Open Source 3D Games

[David Nicol]

On 8/14/05, Justin Dugger <jldugger at 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.