I haven't been much of a gamer, but I recently purchased Allied Assault and have become quite addicted to it. I was amazed to find that there are completely open source FPS out there, though from what I understand, the quality isn't up to current proprietary standards.
From what I can see of the movies, though, the gameplay isn't too bad.
Here are some links to check out if you are interested:
http://www.nexuiz.com/ - a FPS http://www.planeshift.it/ - More of a RPG than a FPS, but looks neat.
Enjoy! Josh
On Friday 05 August 2005 12:25, Josh Charles wrote:
I haven't been much of a gamer, but I recently purchased Allied Assault and have become quite addicted to it.
Heh. I know what you mean. There's a community developed map for Warcraft 3 TFT called "Defense of the Ancients" for multiplayer that's a total conversion of the original game in to a whole new kind of game. I have been playing DotA for two years and I still love it. So maybe there's an example of a place where proprietary and open source meet to make something really awesome.
DotA, IMHO, is the best game ever created. It never gets boring. Now, if only there were some kind of way to make the people playing behave nicely... :)
There's lots more to open source 3d gaming than just First person shooters. Most of them also have a linux version, provided the developers didn't choose directX for their game.
There's crack-attack, a tetris attack clone that plays well. There's also Glest, which looks something like Warcraft 3 from the screenshots. Kenta Cho has some great 2d shooters that use 3d graphics. There's also Armegetron, a neat Tron lightcycles game with decent multiplayer aspects. GL-117 is an okayish air force game.
If you know where to look, you can find a lot of good open source games. I think one of the remaining barriers to Linux gaming is a decent website that focuses on open source games. Happypengiun is neat, but the web design needs... a makeover. The whole site looks like it was designed using placeholder art and then decided to go live with what they had when they heard what artists charge for that stuff. The ratings system is a bit strange, not becaues it uses 5 starts, but that the ratings aren't tied to any specific version. If a game doesn't run, it gets one star, even if the bug is fixed the next day. And hardly anybody posts or reviews.
So yea, the games you mentioned are okay, but they kinda suck for similar reasons to the ones that plague happypengiun.
Justin Dugger
On 8/5/05, Josh Charles josh.charles@gmail.com wrote:
I haven't been much of a gamer, but I recently purchased Allied Assault and have become quite addicted to it. I was amazed to find that there are completely open source FPS out there, though from what I understand, the quality isn't up to current proprietary standards.
From what I can see of the movies, though, the gameplay isn't too bad.
Here are some links to check out if you are interested:
http://www.nexuiz.com/ - a FPS http://www.planeshift.it/ - More of a RPG than a FPS, but looks neat.
Enjoy! Josh _______________________________________________ Kclug mailing list Kclug@kclug.org http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug
In related news, Carmack has declared that iD software will be releasing the quake3 source code under the GPL shortly. This had been expected earlier this year, but had been pushed back to accommodate a recent liscencee of the code who's game had not yet made it to market. I wonder if the return to castle wolfenstein engine is signficantly different than the q3 engine. If not, perhaps those people who refuse to "support closed source software" by playing free binary only games, will have an opportunity to enjoy enemy fortress!
Of course, there is also the concern over cheating made simple with open source. The strongest protection q3 has at the moment isn't PunkBuster, but the fact that there's bigger targets to go after, like Halflife2 and Doom3. Some people are even of the opinion that when iD releases the code, it destroys what remaining community these games had by inviting cheaters to rampage amongst the servers. Personally, I think that this is a failing of the server design. If a player is being excessively disruptive, there should be a social mechanism in place via the server to manage, arbitrate and facilitate the curtailing of that disruptive player, either by kick\bans or other means of punishment. This is probably one of the most important aspects of multiplayer gaming that has gone unsolved, but not for a lack of trying.
Justin Dugger.
On 8/5/05, Josh Charles josh.charles@gmail.com wrote:
I haven't been much of a gamer, but I recently purchased Allied Assault and have become quite addicted to it. I was amazed to find that there are completely open source FPS out there, though from what I understand, the quality isn't up to current proprietary standards.
From what I can see of the movies, though, the gameplay isn't too bad.
Here are some links to check out if you are interested:
http://www.nexuiz.com/ - a FPS http://www.planeshift.it/ - More of a RPG than a FPS, but looks neat.
Enjoy! Josh _______________________________________________ Kclug mailing list Kclug@kclug.org http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug
--- Justin Dugger wrote:
Of course, there is also the concern over cheating made simple with open source. ... Personally, I think that this is a failing of the server design. If a player is being excessively disruptive, there should be a social mechanism in place via the server to manage, arbitrate and facilitate the curtailing of that disruptive player, either by kick\bans or other means of punishment. This is probably one of the most important aspects of multiplayer gaming that has gone unsolved, but not for a lack of trying.
Not being a gamer [for health reasons. ;')], I don't know all the issues here, but it seems to me it should be fairly easy to deal with the cheaters. Of course it really does seem to depend on handling it at the servers. It seems that some fairly decent coders could write a routine to detect the cheaters and either ban them or strip their powers and points. Alternatively, it should also be possible for some decent coders to write a plug-in for users to download andinstall that could detect cheaters and take some action based on that, by any or all of: posting to everyone in the game the "identity" of the cheater, cheating back against the cheater, using some force to terminate the cheater from the game, intercept the cheats and reverse them, etc. Now like I said I'm not a gamer but it seems some of these things should work, or I may just be uninformed to how it all works. I'm assuming all the servers are owned by the game vendors and thus out of the control of the players? It seems to me that this would be a good use for p2p to build rogue servers, with ligitimite clients. Should someone build a server that valdiated legitimite copies of the game software, then there really wouldn't be any angle the vendors could use to sue the servers/clients. I know that someone in St. Louis did build a server for some game, but I don't believe they included verification of clients, which of course just leads judges to believe they are up to something.
just some random thoughts, Brian
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I'll try to describe, briefly, the problems of cheating and cheating regulations. First, the hacks themselves. These include aimbots, that automatically aim at your enemies and kill them, even capable of judging the trajectory of a grenade. You've also got screenhacks, that let you see through walls. These two combine nicely in games where walls are sometimes bullet-permeable. As an amusing example of early internet technology, someone made a proxy between the client playing the game and the server, that altered packets to correct a person's aim. These days packets are well encrypted. There's also hacks that let you move faster than should be possible, either through strafe running (generally considered okay) or bunny-hopping (usually requires a script and looks highly unnatural but allows you to move wicked fast).
So now that we know about screenhacks, aimbots, and bunny-hoppers, I can tell you how these are currently combatted. In the case of bunny-hoppers, you are correct in that the server should be able to prevent that. Counter-Strike I believe finally removed that stupid hack. On the other hand, aimbots don't do anything extraordinary or out of the range of the possible. Screenhacks don't even do anything but reveal the extra information you've been given by the server. It's very difficult to combat aimbots and screenhacks. The most popular option is a program called PunkBuster. This program basically scans the player's computer for known cheats and hacks, and reports unusual results back to a central repository. Generally, when you get detected, you'll be kicked. I think that the BF2 version will actually ban your userid on all rated servers, which acts as a nuclear type deterrant. Usually server software is free to the public, and anyone can run one, even a rated one. The company behind BF2 actively rents servers. There are also "meta servers", which act as a directory of public servers, and as a form of identification and validation for individual users. Steam, the software behind Halflife, requires you to be authenticated by a metaserver before it will allow you onto any server to play.
The problem with punkbuster and its friends is that it requires you to run as admin, in order to let it examine all other programs running in detail. Furthermore, sometimes PB and antivirus software fight. Usually you get false positives for hacks by running norton or something. Furthermore, punkbuster actively fights many of the ideas of open source. By altering the software, you'll trigger a punkbuster alert.
The safest solution is to do all processing server side, but you'll have incredible amounts of video streaming for 32 players, which is both processor and network intensive. A safer solution is to do some form of check to send out only information that the player could observe, but that adds CPU overhead and should result in wierd pop in because of lag. It may be that twitch games are simply doomed in an open source environment.
Justin Dugger
On 8/13/05, Jack quiet_celt@yahoo.com wrote:
--- Justin Dugger wrote:
Of course, there is also the concern over cheating made simple with open source. ... Personally, I think that this is a failing of the server design. If a player is being excessively disruptive, there should be a social mechanism in place via the server to manage, arbitrate and facilitate the curtailing of that disruptive player, either by kick\bans or other means of punishment. This is probably one of the most important aspects of multiplayer gaming that has gone unsolved, but not for a lack of trying.
Not being a gamer [for health reasons. ;')], I don't know all the issues here, but it seems to me it should be fairly easy to deal with the cheaters. Of course it really does seem to depend on handling it at the servers. It seems that some fairly decent coders could write a routine to detect the cheaters and either ban them or strip their powers and points. Alternatively, it should also be possible for some decent coders to write a plug-in for users to download andinstall that could detect cheaters and take some action based on that, by any or all of: posting to everyone in the game the "identity" of the cheater, cheating back against the cheater, using some force to terminate the cheater from the game, intercept the cheats and reverse them, etc. Now like I said I'm not a gamer but it seems some of these things should work, or I may just be uninformed to how it all works. I'm assuming all the servers are owned by the game vendors and thus out of the control of the players? It seems to me that this would be a good use for p2p to build rogue servers, with ligitimite clients. Should someone build a server that valdiated legitimite copies of the game software, then there really wouldn't be any angle the vendors could use to sue the servers/clients. I know that someone in St. Louis did build a server for some game, but I don't believe they included verification of clients, which of course just leads judges to believe they are up to something.
just some random thoughts, Brian
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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.
There is an old adage that goes something like, "Locks just keep the honest people honest."
More comments inline ...
On Sun, 14 Aug 2005, Justin Dugger wrote:
The problem with punkbuster and its friends is that it requires you to run as admin, in order to let it examine all other programs running in detail. Furthermore, sometimes PB and antivirus software fight. Usually you get false positives for hacks by running norton or something. Furthermore, punkbuster actively fights many of the ideas of open source. By altering the software, you'll trigger a punkbuster alert.
I am curious about what ideas of open source that software like punkbuster could be considered to be actively fighting against.
The safest solution is to do all processing server side, but you'll have incredible amounts of video streaming for 32 players, which is both processor and network intensive.
If you stream the video you could consider this to be an issue. If you stream a scene description it wouldn't be too bad, but it would cause other issues ...
A safer solution is to do some form of check to send out only information that the player could observe, but that adds CPU overhead and should result in wierd pop in because of lag. It may be that twitch games are simply doomed in an open source environment.
Unfortunately, the clients need extra information to do movement prediction in cases of higher lag. Thinking about this ... It very well could be that easily accessible high bandwidth connections might just save open source "twitch" games from your doomsday prediction.
I am curious about what ideas of open source that software like punkbuster could be considered to be actively fighting against.
The GNU software sets forth a couple of simple rights of what I like to call Liberated Software (avoids that whole free beer concept). You should be free to use the software for any purpose. You should be free to modify code. There's more, but those are the two might become sticklers.
Social software is different from regular software in that the majority of the value is in the social structure it interacts with and builds. Integrating punkbuster into your software says to its users "please do not change the software." People don't even have the source, and they're changing it! Essentailly, the way I interpret it, the GNU principals must allow cheating through software modification. Any use includes cheating. I'm not a cheater, I don't like being cheated against. But the conflicting desires need be resolved somehow.
Now, there is a counter-argument. It goes like this: people are still free to play open source games, and free to change them, they just can't play on my server. If you want to cheat, start your own server. But I think HomeLAN proved just how cheaters feel about being sandboxed. Moderated game server saw far more cheating than their Servers for Cheaters.
Another solution I've long considered is a matching service. Just match players in terms of skill. Cheaters, non-cheaters, it doesn't matter. In a way, you might consider it a handicap. Cheaters ruin the game by being significantly better than their opponents, right? Their unfair advantage significantly changes the otherwise fair outcome of the game. What should end up happening is that cheaters play themselves (and perhaps amusingly accuse each other), with a certain amount of simply excellent players getting a most excruciating challenge. Of course, this requires the active tracking and rationing of identities, which probably cannot be done without a fee. The fee being the best way to moderate people from creating new accounts as workaround bans, and also serving to pay other needs.
Justin Dugger
On Sun, 14 Aug 2005, Justin Dugger wrote:
I am curious about what ideas of open source that software like punkbuster could be considered to be actively fighting against.
The GNU software sets forth a couple of simple rights of what I like to call Liberated Software (avoids that whole free beer concept). You should be free to use the software for any purpose. You should be free to modify code. There's more, but those are the two might become sticklers.
Well, you are still "at liberty" to modify the game code all you want. You are still "at liberty" to use the software for any purpose. The issue at hand is whether the license guarantees that you should be able to play nice with other people after you modify the code. If you are working on a word processor and you discover a bug in a certain file format and choose to "fix" the bug in your software - in no way are other word editors obliged to fix the same bug if they want to be compatible with each other. If you want to write a plug-in for X program and refuse to follow the standards set forth to write the said plug-in ... should the developers of X program guarantee that your plug-in will work?
I could come up with more examples if you would like, but I think you probably see where I am going with this ...
On 8/14/05, Justin Dugger jldugger@gmail.com wrote:
Another solution I've long considered is a matching service. Just match players in terms of skill. Cheaters, non-cheaters, it doesn't matter. In a way, you might consider it a handicap. Cheaters ruin the game by being significantly better than their opponents, right? Their unfair advantage significantly changes the otherwise fair outcome of the game. What should end up happening is that cheaters play themselves (and perhaps amusingly accuse each other), with a certain amount of simply excellent players getting a most excruciating challenge. Of course, this requires the active tracking and rationing of identities, which probably cannot be done without a fee. The fee being the best way to moderate people from creating new accounts as workaround bans, and also serving to pay other needs.
Justin Dugger
The IGS (Internet Go Server) runs a rating and ranking service, and there is an open protocol for clients. Go is not solved, and IGS is practice for meatspace games. If I create an IGS identity that serves GnuGO running on a powerful cluster, that IGS identity might get a pretty good rank, but it won't help me at the go board.
I have consistently toyed with the idea of creating an IGS client that is tightly integrated with some software to alert me to dangers and situations that I can't clearly see on the Go board, but I haven't done it yet. When I finally get around to it, my IGS rating would improve, while using my crutch.
Rating and ranking systems do not require fees. I don't know how the combinatorics of rating and ranking would work in a group endeavor. Certainly the task will be more complex than the vast set of who won between the two players that IGS uses. Perhaps a system of peer ratings would make sense, or simply who shot who could be plugged into the IGS algorithm, and players with equivalent skill levels would be placed in the same arenas, with whatever customizations they bring.
I'm actually startled to hear that this isn't being done already, since the IGS algorithm approach
http://www.pandanet.co.jp/English/commands/term/TOC.html
has been well-documented for years. Without handicaps, rating who-shot-who would be simpler. Please forward that link to people running big FPS servers if they aren't aware of it.
An automated rating system would level the playing field, if the problem is that cheaters have an advantage and spoil the fun for the non-cheaters.
On another related note, iD Software has released the source code to quake 3. The download comes in at 5 megabytes of zipped source! I'd imagine the first hack will be ASCII q3a.
Justin Dugger
On 8/5/05, Josh Charles josh.charles@gmail.com wrote:
I haven't been much of a gamer, but I recently purchased Allied Assault and have become quite addicted to it. I was amazed to find that there are completely open source FPS out there, though from what I understand, the quality isn't up to current proprietary standards.
From what I can see of the movies, though, the gameplay isn't too bad.
Here are some links to check out if you are interested:
http://www.nexuiz.com/ - a FPS http://www.planeshift.it/ - More of a RPG than a FPS, but looks neat.
Enjoy! Josh _______________________________________________ Kclug mailing list Kclug@kclug.org http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug
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Justin Dugger