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All the decent games out there are proprietary.

Aw, hustle on over to http://www.timecity.org/ and check out the progress on Time City! Heck, Slashdot's own loveable Emmett Plant is in on this one, even.

(I have to confess that the gameplay seems a bit over-convoluted to me, with this "time dilation" business — but then, if you don't like something you can use the code to roll your own system, right? Open Source Software, you know?)

Technically, the argument boils down to the issue of reverse engineering.
And still, judges don't really understand this. If a car manufacturer A can take apart say, a competitor B's carburettor, they can reverse engineer it. There's nothing preventing them doing this, in reality, and no judge would hold this case up. Because there are _manufacturing_ considerations to making the carburettor. Exactly the same applies with software- you can see what it does, but you must still figure out how to "make" (pun intended :) it.

Ideologically, the argument challenges the ideals of free speech, freedom of information, and the ability to innovate on behalf of computer users, hardware engineers and software developers all over the planet.
Hmm, think you're pushing it a bit there about the whole planet. The USA is mostly a nice place, but there are other continents

...without lawyers heading innovators off at the pass."
Sadly, this is my impression of corporate America these days. If you can't win by market forces, crush them with your legal team.

There are a lot of sites that are mirroring [the code], and they'll keep the program alive. I'll sleep easy at night knowing I did my part."
Yep. And when one gets hit with the Cease & Desist, another will take it's place. I really hope this goes high profile. Once corporations get the message that when it comes to the net, winning in court is not absolute, then they may consider their legal actions more carefully. And I find it heartening (hey, I'm British, I always root for the underdog! :) that the "underground" can fight back in this manner - corporate pigs may win the battle, but who is winning the war?

Another interesting point of this case is that anyone who linked to a site that contained the information is also being held liable in the case.
That scares the piss out of me. Where does it end? Say if I link to a site that links to a site with the contentious code, am I liable? Reminds me of a rhyme I was taught as a kid - "Big fleas have little fleas upon their back to bite them, little fleas have tiny fleas, and so ad infinitum...". Surely a judge somewhere _must_ realise the complete and utter stupidity of this... I think it's a plot by the lawyers... If they can sue everybody on the net, then everybody requires a lawyer... :(

Maybe the soothsayers are right... Maybe this is the armageddon coming for Y2K. A poor decision by the judge here could badly hurt the whole internet...

By the way, if you're wondering who this Emmett Plant bloke is (I doubt he's related to Egg Plant, but I bet he's heard that before... :), I think this may be the chap here...... If it isn't, my apologies... Would the real Emmett Plant stand up...

I'm affrde a lot of people are responding with the same old answers.
The fact is on-line games like Quake are VERY sensitive to cheating. The client is trusted with "to much information" it's nessisary becouse the server can not deliver all nessisary information on time. Instead the server delivers information the client MIGHT need.
Time City preposes to solve this problem by building the client/server pacage ground up with an auditing system. All Quake servers and clients were built ground up on a trust system. To change this would require a compleate rewrite.
The problem is Quake expects the client to be 100% reliable and trustworthy. Now that the client is open sourced this is no longer the case. Just as you can close security holes in open source you can open them.
Thies defects have been known for quite some time and could NOT be addressed. Eventually some punk would make a cheat clinet based on the server code (allready open) not the client code and we'd be in the same position. But it would have been sevral years from now and by then Quake would not be that iteresting.

Many open sourced multiplayer games suffer exactly the same problem. They solve it with a closed sorce solution. Trusted clients are compiled by the games develupers and given encryption keys. If your client has a valid key you can play if not you may have compiled it yourself and could be running a cheat client.
So the source is only there to fix the bugs and improve the game but to accually use it you have to return the code to the develupers and let them compile it.
Or you can fork the code and make your own keys.. But then only the servers recognising your keys/code could be used by your fork.

Time citys solution is unqiue and time will tell if the game server will effectively detect cheating or if people will be able to make cheat clients using the open source code.

The way it was explained to me BTW is that if the server detects someone cheating he will be dropped form the server.. It dose this by mesuring to make shure the user really really really could do what he says he's doing and if not.. disconnect...

Some of the cheats in a Quake client rely heavy on the fact that Quake clients MUST have data on ALL players at ALL times. Raidar and transparent walls are the result. The client is trusted to do "the right thing" with the data. A cheat need only take advantage of this...
If Quake did not yeald as much information as it dose it wouldn't be so easy to cheat... but that would take a compleate rewrite of the client server interface....

I'm affrde a lot of people are responding with the same old answers.
The fact is on-line games like Quake are VERY sensitive to cheating. The client is trusted with "to much information" it's nessisary becouse the server can not deliver all nessisary information on time. Instead the server delivers information the client MIGHT need.
Time City preposes to solve this problem by building the client/server pacage ground up with an auditing system. All Quake servers and clients were built ground up on a trust system. To change this would require a compleate rewrite.
The problem is Quake expects the client to be 100% reliable and trustworthy. Now that the client is open sourced this is no longer the case. Just as you can close security holes in open source you can open them.
Thies defects have been known for quite some time and could NOT be addressed. Eventually some punk would make a cheat clinet based on the server code (allready open) not the client code and we'd be in the same position. But it would have been sevral years from now and by then Quake would not be that iteresting.

Many open sourced multiplayer games suffer exactly the same problem. They solve it with a closed sorce solution. Trusted clients are compiled by the games develupers and given encryption keys. If your client has a valid key you can play if not you may have compiled it yourself and could be running a cheat client.
So the source is only there to fix the bugs and improve the game but to accually use it you have to return the code to the develupers and let them compile it.
Or you can fork the code and make your own keys.. But then only the servers recognising your keys/code could be used by your fork.

Time citys solution is unqiue and time will tell if the game server will effectively detect cheating or if people will be able to make cheat clients using the open source code.

The way it was explained to me BTW is that if the server detects someone cheating he will be dropped form the server.. It dose this by mesuring to make shure the user really really really could do what he says he's doing and if not.. disconnect...

Some of the cheats in a Quake client rely heavy on the fact that Quake clients MUST have data on ALL players at ALL times. Raidar and transparent walls are the result. The client is trusted to do "the right thing" with the data. A cheat need only take advantage of this...
If Quake did not yeald as much information as it dose it wouldn't be so easy to cheat... but that would take a compleate rewrite of the client server interface....

Uh, there are several Free (as in GPLed) game projects going on right now.

WorldForge - Massively Multiplayer RPGs ala Ultima Online. They've published a proof of concept demo and are working towards a playable Game.

TimeCity - not one of my personal favorites of an idea, but they seem to have something going. Just recently published some network code.

Tux: A Quest for Herring - 3D game ala Mario 64 or Gex. Has a couple of playable levels.

Crystal Space - Ok, not a game, but a LGPLed 3d game engine.

And that's just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are several Free (as in GPL) projects out there that are just waiting for you to come running. :)

From the premise on their story page, this has potential to be one weird game.

You probably expect me to say something about causing major historical changes. You're waiting for me
to tell you not to touch anything, talk to anyone, or break anything. Balderdash! Just the opposite. We
want you to attempt to cause rifts in the timestream by any means necessary. Kill whomever you want.
Blow up a building if you can. It's only by testing our technology (and the universe) to it's limits that we
will learn from this experiment. Keep in mind that other historians receive the same advice; it will be just
as important to defend yourself against them, as well as the Chronopolian natives. Since we're a
scientific expedition, we're not licensed to issue weapons of any sort. You will need to find them yourself.

If this means that the game will actually try to keep track of events that happen at different times, and the way they affect each other... Well, it's hard to imagine how they'll manage it, but it could really be something. The problem is, since we can't really time-travel, how would it resolve cases like, "I think I'll beam a BFG-9000 back to the room where I had that fight last week. Then I wouldn't have gotten killed, so I would be able to do it."

They do seem to imply that that's the sort of thing they want to make possible, but it could get ridiculous, like that scene in "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure" -- "After I win, I'll go back and put a gun here that I can use to kill you (and win)." "Oh yeah? Well, after we win, we'll go back and make sure your gun isn't loaded, so we'll win." ...

It'll have to have some way of resolving these things: you can't have something you do take effect before the subjective time that you decide to do it, and even then it needs some way to be sure that you actually will do it before it can take effect.

This is all probably way beyond what it'll actually be, but it looks like they are going for some way of having actions and events affect each other non-sequentially. Maybe like forcing a rematch if you change the circumstances of a previous fight, and cascading the effects if the outcome is different. I hope they can pull it off.

That Crystal Space thing looks pretty interesting, too. I hadn't heard of it before. My #@%*% modem just hung up at 90% on the download, so I won't be trying it out for another few hours, though. (Why can't Netscape continue interrupted downloads instead of starting over? It does so occasionally, but it seems to decide pretty much randomly. I know, I know, read the source and fix it, right?)

David Gould

• Alpha 1 by end of August
• Beta 1 by End of January
• Release one year from now!