Commerce & Open Source Games: Libre Music, Tremulous Shirts

Here is some commercial free software gaming news, which I partially failed to deliver on time.

Paul's Music Liberation Experiment is a product of jClassicRPG's lead developer following his passion for composing music. He releases music tracks under the gratis but non-free BY-SA-NC license and visitors can donate to specific tracks, which in return will be released under the free BY-SA license.

The money earned from this will be covered to cover Paul's expensive music software purchases and hopefully a proof that at least small bucks can be made with freely licensed media. It's called "experiment" after all. :)

I am a big fan of this project! I detest the non-free Creative Commons licenses, but this method is perfect to illustrate just how many people think that being free is more important for media rather than just being gratis.

Tremulous T-Shirt Logo

Ministry of Frag (MoFrag) sells a Tremulous T-Shirt and 25% go to the Tremulous team. That's the short story.

The long story is that the project was first thought of 2006 and finally realized in December 2008. It started on the wish to «find some way to support open source games». Most of the people behind MoFrag are from the Tremulous scene.

Powered by the visual awesomeness of Plutocracy's [remember?] lead developer Garoth, it's sure to make you feel sexy about supporting the open source game development.

The MoFrag definition of "open source" is slightly loose: «If your game "feels" open source to us, that is pretty much the only requirement» I was told on IRC. Also I feel a tiny bit insecure about supporting Tremulous, as there might be issues regarding the legality of some of its assets.

LÖVE mousepad

Never minding that, I hope that it will thrive and get involved with lots of cool projects (qubodup's list of cool open source game projects still pending). Do you have any suggestions? My instant thoughts are "LÖVE" (Which by the way has a Merchandise discussion going on) and "SuperTuxKart" (by the way, did you know that the project has an awesome new homepage look?) although last time I checked out STK, this little bit |___| of polish was missing for me to call it "polished enough for merchandise".

EDIT: Supposedly, the Blender Game Engine (BGE) will receive development support from a company using it to develop a commercial title.

I was super skeptic at first, due to Entertainment Arts Research Inc.'s flash page and its subsidiary Twilight 22 Studio's empty page. I Couldn't find anything online but the same press release and compared it to the EVO console scam. Now I'm just confused. Time will tell.

BGE looking awesome

So this turned out to not be a commercial blender update, eh? Aaanyways, about the Blender Game Engine (BGE).. I always thought the BGE was a weak, slow placeholder. I appear to be wrong: its power has recently been shown off in this sunrise thread. Note that this is not a Blender render, it's real-time Blender Game Engine action! Though I bet it's real slow. But hey, I haven't checked it out live yet. ;P

Thanks to Lamoot for the heads up!

Scott's satellite dish model

Newfound Room is Scott's continuation of the Low Poly Cooperative blog.

part of the intention of this blog will be to make some money for me and my family. I’ll be trying out any number of different ways of doing this, but the core of what I am doing here is providing you all with free stuff. The more I make off of it, the more time I can devote to making more.

So far, no sight of any revenue-gaining measures and no post for three months. Ads would make some sense, though not create much profit. Paul's "release-gratis, pay-to-free" method could be used. Although it does have an unfortunate non-free element in it.

Good night! And remember to brush your vaporware-sensors boys and girls!