I registered the domain name www.freegamedev.net yesterday. Initially it will just point to the Free Gamer forums, but I want to evolve that into a proper Free Software game development community with useful features e.g.:
- announce.freegamedev.net - a really easy way for people to announce Free games in a single location. No accounts, no web forms, just email to e.g. announce@freegamedev.net and (pending moderator approval) it'll appear.
- planet.freegamdev.net - a place where Free game development blogs are syndicated.
- forums.freegamedev.net, wiki.freegamedev.net etc
Simple ways to help consolidate the Free gaming community will be the order of the day - none of this "let's implement a super redundant multi-layered workflow based CMS with tightly integrated thingymajigs" that will never happen because we are all busy people. KISS. Anyway, the forums are a good place for organisation.
Flightgear
A new Flightgear snapshot - 0.9.11pre1 - is available but it's source only. There's been a lot of updates since the last release over a year ago:
A gigantic number of new aircraft, new features, enhancements to existing models, and bugfixes were added.
Oooooo! :-)
I read a review of the previous release that commented on how good Flightgear was as a simulator, noting that - whilst it doesn't qutie have the graphical panache - it has several features not found in other commercial flight simulators like sloped runways. There are also different physics models, a massive number of planes and scenarios available. It's a very high quality open source project.
There's also a new version out of the interesting platform game DangerMan. The author notes he failed to playtest the previous version so a whole host of important bug fixes mean this release should be a better experience. The premise for the game sounds interesting:
Dangerman is an old-school platformer with modern features like line-of-sight and physics.
Anyway, let me know of any thoughts or ideas you have for www.freegamedev.net as I want it to be a community project, not a Free Gamer one. ;-)
What are you do with that wiki?
ReplyDeleteI am also looking at starting up a wiki. It is going to be a wiki on Free games.
Look like I have competition :)
This is part of the open source mentality that I sometimes don't understand... we have the same or similar goals, why compete? Work together. If we can establish one official moniker for free game development - and freegamedev.net is quite neat don't you think? - then we can better pool our resources and help Free Software game projects and new developers and artists.
ReplyDeleteOr we could just stay distinct and fractured as an interest group and not help each other...
well this is just a snapshot observation, but you'd think that maybe a flight sim would avoid a 0.9.11 version number, but maybe i've just been reading too many political articles lately
ReplyDeleteCharlie:
ReplyDeleteIn the spirit of Free software and Free contents, I am going to licenses my contents under a Free content license as all my blogs are. I am going to dual license it under GNU Free Documention License to be compatible with Wikipedia
and then a Free content license of contributors' choice as chosen by votes.
If you have a wiki that is similarly licensed, we can share contents as appropriate.
You can also take my tutorial which I licenses all under one of the most liberal creative common license possible. Only need to attribute it to me.
However my wiki project isn't going to be about game development. It is practically a game database, except for Free software only and in encyclopedia format.
There is also my motivation for profits. Don't forget that. Probably one of my biggest if not the biggest motivations but really, I should be focused on providing values. That's where I will succeed the most AND help lot of people in the process.
I have no idea what you're going to do with your wiki. Is it going to be a game development wiki?
We're in the same niche, there is bound to be similar projects like similar distributions.
I have no idea on how do you planned to work together. I also have my self interest of eventually being able to make a living from Free games to boot.
I am in the process of trying to install a wiki on my hosting account. It isn't ideal but it will have to do for now.
How do you expect to make money from a wiki? Adverts? You need 2000 hits a day to make $1 a day with google ads. If you think you will be able to make a significant income from a wiki you may be in for a shock, which doesn't have the regular readership that a blog like Free Gamer does and I only occasionally break 2000 hits a day. I'd be impressed if you achieved more than a few hundred hits a day with a wiki.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I'm not trying to rain on your parade. I hope you can provide a valuable resource and wish you luck at profiting from your efforts. Just be realistic in your expectations.
Also I did not realise from your first post that this was your intention, hence the critical first response.
I'll note that www.freegamedev.net will be a non-profit endeavour, not directly related to the Free Gamer blog. Hence I'll try to encourage any non-personal-profit focused efforts to join with us in doing it.
Charlie:
ReplyDeleteI don't really expect it to be easy to make lot of money at all. For me, I am just expanding to new source of revenues.
The more revenue sources, the more money I'll be expected to make overall.
Still, this wiki project, I think, have a lot of potential, perhaps even more potential than my game development blog in term of profitability and traffics.
But for me to expect to make a lot of money from the start is absurd. I hardly achieve much income from my two blogs.
Perhaps a section where you could find technical resources for free gaming development could be fine. (With subsections like engines:ogre,crystal space ..., tools:blender, wings3d, gimp ..., python, java, mono... where someone new could find the tools and links necessaries to began its project)
ReplyDelete