Hey everybody, does anybody know if there is a free open-source online football (not american football) game? I thought about something like this: You can create an account, then you can make the face somewhat individual and choose a name of your player. After this you can already play. Everybody in the game only controls one player, not a whole team. Then the normal lobby system. When you join a game (must have at least 22 players), you have to choose what you want to play (keeper, defense etc.) or take whatever is free. Optional there could be some kind of clan system, except that clans are teams(must have 11 players at least). A nice ladder and tournament system would be perfect for such a game. You would actually only need 2 player models (plus umpire etc.) where the colors and numbers on the back change. Also the face could be made individual via coding. Is there something like that? If not, do you think something like this would be played and fun? Sincerely, Chris [Edited by - Bahlor on June 10, 2008 12:14:20 PM]

I would definitely love to play it. I'm not sure you want to require 22 players to join though. That's a lot, and you don't want to wait forever to start a match. Either have less players per team or add bots to replace humans. Having everyone control just one player will probably result in very chaotic and unrealistic (and thus fun) play anyway, not following the exact rules of soccer shouldn't make it less entertaining. Unless realism is what you're after.

If played a lot of multi player games of

">Mario Smash Football (up to four players) on the old Game Cube and that was great fun!

O, and congrats with your first match win against Poland! We're up next. :)

Ya true, that thing with bots is a good idea, they could just be replaced by players that join and if they leave, the bot goes on playing. This would also solve the problem when players have connection problems or whatever. :)

Super Mario Strikers is great! :) I love it, just a bit too arcade for what I was thinking of ^^

Thanks for this! I'll be watching your match today, I hope you win! The italians didn't play very fair the last times...

Moved to Game Design.

The challenge in something like is that few people are going to want to exclusively play as defensive specialists. If your team completely outclasses the other, then as a defender you may have nothing to do for the duration of the game. And how many people will really want to play goalie?

(This applies to all team sports with voluntary ball movement - as opposed to mandatory ball movement, like tennis doubles or volleyball. If you're playing a basketball game and your friend is controlling a point guard like Allen Iverson, who both has the ball in his hands the majority of the time and is usually the best scorer on his team, why would he ever pass? And if he doesn't pass, what do you spend your time doing? Setting ball screens? Scintillating.)

I think something like this might work better in six-a-sides.

Interesting point, but I think there would be enough people that are interested in playing a defensive role... you could give points for difference things... offensive players for goals.. defensive for blocks... etc.

should work right? I mean, you could make a ladder for offensive,defensive etc. I personally think it would be fun to play as defensive, a good defense is just as important as a good offensive. That's just my point of view. :)

Anyone interested in trying to get something like this done? (OpenSource)

I think ogre3d would work great:

- ogre3d for rendering
- NaviLibrary for the GUI
- ODE or Novodex for ball physics etc.
- ogreopcode for collision detection
- ProtonSceneEditor for Material and Scene editing
- RakNet or TNL for network
- OgreAL for sound
- Caelum for sky
- OIS for input

[Edited by - Bahlor on June 10, 2008 6:03:25 AM]

In the end the quality of the simulation is what is important, relative to the alternative football sims. Fifa and Pro Evolution are untouchable as the best simulations - there really is no point in trying to compete with them.
The same model but for doubles tennis, or some other game where the simulation is much simpler and the team sizes are small could be well worth looking into.

Just my 2 pence.

Well I wouldn't compare it with ea sports games as it's totally multplayer focused and only one player of a team, not a whole team. Also as open source this would have an advantage.

Believe me, I've thought long and hard about how this could be done, and there are several teams trying - but they are all doomed, DOOMED!!!

A football game comes with expectations, generated by the beautiful game itself but also the mature generations of the two heavyweight games fifa and pro evo. Anything more than a little off the pace would be a huge let down to players who you are then asking to play this game over the others just to be able to hang out and be in some community league. Combine that with the logistical difficulty of getting 22 people to play a match at a designated time seamlessly from start to finish regularly and you see it can't be done by an indie team, and probably couldn't be done at all right now.