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America's Army on Linux
jojor writes "It seems that icculus.org has gotten America's Army to run under Linux, as this screenshot will attest. America's Army is UT based and free (as in beer). More games for Linux, yippeh!" Awesome. I consider America's Army to be one of the best things my government has funded within recent history.
I aggree it is a great game, but shouldn't the government be putting that money to better use? I meen it's just a recruiting tool isn't it?
You did.
Yes! Immagine all that money being used on education, safety of healthcare instead of being used as some military recruitment/propaganda toy. WHAT A WASTE THAT WOULD BE!
Note: Not a troll, nor a flame. Might be hard to see the difference in this case but I'm actually serious, heh.
Hate me!
Maybe they can stop those evil-DDoS-doers!
Though most of the slashdot community may not agree with this, I think this is another sign that playing violent video games hardens the player and desensitizes him to violence. (Disclaimer: I play plenty of UT and Quake3)
I've heard several comments (on TV) from veteran soldiers that have worked with the younger generation of recruits about this. Many feel that many of the new recruits do not have any remorse or feeling for the other soldiers or the innocents in battle. However, most of the comments were talking about soldiers during the gulf war, before the John Carmack revolution...
Granted, correlation does not imply causation; but even I can tell that I have been desensitized to violence to some degree.
Being an avid AAO Player, and an avid linux user, I'm glad to hear that someone has gotten the client running under Linux. As exciting as that is, I'm more disappointed that the linux server software hasn't been released to the public yet....*sigh
WOLVERINES!
Team RD AAO
shftleft on AA
People who have witty things here blow.
Slightly off-topic, so mod me down if you wish.
It's weird that after a billion years of human evolution, we still solve conflicts by killing each others. The only thing that has evolved is the method used.
I think it's sad that young people are encouraged to kill other people, and the army even sends out computer games to recruit people!
Why not spend more money on *preventing* war, in stead of *fighting* war?
There should be an political army as well as a millitary army, but then again, it won't be so "fun" to not be able to kill other human beings.
-"Killing people with bow and arrow is primitive. Killing people with nuclear bombs is civilized."
--
Will work for bandwidth.
US Population: roughly 350 million Cost of developing the game: $7 million Your share: $0.02
If you're lucky, sometimes the threat of force is enough to prevent an attack. If not, you do what you have to and you do it decisively. Look, I appreciate your views and however you arrived at them. You have good intentions.
Unfortunately, there are enough fractured souls in this world who will stop at nothing to lash out, often violently, and sometimes catastrophically. There always will be. Blame it on the human condition.
As shitty a deal as it was for those Japanese who suffered the atomic bombs at the tail end of WWII, something important bloomed from it. We understood just how destructive we as humans can be. And so far while ideologies, politics, and cultures have clashed, the civilized world at least has enjoyed a mostly peaceful, prosperous time. It took a while and a bunch of lives in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan to name a few to get where we are now, but right now ain't so bad.
Can you imagine what it would be like if the third world, the Middle East, all of Africa, and some spots across Asia join the fold? I can, I really can, and what a great time that will be. But we'll never get there watching on the sidelines. When the world can rid itself of despot rulers and give people like the Iraqis a future beyond Saddam Hussein's despotic predestination, we'll be closer to preventing war than anyone can imagine.
Let us not forget that Americas Army Ops and Soldier are costing us less than a single main battle tank! We go thru lots of those every year due to non-combat incedents, so trust me this is cheap.
My personal opinion? How much is it worth to you to teach your **future soliders** proper movement techniques and command and control at the squad level. These techniques keep our soldiers alive, and the soldiers of the future our currently our children.
Note that this game has zero gore.
That's what law and lawyers are for. Think about it. 99% of the stuff people go to civil litigation for nowadays is stuff that might have resulted in a duel in the past. Encroachment on property? Bang. Breached contract? Bang. Fraud, deceit, misappropriation of village wheat. Bang.
Now we just sue the hell out of each other and nobody gets killed.
Nation states evolved from the personal fiefdoms of kings, but, at some point, the rule of law stopped counting. Oh, that's right, presidents and kings aren't bound by law.
My bad.
Nobody else seems to have commented on this, so I will. Has anyone noticed that on one of the desert missions you play the American's and of course you must fight the "terrorists" who are obviously arab. It's pretty sick that our tax payer dollars are being used to promote these racist ideals. They encourage children to play these games, and we all know that a lot of the people playing are very young. Does anyone else see something wrong with calling arabs terrorists and letting you be an American that kills them in a tax payer funded game. What are we teaching our children here? I wrote a letter complaining a while back but received no response. I hope that others out there will complain to the dev team and have the racism removed from the game.
...that you always get to play as the Americans.
It's a networked multiplayer thingy - and when *YOU* play, you
are always "the good guys" - so who is out there playing "the
bad guys" ?
The answer is that both sides *think* they are playing the
good guys - but the graphics show you as a US soldier and your
opponent as some kind of terrorist or something...one man's "Protect
the Diplomat on the way to the peace conference" is another man's
"Free the Kidnapped Diplomat before he's executed".
What's more subtle is that all the high-tech weaponry that you
have is also being used by your competition! Not exactly
a realistic situation in "the real world".
Aside from that, I think this is a VERY dubious way to attract
testosterone-laden video-game-addicted teenagers into the military
- and I'm horrified that taxpayers are shelling out for this.
www.sjbaker.org
has anyone who has read this article tried to run this under linux yet, and have they had any luck? there seems to be nothing on icculus except the screenshot. I tried to wine the installer, but it choked. this news item would have been much more worthwhile if it included some kind of procedure for getting it to work (isntall on a windows machine, and copy over the binaries, then wine?)
That screenshot attests to the fact that there is a picture of America's Army main menu on a Linux box. That doesn't mean the game runs or runs well. Always the skeptic.
I would be interested in hearing more from people who have actually tried to run it.
> I sometimes think that this lack of understanding/
> complacency is what will eventually kill this country.
This may not be the right place to have this argument, but -- I sometimes think it is the attitude that we should be able to fight the rest of the world all at the same time that will kill this country. I'm sorry -- that is killing it.
We wouldn't have to fight a war by ourselves on even one Iraq-sized front if we were able to convince another military power it was worth doing. As it is, we haven't even managed to convince the Republicans in the Senate or more than 40% of Americans.
Yes, it would be nice if we could outspend the entire world militarily, instead of only the next 12 countries -- but you know what? If we took 5% of the current budget, and doubled the budget for diplomacy instead, we might not need to.
You want a little science fiction? Here's one way I can envision our country getting killed: we react to North Korea's nuclear program with threats of war instead of diplomacy. North Korea, being even more aggressive, and having a worse grip on long-term consequences, than Bush, does not back down. Finally their only choices are to admit defeat or rain conventional-weapon hell down on Seoul -- and they make the wrong choice. We can't stop them with the troops we have there. Now Bush has a choice -- does he let millions of South Koreans die, or does he use nuclear weapons?
Well, what do you think?
Of course nuclear weapons do not, in themselves, signify the end of the world. They do mean, however, that from that point on, we actually have to outspend the rest of the world combined -- because who's going to be on our side if we give them a choice?
The trouble is, I don't think we can do it -- and I sure as hell don't think it's a good idea to try.
I agree that we need a military -- but I think the only way that we as a free society can coexist with one is if we question its actions at every step of the way. Right now, I have some serious questions, and they're not just about some computer game.
The purpose of the game is to teach you about teamwork. If you try and run it like an UT fragfest, you'll get killed, just like usually happens in real life. The game would bore you to tears if it used the "Hurry Up And Wait" standard of military ops, as well as the BOHICA (Bend Over Here It Comes Again) when orders are changed. In real life it is very scary to operate for extended periods of time in hostile terrain, without support, but as a game it would no doubt be very boring. There's just no way to capture to lack of sleep, sand in your asscrack, bugs crawling over you which you cannot swat away or you'll be detected, or running into a damn yapping little dog at night in a hostile city.
In a related story: Front-line troops disproportionately white, not black