Free game-making tools?

[Roots]

I'm wondering if any of you are aware of free (= GPL licensed) tools and programs that are useful for developing games. Things like: programs to create tiled-textures, sound (wav) editors, etc. Does Wesnoth use any outside programs or have you guys done everything (art, music, code) from scratch? Someone over at the Allacrost forums posted a site today http://darkbasicpro.thegamecreators.com/ that has a nice selection of programs useful for game making, so it got me wondering if any free Linux equivalents exist for them. Thanks for any help, though I'm skeptical of finding anything out there

[cobretti]

For graphics, Gimp. A very good tool, works great for creating/modifying images.

For coding, you should give a try to syntax-highlight editors, like emacs, jed and a bunch more.

For sound, better wait until an artist tell.

[Torath]

Kdevelop works pretty good for coding, though it depends on what you want

I have heard that Audacity is a good for recording and editing sound though I have not used it.

[Shade]

If you find kDevelop is a little heavy, just use Kate (or Vi / Emacs). Do libs count as tool? If so SDL deserves a lot of credit. (R.I.P. Loki - The games might have been closed source but you gave back)

[Roots]

These are nice suggestions and all, but they don't really seem game specific. GIMP I've already been using, KDevelop/emacs/Kate/VI I've all had expereince using. I'm talking about software that was written specifically for game development. Sorry for the ambiguity

[Integral]

I saw a post on happypenguin advertising an editor for 2D sidescrollers (like Mario et al).

Daniel

[Dave]

I really don't think there are (m)any decent Free game-specific tools out there.

Grumbel at happypenguin has tried to make the Windstille editor fairly general, so it might be usable as a generic map editor. I actually talked to him once about using it for the Wesnoth editor, but he said it would probably be better sticking with our existing editor, since the Windstille editor (understandably) doesn't support hexes.

If your game is rectangle-tile-based (which I'm assuming it is), you might like to check the Windstille editor out though.

Other than that, I don't think there are many tools. On that note, I don't think that the commercial tools aimed at developing games would be much good either. It's just difficult to build a tool that is sufficiently generic, yet sufficiently powerful to actually be useful imo.

David

[person]

The tools that you'd use for making games are largely the same as those you'd use for developing other programs. You'd want a good editor, such as vim ;), a compiler, some libraries, debugging tools and a good brain. The only technical differences I can think of are

- You need a maths background if you'd doing 3d stuff
- You need art skills or an artist for your graphics
- You'll typically end up writing your own GUI widget library inside whatever graphics framework you end up using (eg. DirectX or SDL).

This is, of course, assuming you're not looking for a "construction kit" (eg. http://www.thelegacy.de/Museum/5287/). These sorts of things are toys, where you "make a game" by selecting premade components and clicking a few buttons.

[Roel]

For sound, better wait until an artist tell.

There are some free trackers and multitrack recorders (especially for linux) available

[benheath85]

If you want a few ready-made things, the Kyra engine has some. Yes, it's a library, but it has some tools that come with it as well. I like to suggest it because its author is an email buddy of mine, but it does give you a basic sprite editor and a pretty good data-file packaging system, on top of a very good engine. Here, take a look.

Anyway, you may find it beneficial to just keep with smaller tools, even command-line text filters if that works. Keep your game data files textual for this reason: more tools will be able to work with it, including the one between your ears. As a matter of fact, I once used hexedit to look the datafile for Jedi Knight: DF2, and it's absolutely nothing more than a concatenation of many small text files with a binary header at the beginning. There's absolutely no compression there at all! You could change it with notepad or ed if you wanted to, and producing a data file is a very simple process.

In a similar yet distinctly different direction, you could go with Emacs. I can't say that I've used Emacs Lisp for writing any tools (or anything at all for that matter), but it is possible. You could use that program for everything if you had enough time. I personally do use Emacs, but as I said, I haven't really gotten into configuring it or anything like that.

Besides that, and besides what everyone else said, just use your head. For crying out loud, it's 2004 and plain vanilla graphing paper is still one of the most useful tools around. Not to mention the deposit of electrified cholesterol between your ears and above your neck.

[benheath85]

(necroing thread...)

Another avenue is to go with a program that helped get me started in games, Chris Matthews' RPG Toolkit. I never actually made anything with it and the engine does a lot of things that I would not put in my own engine. Still, it is a good start, it has an active community, and the latest release is under an open source license.

(necro complete)

[Eldmannen]

For graphics you can use GIMP (GNU Image Manipulating Program).

To compile your code you can use GCC if you code in C/C++.
If you develope under Windows, you can use the Dev-C++ IDE (Integrated Developement Environment).

For 3D modeling you can use Blender.

For OpenGL etc you can use SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) libsdl. On the site you can also find game libraries/engines, etc.

[Elvish_Pillager]

For 3D modeling you can use Blender.

I never figured out how to use Blender. Wings is a good modeler though.

[ryn]

Well, I'm in love with blender, but it is quite a difficult interface to learn. blender3d.org has some good, easy to understand tutorials for beginners.

[Disto]

I never worked out how to work blender either, it kinder had a virus on it as well.