MetaFilter posts tagged with opensource and games

Aspiring Animators & Game Designers, Study Your Calculus & Combinatorics

zarq — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 13:20:49 -0800

Every film Pixar has produced has landed in the top fifty highest-grossing animated films of all time. What's their secret? Mathematics. Oh, and 22 Rules of Storytelling. Dr. DeRose has recently been giving lectures about the Pixar formula ("story, concept art, modeling, rigging, shading and lighting") around the country. On Youtube: Movies, Math and Making. PDFs of his papers are archived at Pixar's website. Vimeo: Math in the Movies: Making It All Add Up

Librarians are doing it for themselves

Wordshore — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 06:17:16 -0800

What really concerns librarians; what do they discuss when they self-organise and decide for themselves? After the inaugural UK event, the second UK Librarycamp, with around 200 attendees, was recently held; reflections by Frank Norman, Carolin Schneider [1] [2], Sarah Wolfenden, Amy Faye Finnegan, Shambrarian Knights, Michelle, Jennifer Yellin, Jenni Hughes, Bookshelf Guardian, Amy Cross-Menzies and Simon Barron, and by one of the organisers. Unlike traditional library conferences, where proposals have to fit in with a theme, are submitted months in advance, and scrutinised by a panel, librarycamp follows the camp / unconference / bar format. Attendees can propose anything, right up to and including the day of the event. Sessions are strongly attendee-involved. The event is free to attend (funded by donations, crowdsourcing and sponsorship) and on a weekend, making it a personal, rather than an employer-sanctioned, event. Similar events have been held in the USA and Australia. UK librarycamp has led to several regional and local librarycamps, such as Library Camp South West and Leeds (another review) (video). Pictures of the 2012 UK librarycamp, and of the 2011 one.

Friday Non-Flash Racing Fun

mrgrimm — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 08:52:19 -0800

Trigger Rally is "a fast-paced single-player racing game for Linux" and now, thanks to WebGL, Three.JS, and Jasmine Kent, everyone can play in a browser.

Open source online board game engine with over 1,000 modules

JHarris — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 01:31:49 -0800

Here is VASSAL, an open-source engine for playing board games online, by email, on forums or on a single machine. Which board games? T h e s e . (Requires Java.)

The source of our doom

smcg — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 08:26:35 -0800

id Software have released the source code to Doom 3 under the terms of the General Public License. Driven by founder and programming legend John Carmack, id have released the source code to several of their previous games, following up on their early days in shareware. These do not contain the full game – any game assets, such as textures, sounds, and maps are still proprietary – but enable other programmers to study and build upon the foundations of their games. Particularly popular are Fabien Sanglard's articles on his impressions of the Quake World and Quake II sources. Bonus links: Sean Barrett, previously of Looking Glass software, discusses the internals of Thief's Dark Engine; and what if Quake was made today?

Bossmonsters and BPMs

kid ichorous — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 01:13:56 -0800

Open Tyrian OpenTyrian is a port of the DOS shoot-em-up Tyrian (previously). The port uses SDL, making it easily cross-platform. Builds are available for Windows and Mac OS X [... and] for Android, Amiga, Dingoo, Dreamcast, DS, GameCube, Gizmondo, GP2X, GP32, Nokia Internet Tablets, PSP, PS3 Linux, Symbian, Wii, and Wiz

First major open-source MMO?

®@ — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 07:56:18 -0800

Raising for Ryzom. Saga Of Ryzom's parent company is having some sort of undisclosed trouble, and a group of users are raising funds to purchase the source code and art assets. So far, they've raised 60k in euros.

Wizard of Yendor to mate in three (@xKN)

JHarris — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 04:43:09 -0800

ChessRogue = Chess + Rogue. (Open source, versions available for Linux and Windows.)

This console-based game takes the pieces of chess and puts them into a Roguelike environment. You start out with a weakened King who can only move and capture horizontally and vertically, in a randomized board full of multi-directional Pawns. As you capture more pieces, the king slowly gains additional powers, like diagonal capture and movement, Knight jumping, and eventually even Rook movement, among others. The opposition gets tougher too, until eventually the entire selection of pieces is out to get you.
Originally created for a three-day programming challenge on rec.games.roguelike.development, it's surprisingly cool, and works rather better than you might expect. It's useful as a break between Nethack fatalities.