Open Source Baseball Game

[RizzLinux1388]

I would love to work on a fun baseball game, something like MLB Power Pros or something like it and I would like to find a Linux baseball game, not the stats manager or text based ones. I'm just wondering why do you think there is no baseball game for Linux or OSS? Like I said it would be cool to make one once I get a much better grasp on programming, but before I get to that point I was just wondering why it hasn't been done yet.

[MattEvans]

Probably because Linux isn't really seen as a gaming platform.. But I think that as it is being quite readily adopted as a home desktop PC platform right now, that this is going to change soonish.

Also, it's perhaps not the most attractive platform for a totally money-driven games company to develop for, because:

- there's less of a guarantee that a piece of code will run the same on a large range of linux machines (+ driver + hardware combinations) than there is that that code will run the same on all windows machines.
- there's no financial incentive for a company to release free games, and using certain potentially useful linux libs (i.e. GPL stuff) is thus a problem.

But neither of these issues are actually that big, you can always expect some kind of lowest common denominator for hardware, and it's quite easy to avoid the GPL stuff.

[jbennet]

there's no financial incentive for a company to release free games, and using certain potentially useful linux libs (i.e. GPL stuff) is thus a problem.

Most of the libs are LGPL or dual licenced

E.g SDL (a graphics libary) is under the LGPL so you can link it with commercial closed source apps

The bigger problem here is the fact that it probably wont be very popular because virtualy no other countries apart from the USA, Japan and South Korea like baseball.

[MattEvans]

E.g SDL (a graphics libary) is under the LGPL so you can link it with commercial closed source apps

Yep, SDL is a godsend.

The bigger problem here is the fact that it probably wont be very popular because virtualy no other countries apart from the USA, Japan and South Korea like baseball.

Er, with USA and Japan being about the biggest producers and consumers of computer games... =P

There aren't many (high profile) 'current gen' or even 'last gen' games on linux though, baseball or otherwise.

[RizzLinux1388]

Yeah I see what you guys mean, but there's not even any other sports games like American football or soccer. I just think it's weird it hasn't been done yet. Oh and as for SDL I looked at it a bit and when I get some more time I would like to mess around with it a bit more.

[MattEvans]

Look at OpenGL also, if you want to do 3D... Infact, I'd recommend doing 2D in OpenGL aswel, because SDL's drawing stuff isn't that great (it's good for getting a window to render OpenGL in, and it's good for input and event handling, and a host of other things via extensions [eg image loading, networking, sounds, fonts, etc]). But all of that can also link up to OpenGL extremely well.

There are other routes to getting stuff done, e.g. there are a few multiplatform games engines that target linux, e.g Ogre (http://www.ogre3d.org/). That route gives you more tools upfront than starting from scratch does.

[RizzLinux1388]

MattEvans and jbennet, thanks for the tips, I guess I will have to take a look at OpenGL, is that also good for 2D side scrollers as well?

[jbennet]

OpenGL can be used for prettmuch anything, its basically an open equivilent to something like Microsoft Direct3D