[Coaster]

Yeah! FreeCraft has finally released its first stable version... it's just great!

Basically its an free, open source starcraft/warcraft/AOE engine (yes, I said engine). It kind of makes you grin with pleasure, playing this game which has graphics that seem to have been made on thefly by the programmers, and half of the sound effects are people in monotonus voices anouncing what happened, its just great though! What makes me curious is what this game would be like if the people at sijun where to add to it (basically put their own graphics in the game grapics folder, which is what I like about it... if you don't like where the menu is then you can just place it elsewhere)

Theres also a multiplayer,
URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/freecraft/

Best. game. ever.

[Rat]

*snorts and gives Coaster the look that always sends him cringing into a corner*

[Awetopsy]

heh, it might be fun to organize a bunch of sijuners contributing some graphics and make Sijun-craft.

[[Shizo]]

LOL! Yeah pretty good idea.. i think

[ceenda]

I dunno, I get the feeling that if people were to adopt the Open Source initiative on Windows, that the freeware games would automatically look better than the Linux ones. I think games on Linux (except those ported by WINE or DosEMU) are destined to look crap. I mean really, really crappy. It's nothing to do with the capabilities of Linux (for instance, the graphic design on Gnome looks awesome). It's more to do with the fact that programmers almost _expect_ their games to look crap with no attention to graphics. However, in order to get good looking freeware games in Linux, you have to get artists onto UN*X, and this is where the community is FAILING. Do you have any idea how much hassle it is to get a Wacom working in Linux? Even with the latest drivers the pressure sensitivity is completely and utterly screwed.

Also, artists aren't programmers, they can't be expected to know they have to open their /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file and make the ammendments to <Threshold = "5"> in the SubSsection of wacom device after having loaded the correct wacom.a device driver as a modeule into their XFree86 setup. You will only ever have 'programmer art' on Unix based systems.

*clink clinc* 2c

[Coaster]

Naw I wouldn't say that... because now that there are larger companies starting up doing these they can have graphics designers, and since a lot of the games are open source people like sijuners could contribute to it graphics wise.

I am actually far more impressed with the capabilities of unix based systems (linux especialy) then SOME OS's I know...

And of course if a programmer does the art too it'll suck, thats the same for everything, and it doesn't make sense to say that bacaue its harder to make graphics in linux, look at Gimp (which to is open sourced as well) and all the other graphics programs there are built in!

[elam]

Nothing is destined.

We all know that Windows is poop as an operating system. But it does have the beefy DirectX libraries, which makes it's games look so good.

Linux obviously doesn't have a standard graphics api, but there are some nice ones, most notably SDL which has some pretty cool games.

Hewlett Packard did a bunch of work on Linux and it's graphics deficiencies for Dreamworks, including Wacom support that was supposed to be released as open source, but I haven't seen it.

With OS-X in use, maybe it just a matter of time until more graphics apps get ported to Linux.
You know, if Apple was smart, they'd port OS-X for the x86 line. I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

That gui is so cool.

[Coaster]

openGL will always be supreem though, directX... blah, theres no 'open' pasted before it, and anything it can do openGL can do bet-ter.

Guess what, openGL is open sourced, multiplatformed.
I couldn't care less about directX.