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MSWL Olmec PBEM Soccer Game GPL'ed
zeb writes "MSWL is one of the most popular PBEM football (soccer for North Americans) game, which is itself a variation of a game of postal soccer invented by Alan Parr in England around 1970. In this game, each manager has to organise his team, manage fatigue, train his players and trade them.
Olmec is a game engine written by Alla Sellers. It helps the commissioner (game master) to simulate the games and publish the results. Allan has decided to release the source code of Olmec under the GPL, so that everyone can enhance the program.
The actual version of Olmec is written in Visual Basic and uses MS Access as a database. The author suggests Olmec could be rewritten in a multiplatform language, for example Java, using MySQL as the database. This task is made easy because of the rich documentation about the game engine (PDF format)."
I come to the ultimative conclusion..
what?
All the excitement of soccer without actually any of the playing.
Anyone got an appropriate Simpson's quote?
...when game developers were divided on the question whether C was fast enough, or if assembly was the only way to go.
And these days people write games in visual basic? What has this world come to?!
Did anyone else just stare blankly at the subject for a few second and wonder who took what kind of drugs?
Hate me!
omfg!
A recent Gartner Group study has revealed the surprising news that play by email ("PBEM") football ("soccer") is actually slightly more popular than repeating punching yourself in the balls. However, compulsive genital self-pugilists insist that their sport is growing rapidly in popularity and will soon outpace PBEM football, even given the influx of free software nerds that this GPL announcement is likely to attract. "Punching yourself in the nads is simply more fun than PBEM football," said a spokesman today. "Also, it's less gay."
Yeah, write it in Java, and then anyone who has trouble installing the VM will never be able to run it.
If your game cannot be installed by a complete moron, chances are, it won't get popular enough to acheive any kind of critical mass. Yeah, VB and Access are a piss-poor choice of design language here, but Java is just asking for nobody to ever run the game. Even if they already have a VM installed, you have to make sure it's the RIGHT VM (Yeah, MS's fault) and that you don't have a funky enivronment variable munging up your classpaths.
My suggestions?
For sheer compatibility's sake, the game should be written in ANSI C and use a non-platform specific database format (Dare I say it? XML delimited data?) to keep its data in.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
FUTBOL? I thought that was a programming language.
And if you read that and knew what it meant, you DEFINITELY don't have a girlfriend. ;)
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
LOL
I don't think you understand. PBEM means "Play By E-Mail." Graphics and speed are not really going to be major concerns for games by e-mail.
Here is a mirror of the site including the source code: http://www.madcowworld.com/mirror/mswl/www.mswl.or g/mswlsoftware.html
DXM, MDMA, C20H25N30...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Nice mod. Reverse psychology works every time, eh? It's not a matter of being GPL'd, it's a matter of being open sourced. Isn't /.'s fault people chose the GPL over any other thing.
/. on the simple basis that it's a formally closed source game that's open sourced. Got anything better?
Personally I think it's worthy of
I installed Netscape 7.1, never had to know or do anything about the JVM. Why? Because it has a decent installer. You can't blame Java for problems caused by bad installers.
A developer could wite a Java application, build the '.jar' file, then tell the user "you're on your own". Or that developer can build a platform specific installer that checks for the proper JVM and install it if needed.
There are programs out there that take either approach.
Even if they already have a VM installed, you have to make sure it's the RIGHT VM...
No the application's installer needs to make sure you have the right JVM
(Yeah, MS's fault) and that you don't have a funky enivronment variable munging up your classpaths.
I work with Java frequently, I can't remember the last time I had to set, or find out anything about the CLASSPATH environment variable.
CLASSPATH was an issue maybe *years* ago around Java 1.1, but has has been fixed for a long while. Part of the reason is that nowadays a Java developer can put just about all the resources he/she needs in a '.jar' file, which is a zip file with a meta information. The jar file acts likea mini file hierarchy within a single file, making software distrubution and resolving runtime dependencies easy.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
So if I get a mail through your mailserver, I score. Meanwhile, you tweak procmail/qmail to bounce it. Likewise, I'm doing the same while you try to get a mail through my server. Standard rules.
Otherwise...play an actual (fantasy) sport via email? Gah. I'd be less bored by remote-control hamster ball races.
I'm a big fan of Sun, but a web browser I wrote in Java back high school in 2000 doesn't work under Sun's 1.4.1 JRE. It had worked under 1.1.8. Now the window layout is all messed up, and many elements, like the image that the page is rendered to, don't appear at all. They lost backward compatibility at some point.
They claim that GUI rendering performance has improved greatly in recent releases, but I've only noticed that my programs run slower now than they used to when I wrote them, when I had a 200mhz pentium.
A lot of the new features are very interesting though, especially if you need to write a lot of network related software. It even has built in gzip support.
There was no story on /. when the music-making program Psycle became open-source. Not many people had heard of Psycle at the time. Then again, judging by the comments on this article, not many people have heard of MSWL Olmec either.
Really, does every single closed-source project that becomes open-source deserve a story about it? I don't think so. There isn't enough room for that many stories.
So I actually downloaded the code to see what's up and I'd say that the chances
that someone is going to rewrite this in Java are pretty damn low. Think whatever
you want to think about Visual Basic but this code is almost entirely uncommented,
and whatever language you are writing in that's a crime.
In fact a lot of the comments are... commented out code.
Here's a quick sample which actually has comments in it, one of which is a totally
useless explanation of what the "Randomize" function does in Visual Basic, the second
is just about is pointless.
(If you are not initiated into the VB way of doing things: a ' starts a comment)
'Randomize Random Number Function
Randomize
'Set Vis Team Home Bonus
VisTeam.HomeBonus = 0
If GstrMatchType = "Neutral" Or _
GstrMatchType = "SONeutral" Or _
GstrMatchType = "C1Neutral" Or _
GstrMatchType = "C1SONeutral" Or _
GstrMatchType = "C2Neutral" Or _
GstrMatchType = "C2SONeutral" Then
HomeTeam.HomeBonus = 0
Else
If GstrHB = "S" Then
If HomeTeam.HomeBonus <= 8 Then
HomeTeam.HomeBonus = 8
ElseIf HomeTeam.HomeBonus > 8 Then
If HomeTeam.HomeBonus > 13 Then
HomeTeam.HomeBonus = 13
End If
Call CheckHomeBonus(HomeTeam)
End If
ElseIf GstrHB = "A" Then
If HomeTeam.HomeBonus <= 3 Then
HomeTeam.HomeBonus = 3
ElseIf HomeTeam.HomeBonus > 3 Then
If HomeTeam.HomeBonus > 8 Then
HomeTeam.HomeBonus = 8
End If
Call CheckHomeBonus(HomeTeam)
End If
End If
End If
Call MatchRevenue(VisTeam, HomeTeam)
This sort of code is a pet peeve of mine. Just because it's been released under
the GPL means nothing if others can't actually work on the code and make sense of it.
The story says that the extensive manual will help (which it will a little), but some
explanation of the actual code is vital for any open source project to survive beyond
a few programmers initiated into the dark secrets of the code.
If we want open source to thrive we need to start having some standards of coding
so that others can use the code. Companies do this internally for a reason: they know
that they are going to hire new people who are going to need to look at the existing code.
Why do so few project bother with comments? It's almost as if the Open Source Initiative
should have a quality stamp that gets given to projects that actually care about their
longevity.
John.
...a variation of a game of postal soccer...
So how does that work, you run around in funny jerseys, kicking round balls and, uh, shooting people?
Don't sweat the petty things. But do pet the sweaty things.
The most popular is, hands down, Championship Manager.
(Ref sites:
www.sigames.com
www.thedugout.net)
Has MSWL been able to implement 10% of the features of CM?
Soccer is pretty godawful boring already. Now you're supposed to play by mail?
When I first read the summary of the story, I thought they were talking about some 3d accellerated soccer game written in Visual Basic, and I started crying. Then after reading a few comments I found out that PBEM meant 'Play By EMail', and I started crying again because this is way too lame to be on the front page.
yep
Time passes
Oh no! We have to write the entire shader and physics engines BY OURSELVES!!
Hehe
Many Thanks,
Luke
Not story quality. Not interested by a story? Then just ignore it. Other people may well be interested in it and shouldn't have to read your self-important whining. A lot of people, myself included, do like reading Slashdot so as to be occasionally introduced to stuff that "no one's ever heard of".
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Zymano rules!
Can we, please, stop arguing the language anything is done. Language is not important - I have created high performance systems in Algol, Fortran, MUMPS, assembler ( several ), VB, Pascal, REXX, PL/I, "C", C++, APL, you name it.. Even Tcl/Tk, Python, Java, Cobol - who cares.. The important thing is that someone is giving a system for us ! Don't complain that and have a nice day..
I work for a company that only writes products in Java, but writes them well.
We have a 10,000 active customer base that users our productsts. And they all love them. As a matter of fact, one product has 5-10 million users acessing it as we speak. And it is written in Java.
There is a shitload of bad code in Java, and there is some really tight code as well.
I have two machines at work. A 2 gig celeron and a 366 p3 with 245 megs of ram, our java app runs eqaully on them both, as I used the 366 the past three months and had no complaints other than the graphics card which was fixed by adding a Matrox.
Java is not perfect, but when done right it is pretty damn good.
We have product that on p3 800 with 512 of ram supports 500 operators with about 50 concurrent connections each, and guess what, 7 of the top ten ISP's use us.
Anything can be done poorly, and unfortunately Java got that rap.
C is better, but J aint that bad.
And stop being ANON. PUSSY
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Didn't take long to slashdot that site. Maybe next time we can just post his credit card so that we can just charge the amount we just put on his bandwidth bill?
It's not an acronym unless you pronounce it as if it were a word, like 'scuba', 'radar', 'sonar', 'SNAFU', 'FUBAR', or 'NASA'
Holy cow, I guess I've been pronouncing GPL wrong! Let alone PCMCIA! =)
Why not just write it in XML and XSLT? No virtual machine overhead, no need for a daemon, etc. It's really just pushing data around. No sense involving all that software.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
...then why bother with MySQL? Use HSQLDB, an open source 100% Java database. The more hoops users have to jump through the fewer users will use the software. With an all-Java solution there's just one thing to install, and no configuration necessary.
What, you mean people don't pronounce it 'gupple' and 'pecumsee-ah'?
Why do they need a program ? Just use emails and someone could use printed tables and dices to get the results. Screw software =).
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
It's almost like I'm polish, and saying something incomprehensible because slashdot is so crazy.
Many Thanks,
Luke
You'll see all your favorite soccer stars. Like Ariaga! Ariaga II! Bariaga! Aruglia! And Pizzoza!
This match will determine once and for all which nation is the greatest on earth: Mexico or Portugal!
How your post managed to get moderated -1, Insightful (a negative score with a positive descriptor!) is beyond me.
I'm seeing several odd moderations in this story. It seems that this story is so out of the blue that nobody quite knows what to make of it. In order to see the whole view behind this thing, I actually clicked to see the replies beyond my threshold (which I've never done before except when I wanted to see exactly what it did). My conclusion is that some of the posts were rightfully modded down, but others should have been modded up. And others that were modded up should be modded down!
Moderators, if you mod me down you'll just be proving my point.
Grrrr, where's my mod points when I need them? I would be able to fix at least some of it.
To make this post somewhat on-topic, I was disappointed by the site that the story linked to. There was no information about exactly what it was or any "getting started" type of info. How is someone new to this soccer thing supposed to get into it? It just assumed that you knew what it was talking about, which I think most of us that visit from Slashdot only have a vague idea. Poor web design, if you ask me. But then, I doubt they were expecting to get linked to from Slashdot.
Intelligent responses welcome, flames will be met with marshmallows.
Another quite popular Football (soccer) game.
.haeger
Actually I think it's the largest online game of that kind right now. I enjoy it. Give it a try.
Find it here: Hattrick.org
The best thing about it is that it runs in real time, a week in the game is a week real-time. Two matches a week (cup/training and series) and a 14 week long season. Finally a game that I can play that doesn't require me to be logged in 3-4 times/day.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
That would be great if Tim Wisseman decided to do the same with his VGA Planets
Why rewrite in an entirely different language?
It would make far more sense to work on the Visual Basic code and get it to work off of the Star Basic Engine from StarOffice.
In fact now that Real Basic is available for Linux, as well as Windows and Macintosh, RealBasic looks like a really good choice if you want to make this game more portable.
http://www.realbasic.com/
As for the database the best idea would probably be to try and upgrade it to work with any database that understands ODBC.
You mean it isn't a game simulation of ancient Mesoamerica (Olmecs)? I thought it was odd that the ball court was in Manchester UK and not Tikal.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
from postSeasonAging in basAging
"!PlayerName = !PlayerName"
well, d'uh.
Maybe, just maybe there is a good reason for this, but without a comment explaing why, the author looks less then capable.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yes we call it Soccer in Canada as well. And no, I don't live in an igloo.
Firstly, I do think it's great that the guy released it under the GPL. But I still think the open source community can do a better job of commenting its code.
And I don't agree that I should "shut up" just because I'm not willing to comment this particular piece of code. I was making a point about open source code in general.
You can view some of my code in the following projects on SourceForge:
POPFile: CVS
PrivateSearchBar: CVS
Both those links take you to web interfaces to the CVS repositories for the projects. POPFile is written mostly in Perl for all platforms, PrivateSearchBar is written in C++ for Windows.
John.