As I invariably slowly lose interest in my latest programming project, I decided a solution to my loss of programming mojo would be to contribute to a well-established open-source project, which already has good assets, a community, and a completed quality game that I might want to play as well as help develop. Since I've also decided to start using other languages, it would help me decide which new language to start with.
So after a lot of Googling trying to find potential such projects, I came across a few. Let's see how I got on:-
1) Teeworlds
This is a multiplayer 2D platformer with guns. Unfortunately, on my 2Ghz laptop, the opening screen (a simple background and a box for me to enter my name) was too processor-intensive for even the mouse pointer to move at more than 1 frame-per-second. God only knows how slow the actual game would be, if I could get to play it. It looks very good though, so I was a bit disappointed.
2) XPilot
This is quite an old game (at least 10 years); it's a multiplayer Thrust variant. The game was a bit jerky considering the simple graphics (even connecting to my local server) but the main problem was that none of the 20+ public server had any players online. This is the big problem with multi-player games; they live and die by the players. Once people slowly stop playing it, it doesn't matter how good the game is, it just slowly dies (assuming it had any players to begin with).
3) Unvanquished
I only include this here because it looks great, but doesn't seem to have anyone playing it. It's sad to see that a game that looks so good and, if it plays as well as Tremulous did, plays well, should be struggling to find players.
More coming soon....
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