I finally got a decent laptop and now I want to get a couple of games to use on it. Right now all I have for gaming is Minecraft. I don’t have time to commit hours to gaming so i want something I can pick up and put down as needed.
Back in the good old days I had some fun with the original Wolfenstein and similar FPS, dungeon crawl type, shoot’em ups. Now when I go looking everything out there is an MMO or, at best, has a limited single player “training” mode where you can shoot monsters offline.
Does anybody know of an open source game that has a decent single player experience?
Not sure what you mean by open source; if you don’t have much time for gaming, you probably don’t have a lot of time to spend re-coding the game, so your open source may not be my open source.
That said, I have been having a lot of fun with Rift, which is free to play. It works well as a single-player game in spite of being an MMO; I have gotten characters up to max level and had a ton of fun in the game without being in a guild or groups or anything.
Ah, there we go. Rift is probably not free, but I bought it when it was not free to play, so I’m not sure any more. Might be that it’s free to play with a free download and only mildly crushing pressure to BUY MORE STUFF in game, as opposed to SW:TOR which had huge pressure.
But the two terms mean completely different things…or don’t, depending on what you mean by “free”.
If you mean free as in “no charge”, then the terms are not identical. There is nothing stopping anyone from charging money for distributing open source software, unless the license explicitly forbids it (in which case, it probably doesn’t fit into the second meaning of free–see below). In fact, you’re perfectly within your rights to legally acquire open source software for no charge and turn around and sell it to someone else if nothing in your original acquisition of that software prevents you from doing so. Though, good luck trying to sell something easily acquired by others by other means at no cost. The GNU project encourages people to charge whatever fee for distribution and support they feel is appropriate for software released under the GNU license.
However, if you mean “free” as in freedom from restrictions, which is what GNU is about, then any software designated as “free” in that case is open source by definition.
I’m not really sure what the confusion is. I genuinely am interested in Open Source projects. Part of that is because Open Source tends to be free to play, part of it is because I feel that open source development tends to move in an ever more playable and entertaining direction because the motive of development is the creators’ own enjoyment.
There are a ton of Open Source MMOs out there, a few of which I gave above as examples.
I am not interested in multiplayer though because I don’t tend to spend much time gaming. I am looking for something that I can fire up for half an hour and wreak some havoc.
I’m not looking for validation/condemnation of my lifestyle, a debate on the “true meaning” of Open Source, or a debate on whether I should just go out and buy something off the shelf.
I just want to know if anyone has played any good Open Source FPS games that don’t require logging on to a server.
If you want to have a different discussion feel free to start your own thread.
Have you looked into mods? I’m sure there’s a billion Source Engine/Half-Life 2 mods by now with a single player focus. Mods tend to be Open Source by their nature.
I like the RPG Tales of Maj’Eyal. It isn’t open-source, but it’s free and fun. It won’t challenge your hardware though. It’s pretty easy to play in chunks.