Sunday, 8 March 2015

SDL2 FPS & on Finding New Open Source Games

I took a quick look whether one could find some open source games news (new game projects to be specific) by sorting SourceForge game projects by date but no luck, only established projects seem to show up there.

So I did the same on GitHub, and after making educated guesses whether projects might be worth clicking based on their title and short description, I f ound graphitemaster/neothyne.


The project uses SDL2, is about half a year old, doesn't have shooting functionality but at least movement feels kind of nice and definitely fast. In fact I'm honestly surprised that SDL is usable for 3D.
Neothyne is an attempt at getting back to the roots of good old twitch shooting akin to that of Quake World..
It certainly feels more like Cube 1 or Quake, rather than OpenArena, Sauerbraten or Nexuiz.

What surprised me even more that it compiles in mere seconds.



To come back to the point of finding games: My impression is that development is getting faster, projects are getting more but also less ambitious (read: more realistic to achieve) and less care is being given to licenses but at the same time more legal resources are being used because of OpenGameArt's and Freesound's popularity.

Personally, I have been using old onboard graphics for two years or more (no chance to run anything interesting 3D) because I'd prefer to upgrade from a HTC Wildfire (Buzz) to a OnePlus One, rather than buying a new Power Supply and Graphics card, having a louder computer and the knowledge that it's using more electricity.

This is also the reason why the above video is so tiny. :) No 720p 3D for my GPU.

If you find it interesting to browse through lists of game projects, trying to find a playable one that suits your interest, I recommend the GitHub search. Just don't rely on the "game" search key too much and imagine what the developer might use to describe it (probably genre names...).

For your entertainment, a list of "game" project short descriptions from GitHub.

  • Actual game for the Capstrong DePaul capstone team
  • recreating cs203-game1 repository because of a corruption in the original repo that I can't figure out how to fix atm
  • the tic tac toe game on node.js
  • Survival game
  • kouluprojekti2
  • Hotline Miami inspiered HTML5/JS game for school project
  • Island is a programming game designed as a support for Software Engineering classes
  • game
  • Just a little game I'm working on
  • Card game...
What's your favorite? Can you find anything better?