FOSDEM 2020: Call for participation

General
#1

Hello there,

My name is Stan` I’m a 0 A.D. developer. At Bruxelles in 2020, at an event called the FOSDEM will take place a Dev Room, organised by my friends at Godot.

The details of the devroom can be found here

Small excerpt of the mailing list:

Open source is often neglected in the game industry—and the reverse is
also true: game development is often neglected in open source. We want
to present that it is possible to combine the two. In particular,
Godot being an open source game engine is a proof of that.

We want to present open source tools to make games. That not only
include engines but also asset-making tools. There are many
industry-grade open source tools which are growing in use in the
gamedev world (Godot, Phaser, FNA, libGDX, etc.). Software as Blender,
Krita, GIMP, Ardour, LMMS, etc. can be applied to any kind of game.

More importantly, we want to present games made with those tools. We
want to hear the benefits, the insights, the hurdles, the challenges,
the sleepless nights and everything. Real examples are always a great
inspiration for other game developers, even (or maybe especially) when
things don’t go perfectly. Talking about changing tools is welcome too
(either from proprietary to open source, or between FOSS solutions),
as we can hear a perspective about the differences between them.

Also, we want to hear about open source games. What are the issues
with those and the benefits, and whether it can be a viable business
model.

If you are interested in giving a talk please submit an application here

The deadline is the 14th of December

Looking forward to seeing you there,

Best regards

Stan`

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#2

PS: On a side note I started porting the Spring 1944 assets to 0 A.D. in order to make a RTS game out of them.

You can find a screenshot of a model retexture here.

and Here are the french models

1327×621 879 KB

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#3

You should be able to pull the Polish models out of git to go with these. The French models are suitable for 1940, Polish are ofc 1939, but still about the same timeframe.
Polish models are not in the main branch, look for them under https://github.com/spring1944/models (everything starting with PL)

#4

Yeah, I’m using that repository, but there are a lot of things there :slight_smile: So I needed to automate the conversion from s3o 3do to blend and then to collada (I need the blend files to get everything in order as your engine handles things quite differently than mine)

#5

Hello everyone,

Currently we only have 9 submissions so around 4h30 minutes of talk. if you are interested, there is still time to submit a talk.

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#6

Sorry for not replying in so much time, this forum got itself burried in the thousands of tabs.

As far as I am aware, Eshed was the only s44 crew member there (former developer). Were you presenting anything?

How is the 0ad port progressing? Should probably move that to another thread, though readers are scarce.

#7

Hey ThinkSome,

It’s alright :slight_smile: No I wasn’t though I gave a small interview and was co-hosting the dev room. Eshed gave two really great presentations that might help 0 A.D. eventually move on to Steam, the Ms store, and maybe Itch.Io. (Those are still in discussion) We mostly need more devs, but new players might be nice.

The 0 A.D. port is not really progressing, I’ve released the scripts I’ve made so far, but currently the map translation script doesn’t work because of the way textures are encoded into the file per tile and I need a way to recreate them as whole texture instead of small patches.

Then I need to import the models too :slight_smile: I got in touch with Flozi, which gave me a resource that will help for icons.

#8

indeed, I saw those two talks. What he said about lobbies is very true, but looking more broadly, the same problem is widely present in the FOSS game dev community. In effect, you could look at 0ad and spring as two engines covering the same area (disclaimer: I don’t know how much they differ in features). There is also the warzone2100 engine and some other obscure ones that are mostly irrelevant these days.

But what happens is that

  1. “I’m not satisfied with X,Y,Z projects and want to make my own”
  2. Everybody has a severe lack of developers
    => Duplication of work and resulting waste of time on an epic scale.

Spring could have a great bug-free lobby system 10 years ago if everyone joined forces under the same codebase. Instead, we are in 2020 and everything is in a state of being half-finished or lacking features. Well, perhaps the zk ecosystem is the exception as they always had a bit more manpower available. I’m not saying everybody should unite behind Springlobby (personally I think it is flawed by design and I’d be against it).

Why have you concerned yourself with porting maps at this early stage? If I had concerned myself with porting, I would have wanted to reuse as much of existing assets as possible of the ecosystem I’d be porting to.

#9

Hey,

I’d say they are quite similar in the final goal which is to make strategy games. Spring is a lot more decoupled from a main mod though. The physics are somewhat better.

I guess we can’t blame people for being unhappy with stuff. It’s also hard to convince people that they should stay and help even if it’s frustrating even if it is ‘for the greater good’.

What I do believe is important though is for us to know each other and to to somehow find ways to work together. This is why I invested so much energy in trying to get as many people to talk at the dev room I was cohosting with te Godot guys.

I must say I was and I’m still very confused about the spring lobby. It was a very frustrating for me to get mods to even launch let alone figure where they were downloaded and how it works.

It is very easy to make mods for 0 A.D. as you can reuse all the assets pretty easily. I just wanted to reuse as much stuff as possible from the project including maps. Getting the height was easy the rest not so much. Minimaps are generated on the fly so I didn’t need those either.

Also I was hoping to set up a porting pipeline in case other people would want to go that route.

#10

Communication is critical, yes, and the lack of it is probably the cause of 90% of the time waste.

Perhaps I should make a presentation one day on how the lobby system works.

#11

Maybe next year at the FOSDEM :slight_smile: