Open source games

From Encoresoup - The Ultimate Guide to Free/Open Source Software

This article contains content from the Wikipedia article:

Open source games

Open source games (short open games) are video games which are open-source software. Open source games, which are free software and contain free content are free games. Many of open source game projects are created by programmers in their free time and coded from ground up.

1 Background
2 Toolsets
3 References
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Background

Compared to proprietary games, the majority of open source games are relatively simple in terms of graphics, sounds etc. With proprietary games getting more and more advanced and expensive, open source games rarely, though with notable exceptions, compete with their proprietary siblings.^[1]

One example of an open source game is War§ow, which is based on an open source engine (a derivate of the GPL-ed id Tech 2 but has non-free content.^[2]

[edit] Toolsets

A drawback was that building high quality content often requires expensive tools like 3D-modeller or a toolset for level design. As open source applications like Blender mature and professional tools like GtkRadiant are published under open licenses, this is becoming less of an issue.