#open-source gaming software

[metropolitant]

JBL QUANTUM GUIDE PLAY: A BREAKTHROUGH IN GAMING ACCESSIBILITY FOR THE VISUALLY IMPAIRED

[vgprintads]

'Bugdom'

[MAC] [USA] [MAGAZINE] [1999]

"Brian Greenstone and his pals at Pangea Software have a tradition of making attractive games-Weekend Warrior; Nanosaur; and one of the (Macworld Game Hall of Fame)'s all-time favorites, Power Pete. Pangea's latest effort is, quite literally, cute as a bug, and as such couldn't have a more appropriate name-Bugdom. Bugdom's goal is simple. In the guise of Rollie McFly, a colorful roly-poly bug, you must help free the ladybugs captured by ne'er-do-well fire ants under the control of King Thorax. To do so, you rush around the ten levels of Bugdom (these include The Lawn, The Pond, and The Forest) kicking down the spiderweb cages that contain the fair ladybugs, all the while avoiding or attacking your insectoid-and in The Pond, your piscine-opponents. No one does RAVE hardware acceleration better than Pangea, and it there-fore comes as no surprise that Bugdom is lovely to look at. But the game does require some variety of ATI 3-D-accel-eration hardware. If your Mac lacks such hardware, you can get it by adding ATT's Rage Orion video card to your PCI-based Power Mac. Bugdom's action is frantic enough for hard-core arcade gamers, yet nonviolent enough for children. Best of all, it's available only on the Macintosh." ~Christopher Breen, MacWorld (December 1999, "1999 MacWorld Game Hall of Fame")'

Well, it ain't a Mac exclusive anymore, but it is open source and on Itch.io now!

Source: MacWorld, August 1999 || Internet Archive; gui-dos

[ms2253]

modernized ports of Pangea Software classics

courtesy of Iliyas Jorio

Bugdom

Mighty Mike (aka Power Pete)

Cro-Mag Rally

Nanosaur

OttoMatic

Bugdom 2

Nanosaur 2

Billy Frontier

[malkoddith]

You know whats totally based and should exist more?

free and open source software

[frog707]

Please hold

The project to convert my buildscripts to Kotlin is on hold because I have an EXCITING NEW PROJECT.

Earlier this month (June 2024) Mazhar Akbar drew my attention to his performance comparison between JMonkeyEngine and Godot on a physics-intensive workload. The comparison favored Godot by a large margin. I was skeptical at first, but gradually I became convinced that, in order to level the field, JMonkeyEngine needs a new physics engine, one based on Jolt Physics instead of Bullet.

So now I'm coding all-new JVM bindings for Jolt. Jolt is an open-source software project of some complexity (about 100,000 lines of C++ code), so this could take awhile. Please hold. But not your breath.

I'm having a blast!

[deltoravivisection]

well uh. Guess I'm not gonna be using unity for this game anymore?

[mcgravin]

Here's the above post, textified with links (where I could find them)!

Powerful Free/Open Source Software to Do the Thing You Want to Do

3D Modeling/Animation(Complex) - Blender.org 3D Modeling (Simple) - SketchUp [free webapp version] 3D Modeling (Voxel/Brick) - MagicaVoxel 3D Modeling (Digital Clay Sculpting) - Sculptris 3D Modeling (in VR) - Google Blocks [Steam] Human 3D Model/Armature Generator- MakeHuman Photo Editing/Manipulation - GIMP Digital Painting/Comics - Krita Vector Art (like Illustrator) - Inkscape Storyboarding - Storyboarder Video Game Engine - Unity Visual Novel Maker w/No Code - Fungus + Unity Text-Based Game - Twine (twinery.org) Audio/Sound Recording/Editing - Audacity Sheet Music Notation - MuseScore Retro Game Music Maker - Bosca Ceoil [itch.io] Retro Video Game Effects Generator - Bfxr Screen & Webcam Recording - OBS Studio Live Streaming (Twitch/YouTube) - Streamlabs OBS Video and Audio Converter - HandBrake 2D Animation (Cutout) - DragonBones Pro, Synfig 2D Animation (Drawn) - Blender 2.8, OpenToonz Stick Figure Animation - Pivot Animator Stop Motion/Claymation - Stop Motion Studio (mobile only) Video Editing - Blender (only if you're desperate) Flashcards/Spaced Repetition Learning: Anki

Awesome Websites: Disraction Free Writing - Writer (bighugelabs) Script/Playwriting - Amazon Storywriter [defunct] Sound Effects Database - Freesound.org Music for Film/Games - incompetech.com/music Pixel Art & Animation - Piskel Textures and HDRIs for 3D - HDRI Haven Fonts - Google Fonts, 1001freefonts.com Learn Coding - Codecademy Simple Android App Maker - AppInventor (MIT) Color Palette Generator - Coolors.co Rhyme Dictionary - RhymeZone.com

Complied with love, for you by Cullen. Now go make some art! <3

---

(I tried to find out who Cullen is, but it looks like the list image is from at least 2018 with no attribution.)

Obviously people will have their own opinions on what option is "best" for each of these categories, but I'd suggest:

Photo Editing/Manipulation - Photopea

Video Game Engine - Godot

Visual Novel Maker - ren.py

Text-Based Game* - Inform 7 (*I actually really like Twine, but I'd dispute calling it an engine for "text-based games". It's an engine for hypertext games.)

Script/Playwriting - Scrivener (not free, but please dear god do not use Amazon!!)

And a couple categories not in the original post:

Game icons/symbols - Game-Icons.Net

Thesaurus - WordHippo

The best free software

[bynux]

If you enjoy Scrabble and want a quick and easy way to tally up the score on words, Scorble is for you! To use it:

Make sure you have Java installed on your computer.

Go to Releases at the link above and download the latest copy of scorble.jar (currently 0.2.1)

If you're using Windows, download scorble.bat as well and put it in the same folder. You can then double-click it to run the program. (If Windows warns you that they don't recognize the program, click "More info" then "Run anyway")

If you're on macOS or Linux, download the plain scorble file. You will then need to open Terminal, navigate to the folder containing scorble and scorble.bat, and type ./scorble to run it.

[ardathksheyna]

It's this kind of shit that's likely to spur an interest in open-source game engines. These companies seem to think that game devs won't will look for cheaper alternatives. So I hope Unity loves seeing their revenue decrease while newer game devs give them the finger and switch to alternatives.

I mean, heck—overpriced 3d modeling software (3DS Max, Maya, etc) is why Blender is so good now compared to eighteen years ago. People wanted a cheaper/free alternative and as a result of that support, Blender improved massively from when I first tried to use it back in '06/'07.

/edit

Oh shit. I just realized that Fate/Grand Order is a Unity game. Now I gotta wonder how Type-Moon, Lasengle, and Sony are going to respond to this bullshit?

Honestly, though—I thought FGO was developed on UE?

Lulz, I think Unity just fucked themselves hard. I wonder if they're prepared to take those consequences up their ass without lube?

Nah, scratch that. Unity just fucked themselves Mr. Hands-style. Warning here. If you're not old enough to know about Mr. Hands, do yourself a favor and stay ignorant on that subject.

thanks to unity's downright evil new pricing model that charges per-install (including reinstalls), it will now be impossible to sign a deal with a publisher for your unity game because i can guarantee there are zero publishers who are willing to lose money every single time your game gets downloaded and installed.

[bgammondotorg]

Hello, world! - A technical overview of the software powering bgammon.org

Read the full blog post: https://bgammon.org/blog/20240101-hello-world/

[hydralisk98]

Can't imagine yet a better combo for nuanced opposing agents / characters than whatever Bungie did and does tbh.

Marathon (4?), Halo 2, Destiny 2...

[frog707]

Meshes and Materials

I recently launched a software project to create a JMonkeyEngine model loader based on Open Asset Importer, also known as Assimp. (Assimp is a horrible project name, by the way, a lesson in the importance of choosing a good name.)

A typical 3-D model has 4 main pieces: meshes, materials, textures, and animations. I tackled meshes first, since my previous project (V-Sport) imported meshes from Assimp, and that was fairly easy. I believe mesh import to JME works now, though I haven't tested it extensively.

@Ali-RS has done projects with Assimp in the past. Back in July, he warned me that materials would be difficult, and I'm starting to see why.

[ecrivainsolitaire]

A summary of the Chinese AI situation, for the uninitiated.

These are scores on different tests that are designed to see how accurate a Large Language Model is in different areas of knowledge. As you know, OpenAI is partners with Microsoft, so these are the scores for ChatGPT and Copilot. DeepSeek is the Chinese model that got released a week ago. The rest are open source models, which means everyone is free to use them as they please, including the average Tumblr user. You can run them from the servers of the companies that made them for a subscription, or you can download them to install locally on your own computer. However, the computer requirements so far are so high that only a few people currently have the machines at home required to run it.

Yes, this is why AI uses so much electricity. As with any technology, the early models are highly inefficient. Think how a Ford T needed a long chimney to get rid of a ton of black smoke, which was unused petrol. Over the next hundred years combustion engines have become much more efficient, but they still waste a lot of energy, which is why we need to move towards renewable electricity and sustainable battery technology. But that's a topic for another day.

As you can see from the scores, are around the same accuracy. These tests are in constant evolution as well: as soon as they start becoming obsolete, new ones are released to adjust for a more complicated benchmark. The new models are trained using different machine learning techniques, and in theory, the goal is to make them faster and more efficient so they can operate with less power, much like modern cars use way less energy and produce far less pollution than the Ford T.

However, computing power requirements kept scaling up, so you're either tied to the subscription or forced to pay for a latest gen PC, which is why NVIDIA, AMD, Intel and all the other chip companies were investing hard on much more powerful GPUs and NPUs. For now all we need to know about those is that they're expensive, use a lot of electricity, and are required to operate the bots at superhuman speed (literally, all those clickbait posts about how AI was secretly 150 Indian men in a trenchcoat were nonsense).

Because the chip companies have been working hard on making big, bulky, powerful chips with massive fans that are up to the task, their stock value was skyrocketing, and because of that, everyone started to use AI as a marketing trend. See, marketing people are not smart, and they don't understand computers. Furthermore, marketing people think you're stupid, and because of their biased frame of reference, they think you're two snores short of brain-dead. The entire point of their existence is to turn tall tales into capital. So they don't know or care about what AI is or what it's useful for. They just saw Number Go Up for the AI companies and decided "AI is a magic cow we can milk forever". Sometimes it's not even AI, they just use old software and rebrand it, much like convection ovens became air fryers.

Well, now we're up to date. So what did DepSeek release that did a 9/11 on NVIDIA stock prices and popped the AI bubble?

Oh, I would not want to be an OpenAI investor right now either. A token is basically one Unicode character (it's more complicated than that but you can google that on your own time). That cost means you could input the entire works of Stephen King for under a dollar. Yes, including electricity costs. DeepSeek has jumped from a Ford T to a Subaru in terms of pollution and water use.

The issue here is not only input cost, though; all that data needs to be available live, in the RAM; this is why you need powerful, expensive chips in order to-

Holy shit.

I'm not going to detail all the numbers but I'm going to focus on the chip required: an RTX 3090. This is a gaming GPU that came out as the top of the line, the stuff South Korean LoL players buy…

Or they did, in September 2020. We're currently two generations ahead, on the RTX 5090.

What this is telling all those people who just sold their high-end gaming rig to be able to afford a machine that can run the latest ChatGPT locally, is that the person who bought it from them can run something basically just as powerful on their old one.

Which means that all those GPUs and NPUs that are being made, and all those deals Microsoft signed to have control of the AI market, have just lost a lot of their pulling power.

Well, I mean, the ChatGPT subscription is 20 bucks a month, surely the Chinese are charging a fortune for-

Oh. So it's free for everyone and you can use it or modify it however you want, no subscription, no unpayable electric bill, no handing Microsoft all of your private data, you can just run it on a relatively inexpensive PC. You could probably even run it on a phone in a couple years.

Oh, if only China had massive phone manufacturers that have a foot in the market everywhere except the US because the president had a tantrum eight years ago.

So… yeah, China just destabilised the global economy with a torrent file.

[jadeharleyinc]

the scale of AI's ecological footprint

standalone version of my response to the following:

"you need soulless art? [...] why should you get to use all that computing power and electricity to produce some shitty AI art? i don’t actually think you’re entitled to consume those resources." "i think we all deserve nice things. [...] AI art is not a nice thing. it doesn’t meaningfully contribute to us thriving and the cost in terms of energy use [...] is too fucking much. none of us can afford to foot the bill." "go watch some tv show or consume some art that already exists. […] you know what’s more environmentally and economically sustainable […]? museums. galleries. being in nature."

you can run free and open source AI art programs on your personal computer, with no internet connection. this doesn't require much more electricity than running a resource-intensive video game on that same computer. i think it's important to consume less. but if you make these arguments about AI, do you apply them to video games too? do you tell Fortnite players to play board games and go to museums instead?

speaking of museums: if you drive 3 miles total to a museum and back home, you have consumed more energy and created more pollution than generating AI images for 24 hours straight (this comes out to roughly 1400 AI images). "being in nature" also involves at least this much driving, usually. i don't think these are more environmentally-conscious alternatives.

obviously, an AI image model costs energy to train in the first place, but take Stable Diffusion v2 as an example: it took 40,000 to 60,000 kWh to train. let's go with the upper bound. if you assume ~125g of CO2 per kWh, that's ~7.5 tons of CO2. to put this into perspective, a single person driving a single car for 12 months emits 4.6 tons of CO2. meanwhile, for example, the creation of a high-budget movie emits 2840 tons of CO2.

is the carbon cost of a single car being driven for 20 months, or 1/378th of a Marvel movie, worth letting anyone with a mid-end computer, anywhere, run free offline software that consumes a gaming session's worth of electricity to produce hundreds of images? i would say yes. in a heartbeat.

even if you see creating AI images as "less soulful" than consuming Marvel/Fortnite content, it's undeniably "more useful" to humanity as a tool. not to mention this usefulness includes reducing the footprint of creating media. AI is more environment-friendly than human labor on digital creative tasks, since it can get a task done with much less computer usage, doesn't commute to work, and doesn't eat.

and speaking of eating, another comparison: if you made an AI image program generate images non-stop for every second of every day for an entire year, you could offset your carbon footprint by… eating 30% less beef and lamb. not pork. not even meat in general. just beef and lamb.

the tech industry is guilty of plenty of horrendous stuff. but when it comes to the individual impact of AI, saying "i don’t actually think you’re entitled to consume those resources. do you need this? is this making you thrive?" to an individual running an AI program for 45 minutes a day per month is equivalent to questioning whether that person is entitled to a single 3 mile car drive once per month or a single meatball's worth of beef once per month. because all of these have the same CO2 footprint.

so yeah. i agree, i think we should drive less, eat less beef, stream less video, consume less. but i don't think we should tell people "stop using AI programs, just watch a TV show, go to a museum, go hiking, etc", for the same reason i wouldn't tell someone "stop playing video games and play board games instead". i don't think this is a productive angle.

(sources and number-crunching under the cut.)

good general resource: GiovanH's article "Is AI eating all the energy?", which highlights the negligible costs of running an AI program, the moderate costs of creating an AI model, and the actual indefensible energy waste coming from specific companies deploying AI irresponsibly.

CO2 emissions from running AI art programs: a) one AI image takes 3 Wh of electricity. b) one AI image takes 1mn in, for example, Midjourney. c) so if you create 1 AI image per minute for 24 hours straight, or for 45 minutes per day for a month, you've consumed 4.3 kWh. d) using the UK electric grid through 2024 as an example, the production of 1 kWh releases 124g of CO2. therefore the production of 4.3 kWh releases 533g (~0.5 kg) of CO2.

CO2 emissions from driving your car: cars in the EU emit 106.4g of CO2 per km. that's 171.19g for 1 mile, or 513g (~0.5 kg) for 3 miles.

costs of training the Stable Diffusion v2 model: quoting GiovanH's article linked in 1. "Generative models go through the same process of training. The Stable Diffusion v2 model was trained on A100 PCIe 40 GB cards running for a combined 200,000 hours, which is a specialized AI GPU that can pull a maximum of 300 W. 300 W for 200,000 hours gives a total energy consumption of 60,000 kWh. This is a high bound that assumes full usage of every chip for the entire period; SD2’s own carbon emission report indicates it likely used significantly less power than this, and other research has shown it can be done for less." at 124g of CO2 per kWh, this comes out to 7440 kg.

CO2 emissions from red meat: a) carbon footprint of eating plenty of red meat, some red meat, only white meat, no meat, and no animal products the difference between a beef/lamb diet and a no-beef-or-lamb diet comes down to 600 kg of CO2 per year. b) Americans consume 42g of beef per day. this doesn't really account for lamb (egads! my math is ruined!) but that's about 1.2 kg per month or 15 kg per year. that single piece of 42g has a 1.65kg CO2 footprint. so our 3 mile drive/4.3 kWh of AI usage have the same carbon footprint as a 12g piece of beef. roughly the size of a meatball [citation needed].

[ikiprian]

Barbara Gordon's Coding & Computer Cram School is a popular YouTube series. Tucker Foley is a star student.

Barbara Gordon's Cram School posts free online courses for both coding and computer engineering. Think Crash Course in terms of entertainment, but college lecture in terms of depth. Hundreds of thousands of viewers flock to it— students who missed a class, people looking to add new skills to a resume, even simple hobbyists. It’s a project Barbara’s proud of.

Sometimes, when she wants to relax, she’ll even hop in the comments and spend an afternoon troubleshooting a viewer’s project with them.

User “Fryer-Tuck” has especially interesting ones. Barbara finds herself seeking out his comments, checking in on whatever this crazy kid is making next. An app for collecting GPS pings and assembling them on a map in real-time, an algorithm that connects geographic points to predict something’s movement taking a hundred other variables into account, simplified versions of incredibly complex homemade programs so they can run on incredibly limited CPU’s.

(Barbara wants to buy the kid a PC. It seems he’s got natural talent, but he keeps making reference to a PDA. Talk about 90’s! This guy’s hardware probably predates his birth.)

She chats with him more and more, switching to less public PM threads, and eventually, he opens up. His latest project, though, is not something Barbara has personal experience with.

FT: so if you found, hypothetically, a mysterious glowing substance that affects tech in weird and wacky ways that could totally have potential but might be vaguely sentient/otherworldly…. what would you do and how would you experiment with it. safely, of course. and hypothetically

BG: I’d make sure all my tests were in disposable devices and quarantined programs to keep it from infecting my important stuff. Dare I ask… how weird and wacky is it?

FT: uhhh. theoretically, a person composed of this substance once used it to enter a video game. like physical body, into the computer, onto the screen? moving around and talking and fighting enemies within the game?

FT: its been experimented with before, but not on any tech with a brain. just basic shields and blasters and stuff, its an energy source. also was put in a car once

FT: i wanna see how it affects software, yk? bc i already know it can. mess around and see how far i can push it

BG: […]

FT: … barbara?

BG: Sorry, thinking. Would you mind sharing more details? You said “blasters?”

Honestly. Kid genius with access to some truly wacky materials and even wackier weapons, she needs to start a file on him before he full sends to either hero or villain.

[OR: Tucker is a self-taught hacker, but if he were to credit a teacher, he'd name Barbara Gordon's Coding & Computer Cram School! He's even caught the attention of Dr. Gordon herself. She's full of sage advice, and with how she preaches the value of a good VPN, he's sure she's not pro-government. Maybe she'll help him as he studies the many applications of ecto-tech!]