ubuntu-gaming team mailing list archive

[Kripken <kripkensteiner@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello everyone,

I'd like to bring your attention to a new FOSS platform for multiplayer 3D
games, Syntensity:

Website: http://www.syntensity.com/

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GSi3X5hCdw

The engine behind it, the Intensity Engine, is here:

https://launchpad.net/intensityengine/

This is the result of over a year of intensive coding, and also building
upon a lot of existing open source code. To briefly summarize, we started
with Cube 2, made it much more flexible and generic, added a new scripting
API using Google V8, and wrote a lot of infrastructure like asset
distribution and management (in Python). More details appear in this PDF:

http://www.syntensity.com/static/betapresentation.pdf

Syntensity isn't a single game, or even a single type of game - the
platform's API can be used to make all sorts of 3D multiplayer games. To
show that flexibility, we have two example games, one a capture-the-flag
shooter (sort of like Quake 3 Arena), and the other is a 'sketch world'
where the players can draw on the scenery (every person has a different
color, and sees what everyone else is drawing in real-time, etc.). Both
examples are shown in the video linked to above, and on the screenshots
page,

http://www.syntensity.com/toplevel/screenshots/

and a lot of other games are possible. Also, importantly, you can play all
of the games with a single client program.

We are big believers in FOSS, and we think that to improve the situation of
gaming there we need better platforms and tools. Basically, there is no
reason why we can have operating systems, webservers, and so forth, that are
as good or better than proprietary alternatives, but not FOSS gaming
platforms as well as games of similar quality. Syntensity is our attempt to
help with that, in the specific context of multiplayer 3D games (our
personal favorite genre ;) Of course, we're not saying we are 'there' yet -
it will take a lot more work, and we will need a lot of help. But we hope
that even with this early release others will see the potential here.

Side note: A specific issue that might be of interest to people in this
list, which has been discussed here previously: Distributed content
development. We wrote a simple but useful system for asset management and
distribution in Python (using Django on the server side), which we are
currently using. It makes it easy for people to always have the latest
version of assets, to upload their changes and publish them, and so forth.
If there is an interest from other projects to use this code, we can
refactor it out into a standalone project.

In summary, to check Syntensity out, see the quick start guide:

http://wiki.syntensity.com/introduction/quick-start-1

There are also instructions on the main page and on the download page,

http://www.syntensity.com/toplevel/download/

including a binary build for Ubuntu 9.04 (which is btw where most of the
coding was done), and simple instructions on how to build it on other
versions. (Note that we haven't tested 9.10 yet - we will once it's
released).

Feedback, comments, ideas, etc., are welcome!

Thanks for your time,
   kripken and the Syntensity team

P.S. I am usually on FreeNode (username: kripken), at #syntensity,
#intensityengine, #ubuntu-gaming, among others; feel free to get in touch.