Sure, if the financial backing comes in the form of a donations without any strings attached. Sponsorships can be a deal with the devil, I know from first hand experience

I was meaning donations, or funding from a socialist state. I guess I forgot financial backing could mean manipulative sponsorships, which obviously would be risk and could damage the project.

I’m also writing my own 3D software renderer in a project of mine, also no libraries (the renderer at least) and written in C99/ASM and single threaded

That’s pretty cool! If you have your source code public and care to share, I would like to bookmark it.

I’m curious how they’re avoiding floating points. Too bad they don’t provide source code.

They mentioned they would consider open sourcing the project when it is finished. https://redlib.zaggy.nl/r/GraphicsProgramming/comments/vbpk3j/comment/icauijl/?context=3

They do have some parts and related projects open sourced, including a subset of the integer-only software renderer used in the game.

I don’t doubt that there are professional game devs who love the art

I’m guessing all of them loved the art when they first went into the industry, but as with every job, capitalism turns it into a slog, draining all of the passion and creativity, alienating the workers, eventually laying them off regardless of their performance because the corporations want to inflate their quarter earnings with stock buybacks. However, the passion that game devs, especially professional, have for the craft is insane. They unjustly put up with so much abuse and yet many stay to make more games. I do agree the devs that develop open source clones of popular games tend to have more passion for open source philosophy than the craft of video games themselves. If open source games received more financial backing, however, we would probably see more passion and quality in both areas.

I do find joy in small games made by indie solo devs exploring interesting areas as a hobby. King’s Crook is one of those games, built in C with no third-party libraries and avoids floating-point numbers, using only integers for triangle rasterization.

Even during the PS2 era, games like Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal had 9 month development cycles, with developers working 60+ hours a week. Many games are built with developers essentially sleeping in the office, ordering junk food, gaining weight, neglecting their families, sleeping 4 hours a day for months (nearly killing themselves), etc., because their passion is heavily exploited. While I miss the era of PS2 when many genres were explored and experimented with and games were more of an art form instead of some generic slop to sell microtranscations, season passes, etc., I passionately want game development to do away with abusive, crunch culture.

Adding to the discussion of multiple commenters’ desire for libre game development expressed here, it would be nice if China were to invest in its gaming industry, supporting open source games that can outcompete games made with blood in Amerikkka and the West (and the exploited Global South slave developers especially). To add to my previous comment here, I think China could really take advantage with developing open source games under open source architecture and operating systems which they have been developing. I believe it would be a massive soft power win. If they could make more professionally maintained alternatives to popular games like Minecraft, for example, and I think a lot of people would jump ship as they are fed up with Microsoft’s and other corporations’/studios’ bullshit, though the US pigs would probably ban the games because of tErRoRiSm. It already looks like China’s games, film, and animation production are starting to outcompete the West, though it would be nice to see them create and optimize their games like Black Myth Wukong under their sovereign open source tech and let their gaming industry skyrocket like their AI tech industry has due to open source tech and open collaboration across their provinces.

We could use more open-source games. It would be nice to be able to have open-source versions of RimWorld, Victoria 3, Factorio, etc. I know there’s open source versions already for each of these games, but they are in super alpha builds (I’m not counting Mindustry as an alternative to Factorio, even if it is a good game). Many open source versions are written in C#, too, or use Unity or Unreal Engine. I would like to see more games that I can install with a package manager and have extra packages for mods, and games that are written in less Windows focused languages, like C, C++, Rust, Zig, Clojure, etc. Mods for most games are mostly config changes, reskins, new models, etc., and they feel inadequate. I would like to see people be able to fork games and create entirely new experiences, like the GZDoom and other Doom engines for example. Part of the fun of gaming for me is tinkering them, creating servers in containers like a sysadmin, and compiling games with different use flags. Open Source games are fun, but most of them don’t scratch the itch like the games I mentioned provide.

Some other things I want to see with games:

• Follow the XDG Base Directory Specification
• Luanti could use more development support, but it would be nice to see other Minecraft alternatives built in languages like Rust. Playing MineClone2 is a very clunky Minecraft experience, and the UI is a little shitty. Also Luanti and Minecraft both don’t follow the XDG specification mentioned above and refuse to do so like most developers, which is infuriating.
• Seeing more games start from scratch by developing their own engines (or start without an engine) would be nice. (Examples: 1, 2, 3, 4)
• More Vulkan and Wayland support.

Anyway, the reason I am mentioning all this is because if we could see games start from scratch and support this architecture, it would be a good time to start building games that properly support open source operating systems instead of being slopped together like most Windows games ported to Linux are. Proprietary code in games hold their potential back in chains, and open-source games are made by people that are not well financially supported and make them in their own limited free time.

Lol, I know. It’s an interesting video, though, and they are pro-China and promote the need for collective action to fight against technofeudalism as opposed to individual activist work.

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