Help wanted for open-source project - openFRAG Thread

On the 20th of May 2003 one of our founding members, IFASS, came up with the idea of developing a game, together with anyone he could find. What kind of game it needed to be was still not certain but one thing was certain, it had to be open-source from the start. A large part of the target audience at the host forum was, and is, very fond of the opensource community. While many people are still not much further than opensource is for free as in free beer, and not free as in freedom.

So where do you start? You have this desire to get as many people you can working on a game that you still don't even know what it should be like. In the early days we really talked a lot on IRC, while many people were extremely motivated on pioneering in this project it became very clear to me that there were so many opinions that it would probably never come out of the idea phase.

Some people wanted to make a role playing game, others rather worked on a real time strategy but the absolute winner was the first person shooter. The next problem that arose the more quickly was the setting of the game would it be history, present, future or fantasy based, and to be honest we never really answered this question. It's still open. And that's probably where the most interesting part of openFRAG is to be found. We began developing with only one real objective, developing a game we would like to play ourselves. For one person that would be slaughtering aliens on a spaceship, while others rather be a knight and save the maiden.

Mostly commercial game development focus is based on the biggest target audience, so what you see is waves of games that are more or less the same, as you are seeing at the moment with World War 2 first person shooters. Games like Half Life relive their popularity by MOD's like Counter-Strike, giving the player a total different game by still using the same engine and environment.
openFRAG in this context is not a game but more of a game platform. Beside the development of the platform we can create as many MOD's or "themes" like we prefer to call it and integrate them into the project. That would enable you to create a server where you can be a knight, fighting an alien in a supermarket.(or any other weird combination you can come up with)

We are not the first guys to come with an idea like this, you have probably seen other projects like ours and see them bleed to death after a few months, and some even quicker. Maybe you were even in one of those projects. I can't guarantee that we will build a game that equals the quality of games like Half Life 2 or Doom 3, and it's very probable that we never will. But if you have enough motivated and talented guys together with one clear vision, we can have a real good time trying.

- Geert Schoots (MrPierce)
Team Leader Project Management

If you would like to be part of or just read more about openFRAG visit our website and forum at www.openfrag.org
If you would like to play around with our Techdemo v.3, you can download it at sourceforge.net/projects/openfrag

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We are looking for highly motivated persons who would like to help us realizing this game who have at least 8 spare hours available for the project every week.

- Programmers
- Arists
- Communication
- Sound
- Project-Management
- Game-design

Requirements for Coding:
- Knowledge of the C++ programming language
- Knowledge of object orientated programming
- Some knowledge of working with graphics engines

Requirements for Artists:
- Knowledge of 3d modeling with Blender/Maya/3ds max or making maps with Radiant or Quark
- Knowledge of animating and texturing

Requirements for Communication:
- Knowledge of php/html/sql programming
- Knowledge of forum management

Requirements for Sound:
- Knowledge of professional in-game music and sample (e.g. effects) editing
- Knowledge of forum management

Requirements for Project-management:
- Project Management is seeking members who want to have an active role in managing and directing the project.
- This can mean writing guidelines, advising team leaders or helping individual members to work in more productive ways.
- You are experienced of working in projects and have occasionally been project leader.
- You have a optimistic spirit and are social communicative.
- You are willing to take on responsibilities.

Requirements for Game-design:
The Game-design team deliveres the concept-art, ideas and much more things which is needed for the game-design.
- Must can draw a concept-art of a map which is playable, good to understand and write your idea and story by your map.
- must can draw a concept-art for characters which deals with one of these kinds of characters: Gnome, Knight or the Grunt.

heh heh, that looks kinda like Cube...

i think this is a very good and decent idea man, i hope you guys make it trough the release 8) i would like to help but i suck at everything

we've already released 3 techdemo's, they can be downloaded at our site (www.openfrag.org) and number 4 is incoming

I second Neo-Reloaded's comments. I wish you luck.

...I wish someone would make Society Wars since im lazy and have no uber skillz

Very nice, I can help with the mapping aspect if you need it

would be nice

thanks for the replies guys!

at 19:00 GMT we have an IRC meeting at Irc.tweakers.net and everyone who wants to talk with us or just want to meet us and/or ask some questions, you can come to our IRC channel

- Edited By IFASS On Sun 7th, Dec 2003 @ 1:19:00pm