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Tron 2.0 Multiplayer Demo Out Now

Posted by simoniker on from the psycho-tron-ic dept.

ydkcookie writes "According to Voodoo Extreme, the PC multiplayer demo of Tron 2.0 has been released! This 160mb demo features light-cycle racing and a first-person multiplayer shooter style level." There's also a BitTorrent link available, courtesy GameTab, and also a download link at GamersHell for the demo of this Monolith-developed title we previewed a few weeks back.

23 comments

  1. Meh by Tumbleweed · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Until they have the full Tron experience with light cycles, tanks, and recognizers, all playing in the same 3D environment simultaneously, I'm going to continue to be underwhelmed compared to the movie. *shrug*

    And I want a bit of my very own! (*YES**YES**YES*)

  2. Singleplayer Demo by vigilology · · Score: 1

    Would it not be better to release a singleplayer demo first? When I try out a game, I don't want to have to wait until a friend gets it and we arrange a time to try it out together. I know that might not be what people do, but 'multiplayer' certainly gives that impression.

    1. Re:Singleplayer Demo by Wonko42 · · Score: 5, Informative
      You didn't just step out of a time machine, did you? You're not a visitor from the past, are you? You do realize that multiplayer demos of first person shooters have been pretty standard fare ever since Quake, right?

      There's just no better way to test multiplayer code than to release a demo to the public and see what bugs crop up. The fact that the demo helps give the game publicity is really just a nice side effect -- they're probably primarily interested in working the kinks out of the multiplayer system.

    2. Re:Singleplayer Demo by vigilology · · Score: 1

      You didn't just step out of a time machine, did you? You're not a visitor from the past, are you? You do realize that multiplayer demos of first person shooters have been pretty standard fare ever since Quake, right? Yes? Not sure what your point is. There's just no better way to test multiplayer code than to release a demo to the public and see what bugs crop up. The fact that the demo helps give the game publicity is really just a nice side effect -- they're probably primarily interested in working the kinks out of the multiplayer system. I'm sorry but 'demo' is just that - a demonstration. Bugs should have been worked out in earlier stages. If one wants to see what bugs crop up by releasing code to the public, one should not call it a demo. Any bugs that people see in a demonstration are expected to be present in the 'final' product (it is a demonstration of this, after all). This was true for Will Rock. I do realise that it is good that companies release patches to fix bugs after release dates, but it is a sorry state of affairs that the bugs got past their QA stage at all. Imagine if Ford made a car whose right rear electric window didn't work. Software is massively complicated and impossible to work out every bug? So are cars, and Ford seems to manage it.

    3. Re:Singleplayer Demo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      I can see what you mean. Ford never makes mistakes.

    4. Re:Singleplayer Demo by Wonko42 · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Perhaps you have more software development and quality assurance experience than I do. Please, explain to me how one goes about testing the limits of a multiplayer game without getting hundreds, perhaps thousands of people to play it online, in the environment for which it was intended. Do you expect the game developer to hire hundreds of QA testers and set up hundreds of machines, each with different hardware and a separate wide-area Internet connection? Ha! Not likely.

      Furthermore, there is nothing in the definition of the word "demonstration" that implies that the demonstration must exactly reflect the nature or workings of the thing being demonstrated. A demonstration is an *example* of the final product, it is not necessarily a fractal representation of the final product itself.

    5. Re:Singleplayer Demo by sandalwood · · Score: 1

      Actually, the release of demos is usually a marketing-driven decision. Since a demo often comes before the game is released it means forking the code, and this eventually turns into a pretty big chore. Releasing a demo to find bugs or balance issues is very, very rare - developers most always have their hands full just trying to fix the ones QA has already found.

    6. Re:Singleplayer Demo by Wonko42 · · Score: 1

      In the case of a single player demo, I would agree with you, but multiplayer demos serve a very useful purpose. There's just no better way to test a multiplayer game than for a whole lot of real people to actually test it in real-world situations. This has been the case with every major multiplayer game I can think of released in the last ten years.

    7. Re:Singleplayer Demo by Matchstick · · Score: 1
      Do you expect the game developer to hire hundreds of QA testers and set up hundreds of machines, each with different hardware and a separate wide-area Internet connection?
      You're right; it's much more common for the publisher to do it.
    8. Re:Singleplayer Demo by vigilology · · Score: 1

      Calling it a demo (when it's obviously a beta) kind of implies that what you see here, you get later. To put together a demo implies that you have already finished the product and are releasing a taster to show it off. That would be the purpose, in my eyes, of a demonstration.

    9. Re:Singleplayer Demo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They have these things called 'betas'. That's what they're for. Demos are supposed to be *exactly* what you get with the final game, only not as much of it. You're a fucking idiot if you think that a demo is a load-balancing effort. There are these things called 'protocols' that have been pretty standard for a while. They give a pretty accurate idea of how performance is going to be, because you know how much data can move to where in how much time....BEFORE you start your code. Betas take care of the rest. By the time a demo is released, there isn't TIME to collect all the data, analyze it, and implement changes before the game is ALREADY SHIPPED. Now, had you said that companies *may* take lessons learned from the demo PLUS the first few weeks of general release to make a patch....fine. But that's NOT the reason they release demos. It never was, and I doubt it ever will be.

    10. Re:Singleplayer Demo by Wonko42 · · Score: 1
      Name one publisher, game developer, or other entity that has gone out and hired over 100 quality assurance testers for the specific purpose of testing a multiplayer game. Or, better yet, name one that has hired over 1,000.

      You won't be able to, but even if a company had done that, they'd be paying an enormous chunk of money for an unrealistic testing environment when they could just release a free demo and get the game tested by potentially hundreds of thousands of real people on real configurations on the real Internet, and they wouldn't have to pay a dime for it other than the bandwidth costs for hosting the demo download.

      Now, which course of action seems to make more business sense to you?

  3. Heh... by Darkwraith · · Score: 1

    It sounds like you want Battlefield 1982.It would be so cool if BF 1942 had a mod with a Tron kind of environment.I'd probably make it if I knew a thing about programming.

  4. My bad. by Darkwraith · · Score: 1

    There seems to already be a mod named Battlefield 1982.

  5. Pron still better than Tron by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    20 years later, I still prefer pron to tron.

  6. Controls Suck Ass by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Just tried it with Keyboard\Mouse and the controls suck. It's too difficult to keep the accelerator down and turn multiple times in close quarters. Tried it with a Joystick and you lose the ability to change the perspective and activate power ups. I went into the Control config screen and they don't even let you re-map stuff to different keys. For Joystick you only get to re-map the "strafe left/right" to the x or y axis. Total crap. I hope they change this before the retail release in August.

  7. My Tron cartoons by aWalrus · · Score: 4, Funny

    I just thought I'd drop this by: I made a series of 4 Tron cartoons in my webcomic, Overcaffeinated. These are the links:

    Strip 1
    Strip 2
    Strip 3
    Strip 4

    I've been expecting this game for a while now. =)

    --
    Overcaffeinated. Angry geeks.
  8. dude, where's my demo by notanatheist · · Score: 1

    Wish more people would release more linux demos. Why not gauge the linux users response while working out the bugs in the demos?! I hate rebooting to play some silly game demo. At least I have plenty of entertainment on the linux side of things.

    1. Re:dude, where's my demo by line72 · · Score: 1

      Guess I won't be playing this one. I don't even have a Window partion. 3 computers all running Linux. At least Savage is coming out soon for linux !!

  9. Will they learn from Armagetron? by Thornae · · Score: 2, Informative

    A while ago, the ever-popular Penny Arcade had a comment from Tycho about his hopes for the camera system in the lightcycle part of Tron 2.0, and suggested that the developers take a good look at Armagetron and see if they can come up with something that good.

    I duly downloaded said game, and have since become quite addicted. Something it has over other Tron type games I've tried (eg GlTron) is that the closter you get to a wall, the faster you go. This makes for some interesting strategy, and unless Tron 2.0 has something similar, it's not going to replace Armagetron for me.

    --
    |>
    Here be Dragons
    1. Re:Will they learn from Armagetron? by yotto · · Score: 1

      AND anybody who already has Armagetron, so didn't click on the link (and instead went to play the game) better click on the link, they updated it about a week ago. The beta most of us have been begrudgingly playing for the past year is now a final version, bug free (for me, so far, at least) and very very nice.

      --
      Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
  10. Ohmigod! by Icephreak1 · · Score: 1

    The MCP smiles upon me! A joyous day indeed! Catch me around as "Inode", the same Inode as on the Tron PKMUD I used to frequent back in the day.

    - IP

  11. Tried it. Not all that impressive by aWalrus · · Score: 1

    I tried it yesterday for a while. I have to say that I like the gameple of the lightcycle part better in Armagetron or even in Gltron. The camera just feels 'iffy'. It's a pain controlling it with the mouse, and apparently there's no option for first person view, which sucks (because, although much more difficult, that's the best mode to play in).

    I also logged in to the disc tournaments with a bunch of people in Minessota I think, and although the visuals are amusing, I didn't find them particularly good. They may be quite impressive in full glory, I don't have a very fast computer, so I kept it simple (640x480 with medium detail). There seem to be a bunch of problems with clipping and the animations for the models quite frankly suck. There are just a few positions for the models (hopefully there will be more models in the final game, by the way) and the transitions between them are not very fluid. A lot of times people going up a ramp looked like they were floating above it or walking on steps rather than on a slope. The disc gameplay itself is pretty straightforward and seems like it could be fun. I think.

    Maybe I've heightened my expectations too much since the release of the Half Life 2 gameplay video, but this didn't seem all that impressive.

    --
    Overcaffeinated. Angry geeks.