Textmode Quake 2

Artemis writes: "Following the Quake 2 source code release under the GPL, here's the follow-up of the famous ttyquake, it's a text mode Quake II called aaquake2 which has just been released. Time for more 3d text mode gaming fun! The site includes screenshots for those of you who haven't seen Quake-turned-Text before."

Comments

Hmm...

[senine]

I wonder how much bandwidth it would take to play this via a telnet interface.

-Senine

Forget first post

[grahamsz]

Someone evidently feels the need to be right at the top of every list of downloads

aaquake indeed

Re:Forget first post

[chuzwuzza]

aa = ascii art

Forget it.

[Matt2000]

This is such bullshit, I've seen this kind of hoax before. All they do is have a bunch of guys sitting at their computer and as each move request come in, they just type out the screen on their keyboard and send it back to your viewer. When they get tired, it's called "lag."

Wake up slashdot and check out your stories before you post them!

cool

[GoatPigSheep]

this is great, but we all know what the true ascii enthusiast needs: a text-mode version of x-windows

Re:cool

[penguinboy]

Apparently, that's the way the initial port of X-Windows to Linux was done - instead of driving the graphics card, it just used the terminal. Who knows if the code is around anywhere, though.

Allright!

[Hercynium]

Now I can really test the pixel output of my brand-new geForceRS232vt220turbo!!!

Imagine a beowulf clus... ah nevermind.

It could work

[Chazmati]

Well, with sufficiently small characters, it should look fine. In fact, as you approach a 1-pixel font it should look quite nice. Add color and you're there. Oh, wait...

Re:It could work

[nick_davison]

"In fact, as you approach a 1-pixel font it should look quite nice. Add color and you're there."

Approximate with just a constant brown font. This is Quake after all, no one'll know.

Oh man.. I love the sickness!!

[Indes]

I remember playing ttyquake for the first time.. played for an hour and couldn't make it past the first level.. got lost so many times.. after playing for the hour I felt sick to my stomach for days but the pain was worth it..

LIVE ON TEXTMODE QUAKE!! LIVE ON!!!!!!

This is fast becomming one of my favourite things to rant about.. textmode gaming!!

The future is here. ;-)

In case you couldn't use the link above

[jsse]

The link above seems to be slashdotted, try this one.

Example for mandatory open sourcing

[ShieldWolf]

This gives us an interesting example of what Lawrence Lessig suggested earlier: mandatory source code release after a set period of time for software, which follows a reasonably short period of exclusivity.

This guys speech, as weird and freaky as it is ;), would have not have come to light if Quake II had not been open-sourced after it ceased to become cutting-edge technology. By releasing the code after a reasonable period of time Carmack has given us a golden lesson in copyright. By putting the source in more hands we get more speech and interesting ideas put into the public domain, this is the kinda of thing closed source and excessively long copyright terms deny, e.g. Looking forward to David Fincher's Catcher in The Rye? Keep waiting, that book will still be in copyright over 70 years from now, and he will be long dead.

-Shieldwolf

PS - of course I know the software is still under copyright, e.g. GPL via Id Software, I merely mean that it is gives you an IDEA of how this could work.

Re:Example for mandatory open sourcing

[j-pimp]

Most copyrighted software isn't intended to be put into the public domain anyway.
United States Constitution, atricle one section 8 states:
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States; ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; ...
Now IANAL, so take the following as my personal educated opinion.
The purpose of intellectual property law was originally intended by our founding Fathers to server two purposes. The first, is to allow artists and inventors exclusive rights to use there works for the pursuit of profit. This is to encourage and reward successful R&D. The second, is to provide through these same mechanisms, now knows as patenting and copyright, assurance that in a reasonable amount of time such IP is put in the public domain. IP laws were originally designed so information got into the public domain regardless of what the authors intended.

Re:Example for mandatory open sourcing

[aka-ed]

Another Free Software Gunslinger...

He was making a broader point about intellectual property and the current state of copyright law, not "Free Software." Perhaps you are too young to remember the days when books would become public domain after about 30 years, in most instances. This is more nostalgia for copyright as intended by the framers than it is "hippy revolutionairies."

"Another Gutenberg Project Gunslinger" would have been more appropriate.

Please read before sharing your knee-jerk reactions.

[OT] Textmode Quake 2

[pgilman]

from the we-will-be-getting-duplicate-submissions-of-this-f or-weeks dept.

and given your recent track record i guess you'll post it a couple more times as well &nbsp ;-)

Re:[OT] Textmode Quake 2

[ThatComputerGuy]

Yes, for the reposts "here and there". It's just too bad every other day isn't "here and there".

On Taco, on Hemos, on Michael! Post those dupes!

All right! Now I've got a use for...

[ChaoticCoyote]

...that old DecWriter II in the garage, which my wife keeps suggesting we toss. I *knew* text mode gaming wasn't dead!

This is the most perverse, bizarre, absolutely *useless* thing I've seen in a long time. Damn, I wish I'd thought of it first... ;)

A Horrible Rift

[Bios_Hakr]

...just appeared in the universe. When ttyquake was released, God cried at the absolute wrongness of it. But after this, he has torn the universe asunder. The only way to clense his creation of the horrible mistake is to purge all life from the Galaxy. Yea, even as it happened in the day of Moses, a great flood is being brought down upon us.

In related news, astrophysicists everywhere stood in amazement as the expanding universe slowed, stopped, and began to collapse back on itself.

Also of note, astronomers in the Northern Hemisphere were baffled by the apperance of a new constilation. The collection of never-before-seen stars actually spelled out a phrase. "1 0wn3d j00" could clearly be read in Hebrew.

So Paint The ASCII Green And ...

[Freneticus]

Taa-daa! Instant Matrix in a box!

Keanu: "What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge rockets?"

Bad Mutha Lawrence Fishburne the III:"No, Keanu. I'm trying to tell you that, when you're ready ... you won't have to."

Keanu: (pauses) "Dude, you just don't want me camping on the railgun, do you?"

Bad Mutha Lawrence Fishburne the III: "Damn, you've figured me out! Now eat my boomstick!"

BANG!

Uh, use you "brain"... *smacks chest*

[Lethyos]

First of all, let's figure out how big a frame is. If you have a matrix, like in a terminal, which consists of rows and columns, there is a powerful technique called "multiplication" that will allow you to calculate how many elements there are in this matrix. So, we compute the width (w) by the height (h) to get a product (p), in the form: w*h=p. Whew! That was tricky, but it gets more complicated! Consider that each character on the terminal (for ASCII, not Unicode) is one byte. That is eight bits. Since bandwidth is measured in bits, this what we're interested in. So, we take our product (p) and do that crazy "multiplication" thing again in: p*8. WOW! But let's not slow down there!! We're almost near the end! The result of p*8 (which is actually (w*h)*8, surprisingly) is only for one frame! So what do we do? Think that maybe the average number of frames we'll get per second is 20. That means, that every second, 20 frames of p*8 bits passes through the wire. You know what that means, MORE multiplication! p*8*20, crazy, isn't it? It comes down to (w*h)*160 bits per second. So now, all YOU gotta do is figure out how big your terminal is, and that's now many bits/second it costs! Isn't math fun? (DISCLAIMER: this does not take into account compression, or encoding scemes used to reduce the number of characters sent/received.)

Re:Uh, use you "brain"... *smacks chest*

[Surak]

DISCLAIMER: this does not take into account compression, or encoding scemes used to reduce the number of characters sent/received

Nor does it take into account whether the whole screen is being updated each time, the overhead of the protocol, and the overhead of the terminal emulation. I.e., for a typical VT-102/ANSI type terminal, moving the cursor up 10 rows, for instance, involves <Esc>[10A. That's five extra bytes. Note that I don't know if the software relocates the cursor or draws every character in every frame as I have only a passing familiarity with AALib.

On the other hand, your comment was funny enough that it did make me spit my Pepsi all over the screen. :-)

No color?

[exceed]

Why doesn't this game have color capabilities?

While I think this is pretty neat (porting a 3D game to text), the screenshot makes it apparent to me that playing the game in black and white would suck. It's hard to distinguish the stairs to the right of you, you can hardly make out the gun, and the crosshairs aren't even visible. What good is a first person game without visible crosshairs?

Bravo for porting Q2, but could we please get some color?

Re:No color?

[Mawbid]

What good is a first person game without visible crosshairs?

Dude, get a felt tip pen and draw one on your monitor.

Just how fast is it?

[TrevorB]

I'm curious about this. Obviously there's a fair amount of CPU crunching going on to render the screens and a certain amount of character refreshing, but just how much?

Could you play this on a Pentium 100, for instance? How about over a telnet or ssh session?
What would be the bps limitations?

I just have visions of labs of vt100s connected for a quick frag between class...

It's as fast as your network

[Erris]

Dude, I just insalled it on my spare beowulf pocket cray cluster. Though it's graphics engine was capable of running the holodeck, I decided I'd be better off using a telnet session. Here's a screen shot, honest:

You are in a dark room.

An imp has shot you.

darkness decends, you are dead.

There was a page of text characters that represented a dark room for most of the above transaction. I'll attibute the blazing display of that page on the awsome power of the token ring network adaptor used.

Re:It's as fast as your network

[Graff]

You are in a dark room.
An imp has shot you.
darkness decends, you are dead.

No, no - it's more like this:

You have moved into a dark place.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
You have been eaten by a grue!

I beat them to it.

[Jennifer E. Elaan]

I had Quake2 in textmode long before this. I hacked the aaquake svgalib-emulator module so that it supported multiple video pages.

I'm updating my homepage right now with some screenshots, see it at my homepage.

Next logical step...

[oldmildog]

Excellent! Does this now mean that Quake 2 can be used as a BBS door game? Where's my list of phone numbers... is Telenet still around? It's 7,E,1, right?

This has been done with Quake2:

[netfunk]

Relnev's Quake2 already had SDL support, so if you ran it as:

export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=aalib
./quake2

You would get the same results. And, when you get quickly bored of it, the same binary can do the regular graphics, too.

(SDL just uses AAlib as one of the drivers, so effectively, you get the same end result with either project, but this is more unified, and unified is good.)

Relnev's project page and cvs-over-the-web.

--ryan.

Text Mode Porn is Next

[sparkyz]

And my wife won't know what I'm looking at.

Re:Text Mode Porn is Next

[damiam]

It's already here. :-)

Try "twin"

[cout]

It's a window manager for your terminal. http://linuz.sns.it/~max/twin/

Re:Try "twin"

[BrookHarty]

Anyone have a working mirror for the file above? I have found 0.3.0 but 0.4.0 stable isnt on the the 1 mirror i found.

Re:I have just one question.....

[ColaMan]

Excuse me while a go write a program that will help Windows render my wallpaper as a text box of ASCII characters...


You don't need to - recent versions of windows already has a program (called kernel32) that randomly renders your wallpaper as a blue screen with indecipherable text upon it. It's not usually enabled with a straight out of the box install of windows though. Best way to get the blue text renderer going is to actually try and do some serious work with your windows computer. Ensuring that you do not save your work for at least an hour will often cause the renderer to appear as well.

Hope this helps.

Re:Blind FPS Interface

[scott1853]

For a blind person you wouldn't want a direct translation of the video output, it contains more data than is necessary. For a blind person to interpret all the data in realtime, they would only need to be able to "see" the floor and wall, basically a top-down view, complete with bad guys. Something about the size of a hand with rods or blocks that move up and down to indicate things like walls or stairs or baddies. The device should pivot so they can rotate their hand to "look" in different directions. They wouldn't need to be able to turn their hand all the way around since everything is relative you could make a 30 degree rotation into a 180.

Criminalizing secrets

[volpe]

MANDATORY source code release? You want to make it a crime to keep your own information secret for as long as you choose, if that information happens to be source code? Why stop there? Here's a few other things we can make subject to mandatory release after a set period of time:

1. Your PIN
2. Your PGP key and passphrase
3. Your diary
4. Any recorded discussions between you and your attorney.
5. Your complete medical history.

The government is obtrusive enough as it is. I don't want the government to be able to force anyone to release information that they don't want to, just because some arbitrarily chosen timer has run out.

Re:Criminalizing secrets

[coldmist]

From the way I understand it from Lessig,

The difference is whether you want copyright protection for said program or not. If you want it copyrighted, then hand the source code over to the copyright office, and after x years, they release it upon request, after you have had your chance to make your $$$.

If you don't ever want your source code out there, you don't have to file for a copyright. But, then people could copy/hack the binaries all they wanted.

Interesting tradeoff!

Re:Criminalizing secrets

[nathanh]

The government is obtrusive enough as it is.

But copyright only exists because the government intrudes. If the government didn't intrude then we'd have the situation of 200 years ago where people were copying data freely, much to the annoyance of the authors and publishers. If anything, the poster you were responding to was asking that the government intrudes less.

I don't want the government to be able to force anyone to release information that they don't want to

And nobody was asking them too. You seem to have confused copyright with privacy.

Re:Criminalizing secrets

[glassware]

You both have good points.

May I propose an addition? What if the law said "Software that is avaliable for sale must be available indefinitely". Example: Microsoft makes Windows 3.1 a success by selling copies for $49. If we apply this rule, Microsoft is required to keep on selling Windows 3.1 for $49. We shouldn't require them to keep on manufacturing boxes forever, but when they stop making boxes it shouldn't be too hard to make it available for electronic purchase over the Internet at the same price (maybe increasing profit margins?).

If Microsoft came up with a better program, Windows 95, they could start selling that at $95, but that wouldn't let them stop selling version 3.1. We wouldn't allow them to drastically raise the price of old products (maybe it should be permissible to raise prices to keep up with inflation), and they wouldn't have to keep advertising obsolete software; but a customer who wants the product should still be able to buy a new copy no matter how old the program. That way, people whose businesses or homes depended on Win 3.1 could still get a new copy if it was necessary.

In this context, if Microsoft wanted to stop selling Win 3.1, we should require that they make the code public domain (excluding any stuff owned by third parties that Microsoft was licensing). This should also be a requirement if the company goes bankrupt.

This seems like it would have a number of benefits:

Software developers would be unable to force you to upgrade to a new software version.

Abandonware would be eliminated - software would either be always available for purchase or always available for free.

Electronic commerce would get a huge boost.

We would have, as a society, a huge archive of software, pay and free, to draw upon. Kind of like the library of Congress.

I'm sure I'm overlooking some negative points, but maybe with some inventive thinking this could be a good idea to propose... Any thoughts?

Re:Criminalizing secrets

[Electrum]

In this context, if Microsoft wanted to stop selling Win 3.1, we should require that they make the code public domain (excluding any stuff owned by third parties that Microsoft was licensing). This should also be a requirement if the company goes bankrupt.

An shorter limit on software copyrights makes sense, but forcing the release of source code does not. For example, a large amount of Win 3.1 code might be used in Win 95. Forcing them to release the source could compromise a current product. And your licensing issue brings up a good point. Who is going to go through the code to determine who owns what? How many man hours would that take for a large product? What if know one remaining at the company knows? This is a big factor in the open sourcing of many programs. The Open Watcom project is a good example of this. The original DOOM used a licensed library for sound on DOS, so they couldn't release that, even though the rest of the source was released.

Re:Criminalizing secrets

[hughk]

In this context, if Microsoft wanted to stop selling Win 3.1, we should require that they make the code public domain (excluding any stuff owned by third parties that Microsoft was licensing).

This is one area where I like Software Patents, but only if they were done properly. The original idea of the patent was a limited monoply on an idea in return for

• full disclosure

of the idea. The concept was to foster innovation because the details of the innovation had to be disclosed and others could base their own inventions on that.

Note that the IP issue on opening the source would then largely dissappear because the version of the libraries used by the openned source would have the same limit on protection.

Actually what does really happen with closed source projects that have been openned is that the open substitues are found or developed for the closed source components.

With large companies such as Microsoft or more actually with regards to Open Source, HP, they use patented technology which they cross-license. That is HP may have a patent in something that Compaq want and vice vera so a deal is made for licensing Compaq's technology. This is great for closed source projects but it can't work for Open Source. A company like HP has lots of patents of its own so it is easy for them to cross-license. This may not even be noted in the code, so the overhead of checking what is subject to which deal is a headache.

Re:Criminalizing secrets

[SubtleNuance]

Your examples are completely off-base. There is no parallel between client-attorney privilage and copyright law.

The point is simply this: When software is allowed to remain under copyright for as long as present american-plutocratic-law allows, it stiffles real innovation, it enables absurd manipulation of the software landscape by using your once-state-of-the-art and successfull pc of S/W to entrench because (here we switch to business principles which (C) law appears to serve...) the barriers to entry in the software market become ever greater and greater...

Imagine if M$ simply refused to stop updating Windows... how long would it be before GNU/Linux (or some other thing) rose to dominance? 10? 20? 30 Years?

This situation is brought about by moronic "intellectual-property" law in USofAmerica.

IN short, s/w copy-rights should be for no more than 3 years (or so) then all source is released. You see, Copyright is an artifical agreement that gentle(wo)men created... its intent should be re-integrated into its practice... which it CERTAINLY is not now. Copyright is meant to reward creators (not corporations-but thats another disussion) to be compensated for their nebulous creations... its not natural law - its an 'agreement'.

Im betting you have some libertarian ideals (just a guess based on the tone of your comment)...and you dont like to be 'forced' to do anything, neither do i frankly... so how about this: If i can't "make" you release your source, then *you* can not "make" me not make a copy of something.

Now we are back at that 'this is not natural law but an agreement' idea again...

OT: This, i believe, is where libertarian-ism becomes a little kludgy, most libertarians are simply Tin-Foil hat McCarthy-ites afraid of Gummint. Free-market capitalism + Libertarian-ism == survival of the wealthiest... which ends up with royalty and peasants... and this ends up with R evolution.

Re:Criminalizing secrets

[nick_burns]

This is the same theory behind patents. You tell the government how your product works and you're guaranteed that for a certain length of time only you can sell it. When it expires, it's public domain for usage (It's actually public domain information from the start). Patents weren't created just to allow inventors to profit, but to allow anyone access to information and use it after a certain amount of time. But a copyright shouldn't necessarily expire, or it should have a really long life. Otherwise, anyone would be allowed to publish and sell books once they became, say, 50 years old. What is needed is a new copyright system. One where once a product is deemed obsolete or unsupported, anyone can do what they want with it.

Re:Criminalizing secrets

[volpe]

If you don't ever want your source code out there, you don't have to file for a copyright. But, then people could copy/hack the binaries all they wanted


The binaries can't be copied because they are protected by copyright. I have no problem with copyrighted source code becoming public domain after a certain time period, as that is the way things are now. But I don't want to give the government more power to COMPEL people to relinquish their information. The expiration of a copyright allows others additional rights to the work, but it doesn't compel the former copyright owner into taking any particular action.

And, for the record, I think it was unfair of those four people or so to mod my post as a troll. It was not a troll.

Re:Criminalizing secrets

[volpe]

This isn't about copyright. It's about compelling people, under penalty of law, to release information of their own creation. I have no qualms about the expiration of copyrights. But if they want to keep their source code secret, what are we prepared to allow the government to do to compel them to do this? Shall the government be empowered to stick bamboo shutes under their fingernails? What if they shred all copies? Do we throw them in prison?

Re:Criminalizing secrets

[volpe]

Your examples are completely off-base. There is no parallel between client-attorney privilage and copyright law.

Your objection is completely off base, because this discussion has nothing to do with copyright law. This isn't about the removal of copyright protection. It's about COMPELLING people to turn over secret and/or private information.

Re:Criminalizing secrets

[volpe]

What about patents? They expire.


Yes, but no one is compelled to document their invention. They are encouraged to do so with the reward of a patent. But if they choose not to, nothing compels them to do so.

I'm not saying copyrights shouldn't expire. After the expiration, you can make copies galore of whatever you've got. But if the author/owner never released the source code, they should not be COMPELLED to do so. If you've got a binary that is now PD, great. Go nuts. Allowing the government to COMPEL people to do something is going a step further.

Re:Criminalizing secrets

[volpe]

However, works that no one cared about, by default were "donated" to the public domain.

And this did not mean that your private info had to be distributed to anyone.



But that's exactly what's being discussed. Forcing people to distribute their private information (in this case, source code). It's one thing to let a government-supplied protection expire. It's something else to compel an author/owner to do something he/she doesn't want to do.

That's it! I'm not human!!

[erroneus]

There is just something wrong and inhuman about my ability to perceive in a way that is similiar to all other humans. Here is a short list of things I cannot read:

1. Music
2. Prenatal sonograms
3. tty Quake and Quake2

Now, I've been able to see those "optical illusions" in the Sunday funnies. I can even read hiragana, katakana and a few Kanji characters as well. But those three things and probable a few others I can't think of right now escape me entirely!

I can't "see" the sound it's [music] supposed to make. I can't "see" the baby and I certainly can't tell if it has a penis or not. I can't tell where I'm going on those screens!!!

Am I alone in this?!

An upgrade

[Luggage]

Compare to UserFriendly, Dec. 29.

Well, It wouldnt compile.

[BrookHarty]

Humm, Why is it, when something cool comes out you cant compiled it on linux?

Had to get the files q2source-3.21.zip and quake2-ref_softaa-0.1.tar.gz
then it complained of some files missing, had to get MesaLib-4.0.1.tar.gz and svgalib-1.4.3.tar.gz. Dont know if they are the correct version but it had the includes It needed.

Then

gcc -Dstricmp=strcasecmp -g -fPIC -I/usr/local/src/Mesa-2.6/include -I/usr/include/glide -o debugi386-glibc/ref_gl/gl_draw.o -c ../ref_gl/gl_draw.c
In file included from ../ref_gl/gl_local.h:39,
from ../ref_gl/gl_draw.c:23:
../ref_gl/qgl.h:484: parse error before `0x84C0'
make[1]: *** [debugi386-glibc/ref_gl/gl_draw.o] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/temp/quake2-3.21/linux'
make: *** [build_debug] Error 2

Any ideas?

-
Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work. - Thomas A. Edison (1847 - 1931)

Life imitating art? (or whatever passes)

[fidget42]

For those who read UserFriendly, you may remember seeing something similar, Sid, and the gang playing Quake2 with punchcards (http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20011229 )

Paper Quake

[DeadBugs]

Now just send the text output to your printer, staple the pages together and make a nice animated quake flip book. If you flip the pages fast enough you should get a faster frame rate than most high end video cards.

Cool

[jsse]

I feel like killing with snake-vision. :D

I agree somewhat, but this is apples and oranges

[oGMo]

The government is obtrusive enough as it is. I don't want the government to be able to force anyone to release information that they don't want to, just because some arbitrarily chosen timer has run out.

I agree, but this isn't the same thing. It's not really different from, say, copyrights expiring after a reasonable period of time (read: a few years, 7 max for software, just like when copyright law was originally enacted). The limit on software should probably be 3-4 years due to the extremely short lifespan.

In fact, it could be made a part of software copyright law that for a copyright to be granted on a piece of software, it as well as the source must be released into the public domain after the 4-year copyright period.

This is a far stretch from requiring private, personal information from individuals. It's just the original spirit of the copyright law returned. But don't expect to see something so sane get passed, large corporations are making too much off the laws as they are, and pushing for even worse ones like the DMCA and SSSCA.

(Personally I think corporations should be required to disclose all information publically at all times, except for "trade secret" information, which can stay secret for at most a year or two. Patents should not be applicable against individuals or non-commercial entities, only against commercial corporations. Copyrights should also be reduced to 7 years again. But then I might as well wish for world peace or something. :-P)

think that's twisted?

[scrytch]

GGI has a renderer that will render *any* graphics context into ascii art. Neither that nor ttyquake are really all that interesting, all they are is really low res greyscale that chooses characters from a hand-made table based on how "bright" they appear.

What would be really neat would be something that converted bitmap displays into *line* art.

Re:I have just one question.....

[Waffle Iron]

This is perhaps the biggest ever display of time-wasting I have ever seen.

So, you're saying that the original Quake in graphics mode is not a waste of time? Hasn't this one family of programs been one of the biggest drains of people's productivity, educational potential and physical health since the introduction of TV and alchohol?

I cringe when I think of how much more I could have accomplished by now using the time I've wasted playing computer games.

At least this hacker probably learned something new by doing this.

what about color ?

[tempmpi]

Why are all these textmode projects in grayscale ? What about a color textmode quake2 ? The vga textmode can do 16 foreground and 16 background colors. Why don't it use them ? Very likely it wouldn't work over a network connection when that would require a lot of ANSI codes but it could be really good localy.
What about something like a textmode vnc ? For things like playing textmode quake it could be much better than the old style telnet.

Re:Textmode Quake....

[gilly_gize]

According to the web site:

Why not? You can watch TV in text mode, you can play DVDs in text mode,
you can play Quake 1 in text mode. Quake II is the logical next step.

Or, as the author of ttyquake put it, "If you have to ask why, you're not a member of the intended audience."

Oh, I get it

[eyeball]

I thought they meant something like this:

QUAKE II
Copyright (c) 1991-2001. All rights reserved.

West of steaming pit of hell
You are standing in an open room west of a steaming pit of hell leading down.
There is a gun here.

>

Re:Oh, I get it

[jeremycx]

Excellent idea -- now for Infocom-style multiplayer deathmatch! I can see it now:

West of steaming pit of hell
You are standing in an open room west of a steaming pit of hell leading down.
There is a gun here.
>pick up gun
Fragmaster enters the room.
>shoot gun at fragmatser
I don't know who 'fragmatser' is.
Fragmaster shoots at you. You are hit!
>shoot gun at fragmaster
You hit fragmaster.
Fragmaster shoots at you. You are hit!
>e
Steaming pit of hell.
There are exits to the west and north.
Fragmaster enters the room.
Dethhead enters the room.
...

Oops. Just reinvented the MUD. Damn.

More AA Lib Action in an X Server!

[Juggler cant juggle]

Some fool compiled an xserver with aalib and you can see the output including screenshots of enlightenment menus etc here:

http://www.meow.org.uk/stan/xserver/

Maybe that'd work with xquake?

Re:I have just one question.....

[GypC]

Really? My Win2K box crashes on me in games sometimes, but I'm using reference drivers and hot-rodded BIOS settings, so I guess I don't blame it. Actually, it usually just locks up rather than actually blue-screening.

I've never had a crash through normal (non-gaming) use, though. But I don't do any development on it, that's all in Linux because after all, *nix is the only serious choice for real work. ;-D

Flawed.

[mindstrm]

Copyright expiring in a reasonable amount of time, yes, that would be good.
But that still doesn't compel anyone to release source.

Also, in the case of, say, Quake, and now Quake2, ID really has nothing to gain by keeping their game (which was *designed* to be hackable, remember) as source, so people can further hack it. It keeps them in everyone's good books. The tech is old enough not to matter.

This is *very* different than MS releasing the source to an older version of office, or Autodesk releasing the code for Autocad from a few years ago.. that codebase is still very active.

Regarding corporations, I think we should just go back to how it used to be before our time... corporations were *not* 'natural persons'. They were used for the sole purpose of limiting liability to the owners.. and their charter could (and would) be revoked if they stepped outside the lines of what that charter entailed.

The idea was a bunch of poeple could become a 'corporation' and say 'we're going to do x and y and z', and if it was agreeable, they would be granted a 'charter'.. this would protect them from personal liability if the company did certain things wrong.

Re:Screen shots...

[Pxtl]

That shot was in software renderer, which lacked coloured lighting or good alpha blending, not to mention smooth textures, circular particles for particle systems, and other warm fuzzy things voodoo 2 era 3d accelerators provided.

Eh, I won't get excited...

[ColGraff]

...until I see a Dreamcast port. :-)

ASCII Porn has been around a long time, my friend

[ColGraff]

I'm not going to post a link, because I'm not going to take pageview away from the hard-working REAL pornographers, but ascii pr0n has existed for literally decades - people used to post it to USENET.

Shh!

[ColGraff]

Jesus Christ, man, stay quiet! Are you trying to destroy the credibility of our 133t reputations?!

It's like this, erroneus: No one on Slashdot - in fact, no one at all, not even the creators - can play tt or aa quake. Very few people - perhaps no one - can even compile any version of textmode quake. But saying we can compile and play it makes us sound very smart and techy to the uninformed, so for the sake of us all-

SHUT THE [EXPLETIVE] UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Someone actually did that for doom

[ColGraff]

You can find the game (I forget if it's TADS of INFORM, sorry) at ifarchive.org .

Re:Cheat elimination

[digitalunity]

The player synchronization code would be really different. However, this is a really good idea. And, you're not that far off. There are several ways this could be handled. There are provisions in OpenGL whereby a program can store a list of polygons and render them by issuing a single command. If this apparatus were to be extended to run over the network, the client could do the same type of thing. When connecting, the most often used nondeformable objects could be sent to the client and rendered later with only a few-byte command send over the network. Such things would seriously reduce network bandwidth consumption. The rest is pie... :)