In summary, I'm surprised at how few OSS games there are considering how much effort goes into modding. But could you get 80% of the way there in 10 developer-years if you strip out some of the features the mods eschew like story content? Plus, with Patreon, these days it seems viable for a small number of developers to work full-time on niche content like this. One issue is that most OSS games I've seen build an engine from scratch, which is fun but a massive time sink I wonder how much of this is due to professional engines having OSS-incompatible licenses? I noticed that Unreal Engine 4 was made open-source (royalty-based licensing, not FOSS) which might be compatible with an OSS free game?Īnother aspect is that it's just a lot of work to build an A-tier game (not even considering AAA) but with a good engine this floor is being reduced over time Battletech for example was I believe on the order of 100 developer-years of effort, which is huge for an open source project. I do wonder how far we are from having the default "community driven game" be implemented from the ground up in open source instead of being implemented as a mod on top of a closed-source commercial game. I've been thinking about this recently - there's a healthy mod community around the tactics game Battletech (Roguetech being the most expansive mod, but there are many others) and the modders all seem to agree that the base game is quite janky under the covers it's not a deep simulation nor is it graphically advanced, yet it suffers from poor performance, and it's also awkward to mod in some places, since there are some things that you just can't change with mods.
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