Well, I guess I did see the need to add to the previous post.

Again, this entry is inspired by events in [ #freegamer ]. Ghoulsblade, ( One of the two main developers of [ StressFreeZone ], which was mentioned in the last entry ) Sindwiller (of [ Rgames ] ) and myself talked about possibilities for improving the current production “pipeline” for FLOSS Artists. Currently, there are many, many tools, all separated, and not much tie-in between them, no decent solution for the design (and production) of game art.

The individual parts are, indeed, there. But.. there’s no connection between them. Each part is isolated, and not part of a greater whole.

A Free Libre Open Source Software solution could possibly be created by a combination of:

SVN (for versioning)
Blender (or others, for 3d Modeling)
GIMP (for 2d Art/texture-making/photo-editing)
Tomboy (?) (or other note-taking systems (?) perhaps with a possibility for adding notes/comments to images in the repo)
mtPaint (pixel art (?) )
Inkscape (Vector Art)
KolourPaint (?) (perhaps not a kde-only one, but, listing kolourpaint, due to not being 100% sure on what others could be used for simple quick-and-dirty scribble-sketches on the images (as an overlay) in the repo, perhaps as an addition to the note/comment adding stuff. (or as part of it.) )
Bugzilla (or non-web-based equivalent, for issue/bug tracking)
Jabber (for messaging/chat within the project, and within the “pipeline”)

These or similar could be used to create a “production pipeline” for FLOSS projects, especially games.

I guess you could take [ Gobby ] as a smaller-scale example, really.

This wasn’t all I had planned, but, its already pretty long as it is. I’ll leave the rest for next time.

So, I was hanging around [ #freegamer ] last night, and, Kiba ( Founder of [ LibreGameWiki ] ) seemed to mention a general dislike of artists, and expressing what I’ve seen mentioned before, sadly, that artists are often more “selfish” than coders in general. I tend to disagree with Kiba with most things, and, of course I disagree on this.

I must admit, being an artist, I am somewhat biased on this matter.

I know that a lot of artists have issues with commerical distribution, and some even rabidly defend their work from “Art Thieves” (Real or Imagined), to the point of putting great big copyright labels in bright colours all over their works.

This is not universal, however. And, I believe, it is possible for artists to be encouraged, and, have their fears of open source overcome. I sincerely hope that the people mentioned above do not taint the view of the Free Software community against those of us who do contribute in our own way to the cause.

What do the greater body of Free Software Coders think of Artists? I honestly don’t know. I know some are, indeed, supportive of our efforts, and are willing to help us to help them. I don’t know how wide-spread this is, I’ve been involved with mostly supportive projects, but, I’ve not worked with that many different projects.

I think the best project I’ve been involved in.. is [ StressFreeZone ] the guys there are great, and really make doing art for them a lot of fun, you get to be creative, when things don’t match their needs, they do their absolute best to explain (constructively and nicely) what they’d like changed. They’re a pleasure to work with, too. I still have a bunch of things I’d like to do for them, and, I look forward to finishing those things up, and, hopefully, continue to contribute to their project.

I think I’ll wrap this one up here for now, I may see some more things to add, later.

So, another entry for me.

I’ve been playing around on Windows (and I’ve been feeling the pain, trust me on that) lately, giving Steam a shot, and personally, I think its a rather interesting tool, and, I’d love to see an open-source program inspired by it.

The most brilliant part of it, to me, is not so much the content distribution system, really. Its the “community” aspect. It allows users to open an overlay when in a full-screen game, that can let them talk to people on an (sadly steam-only) instant messaging system. So, you can talk to people about things in-game, without them playing with you. It’d be nice to have a browser in this overlay, too, I might add, so, you can quickly open the overlay, and search for things relating to whatever you’re doing. On that note.. It doesn’t require special code in the game itself. (Which is a VERY good thing.) May I note, In an open source version, it could be good to use the XMPP/Jabber system, perhaps.

The content distribution is a good thing, sure, and may perhaps, be possible to do with something like APT, in a Free Software version.

I hear the OpenFrag project is working on something like the content distribution system, but, as I said above, that’s not the beauty of Steam. Here’s hoping that this might spark some interest to someone.