I know how to work,
I know how to write,
In this life of misery
I’m getting it right,I’m the professional
the one how get things done,
I’m the professional
It’s easy to be number one,I’ve learned how to talk,
I’ve learned how to have style,
I’ve learned how to lie,
and i’ve learned how to smile…but I’m always feeling lonely,
I want to have some love,
and who will come and get me
when I’ll start to fall apartI’m tired of smiling to people,
I’m tired of being nice,
I’m tired of all those people,
always showing vice,I want to feel human,
I want to fall in love,
I also have feelings,
I want to get off my gloves,I’m the professional,
but I’m a human too,
With no mechanical parts,
but who knows it, just few…I’m a professional
tired of getting things done,
I’m a professional
with a soul left undone.
The Professional
Good open source game… Facts
I know that many of you, when reading the title, will say that I’m asking a stupid question, or maybe just trolling and try to get attention to my blog. Also, as a FOSS defendant, I should not ask such question, knowing how much open source games are there, also I want to make it clear that I’m not blaming the open source game developers, but let’s face it: In video games, FOSS is not much of a player !
Good games exists, like Frets On Fire, or Nexuiz, but they are far from being competitors to commercial games. Most of open source games are good to play with friends, to have fun, but there is two things that are missing: Excellent graphics and a Good story !
So, the first point is visual experience, and if you played games like Half Life², Quake 4, Crysis, then you know what I mean ! Each new commercial big game push the limits a little bit further, with new graphics engines and new astonishing effects, with more and more realistic rendering. Also, gamers expect games to take full advantage of their machines. Can open source engines achieve such results… even on Linux, and with OpenGL… ? Sure they can ! And for those how don’t know, PS3 uses OpenGL, and the graphics are just wonderful !
Of course not all Open Source graphical engines are of the same quality, with some promising ones like XreaL, but even this engine is far from what recent engines deliver, like Crytek 2 and others.
Now, I’m sure most of you will say “Hey ! The XYZ engine has all the features you talk about !”, and here comes another problem: Modeling and Mapping ! Even if some engines offers possibilities for excellent graphic rendering, they are under-used, because games rely not only on technical stuff like graphics and physics engines, but also on 3D models and maps. Well, even if the majority of open source games uses good maps and games environment, when it comes to 3D Models, well, many of them are just… ugly ! I don’t need to say a lot about this, just take a look at most of open source games, compare with commercial games and judge by your self !
Now I come to the second point: Good Story ! Many gamers, so do I, acknowledge that only graphics doesn’t make a good game, to have a good gaming experience, we need immersion, a well written scenario, with a plot, characters, places and scenes to remember. This is what makes us remember games we played when we were kids, this is also what makes us play old games again and again and I still play Duke Nukem 3D since 1997 !
Now, if we take a look at open source games… well, 99% of them are e-sport FPS games, with many Unreal-Like games, Quake Arena-Like games. So, where are single player games, single player FPS, single player horror and survival games, single player action/adventure games ?! In my opinion, this is a bigger issue then not having good graphics.
The partial exception to this is open source strategy and RTS games, where single player campaigns are good enough, examples include Bos Wars and The Battle For Wesnoth. Also, there’s the platform game Yo Frankie! by the Blender Institute.
Finally, the last problem faced by open source games is the lack of advertising, we need to be looking for open source games to find them, and this must change, open source games need some advertising and needs to get reviewed on major video games websites.
Well, I repeat that I’m not against Open Source games, also, what I wrote doesn’t mean that open source games are bad or not worth playing, but, this are the facts that holds open source games from being a real competitor to commercial ones, like Linux is in the OS market or Firefox in the web browsers market.
This situation needs some serious work and solutions, and this will be the subject of my next post, until then your comments and suggestions are welcome !
Status update…
Well, another year full of studies has passed, with it’s pleasures and pains, and the good news (at least for me) is that I made it !
Next year will be the last one, unless I decide to continue further into research, anyway, the next year, I’ll finally be an engineer !
Otherwise, on June and July I’m having a training, so no sea for the moment, at least I hope learning something new !
Busy…
Well, i haven’t wrote a single line for a while… Studies are taking almost all my time, especially projects !
CLFS for ARM, simple RISC Processor, some “Statistical methods” related project and a bunch of other stuff… and all I have is two weeks !
Well, look at the bright side… only two weeks left, and the studies are over !
By the way, when I get those projects finished, I’ll publish my works, hoping somebody will find them useful !
South Trip…
Recently, I’ve been on a 4 days trip to the south of Tunisia, from March 16 to March 19… Four memorable days !
Sunset with Dust
The first day, it was almost driving day, 12 hours from Tunis to Douz, but with two stops, one in Karouan and the second in Gafsa, for lunch
We arrived at 7h30 pm to the Douz based hotel, “Touareg”, a 3* hotel with big outdoor pool, disco, bar with very affordable prices, restaurant… but I have to say, the dinner needs a bit of salt and spice !
The rooms are quite spacy, with one double bed and one single, with a green theme !
The second day, we went to Matmata and we visited “Hotel Sidi Driss”, used as “Luke Skywalker” home during the movie, also, we visited the oldest home in town, with 320 years on the counter, “Dar Douja”.
In the evening, we were supposed to take Camels for a ride in the desert, with a sunset on the Sahara waiting… but it was cloudy, and then rainy… you can imagine what happened after that ! We came back to the hotel all wet, time to take a good hot shower, but before that, let’s jump into the cold outdoor pool !
We have booked the little disco for the night, so after the dinner, direction disco. Personally, I preferred passing the night with friends, playing card and watching movies.
The next day, we woke up at 5 am ! We must hurry if we want to get on time to the 4×4 ride, and this time, the weather was good !
First, we visited the “Chbika” and “Tamaghza” oasis, then the big canyon… Beautiful sight !
Second, we made it to the “Lezard Rouge” train, we were 5mn late, but due to verification routines, the train was there ! Time to visit “Metlaoui” !
The final day, we started by “Tozeur”, with camel meat for lunch, then we visited “Dar Chrayet”.
I know words are sometime worthless, so here’s links to some photos I’ve uploaded on Facebook:
Day #1, Day #2, Day #3 part I, Day #3 part II, Day #4 part I and Day #4 part II.
Hope you’ll like the pictures !
Getting in touch with people
As a member of Freeways, the FOSS club of ISI (my institute), I think it’s a good idea that the club (or any similar little association) encourage its members to become active on a global scale.
It’s a good idea to have your own host, with your website and tools on it, but, I think it will be better to get in touch with people by using existing frameworks like Sourceforge.net, Launchpad or others, thus, you will encourage your members to get in touch with the community, also, it will be a lot easier to get known by the entire community…
Well, Freeways website and projects are now hosted on sourceforge.net, i hope this will give us a newer opportunity to rise and shine !
Fedora 10 /usr/local/lib
Under Fedora 10, when you compile and install some programs and software, usualy the installed libraries goes under /usr/local/lib, the problem is, Fedora doesn’t look to files installed under this folder !!!
How can we fix this ?!
Well, it’s easy, login as root, edit the “/etc/ld.so.conf” and add “/usr/local/lib” on the top.
Save the file and run “ldconfig”, that’s all !
From the Xreal site:
XreaL will be a non-commercial multiplayer only first person shooter based on a heavily modified Quake 3 Arena engine (id Tech 3). The aim is to push the rendering technology until it can be compared with current commercial titles and then to produce a playable Total Conversion. Quake 3 Arena’s gameplay will be only slightly modified. The simpleness of the original game will stay but the game media will be replaced completely with high quality assets that match the new engine’s technology.
Take a look at the screenshots here.
Now, let’s install Xreal under Fedora 10 !
First, we need to install some libraries and tools, we will use yum: “yum install subversion scons SDL-devel openal-devel curl-devel gtkglext-devel libxml2-devel zlib-devel”
Now, we move to compilation process, during this tutorial, my working directory is “/home/duke/Public”.
We’ll start by getting Xreal sources, “svn co https://xreal.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xreal/trunk/xreal XreaL”
After all the sources are downloaded, enter “cd XreaL”, we’re working under the XreaL folder.
You can compile the game using the “scons” command, or you can fine tune it a little bit, enter “scons -h” to get the list of possible compilation options.
I’ll use this command to compile: “scons arch=linux-i386 smp=1 mapping=1 tremulous=1″, the last option will compile the Tremulous game using the XreaL engine, but I don’t know what to do with the files, and I didn’t find any useful informations yet, I’ll update this if I have useful news.
If nothing goes wrong with compilation, well, it’s time to test XreaL !
Go to “base/maps” directory and run “./gwdm2.sh”, than, “cd ../..” and run “./xreal.x86″, when choosing a map, choose “gwdm2″, that’s all !
Intrepid Ibex is here !!!
Finally, the new and the latest Ubuntu distribution is here !
Even if I am a big Fedora fan, I aknowledge that ubuntu IS the best and easiest GNU/Linux distro for begginers, and an Ubuntu Live CD is a must have !
So, don’t want to bother you with long speech… just go and get it here !
Fedora 10… Shiny New Features
With the developpement freeze schuduled for tommorow, 28th October, many wonders what new goodies will we have in Fedora 10, codenamed Cambridge.
Well, here is a list of the 13 prime features that are included onto Fedora 10:
For simple users we have:
1- AMQP (Advanced Message Queueing Protocol) Infrastructure: AMQP is a technology that makes it easy to build scalable,high-performance enterprise application.
2- Better printing
3- Better and faster startup
4- Better remote support (I think it’s already good enough with Fedora 9 :p)
5- Imroved PulseAudio, means less power consumption and less latency for audio devices
6- First Aid Kit: An automatic recovery tool, with a funny name, that can fix what ever is wrong with the system ! I don’t think we will need it, since I don’t remember my Fedora has ever crashed :p
7- Kernel mode sharing for graphics: user switching will be faster and smoother !
8- Remote Virtual Settings, to setup virtual machines
9- Security Audit, with new security audit system and intrusion detection system
10- Virtual Storage
Hey ! That’s not everything, Fedora 10 has some goodies for devellopers too:
1- Appliance Tool
2- NetBeans IDE
3- Eclipse 3.4
Well, that’s only the seen part of the new rocking features introduced on Fedora 10, you can read a more in depth article here !
All we have to do now, is to wait for the 25th of November 2008 ! (or grab a beta 
)
