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Gamespy is a company, and needs to stay profitable, and supporting a customerbase that is costing it more money than it stands to make isnt a good financial move for any company.

Bullshit. Gamespy use to have free versions, and gave the SDK's away so they could lock companies in. Now that they are Bigger, they cant afford to offer the SDKs You always develop the SDK and give it away for free, you make your money on the license later.

And building on OSX is much easier now, if you have a standard platform, you can cross develop a customer client that works on both. One of the nice things about OSX is games run in OpenGL on top of a unix based OS. (Can you say Linux port anyone?)

BTW, what is an alternative? Could All Seeing Eye be the replacement?

A mac version of the all seeing eye? that would be a worthwhile interace. unfortunatley my company blocks it so i can't check.

Pun aside, this is a point. The only reason people is so interested in Steam is Half-life 2; otherwise, all you can download from Steam is HL and assorted mods. The integrated server browser is nice, but hardly anything we haven't seen before (and even better done).

So, if the choice is so limited, why even bother? It'd like be going to a supermarket and paying to use a cart than only lets you bring home 10 products. If Steam let me download any game i wanted, make sure it stays patched and assures me i'd be able to play it no matter what (even if i cancelled my subscription), i would consider it. But no thanks.

There are always tons of servers online. Make sure you have Galactic Conquest completely updated (You need to download RC4 before you download 4.2, and there is no update from a previous version to 4.0), and try using The All-Seeing Eye for finding your games. The 7 day notice might get annoying, but it is very very useful for finding BF1942+mod servers. Also, if a server is full, it will ping it every 3 seconds until there is a spot open, and then join it. Very useful :)

MTA uses the ASE protocol, so The All Seeing Eye supports it just fine. Much better than GameSpy anyway (imho).

If you use gamespy for connecting to online games you should really try The all-seeing eye instead. It's a lot cleaner, faster and easier to use (IMHO).

I haven't used gamespy for a few years, but when I did it just had too much crap in it that I didn't want. All-seeing eye was a blessing.

The page says something about a free trial, but it's free all the time. The server scanner might get clogged sometimes though and you have to try again. When/If you register you won't have that problem.

BTW, if you're one of the two or three remaining people who hasn't already switched, check out the All Seeing Eye from UDPSoft. It's constantly updated with new games and is just generally excellent. It does exactly what it's supposed to do without all the bloatware useless crap that Gamespy shoves down your throat.

I am so thankful I found all seeing eye. It what GS3D used to be. (Now gamespy 3d brings back some memories!) A light, powerful game matching program with little bloat and a lot of powerful uses. Granted it doesn't have a child safe UI, but what it lacks in visuals more then makes up in its options.

But I may be a bit bias because I hate gamespy with such an undying passion.

All Seeing Eye is, imho, far superior to GameSpy and nowhere near as bloated.

There's one problem with your logic. To my knowledge, Gamespy still doesn't actually own the source to Gamespy3D, to which I believe these security holes refer. That codebase is owned by the original coders of Quakespy, the program that got the company started. The deal was: Surfas owned the brand, the coders owned the code. Never at any time could he talk them into selling it. That is the primary reason for the original development of Arcade - to bring ownership of some form of Gamespy software in- house.

How do I know? I was one of the original coders at the company back when Arcade was just an idea tossed around the Tuesday morning staff meetings. And no, I didn't have much of a hand in Arcade, thankfully, so please don't put a pox on me.

Of course, if this guy was pointing out holes in Arcade (to be honest, I couldn't tell from his website, it didn't seem 100% clear which product he was testing) - well, it's going to take *alot* more than a single day to fix.

Not that you really want to know this, but Arcade was very tightly coupled to a stock MFC, App-Wizard generated Doc/View project, and didn't stray too far throughout its lifetime. In fact, by the time I left, most of the code was essentially layered on top of rather poorly implemented MFC classes. (Props, Walla!) It gets even uglier (like data and UI being completely interleaved), but I'll save you the anguish.

Suffice it to say, you would be ill-advised to hold your breath while waiting for these issues to be fixed. Better to use the All Seeing Eye instead. That's what I do. And this coming from a Gamespy stock holder! hehe.

How does Gamespy live on?

There's you answer >> "crappy players" and noobs.

A big parts of the problem is that Gamespy is usually bundled with every game that has online capabilities. The installer prompts the user to install Gamespy without ever mentioning that it's not required to play online. Granted, sometimes it is, but in most of cases it's not.

The crappy players who think Gamespy is "great" and the noobs who don't know any better keep Gamespy alive. Of course, some don't know about, or don't see how ASE does what Gamespy is supposed to do a billion times better.

I haven't come across one gamer worth his salt that thinks Gamespy is anything other than a gigantic pain-in-the-ass. And that's just their game client -- nevermind their "web services."

Gamespy really is a pain in the ass.

The best game-browser I know, by far, is The All-Seeing Eye.

It works fast, simple, the program doesn't lock-up when performing a search, useful filters, auto-updates.....

And that's only in the FREE version of the program. The registered version adds some more features.

This is one piece of software I can really say is good.

So if I'm not mistaken then that's a sort of Steam application, but not only for VALVe/Sierra games. That's quite good. If you guys manage to get a thing like that going, I'm sure it's going to be popular. It's like, All Seeing Eye with intergrated chat,resource downloads and everything. Nice idea, care to share the URL?

What has GameSpy got to do with games? Last time I looke it involved reposting stuff from various fansites, cram it all in some dumb www.planet.com URL and then wait for stupid people to do even more stupid things like opting-in to various spam lists to be able to download DEMOS (Blasphemy. I remember CDs full of demos on various magazines. No spam, not shitty slow downloads...) or maybe downloading a spyware infected client which isn't just tremendously inferior to it's alternative, The All Seeing Eye, and it's about as user friendly as RMS before his morning coffee.

This is a copy of a letter I sent to ID and Activision a few months ago. These companies are loosing players in droves and the companies don't even care. Check out the PB forums and see the comments from all the irate players:

What happened to the Quake (2/3) Series?

This is basically an open letter to id Software and how little importance they place in their products. They are loosing players in drovers and their reputation is going down the toilet.

But first a little intro.

I began playing Quake 2 in 95 when some friends at work were having a DM/CTF LAN party. Needles to say I was hooked. I went out and bought the game and downloaded Map after Map. I Became pretty good and eventually became one of the best Q2 CTF players around .

The Q2 CTF MOD was, at the time one of the most innovative MOD's around and pretty much dictated what a Capture the flag Mod should be like. I enjoyed playing on the old YYZ CTF servers and testing new maps from some of the most awesome mappers at the time (Hafhead and gizm0 to name a few). Everyone was into the games, teamplay was amazing and cheaters were nonexistent because Id was on top of various hacks (wallhacking excluded).

Eventually, my scores started to go down and I was ending up at the middle of the pack at the end of rounds. I began spectating people and noticed that people were gibbing enemies from the side and from behind them and discovered the world of bots.

What is a bot?

Some n00bs may get confused by the definition.

There are two types of bots. 1) Used as an AI opponent on various servers to fill empty spaces on servers. These AI players have incredible aim. These bots are good if you want to practice aiming on the run. On Half-Life Servers you can tell bots by their ping. (They all have a ping of 5)

2) Players use the bot components noted in #1 and integrates the auto aim features into their character and play on servers with the auto-aim components. I'm not going to post any of the bot links but they are out there. The people who started using the bots to enhance their own playing experience were mostly pretty stupid. They usually configured their bots to cover auto aiming in a filed of vision of 180 degrees or more around them. What this means is that if a player with a bot is looking forward and they hit fire, the bot will hit anything 180 degrees or more around them without turning. Secondly, they will usually just (if playing a CTF map) shoot and kill people and not work on any of the team objectives.

One more thing to note is one other problem with Quake 2 was that Q2 Servers were susceptible to IP Ping Floods and could take down a given server.

ID Software has a practice of Stopping builds and not releasing any further upgrades or practices. Not long after this, I started to loose interest in this game.

This was about time that the Q3 Arena Demos started to Circulate around. I began playing this game and reading the advanced press from various sources.

When I learned that CTF would loose all the cool components that made Q2 CTF a classic, it was time for me to find a new on-line game to play.

I wasn't drawn to this game very much. Sure there were some cool things about it but I wouldn't buy it ($59.99 was the price I believe) when Q3 Arena came out.

I chose to buy Half-Life and still play it to this day. It's an amazing game and Awesome Mods are still coming out to this day.

In my opinion, if a company can't take what made a given game famous and remove some or all components in a multiplayer game in the next release of a game, the company looses face in the gaming community. No One Lives Forever 2 is a good example of this. No One Lives Forever 2 was initially released without a DM or CTF mod (DM were later added with the first Service Pack after MANY irate customer complaints) the MODs that made NOLF1 a classic (running over people with snowmobiles rock!!!).

Bought Q3 Gold

I was at a Wal-Mart one day and noted Quake 3: Gold for $19.99 and bought it for the heck of it. I was interested in seeing what became of the game and was looking at what it took to map CTF maps. I've been looking into getting into mapping and wanted to do some research into what is needed to create Maps. I soon learned this was a kettle of workms that I probably should not have opened. Install a pain on XP Long story short, Quake 3: Gold has to be installed in a specific manner (it has to be a complete install) on the primary partition, in the default 'suggested' path (XP Pro) (this information was found on the Planequake forums ).

I soon found out that this install was to be the source of some of the issues I've been receiving.

I also use The All Seeing Eye to connect to games and because Q3 wouldn't work in the manner I wanted to install the game in, ASE wouldn't work.

PlanetQuake, Fileplanet other quake related files

Ok, when I played Quake2, planetquake.com was the place to go for all information, patches, maps, etc. I went back to this site and went to the Quake 3 section and began researching what would be needed to update my installation. The planetquake site was slow (I'm on a Cable Modem) to load and took a good 2 minutes to load a page. When I found a given page on maps or mapping, the links that were available were outdated or didn't work. There was no definitive 'manual' on how to find different mods or what programs are needed to map and which files were the most up to date. The links they provided (when they worked...which was about 10% of the time) were anything but helpful. I found four different mapping programs, none of which I've gotten to work correctly yet.

Planetquake has gotten lazy in their old age.

I found the Q3 MODS and patches on fileplanet but due to the new structure of the site (wait in line?!?!?...LAME!!!) I would have had to wait 4-5 days just to download a few files. I searched all over the net for the files I needed on other sites and was able to finish the download in a day.

Once I got some semblance of a Q3 install completed, I connected to a Q3 Server through ASE.

I remembered in the Q3 Install and patch that a program called Punkbuster which is a program that would detect cheaters and bot users. I thought 'cool' Id is doing something about bots and cheaters!'

Punkbuster a nightmare to upgrade

When installing and upgrading Punkbuster to current Standards I was not able to either through the game or using the command line update util. I found out that the problem with the PB (again on XP Pro in Non-Domain mode patched to current standards) is two fold:

1) The Quake Final Patch Release does not install a couple of key files for some reason or another (I found this out on the Planetquake forums ).

2) XP has a default behavior in that all system directories are 'read-only' and cannot be changed no matter what you try (Group Policies, ACLS, command line attributes, removing simple file sharing, etc.). In the case of Quake 3: Gold on XP, the default install dir is 'Program files' directory. Punkbuster needs to convert a couple of HTML files to binary and since the Read-Only Attributes are pushed from the Root Level of the primary partition, PB can't make the conversion.

New Cheats out that render Punkbuster Useless

I'm not going to go in depth about this but there are a couple of serious issues with some cheats out in the wild that PB can't handle at the moment. One issue seems to be addressed. The other is a bot that is undetectable by PB and is being used more and more on Q3 servers.

Players are furious that this issue isn't being addressed (myself included) by ID.

Read the Punkbuster Forums . Just about every single post is a rant about when/how is ID/Punkbuster will be addressing the current hacking issues and how ticked they are on how this issue isn't being addressed. (Side note: as of approx 27.Jan.2003 Punkbuster's forums have been removed and this site is taking the brunt of the PB issues.

I played on some of ThreeWave's CTF Servers (A killer MOD by the way)the other day and played against bot users. Some of these players are so stupid they turned their bot settings to 180 degrees or more and all players on my team wereable to spot this immediately.

Before I wrote this article I played a Vanilla CTF Game on a Q3 Server and there were a couple of players who were killing players in midair with weapons with the littlest fire power or hitting people in midair (from long distances) so they fell and cratered.

Needless to say, the team that I was on were trying and were winning in caps for a while (but not gibs) slowly left the server after many of the players on my team left (we started with 8 and when I left there were 3 versus 7 on the other team).

What's going on ID?!?!?

You're loosing players that used to be hardcore Q2/Q3 players in droves and they probably won't buy any more of your games due to the lack of attention you're giving to the cheaters and hackers.

Also, as a result of my experiences, I have since turned my mapping interests to the Half-Life Mod 'Day of Defeat' and the new James Bond Game '007: NightFire'.

I tell you one thing, I'll never buy another ID product again.

Software is easy to fix, reputations are next to impossible to fix. Get with the program ID!!!

Dolemite

If you like Gamespy's server scanning features, check out The All Seeing Eye (no, i don't work for them or anything). It's the best server browser i've seen - although it only supports first person shooters.

Personally, I found The All-Seeing Eye to be much less bloated than Gamespy 3D. I have both a registration to Gamespy 3D (which I originally got years ago) and to the Eye, and I never (never!) go back to using Gamespy any more, because the Eye is just that much faster.

Good to see that an actual error was found with the program - It might make developers think twice before using their bloated propriatary, closed, middleware that is all but designed to lock out other browsers like all seeing eye.

Well, they didn't take over the "Game Browser" industry, while that WAS the original purpose of GameSpy...

The All Seeing Eye is by far a superior system and is gaining popularity all the time.

try to use a game finding tool other than Gamespy -- the alternatives don't support as many games, thanks to "exclusive content"

Try The All-Seeing Eye. It's a great way to see all of the servers out there, assuming that the game you want to play has a master server that enumerates all of the hosts. Windows-only, as far as I know.

It's not fun to play on listen servers - but there are thousands of servers at ISP's and the like which are dedicated. Find the servers with either Gamespy or the more powerfull All Seeing Eye

Unless you're a part of a gaming community/clan on irc these tools are must have.

On a sidenote i get ping 20-40 on the servers i play on - with dsl. Not that different from LAN really.

Although many people believe they HAVE to use Gamespy Arcade to play their favorite game online, and some games bundle it on the CD and suggest you install it, most games also include their own in-game browsers and there are also alternatives available which don't try to force you into a chat room when ever you want to look for a game or shove banners in your face, although some (pingtool) are dead.

Don't use Gamespy, use The All Seeing Eye for all your online gaming needs. It is 100x better. Trust me.

(Why'd you post anonymously? This is good info! Someone mod the parent up!)

I spend nearly all of my gaming hours (30+ / week) playing QuakeWorld and Q3 CPM [ ... ]

Wow. And I thought I played a lot.

In all actuality the best way to see the best of the best work the movement in Quake for all its worth is to look into speed running. [ ... ]

I'm very familiar with the Quake Done Quick series (I particularly like Scourge Done Slick; how about that rocket jump rebound off the floating exploding thing?). But watching the demos by themselves doesn't show you what the player is doing with their hands to make it happen; all you see are the results.

Check out a speed run demo, here [[e1m7_028.dem]]

That link doesn't work, but I looked at its predecessor e1m7_029, and it's damned impressive. (Hopping off Chthon's head. Brilliant.)

Everyone calls this "level lockdown", "level control, or "denial of items". This is definately not easy to maintain as multiple respawns (w/100 health) certainly can chistle you down to nothing.

I'll have to disagree here. On DM6 in Quake{World}, a guy can camp the red armor and hang out for days. There's a +25 health pack right there, and another +25 and two +15 packs within walking distance. In deathmatch mode 1, each time the rocket launcher respawns means another +5 rockets for him, and it only takes one solid hit to down a guy. Deathmatch mode 3 (weaponstay) mitigates this slightly, as it forces him to go hunting for more rockets when he runs out (and there's only one place to get them other than from your corpse).

Yes, you can pick up the +100 health pack and second rocket launcher, but your aim needs to be perfect or he'll still clobber you.

BTW, thanks for the pointer to the FDE (Frags Done Extreme) video. That was amazing.

Just how, in practical terms, do I [improve my skills] without some advice? Doing it on one's own tends not to yield helpful results: [ ... ]

Simple. Start watching some pro matches, speed running tutorials, join a clan, practice like a mofo alone on DM maps so that you do the moves you need to when the pressure is on. Learning trickery in the middle of a [live] deathmatch is just dumb.

Sound advice, thank you. But doesn't the precise timing of the tricks change based on network latency (in which case, skills learned on a LAN or localhost connection prove useless on public Internet servers)? Further, aren't the details of the tricks different between Quake and QuakeWorld (since QuakeWorld has slightly different physics)?

Finally, if you're still out there, do you have an opinion on Qizmo and/or MoreQuakeWorld? Some seem to regard them as indispensible tools, while others see them as cheat enablers.

Schwab

For any user of Gamespy, you know what it's like to wait for servers to load.

Amen to that. Gamespy has so many "features" now that I can hardly figure out where the hell the server listings are.

Side note: I recently tried out the All-Seeing Eye server browser to find WolfMP servers. I am very impressed with the speed and interface. Plus it auto-updates itself.

-prator

you might want to try using The All Seeing Eye to find a game.

The in-game server list seems to be broken/hammered right now.

-Jon