Open Source 3D Games

[D. Hageman]

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.

-- 
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||  D. Hageman                    <dhageman at dracken.com>  ||
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