On 8/14/05, Justin Dugger jldugger@gmail.com wrote:
It may be that twitch games are simply doomed in an open source environment.
Did people stop playing monopoly when pocket calculators became ubiquitous? I don't think so
Games that allow cheating will have cheaters, that is human nature
when it's just for fun, the "punkbuster" methods sound like they are effective at mitigating the perceived problem. Let the people who want to auto-aim get their own server and then they can auto-aim at each other, no problem. Not at all the doom of the genre, but a flowering of more variation.
For the "purists" who want a level playing field, or who don't want to play the metagame of hack development, aquisition and familiarization, doing binary distribution with checksum management and so on sounds like the way to go, and sounds like a good test-of-fire for open source DRM technology.
I'm imagining some kind of oniony double-encrypted binary distribution that starts by taking a hash of itself and submitting that as the key to a VPN over which the key to decrypting the rest of the program is sent -- but what about ptrace? The bar could be pushed up pretty high to running hacks when you're not allowed to -- for full paranoia, perhaps video feedback of the players and their keystrokes in real time --
I dunno, the only FPS I ever got into was playing KAOS in high school, we pointed bananas at each other and yelled "Bang!" -- didn't have any authentication or hacking problems.