea how a jukebox could win the contest for the best project for gamers.

Regards.

[Superkoop]

I have no idea how a jukebox could win the contest for the best project for gamers.

Regards.

I'm wondering if the Diamond sponsor had anything to do with it...

[Rotonen]

If anything, they would have been against it.

XBMC had the largest userbase and the site providing SVN nightlies for it had a banner about voting.

[ElvenProgrammer]

Ok I don't want to discuss why a multimedia project won a game category neither I expected TMW to win the first contest it participated in.
What I could be more interested in is our placement. Being in 2nd place this time could be even better than first place.