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Re: Fwd: identifying obstacles in ubuntu gaming and pushing it forwards

 

2009/6/17 Ingo Ruhnke <grumbel@xxxxxxxxx>:
> 2009/6/17 Luke Benstead <kazade@xxxxxxxxx>
>>
>> There is launchpad and its type of course, but that isn't suited to music,
>> level, texture and model
>> creation. If someone creates an amazing 3D model of a game character,
>> where do they put it?
>
> For example on:
>
> * http://opengameart.org/
>
> Or one of the pages listed at:
>
> *
> http://wiki.freegamedev.net/index.php/Free_3D_and_2D_art_and_audio_resources
>
>>
>> If I'm writing a game, where do I go to find a pre-made model?
>
> You don't, you create them from scratch. When you want a new good story you
> don't go to ProjectGutenberg and start copy&paste bits and pieces either,
> you write something from scratch. While some art is recyclable (mostly music
> and generic textures), most simply is not if you want to end up with decent
> results. You can't replace a good artist with a webpage.
>

While that is true, if I need a model of a Lion it would be quite
handy to find a model of a Tiger, edit it, retexture it and reupload
it somewhere. In the same way that the open source allows for
improvements/adaptations to source, adaptations to
models/textures/sounds should be just as easy.

> That said, it wouldn't hurt to have more free art, a game character full
> with walk cycle, jump animation and all that stuff could certainly be useful
> either as reference or as placeholder.
>

Indeed.

>>
>> The code, libraries, engines etc. aren't the problem.
>
> Most of the time they are as much of a problem as the art, as the engines
> are unfinished, the export scripts being buggy and numerous other issues.
>

I feel that it's more the toolset than the engines themselves. For
example, take irrlicht. The engine is really nice, but the recommended
scene editor is irrEdit which is closed and Windows only. It can load
Quake 3 BSP files, but they must be compiled and binary partitioning
information isn't exactly useful for an outdoor game.

> The core problem with games is simply that they are *a lot* of work. Free
> Software works for other project because a Linux, Gimp or Apache has a
> lifetime of well over 10 years, your average mainstream game has a lifetime
> of maybe a month or two, after which it gets boring and you move on. So you
> simply don't have time for incremental improvments.
>

I would suggest that a central point for resource collaboration would
help this. Even if it was just a place where people could post the
artwork etc. they needed then a group of artists could create it and
people could submit back their incremental improvements. For example,
say I need a spaceship for my game, I sketch out the spaceship in
programmer art and upload it to a models wanted section. Some modeller
comes along and makes a basic model and uploads it but it doesn't have
any animations of the wings unfolding, so someone else comes along,
takes the model, adds the animations reuploads it etc. until I'm
happy. The model is there forever for people to use new ways, RTS
games, 3D space shooters 2.5D side scrollers etc.

Luke.



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