Geekfoolery

I really enjoy games like Medal of Honor and Battlefield 1942 and others in the genre of the first-person shooter. I don’t always have the patience to get through the narrative of the single player mode story, and sometimes I just like to connect to closest server and trip over my feet a couple dozen times.

Of course, these games are slick professionally-made boxed software packages. Fifty bucks a pop, retail, maybe thirty if you’re buying last year’s game. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a solid, slick, full-featured game like that for, oh, I don’t know… how about free?

Thank you, open source software, I present to you Sauerbraten. Sauerbraten is a free, multiplatform single/multiplayer first person shooter game based on what is called the Cube game engine. The engine is not necessarily designed to create the most eye candy–boxed set games might look prettier–but the graphics are just fine, and the game allows you to edit the geometry and maps during the game. The game engine is completely open source, and is the foundation of a number of other programming projects.

I’ve spent a couple hours now playing Sauerbraten, both in single and multiplayer mode, and I am impressed. I am running a fairly new Macbook Pro, and it both loads and runs pretty snappy. I noticed no lag with the multiplayer servers and all the fundamentals of the genre are in the game.

What’s great about this being open source is that even if you couldn’t spot, let alone write a single line of code if you and your family’s lives depended on it, you will still get the benefits of the work of other people who do contribute to the project. Unlike people who use Microsoft… or who play Halo… you have to pay to get your upgrades.

And if you do write code, you can contribute your own modifications to the game, or create new maps, or even use the game engine in your own project.

Sauerbraten is now added to my list of open source software that I have and use.

Go back a few years the computer wayback machine and think of the first time you heard the term “open source” software. Linux was the first major free open source software I had heard of that had any complexity to it, and in the geek environment I worked in at the time, getting Linux to load and install on your PC was no trivial task. It could be done, sure, but there was a lot of downloading to be done, and configuration, and other fiddling around, and at the end of the day you had a computer with an operating system that for the average user was harder to use and find software for.

Fast forward to today, and every time you turn around, there’s another free open source application out there that is getting ready for prime time. Linux is no longer the untamed beast it once was. Firefox is quickly becoming the browser of choice, even beyond geekdom. NeoOffice continues to make strides in chipping away at any reason ordinary people (and even businesses) should pay money for Microsoft office.

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