Re: Free Gaming (was: Re: [ox-en] muddev)
- From: Chris Croome <chris croome.net>
- Date: Sun, 9 Feb 2003 18:04:07 +0000
Hi
I don't know much about Counter Strike because it won't run on
Linux, however I do know quite a lot about FPS's (First Person
Shooters, games where you run around from a first person perspective
shooting other people and / or bots) that run on Linux :-)
The game that will go down in history as being the iconic game of
this genre is Doom and Doom II from id Software [1]. Two of the main
developers were John Carmack and John Romero, Romero's Doom site [2]
is a good place to find out more of the history of the game. Not
long after the game came out people started creating their own
levels (.wad files) and used the internet to distribute them.
I could go on at length... but to cut a long story short John
Carmack has been making id Software's games available for Linux (see
the FTP site [3]) and has also adopted a strategy of GPLing the game
engines a few years after they came out, and this means that people
can continue to develop the code:
PrBoom -- Doom code
http://prboom.sourceforge.net/
Quake and Quake2
http://quakeforge.net/
The 3D models, music and textures all remain non-free, but there are
many free levels and also total-conversions that are free.
Personally the only game I've played much over the last few months
is the Urbanterror Quake3 total conversion [4] and although there is
no license info on their site (as far as I recall) the code is
basically public domain -- a lot of different people have worked on
the code for nothing. Sometime next year the Quake3 engine will be
GPLed and then the Urbanterror folks could distribute a complete
working game.
On Sat 08-Feb-2003 at 12:44:04PM [PHONE NUMBER REMOVED], Stefan Merten wrote:
I understand that in a game like Counter-Strike or MUDs it is not
possible to publish the source code without making the whole thing
useless. This type of information I'm calling a secret. IMHO
secrets are an interesting challenge to the whole concept of Open
Information. At least we need to think about it.
Yes there is an issue here, and it has been discussed several times
on slashdot, basically the problem is for net games it's virtually
impossible to stop people cheating.
Feel free to ask questions about all this stuff -- there is a load
more I could say... :-)
Chris
[1] http://www.idsoftware.com/
[2] http://www.rome.ro/games_doom.htm
[3] ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/
[4] http://urbanterror.net/
--
http://chris.croome.net/
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