I have been silent about this whole manipulative clique issue for far too long, and it's this little paragraph that triggered my emotions...
Julius wrote:But I find that sentiment strange in general. There is way too much reinventing the wheel in game development, especially in open-source and independant. I think this is due to a history of technical quick advancement, but these days this isn't the case anymore (only multi-million dollar projects can afford the artist man power to stay cutting edge). But this constant reinvnting the wheel is IMHO the main reason why 95% of all game projects never reach anywhere near the state of playability.
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On the other hand I think discriminating projects because they don't fit your recycling agenda as "pointless" and "reinventing wheel" are far more harmful to development than not saying anything at all. Maybe that's why there was no news about
Godot going MIT on FreeGamer, because it is "pointless" as Torque and Darkplaces (BECAUSE USED IN XONOTIC AND I GOTTA PLUG TEH XONOTICS) already exist. You don't go up to fishermen and tell them what they're doing is pointless when they could buy fish from the market, do you? I certainly got that impression over at the two sites you administrate - which I left, incase you have never noticed. I was also very hesistant about joining both in the first place,
fearing exactly this attitude.
As a proud "pointless wheel reinventor" I feel better for OA3 to use original assets that are tuned for the engine rather than shoehorning every Free model out there that doesn't conform to a style or a technical direction (like having proper LOD meshes, which i've also seen you detest for another project somewhere before.
DO NOT EVER UNDERESTIMATE THE BENEFIT OF LOD MESHES). OA is already cursed for reusing the same low-res Evillair textures so many other projects (ab)use, and this 'entitled scavenger culture' is something I'd rather avoid in the 'pointless' reboot.
Also Engoo would have lead to an original game using it, and since there was no interest in that in the FOSS community
to even get it working on other platforms (like a SDL port I asked for help on), I've canned all of my future plans for that one, because software rendering = retro low poly model style = can't use existing models =
POINTLESS!1!1!!1! Nice job breaking it, hero. Over 2 years' spare time, I developed software colored lighting, software fog, an enhanced software particle system, things that are rarely seen in any software renderer, let alone a Free one... all for some site admin to figuratively tell me to fuck off and use Darkplaces. That doesn't exactly spur any motivation to continue development, now does it? May 2013 was one of the worst months of my life, it didn't help my depression any, and you have this empowered feeling for influencing that.
It did have a chance to take a turn for the unspeakably worse, which in the end,to just your selfish self, two less 'pointless' games to not play because it doesn't look representative or unrealistcally next gen to appease LINUX GAMING ON THE DESKTOP(tm)
And finally, since the Ryzom assets were freed and open sourced ages ago, I still haven't seen any projects reusing them. There was a huge draw for donations on that one with the motivation as being a resource trove rather than a free MMO. Was it worth it?
tl;dr: The bottleneck of FOSS game development are overzealous admins who are eager to bury projects that aren't done their way. Reminds me of GSI, because one popular news portal controls what the community percieves on the basis due to politics over web hosts. This is more true after the closing of Linux Game Tome, which simply aggregated release updates and announcements without any bias nor righteousness.
DISCLAIMER: Darkplaces is a fine engine, but telling indie developers to switch their engines for reasons regarding graphics pretty much translates as 'fuck you, you and your game are too ugly for me' to them. Since when has an engine switch been healthy for projects? Especially coming from someone who states how there's so many projects that never get done. Even big commercial projects can barely even afford the labor of switching, as you can clearly see from DNF... I know OA had many suggestions to switch to X-ReaL (when that was promoted), id Tech 4 (after Doom3's GPLing), and Darkplaces (after Xonotic), completely missing the point of the whole compatibility thing, the framerate target, the target systems, and the huge human resources requirement for fully normal/gloss mapped artwork. Telling the burdened to get even more burdened is just illogical. If they listened to you, that silly estimated figure of 95% would be more like 99.9% so don't act like you haven't had a hand in this.