A Peach of an Apricot

I wrote previously about the open source film "Elephants Dream", produced the Blender Foundation. Recently it's been working on Peach:

As a follow-up to the successful project Orange’s “Elephants Dream”, the Blender Foundation will initiate another open movie project. Again a small team of the best 3D artists and developers in the Blender community will be invited to come together to work in Amsterdam from October 2007 until April 2008 on completing a short 3D animation movie. The team members will get a great studio facility and housing in Amsterdam, all travel costs reimbursed, and a fee sufficient to cover all expenses during the period.

But this time, it's going even further:

After Orange and Peach Blender Institute continues with a new open project: Apricot. This time it isn’t a movie but a 3D game!Starting february 1st 2008, a small team of again the best 3D artist and developers will develop a game jointly with the on-line community. The main characters in the game are based on the short 3D animation open movie Peach.

Once again, Blender will lie at the heart of the project, and the intention is to do much more than produce an open game:

The team will work on a cross platform game (at least Linux, Windows, OS X), using Blender for modeling and animation, Crystal Space as 3D engine and delivery platform, and Python for some magic scripting to glue things together. It is not only the purpose to make a compelling 3D game experience, but especially to improve and validate the open source 3D game creation pipeline, with industry-standard conditions.

The last point is important: what open source needs is not a good game, nice as that would be, but a framework for producing hundreds of them. It's great to see Blender and the open source 3D engine Crystal Space stepping up to that challenge.