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Is BeamNG Drive a Free Software Game
Once upon the time, I remember feeling utterly unpleasant toward playing racing games where cars did not break. I thought that GTA games, for example, were far more realistic because making mistakes and crashing into something is going to break the car and therefor you have to drive more carefully. Yes I was a strange kid. But I did enjoy games such as Flat Out where the objective is to crash your car as much as possible. I think I liked games that simulate reality, rather then those that are just made for fun. You could imagine how excited I was when I saw videos of this new racing game that came out at about 2013 called BeamNG Drive. A game where cars don't just swap body shapes with pre-modeled deformations. But a game that simulates the destruction fully. Using soft body physics. I didn't play it. At first my computer was way too slow and there was no GNU / Linux support. Then the game became paid. Then I changed from being a mere "Linux user" to being a "GNU / Linux user", which meant that this game is not good for my freedom. But is it though?
The Freedom of BeamNG
Not being able to play this game did not stop me from looking at videos of how other people play it. And from the very beginning it seemed like the game is not your typical car game. The game was filled from the very beginning with wild constructions and mods. It seemed like, not only that there was no need to reverse engineer the formats, but that the developers actively helped and encouraged modding. Which is more something a Free Software game developer would do, and not your typical game dev.
Don't get me wrong, BeamNG Drive is a proprietary game by all accounts. But the structure of the game and the community behind it doesn't feel that way. It's a sandbox game. There is a community of modders. They use Blender for making assets for the game. Yeah, both the modders and the original devs. This doesn't seem right. Something is missing.
BeamNG's Free Software
Okay, say that they have released an addon for Blender for modders. Because Blender is under the GNU GPL the addon they release has to be at the very least compatible with the GPL and therefor it should be Free Software. They wouldn't care. I mean if people can make mods, and improve the addon, it will be easier for them themselves to use it to make assets and everybody benefits. Typical "open source" mindset. And guess what? They did exactly this. Their Blender Addon is under a GPL compatible license ( MIT ). So okay, they at least developed one Free Software thing.
But if you look into it more deeply you will find more interesting things. For example, there is a Free Software python API to drive a special variant of BeamNG called BeamNG Tech. Which is for professional use. Yeah, well... This python thing still requires the proprietary BeamNG tech to be installed. But still. Here is another technically Free Software thing that they developed.
Then if you look even deeper, you will notice that they switched a game engine sometime in the early days of the game. First they used Cry Engine. Which is very proprietary and probably very costly. And then they chose to use a Free Software game engine called Torque 3D instead.
So they are building the game with Free Software on a Free Software game engine for which they built Free Software tools. And yet the game is still proprietary. Even though, as I already said, it feels more like what a Free Software game feels, with community collaboration and an insane level of customize-ability.
What is going on here?
Rigs of Rods!
By mistake, or perhaps luck, I saw a link to another game called Rigs of Rods while researching around BeamNG. At first I barely noticed it. Just another game with a similar premise. I mean even the developers of Flat Out made their "Wreckfest" game with more or less the same tech as BeamNG. So another copycat was expected. Then I noticed something. The Wikipedia article had the words "open source" in it. Wait a second? There is a Free Software clone of BeamNG? Really?
I obviously got excited! I mean, finally I could play a game that lets me crash cars realistically. Yes!!! And then I looked further and saw that it's not just a mere Free Software game, but rather it's under the fucking GPL. Are you kidding me? And it doesn't stop there...
Apparently the game is older than BeamNG drive. And not by a little bit. It is almost a decade older than BeamNG. Holly shit!!! But it didn't even stop there.
I looked at the names of the authors of Rigs of Rods and saw a name that was familiar to me. Thomas Fischer. I scrolled back the tab about BeamNG and guess what? Yes... I saw Thomas Fischer there too. Oh my god... BeamNG started as a Free Software game!
Of course I immediately downloaded it and started crashing some cars. But then I noticed something weird. This game has way more trucks and heavy machinery. It has an aircraft carrier that you can play. What is going on here? And then it struck me...
Possible ( speculative ) history of BeamNG
So a few people are sitting there in 2005 and thinking about a grand project. A realistic simulator of trucks and stuff like this. I mean people already did good car simulators. Torcs exists. But trucks! I mean properly. With actual real consequence metric. You know those videos of insane truckers trying to drive in reverse on a mountainous terrain somewhere, barely managing to make the corner. What if they fell? What the truck got stuck on a rock and a part of it was slightly bent? How would that effect the steering? How would that effect the challenge? It wouldn't be too hard to make a simulator like this? Would it?
And so Rigs of Rods came out. And with it a new Rods system. Later they would not actually know if those are called "Rods" or "Beams" or whatever. Basically there is a low resolution mesh of those rods around the truck. And for them a basic soft body simulation would not take too many CPU cycles. And using that mesh, you can deform the high resolution mesh that the player actually sees. And since those trucks are big rigs. Well "Rigs of Rods" sounds like a good title!
Anyway people started joining. I mean of course they did. It is a Free Software game! And only that. I makes it possible to smash trucks! Wait... But what if not only trucks? Yes trains! Boats! Jets!... No... Not that. What if somebody modeled a car? Like a real existing car? And tried driving it in a physically based world? That would be a hell of a good driving simulator. And somebody did. One addon lead to another. And suddenly there was a good selection of city terrains and real cars. People could now smash into things and see how mangled they could get their cars. What a joy!
Thomas Fischer is there too. Developing with those people. Seeing how much fun it all is. But he already has other plans. Oh! How angry he is! Who was that "genius" that put the code for this game under the GPL? Thomas is firing with anger! There is a potential there. They could make money. No! Somebody had to take that away from him.
Okay, fine! Thinks Thomas. He can re-write the code. He can re-implement the game from scratch. Focusing on what people truly want. Destruction of cars. He can make millions. So he sits there with a few people and makes a plan. They will re-implement the game in a new engine. Fuck Free Software! The new game will be proprietary! They gonna get some hot engine, whatever it might cost and make the game in it.
They rip GNU / Linux off their computers! They install Windows! How dare they?! They give money away so they could use the new and hot Cry Engine! How stupid of them! But they are determent! They will show who's who! They will not let this idea go to waste!
All of a sudden somewhere inside of Fischer a spark of consciousness came back. He felt a bit ugly. Cry Engine? Really? Oh... Can we use something else? I mean... This engine is not good! It's too expensive! Eh... We could use that one instead. Yeah it's Free Soft... eh... I mean. It's "Open Source". It means we could dial up the physics of the game the way we like. Thought Fischer. But deep inside his heart was probably longing to that freedom he just lost.
Yeah, he thought, we will definitely develop a Free, I mean, Open plugin for that Free, I mean, Open 3D editor... I mean Blender is popular. A lot of people will help us develop the game. While actually perhaps he was rebelling his own regime at this point. What a mistake he had made...
On the other side of the tech world Free people continued to be Free and Rigs of Rods continued to be maintained. Not as viciously as that other group. Not as well as their unofficial proprietary fork. But still, enough to keep the community sort of alive.
Conclusion
I was stunned when I launched the game and saw that there are people in the multiplayer. When I saw that there were new plugins in the repository ( or at least they were updated recently ). Yes the game and the stuff in it are not on the same level as the fork. Perhaps people are loosing hope and switching sides. And only the most hard core Free Software purists like myself contribute to Rigs of Rods. Or perhaps the illusion of Freedom is way to good on the Fischer's side. And those contributors are fooled into switching. But maybe... just maybe... people are contributing more to BeamNG because BeamNG is proprietary just on the exterior. It is proprietary just on the technical terms. But deep in the heart it is still that old Free Software game.
Happy Hacking!!!
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