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Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

Open source games are rarely very good. There are exceptions (looking at you NetHack), but this is the one area where "give away software, sell support" does not seem to work. Then again, I wish more games were open sourced a la Quake after their sales start declining.

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Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup is an open source game (and not open source in the sense of "you can look at our code but don't expect us to value your input", open source in the sense of "make pull requests!") and it's probably the best game I've ever played. I don't think I disagree with you, though: the reason it works so well for Stone Soup is because the game lends itself to personal extension (it's a roguelike, so you're dealing almost exclusively with game logic).

Thanks for the praise. crawl is the only major project I'm involved with, but I'm really pleased with how well development works. The team is totally open to external contributions. For example, some friends and I added a god back in 2009. Late last year we started getting high quality patches from a contributor who then became the most prolific member of the team.
One thing that holds crawl together is an overarching philosophy, particularly the Berlin Interpretation (http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=B...).

Someone even made fan art for us: http://i.imgur.com/cGO39.png

You added Chei? I lost many a Naga because of you, until I got the hang of Temporal Distortion :)

I added most of the really bad features.

I so badly want to learn how to really play roguelikes like DCSS. I've never gotten past the wander-around-first-few-levels of NetHack and DCSS. There's so much there!

You should start with Brogue (https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/). It's a roguelike that manages to be accessible without compromising the core elements of the genre. The interface is great and it actually looks quite beautiful with its lighting system. The design has been streamlined, simplified but not dumbed down.

Try FTL. It's the most modern reincarnation of the rogue-like genre and it's close to perfect in everything it does in that area.

I would suggest Moria. I think I was 10 or 11 when I played this. Nethack and DF are very hard, relatively.

http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=M...

> I wish more games were open sourced a la Quake after their sales start declining.

That is where open source in games seems to excel: keeping old games alive and running on modern systems.

Closed source games are rarely very good.

Closed source games are the only ones that matter. Name one AAA production that's open source.

chess

Quake is not open source. The engine is. To actually play "quake", you need to buy the assets.

Considering the quality of open replacement assets like OpenArena, I also don't think that open source games work particularly well.

Dwarf Fortress is completely free (gratis) to play. The developers make money via donations, which I expect would only increase if the game were open source.

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