several days ago LGN had a Trivia contest asking “What game engine is being used in the largest number of GNU/Linux games ?”
I frankly thought that this would be an easy one, but only after several days and two big tips someone managed to guess the engine I thought about.
Many readers said id tech engines as the most popular answer but some people got more creative with PyGame, nethack, OpenBor and Eamon Adventure System. (some of which aren’t really game engines).
The trivia answers were interesting to read..someone even suggest Unigine (I wish) and SDL (it’s a library, not a game engine).
My answer was the visual novel game engine Ren’Py which has over 240 GNU/Linux games and growing.
I thought that LGN readers should have known it because I post a LOT about visual novels and all of them use the Ren’Py engine.
So the current winner is failsaurus BUT as I’ve said before nothing is set in stone and you can still prove me wrong.
Just some notes about what I call games…
Games should be stand alone and executable and not relay on some engine or a program (apart of the OS) to be installed on the users system.
For example MAME is NOT a game engine but an Emulator, it’s ability to run games of different systems still doesn’t make it a game engine as you can’t develop with it.
PyGame is “a cross-platform set of Python modules designed for writing video games. It includes computer graphics and sound libraries designed to be used with the Python programming language.” , but I doubt that it counts as a game engine on itself.
If you think that I’m wrong, please discuss here at the comments.
If until Friday the 7/10/2011 my answer won’t be disapproved then I’ll grant the winner failsaurus the key for Achron.
What is a game?
What is a game engine?
What does a library need to be called a game engine?
What are GNU/Linux games?
I saw movies on youtube where you could choose how the story would go on. Would you count that as a game?
Trauma (http://www.traumagame.com/) is a game – they say. Would you disagree? It’s just clicking on images. Just like the movies on youtube.
What do you need to create something like that? Just the position and clicks of the mouse and the drawing of the pictures. Really simple.
E.g. SDL and SFML provide much more. You can use them to easily create games. So why aren’t they game engines? You say they a libraries. But what is the difference between a library and a game engine? What are they missing?
Ren’Py (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%27Py , http://renpy.org/) is called a “Visual Novel Engine” – not a game engine (as they say). Why don’t they call it game engine? The things you create with it are kind of games. Aren’t they?
“The core functionality typically provided by a game engine includes a rendering engine (“renderer”) for 2D or 3D graphics, a physics engine or collision detection (and collision response), sound, scripting, animation, artificial intelligence, networking, streaming, memory management, threading, localization support, and a scene graph.”(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_engine)
There are so many libraries which are called game engines which doesn’t fit inside that statement.
Has Ren’Py all those things?
Wouldn’t you count Doom3 and Quake4 and ET:QW and Prey as GNU/Linux games just because you need to get the executable separated from the game-disc?
Same with Arx Fatalis.
What about games that are played with ScummVM? Aren’t they played native as GNU/Linux games?
But you need to get something extra.
It isn’t just one single disc, one single download.
Sometimes you even need to e.g. compile stuff yourself just because something isn’t available on your Linux distribution.
So what?
Ren’Py is some sort of game engine. Although you can’t create any game you like with it.
And it has a long list of games that work on Linux.
Most (game) engines doesn’t count or list all games and projects that are made with it. So it’s hard to tell which one has most games.
SDL is used in over 540 Linux games (http://www.libsdl.org/games.php?order=name&category=-1&completed=0&os=1&match_name=&perpage=25).
But SDL doesn’t count – you say.
I would say the question was a bit problematic on the beginning.
I don’t expect any answers to the questions above.
They are just to think about.
Anyway…
Nice to know that there are so many engines and much more games for Linux. Hopefully they will grow.
So,
all: Have fun playing and creating games – equal what you use!
You got some really good questions, shame you waited for the last minute to post this – we could have an interesting discussion.
It’s true that I haven’t thought about all the options in this trivia contest, but I wanted to make something different – I don’t like to just “giveaway” things, it’s not interesting.
But you can propose the next contest.