Scorched Island 3D

kost writes: " There is clone of popular DOS game called Scorched Earth but this one is in three dimensions (very good concept). It is called Scorched Island 3D and you can download it here from FTP server or you can see some screenshots. It is a game where you try to shoot your opponent over the hill with different weapons and such. Disadvantages of the game include lack of sound and network play. " Ah, Scorched Earth. I spent a lot of quality time perfecting my angles to play the crap out of my friends and neighbors. It's good to see this game back. (michael: Enemy has rubber shield (the purple one), and is in a depression. Solution: napalm, contact triggers, fire shot that hits shield and immediately goes into the dirt next to him. Napalm pours out, fills up, and pours into the tiny hole in the rubber shield created by the shot hitting it. A single sweet second where the entire inside of his shield is full of napalm, held in by the shield, then, FOOM! Toasty.)

Comments

NiL

[CrusadeR]

There's an open-source game similar to Worms, except for the fact that's it real-time as opposed to turn-based:

http://nil.sourceforge.net/

Re:Network play

[Sludge]

You can use a binary frontend to encrypt the protocol so as to not to allow proxies that alter the gameplay after the actual protocol has been reverse engineered from the source. However, it would be a simple matter in a game like this to make a computationally inexpensive calculation that gives the angle and velocity for the bullet, while compensating for the wind.

Scorched Earth had some pretty tough AI that basically did just this. (Poolshark, was it?)

Re:Network play

[Sludge]

When presented with a client, there is more one can do than 'play a game'. One person created an aimbot for Quake 3 and distributed it across the Internet because of a political agenda to 'destroy' the game online, because he thought the entire scene had become too 'commercialised' and he missed the days when people just played Quake 2 for fun.

Sad mentality, but it's a special case that any programmer needs to address, in my opinion.

Re:Network play

[scrytch]

> You can use a binary frontend to encrypt the protocol

Who has to decrypt it? That's right, the client. Or else the frontend has to pass unencrypted instructions to the (hacked or not) client. Cryptography cannot be used to hide information from its intended recipient.

--

Re:Network Play (and Mac Bolo)

[scoove]

Silly me... just searched and found both LinBolo and WinBolo. Santa's early!

http://www.irchelp.org/winbolo/

*scoove*

Unstable for anyone else?

[stevens]

Wow.

I got the static binary tarball. Unpacked and tried it on SuSE 7.0.

Game runs; looks good. Spacebar for fire doesn't work. Hmm... Two minutes into play, X just dies and kdm restarts it. Hmm...

Same thing happens next time, except it's not just X. The machine spontaneously reboots. Wow. I've never been able to do that on my linux machines, no matter how many flailing pointers I've dereferenced. :-)

I may try this later, when someone else finds a stable configuration.

Steve

Re:Network play

[AndyL]

The point is, that he trusts his friends not to use aim-bots.

"Multi-player" doesn't have to mean "Play with complete strangers."

-Andy

Re:I remember this back in the day...

[Xenex]

I remember this in the dark ages of 2000 when the 'IT' teacher was teaching Pascal on the NT4 boxes littered around my high school.

She has been trying to learn Visual Basic, so I'm sure that'll be a big improvement *sarcasm*

My school's computer teachers sucked. I got told off for using ping to see if the network was up last year. Of course, to do that requires me to use the evils of DOS! Ironic, if they don't want me to use the command prompt on an NT box, why is it in my Start Menu? But then, they are the same people that tried to convince me that a mouse was a GUI, so who know what the hell is going on in their minds.

I am fucking happy that part of my life is over.

(Look at what one idle comment about Pascal can do to me now... ;)

Linux only?

[Ravagin]

Disadvantages of the game include lack of sound and network play.

Not to mention lack of a DOS version.

-J

Indeed.

[Ravagin]

I'm not sure it's greed. Laziness, perhaps.

The main thing is, I don't know enough C++ to be comfortable porting it myself. I think maybe I'm too used to the roguelike community, which is port-crazy. It's made me lazy.

-J

Re:Indeed.

[Ravagin]

Now, was that directed at myself, or Rix?

I think one of the main points of releasing the source with a program is that anyone can do whatever they want with it - including port it to their system.
However, I do think it's a bit unfair to expect someone to be able to do something like port a program. We aren't all C++ programmers, here...

I'm not gonna touch the "nerd" comment.

-J

Re:Not a disadvantage...

[Ravagin]

For some reason, I find it utterly hilarious to find that on Slashdot.
Heh, I see the humor there, now that you point it out.

As I said in my repsonse to Rix's comment, I'm used to the roguelike community, in which every release is accompanied swiftly if not immediately by a DOS/Windows port. Many games are developed in Windows. I don't have much interest in porting, either, in addition to lacking the skills. But I think Rix does have a point to a limited extent: the source is there to be played around with, and that inlcudes portation (ok, not a word, sue me ;-) ). Someone could and maybe should port this to DOS. It just needn't - it won't - be me

-J

Re:So...

[Ravagin]

Hmm. Sounds like that might have potential for a first-person shooter spin-off...

Alternatively, when do we get Nibbles 3D? Or has that been done?

-J

Another promising "Scorch"

[Calrathan]

I was bumbling around with usenet a week or two ago, and stumbled across a group called "wsoft" which is based at the University of Michigan (which I happen to be a freshm'n at), and was startled to see that one of their projects is "Scorch", a 3d version of scorched earth. While its not complete yet (I think they mention its approx 50%-60% done), there is a downloadable demo which lets you drive around and fire a standard missile. Take a look, and try not falling into the big watery pits you make in the world. That little gun can displace a lot of dirt when you hold down fire. http://people.mw.mediaone.net/alive/index.htm

Another Scorched Earth clone... on Nintendo NES

[yerricde]

Solar Wars is a clone of Scorched Earth for your NES. The developers (Chris Covell and friends) have released the full source and binaries for download RIGHT HERE! (You'll need an NES emulator; get it for Linux86, DOS, or Windows.)

Of course, you could also scorch your brain at Goats.com (not Goatse.cx!)
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.

If you find the original, try this:

[jeroenb]

There was a simple way to always hit other tanks when the borders were set to bounce: fire at 100% and put your angle to 99 degrees. That way you'd always hit the tank right next to you. The next time you fired the same shot it would bounce on to hit the next tank, or you could put your angle to 98 degrees, in which case you'd immediately hit the next one.

After a while I figured out a way to almost always score perfect when the bouncing walls came around (most people play(ed) with walltype at random.) If only it weren't for those mountains...

We play it all the time...

[Ron Harwood]

DR dos in a vmware window... :)

There's also x-scorch... but it lacks a little right now.

Re:Linux only? Not necessarily.

[Fortyseven]

This uses Allegro. A great gaming library, and it's quite possible and very easy to write code using it that compiles under Linux, DOS, BeOS, Macs, and Win9x with only one or two very simple changes... In fact, years ago I wrote a Quake fun-name utility using Allegro, and about a year ago I tried to compile it under Linux, and it worked PERFECT with only ONE change and that was just a small change to the Allegro API (which is otherwise rock solid, and not a moving target). Not long after I was also able to get it to compile under Windows 95 with NO changes. It's a great lib. I think a 3 year old could probably do the port to DOS. ;D

Scorched Worlds

[Coffee Warlord]

There is actually a real, licensed sequal to the game in development right now. It's called Scorched Worlds, being developed by Magic Lantern. Two of the people working on it are good friends of mine, which would be how I know.

Network play

[Sludge]

It would be impossible to implement network play on a game with the source available like this, where you cannot trust the other party. The correct moves can be very quickly mathematically derived. It's actually a question I submitted to Ask Slashdot some years back, if anyone had an ingenious way to get around it.

An important note to anyone who is working on a free software project that might get posted on slashdot: Have the infrastructure set up to harvest volunteer programmers who would like to commit some time and effort to the project! Don't let this free talent slip through your fingers.

Re:Network play

[Sludge]

ESR touched on this issue after Carmack commented on the binary-only frontend. The truth is that Quake is written to rely on security through obsurity (obscurity being the binary where the renderer and networking protocols resides).

The truth is, if Quake had been written in such a way that there was zero trust for the client, it would not have ran as efficiently. Entity positions are sent to the client when they are supposedly in line of sight. In theory, this sounds good. However, the PVS (potentially visible set) has, with my visual estimate, about 10%-20% overdraw. Because of this, a number of cracks can be employed, such as a wrapper for your OpenGL library that will draw all surfaces with an opacity of 0.5f, making characters pop up behind walls before they get to see you.

The fact of the matter is that if the entity's data was sent to the client at the moment that it appeared on the screen, it would pop up because of network latency. In very lagged situations, you can even see this happen.

This is just one example of why networking security in games require different philosophies than that of normal application client/server design.

If there is no obscurity needed, you can have a completely client-to-client game.

The idea of a client to client game as you call it, or peer-to-peer, suffers from having to send all data to all players at all times. Doom required approximately four times the data as Quake did for the same number of players in the game. (Perhaps that's why Quake originally had 4*4 the number of players as Doom did when it initially shipped.)

Re:Network play

[JabberWokky]

It would be impossible to implement network play on a game with the source available like this, where you cannot trust the other party.

BS. I have friends who cheat at closed source network games by looking over at my monitor, and I have friends who I would trust with my root password and keys to may house, let alone trusting that they won't cheat at a game.

For that matter, I play D&D where people roll dice in front of themselves and call out numbers that could save or kill their characters, and nobody checks, or worries that there is no system of checks in place. For another good example of "honor" based sports (where the reward is great and pressure is high) look into SCA combat and how they choose their king.

There are human factors involved in games that surmount any technical consideration. It's a darn shame when people forget that humans play the game, and just worry about 17 million filled polygons and 128 bit encryption.

--
Evan (Oh, and Merry Christmas!)

play it in javascript

[FrenZon]

http://kaput.org has scorched earth done in crossbrowser DHTML, with destructible terrain, wind, etc.

DISCLAIMER: kaput.org is one of my sites
Glen Murphy

Don't forget the Palm version

[JoeShmoe]

It's been out for well over a year. Still not as feature-packed as the original but certainly enough to keep yourself interested during that boring meeting.

Just make sure the sound is off. The sound options for this program overrides your system preferences (ie, off). Be warned.

You can check it out here:

http://www.palmgear.com/software/showsoftware.cf m? prodID=3856

Or for the cut-and-paste impaired, here.

- JoeShmoe

Not as good as it looks :(

[autocracy]

As cool as the screenshots looks, the gameplay is dissapointing. The calculations are slow, targeting is poor, the game make "invisible walls" that prevent you from going uphill in some places, and the program eats processor time for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Don't get me wrong, it's nice to see a 3-D remake, but this one still needs some heavy work on the actually coding...

It would be nice if somebody could help him out to make the program better, it is really nice. I'd do it myself, but I don't know C...

It's all about the Karma Points...
Moderators: Read from the bottom up!

Hey, I got that on my calculator!

[autocracy]

Yeah, that's right - my calculator. I think you can still get the instructions for it from www.ticalc.org. You'll need at least a TI-80 to play it. It's called cannon.

I also have a friend who had this on his Mac. Pretty cool. It think it's awesome to see it in 3-D now.

It's all about the Karma Points...
Moderators: Read from the bottom up!

COOL!

[zeromusmog]

A sequal to Scorched Earth?! Woah, wait, what the hell am I doing posting on the message board... I gotta go download this sucker!

I Mirrored All The Files..

[citizenc]

I got here early, and, as the old saying goes, mirrored early and often. You can thank me with karma points, even though I'm at 50 already. *GRIN*

si3d-1.1.1.tar.gz
si3d-1.1.1-1mdk.src.rpm
si3d-dynamic-1.1.1-1mdk.i586.rpm
si3d-static-1.1.1.tar.gz
si3d-static-1.1.1-1mdk.i586.rpm


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CitizenC

Jesus guys, worms

[wuice]

Why don't you guys all go out and buy copies of Worms, or Worms 2, or Worms Armageddon? We've evolved past tanks; the future is worms. Seriously, the last time I found an old copy of scorch kickin it on one of my disks, i fired it up, and it made me wanna play Worms.

I remember when my friend said...

[X-Dopple]

"Death's Head? DEATH'S HEAD?" You're insane! You'll kill us all!"

And I said:

"Exactly. See you in hell, punk"

..and then my tank got zapped by lightning, and the wind was blowing MY direction, so of course I winded up blowing myself up.

Does anyone know what good the Tracer did?

So...

[AKAImBatman]

When do we get Gorilla's! 3D? I have an urge to chuck some bananas man! :-P