A typical example of an industry where people tend to “sit” on their intellectual property (IP) is game development. If you have a fantastic game concept and built a real good engine around it, it will potentially generate a lot of money for you and your publisher, as long as your game has an uniqueness or credibility that attracts potential players.

Because the process of development for a commercial triple-A kind of game may take years and millions of dollars of investment capital, it is no wonder that a game developer is not happy at all to let outsiders peek in their laboratory. Copy protection measures try to minimize the risk of pirating the software after it has been released, in order to lose as little of revenue as possible – highly anticipated games create their own demand market.

Now I totally agree with the fact that those game developers deserve to earn their money and pirating software is bad. If you create something beautiful for other people to enjoy, you are entitled to financial returns.

But, it is not set in stone that you have to sit on your properties in order to generate a good revenue!

The prime example of this idea is idsoftware, the company that became famous with titles as Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM. Since the early days, the people at id Software have made parts of their games available for free (distributed as shareware) without limitations. This concept proved incredibly succesful thanks to the high quality of the games they release. People would download and play the shareware levels for free and then decide if it was worth the money to buy the complete game. This, and the vision of the code masters at id Software, made them to a game company that everybody respects and looks at to see how game engines evolve.

It was once considered a daring move to give away your games for free and trust your product’s quality so much that you expect people to buy it nevertheless. Nowadays, this is common and nobody thinks twice about releasing “demo” versions – but not so 15 or more years ago.

And id Software went one step further even. They made it a point to release the full source code to their games (excluding the copy-righted artwork and music) after a while, when the game had made enough money. With source code released under the GPL license, other people were able to modify and expand on it, and as a result we have seen DOOM, Hexen and other game ports and derivatives appear for Linux, handheld devices and more.

This in itself shows a lot of confidence in the quality of their code and the rapid adances the company makes with every iteration of their graphics and game engines. Their current games are always huge steps further than the code that is released for the older games. The fact that idsoftware cares for the Linux community shows through their Linux versions of several of their past games. The port to Linux is apparently relatively easy because of the program code’s high level of abstraction from the underlying operating system and even hardware. This is being inherited from the days of their DOS games. Id Software did their software development on UNIX (they used Silicon Graphic high-end workstations) and then built DOS versions to be released to the public.

While you can argue that releasing the source code of old software may be a gimmick, and old code is just that (old),  history actually proves that it has given them a lot of credit not only by fanatic followers of their games but also by” rival” game developing studios. Their commitment to open source is a shining beacon in commercial software development – not just game development.

And now this philosphy is actually paying off for them!

What happened? John Carmack, who is the lead developer at id, bought an iPhone (that piece of Apple hardware which is more gadget than phone) and decided that it would be fun to port a few of the old games to that device. The fact that people had picked up the original GPL-ed source code and improved on it, gave him a head start by using the code from Wolf3D Redux for the Wolfenstein game.Early 2009 they released it as an iPhone game. You can read more about the process here at Voodoo Extreme.

The DOOM port to iPhone went similar because code from the high-quality open source enhanced DOOM port: prboom could be re-used. The result is DOOM Classic for the iPhone, and you should go and read John Carmack’s developer blog about this particular port, it is highly entertaining.

The source code for the iPhone games Wolfenstein and DOOM Classic have been released, as required by the terms of the GPL. Isn’t this a perfect example of how commercial software development and the open source movement mutually benefit?

And yes: I have bought all the games of id Software that I’ve ever played, most often after enjoying the shareware version for a while. And to be homest, I have not bought a lot more games than those (I have the Half-Life boxes on my shelf, and Prey, and even those are derived from original id Software game engines).

Cheers, Eric

I always liked the Nintendo DS for the innovation it brought to the console market. Nintendo has a unique grasp of what makes a game really good and enjoyable, and they continue to invent hardware which is a match to their games. Here at home we own a Gameboy Advance as well as a Wii console, but until now a DS-Lite has been lacking.

I was tempted to buy one, way back then, for the Linux that you can hack onto it. But Slackware development took enough of my time already, so the idea never became reality. And it never hurts to dream.

Now though, I came across this video:

It demonstrates a software synthesizer, the Korg DS-10, which has recently been released for the Nintendo DS. It is simply amazing what this program is able to do. I watched – and watched again (there is more video footage on YouTube) and found a positive review of the DS-10 on Ars Technica which confirmed the gut feeling I had after watching the demo.

Something that makes me want to buy the DS after all that time…

Eric

My son went on a school camp where they played SET, and back home we bought a boxed version. It is very addictive!

This card game was created by Marsha Jean Falco in 1974. As part of a genetics study she wrote down the information she collected in the form of colored symbols. This made it easier for her to compare combinations of inherited genes and the resulting behaviour of her subjects (german sheperd dogs). At some point, someone suggested that there was potential for having some fun with these cards, and that is how the game was born. It took until 1991 before SET appeared on the market though.

The rules are very simple. They involve creating sets of 3 cards out of a total of 81 cards. These cards have four different characteristics: each card has a unique combination of numbers (one, two or three), shapes (diamonds, ovals or squiggles), colours (red, green and purple), and fillings (solid, striped or open). Three cards form a set if the following is true for each and all four characteristics: all cards have the same property, or, all cards are completely different. An example of a set is the combination of three cards that display:

1. one red striped oval
2. two green open ovals
3. three purple solid ovals

You try to find sets of three cards and take these off the board. The game ends when no more sets can be found, and the winner is the one who has collected most sets. When you hear people yell “SET!” you will realize that they are actually playing this game.

I will not try to explain the full rules here. The SET website has documented the SET rules, and the mathematics behind it., They also have a daily puzzle competition and more worthwhile things to read.

I have found several online versions of the game. Because the rules are so simple and well-defined, it does not take a lot of code to write.

• Browser-based:
  • Javascript based: http://geocities.com/humblephysics/set.html – this version is the best I found. It plays a complete game, removing cards you selected as a set and replacing them with new cards from the deck. If necessary (because there is no set available in the cards on the table), it will also add extra cards to the table. You can download a ZIP archive with everything needed if you want to play the game offline. Update: the original site seems to have been taken offline, so I hunted down a copy and here it is: the ZIP-ed game as well as an online playable copy.
  • Javascript/AJAX based: http://thebreretons.com/setgame/ – this version of SET is not about playing the game to completion, but rather the goal is to find the 6 possible sets available on the table. The javascript used for this game is ‘obfuscated‘ and the game does not work if you copy it to your own machine.
• Windows/Linux
  • The best program to use (in my opinion and that of my wife) is TATset. It is open source and although the homepage (http://www.tatset.com/) seems to be off-line, the Sourceforge page is still there. Screenshot:

TATset

I hope you will have as much fun with SET as I am having!

Eric