The ranks of open source games replenished with 4 more cool instances

An epic-scale march initiated by Wolfire - an action to sell 6 popular indie games “buy for as much as you want” - The Humble Indie Bundle - World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru, Penumbra and Samorost 2 - ended about 2 hours ago and had such an ending that many had dreamed of for several years, but no one really believed in such a thing.

Over a week of work, they managed to raise more than a million US dollars - and 2 hours ago, in appreciation of the community that supported them, the development team Wolfire, Bit Blot, Cryptic Sea and Frictional Games announced that from now on four games out of six - Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru and Penumbra - will be released in the source under an open source license.

Sources of Lugaru HD are already laid out, the remaining 3 games should follow suit for several days. Lugaru is posted as a Mercurial repository on Icculus.org - code is built using regular Makefiles (and gcc), as an Xcode project and as a Microsoft Visual Studio project. License - GPL v2.

Phew - and now, having thrown off a touch of pathos and euphoria, let's think, firstly, what it gives to the community, and secondly, what pitfalls are there, if any. So, the indisputable (or slightly controversial) pluses: The

community has received (okay, not yet received, but will receive) ready-made, high-quality engines tested by the attention of the public and even for a little time. The number of mods (and all kinds of partial conversions) of the same Lugaru, even without source codes - only due to the substitution of maps, scripts and models - amounts to tens and hundreds.On the Wolfire wiki page about Lugaru mods, you can see the most interesting, complete and high-quality of them - and what’s going to happen here - you can imagine a fantasy flight.

The immortal phrase “Code rots. Game code rots even faster ”, which is attributed to almost a dozen well-known people - from John Carmack from iD software to Scott Miller from 3D Realms - is right here as never before. The community received a fresh , up-to-date engine code, rather than the “last year’s generation” engine, as is the case when companies such as iD software release the code (honor and praise, however, even for that):

• Lugaru - an interesting three-dimensional engine with high-quality and very fast ragdoll physics - by and large - this is what was a logical modern continuation of games like Mortal Kombat and Tekken, incorporating the elements of Max Payne.
• Aquaria is a high-quality, fast and feature-rich engine of a two-dimensional platform-like game, with lots of modern twists like particle systems on OpenGL.
• Gish is an engine of two-dimensional physics, including the physics of amorphous bodies - because the protagonist of the game is a jumping and sticky ball of tar, which can take any form.
• Penumbra - here, due to the specifics of the genre, of course, the plot and the horror content of the game are in the foreground - but after all, distracting from this, Penumbra is also a three-dimensional engine, with a non-trivial approach to character management, with very decent physics, with fast, high-quality and non-traditional calculation of chiaroscuro, etc. Who knows - maybe we will see the reincarnation of Alone in the Dark on it?

What did we miss in these games? Multiplayer in Lugaru and Aquaria? New tricks, weapons, enemies, a couple of thousand new cards? You can roll up your sleeves and do it. All 4 released games lend themselves well to modding - you can only guess what fantasy will come to when interested people get the source code. Want to port this to other platforms? iPhone OS, BSD, Solaris, Symbian, Android, MeeGo - now all this can be easily done. And finally, all these games will receive normal, full-fledged 64-bit versions, without 32-bit libraries and emulation. Well, in the end - this is the GPL - nothing prevents you from taking only the engine as a basis and creating something of your own, completely new.

This is how, for example, the Lugaru ragdoll model looks from the inside:


But besides the pros, there are also slippery issues that not everyone has paid attention to. Judging by the promises on the blog, all games will be divided into “free” engine and “not free” (or “not quite free”) content. In the case of Lugaru, the content from the demo version (artwork, maps, models, textures) is uploaded to the general repository under a vague license “you can download and use it for personal non-commercial use, you can’t sell it” - derivative works from such content are most likely also prohibited. Full content from the full version remains proprietary and paid - i.e. thus, those who bought these games - bought them for good reason - the only way to play them legally. Other games are likely to follow suit Lugaru.

In principle, this is correct - it would be rather foolish to equate those who bought and paid money with those who did nothing to help the project - this is, after all, not abandonware. But, on the other hand, this puts an end to some kind of beautiful idea of ​​the full availability of these games for free from the operating system repositories and the ability to put everything in one command of the type apt-get install lugaru. In the best case, there will be a more complicated procedure “put the engine separately, put the content here, run it”.

PS The campaign’s financial results are extremely interesting: this action, without a doubt, has become the largest and most successful such event. I hope that a little later I will cover topics such as “how to earn a million $ in a week” and “which operating system users are the most generous” on the hub.

PPS The opportunity to buy extended for another 3 days - for those who did not have time, but still want to.