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Microsoft Releases Allegiance Game Source
Zenin writes "Microsoft has graciously released the source code to Allegiance for free on their site. Allegiance was released back in 2000, and rated the 'Best Game No One Played' by GameSpot - this little- known multiplayer space-combat/team-RTS was pretty innovative, yet never took off in the mainstream. Nevertheless it quickly developed a fanatical following - a dedicated community who reverse engineered the game to enable complete mods, expand server power, and much more. A million thanks to Joel 'solap' Dehlin and the rest of the Allegiance development team for making this happen!"
The license agreement:
This Microsoft Research Shared Source license agreement ("MSR-SSLA") is a legal
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WA
I have been pwned because my
The Allegiance Demo is available here.
The ______ Agenda
Certainly you could do a Linux port. However, you'd have to replace the calls to DirectX 7.0 with calls to something more cross platform like OpenGL. This can be done of course, as you can see from the Mac port of Halo.
- Vincit qui patitur.
It isnt a trick. Allegiance was a product of Microsoft Research which is just a bunch of MS funded groups. This is why Allegiance never really got the ad support it should have gotten. It mostly was and experiment that turned out to be one of the best mutliplayer space sim games ever made, but unfortunatly didnt get a big following due to lack of ad revenue. It was eventaually taken off support and allowed to be distributed for free.
The giving the source was in repsonse to the still going strong community that have been trying for a while now to get the source.
Of course, it had problems because of that last part--even the slightest bit of griefing or rambo syndrome and your team was in trouble. IF you had a bad commander, your team was screwed. If the sides weren't well balanced, it was very hard for the inferior team to pull off a win. If the sides were balanced, it was an insanely fun and intense game, even better than Tribes was.
They didn't really market this one much, and it was nigh unplayable over modem connections and residential broadband was still in its infancy. Had this game come out today with some decent marketing, I think it could easily become one of the "Best Games of 2004"...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Allegiance came from MS Research Games, not MS Games, and infact was built to be a testing ground for Direct* pieces at the time (in particular DirectPlay was completely forged in Allegance). The fact it turned into a commercial game at all was a bit of happenstance, not original intention.
So yes, it's heavily Direct biased, likely including "beta" versions of some DirectX pieces that won't map directly to any real DirectX release. If this makes it harder to port (unknown/never published DirectX features) or easier (above are in the Allegiance code and thus come with it), we don't know yet.
My
I was a beta tester for the game and here's what I remember FWIW.
I never bought the retail version after the beta was over, so I'm not 100% sure what the final decision was, but Microsoft's original plan was to have 2 types of servers:
1) Community run, free servers to play ala Counter-Strike, Quake and the like. That way you could play and not pay monthly fees.
2) Monthly fees for access to Micorosft run servers that would include persistent stats, rankings, ladder tourneys, clans, etc... Basically a value-added package.
As I said, I don't know if MS implemented this system, but it seemed like a great idea to me, as it catered to both types of multi-player gamer.
Yep, the "FreeZone" and the "AllegianceZone", they had it up at game launch.
Eventually they made the AZ free too...then a bit later dropped the AZ servers so it was only community hosted servers...then a bit later dropped the lobby and we had to create a utility that routed "local lan" DPlay connections to servers out on the internet (SOVRoute). Some time later MS gave the community the Lobby server install and some other toys and we got the FreeZone lobby back up on your own hardware.
Currently, as has been for a couple years, the community owns the Lobby server, the game servers, the auto-update server, etc. This source will help us greatly in restoring the AZ features as well (but of course it will remain free for all).
My
Nintendo needs to step up here.
I'm a parody of a 14 year old b
Ooops -- I meant the Netscape Public License, not the Mozilla Public License. Heh.
May we never see th
Note the "source" download also includes all raw media files, including all sound files, image files (bitmaps...), and the WAV file format CD music tracks.
95% of the source zip is media...
My