Demo

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(Redirected from Freetures)

Fuzzie has a simple project in mind: A Creatures-style game which is completely community-made - everything being open-source and completely independent of anything from Gameware. If you're not interested in a future of Creatures-style games where the community gradually improve the games in meaningful ways, and are happy with being stuck with Docking Station forever, then you should probably go away and not bother with this. The same if your reaction is "wah I don't want to be bothered until you have everything working perfectly", because obviously that's a long way off.

The long-term ccdevnet goal is Lifandi, a completely newly-designed game. But this is far too ambitious so far - barely anything has been constructed because no-one's willing to put an awful lot of effort into it without being able to already see something which exists. And Creatures people are all grumpy about the idea, with people wanting everything to be perfect (see all the people complaining that openc2e is not perfect, for instance, despite the incredible amount of work we've put in and no-one else being willing to actually put any effort in).

So fuzzie suggests going back to the original idea of Freetures for now - a game which is a not-very-designed mishmash of any Creaturesy open source which is available - to have something to begin with. Because really otherwise nothing is ever going to get done.

Once we have a working open-source game, then we can gradually improve it to add all the neat new things we want. And it involves minimal effort to make something interesting. So rather than worrying about design and etc, just worrying about having *something* to fill all the needed spaces of such a game.

1 Important notes
2 Stuff we have
3 Stuff which is half-finished
4 Stuff we need
5 Demo

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Important notes

If you want to contribute something, it needs to be licensed in an open source way. We want to be able to distribute this stuff with Linux distributions etc, so not-really-open licenses like "you can use this, but only if you get no money at all for it" are no use. Also, people need to be able to improve it, so not-really-open licenses like "you can use this, but you can't change it" aren't useful too. Obviously everyone will get credit for whatever they contribute, and keep full copyright etc.

Fuzzie suggests the best license is probably CC BY-SA 3.0 - a Creative Commons license which allows commercial use (so allowing distribution in Ubuntu/Debian/etc, for it to be possible to put it on magazine covers disks, etc). There's an older proposed license at Licensing which is simpler - basically "you can't sell this on its own, only as part of a bigger thing like a distribution or magazine cover disk" - but the CC license is probably better. Obviously other approved as open source licenses are fine too.

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Stuff we have

A community-created game engine: openc2e. Together with bdonlan's kaos, we can do an awful lot of cool stuff in it. It's certainly more than good enough to run Creatures-style worlds with fun-to-play-with creatures in them, if people are willing to work at it and help.
Some basic scripts: a CAOS command line style thing, speech bubbles, etc. Basically the infrastructure bits.
Some basic sprites for those scripts (eg an input cursor, a basic font, the speech/thought bubbles, etc), since obviously they'd be sort of useless otherwise.

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Stuff which is half-finished

Aftran has a 'hand' model but we only have two rendered frames (normal and 'pressed') right now. He'll render more when he has time.
Liam has made a bunch of his metaroom models available to us, licensed under the "whatever fuzzie wants" license. They'd need re-rendering (the final backgrounds he released contain stuff photoshopped in from Gameware's copyrighted content, which we can't use), at least.
(Fuzzie thinks that Liam possibly also made some critters/etc available to us, but she can't remember which or anything. Someone should ask Liam.)
Daan is working on a world, with the help of Meer.

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Stuff we need

Creature sprites! Perhaps Embri would be willing to license her adorable Flaris Norn model so that we could modify it for our use?
Creature genetics. No-one's even thought seriously about this yet. All the existing projects have just been hacks on top of CL's stuff.

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