Re: OT: America's Army
On Sun, 22 Jun 2003 22:50:11 +0200, Bijan Soleymani wrote:
> I'm sorry that I offended you by pointing out that this is not
> technically Free Software. Debian aims to be a Free operating system.
> Now I might run a piece of proprietary software if I really have no
> choice (I even use Windows),
How could you...!
> but I always consider the alternatives.
>
> I think that the engine to quake2 is available as Free Software (GPL'd I
> think) and it can load custom maps and such, which are also free. That's
> much more amazing.
It stops being amazing when all the walls are white because id's original
Quake2 textures aren't GPL'd and all the invisible players (models not
GPL'd) don't move because the game code hasn't been GPL'd :-) In short,
the engine is a really nifty present to the open source community, but it
doesn't make a full game, not even with user-provided maps. Unfortunately,
AFAIK very few is done with that present - most OS lovers seem to be
coders, not game designers and artists :-(
> A commercial company GPL'd a major game.
Have a look at http://www.icculus.org/ and you find a few more such
examples (although id started that trend IMHO). Alas, none of these games
comes with free data files. Just the engines are free.
> It's not that surprising that the US army releases a binary only copy of
> their game for linux.
Yup. The game is advertisement. Since when does advertisement cost the
viewer anything. AFAIK AA is based on Unreal Tournament, so the Linux port
was basically free even for the developers.
> And there are new Free games like flightgear. I've had a lot of fun with
> those, and other smaller games.
Definitely. Something like Mahjongg... *runs off and plays mahjongg*
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