The other day I came across Battleship 88. Assuming it was freeware, being Windows only, I didn't mention it but did download it. Given the lack of a source code download on the website, I was a bit surprised at being forced to agree to the GPL before installing it. Despite what the word Battleship imbues - some form of strategy - the game is much more arcade in it's nature. You steer your battleship around blowing the <expletive> out of anything that gets near you. The game is complete - the graphics and sound are polished and it even contains an introduction to the gameplay (which is topical).
Anyway, those who followed the link might have noticed it's to an organisation called www.gamecreation.org and they have completed a few games. I wonder if they all are available under the GPL and, if so, where the sources are?
One game they list, which I've been looking for since forgetting it's name, is Shotgun Debugger. It's a top down shoot 'em up, cross platform, the sources definitely are available, and the gameplay looks crisp and fun.
The Gunbound inspired game that is being "brainstormed at the moment now has a website and a name - i-team.
And an interesting little debate cropped up on the tt-forums when somebody labelled FreeTrain's graphics as "awful". Some people can be very judgemental without ever actually investigating things. The reality is that FreeTrain's graphics are good but a different style to (Open)TTD's, and as such appeal to a different audience. I personally prefer the really varied cityscapes that you can generate in FreeTrain vs the somewhat repetitive towns that litter an OpenTTD landscape.
Other than all that I have not yet gotten around to working on the previously talked about award categories, but I will try and work on that for tomorrow's blog entry.
The Free Gamer forums really should be more stable now after the freeforums.org guys eventually resolved all the problems afflicting their service. Pffft, free services, eh? ;-)
Well, a quick search of their forums turned up that their default is to only release as freeware unless an individual project's members agree to something else. They're a little hazy on the IP issues of a game created at CMU, too. Still, someone created a sourceforge project for the Game Creation Society so projects could use it and upload source and things, although it's apparently unused.
ReplyDeletehttp://sourceforge.net/projects/cmugcs/
I'm guessing the Battleship 88 guys intended their release to be GPL but the source code release just got lost in the shuffle. Maybe someone should talk to the GCS and explain that the source to a GPL-licensed project has to be available or else distributing the binary is a copyright infringement against the team that made the game.
What Mantar said:
ReplyDeleteSource must be made available (even if you have to mail them a CD to burn the source onto) or GPL is violated.