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Dystopia Mod Released for HL2
fistfullast33l writes "Dystopia, a Matrix meets TRON mod for Half Life 2, has finally been released to the public today. This has been one of the more beautiful and original mods under development for HL2 so far. Files are available all over the place but check out their homepage for more details." From the article: "After 9 long months of heavy development and another year of planning and designing before that, it has been a long and challenging road to this point. We're extremely excited to let the public see what we've been so busy working on all this time and hope that you enjoy it as much as we do. This demo version is limited to only 1 map; Vaccine, but features all of our high powered weapons and extensive range of implants."
I thought that the Matrix was already TRON inspired.
TRON had a better plot at least.
I've been playing this mod for most of the night, and I have to say I'm absolutely loving it. The balance on the map's a little off, but it's very fun on either side.
Heavy with minigun = doom
I downloaded Dystopia around the hour it came out, and jumped into a server as soon as one with an empty slot became available. While it doesn't have a unique concept, it's a fairly decent mod, so far.
Releasing this as a demo may have been a mistake for the team, since there are a bit of "known issues" that cause the game to crash, or just slightly inconvenience people. In the day or so I've had it, the mod has crashed no less than eight times. Perhaps they should have called it a "public beta" instead. Another interesting issue I had come across was a server on which the doors on the level had more kills than the players.
Teamplay, like on most internet games, is hit or miss. When you've got a good team that's working together, it's awesome. When you have a bunch of idiots that are doing things like monopolizing the hack points without knowing what they're doing, it's infuriating.
The following forum post on their site, here, gives me an uneasy feeling. I don't think the game merits a retail release, and fear if they license the Source engine it will be doomed to failure instead of being an enjoyable mod for anyone to enjoy. Most people I've talked to on servers do not forsee Dystopia being worth buying if it is not released as a free modification.
Is Dystopia good? Yes. Can it be a lot of fun? Most certainly. But it has its problems which I hope can be hammered out between now and its "real" release.
If there's anything more important than my ego around here, I want it caught and shot immediately.
The point is they put work into it, and they control the sources to their game, so yes, they can ask money for it.
Whether Valve asks them for a part of the money, or whether they make them release the game under the GPL is up to Valve. As you wrote yourself, its up to Valve, and Valve seems to be fine with it
By the way, you are still allowed to ask money for programs under the GPL, it is just harder to continue finding people who pay your price.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.