Introducing Apricot
The Apricot Project is here. A team of developers has been selected to produce a game using the Crystal Space engine and the Blender 3D graphics environment. From my initial pass at the announcement and associated sites it looks like this project will release everything under the creative commons license so that others can utilize the work freely in open source or commercial projects. The bonus of using Crystal Space is that it's a cross platform environment - games should work easily with Linux, Windows, and Mac OS/X on either x86, AMD64, or PowerPC processors.Blender looks to be a nifty tool in the spirit of 3d studio max, although I haven't downloaded a copy to start playing with it myself. Crystal Space looks a little thin on the documentation side for a newbie, but the libraries seem well structured and documented from a developers perspective. The engine appears to be another 3D environment that I'm sure most people use to build castle wolfenstein-ish 3d first person shooters. (Yeah, I'm dating myself here, but at least I didn't mention the text based version of wolfenstein... d'oh!)
Personally, I've had enough of 3d. A lot of the stuff being done that pushes graphics cards to their limits really is interesting and cool, but the 3d multimedia experience just doesn't equate to a simple and enjoyable scrolling game like donkey kong, elevator action, or defender for me. Give me a game where you interact with a 4 direction joystick and a single button and I'll have a lot of fun. Throw a game at me where I have to read a manual, learn 27 combo-commands, and re-invest in my computer to be able to play and my enthusiasm is limited.
Don't get me wrong, I really like the idea of the project, and I'm tempted to pre-order the DVD to help fund it. I just wish someone would do the same for nostalgic old farts like myself.
Here's a screenie from a Crystal 3d game (links to the game overview page):
And here's a sample of what you can do with Blender (links to the Blender gallery):
Here's another interesting picture. This one was rendered by the indigo rendering engine, while the scene was built using blender. Indigo seems to provide a bit more photo-realistic rendering. Click this one to get the full size image so you can see the incredible amount of detail:
Talk About Open Source Game Development
