Slashdot Mirror

There's another article that sounds similar about is written by Peter Lincroft entitled The Internet Sucks: Or, What I Learned Coding X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter back when multiplayer games were not plentiful.

It's interesting reading, including "Lesson four: UDP is better than TCP, but it still sucks" and "Lesson five: Whenever you think the Internet can't get any worse, it gets worse". It's good stuff.

We realize that all attempts to combat piracy are futile. We put these schemes in place more to frustrate legitimate users than to stop determined people from copying our software.

Actually, they put those measures in place to attempt to delay the distribution of a working warez version for as long as they possibly can. The majority of sales for most games occur in the first couple of months, and then it slows to a trickle. Just because Blizzard tends to move units in considerably more volume and over a longer period of time does not invalidate their desire to profit from their work during the most critical sales period.

Gamasutra has a feature on the copy protection for Spyro the Dragon. It's a good read, but you have to sign up (free) to read it.

This method has been done, only worse. Spyro: Year of the Dragon took months to crack (as in, create a patched execuatable, in this case) because when the system detected a variation on the code it would cause a critcal item to disappear int he game... So you'd be running around looking for the blue key to get through the blue door, and no blue key would exist (or whatever... I've never actually played Spyro... I just know about the copy-protection). If it used a CD-key, a similar circumvention could have been applied, such that the player wouldn't even know that their hack hadn't worked unless they'd played through a real version first... ie. no crash indicating that something had gone wrong.

More information available here.

There's an article on GamaSutra (free registration required) about how to design a game to maximize it's addictiveness. It's not phrased that way of course, but I'd be willing to bet if you made a comparison between the article and EverQuest, you'd have a perfect correlation. I know I discovered that when I compared Diablo 2.

Theoretically you could make a video game as mentally addictive as any drug (and maybe Verant already has?), all you need to do is research the psychology.

Remember, Louis Woo was the only man to ever quit the wire...

we could learn a lot if a good journalist asked the folks on successful projects what went right, what went worng, and what lessons were learned.

The website Gamasutra has an archive of what they call "Postmortems", which detail exactly the sorts of things you're on about.

These include Unreal Tournament, Black and White and, interestingly, Warren Spector's postmortem of Deus Ex, which alludes to some of the goings on between Dallas and Austin.

Alistair Baxter, programmer, Rage Games Scotland (too lazy to create a profile)

> the damn game developers [ensemblestudios.com] or Microsoft, I don't know which one

Ensemble Studios are the game developers. Microsoft is the publisher

> do some sort of a check on the size of your dat files which holds game data during game play, i.e. like 10000 gold, 20000 food, 10000 stone etc etc, and if your file size is greater, it is what is called a "Sync Error" ...

Everyone has to be using the same networking code (i.e. game version)
One person out of sync means the game is in unknown game state, which is bad for peer-2-peer gaming.

One of the programmers who worked on Age of Kings wrote up this interesting article on hacking/cheating:

How to Hurt the Hackers The Scoop on Internet Cheating and How You Can Combat It [07.24.00]

Cheers

Fortunately, the GameCube seems to be cracking this stigma a little. Too bad I can't get it on the net yet.

It's not so much the Gamecube that's "cracking the stigma", as Sega. Chu Chu Rocket, Jet Set Radio, Super Monkey Ball, etc. All Sega games. I'm assuming that you're referring to Super Monkey Ball, and possibly Pikmin, when referring to the GameCube breaking the trend, but look at Rogue Leader (hey, it's a sequel to Rogue Squadron!), Wave Race: whatever it's called (look! sequel to Wave Race on the N64), and Super Smash Bros. Melee (look! sequel to Super Smash Bros.!). The Gamecube is just as "me-too" as any other platform. It's the game developers that have to make the difference. Thankfully, Sega is playing all the consoles (Super Monkey Ball on the GameCube, Chu Chu Rocket and Sonic on the GameBoy Advanced, Shemue II and Jet Set Radio: Grind on the XBox, and I don't remember what they're bringing to the PS2, besides things like the Crazy Taxi series (was that Sega?)).

I miss the days of 'Garage Developers' creating shareware games on BBS's.

Check out Garage Games. If the next John Carmack (mmm ... Commander Keen) is going to be found anywhere, it's highly likely it'll be there. Sure, you can license the Tribes 2 engine (or V12, now the "Torque Game Engine", as it's not completely the T2 engine) for cheap, but there are plenty of other engines, or you can write your own. Also, check out places like FlipCode, GameDev, and GamaSutra (probably need a free registration to read most of the interesting things) to see what's going on in the world of amatuer graphics and games development (the first two more than the third, as gamasutra seems aimed more towards the game development professional). There's some crazy stuff going on, and lots of great little games that you'll never see elsewhere (the games, that is, not always the concepts. You'll see a lot of tetris clones, defender clones, whatever. but every now and then a completely off-the-wall concept shows up).

The psychology that motivates gamers has been thoroughly studied, as basically the more addicitive a game is, the more successful it is. Gamasutra has an a related article on Behavioral Game Design which is a high level overview of how to think in order to effectively lure in your audience.

I've wasted a good half a year on an old school text based MUD, and as such stay completely away from EverCrack et al. as I just can't afford to devote my time to virtual characters.

A quote from Gamastra.com :
"Square's CEO Quits after Poor Showing by Final Fantasy Game software maker Square announced that president and chief executive officer, Hisashi Suzuki would resign after the company reported its worst-ever loss for the first half due to a disappointing showing by its Final Fantasy The Spirits Within mo Square reported a group net loss of $106.8 million for the six months through September 30. The film has generated revenue of about $30 million in the U.S. market, well below the targeted $80 to 90 million, and interest among Japanese consumers has also been weak. The earnings news came as no surprise to the market as the company issued a profit warning last week.
Chief operating officer Yoichi Wada will take the top position on December 1, while Suzuki will remain as the chairman."
from this page.
It's sad to see that people who worked so hard on something that was quite something technically have not succeeded, at least financially.

There is nothing colossally more wrong with being able to patent software than there is with patenting hardware.

There's a huge difference between software innovation and hardware innovation. Software innovation is sequential and complementary. Software development is not a zero sum game. Developers have always used the work of others to build, improve and enhance functionality. In the open source and Free Software worlds, this works through availability of source and the distribution licenses. In the commercial worlds, it works through user groups, conferences and special interest Web sites (like this one) where people can share ideas and code.

If I make a living by it why should I spend time developing software if I can not protect my self from people ripping me off???

Be my guest. Discover a new algorithm without any access to the work of others (I'd be impressed with that straight away) and then patent it. Oops. Is it too expensive? Darn. It seems only the big companies can afford to patent XORing a bitmap with the background to achieve transparency, something I thought up independently when I was 12. And are they protecting themselves from others ripping off this "innovation". Nope - they use patents for attack, not defence. So smaller developers can't write software even when protected by the patent system.

If a commercial software developer comes up with a clever way of coding something he has a right to patent it like any other inventor.

This is a great idea - in theory. The problem is that there are no "clever ways of coding something" which don't boil down to techniques which have been used for years: linked lists, hash tables, look up tables, mathematical operations, bitwise operations and basic algorithms used on basic data structures. It's easy to check this too - pick any software patent held by say IBM, get it translated into English or pseudocode and it will be a trivial operation. Guaranteed.

Open source organizations will have to live with the fact that if some technology is patented by a commercial organization they can not use it free of charge and without permission.

Do you mean technology or software specifically? If software, then commercial organisations should not be using free or open source software at all. Come to think of it, they shouldn't be using the Internet either.

Pay up or bugger off that is the rule of the game. What Open source organizations can do is either come up with alternatives and/or they can stop whining about patents and try to beat Commercial organizations at their own game by patenting software them selves.

Software innovation doesn't happen when development is hampered by a mass of patents. In the non-software worlds, the inventor needs to recoup his costs and thus I can see the need for a limited time of protection. But in software, all that happens is those that can afford to hold patents use them as a weapon against those that can't. And very few true innovations happen in large patent-holding companies. It's the garage operations, the one or two guys in their back rooms who come up with new stuff all the time.
And why should non-US programmers pay license fees to someone like IBM in the US? What gives them the right to tell me whether I can or can't write software in a country 10 000 miles away?

Matt Pritchard on Cheating is a good article about cheating and it relates to copy protection, etc.

Section #4 ...

"The hackers have access to the same tools that you had while making the game. They have the compilers, dissemblers, debuggers, and utilities that you have, and a few that you don't. And they are smart people - they are probably more familiar with the Assembly output of an optimized C++ file than you are."

I've seen warez rips where the whole package format for the game has been changed, a CD or two of content removed, and bugs fixed. All with only the binaries. I doubt many people here could do that... trace through the object code well enough to make large-scale changes in the program.

I've also seen very clever protection removed from games, where subtle checks take place in the middle of the game and patch the game to crash at a later time, if the check failed.

It is easier to break than to protect, but that's usually because you have unlimited tries when breaking and only one chance to get it right when protecting.

Gamasutra had a couple of articles on the subject of (real-time) procedural formation of planetary bodies. (Free login required.)

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010302/oneil_0 1.htm
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010810/oneil_0 1.htm

There is a nifty demo available for download. The same code is used in the glElite project.

Gamasutra had a couple of articles on the subject of (real-time) procedural formation of planetary bodies. (Free login required.)

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010302/oneil_0 1.htm
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010810/oneil_0 1.htm

There is a nifty demo available for download. The same code is used in the glElite project.

hgh

Regarding thedisplay of emotions, see this article. Here's a quote:

Emotions and the Face

Research has shown that people recognize six universal emotions: sadness, anger, joy, fear, disgust, and surprise. There are other expressions that we have that are more ambiguous. If you mix the above expressions together, people offer differing opinions on what they suggest. Also, physical states such as pain, sleepiness, passion, and physical exertion tend to be harder to recognize. So if you wish to make sure that the emotion you are trying to portray is recognized, you must rely on the overall attitude or animation of the character. Shyness, for example, is created with a slight smile and downcast eyes. But this could be misinterpreted as embarrassed or self-satisfied.

Emotions are closely linked to each other. Worry is a less intense form of fear, disdain is a mild version of disgust, and sternness is a mild version of anger. Basically blending the six universal emotions or using lesser versions of the full emotions gives us all the nuances of the human face.

Emotions and the System

Creating the emotions on your base skeleton is the next step. Which emotions should the system incorporate? We use the six universal emotions, some physical emotions, a phoneme set and a whole load of facial and head movements. The system inside Maya runs off the back of three locators. Each locator controls a different set of Set Driven Keys. A locator in Maya is a Null object that can have attributes added.

The first locator controls expressions. Each of the following is an attribute on the locator: sadness, anger, joy, fear, disgust, surprise, shock, perplexed, asleep, pain, exertion, and shout. Each attribute has a value which ranges from 0 to 10.

The skeleton is set to a neutral pose which is keyed at zero on all the emotion attributes. Then the joints are scaled, rotated, and translated into an expression, for example, "sad." Using Maya's Set Driven Key, this position is keyed onto a value of 5 on the sadness attribute. Then at a value of 10, "crying open mouthed" is keyed, giving us a full emotional range for sadness. Now the face is set up so that Maya can blend from a "neutral" pose to one of "sad" and then continue on to "crying."

For each emotion attribute, several different keys are assigned as above. This gives the character a full range of human emotions. These emotion attributes can then be mixed together to achieve subtle effects.

A mixture of joy and sadness produces a sad smile, while anger and joy produce a wicked grin. The process is additive, which means that mixing emotions over certain values starts to pull the face apart. A good rule of thumb is never to let the total of the attributes exceed the maximum attribute value. As we have keyed ours between 0 and 10, we try never to exceed 10. If you mix three emotion attributes together and they have equal values then each cannot exceed 3.3. There are attributes that can be mixed at greater levels, but trial and error is a great way of finding out which you can mix and which you can't.

The Playstation II game "Star Wars Starfighter" was developed using a Playstation II version of OpenGL. It looks, from reading the 'postmortem' on Gamasutra that this decision was made when the game was initially being developed for the PC, and that the change allowed the code to be migrated to the PS2 with relative ease.

Maybe the 'saviour' of OpenGL as a games-level API lies in allowing similat (I know about card-specific bits..) code to be used on all main games platforms, Windows, PS2, XBox, and so on?

We've only had professional game developers for at least 10+ years :)

It reminds of the Journal of MUD Research now Journal of Virtual Environments ( http://www.pennmush.org/~jomr/ )

Maybe we'll see more well written articles like the clasic Bartle's "HEARTS, CLUBS, DIAMONDS, SPADES: PLAYERS WHO SUIT MUDS" ( http://www.pennmush.org/~jomr/v1n1/bartle.html )

Of course we've had Gamasutra hosting articles by Ernest Adams.
i.e. http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010521/adams_0 1.htm

There's always been gamasutra. The site covers everything from sophisticated graphics techniques to editorials on the gaming culture. There is also a pretty good forum and other useful areas.

> I challenge you to identify a single FPS made in the last three years that has been hugely successful (financially - I don't really care whether you liked it or not) without multi-player capability.

Thief (it's successful enough that they are doing the 3rd version :) and Max Payne (which just went gold. It has enough "cool" elements that it will be BIG.)

> But when it comes to running around with a first-person viewpoint and shooting the crap out of people -- AI sucks.
I wholeheartly agree. The "ultimate" AI is/are people. CTF bots are probably the best examples of this. "Simple" rules for CTF, but bots suck @$$.

> That's why I was so disappointed that it took them a freakin' year to add multi-player support. That indicated to me that they hadn't even thought multi-player through until after the game was released...

If you read the post-mortum article in Game Developers (online at Gamasutra ), it says: "We wanted to provide multiplayer support but didn't have the time to do the job we knew we needed to do, and so it got cut."

If you knew Warren Spector, he's a bit of "perfectionist." He's not one to just "add X into the game" if he feels it's not working. Multiplayer is NOT something you jsut "drop" into a game. Gameplay must be designed / changed to accomodate it. Witness all the "balancing" Unreal went through on it's transition to UT. Same with Q3 & Q3A. Secondly, shipping a game ON SCHEDULE is more important then "wish-list features".

As a game developer, I can tell you, that when a game is designed, multiplayer is not just some checklist on the list of feature, but usually thought more in terms "does multiplayer even 'work' in the confines of the game rules. e.g. Does the meta-game support multiplayer?" (Usually the publisher is the one thinking: add multiplayer so we can get more $ale$ )

> and in this day and age, that (in my mind) is unconscionable.

Obviously multiplayer support is important to a LOT of players (FPS crowd), but you have to stop jumping to the conclusion that "FPS w/o multiplayer = sucks & won't sell." (We have Deus Ex and Thief as examples)

Let me expand what I mean.

There are elements of a single-player game that just CAN'T be experienced multiplayer.

For one thing, in a single player game, the control of time. i.e. Something as basic as savegames, and pausing.

Also in single player games, the game designer has better control of the plot/story, and can immerse the player in it, MUCH better then any multiplayer version.
e.g. *You* can be the hero. Having N "heros" running around, is a b!tch to design and give everyong a rewarding experience. This is currently one of the "unsolved" problems of massive gaming.

Deus Ex is partly an RPG. Multiplayer isn't a "perfect" fit like the Deathmatch-only designed games (Q3/UT) and hence it doesn't "loose" much w/o multiplayer.

I mentioned Max Payne at the top, and the developers are basically saying the same thing.
e.g. The Max Payne interview

I think you need to look at ALL the evidence: Where have games been, what is being made, what "problems" do FPS still have, etc, and you'll come to the conclusion:

Single-player FPS's are NOT dead.

Cheers

If you want to learn OpenGL, your next stop should be NeHe's tutorials on Gamedev.Net.

http://nehe.gamedev.net/

GameDev itself is helpful...

http://www.gamedev.net/

As is Flipcode...

http://www.flipcode.com/

If you're interested in writing a good game, you should learn from those that came before you. Check them out using emulators from Zophar's Domain...

http://www.zophar.net/

Also, no game developer worth his salt can ignore the virtual treasure trove of information archived at GamaSutra...

http://www.gamasutra.com/

And finally, you'll want some cool free video game tunes to listen to while you code. The two best sites for video game remixes are Bart Klepka's remixes and Remix at Overclocked.org:

http://bart.overclocked.org/
http://remix.overclocked.org/

Go to it. I hope to play your games soon.

• Budgeting and Scheduling
• Go here and punch in "Post Mortem"... they contain a lot of useful info about starting up.
• Creating a Design Doc... there are tonnes more like this there.
• Creating a business plan
• And finally the one you probably really want: Birth of a Game Studio

Ryan T. Sammartino

• Budgeting and Scheduling
• Go here and punch in "Post Mortem"... they contain a lot of useful info about starting up.
• Creating a Design Doc... there are tonnes more like this there.
• Creating a business plan
• And finally the one you probably really want: Birth of a Game Studio

Ryan T. Sammartino

• Budgeting and Scheduling
• Go here and punch in "Post Mortem"... they contain a lot of useful info about starting up.
• Creating a Design Doc... there are tonnes more like this there.
• Creating a business plan
• And finally the one you probably really want: Birth of a Game Studio

Ryan T. Sammartino

• Budgeting and Scheduling
• Go here and punch in "Post Mortem"... they contain a lot of useful info about starting up.
• Creating a Design Doc... there are tonnes more like this there.
• Creating a business plan
• And finally the one you probably really want: Birth of a Game Studio

Ryan T. Sammartino

• Budgeting and Scheduling
• Go here and punch in "Post Mortem"... they contain a lot of useful info about starting up.
• Creating a Design Doc... there are tonnes more like this there.
• Creating a business plan
• And finally the one you probably really want: Birth of a Game Studio

Ryan T. Sammartino

A better solution would be careful game design that thwarts cheaters. For details, please refer to the Slashdot posting titled "Combating Cheating In Online Games". It refers to an article on gamasutra.com titled "How to Hurt the Hackers: The Scoop on Internet Cheating and How You Can Combat It". Please disregard gamasutra's incorrect use of the word "hacker" here.
--

A better solution would be careful game design that thwarts cheaters. For details, please refer to the Slashdot posting titled "Combating Cheating In Online Games". It refers to an article on gamasutra.com titled "How to Hurt the Hackers: The Scoop on Internet Cheating and How You Can Combat It". Please disregard gamasutra's incorrect use of the word "hacker" here.
--

Also, check out the Ask Devs section of Voodoo Extreme. Kevin Levine, Brian Hook, and Tim Sweeney have addressed this topic.

"Meet the Next Game Gods" in PC Gamer 11/00 touches on how some current designers got their start.

On the development side, the consensus seems to be that becoming a game developer involves being serious about it, and not just sitting around thinking about it. Check out GameDev.net for insights from professionals on how to get started.

Look at all the k-rad 3D games that are boring to play. Look at some games that are behind the technology curve that are fun to play (I'll offer up Starcraft and Counter-Strike as a pair of recent examples, I'm sure you can come up with your own).

The skillset that goes into a modern game is enormous. Art (3D modeling, texture art), Music, Game Design & Balance, Programming (3D, Network, UI), etc. You're lucky if you're good at one of these, much less a few of them. Find an area that you are good at and cultivate it, make yourself the best. The companies you mention often have 20-40 people working on a game, you'll have to find your spot on that team.

gamasutra.com is an excellent resource for professional level game development info.

Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos

here

If you're keen on building games, you ought to be hanging out on sites that deal with them, like the Linux Game Development Centre or Gamasutra and such.

• Gamers.com - Not too much info nowadays (they got bit too)
  
• The GIA - Fairly good coverage of major events. Very review and gameplay heavy, rather than industry news.
  
• Gamasutra - Industry news in a simple format, though more finance and 3rd party tools related
  
• FGN Online - Pretty good coverage. It's now an IGN affiliate.
  
• SegaDojo - Fairly good SEGA related coverage
  
• MS Xbox - For the people who can get past the fact that Microsoft might just have a kick ass gaming machine
  
• Final Fantasy Online - For any Final Fantasy freak. The site's down at the moment, though
  
• IGN Games - Coverage of anything and everything in gaming
  
• GameSpot - Okay, so it's GameSpot. At least they publish all their media in downloadable MPEGs
  
• Core Magazine - All the random things that other people don't cover, including interviews and stuff straight from Japan.
  
• US Famitsu - Currently down, with no plans of coming back up, but it's the US branch of the standard gaming press in Japan - Famitsu
  
• Stomped - Lots of coverage of gaming in general, with some focus on FPS.
  
• Blue's News - Blue keeps going, and it's always focused on FPS for the most part.
  
• OMM - And of course, Old Man Murray.
  

I found what is best described as a white-paper about a part of the PS2 architecture: Benefits of A Micro-programmable Graphics Architecture. Seems that you need to write some heavy VLIW assembler to get the most out of it. Fine by me, I love assembler. ;-)

An excellent read, check it out.

An excellent read, check it out.

Beyond its technical minimalism (location shooting only, no added props, no added lighting, hand-held camera only...) the Vow even limits content (no murders, weapons or "genre" films) and prohibits the director even getting credit for the work. Yet, ironically, there are some rules even they forgot to include:

We would live in a better world if these rules were applied universally to both the film and game industries, especially the one about the peanut butter.

Dug this up from my bookmarks because I think some may find it interesting. Essentially Valve focused on making a specific portion as cool as possible, then they moved on, went back and made it as cool as possible again. I think it's a shame this isn't tried out more.

Considering that this is one of the little gems that has done things RIGHT lately, I should hope more people take note of HOW it was done right.

Now, if both the client and the server are GPL'ed it will be that much harder to crack down on the cheaters. The biggest hurdle these folks have right now is that they can't access the code directly and must play a constant game of cat 'n mouse with simple scripting tools.

Pretty much everyone can agree that security through obscurity is not really secure at all. Linux is all open source, but does this mean that cracks run rampant? No, it generally means that is is even easier to take steps to prevent cracking, as long as you think about it the right way.

What an open source client and server does mean is that the developer will have to find ways of securing the game that actually *is* secure. This means a smarter server, clients the don't implicitly trust other clients, data that is verified by the "secure" server, and smarter in RAM encrpytion techniques for game variables.

For more info on security against MMOG cheaters, read the excellent gamasutra.com atricle at: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20000724/pritcha rd_01.htm

You are perfectly correct. There was an excellent article on /. talking about just that. You can find the article here. You seem concerned that this phenomenon will increase if everyone has the source code for both the client and the server. The concept of security through obscurity doesn't work. This situation applies IMHO.

Take a look at IRC. Everyone has access to the specifications. That means that anyone can write a client and a server. Only certain people actually run active servers, but nothing can stop me from writing a client that will take advantage of some poorly written server. In theory, I would then be able to get a * next to my nick (server operator), an @ (channel operator) and who knows what. The trick is that there is a community. Everyone has access to the source => anyone can submit a patch that will prevent me from running my exploit.

This situation applies to all Free client-server models. Apache, Bind, etc. As a system admin, I consider security breakins as you, as a gamer, consider online cheating. The fact of the matter is, I have a huge open source community of developers next to me (I mean an email away) to help me. I can read - modify - distribute patches and do whatever the hell I want with the source.

If someone is caught cheating (and it's not very hard to know who is cheating), someone can patch the server. Since it will bne released under GPL, this someone has to distribute the modifications. Isn't it nice? I think it is.

Trust me, you are better off playing on that type of environment. At least, you know exactly what you are connecting to.

As long as the server is well written, there shouldn't be any issues. You probably remember what happened when Quake went open: since the client was trusted to tell the server when the player had done damage to another player, it was easy to say "I did 999 damage to every player but me. I win."

BUT! that was /not/ a well written server. Quake sacrificed security for performance. Since the Quake server trusts its clients, once the client became open anyone could cheat. A well-written MMORPG can be written to avoid these things. Just look at cheating in DiabloII compared to Diablo.

examples:

Bad Idea: server trusts client to determine wether or not a swing of your sword hits the enemy or not and how much damage it does.
Good Idea: server trusts client to say "I swing at that enemy" and server decides hit and damage.

I know Gamasutra had an article written on preventing cheating (from the designers perspective) which goes over a lot of this.

And besides, the code for most MUDs have been open for ages, and cheating isn't (much) of a problem there, and this is just a mud+pictures.

God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein

well, Infogrames recent purchase of Hasbro Interactive(Hasbro owns Microprose) maybe we can talk them into it

It's funny that you would ask that question right at the same time that i found this link. It's an article (with a reasonably good bibliography) about software engineering and writing good code.

check out his links at the end of the article as well

Here's a nice little story on Gamasutra about how the spec for the X-Box has changed over time.
- Check out the difference in the polygon counts and having to fork out more cash just for a remote to play DVDs.

Setting aside my comments about not being too surprised (give enough users/hackers enough time and a jucy enough target/challenge) - my big questions is this:

What, if anything, will Blizzard do in the form of an 'official response' that acknowledges the cheats and lets the online community know how it will be dealth with?

As fellow slashdotters probably remember, I wrote an article on online cheating last june that was printed in Game Developer and posted to gamasutra.com

I asked people at several companies if they would talk about exploits that had occured in their games. One of those requests went to Blizzard, asking if I could talk about what happened to Diablo 1. Now at that point in time (last spring), the cheats and exploits on Diablo 1 were well known and old news. Yet the response I got back from Blizzard was (this obviously is not the exact quote) "No - we can't talk about anything regarding any cheating on any of our games and if you did say something too specific we'd strongly discourage you as we might get mad". For the record, in the article, I discussed the various cheats in my own games (Age of Empires series) most of all.

Now, this was actually about par for the course - for every developer willing to talk, there were ten that were in public denial mode. And as you might have guessed, it's a peeve of mine. Wishful thinking won't make anything go away and it only can further hurt the honest players.

I do think the climate is shifting, and that users are becoming less tolerant of 'head in the sand' tactics by developers and publishers.

I'm waiting to see what happens next.

I'd ramble on, but I have to leave.

-Matt Pritchard

Ask Slashdot is not legal advice. It is not a substitute for time with a lawyer. It's still a resource. Ditto USENET and any other distributed discussion forum. I sometimes read the forums at vwvortex.com for ideas and help with my car. I still take it to the mechanic.

My advice for the original poster is to be very careful about investing time on a project that is based on a TV show, movie, etc. The game industry refers to this as a license, as in "The Matrix is a hot license"--the right to use Warner Brothers' Matrix trademarks, copyrights, and possibly patents is valuable. Incidentally, some folks are working on a Matrix mod for Half-Life. They are setting a trap for themselves. Warner Brothers can shut them down (or threaten to do so, which is almost as good). Another poster on this topic mentioned that this happened to the Aliens TC for Doom.

Some game companies will develop a game in the hope of securing a license. This is kind of like typecasting a role for a play or a movie. For example, M. Night Shyamalan wrote The Sixth Sense with Bruce Willis in mind. It worked out as he hoped. That was lucky. As an independent working more for love than money, don't count on such luck.

There are some articles at Gamasutra that discuss this topic in more detail. For instance, "Artistic License: Acquiring, Managing and Dealing with Licenses (and Making Them Profitable)" in the Business & Legal features and "Adapting Licensed Products to the Computer Medium." Most of the rules that apply to a game company apply to a mod maker. It doesn't matter that you're not trying to make money. It doesn't matter that you love The Matrix, DragonBallZ, Aliens, etc. The owner of the licensed property will defend his trademark, copyright, and patent rights.

Ask Slashdot is not legal advice. It is not a substitute for time with a lawyer. It's still a resource. Ditto USENET and any other distributed discussion forum. I sometimes read the forums at vwvortex.com for ideas and help with my car. I still take it to the mechanic.

My advice for the original poster is to be very careful about investing time on a project that is based on a TV show, movie, etc. The game industry refers to this as a license, as in "The Matrix is a hot license"--the right to use Warner Brothers' Matrix trademarks, copyrights, and possibly patents is valuable. Incidentally, some folks are working on a Matrix mod for Half-Life. They are setting a trap for themselves. Warner Brothers can shut them down (or threaten to do so, which is almost as good). Another poster on this topic mentioned that this happened to the Aliens TC for Doom.

Some game companies will develop a game in the hope of securing a license. This is kind of like typecasting a role for a play or a movie. For example, M. Night Shyamalan wrote The Sixth Sense with Bruce Willis in mind. It worked out as he hoped. That was lucky. As an independent working more for love than money, don't count on such luck.

There are some articles at Gamasutra that discuss this topic in more detail. For instance, "Artistic License: Acquiring, Managing and Dealing with Licenses (and Making Them Profitable)" in the Business & Legal features and "Adapting Licensed Products to the Computer Medium." Most of the rules that apply to a game company apply to a mod maker. It doesn't matter that you're not trying to make money. It doesn't matter that you love The Matrix, DragonBallZ, Aliens, etc. The owner of the licensed property will defend his trademark, copyright, and patent rights.

Ask Slashdot is not legal advice. It is not a substitute for time with a lawyer. It's still a resource. Ditto USENET and any other distributed discussion forum. I sometimes read the forums at vwvortex.com for ideas and help with my car. I still take it to the mechanic.

My advice for the original poster is to be very careful about investing time on a project that is based on a TV show, movie, etc. The game industry refers to this as a license, as in "The Matrix is a hot license"--the right to use Warner Brothers' Matrix trademarks, copyrights, and possibly patents is valuable. Incidentally, some folks are working on a Matrix mod for Half-Life. They are setting a trap for themselves. Warner Brothers can shut them down (or threaten to do so, which is almost as good). Another poster on this topic mentioned that this happened to the Aliens TC for Doom.

Some game companies will develop a game in the hope of securing a license. This is kind of like typecasting a role for a play or a movie. For example, M. Night Shyamalan wrote The Sixth Sense with Bruce Willis in mind. It worked out as he hoped. That was lucky. As an independent working more for love than money, don't count on such luck.

There are some articles at Gamasutra that discuss this topic in more detail. For instance, "Artistic License: Acquiring, Managing and Dealing with Licenses (and Making Them Profitable)" in the Business & Legal features and "Adapting Licensed Products to the Computer Medium." Most of the rules that apply to a game company apply to a mod maker. It doesn't matter that you're not trying to make money. It doesn't matter that you love The Matrix, DragonBallZ, Aliens, etc. The owner of the licensed property will defend his trademark, copyright, and patent rights.

Danny Hillis (of Connection Machine fame and author of The Pattern on the Stone : The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work) gave a keynote address at this year's Game Developer Conference on this topic. He made a strong case for the idea that computer games (in the broad sense) are now the dominant source of culture and narrative. And that this is probably a good thing. Culture was once participatory and social - e.g., story telling around the camp fire but reading novels, watching theater, opera, TV and movies is passive. Computer entertainment is interactive. It engages. And significant learning is involved.

-ken kahn