Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: November 2009

How opensource works for commercial game developers

November 24, 2009 / / 1 Comment

The alien  preaches… about open source.

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!

Idlogo 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?

cacodemon

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

Dropbox

November 19, 2009 / / 19 Comments

Dropbox Logo

Is your head in the clouds yet?

For years now, I have been waiting for Google’s promise of free online storage, called the “GDrive“. In the meantime Google (and it’s competitors) have made it much easier to store your data online in various ways (look at Picasa Web Albums, Google Docs, Gmail etc), but that is not quite the same.

With the current expansion of “cloud computing” –  yet another small step toward the Matrix becoming reality – it was just a matter of time to see new free cloud services emerging.

One of those cloud services made a click in my brain the moment I saw it. Dropbox gives you a free 2.5 GB of online “cloud” storage. As if this is not enough, the Dropbox folks increase your storage limit with 250MB increments – also for free – when you go through the Dropbox tutorial, and/or invide your friends to use the service as well. You can buy even more storage , if you need it.

What exactly does it do? Well, think of it as a two interconnected “boxes”, one on your own computer and the other on the Internet, in which you store your files. In fact, the manifestation of that “dropbox” is just a directory on your local computer. Everything in the local Dropbox is immediately synchronized with the server’s Dropbox. It is a real-time backup facility! Beware of modifying large files though – because any change to a file inside the Dropbox triggers it’s upload to the server. That will eat your bandwidth if the file would be hundreds of megabytes in size.

By installing Dropbox on another computer using the same account, you are able to access your online backup there as well. The Dropbox on the other computer will be synchronized with the server – i.e. all files on the server will be downloaded to that computer. Dropbox is intelligent enough to allow multiple people using the same Dropbox at the same time! If more than one person changes the same file (so that two versions of that file will be uploaded to  the server) you end up with all versions of the file being stored on the server with slightly changed filenames, nothing gets deleted. Bonus: the changed files that were uploaded to the server by the other person’s Dropbox, will find their way to your own local dropbox and vice versa. The synchronization works both ways.

I have been using Dropbox for a while now and it works very well for me. It is platform independent (clients for Linux, Windows and Mac are available).  It has built-in collaboration: you can share a directory in your Dropbox. When someone joins a shared folder, the folder appears inside their Dropbox, and syncs to their computers automatically. You can even make  files available to people who themselves have no dropbox account: one directory in your dropbox is considered “public”, and that is how it is named too. Every file in that directory is publicly accessible using a web browser.

In true alien tradition, I created a Slackware package which gives you the dropbox-client, a system tray applet. Depending on your DE, it will either start dolphin (in KDE4), or thunar (in XFCE), or whatever application is your default file manager when you click the applet’s icon. The first time this Dropbox client starts (from the system menu or by running /usr/bin/dropbox), you will be asked to fill in your account data and if you did not download the server component yourself, the client will proceed to download the binary closed-source dropbox server and install that to ~/.dropbox-dist/ (yes, the program lives in your homedirectory). Oh, I hear your “gulp!” but it is really basic stuff, and you will find it easy to setup.

If you do not care for a GUI because you run a server, you’re not left out in the cold. You can simply forget my package, and download the dropbox daemon yourself. There is a page on the Dropbox Wiki which explains the steps.

Enough talk! Get Dropbox at http://www.dropbox.com/ or even better, use my referral link http://db.tt/Rv5417bY to create your account. Using the referral gives you and me both an additional 500 MB of free online storage (up to a maximum of 16 GB bonus space).

And remember: backups are important! It can not be stressed enough. However, if you intend to save sensitive data in your dropbox, be sure to encrypt that first, for instance using KeePass or Truecrypt, both programs are cross-platform (Linux and Windows).

Take care,  Eric

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