Pour les GAMERS :)

[MaWaLe]

Bonjour tout le monde
voici un mail qui pourra in,téresser bon nombre d'ntre vous qui
s'identifient en tant que GAMERS ou bien des GAMES-DEVELOPER
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________


Hello everyone,

I'd like to bring your attention to a new FOSS platform for
multiplayer 3D games, Syntensity:

Website: http://www.syntensity.com/

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GSi3X5hCdw

The engine behind it, the Intensity Engine, is here:

https://launchpad.net/intensityengine/

This is the result of over a year of intensive coding, and also
building upon a lot of existing open source code. To briefly
summarize, we started with Cube 2, made it much more flexible and
generic, added a new scripting API using Google V8, and wrote a lot of
infrastructure like asset distribution and management (in Python).
More details appear in this PDF:

http://www.syntensity.com/static/betapresentation.pdf

Syntensity isn't a single game, or even a single type of game - the
platform's API can be used to make all sorts of 3D multiplayer games.
To show that flexibility, we have two example games, one a
capture-the-flag shooter (sort of like Quake 3 Arena), and the other
is a 'sketch world' where the players can draw on the scenery (every
person has a different color, and sees what everyone else is drawing
in real-time, etc.). Both examples are shown in the video linked to
above, and on the screenshots page,

http://www.syntensity.com/toplevel/screenshots/

and a lot of other games are possible. Also, importantly, you can play
all of the games with a single client program.

We are big believers in FOSS, and we think that to improve the
situation of gaming there we need better platforms and tools.
Basically, there is no reason why we can have operating systems,
webservers, and so forth, that are as good or better than proprietary
alternatives, but not FOSS gaming platforms as well as games of
similar quality. Syntensity is our attempt to help with that, in the
specific context of multiplayer 3D games (our personal favorite genre
;) Of course, we're not saying we are 'there' yet - it will take a lot
more work, and we will need a lot of help. But we hope that even with
this early release others will see the potential here.

Side note: A specific issue that might be of interest to people in
this list, which has been discussed here previously: Distributed
content development. We wrote a simple but useful system for asset
management and distribution in Python (using Django on the server
side), which we are currently using. It makes it easy for people to
always have the latest version of assets, to upload their changes and
publish them, and so forth. If there is an interest from other
projects to use this code, we can refactor it out into a standalone
project.

In summary, to check Syntensity out, see the quick start guide:

http://wiki.syntensity.com/introduction/quick-start-1

There are also instructions on the main page and on the download page,

http://www.syntensity.com/toplevel/download/

including a binary build for Ubuntu 9.04 (which is btw where most of
the coding was done), and simple instructions on how to build it on
other versions. (Note that we haven't tested 9.10 yet - we will once
it's released).

Feedback, comments, ideas, etc., are welcome!

Thanks for your time,
   kripken and the Syntensity team

P.S. I am usually on FreeNode (username: kripken), at #syntensity,
#intensityengine, #ubuntu-gaming, among others; feel free to get in
touch.