Guest post by Blood Frontier is a hot new free and open source first person shooter with original artwork and based on the Cube 2 engine. Phoronix takes a look “Blood Frontier is based upon the Sauerbraten engine and takes advantage of the features like a 6-direction height field world model, real-time map editing, light-maps, shader-based lighting effects, integrated physics support, and a particle engine. Like Cube and Cube 2, Blood Frontier uses OpenGL and SDL, which makes it multi-platform friendly with binaries for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.” Read more
It seems like a decent project – but the sad thing is that even though they seem to use a kick-ass engine, the screenshots still look like Quake 2. Yes, nicer textures, and some reflections here and there, but in all essence, it’s still the same thing.
Yes, the trouble with game production is that the greatest graphics engine in the world won’t do squat without vast amounts of high quality artwork to back it up. The open source world doesn’t have the infrastructure for such work. Lots of coders, few artists.
The only solution is to use more imaginative game designs which don’t rely on this level of investment. 3D should probably be avoided altogether unless you’re procedurally generating all your textures, models and animations.
I’m not as unimpressed by the artwork as much as by “Oh, another FPS. Hurrah”.
I’d much rather see more work poured into games like Globulation 2 or pretty much anything that isn’t yet another dull FPS.
But I don’t think the problem is “yet another FPS” – it’s more the other part of your comment, “yet another dull FPS”.
If they spent some time on level design, themeing and some other areas, the game would be a lot more interesting, IMO.
I can understand if they don’t have a ton of artists to make it ultra pretty. However………….
Why do they only have DM and CTF and that’s basically it. Thinking about the public created mods I’ve seen for games like Battlefield 1942/vietnam I don’t understand the lack of creativity in these opensource games.
Give me vehicles (air and [under]ground), 32 players/bots, persistant servers, portals between servers, destructible environments, coop, points for holding territory (like Battlefield games), mutant (like some aliens v predator or L4Dead), grappling hooks, portal guns, gravity guns, lasso’s, night vision, class based fighting like (half life) Team Fortress, Escort the VIP scenario, earn $ for upgrades like Renegade or have unlocks, Tanks v.s. Wizards etc. All with bot/AI support. Those are all coding challenges, not art challenges.
I tried Blood Frontier just to find out that it isn’t playable at all on my computer.
I’m quite surprised because my computer isn’t that old! 😉
On my P4 3GHz with 1.5Go RAM and a discrete nVidia card, and it ran… Not playable at all. I had about 1 FPS with the stock configuration (yes, one refresh per second)… After deactivating everything and setting the resolution to the lowest setting (320×240), the game were… relatively smooth, but still less than 25 FPS. I’d say around 20 FPS. So still not really enjoyable (not to mention the low resolution).
So I’m wondering… Are the hardware requirements of this game very high? Is there something wrong with my configuration? I’m a bit puzzled about it…