Open Source Shooter Nexuiz 2.5 Released

Michael writes "A new version of Nexuiz, a GPL-licensed, first-person shooter, has been released. There are over 3,000 changes in Nexuiz 2.5, including new maps, new game-modes, enhanced graphics, new audio, and other major changes. Phoronix has posted a preview of this Nexuiz 2.5 release, with screenshots showing the impressive graphics and how it has raised the bar for open-source gaming. Details about the Nexuiz project are available at SourceForge."

Comments

Bizzaro-UT

[im_thatoneguy]

Are all of the maps UT maps or just all the the ones in the trailer?

Re:Bizzaro-UT

[Firehawke]

Well, I certainly recognized Facing Worlds, but I saw a lot more Q3 than UT in the videos in the map overall.

Re:Bizzaro-UT

[esteel]

Actually there are only two q1/q3 alike maps in Nexuiz, all the other 20+ included maps are new to Nexuiz. Quite a few custom mappers were inspired by ut/q3 maps though.

Re:Bizzaro-UT

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, a lot of those maps, especially the Facing Worlds clone appear to have been heavily inspired from UT.

Re:Bizzaro-UT

[jonaskoelker]

No, they also have dm6 from quake 1.

I haven't played too many non-ID shooters, so I can't recognize any other maps. Maybe some of them are original to Nexuiz... ?

First PS

[Bromskloss]

Many games claim to be the first person shooter. I don't know whom to believe.

Re:First PS

[dns_server]

I guess it's just a matter of perspective.

Re:First PS

[Minwee]

And many other games claim to be the second person shooter, "On a Grassy Knoll". I think they're just nuts.

Re:First PS

[v1]

Depends on what criteria you want to use. Doom was probably the first contender but lacked almost all notion of the 3rd dimension. IMHO bungie hit it first with Marathon, with improvements over Doom too numerous to list. Some of the key additions were vertical aim, lifts, reloading, reasonable ammunition limits, bundled map AND physics editors, improved mob AI, and of course the big winner, networked multiplayer deathmatch. I personally think that last one is a requirement, though there have been some very good FPS that lack multiplayer. (Deus Ex my fav) The only thing Marathon lacked at the time was "jump" and "climb".

Re:First PS

[Anonymous Coward]

Well first of all, either wooosh on you or wooosh on me.

But ignoring that and answering your post. You are saying Doom didn't have reloading? And no deathmatches? I mean the first Doom I played (1.1 or something?) had lifts, reloading, network games. The vertical aim was fake though...

But before doom there was Wolfenstein 3D of course.

Re:First PS

[KeX3]

Doom didn't have reloading, now did it?
I recall Doom 2's double barreled shotgun having some "chug two more cartridges in there"-animation, but apart from that there was nothing keeping you from holding down the fire button and spewing sprites until your ammo counter read 000, was there?

Re:First PS

[FishWithAHammer]

Uh...no, Doom did not have reloading. It had cooldown on weapons, but it did not have reloading.

You are right about lifts and network games. But, IIRC (and I could be wrong), Marathon actually supported stacked sectors, whereas Doom does not. Being unable to put a room on top of another room kind of really sucks.

Re:First PS

[Anonymous Coward]

Joke went right over your head, didn't it?

Re:First PS

[Blakey Rat]

That's ok, I can never tell the real time strategy games from all the fake ones out there, either.

Re:First PS

[ZosX]

Actually you had to wait for double barelled shotgun to reload. Or was that Doom 2.....? Its been so many years.

Re:First PS

[Anonymous Coward]

Doom indeed had networked multiplayer deathmatch. Limit was to a local lan and only four players, however.

Re:First PS

[LMariachi]

Deus Ex had multiplayer. Wasn't very popular though.

Re:First PS

[genner]

Wrong, the original Wolfenstien was the first FPS. Doom was the first multiplayer FPS though.

Re:First PS

[hajus]

I remember playing multiplayer (via ipx) on doom in 93. I don't remember the details but I remember shooting at them.

Re:First PS

[nog_lorp]

The very first PS was a game called Sociopath, where you bought a gun from the local gun smithy and shot the local kids for fun.

Re:First PS

[FishWithAHammer]

That's not reloading. That's cooldown with an animation. Reloading is when a weapon has a clip of X rounds (or X in the magazine) and must be reloaded, pausing your ability to fight. The supershotgun in Doom 2 was no different from any other gun, it just took an extra half second or so to cool down after a shot.

Re:First PS

[AKAImBatman]

Try again. Ever hear of HoverTank 3D, Ultima Underworld, or Catacomb 3D?

Wolfenstien was the first popular FPS.

Re:First PS

[Ascagnel]

A patch added multiplayer to the original Deus Ex. The version that's sold on Steam (and as the GOTY edition) has this patch, and if you have an older copy you can just download it. Its worth a look, since its a compressed form of the character development in the full game. Plus there are some pretty good server-side mods.

Re:First PS

[Ascagnel]

DWANGO. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWANGO

Re:First PS

[supernova_hq]

"Second Person Shooter?"

From and English perspective:

• First person: me
• Second person: you
• Third person: him/her

So if first person is seeing through the eyes of the main character and third person is seeing it from afar (above, behind, etc.) Would second person be seeing it from the eyes of the target?

Hmm, that might actually be fun. Your character is controlled as normal, but you can only see what the other guy is looking at...

Re:First PS

[Unoti]

I remember playing MidiMaze, a first person shooter, in the 80's.

Re:First PS

[Dutch_Cap]

Actually, both Doom and Deus X have a multiplayer option.

Re:First PS

[spydum]

ken's labyrinth, Catacombs 3D for sure.. then Wolf-3D. Ultima Underworld came out later I think, but was vastly superior as far as story and gameplay. Too bad the movement interface was terrible.

Re:First PS

[AKAImBatman]

You have them backwards. Hovertank, then Ultima, then Catacomb, then Wolf, then Ken's Laybrinth. I used to make the same mistake since Catacomb and Ken's were so confusing. But Ken's really was last. It was inspired by Wolf3D and eventually lead to the Build Engine used by Apogee (aka 3D Realms).

Re:First PS

[Phasma Felis]

Depends on what criteria you want to use.

It really does. If you mean "game with a first-person perspective and combat", that goes back to Maze War in 1973--it was even multiplayer. If you mean "game with true 3D environments", well, wireframe/polygon shooters have been around since the early 80s at least, possibly earlier. ID's Catacomb 3D introduced texture-mapped walls (in 16 colors!) in 1991, but unlike those polygon shooters was really only 2D in layout.

DOOM really kickstarted the modern FPS concept in 1993 with psuedo-vertical 3D, floor and ceiling textures, and immersive lighting and audio effects. DOOM was revolutionary in a lot of ways, but it was far from the first FPS.

Re:First PS

[Phasma Felis]

ken's labyrinth, Catacombs 3D for sure.. then Wolf-3D.

Nope. Ken's Labyrinth was just another Wolf3D knockoff; it came out a year later. Catacomb 3D wasn't even id's first FPS (that would be Hovertank 3D).

Re:First PS

[Contusion]

I heard about that one. The graphics were said to be mind blowing, but there was little replay value.

Re:First PS

[djnforce9]

I guess that means Psychonauts has a "second person" view when you use the reconnaissance power :). Cool. Never thought of it that way

OMFG Based off of Quake 1 engine

[ZeroNullVoid]

This should run on crappy systems and good ones based off the system specs and engine.

Re:OMFG Based off of Quake 1 engine

[Gordonjcp]

Same as Half-Life then...

Re:OMFG Based off of Quake 1 engine

[Anonymous Coward]

If only it were true, ioq3 based OpenArena and even Tremulous get better performance on most machines, Nexuiz is extremely heavily modified and takes a fair bit more grunt, but it does look pretty impressive considering its roots.

Re:OMFG Based off of Quake 1 engine

[esteel]

HL did not have a completely rewritten quake1 engine with realtime light/shadows like doom3, bumpmapping, reliefmapping and such great stuff. The DarkPlaces engine used in nexuiz is just BASED on the quake1 engine but its greatly improved and almost totally rewritten and is one of the most powerful and featurecomplete engines there is!

Re:OMFG Based off of Quake 1 engine

[sortius_nod]

HL was Q2, not Q1...

Re:OMFG Based off of Quake 1 engine

[gbarules2999]

Half-Life 1 used chunks of both engines.

Re:OMFG Based off of Quake 1 engine

[Narishma]

You would think so but the requirements are actually higher than even games running on the Quake 3 engine.

Re:OMFG Based off of Quake 1 engine

[yelvington]

Unfortunately, it doesn't.

Nexuiz is in the Ubuntu 9.04 repository, so I gave it a try. On a 3-gigahertz Pentium 4 with 1.5 gigs of RAM and an ATI Radeon 7000 video card, the game is unusable.

I'm not talking about dropped frames; even the configuration screens are unusable due to lag between the mouse and the pointer.

The original Quake I and II engines ran fine on a Pentium with one-tenth the speed of this one, so the guys recoding the engine must be having an awful lot of fun at great CPU expense.

Re:OMFG Based off of Quake 1 engine

[Anonymous Coward]

The system requirements to play adequately are quite high, actually. Comparable to UT 2004.

Re:OMFG Based off of Quake 1 engine

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll take a wild guess and say your problem could be the ATI

Re:OMFG Based off of Quake 1 engine

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't feel like it was the blazing headbobbing speed of Classic Quake; or maybe the cartoonish look made it more like Q2. Can anybody confirm?

Re:OMFG Based off of Quake 1 engine

[AirRaven]

Nay, 'twasn't.
The Half-Life engine is a heavily modified version of the original QuakeWorld engine, with a couple of changes from the Q2 engine implemented to buff it up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldsrc

Re:OMFG Based off of Quake 1 engine

[Ailure]

Actually the GoldSrc engine (aka Half-life) was based on Quake World.

Re:OMFG Based off of Quake 1 engine

[TheSambassador]

Actually, I found the mouse lag to be due to Vsync. Try turning it off.

Re:OMFG Based off of Quake 1 engine

[nabsltd]

I don't have my Dark Places engine games handy right now, so I can't give the exact setting, but try disabling (or reducing) some of the variable lighting and shadow settings.

When running Quake 1 under Dark Places, I was getting more than 100fps with dual Radeon X1900 Pro cards, until I enabled one of the über-lighting settings. At that point, I dropped down to less than 20fps.

Re:OMFG Based off of Quake 1 engine

[X0563511]

Well...

Nexuiz runs on top of Lord Havoc's Darkplaces engine, which was (is) a rewrite of the Quake 1 engine.

When I play Quake 1 in his engine, with everything on, it slows to below 10FPS at times. This is on a quad-core with a high end nvidia card.

This is a powerful engine.

Re:OMFG Based off of Quake 1 engine

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is ridiculous. Whatever modifications Darkplaces has must be very poorly coded.

For comparison, the Doom3 engine looks infinitely better and runs fine at Ultra detail settings on just a single Geforce 7600GT. Hopefully when id Tech 4 gets open sourced, we'll start seeing more projects move away from these old engines that have features glued on in ghetto-fabulous fashion.

Re:OMFG Based off of Quake 1 engine

[Ascagnel]

Its not that its poorly coded, but rather an oddity that comes from playing maps that aren't designed for real-time lighting.

In the original Quake, the lighting was hardcoded (maps were put through a "light" compile phase that would determine all the shadows and put the shadowmap directly onto the level). Because it was static lighting, the designers put lights all over the place. This gave them nice, even lighting with no performance hit, except that the light phase would take longer.

This worked great in 1996, but since modern games have real-time lighting, jamming a room full of lights doesn't work as well. Since the "light" phase is run on every frame, there's a substantial lag introduced by having the number of lights they used (if you poke around the map source posted by Romero, its well into the hundreds in some levels). By comparison, Doom 3 had far fewer lights per level (typically, >100 lights) and had some serious culling going on so it wouldn't have to render every light every frame (something that the id Tech 1 engine doesn't support).

Moral of the story: a crapload of lights is slow, no matter where you put the lighting calculations.

Re:OMFG Based off of Quake 1 engine

[Anonymous Coward]

I am aware of how these engines handle static vs dynamic lighting, as I've been a mapper for Q3 based games for many years now and have worked with Doom3 maps as well.

Static lightmaps do affect performances, significantly if you are using a low lightmapscale scale, three or more samples in the lighting phase of the compile and eight or more bounces (radiosity). You might be able to get by with fewer or no bounces, but unless your map is a large outdoor area that is primarily and uniformly lit by a skybox shader, using high lightmapscale and less samples looks REALLY bad. Dynamic lighting in Q3 isn't actually dynamic. The engine just swaps between multiple lightmaps when needed (ie. a light entity attached to a trigger) and you cannot have moving light entities. Every dynamic light layer makes for a noticeably larger BSP and builds up to a large performance hit very quickly. The lighting on character models is nothing more than gouraud shading, though there is glitchy support for using stencil shadows which don't properly clip, don't support multiple light sources and only work on a per vertex level (very visible on self shadowed areas of character models). In addition, all dynamic shadows/lights and shaders are handled by the CPU.

Dynamic lighting in Doom3 uses per pixel shadow volumes for everything. Hardware pixel shaders easily handle the workload and also support culling of non-visible shadow volumes so the only lighting that needs to be processed is that which is visible on the screen. Any geometry can also have keys attached to it that specify whether or not it should receive and/or cast shadows. With "modern" (5 years or newer) video hardware and a mapper who understands proper level design from the beginning, the use of only unified lighting poses no real barrier to creating an effective, well lit or not environment; at least no more of a barrier than handling vis (structural vs detail brushes, use of areaportals and antiportals) did in the older engines like Q3.

Take a look at some of the other games that use the Doom3 engine, like Quake 4 and Quake Wars. Both have environments that are significantly brighter than Doom3 without performance loss due to lighting. Doom3 is dark because of a design choice, not a technical limitation.

In the end, if Darkplaces needs such high system specs to support features because of workarounds for engine limitations, future game projects will be better off using engines that were developed from the start with those features and more up to date hardware capabilities in mind.

Re:OMFG Based off of Quake 1 engine

[MrNiceguy_KS]

No wonder Doom 3 was so frackin' dark.

Re:OMFG Based off of Quake 1 engine

[basotl]

I don't know what settings I have that are different but it plays well on my laptop.

2 GHZ Single core Centrino Processor
2 GIGS DDR2 RAM
Geforce 6800 (256 MB)

I normally play OpenArena but I switch to Nexuiz on occasion.

Re:OMFG Based off of Quake 1 engine

[Ascagnel]

The workaround for DarkPlaces is to compensate only for old maps. New maps typically are designed with rtlights files in mind, which lets the mapper designate which lights are static and which are dynamic. If you use these features, DP gets a whole lot faster per frame.

Re:OMFG Based off of Quake 1 engine

[CSMatt]

Compiz Fusion might be the culprit. Try turning it off before playing.

Re:OMFG Based off of Quake 1 engine

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, it doesn't.

Nexuiz is in the Ubuntu 9.04 repository, so I gave it a try. On a 3-gigahertz Pentium 4 with 1.5 gigs of RAM and an ATI Radeon 7000 video card, the game is unusable.

I'm not talking about dropped frames; even the configuration screens are unusable due to lag between the mouse and the pointer.

The original Quake I and II engines ran fine on a Pentium with one-tenth the speed of this one, so the guys recoding the engine must be having an awful lot of fun at great CPU expense.

Unfortunately, it doesn't.

Nexuiz is in the Ubuntu 9.04 repository, so I gave it a try. On a 3-gigahertz Pentium 4 with 1.5 gigs of RAM and an ATI Radeon 7000 video card, the game is unusable.

I'm not talking about dropped frames; even the configuration screens are unusable due to lag between the mouse and the pointer.

The original Quake I and II engines ran fine on a Pentium with one-tenth the speed of this one, so the guys recoding the engine must be having an awful lot of fun at great CPU expense.

Yes its something else not your pc specs turn desktop effects off

Cheating?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always wondered, how do open source games (Especially FPS ones) deal with cheating. Server side checks and such can of course be implemented, but what prevents someone from just turning all the enemies bright red?

With the source, one could even make a rather effective aimbot (Or just write a bot that plays completely by itself) and it would be nearly undetectable since any countermeasures are also open source.

I understand that even a closed source game will have its fair share of cheats, but open source is almost begging for them.

Re:Cheating?

[x78]

Most FPS games have a voteban/kick method, or regular admin appearances.
I'd imagine it'd be the same with this game, if you notice someone is cheating then ban them.

Re:Cheating?

[Razalhague]

Yeah, just like open source OSes are just begging for viruses :D.

Re:Cheating?

[KDR_11k]

Preventing cheating is more like DRM, you give the user's system information but restrict how that information can be used and the user can cheat simply by using that data in a way that's not intended.

Re:Cheating?

[struppi]

Yes, but how do you notice someone is cheating? Because he is good? In counter strike, any time someone enters a server who is much better than all the others, people start shouting "cheater". That doesn't necessarily mean they are cheating.

Re:Cheating?

[struppi]

What a stupid reply. The parent made a point and gave good arguments for it. You just replied quoting some unprooved stereotype. Preventing cheats in games is indeed completely different than writing a virus, since you rely on client side security. And as you might know, client side security is always a bad idea.

Re:Cheating?

[Anonymous Coward]

Netrek, an ancient unix game, had a primative form of DRM to prevent cheating ages ago.

Re:Cheating?

[Patch86]

When playing MP, what's to prevent the same server-side checks that are in all FPS games these days? And you can turn all the enemies bright red in proprietary games too- the models and texture maps are usually pretty easy to find, and don't form part of the binary (which is the bit people are talking about when they refer to open source).

And SP doesn't exactly matter- people are free to cheat to their heart's content if its just for them. Not that I know if the FPS in TFA even has a SP mode.

Re:Cheating?

[Anonymous Coward]

In sauerbraten there is no protection whatsoever against cheats.
It makes playing on the net with high latency both possible and enjoyable since much trust is put on the client.
Aimbots and other cheats are there, they are detectable by spectators following the cheater. But i guess cheating is boring as most games seems ok.

I prefer sauer to the old versions of nexuiz, BTW.

Re:Cheating?

[janopdm]

I've always wondered, how do open source games deal with cheating

Easy. A ladder system. There will always be an aimbot fight at the top of the ladder, but it still matches players with other players or bots with the same skill. This won't allow you to brag about your position on the ladder, but for most of the population games are there to have fun, not to brag about your e-peen.

To prevent someone creating a new account to be able to play with an aimbot against casual players, an openid system would be needed to track the score and the amount of played hours of each account.

Re:Cheating?

[Anonymous Coward]

In Quake 3 based games at least the server can be set to "pure" mode which will check that all default assets such as maps, models, textures, shaders, effects and sounds exactly match those that are being used on the server. Of course you can throw in a mod that uses the same path/name as an existing file, say a texture, that will overwrite the original texture when the game is loaded. This would allow your bright red models since a mod doesn't actually change the standard assets, it just extends them.

Because an aimbot will most likely be directly changing values in memory, it wouldn't be possible to automatically detect such a thing. Some of the primitive aimbots use colour as a guide where to aim, so they might be used in tandem with a mod that overwrites textures to solid colours to make the aimbot's job easier. In Quake 3, the server actually sends all information about all player locations, no matter their proximity, to each client. An aimbot would only need to look in the right place in memory to "see" where another player is relative to you and modify another memory value to make your character face in the right direction. Aimbots really only work well for hitscan weapons and usually have pretty characteristic signs.

In the end, it's not just open source games that are susceptible. All game are unless they utilise very intrusive measures like Punkbuster, which can cause compatibility problems, performance issues, lag and false positives. The fact that Punkbuster actively scans your system memory and sends that information to a third party location could also classify it as spyware.

Re:Cheating?

[Tei]

Some QW engines use a closed source module. Since QW is GPL this is a small violation of the GPL no one care about.

I don't know how to handle this Nexuiz. Has to be easy* to pick the Darkplaces engine and compile a version with wallhacks. Most probably this is managed by real humans on the other side banning ip's and the sort.. and with a nice enough community where cheating is rare or non existant.

* to tell the truth.. DarkPlaces is (sort of...) a total rewrite of the Quake engine. It has interesting tecniques to speedup the rendering, and use today technologies. This complexitude will act somewhat like a "unintended obuscation" to make writting wallhacks somewhat hard.

Re:Cheating?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've played nexuiz for about two years and have not encountered cheating. There are some really good players, and it's obvious, because it's not about aimbotting. Sure, there are good snipers, but they also maneuver extremely well using techniques which take time to master. Noobs are really easy to pick out for this reason, and if one we're aimbotting, we'd know. Experienced players value the servers, and the people who run them are smart. Cheating is simply not an issue.

Re:Cheating?

[TeamMCS]

This very problem had me thinking yesterday. The problem is "Security through obscurity". Sure, you can hide the doors and windows on your house, it'll take the burglar a little longer to find the way in, but if he wants to, he will (CounterStrike). When we think about the open-source community, presumably they could take StO approach, they could pay âoepunkbusterâ to support their game, but letâ(TM)s be honest thatâ(TM)s not going to happen for many reasons. If an open-source game is popular enough to warrant cheating, low-lives excluded, and then the âoeWikipedia effectâ would come into effect. If a bug was found, usually by an experienced code-hacker, chances are that it wonâ(TM)t be long before someone patches that hole. Though I do not speak from experience, I would imagine the respect of your peers, the foundation of FOSS, would be a far greater reward than âoepwning some n00bsâ. Most, respected, hackers find an exploit in a piece of code out of curiosity; they are rarely the ones who choose to exploit it. Itâ(TM)s the script-kiddies who, casually, hack games âfor the fun of itâ(TM). So in short, once the game reaches critical mass, the problem would likely continually fix itself. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/12/18/the_wiki_effect/ One final thought: I wonder how that would play out in a game like WOW.

Re:Cheating?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cheating is simply not an issue.

Wrong. You may not see something as obvious as an aimbot, but the best cheaters never get caught. In a twisted way, cheating without being detected is a skill in and of itself. I've used cheats off and on before in a variety of games and haven't been caught once. It's more widespread than you think because the evidence isn't always visible to you.

Re:Cheating?

[windsurfer619]

I actually find it a complement when I'm kicked for "cheating" when I'm actually not :)

Re:Cheating?

[Joren]

Yeah, just like open source OSes are just begging for viruses :D.

In order to cheat, you just need to modify your own game's code and play. To spread a virus, you have to find a way to take advantage of or modify code that other people are already running. It's a different ballgame that may make things harder for open-source gaming, and I look forward to seeing how these challenges are addressed. I still appreciate the humor behind your post, though.

Re:Cheating?

[ion.simon.c]

...how do open source games (Especially FPS ones) deal with cheating.

I saw a social solution to this problem. Back in the day of Descent and Descent ][, (Both of which were closed source apps at the time.) folks would host matches explicitly for folks who wanted to cheat. If you ran into a cheater in normal play, you either ignored him, or generated another game. (IIRC, there was no kick/ban feature.) D1 and D2 were P2P games, not server/client, so it was trivially easy to cheat. Very few people did.

Re:Cheating?

[trum4n]

who cares? he seems to enjoy the game, let him.

Re:Cheating?

[Anonymous Coward]

Usually players would spectate and look for telltale "snapping" to players, where if someone is close to the player the player will immediately turn and aim right for their head in an instant. This is evident when they're not even looking in the same direction and they get a headshot a split second later.

I just experienced this in Left4Dead when a guy got 2 headshot/instakills on hunters seconds apart, while being completely blind. We also noticed the guy getting a bunch of noob achievements so it was his first time playing.

Re:Cheating?

[Anonymous Coward]

well, its based on the quake engine, so you can spectate the players (meaning, you can not play, and just take on their camera view as their own). You just look for irrational behavior, mainly, the aim staying trained on someone's head, no matter what. If the person jumps, aim stays at the head. Reloading, and taking heavy fire? aim still stays at the head. And the classic, guy dies, and the aim hops over to another target, instantly.

There are more subtle cheats, where is becomes more and more of a judgment call.

It really comes down to games need to be made more fun, and incorporate more strategy. If its just a headshot grind fest, guess what, people are going to use aimbots.

And if some pro player joins a noob server, just pwns everyone, and gets accused of cheating and kicked, so what? The game is about having fun. That pro player should play people that match his skills, and let the noobs play other noobs.

[idea rant]
This actually gives me an idea. Enforce skill matching through statistics. If someone is getting way more kills than everyone else, force them to sit out a few rounds. Same if the player just sucks, and is just "feeding" the other team, have that guy sit out some rounds too.

Now, don't be a noob and complain that such a feature would get tiresome, of that you don't want it. FOSS mods are always configurable. That's the beauty of FOSS. So, if you didn't like it, you could just turn it off.

I've already seen this idea implemented for noobs. If you died allot, and never got any kills, you would get either kicked from that round of play, or kicked from the server entirely. I felt mixed about it, but I was playing tremulous. You would have to understand that game for me to go into it.[/end idea rant]

Re:Cheating?

[mutube]

It would probably work to just kick people who are much better than everyone else on a particular server with a 'Sorry, you're too good to play here' message. They can find another server with people of comparable skill. If you're playing for real it'd be no fun to stay anyway. If you're cheating, there goes your incentive (or at least you'll have to improve your bot).

Re:Cheating?

[Dersaidin]

When playing MP, what's to prevent the same server-side checks that are in all FPS games these days? And you can turn all the enemies bright red in proprietary games too- the models and texture maps are usually pretty easy to find, and don't form part of the binary (which is the bit people are talking about when they refer to open source).

"server-side checks" can't pickup changes made to the client. Maps and textures can be checksumed, but again, that's a client side check and nothing server side can stop the client from lying about being clean.

Re:Cheating?

[Anonymous Coward]

What one of the developers had to say about cheating: http://www.nexuizninjaz.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=428&pid=3267#pid3267

To add some technical stuff to this emotional matter:

Basicly only a few cheats are possible: auto-aiming (which aims for you and SHOULD be able to hit perfectly), wallhacks (which allows you to see through walls) and speedhacks (which allow you to run faster). Stuff like health, armor, weapons you posses are TOTALY in control of the server and can't be changed by any client. So if you suspect people to be unkillable this usually just means they collect lots of health/armor and as you can collect them almost without limit it can be hard to kill someone really stacked. Being able to change health/armor/weapons would require a custom setup (recompiled) server, so if you play on the 'well-known' servers you should be fine. In theory it might be possible to hack a server but thats totally unheard off. So, nothing to cheat here..

Speedhacks usually point to some bugs in Nexuiz and while there were such bugs in the past they should all be fixed now, which should make speedhacking impossible. If there are still bugs in Nexuiz the developers should be told about! For the fun of it, due to network changes a certain Nexuiz version acted as speedhack on certain older nexuiz servers, but again, thats all fixed now and also helped to get server admins to update :-) So, nothing to cheat here..

Wallhacks are also impossible with the default settings because Nexuiz uses a clever anti-wallhack. Basicly most games tell the client the position of all other players and items and when using a hack to make walls transparent you can see those players and items in the whole map. Nexuiz in turn only sends info about players and item only if you could possibly see them. So even if someone WOULD use a wallhack and make walls transparent there would be nothing to see. This means wallhacks are USELESS in Nexuiz, nothing to cheat here... (Unless someone changes the default settings to save SERVER cpu power). One can also usually notice a wallhack when spectating as the user of such hacks tends to aim at players behind walls. However notice that good players tend to do 'prediction shots' aka shoot were they think someone might be or go to. Their experience is good enough to make this tactic work very well.

Which leaves us with aimhacks or autoshoot hacks. First the bad news, in theory there is nothing to REALLY stop them. Some games, companies TRY to run programs to find KNOWN aimhacks but thats a arms race and can only be lost. Programs like punkbuster will only hog your system while searching for known hacks, they can not find UNKNOWN hacks and a few month ago there was a big uproar as someone found a way to get MANY (iirc tenthousends) people banned via punkbuster though they did not cheat at all :-).
Now the good news, aimhacks can usually be spotted very easily if you spectate. Also, as i said they should be able to hit perfectly but they do not. Most of the hitscan (point-and-frag) guns in Nexuiz have spread. For example the shotgun and mg. Also while playing online there is ping which changes slightly and thus some shots are missed. Other weapons are projectile based which can be evated. Thats an area were good players with lots of experiance can even be better then aimhacks because they are better at anticipation and can 'feel' were that guy will move to :-). Also players that use aimbots usually do so because they are not as good as they would like to be so you will notice a big difference in movement and aiming. As for autoshoots, thats a hack which 'fires' if you move the crosshair over an player. That thing can be harder to find in an demo or spectating but it will ONLY work with hitscan weapons and is also not perfect. If its a bad autoshooter you will notice it fires rockets or similar guns when the crosshair meets the other play

Re:Cheating?

[DittoBox]

I quit counterstrike partly because of this. I got tired of hearing people bitch, and I wasn't even good enough to be accused of it...often, anyway :)

I saw a few aimbots and people who would "glitch" in maps but I never saw any other kind of "cheating." Aimbots are easy to notice since the people playing are very twitchy in that the software has to scan a given area around the reticule for a target. Glitching of course is when some asshole literally walks through walls.

But the other kinds of cheating are harder to detect, like changing game files to provide easier targets, turning off any kind of distance fog, going wireframe, changing object opacity et cetera. PunkBuster deals with this by doing MD5 hashes against random files in the game's installation directory. "Trainers" or memory cracks/patches are found via memory scanning.

I don't think many who say "cheater" have any clue what cheating actually looks like. They just hear someone else yell it out and then they copy them.

Re:Cheating?

[FishWithAHammer]

You can make it a lot harder, though. Hashing sections of media files, for example, is a lot harder to fake ("hash bytes 100 through 1120 of file XYZ.mdl and return the checksum"). Unless you have some sort of dual-check system where you checksum the real one on the fly but then load the hacked one (basically loading all checksummed files twice...eesh), that's not going to be easily dealt with.

With it being open source, though, it is much easier to build a working hack, and I'd be interested to see any method of addressing it that's at least reasonably bulletproof.

Re:Cheating?

[FishWithAHammer]

Sauerbraten is interesting and fun for the first couple minutes, but it's unpolished and really feels just-plain-unfinished.

The mapping system looks really cool at first glance, but is a serious pain in the ass to actually try to use.

Re:Cheating?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had some arguments with people who were bugging me why I didn't take each and every half-assed snake-oil countermeasure to cheating.

Because the benefits do not outweigh the implications.

But it's the same on the other side. What are the benefits of cheating, especially if the other players KNOW or at least suspect you're cheating?

Cheating is no different than joining a server and insulting everyone or flooding the chat with spam.
Eventually some stupid kid will do it, but most people don't.
The solution is simple: Call a vote to kickban them, or sit it through until he loses interest.

As for the bot that plays all by itself ... what prevents them from having an uber skilled friend play for them?

Re:Cheating?

[mikael]

I've always wondered, how do open source games (Especially FPS ones) deal with cheating.

Games like bzflag allow the admin of a map to ban players for a particular amount of time if they start breaking the rules. Some of the worst activities are:

Wall-walking - taking advantage of the latency between the server and client to walk through walls. Happens when someone tries to take a screensave while moving fast.

Team-killing (TK'ing) - shooting the other members of your team just for fun. Can happen by accident if there are ricochets in a complex environment.

Flag-runner - taking your teams flag and running off with it to the middle of the map or another team's camp. Sometimes done by accident if a spawn occur right on the base or on a "safe place" for the flag.

Team bots - players having a number of bots with them as well, which don't play very well.

Bad language - Having someone constantly repeating the same political statement over and over again.

Re:Cheating?

[Anonymous Coward]

As I heard it before,
Seven kills in a row in Quake 3: EXCELLENT
Seven kills in a row in Unreal Tournament: MMMMONSTER KILL
Seven kills in a row in Counter Strike: Kicked by console

Re:Cheating?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can use AI methods that inspect the behavior of a player in terms of movement and accuracy plus other factors. There have been already efforts to do this with rather great success. One of those methods is by using Bayesian networks. Where the actual network is trained by a broad range of players of any skill plus cheaters. When much training has been done the network has a very good perspective (let me say) of what kind of behavior the aimbots exhibit. Remember all this has only got to do with aimbots. A very hard cheat to deal with though is the wallhack.

Re:Cheating?

[Idiomatick]

What does that have to do with open source? With closed source games you can run such a hack without much difficulty. Granted it could be harder but not a big deal. Client-side hacking can always be done.

The problem is not that the game is free as in libre but free as in cash. You can make an infinite amount of hack detecting tools. But if you don't charge people for the game you can't punish them. Ban them? and they will be back in minutes. They only reason client-side isn't CONSTANTLY hacked in games is because if you fuck up and get busted you are out 10~60$ which ruins the point. Client side hacking in MMOs can be stopped, instead of losing money you lose your character if you get busted. Not quite as unstoppable but it cuts back on hacking a decent amount.

Re:Cheating?

[cdfh]

I used to play AssaultCube (aka ActionCube) a fair bit, where cheating was a fairly common occurrence. The AC solution was rather depressingly inefficient. The admin could kick cheaters (with some servers allowing bans too), but that was about all.

In the Cube-derived games, anyone can be an admin. When there is no admin currently active, a player can request it. Therefore, rogue admins were quite common, and the powers of the admin were typically limited for obvious reasons. The server admin could, of course, claim full power when they were online, but many server admins were either ignorant of this, decided not to, or were rarely online.

I've always felt that a web of trust-style system could work quite nicely. Clans act as good hubs of authority, where the top 5 or so clans are commonly known among frequent players. Open matches could be played when the server's admin is online, such that cheaters could be properly dealt with. When the admin is offline, an automatic system could allow only reasonably trusted players to play. Players who have not obtained any trust could do so in the open matches.

Something that could be interesting would be to allow all players to enter a game, but only allow players to directly interact with players who share a mutual trust. Players with whom you do not share a mutual trust might have low opacity, and can not harm, nor be harmed by, you.

Of course, this would introduce problems. If three players are in a fight (assuming every-man-for-himself, to simplify things): Joe, Jim, and Bob. Joe and Jim trust each other, but only Jim trusts Bob. In such a situation, Jim is at a disadvantage, for he can sustain damage from both Joe and Bob; whereas the other two can only sustain damage from Jim.

Interesting algorithms could be used to assign handicaps to players in such circumstances.

Re:Cheating?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let em at it.

There has always been cheaters and always will be. The people who consistently cheat or always just happen to be flawless each time they play will be left to them selves in their parents basement with no one to play with them. As a programmer its not quite as easy as you might think to rewrite the code to be completely autonomous and very good. You could likely fool/hack the source to think the human player is a bot and have it play for you but bots are being smoked all the time they were never meant to be that great, even if they are that great people would be practicing against them all the time when they are offline.

This type of cheating would be definitely pretty cool to watch if they can do it right. It would be similar to a FPS Turing test and people could pit bot vs bot to see who's the 1337 c0mm4nd4r(or something like that).

As I see it, it's still entertainment and those who are good will always scare away the ones who are not as good let it be a bot or human. So open source really gives way to some real competition in all aspects of gaming not just button mashing, all the way from your first frag to creating your own AI.

Hey why not?

Re:Cheating?

[TheoMurpse]

I haven't played CS in a couple years, but I used to stick around in rooms where I dominated simply because it was so difficult to find a room with free slots that didn't have a high ping.

Re:Cheating?

[TheoMurpse]

I haven't thought this through, but this seems like a good way of testing for who is a cheater (of course, assuming you use the expected compiler and don't change the source code in any way):

1. send client a random number
2. client sends back a hash of the executable + random number and its version number
3. server performs hash on executable with that version number + random number that was sent

If the client's submitted hash and the server's calculated hash are equal, they're not cheating.

Of course, this means that people can't play online on certain servers with their own modified versions of the game. But isn't that what the definition of "cheating" is, to a certain extent? Playing with a modified version of the game (that improves your ability), that is.

Re:Cheating?

[KDR_11k]

And the modified client could just do the same thing except do the hashing on a copy of the original executable instead of the one that's actually running.

Re:Cheating?

[AdamHaun]

I think that has as much (if not more) to do with CounterStrike itself as with actual cheaters. CS is designed to be a frustrating game -- it's very common to be killed instantly from a long distance by someone you can't see, at which point you often have to wait minutes to be able to play again. This encourages players to get angry when they die, and angry, frustrated people say and do stupid things. One of the first things I noticed when I started playing TeamFortress 2 was how much nicer everyone is, and I think the gentler difficulty curve has a lot to do with that.

Re:Cheating?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but who will bust the punks who bust the punkbuster?

Re:Cheating?

[K.os023]

Netrek, an ancient unix game, had a primative form of DRM to prevent cheating ages ago.

While interesting, that statement is very poor in actual information. At the very least, a link to some page will let people easily see what you're talking about. Actually saying that it had "an anti-cheating mechanism using an RSA-based public key cryptography authentication system that also attempts (with limited success) to detect and prevent Man-in-the-middle attacks." is even better, especially if you give references. Now I know wikipedia is not the best source but it does give more information than simply saying it had a primitive form of DRM.

Re:Cheating?

[TempeTerra]

Bad language - Having someone constantly repeating the same political statement over and over again.

Yo momma panders to the masses!

Re:Cheating?

[Anonymous Coward]

I play games to waste time - but not that much time (to write my own aimbot, etc.)

If you've got that much time on your hands, hopefully you can use it in places where bots are expected (like the 3D open source driver game whose name escapes me at the moment), judging by the number of high quality AI drivers in there, I'd say there are very very few people with both the skills and that much time on their hands to write a full-up AI player.

Re:Cheating?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh punkbuster is funny. From what I've heard in one case hundreds of people were permabanned from a game since they had IRC open, and some guy typed "Rifle Aim Prediction" into the chat. Since that was put in memory, and PB scans process memory for memory fragments from known hacks, anything that had the words 'Rifle Aim Prediction' in memory would summarily cause a PB kick for gamehacking.

The best part is that the particular cheat software in question was a private hack only a handful of people had, yet you could pretty much screw up someone's game by pasting strings from it's menu data into an IRC channel. AFAIK the only way to get PB to stop kicking you was to reboot and clear your swapfile.

Re:Cheating?

[Razalhague]

So, tell me; what do I have to do to make it obvious that I'm not making a serious comment? The smiley at the end doesn't seem to be doing the job...

Re:Cheating?

[Phyvo]

Kicking people for not being good is just bad. Yeah, noobs are a pain when they're on your team, especially in Tremulous where feeding is a problem. But for most cases, at least when I've played, you can votekick people who are really feeding or newbies who won't listen to reason.

But I really don't like automatic newb kicking, a.k.a. "winner stays on". If you're a really competitive player, than sure, having a newbie on your team sucks. Ideally you shouldn't have one and there are so many players that there's some kind of matchmaking system, or ranked/unranked servers. But the instant you start alienating new players who are trying out the game that you're playing is the instant you start strangling your game to death.

New players are, in a sense, the next generation. When you're small community you can't afford to give up your ability to grow. Can you imagine if that newbie rule was in place, 1.2 was released, and a bunch of newbies joined, but were subsequently kicked out of every other round? Most would just stop playing then and there. They don't want to be second class citizens, then ones you want just want to suck at the game in peace.

Maybe I'm conjecturing too much. I honestly don't think that being nice can actually save Tremulous, or any other game, by itself: the developers are the natural leaders who make stuff happen, and it is hard to do anything without your leaders.

Also, "loser stays on" is also kind of a bad idea, as it's really easy to fake being worse than you actually are just so that you can stay on. It wouldn't be as great in Tremulous as you'd be directly making the other team stronger, but I can still imagine people who would rather lose than be forced to not play because they're too good. The point of people playing your game is so that they can play your game! Not sit out...

Re:Cheating?

[techprophet]

Aye. Same here. And when I also find it a compliment when people say I'm not cheating when I'm in 3rd and AFK.

Re:Cheating?

[noname444]

This problem has nothing to do with open source. You can never trust a client, whether the game is closed or open source. The problem is just less apparent, but just as real when it comes to closed source games.

I had friends changing the models in the original quake (before it was open source) with completely white ones to make enemies easier to spot.

If you really want to avoid wall-hacking (seeing enemies through walls) etc. you'll have to make sure that that the sever simply doesn't provide the client with the coordinates of enemies she can't possibly see.

There are lots aim bots and wall hacks etc. (if not only?) for closed source games, including quake- and half life-/source-based ones.

To reiterate my point: you can never ever trust a client application. All information you provide a client with can be displayed, in any manner, on the client machine.

Re:Cheating?

[syousef]

I actually find it a complement when I'm kicked for "cheating" when I'm actually not :)

Wait, are we still talking about games or have we moved on to your marriage? ;-)

Re:Cheating?

[GooberToo]

I've always wondered, how do open source games (Especially FPS ones) deal with cheating.

Not well. It can become very frustrating because you then have to convince a mass of people who generally couldn't care less; especially when they are on the same team as the cheater. Worse, just like with any other game, low skilled players frequently make accusations of skilled players. This in turn creates a "cried wolf" environment where few are willing to bother. And yet even worse, many get to the point of kick voting for anything which can often result in the victim being kicked because of the initiation of a kick by the person who is cheating in the first place.

Having said all that, you can find fun and engaging servers. You can find quality players. But given the relatively low number of servers for most of these types of games, both players and cheaters are typically drawn together fairly frequently. It can be very frustrating - especially when cheaters bring their buddies and start vouching for each other. In this much rarer case, its all bug given the victims who complain will be kicked - unless an admin is on to take action.

Re:Cheating?

[GooberToo]

Right, but it completely relied on the the integrity of the server operators and client coders to work. This had the side effect of limiting who ran servers and that only official clients were allowed. This in turn minimized client innovation.

Re:Cheating?

[supernova_hq]

Use a "~"!

Where is that guy with the sarcasm sig...?

Re:Cheating?

[x78]

Well they may be the unfortunate ones kicked for being good!
At least it deals with anyone that is quite blatently cheating I guess.

Re:Cheating?

[Anonymous Coward]

what are you his fucking teacher? patronising cunt.

Re:Cheating?

[sp0tter]

I actually find it a complement when I'm kicked for "cheating" when I'm actually not :)

Same goes for when I am cheating and still get p0wned by much, much better players...

What type of DRM do they use?

[Anonymous Coward]

What type of DRM do they use?
Because EA has taught me that playing games without DRM is stealing and wrong ... very wrong.

Unless this installs some horrible boot-sector-writing DRM to my computer, it isn't up to EA's commercial quality standards and I don't want it.

Re:What type of DRM do they use?

[MrNaz]

It's not often that I feel it's appropriate to say this, but this is one of the rare occasions where it is:

You want it? Go code it yourself!

(Oh, and before you whoosh me, I know the OP was joking.)

Re:What type of DRM do they use?

[Anonymous Coward]

Should have left out the disclaimer so that whoever wooshed you could have been wooshed in return.

Re:What type of DRM do they use?

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

You want it? Go code it yourself!

So that's why some people want companies to open up DRM! It's because they do a clearly superior job compared with open source equivalents!

Re:What type of DRM do they use?

[DeskLazer]

first whoosh?

Awesome, lets hope it works now!

[Seriousity]

I've tried to run Nexuiz on my ubuntu desktop and each time it's crashed the X server, hopefully I can share in the glories this time around! :D

Re:Awesome, lets hope it works now!

[eqisow]

That may be an Ubuntu issue rather than a Nexuiz issue. Either way, hope it works for you!

Re:Awesome, lets hope it works now!

[Artemis3]

Don't use full screen mode (use windowed) and it works. Hopefully this has been fixed...

Re:Awesome, lets hope it works now!

[Anonymous Coward]

stop complaining and code your own fix

Re:Awesome, lets hope it works now!

[drinkypoo]

It's pathetic that we're still talking about things like this but windowed games with resize support can be made to behave just as if they were fullscreen games (but still supporting virtual desktop changes) by using compiz's window rules plugin. Set the game fullscreen in there, and disable argbx visuals (iirc) for anything OpenGL.

Re:Awesome, lets hope it works now!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been running Nexuiz on Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mepis, Debian etc for 18 months. Using an Nvidia 5200, ATI 9550 and now an ATI 4670. I run it full screen or windowed at various resolutions. The only problems have been caused by the lack of installed drivers, easily fixed with the appropiate download and install.

Re:Awesome, lets hope it works now!

[berend botje]

I just tried it on Ubuntu 8.10 and it Just Works. It runs very smoothly at 1920 x 1200.

And, also, it is very, very good to play!

UT always felt like a pinball machine to me. Nexuiz is fast-paced but still lets you keep control.

I like it a lot.

Re:Awesome, lets hope it works now!

[berend botje]

It also works in full screen mode. I didn't know it could be run in a window :-)

Re:Awesome, lets hope it works now!

[geekangel]

I play it on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid), and it works a treat. It hangs when I try to exit, but I can live with that.

Also, A New Open Source Train Sim has reached v1.0

[distantbody]

openBVE has just reached v1.0.

This free and open source 3D train simulator was born in April 2008 as a replacement to the popular freeware programs BVE Trainsim 2 & 4. The lack of compatibility between BVE Trainsim 2 & 4 routes and the developmental uncertainty of the 5th version (originally named Boso View Express by the sole Japanese developer Mackoy) lead one resolute user to start openBVE.

The sole developer Michelle has done amazing work; openBVE beats out commercially available simulators in its ability to simulate starting resistance, inertia, curve resistance, gravity, toppling, coupling, air resistance, pressure, temperature and density, altitude, friction and wheel slip.

(Link to openBVE website omitted due to already unreliable servers)

Re:Tool can be used as a tool

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh shit, my Linux-based toaster can't pop out one of the slices.

It sure looks spiffy and has all kinds of buttons and dials and a big internal gear with a "K" stamped on it. It has a 1000-shade-of-toast resolution, but it still can't even pop out one of the slices half the time. Just goes to show that nerds have their priorities straight. Just like they can write treatises of how the world should work, but they can't even pick up a woman on Friday night. There's an analogy there, albeit not a car one.

Re: Also, A New Open Source Train Sim has reached

[distantbody]

Here are some videos of openBVE v1.0, and on Wikipedia.

Re:Also, A New Open Source Train Sim has reached v

[Anonymous Coward]

Needs good packaging - my kid brother would LOVE this, but there's just way too many steps for him to perform. An installer for Windows, packaging for Linux.

Re:Tool can be used as a tool

[Anonymous Coward]

If the stores didn't sell so much proprietary bread, this wouldn't be a problem!

Re:Also, A New Open Source Train Sim has reached v

[KDR_11k]

Because people who play twitchy arena FPSes are known for their appreciation of train simulators...

They've raised the bar alright.

[Computershack]

Wow they've really raised the bar on that one. They've now managed to get where Windows gaming was a decade ago. Give it another 4 years and they might get up to the quality of a game released at the turn of the 21st Century.

And that's the problem with gaming on Linux. Its not seen as that important unlike server stuff so it gets very little developer attention so can basically only progress at the speed that a few people can work at with the time they have spare after work and family commitments. They're also forced to use woefully out of date game engines if they actually want to get something out the door at any point. Even if you use WINE or Cedega, you encounter such problems as Counterstrike: Source only running in DX8 or not being able to connect to Punkbuster enabled servers in Battlefield 2. On the whole, it's a mess.

Re:They've raised the bar alright.

[Anonymous Coward]

They've now managed to get where Windows gaming was a decade ago.

What Open Source game looked like this on Windows a decade ago? This is not about Windows vs Linux, this game is available to both of those platforms _and_ OSX. The comparison here - if you absolutely need to make one - is Open Source vs Proprietary games. And it's amazing what people are able to produce without getting paid for it.

Good job at bashing people who work on stuff on their free time. And yes, Wine owes you to work flawlessly with whatever Windows game you decide to throw at it, because you paid for it, right?

Re:They've raised the bar alright.

[Rockoon]

..and of course you realize that the game engine this is based upon was originally a proprietary one, right?

They have risen to the level of using a proprietary engine, QUAKE ONE, which was open sourced NINE YEARS AGO.

This doesnt say anything good about this case of open source gaming at all, especialy since QUAKE THREE was ALSO open sourced, and is now playable in the browser.

Now, the poser that YOU are attacking was commenting on THE ARTICLE, not the developers of this "open source project"

Give up your religion, man.

Re:They've raised the bar alright.

[Anonymous Coward]

..and of course you realize that the game engine this is based upon was originally a proprietary one, right?

Sure, but how much of the original Quake engine is still there?

They have risen to the level of using a proprietary engine, QUAKE ONE, which was open sourced NINE YEARS AGO.

If we're bashing the Quake engine with it being old and all, you do realize that the Source engine used by Half-Life/Left 4 Dead/Portal etc. is based on the GoldSrc engine, which in turn is based on the Quake1 engine? There's not much if anything at all left of the original Quake engine in Source because pieces of it have been rewritten one by one over the years, and I expect this to be quite true with the Nexuiz engine too.

Strangely I don't see anyone bashing the Source engine because of the Quake ancestry.

This doesnt say anything good about this case of open source gaming at all, especialy since QUAKE THREE was ALSO open sourced, and is now playable in the browser.

If you're saying that Nexuiz should be based off Quake3 because it's newer, well, refer to the statement above.

As far as I know, Id hasn't released the improvements they made to Quake3 for the browser-playable version, so that one is not open source.

Re:They've raised the bar alright.

[Dragonslicer]

They've now managed to get where Windows gaming was a decade ago. Give it another 4 years and they might get up to the quality of a game released at the turn of the 21st Century.

You, er, might want to brush up on your math. One decade ago was 1999, which, by any time frame measured in years, pretty much was the turn of the 21st century.

Re:They've raised the bar alright.

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems you're the one who can't do math. 1999 was two years before the 21st century, which started in 2001.

Re:They've raised the bar alright.

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have a clue. Nexuiz'es engine, Darkplaces, is about a much Quake 1 as Valve's Source engine.

Re:They've raised the bar alright.

[mdwh2]

Although it was originally Quake 1 they started with, it looks like they've made major changes to it, adding in newer technology (e.g., dynamic lighting and realistic shadows, which is more comparable to Doom 3 than Quake 1).

I must admit, I was a bit confused. A lot of the screenshots in TFA look rather crappy, no different to the Quake 1 or 2, and don't seem to show off what the engine's really capable of. There's no evidence of anything newer such as dynamic shadows (the lighting on the walls could easily be precomputed lightmaps).

But go to the older article one year ago, and there are much better graphics - e.g., here you have realtime shadows, and what looks like bloom effect, and possibly bump mapping on the walls. There is one screenshot in the latest article that shows realtime shadows from a character, but it's rather hard to see in the screenshot. It seems odd why they released this latest batch in order to show its "impressive graphics".

There is also a lot more in the way of open source graphics engines - e.g., projects like OGRE (check out the Gallery).

Re:They've raised the bar alright.

[adamofgreyskull]

..and of course you realize that the game engine this is based upon was originally a proprietary one, right?

They have risen to the level of using a proprietary engine, QUAKE ONE, which was open sourced NINE YEARS AGO.

Sorry, but at the very least, that's disingenuous...they haven't just used the Quake engine to make their game. They've taken the open-sourced Quake engine, and by the looks of the video, completely overhauled it. I played Quake Arena and from that video Nexuiz appears to be orders of magnitude better in terms of graphics, features and pace. The state of the original engine is completely irrelevant.

Re:They've raised the bar alright.

[Ant P.]

They've now managed to get where Windows gaming was a decade ago.

Considering Windows gaming has spent the last ten years doing nothing but adding pixels and polygons (and is now in decline because the consoles have caught up in that area), I guess that's a compliment.

Re:They've raised the bar alright.

[dbcad7]

Just curious .. have you even tried playing it ?.. or is your love for Windows (which it runs on BTW) so great, that talking out your ass is more important than trying something before you comment on it ?

Re:They've raised the bar alright.

[Haeleth]

Your maths is spot on, but your English comprehension could use some work. "The turn of a century" means "the period of a few years before and after the start of a century". There's no standard definition of how many years it covers, but it's normally taken to be at least 10 years and sometimes as many as 20; either way, 1999 definitely falls within the turn of the 21st century.

Torrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

Torrent be here yarr!

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4821677

I'm sorry but the graphics are old...

[emanem]

Come on, I'm plying on the PS3 at Killzone 2 and Resistance 2. The graphics is not comparable at all... Are we sure, Michael, that this is a new game? Cheers,

Re:I'm sorry but the graphics are old...

[emanem]

Lol, who modded this as troll? Have you ever seen FPSes for PS3 or do you live in '90s?
I play warsow, and I like the graphics of the game, and that graphic is very functional to that kind of FPS.
But this is too much a delusion...
I expected definitely more...

Re:I'm sorry but the graphics are old...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. And as we all know, graphics are the one thing that make for a fun game.

</sarcasm>

Re:I'm sorry but the graphics are old...

[Rycross]

God that just never gets old.

I haven't played Killzone 2 or Resistance 2, but they're generally considered to be fun games as well as being pretty. So what makes Nexuiz more fun than either of these games? Because if your game looks half-assed you're going to have to have something in the terms of gameplay to show for it.

Based on the discussion and the website, the game appears to be altogether unimaginative and derivative. So what makes this special?

Re:I'm sorry but the graphics are old...

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is that this game is free as in beer and free as in freedom.

Not everyone can afford the hundreds of dollars required for a new console and games, or for a high-end PC and games.

Most people just pirate things they want to play, but that's illegal as we all know.

Nexuiz exists to showcase that the FLOSS community can produce an acceptable game that is playable by everyone; fast hardware or slow, money or not.

The best part about open-source games is that they will never die. Enthusiasts can play Nexuiz for as long as they live, because all of the resources belong to the community, and not a company.

Re:I'm sorry but the graphics are old...

[Anonymous Coward]

So basically this is a legal alternative for freeloaders who are too cheap to buy a real game and don't have the balls to pirate one?

Way to make floss gaming look better..

Re:I'm sorry but the graphics are old...

[emanem]

FYI, I've finished Resistance 2 and I should be halfway though Killzone 2. I've always played all FPSes from Wolf3D to Far-Cry 2 passing through Doom 3 and Quake 4 (Linux binaries whohooo).
As you can easily find on the internet the graphics of Resi2 where the best (comparable to Crysis, don't imagine to talk about the XBOX 360 it's far away...) before Killzone2 came.
Killzone2 has all the special FXes that made Crysis so good looking, plus it runs on an hardware that costs a lot less (with 300£ you get the PS3 and the game, instead to play Crysis you need a 400£ videocard and a pc and a WinXP/WinVista license...).
Now, I can tell you for sure that the gameplay and the plot of Resi2 are great. It is very immersive and you're straight into the action. If you like the genre, Resi2 is supposed to be the best on PS3.
Killzone2 is very good. It has better graphcis than Resi2 but the plot isn't so tied for the first 2 levels...after a while instead all makes sense and finally you get sucked into it and is really immersive.
Cheerz
Ps. About Far-Cry 2. The graphics were tied to a XBOX 360 (very old looking), the gameplay was very bad...it was the worst game I ever bought!

Re:I'm sorry but the graphics are old...

[CSMatt]

Graphics make the game? I guess no one told all of those Wii customers.

Not Very Impressing

[aaaaaaargh!]

Sorry, I know that some people think you shouldn't criticize any free open source software, but this is really not impressing. It's kind of weird that with all the freedom they had the developers of this game only came up with a generic Quake Arena clone. If that's typical for open source games, then No, thanks.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, I know that some people think you shouldn't criticize any free open source software, but this is really not impressing. It's kind of weird that with all the freedom they had the developers of this game only came up with a generic Quake Arena clone. If that's typical for open source games, then No, thanks.

Hey man you are most welcome to atleast make up some concepts and do some coding there buddy boy. ;)

"And well this is quake arena done rite" ;P

Re:Not Very Impressing

[Anonymous Coward]

The Nexuiz team didn't actually do any coding now did they? The Quake engine was written by John Carmack, some guy hacked it up with a handful of new graphical features and the Nexuiz team chucked out some poorly made models and maps for it. If you're going to just make a generic MP deathmatch shooter, at least make it visually stunning so that it has something special. Anybody could take the Quake/Quake 2/Quake 3 engine, make some generic assets for it and release it as a "game". Unfortunately, most open source FPS games projects do exactly that. Why not try making a cooperative multiplayer game? How about a single player game with a great story? How about just anything different from MP FFA/TFFA/CTF?

If I were prepared to dedicate time towards a game project, I'd rather start my own (which I very well may be doing soon, provided I can find suitable voice actors) so that I can make sure it has some unique qualities rather than churning out yet another cookie cutter MP shooter. I certainly won't waste time helping to polish the turd that the Nexuiz team has pushed out.

As for your last statement, sorry no. Quake 3 Arena was done right from the very beginning. Nothing short of the original Unreal Tournament has ever been as good. In this case Nexuiz is simply an imitator with worse graphics, copied gameplay and an unimaginative new gametype.

I realise that my criticism sounds harsh, but the truth can hurt and if nobody gives anything but false or uninformed praise, then the people behind the project will never learn or try a thing.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[4D6963]

Exactly, that's what boggles the mind about such projects. Why on Earth do they try to do exactly what the big studios have done to death in a way they'd never be able to equal, rather than something different?

That's exactly as if independent movies tried to be like Armageddon or Die Hard 4. They don't because they know it would be shitty and no one would pay to see that, that's why they do precisely what big studios can't afford to do, they innovate, they go in wild directions, they take risks, and more importantly, they don't get over ambitious.

And actually, independent commercial games are the same way, because they *have* to make money, so they can't afford to fail. But FOSS doesn't have to make money, what they do is free, so if what they do isn't worth a penny it's fine because it doesn't cost a penny either..

Re:Not Very Impressing

[physicsphairy]

First person shooters have never been and will probably never be a competitive aspect of opensource. The major reason is because they are extremely content-intensive, and the collaboration advantages open source has in creating code just don't apply to things that require sound and art studios.

That out of the way, your complaint is totally invalid. While Nexuiz might not be an innovation to the genre, and might not smitten you with the highest res graphics, it still proves the concept of open source by taking something that already existed (the original Quake 1 source code) and continually improving it with user contributions. Hardcore gamers will definitely appreciate the never ending flow of UI and gameplay improvements. And if someone ever has a better idea, they can take Nexuiz and expand on it, whereas without that open source foundation, not only would they be delayed by years of extra work, they might not even start.

And I'm sure if you go to the trouble of reading the changelogs, you will have a much greater appreciation for all the work that has gone into it than you do just as some guy who plays the latest console releases.

Meanwhile, checkout TA: Spring for a RTS, and Wesnoth or Freeciv for turnbased strategy. If you aren't impressed, I suppose you aren't in to strategy games.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[dave420]

That sounds lovely and all - I appreciate the immense amount of work the developers put in, but they ended up with a game that looks 10 years out of date. So what you're saying is that FOSS FPS games are made by people with the best intentions and skill, but end up being terrible when compared to closed-source commercial games.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[Jamie's Nightmare]

Amen to that. First thing that caught my eye? The players legs do not move when firing. It's like the Ice Capades without the ice. If I recall Quake 1 had the same behavior, but you can excuse that because it was 1997. Regardless, the ugly models and animation makes the game play seem very hoakey.

As an avid Quake 3 players back in the day, these maps are OK and sport some more modern effects like HDR and Bloom, but overall are of lesser quality than the old Threewave CFT maps, which were a nice bonus to Quake 3 for the price of $0.00

Bottom line? With commercial games you not only get good quality, but better user generated content too.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really true though...

While many not open source, there is a lot of high quality mods for other games out there, which means that it is possible for a group volunteers to create high quality game content, working together over the internet.

Take a look at the Black Mesa mod for HL2, for example. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGlhgVz5r6E

I don't see why this level of artwork wouldn't be able to go into an open source game. But it haven't happened yet I guess.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[Anonymous Coward]

but end up being terrible when compared to closed-source commercial games.

I don't know, closed-source AI is still sucks as much as it did 10-20 years ago. All the commercial games can offer more is shinier graphics.

And that's the only thing big money can offer more: more hours wasted on "realism" and better graphics. That's all the big studios can do better. Their playability, interface, controls, AI, aren't any better than indie games'.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[Jamie's Nightmare]

First person shooters have never been and will probably never be a competitive aspect of opensource. The major reason is because they are extremely content-intensive, and the collaboration advantages open source has in creating code just don't apply to things that require sound and art studios.

No, the major reason is because it's a genre that's way past it's prime. Take ID Software's entire lineup of Doom and Quake games plus throw in the Unreal Tournament series and you've got over 15 years of quality games that have pretty much covered everything you'd want to do with a First Person Shooter. Most of us who played these games back when they were new have long since moved on to games like Half Life 2, Call of Duty, STALKER, and Fallout. The gamers moved onto greener pastures, and we aren't interested in re-polished turds.

Like it or not, the art of creating good games requires you understand your audience. By in large, if today's gamers want to play something that looks like it is 10 years old, they will play the authentic classics. As it has been said, Nexuiz not only looks dated, but brings nothing new to the table. Better luck next time.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[Fungii]

That out of the way, your complaint is totally invalid.

What? How can a compliant be "invalid"?

The amount of work that's gone into the development is completly irrelevant, so there's no need for your snide remarks about 'some guy who plays the latest console releases - the fact of the matter is that this shooter isn't a patch on commercial games from 10 years ago, as is the case for most open source games.

Now, excuse me while I go for a game of tux racer.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody is forcing you to play it...

They are not even competing with with games that cost you 60 bucks and a DRM infection, they make free software.

So, pay or play what you like with your supercomputer made of diamonds.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[pizzach]

From wikipedia:

Nexuiz development started as a Quake modification in the summer of 2001 by Lee Vermeulen. Soon afterward the project moved to the DarkPlaces Quake engine created by Forest Hale, who later also joined the project.

From there, it looks like it basically only has had added effects and general graphical upgrades. I hope that helps explain it's roots and why it looks like a quake clone.

If you're wonder why a project is the way it is, you're best off searching the about page of the actual site or looking for it on wikipedia. You're much more likely to get group think by just saying what you did on slashdot.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[gbarules2999]

The gamers moved onto greener pastures

You may have, but unfortunately not everybody is exactly the same as you. You fail to account for taste. Heck, look at all the people still playing Quake, Quake 3, and UT99. Some people still like simple arena FPS games.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[gbarules2999]

I'd be hard pressed to say Nexuiz is a bad game by any means. It looks nicer than Unreal Tournament 2004 (definitely not the "ten years" bollocks you spouted) and plays like a dream for me, a mainstream PC gamer who wants a fun, simple shooter. I'm certainly not alone in the servers, I'll say that much.

If you don't like it, don't play it. But honestly, if you don't like it and you really feel like trolling, give us reasoning besides "I don't like the genre."

Re:Not Very Impressing

[gbarules2999]

Nexuiz is (partially) compatible with Quake 3 maps. Some shaders and other effects might be off, but they all use basically the same format.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

First person shooters have never been and will probably never be a competitive aspect of opensource. The major reason is because they are extremely content-intensive, and the collaboration advantages open source has in creating code just don't apply to things that require sound and art studios.

I agree with your premise, but disagree with your conclusion. I think opensource video games, including first person shooters will eventually out-compete closed source, but I think this will happen once OSS projects are developed which sufficiently separate the content from the engine and controls. When there is an OSS project that has a strong engine that allows end users to drop in content (which includes most graphics, sound, maps, and scripting) and said OSS project includes decent, free developer tools for creating said content. We're a long way from that stage, but think of it in terms of the following analogy. Some day gaming engines may well be analogous to DVD/video players. They can play open or closed source DVDs and the DVDs themselves can be quite profitable to make, separate from the player.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[dave420]

Don't get me wrong - I *love* the genre. It's my favourite genre by far. What I don't understand is people defending it by saying it's on the same level as modern closed-source games. That simply isn't the case. And the 10 years "bollocks" is not bollocks - it's based on the freakin' Quake engine, which was created 13 years ago. Sure, bump-mapping and dynamic lighting is great, but hardly on-par with the shed-loads of further advances that are present in closed-source games. It looks nicer than UT2K4? Really? Considering the UT2 engine supports sooo many more effects, it's almost - almost - like you're making stuff up to suit your argument. I know a lot of people feel strongly about FOSS, but really - saying a game based on a slightly-modified Quake engine looks better than the UT2 engine is frankly hilarious. I mean no offence in this post, I'm not trolling by any means. I just care about results, not excuses. And you won't be seeing me on any servers :)

Re:Not Very Impressing

[mdwh2]

And the 10 years "bollocks" is not bollocks - it's based on the freakin' Quake engine, which was created 13 years ago. Sure, bump-mapping and dynamic lighting is great, but hardly on-par with the shed-loads of further advances that are present in closed-source games.

You are conflating two issues. Yes, I'm sure that this game isn't comparable to what's possible in 2009 commercial engine, but these extra features are way beyond what Quake offered 13 years ago. More accurate might be to say under 5 years ago (taking Doom 3 as a rough benchmark). If you want to bitch that the game is 5 years old comparable to commercial engines, go right ahead, but please don't make false claims about it being 13 years old (the fact that it was originally based on a 13 year old engine is irrelevant. There are modern commercial engines that were originally based on the Quake engine, or you might as well whine that Linux is based on code that is 18 years old...)

By your reasoning, if we can handwave these extra features away, this would make Doom 3 no more advanced than Quake 1!

(I'm not sure why this is pitched as an open vs closed debate anyway. The problem isn't being open, it's being non-commercial. Yes, if you spend millions of dollars and have a team of programmers working full time for 2 years or more, you'll get better results than what people can achieve in their spare time. That's hardly surprising in any case, and especially makes a difference when graphics technology moves so fast. But I do think it is nice that the improvements trickle down - so what we thought of as cutting edge, that required millions of dollars just a few years ago, is now available in open source engines for free.)

Re:Not Very Impressing

[Blakey Rat]

Fortunately, the article summary contains the phrase "Details about the Nexuiz project are available at SourceForge," which is code for "it sucks, don't even bother."

So, unlike the last open source Quake-clone game I wasted tons of time on, this one I don't even have to bother.

BTW, why is the open source community so obsessed with Quake (generally, and deathmatch specifically) when the wider gaming community has almost universally moved on to more complicated games? Deathmatch simply isn't fun for the majority of the people on the server, I'd much rather play something like a Battlefield game where even if you suck, you're clearly contributing.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[Draek]

Are you in any way, shape or form correlating a videogame's graphics with its actual quality as a game? or did whole paragraphs of your post suddenly and inexplicably banish into the aether of the interwebz?

Re:Not Very Impressing

[AceofSpades19]

Have you even played Nexuiz?, it doesn't look 10 years out of date at all, maybe a year out of date at most

Re:Not Very Impressing

[Rycross]

Bullshit. You either haven't played any recent *good* commercial games or you have the rose-colored glasses on with regards to indie games.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[Rycross]

All things being equal, a games graphics - in both engine features and art direction - will add to its quality. If you offer two identical games, one with poor graphics and one with good, then the vast majority of people will pick the game with the good graphics. I'd be willing to bet that most of them would think that the one with good graphics is more fun. Humans like aesthetically pleasing things: go to any bar or art gallery if you don't believe me. Graphics do add to enjoyment.

On the flip-side, gameplay is far more important than graphics, yes. But the unspoken expectation is that if you have sub-par graphics, then you have to bring something new and interesting to the gameplay table. So what does this game bring? No-one has pointed out any features that could excuse the lackluster graphics. Why should I spend time with it when there are commercial games doing new things gameplay wise and graphic wise? Because its Foss?

Re:Not Very Impressing

[mochan_s]

That sounds lovely and all - I appreciate the immense amount of work the developers put in, but they ended up with a game that looks 10 years out of date. So what you're saying is that FOSS FPS games are made by people with the best intentions and skill, but end up being terrible when compared to closed-source commercial games.

You're falling into the trap of thinking of games in terms of release dates and being done and looking for the sequel. It's a stable release checkpoint and not the end of development of the game source.

The aim is not to release a game and start working on the next one. It's a work in progress and it will get better with time.

And, with the "press releases" more and more people will know about the effort and put their effort on it.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[iluvcapra]

The major reason is because they are extremely content-intensive, and the collaboration advantages open source has in creating code just don't apply to things that require sound and art studios.

As a sound designer and someone that wasted most of his undergrand noodling around with the StarCraft map editor, I don't really buy this. There are A LOT of creative people in graphics and audio and music that would love to demonstrate their abilities and have a "calling card" for their work. I don't know the specifics of this project, but in my experience as an erstwhile OSS dev (I do too many things) the people who run these projects are way too developer-coder centric in their management and don't make any effort to create easy tools for artists. I don't mean "download this python script and you can only use GIMP, luzer!" I mean "drag-and-drop your art from whatever source you want and use your wacom or whatever industry-standard tools you're confortable with to manipulate it." If you need to know any coding at all in order to contribute art to these projects, you are in fail territory.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[iluvcapra]

Sorry, I realize I didn't finish my point...

I think the quality of games projects like this would improve immensely if the developers/BDFLs did a few things...

• Develop useful and easy tools for authoring the content. Map editors, audio sequencing, all of that stuff. It should all be useable without any knowledge of the code.
• The developers should work hard to integrate a few key artists into the devlopment workflow to code the packaged levels. It isn't sufficient to put out a game and tell a mass-market audeince "you can build whatever level you want!" A game needs a very high-quality campaign the brings in newbies and showcases the abilities of the platform.
• The artists should be able to submit their work in an analogous way to how coders submit their work. The developers should foster a commuity process that lets everyone have their say without stepping on the artist's prerogative to create. (This is a really hard one. Not everyone knows the best way to ray trace, but every idiot with a keyboard thinks they know what color the BFG's stock should be). The art can go through code review like anything else -- a big problem with this is that most audio/visual file formats are undiffable and can't be run efficently through an SCM. I know, I've tried.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[Eil]

I know this might be such a radical idea that I'll certainly be modded down for it, but I simply must suggest...

If you don't like the game, maybe don't play it?

Give it a shrug and walk away, as you'd do with anything else that doesn't interest you. It doesn't cost anything to download and play in full, so if you tried it and didn't like it, the only thing you've wasted is your own time and who's fault is that really? Those of us that think it's just fine will continue having our fun, absent your oh-so-valuable approval.

Thanks.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[FishWithAHammer]

As it has been said, Nexuiz not only looks dated, but brings nothing new to the table.

You might want to check out Warsow, then. It's open-source and actually does bring quite a lot to the table. It's an exceptional game. (It also makes one wonder if they're on acid when they play, but I digress.)

Re:Not Very Impressing

[coolsnowmen]

The Nexuiz team didn't actually do any coding now did they?

This is untrue, you do not know what you are talking about.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[o2sd]

a game that looks 10 years out of date.

It's obvious you haven't played it. Nexuiz physics and gameplay are very different from previous FPS, and I've played most of them.

I know the eye candy looks a little dated, but that has everything to do with not having an art department, and nothing to do with whether the developers have created something truly new.

And believe me, they have. There are still some glitches in the game, but overall, it plays like no other FPS.

Still, the MTV generation do love the graphics, even if the game play sucks.

My only complaint with Nexuiz is that they completely change the weapon characteristics with every major release to further bias the game to their love affair with hit-scan weapons.

Ah well.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[Anonymous Coward]

Numero Uno: This Game is Free.
Letter B: It is fun, trust me.
Point III: It requires skill to master the gameplay.

In defense of point one, there is nothing to defend, It's free. Period. .

In defense of point B, the gameplay is centered around quick intense fights.
It forces the person to think quick and use all their skills.
It is important to learn those skills to win. It takes practice.

In defense of point III, This game requires great skill and reaction.
Some videos to prove my point.
1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ick6F1doCsU
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWn2PmMxQl8
3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR_Ycd4VESs

And a website dedicated to skill: www.nexuizninjaz.com

On a side note, the community is not big. While this may seem like a downside,
I know more of the Nexuiz community than I do my own friends on Halo 3 on LIVE.

On the graphics.

I have yet to see any form of impressive graphics. I hear the comments like
"Oh [game here] is so 'realistic'."
"Those graphics are stunningly real."
"Is that a game or a movie."

Excuse me, but I have yet to see real graphics from any form of a rasterized engine.
2 seconds of looking at a Ray Traced image reminds me of the junk I am currently playing.
1ms of render time with a junky image vs. 2 days of render time with a photorealistic image.
Come back to me in twenty years and show me a "realistic" real time engine.
Than I will agree on the graphics issue.

A game with "insane" graphics that has horrible gameplay is worthless to me.
The reason people still play Tetris is because that game has good gameplay.
The reason Super Smash Brothers is so popular you have to order it months ahead,
Is because the game has awesome gameplay. You can't tell me that game has good graphics.

So graphics are mostly a moot point in any game. Good graphics are awesome,
but good gameplay is better.

So in conclusion,
A game is only fun to those who enjoy it. If you don't enjoy this game, go buy one you will.
I enjoy this game more than any other FPS I've played. It is a personal opinion that each
should form on his own. Keep in mind that If YOU tried to develop this game, you would
most likely give up. These people work hard to produce something you might enjoy.
So instead of criticizing it like it is a peice of junk, master it than criticize it.
Only when you have mastered the game do you have the true right to flame it,
and by then you should like playing it. So try it, and if you don't like it,
stop playing it, no one is making you. Just enjoy it.

P.S. If those videos didn't prove my point about skill, I give up.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[Anonymous Coward]

Adding menu items and throwing in a few if/else conditions doesn't qualify as coding, sorry.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[Anonymous Coward]

there's a huge difference between a game that LOOKS out of date and a game that, despite how it looks, is extremely addictive and playable.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[__aamkky7574]

I'm sorry, but you're just deluded. Or, posting from the year 2001. Here's a screen from the game: http://offload2.icculus.org:9090/twilight/darkplaces/pics/nexuiz_pretty1.jpg Are you saying the graphics in this are comparable to Far Cry 2, Bioshock or Crysis? P.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[Kashgarinn]

Well, no.

Best intentions, definitely. Best skills, highly doubtful.

Thing is, no one has taken the idea of open source gaming to it's real potential, as in reducing a game engine down to its fragments so that individual people can pick at its individual pieces.

This project is still one big project, it isn't a layered combination of a multitude of programming functions/projects which in the end create a gaming engine. If it was, perhaps more people could invest time in individual parts of the engine, and also a more robust engine could be created, one which could be configured between being a simulator, RTS, FPS depending on what is needed.

A good game-engine project would also be a reserve for best-practices solutions, similar to what linux does today.

When this happens, we might see a real contender to create our own open-source games with. Until then, developers will want that paycheck.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[Kashgarinn]

Just an afterthought, this kind of system would help people who are getting into programming and want some experience, they can look at a single part of a layered system and see if they can make it better, or develop it further. Maybe one of these days this'll happen.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a thought...if you don't like it, don't fucking play it! Keep throwing $50 at every game of the week that comes along instead. That's your choice.

Re:Not Very Impressing

[tieTYT]

This begs the question: Why aren't there more open source game artists?

Re:Also, A New Open Source Train Sim has reached v

[distantbody]

(Link to openBVE website omitted due to already unreliable servers)

Good thinking! The only way someone could find the website now is if they used a search engine, but they'll never think of that.

If someone is interested enough they CAN google it. If not they'll probably just hit up the servers for some screenshots and leave.

dated look

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm impressed this was done for free in some people's spare time.
However, it really looks amateurish and dated.

Re:dated look

[Anonymous Coward]

link to your work? plskthx.

Re:dated look

[Anonymous Coward]

Irrelevant. Whether the OP can do a better job or not is of no concern. Whether any other game can do a better job is what matters. By your logic nobody can say anything is bad unless they personally can do a better job.

"Wow, that Watchmen film really sucked!"
"link to your work? plskthx."

"This car is a gas guzzler!"
"link to your work? plskthx."

"Windows Vista is a horrible operating system!"
"link to your work? plskthx."

See how stupid you sound?

Re:dated look

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not take it further?

"Investment bankers have ruined the economy!"
"link to ur bank? plskthx."

"Osama bin Laden is not a good person!"
"link to ur kids? plskthx."

"This world is full of poverty and disease!"
"link to ur univrs? plskthx."

"Pi is an irrational number!"
"link to ur fundmentl math systm? plskthx"

"I like pie!"
"pix or it dint happen. plskthx"

FOSS gaming has a long way to go...

[John Betonschaar]

Kudos to the developers and for someone who likes this kind of games it's probably good fun to play, but seriously, you can't really call this 'impressive graphics' or 'raising the bar for OSS gaming', can you?

It looks like they just took the Quake 2 engine with Quake 3 sound clips and recreated all the levels en textures.... badly...

Worst of all: from the video it appears there is literally zero innovation in the gameplay, its just adhd shooting and running with the same futuristic weapons all over again.

I can understand it's hard to create something that compares to a commercial game in terms of graphics and content, but you'd excpect some more creativity in the gameplay. There must be some guys with really crazy ideas they can try out.

Re:FOSS gaming has a long way to go...

[Anonymous Coward]

Presumably you have a few, why not submit some as feature requests?

Re:FOSS gaming has a long way to go...

[gbarules2999]

Some people like this type of gameplay. Who are you to judge?

Re:FOSS gaming has a long way to go...

[VPeric]

If you're looking for something with a bit of innovation, I'd suggest Warsow. First of all, it has cel-shaded graphics, so it'll never look "old" - just different (in a positive way). Second, while the same ol' formula is there, the game is focused on movement, and that's the edge it needs to be different enough to be considered innovative. My favorite showcase video of the game is this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O776iJ_mdSM (though, of course, something like that is very difficult to pull off).

Re:FOSS gaming has a long way to go...

[Goaway]

A horse cart does not turn into an automobile through "feature requests".

Re:FOSS gaming has a long way to go...

[Telvin_3d]

That wasn't a judgment on people who enjoy this type of gameplay. The GP was putting a spotlight on the ridiculous nature of the claims. By any measure that includes games outside of the OSS community this game is anything but raising the bar. It may be fun to play, it may be an excellent example of this style of gameplay done well, but the game design itself is a retread. The graphics are passable but on par with legacy commercial shooters. The level design is, frankly, brutal and very behind the curve. The weapons and characters are obviously based on well known commercial equivalents.

It may also be a lot of fun to play. So is Tetris. Nobody would post a Tetris clone and claim it is raising the bar for anyone.

Re:FOSS gaming has a long way to go...

[mdwh2]

Well in that case it's TFS and TFA that are misleading - do not take this as representative of open source. E.g., check out http://www.ogre3d.org/gallery/ for some decent screenshots from an open source engine.

The technology is also more comparable to Doom 3 than Quake 2 (it's just that the screenshots on TFA mostly don't seem to show them very well - even the screenshots from version 1 4 years ago showed realtime shadows for example, but for some reason these are disabled in most of the screenshots on the latest article!)

Re:FOSS gaming has a long way to go...

[AlexMax2742]

Worst of all: from the video it appears there is literally zero innovation in the gameplay, its just adhd shooting and running with the same futuristic weapons all over again.

How exactly do you innovate a competitive first person shooter? Give it some weird play mechanic which never ends up being fun at all? Give it realistic weapons and a reload button? Come up with some uber-complicated gametype that nobody will play anyway because it's too complicated and doesn't play well? Add vehicles and turn it into a bad version of Battlefield 1942 instead of a bad version of Quake?

I like simple first person shooters. Years later, I'm still waiting for something to out-Doom Doom 2 or out-quake Quake 3 Arena/Quake Live. That said, Nexuiz isn't a bad game because it doesn't innovate, it's a bad game because it falls into the trap most simple first person shooters fall into, in that instead of refining their core gameplay into something simple, fun, balanced and deep, they just throw a bunch of random content into a box and hope some of it sticks without caring about how it'll play long term.

It's not just the open source projects doing this either, look at how many people are still playing Unreal Tournament 99 and take a look at what they're actually playing (usually autosniper FFA or instagib CTF). Compare this and the number of people still playing the dozens of unforgettable quake clones that came out in the late 90's to the number of people playing Quake 3 Arena in one of it's various incarnations (Original game and Quake Live).

Nexuiz might have enough content for a game, but in terms of gameplay it's not even close to out Quakeing Quake. And that's why it's not noteworthy, not because it's "not innovative", whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean in this context.

Re:FOSS gaming has a long way to go...

[Blakey Rat]

How exactly do you innovate a competitive first person shooter?

Well, you could *play* some made in the last 10 years and figure it out based on example.

Give it some weird play mechanic which never ends up being fun at all?

You could be, say, Red Faction and give it a game play mechanic that's no fun at all. Or you could be, say, Battlefield 2142, Half-Life 2, Portal, Halo 2, etc and give it game play mechanics that are fun.

Give it realistic weapons and a reload button?

It doesn't have a reload button? Criminy.

That said, lots of games have gotten lots of mileage with the exact approach you recommend-- look at the Call of Duty series and how many titles they've sold based on realistic weapons.

But seriously, *all* games have a reload button now.

Come up with some uber-complicated gametype that nobody will play anyway because it's too complicated and doesn't play well?

Most games being played online today are popular because they have a game type more complicated than Deathmatch which does play well. Even Unreal Tournament, the spiritual successor to the Quake series, has more "complicated" game types than deathmatch game types. Battlefield 2142's* "Titan" mode is super-complicated, and pretty much the most fun you can have playing that particular title.

Hell, Starseige: Tribes had, by far and away, the most complicated gameplay for a game of its era, and it's also pretty much still the best FPS ever made by a long stretch. Even the Deathmatch modes in Tribes were awe-inspiringly good.

Add vehicles and turn it into a bad version of Battlefield 1942 instead of a bad version of Quake?

Has it occurred to you to turn it into a *good* version of something? If you're resigned to making a bad version, then yah do the least amount of effort possible. I guess I can't argue with that strategy.

Years later, I'm still waiting for something to out-Doom Doom 2 or out-quake Quake 3 Arena/Quake Live.

The Unreal Tournament series already out-Quaked Quake 3, years ago. Doom 2 has been out-Doomed by pretty much every single player title from Marathon to Aliens vs. Predators to Serious Sam...

* (Not to bring it up a lot because it's necessarily a great game, I just know a lot about it.)

Re:FOSS gaming has a long way to go...

[gentoofu]

Name another Open Source game that surpasses this game, then I'll agree with you that this isn't really 'raising the bar for OSS gaming.'

Creativity can come later when eye candy has caught up. And it wasn't even just eye candy alone they worked on. They made memory usage, bot AI, and network communication (biggie) improvements.

Re:FOSS gaming has a long way to go...

[Anonymous Coward]

How exactly do you innovate a competitive first person shooter? Give it some weird play mechanic which never ends up being fun at all? Give it realistic weapons and a reload button?

Simply asking this question shows that you're a horribly unimaginative person. You not only can't comprehend how something can be improved, you can't even comprehend that it could be improved. Seems like you and the developers of this game have more in common than you think.

I'll give you a starting point in your research though: Team Fortress 2.

Re:FOSS gaming has a long way to go...

[Haeleth]

Because they'd almost certainly be ignored.

And reasonably so. The people putting their free time into making this game are making the game they personally want to play. They don't owe anyone anything, and there's no reason why they should change their game just because someone says they should.

Conversely, the rest of us have no obligation to admire their work or to heap unconditional praise on it. We're into freedom, right? The freedom to contribute, criticise, enjoy, or ignore, as each individual prefers.

If we think it's fun, we can say so, and I'm sure the developers are encouraged that so many people are doing just that. But likewise, if we think it's derivative, then we have every right to say so and move on without contributing whatever ideas we ourselves might have.

Re:FOSS gaming has a long way to go...

[Haeleth]

How exactly do you innovate a competitive first person shooter?

By making a game based on your own creative ideas, instead of slavishly cloning someone else's ideas.

Look at Counter-Strike, for example. Arguably the most popular online FPS of all time. Observe how un-similar the gameplay is to Quake or Unreal Tournament. That was innovation.

What will the next innovation be? I don't know. If I did know, it wouldn't be innovative when it came. But I'll know it when I see it, because it will be something that's new and exciting, and it won't just be more of the same gameplay we've been seeing since the invention of modern deathmatch gameplay nearly two decades ago.

Re:FOSS gaming has a long way to go...

[grumbel]

but you'd excpect some more creativity in the gameplay.

Innovating in gameplay is pretty hard in FOSS games, since its really hard to get anybody interested in an unproved original idea, its much easier to get people interested in a clone of their favorite game that they already know and love. Only exception of course are those ideas that are simple enough that you can implement them on your own.

Also its not just commercial games to which FOSS gaming as to catch up, its also the MOD community which is way ahead of FOSS games. I guess that has largely to do with commercial titles actually having solid engines and tools, while FOSS games most often have neither a solid engine nor proper tools to create content for them, which of course makes it hard to get any serious artists involved.

Re:FOSS gaming has a long way to go...

[Anonymous Coward]

Warsow and Sauerbraten. Two OSS games which are far better then this.

Re:FOSS gaming has a long way to go...

[__aamkky7574]

"Some people like this type of gameplay. Who are you to judge?"

A retort which basically says that you can't criticize anything.

Sorry, but apart from being open source, I can't see anything to recommend this game. I don't mind ancient-looking graphics as long as there's some innovation, but this just appears to be a Quake III clone, a game which was already dated concepts-wise when it came out.

P.

Re:FOSS gaming has a long way to go...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you could *play* some made in the last 10 years and figure it out based on example.

I have, and there are a fair number of great games out there. You mentioned Starsiege Tribes, I preferred Tribes 2 just for the sheer amount of tomfoolery you could do with all of the various kits. I played a fair amount of Counterstrike when everyone else did back in the early 2000's and consider Call of Duty 4 a great successor to it. Team Fortress 2 was also quite awesome in it's own right, and Valve's continual commitment to quality expansions really helped the fact that the initial release was a bit underwhelming. Left 4 Dead took up a few weeks of my time as well...the list goes on and on.

However, Nexuiz isn't trying to be any of these things. It's trying to be traditional first person shooter, and I find that most people pin the blame on it not being "innovative" enough or some such nonsense. It's not a bad game because it's not "innovative", it's a bad game because it's a bad traditional deathmatch FPS. It's a subtle distinction, but it's important.

The Unreal Tournament series already out-Quaked Quake 3, years ago.

No it didn't. It made the same mistake that Nexuiz did, throw a bunch of content in a game and see if it stuck, only difference being that the content was professionally made and thus had an ounce of quality control. It was fun because nobody had really bothered to do that before on the scale that UT did. Now, however, it's pretty obvious which game had actual staying power and which one was a short-lived gimmick.

Re:FOSS gaming has a long way to go...

[Anonymous Coward]

Unreal Tournament still has a couple thousand servers running. I would call that staying power.

Re:Also, A New Open Source Train Sim has reached v

[Patch86]

http://openbve.uuuq.com/en/index.html

I somehow feel a train sim posted in an offtopic comment might be immune to the traffic bombardment of slashdotting...

Ugly weapons!

[ivoras]

All the time I couldn't actually concentrate on anything in the video besides the weapons! The effects are ok and projectile "physics" looks playable but the weapons themselves are sooooo damn ugly!

Looks like FUN

[BLKMGK]

I see complaints that the engine is "old" and that the graphics aren't up to snuff with more modern games. I say "So What?!".

I like FPS and own all of the UT series of games as well as some of the older id games. I still find myself going back to UT2K4 over and over even though I have a later "better" UT3. Why? It's not the graphics, it's not the engine, it's not the sound - it's the gameplay. UT2K4 is FUN for me. Fun doesn't require super duper grpahics it simply requires engaging gameplay. With all of the custom maps, weapons, and other things added to UT2K4 it's a ton of FUN to play. Looking at the movies for this game it looks FUN just like the old Quake games were. Okay maybe the graphics aren't quite as good as a modern shooter but I don't appear to be paying $50 for it either AND honestly many of those bells and whistles found in expensive games don't add to the FUN. Kripes I had FUN playing the original Wolfenstein. the original Quake, why couldn't I also enjoy this one? Folks don't like the maps? Build better ones - just like what has been done with UT, Quake, Doom, and others. Stop bitching about that stuff and fix it if you really have heartburn with it...

Re:Looks like FUN

[4D6963]

Huh? If I hadn't noticed your short UID I'd ask you how young you can possibly be. UT2004 isn't old, and is objectively superior to UT3. Besides, you play Quake, UT and Doom, so why on Earth would you want to play that pale imitation instead?

Folks don't like the maps? Build better ones - just like what has been done with UT, Quake, Doom, and others. Stop bitching about that stuff and fix it if you really have heartburn with it...

Are you a moron? Yeah, right, let's invest some precious spare time trying to save the shit out of an hopelessly lame knock off game just for the sake of it. If you like lost causes there you've got one.

Re:Looks like FUN

[willyd357]

Here, here!

Re:Looks like FUN

[Anonymous Coward]

Here, here!

Where, where?

Re:Looks like FUN

[thermian]

I find a lot of younger players are habituated to beleive graphical goodness == a good game, so they look at these less visually impressive works and extrapolate that the game itself is poor. Its hard getting past that. My son has managed it, but only because he was trying to 'get' why I still play games that were written before he was born.

The simplest answer it "don't like something in a project? Join the project and improve it". Alas this isn't usually what happens, because for every person with the skills, there are a thousand with loud ideas and critisism but no actual ability. Trying to clear the cruft from the mass of potential project members is a problem that can make you just reject everyone.

I know, I had the same problem. After receiving a huge amount of offers to assist in my project, I only found one person with the right attitude and skill. Most came in with grand plans, and then disappeared before doing anything more than taking up my time with emails.

Re:Looks like FUN

[night_flyer]

There, there!

Re:Looks like FUN

[xlotlu]

I see complaints that the engine is "old" and that the graphics aren't up to snuff with more modern games.

Besides, the engine is not "old". For more than a year, DarkPlaces does things that you can't even find in Quake 3: high dynamic range rendering, realtime dynamic lighting, parallax mapping etc.

Yes, 7 years ago the engine was a fork of Quake 1. And the point is?

Re:Looks like FUN

[gbarules2999]

I find a lot of players are habituated to beleive graphical goodness == a good game, so they look at these less visually impressive works and extrapolate that the game itself is poor.

This. But, I removed the "younger" from your post. There are plenty of thirty year olds who can't get past how nice a game looks, and they'll let you know it.

Re:Looks like FUN

[gbarules2999]

Mod parent down.

Nexuiz isn't a lame knock-off, and you cannot say it's "objectively" so. I doubt you even know what that word means.

Some people actually like Nexuiz. Try playing it first before spouting off incoherent fragments of "hopelessly lame" comments.

Re:Looks like FUN

[El_Isma]

I completly agree with you. I play Urban Terror ( http://www.urbanterror.net/ ) which is a Q3 mod. It's graphics aren't super but it's FUN to play.

Also, I *hated* (and never finished) Crysis. I didn't enjoy it at all, the AI was sniping me with pistols miles away while I couldn't even see them, and if I did, I'd always miss my shots. Totally frustrating.

Re:Looks like FUN

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that for the most part first-person shooters are the same thing done again. To do it better, you need new gametypes (eg team fortress, ut2*'s bombing run and assault maps, or ut3's warfare [which imho isn't superior to bombing run and such that they removed]), new graphics, or new weapons (eg, dead space's use of mining equipment).

Re:Looks like FUN

[Rycross]

Because you can have a game that is fun and has good graphics too. Some games are more fun because they have better graphics (better atmosphere, more varied enemies, etc). This is a just-released game, so it doesn't get to play the old-game card. Furthermore, the summary throws in a line about its "impressive graphics," of which they are anything but.

Is it fun? Maybe. I haven't played it, but the screenshots sure don't portray it as anything special. But there are plenty of games out there right now that are fun *and* also focus on delivering visual polish along with the gameplay polish. I don't have to compromise, so why should I?

Plus, in my experience, there's a difference between low-tech graphics and unpolished graphics. You can take a graphically inferior engine or game and still put effort into it to make it look polished. Plenty of games on XBox Live manage this. The game in the article doesn't. All things being equal, I find that when a game doesn't put effort into the graphics, that they usually aren't fun either. Having graphics that look thrown-together usually means that the game feels thrown together game-play wise as well.

Anyway, the constant drumming of "Graphics don't matter, only gameplay!" is getting tired. There's tons of games out there vying for my attention, and if they want it then they have to deliver a product thats at least as good as others out there. You can do it with innovative gameplay (Portal), appeals to nostalgia (Mega Man 9), or just a fun and polished experience (Call of Duty 4). Throwing out a graphical turd that has no obvious gameplay innovations, with the sole selling point of being Free software... well that isn't going to cut it.

Re:Looks like FUN

[anomalous cohort]

I have casually played this game over the years and it's great! Congratulations to Alien Trap on their new release. I agree with BLGMGK that there is nothing wrong with circa late 90's UT and quake style graphics. For me, it's more about playability than it is about awesome effects.

Re:Looks like FUN

[Anonymous Coward]

You keep saying 'gameplay' and 'FUN,FUN,FUN' but this game offers nothing new to the table and simply copies Quake. Stop being such a tool.

Ahhh can't handle the criticisim and tell your customers to go fix it themselves; this is why nobody trusts the FOSS community with the PC desktop because you guys can pull the rug from underneath the user without having to worry about any consequences.
Add to it the FOSS community is notorious for snuffing its nose at the average user and the 'sheeple' who are "stupid/lazy". There are good people there, it's just a lotta bark and no bite.

It is called QuakeLive and it's FREE, get with the times.

Oh I know it's ok to bash EA and every single game they put out while blaming it dismall sales on DRM, well welcome to the community of making bad games and getting criticized for it. Criticizing it will hopefull make it a better game, but the FOSS community seem to have their heads up their culo when taking criticisim of their product.

It is sad because usually a company would pay somebody like you to give such a desperate highly raved review, yet you do it for free in such a bias way.

Re:Looks like FUN

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Fun is king. Yes, UT2K4 is huge fun. (Still playing it, still haven't managed to spend quality time with /all/ the maps and mods and characters yet. T-rif game.)

Unlike pro studios, Open Source games don't have to move to the next level of console graphics or lose funding. Which brings some interesting opportunities the pro studios can't explore.

First, how much detail do you need? I'm not against detail, but there are sweet-spots of detail. It's like comics. How much detail do you need to be funny? Is Mary Worth funnier than XKCD? It's a daft question - it's how you use the detail.

FPS have been tied to DETAIL=BETTER like flight sims for a long time now, and that's hard to shake. But it's not necessarily true, just like DETAIL=BETTER isn't true for comics. Open FPS means we can have FPS categorized, like comics, by Detail simply being an item of style -- no relation to Fun.

Other advantage of picking a sweet-spot below the latest level of detail is it doesn't take a whole studio of developers to make a map and characters. It's kinda the difference between ink drawing and oil painting for time-sink. Nothing wrong with oil painting, but we'd have a hell of a lot less damn good illustration out there is oil painting was the only accepted form of image. Ramping required detail shuts out a lot of real talent that wouldn't be able to find the time.

It's complicated, it's worth a Gamasutra essay or two, and it's not going to happen overnight, but today's Open FPS lay the foundation for moving in that direction.

And if you want to use your modern processing power, consider how big and populated you can make a UT2K4-style map in five years.

Re:Looks like FUN

[techprophet]

There is a rant in an old PC Gaming magazine about that. A 2 page-spread long rant. Very good. And this was calling Starcraft graphical goodness.

Re:Looks like FUN

[ahabswhale]

Right on brother! I play UT2k4 quite a bit even though it's pretty old now. Even when I periodically get a new game, I find myself drawn to UT2k4 while I'm playing it.

I was really looking forward to UT3 but it was a disaster and I couldn't believe how badly they ruined it. UT3 was clearly dumbed down for console play.

With what I've seen coming out of the gaming factories lately, it looks like I will be playing UT2k4 for many more years to come.

Re:Tool can be used as a tool

[jabithew]

You know what they say, all toasters toast toast!

Re:Also, A New Open Source Train Sim has reached v

[jabithew]

Great! Now when I've finished sitting on the tube on the way home, I can sit on a virtual tube!

Anyway, they've got some details wrong; not enough people. I don't think it would increase rendering time a lot, just add some textures of faces squashed against the windows, or maybe a medieval woodcut of Dante's Inferno.

Nexuiz can't compete with Quake Live and Tremulous

[PNP_Transistor]

I don't see how a game like this can compete with something like Quake Live. Quake Live (still in beta) is free and has comparable graphics and gameplay. Yet it already has a much larger community, more polish, and runs more smoothly.

I understand that it is difficult for an open source game to have the same playerbase and polish as a professionally developed, ad-supported game. But at the very least Nexuiz should run more smoothly and should differentiate itself from other games that have already been released.

I'd say that a better open-source game might be Tremulous. Runs much more smoothly on my computer, and I often want to play it because its gameplay is different from other games I already have. Perhaps that's why there have always been more Tremulous players than Nexuiz players in my area.

Re:Cheating? Solution:

[xororand]

Play with your friends or in a league.

Regarding Cheating

[TwoSeven]

There are methods for this, but most prevalent seems to be using a closed source binary .dll/.so to check the signing of the binarys, to make sure you're playing with what the dev team shipped. This means playing on authentic servers using your own self-compiled blobs is unlikely.

Giants Reptilians on my Godzilla movie?!

[Tei]

I totally agree with you on one bit. The genre is somewhat like unoriginal. On the other part, it was the intention of the dev's to create preciselly that. Nexuiz is a long proyect, it was in active dev, in 2002, so is maybe a 7+ years old proyect. Is timeless, is a effort to create a very good "Quake Arena" gameplay. In his defense, Id Software also released this year "Quake Zero", and seems was wildy sucessfull. So seems there are people out here that want this type of gameplay. Maybe not u, and maybe not me. But other people like this type of fun, and Nexuiz deliver it.

There are lots of other games out here that are tryiing other ideas, but this one is about this core gameplay that is proven that is fun and as lots of followers. And IMHO, this type of gameplay is very good for the opensource model, but other type of gameplays are not good.

On the other side. If you don't like this type of Gameplay, Nexuiz is a opensource proyect AND a platform. You only need a bit of QC to make a mod with a totally different gameplay style. Maybe something like Natural Selection, or a action-RPG, or whatever you want.

I maybe can help you.

[Tei]

On the BSP loader, you only need to create a function that generate a CRC of the data loaded. And have something like a list of "banned" CRC's. That way, If you hate a mapper, because he is a ugly bastard, you can release a version of Nexuiz where his map's will not load at all (you can calculate the CRC of all his released maps). TADA!!... DRM for Nexuiz.

Just consider it a new aspect of gaming...

[jopsen]

Why don't we just consider it a new aspect of gaming... ?
- May the best hacker win...

Re:Just consider it a new aspect of gaming...

[FiloEleven]

Hackers should play corewar.

Re:Just consider it a new aspect of gaming...

[nog_lorp]

Meh. That is traditional hacking. A lot of the fun is lost when you don't have that subversive element.

I think it would be excellent to make an MMORPG style game, complete with anti-cheat mechanisms and banning (automated bans, not in-game mods), where the goal is to defeat the anti-cheat,automate the grinding, and use exploits to achieve faster leveling.

Re:Also, A New Open Source Train Sim has reached v

[rackserverdeals]

(Link to openBVE website omitted due to already unreliable servers)

Uhmm... you do realize the slashdot effect is only for the main story. Most links in comments don't get the same amount of traffic.

In addition to the RTFA phrase, there is a RTFC (read the fine comments) that is similar. You probably never heard of it because the people that use it, don't leave or read comments.

GPL? Where's the source code?

[Anonymous Coward]

I went to the sourceforge download page and could only find binary packages. Where is the source code? It's GPL!

I saw this phenomenon with another package yesterday too. It was NoMachine NX - looked interesting and GPL - again, no source!

What is going on?

Re:GPL? Where's the source code?

[esteel]

Source is included in the zip file.. Stupid trolling on your part.

Re:GPL? Where's the source code?

[Anonymous Coward]

So I've got to download 640MB of everything just to get the source? I'm sorry, I'm only on an 8mbit/s connection and life is short.

Re:GPL? Where's the source code?

[Anonymous Coward]

Be grateful.
They don't have to make the source available as download at all.
They could also ask you to pay them $15 for shipping a cd with the source code to you.

Stupid 3D sickness! :-(

[stesch]

I can't even stand the video on http://www.alientrap.org/nexuiz/ :-(

Re:Stupid 3D sickness! :-(

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an old video, from version 2.4. This version is a lot more polished.

Re:Nexuiz can't compete with Quake Live and Tremul

[thermian]

Why should it try and compete? They don't have the money, true, but so what?

Did the people who wrote Narbaculer Drop have much money? Nope, did they create an awesome game that got picked up and remade as a hugely succesful commercial product? Yep.

Tried World of Goo yet? That was low budget, almost certainly less graphically pretty than would have been the case if they'd had more cash, but the game is a commercial success.

Good graphics and funding won't create good ideas. For that you need a passion for the subject, artistic ability and lots of experience with games in general.

Possibly the guys writing it may be getting more out of the experience then the people who play it, but thats because they are also getting exactly the skillset that would put them in a good position to apply for positions at games development companies.

So this is Quake 3 with little improvement...

[Anonymous Coward]

is that the 'high bar' with open source gaming? just downloading what ID open sourced years ago and add your own maps ?

  WOW, I'm impressed by their work!

Re:So this is Quake 3 with little improvement...

[esteel]

Nexuiz uses a heavily modded quake1 engine, added effects like bumpmapping, reliefmapping, reflections, scriptable effects, realtime lights/shadows similar to the doom3 engine. Just downloading q3 sources? LOL you suck so bad at trolling.

Re:So this is Quake 3 with little improvement...

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL you suck so bad at trolling.

I dunno, he got you to bite.

Production costs rumoured to be 16 million

[Anonymous Coward]

16 million cookies, I think. They ain't gonna get no money for it so you gets what you pays for.

Re:Production costs rumoured to be 16 million

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the write-up didn't bother to mention it, not only is it open source but it runs on Linux and OSX as well as Windows.

Re:Tool can be used as a tool

[tomhudson]

You're lucky, you can at least make toast one slice at a time. I bought one, and when I opened the box, it turns out I got stuck with one of those "BSD" brand toasters, and it really smells funky - I think it's dead (either that, or the smell of the people who developed it has worn off onto it).

Re:Also, A New Open Source Train Sim has reached v

[Sen.NullProcPntr]

I somehow feel a train sim posted in an offtopic comment might be immune to the traffic bombardment of slashdotting...

Apparently the server is _that_ bad.

For those curious there is always wiki and youtube

(Much better servers;-)

The problem has already been explored

[Anonymous Coward]

For starters, either get an admin to watch the game from the alleged cheater's pov, or take a recording of the match and submit it to the administrators. Either way, aimbots almost always stand out like a sore thumb, and maphackers, etc. aren't much less obvious. Graphics hacks are less simple to detect that way, obviously, but if someone's consistently first-shotting people in full-black, foggy, or otherwise low-vision parts of the map that are generally effective in making people miss, or making ludicrous first-instant shots at people coming around corners or sprawled in GOOD sniping positions (NOT in the map's obvious dark-windowed "insert grenade whether you see someone or not" tower), it's a good sign that they're fiddling with the game's parameters. Another thing to check is whether their performance really seems to match their kill count. If they're moving badly, not using the high-power, but "lifetime-to-master" weapons, not coordinating with their allies (at all), not using any detectable strategy, or otherwise looking like they truly shouldn't have the score they have, it's a fair bet that something's up. Now, the reliability of any such call will vary directly with the skill of the observer. A newbie watching an Unreal Tournament match could see an event and maybe say "no way he could have made that shock combo," where a veteran player might well see it as a near-certain sign of a pro.

On the other hand, I DO feel that an admin has the right to ensure a good play experience for the server users. If that means kicking someone who is obviously either hacking or simply leagues better than the rest of the players (and, I stress, not interested in helping their fellow player improve), they can and ought to use their powers. If the kick/ban-ee is actually worth their salt, they have a dozen other servers they can go mess around on to warm up, and they know how to contest unwarranted bans on desirable servers (from long experience...ask me how I know this). If they're a cheating moron, they'll usually either duck the kickban system within 3.4 seconds and get even sloppier in their cheating, or move on to the next target -- it's the open server dilemma at that point, and it's again up to the admins whether they're willing to put up with the occasional griefer, or put a password on the server and deal with low populations.

Online competitions at the very least run an integrity check on the game files, and usually have a process blacklist, a banned settings list (there were some really dirty tricks UT players could pull by adding scripted events to hotkeys, all within the UT engine) and a couple other tricks. That being done, the only other things possible for ensuring fair play are either to insist that the players bring their machines to a central location to have their installations verified on-site and their playing monitored by referees, or insist that they play on pre-loaded machines (bring your own input devices, and maybe a configuration file to be vetted before installation).

Do some slick bastards get in? Heck, this is Slashdot, folks should know the answer to that by default. But, most of the really big cheaters can get weeded rather easily by intelligent administration, at least up to an adequate standard for the match in question. Open matches? Kick the twitchy aimbot freaks. Online ladder/clan matches? Run an automated process to scan for flagrant abuse, and record the match for later review if necessary. For-cash tourney? Better have players local and referees on hand.

Other open source FPS

[Anonymous Coward]

When it comes to fun, and skills, there's mainly free addons built by the community for the community...

For Quake3 you can find CPM, or you can find the best fps of all, Warsow, which is full open-source, cross platform and is faster than everything you know.

If you're searching fun, and gameplay, warsow is definitely the game... (checkout the tricks tutorials, and all the movements ) .
Finally don't miss warsow movies
 

Re:Nexuiz can't compete with Quake Live and Tremul

[gbarules2999]

It runs plenty smoothly, and it plays like a mix between UT2k4 and Quake 3. It's basically Quake Live plus, you know, things like secondary fire.

And the other poster put it nicely: why do they need to "compete?" They're doing just fine; the game runs great and looks very nice. It's a hobby project. I'm not a next-gen kind of fellow, but it runs on Ubuntu just fine (more than you can say for Quake Live) and manages to be a simple, fun FPS.

It is fun

[shiftless]

I have played Nexuiz quite a bit. I found it in Ubuntu's applications catalog while browsing through looking for interesting games. It really is a fun game. The game is freakin FREE, and pretty decently done, so who gives a shit if it doesn't have some big fancy storyline or the latest in state of the art graphics? You can just jump right into it with no effort and start blasting. When you're tired of it you can just quit and start back from the same place later. It doesn't require any thought to play and have fun, and you know what? Sometimes that's 100% fine.

Casual gamers, unlike hardcore FPS gamers, don't really give a shit about a game having the 100% latest state of the art graphics, or following storylines, or that type of thing. They just want to play a fun game that they don't have to put much thought into, then when they get tired, jump up and do something else.

Now let me ask you this. If Nexuiz were bundled with Windows Vista, what percentage of people would rather play that instead of freakin Minesweeper, Hearts, etc? I bet tons of people would rather play that game. These people are casual gamers. So you see what Ubuntu is doing, by including such games in their catalog, is adding value to their product by satisfying a desire. That is just one more reason which might help persuade an average Joe to say "Sure, I'll give Linux a try." It also helps to grow the Linux "gamer" market, which also helps to make said market more attractive to other software developers, both big and small.

Re:It is fun

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

It really is a fun game. The game is freakin FREE, and pretty decently done, so who gives a shit if it doesn't have some big fancy storyline or the latest in state of the art graphics?

I didn't find the game to be much fun when I tried it on OS X. Maybe I'll install the Linux version and give it a try. Basically, I found it pretty unusable.

You can just jump right into it with no effort and start blasting.

Yeah, I tried that. The mouse sensitivity was so bad it took me a full minute to turn around. I went back and adjusted it, but spent a good minute and a half trying to get out of the settings because to close them you have to find a nearly invisible textured dark grey on textured dark grey button in the upper right of the window. Now I've been casually playing FPS games since the original Wolfenstein. I've sunk many hours into Doom, Marathon, and Quake variants. Even so, trying to just run around in Nexuiz was painfully difficult for me. I'm sure with practice and enough time tweaking mouse settings I could get it to work acceptably, but "out of the box" it was pretty unusable. I might mention other controls were similarly poorly designed.

Casual gamers, unlike hardcore FPS gamers, don't really give a shit about a game having the 100% latest state of the art graphics, or following storylines, or that type of thing. They just want to play a fun game that they don't have to put much thought into, then when they get tired, jump up and do something else.

I think casual gamers do care about the story to some degree, but really gameplay is the key. You don't need the latest engine or most polished graphics to have a fun game for casual players. You do, however, need a higher degree of usability testing, UI design, and learnability for the interface. Nexuiz is a step backwards in usability, even from games like Doom or Quake.

Now let me ask you this. If Nexuiz were bundled with Windows Vista, what percentage of people would rather play that instead of freakin Minesweeper, Hearts, etc?

I haven't tried the Windows version, but based upon the Mac version, I'd say a minority. Sure, some people would get it to work for them, but those are the same people that currently go download freeware games now instead of relying on pre-installed games like minesweeper. The minesweeper crowd needs usability and something they can pause while they do other tasks and come back to quickly. They need something obvious in its use that tells them the controls and just works smoothly and which gradually teaches them the interface as they play. You think of Minesweeper and think "crappy game" and in many ways you're right. But in terms of some of the characteristics that matter to novice users, it far exceeds Nexuiz.

So you see what Ubuntu is doing, by including such games in their catalog, is adding value to their product by satisfying a desire.

Absolutely they are. They're also giving some users the (correct) impression that a lot of Linux and Linux software is still pretty amateur and poorly implemented in certain ways... but hey its free. There is a trade off there.

It also helps to grow the Linux "gamer" market, which also helps to make said market more attractive to other software developers, both big and small.

I'm not sure this is true. Getting more people running Linux certainly grows the potential market for people to buy games developed for it. Introducing more competing games, however, reduces the chances people will buy their game. After all, if they can play another FPS for free, why will they pay to get the one we're developing? One of the draws of smaller market is the lack of competition and this undermines that to some degree.

Re:It is fun

[shiftless]

Well, you should probably play the Linux version before passing judgment. On my Ubuntu system, I installed it from the package manager, then jumped in and started playing. I did not have any of the problems you described. I guess the OS X port just sucks.

It's FOSS, make it FOSS.

[Auraiken]

TLDR: Open Source is open. We should be making games as demos only to show off the engine and it's tools. There needs to be more content tools like map/game editors so others can make the game their own.

The main thing I see with FOSS games is that they're mainly followers of trends and a bit too much of MeTooism. Which is understandable since most of the reason why we have FOSS is because someone else closed their source and we're writing it to get around that. What we really need for the FOSS movement for games however is some way to better edit the games themselves.

I know I know, they have the source, what more could you ask for?

Well, this seems to be both the strength and weakness of the community. We had the ambition to write an entire engine but no ambition to actually make it useful. The "Here's the source, go do it yourself" argument. That's great. Most people are not coders, they don't have the percieved time to go learn the language just to understand the code in the first place. To be even more honest, commercial games usually provide an easier means to edit content. Which, to me, is quite sad. Since we promote editing and creativity but provide no tools for people to use to achieve these means.

The best way for FOSS to move forward would be to start providing tools for regular people ( come on we can't say /.'s are regular people ;) ) to edit engine content but without touching the engine itself. We need level editors, some simpler abstraction for scripting, model importing that doesn't require people to write a line of code.

FOSS also needs to admit that Art is not it's strong point. While the engine might have realtime dynamic lighting, or textures that can self illuminate, it isn't a replacement for pure genuine creativity. Glass chess sets, and abstract triangle people isn't being creative. You can see it as the reason why we strive to copy things like tanks from reality. Sherman tanks are not creative, no matter how close you got it to the real thing. But, I digress.

What would get the movement a lot of traction would be to start providing a means for people who aren't coders to actually take it up and give us more of a reputation if not make FOSS more popular and more in the eyes of people who can market it better than us.

Seriously, it's FOSS, by definition we don't just make the things we want, we make them so other people can to. There needs to be a higher abstraction so people can use the engine and build their own game. This is the strong point.

Re:Also, A New Open Source Train Sim has reached v

[Daimanta]

I believe it's not only because of the /.ing but mostly because the 1.0.2.0 version is out according to wikipedia. Posting a link here doesn't really help you know.

Re:Nexuiz can't compete with Quake Live and Tremul

[telek83]

It already has beat Quake Live, Quake Live is Q3 without partial effects, including blood, rail gun effects, plasma effects... no thinks I enjoy Q3 the way it is, I see no reason for Quake Live. It's easy to run a smoothly with no effects, (go into Q3 and take of dynamic lighting... on older cards it gave a +50% increase (voodoo 2,3 cards) So please don't compare games that remove effects from games and and say abc runs smoother then xyz cause it doesn't, it's doing as much... with that logic Wolfenstien 3D should be your fav game then.

Slow as molasses + looks horrible

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I've just tested it, and it's slow as molasses, especially when enemies get close, which is when you need your frames the most, and it looks horrible compared to RTCW. I guess that instead of an old engine working on older machines, we get an old engine needs to do more work to achieve the same results, making it run crappily even on a relatively recent machine. I guess I'll stick with OpenArena for now.

Re:Nexuiz can't compete with Quake Live and Tremul

[AlexMax2742]

World of Goo and Narbaculer Drop weren't badly done Quake clones.

Emphasis on "badly done" because if it was actually a well done Quake Clone I'd be playing the shit out of it.

Is there a single player mode?

[jopet]

It seems there are few to none 3D games for Linux that are not just multiplayer arenas but have a story or at least can be played alone with artificial enemies.

Re:Is there a single player mode?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Is there a single player mode?

Yes.

It seems there are few to none 3D games for Linux that are not just multiplayer arenas but have a story or at least can be played alone with artificial enemies.

There isn't any real story I've seen. The single player is more like Quake.

Re:Is there a single player mode?

[Ant P.]

Yes. It has a set-piece thing much like the "Challenges" part of N64 Perfect Dark.

Thanks for the memories.

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to play Quake 2 with the guys in the office. One of the CS guys was so bad that I changed the skins on his machine so that all of the clothes were neon green just so that he'd have a fighting chance.

Good times, good times... :)

epic fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Only on slashdot would such a troll get a 5 insightful. Ok John Betonschaar, what game have you released that we can criticize? Please reply back with the url.

Re:Nexuiz can't compete with Quake Live and Tremul

[Blakey Rat]

Yes, but those are *new* games. We've already seen Quake like 15 times. We don't need more Quake, but if you're going to make more Quake, you have to make it *damned* good to compete against all the other Quake out there. (Much if which is also free, in the sense that matters.)

Neither is the gameplay comparable...

[Draek]

Nexuiz is actually fun, y'know.

Re:Neither is the gameplay comparable...

[emanem]

I don't discuss this, just the graphics are really old and technologically very simple.
You can't state in the news that the graphics is the main feature of this game...
Cheers,

Re:Neither is the gameplay comparable...

[Rycross]

The summary bills its "impressive graphics." The graphics aren't impressive. That was the poster's point.

I can't speak to Killzone 2, but I hear its actually fun too, y'know? I know its the trendy thing to pretend that indie/hobby games are these fonts of pure fun and creativity, while commercial games are stagnant wastes of boring-but-pretty snore-fests, but that's actually not really the case. You *can* have a game that's fun and pretty too.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Do we still want nexmappack_r2?

[X0563511]

Is the nexmappack_r2 on the sourceforge page still compatible, or do we give that a miss for now?

World of Padman is way better than this

[XPulga]

World of Padman is an open source FPS, and has better looks, graphics and music than Nexuiz. Oh, and has a name that doesn't sound like cough medicine. http://www.worldofpadman.com/

Re:World of Padman is way better than this

[Anonymous Coward]

World of Padman isn't open source, only the engine is.

Powerful, or inefficient?

[zooblethorpe]

Nexuiz runs on top of Lord Havoc's Darkplaces engine, which was (is) a rewrite of the Quake 1 engine.

When I play Quake 1 in his engine, with everything on, it slows to below 10FPS at times. This is on a quad-core with a high end nvidia card.

This is a powerful engine.

Seriously, not trying to slag here, but I really have to ask -- a rendering engine that brings such hardware to its knees might just be inefficient rather than powerful, no?

Cheers,

Re:Powerful, or inefficient?

[X0563511]

Not really. The part that kills, is the realtime lighting.

Realtime lighting and shadows, plus refractive and reflective water (need special VISpatch to use that). Shadows cast on models for instance... and there is no limit to the number of projected shadows. As many shadows are cast as there are light emmiters and objects, and this includes explosions, muzzle flashes, even self-emitting textures.

I would venture to say it's almost to the point of photon mapping.

Re:Powerful, or inefficient?

[Antidamage]

Modern hardware can easily handle the features you described, not including the ridiculous comment about photon mapping.

It's just poorly written. No slight to the author, but it needs some more professional input.

Re:Powerful, or inefficient?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just look at saurbraten, it can do most (all?) of this and at a decent framerate on older hardware, it also looks a hell of a lot nicer doing it.
Not that nexuiz isn't a nicely put together game with some half-decent maps, ok models and a nice ui(really quite slick, to be fair), the engine underpinning it all just needs work.

I'll continue to play tremulous, it's the only FPS game that keeps my attention, jump run 'n blast gets old.

Re:Nexuiz can't compete with Quake Live and Tremul

[thermian]

Yes, but those are *new* games. We've already seen Quake like 15 times. We don't need more Quake, but if you're going to make more Quake, you have to make it *damned* good to compete against all the other Quake out there. (Much if which is also free, in the sense that matters.)

This is a viewpoint I hadn't considered. I saw this and thought initially of the great programming experience the people involved would be having, not of the lack of originality.

Elo rating

[tepples]

In counter strike, any time someone enters a server who is much better than all the others, people start shouting "cheater".

Tetris DS solved this by giving players Elo-style ratings centered on 5000 and then only matching players with similar Elo ratings. It also shows the other player's screen: if the other player is obviously getting only I pieces and not getting garbage, then he's using the "always Starman" cheat.

Fake time strategy

[tepples]

Starcraft: real time strategy. Final Fantasy Tactics: fake time strategy.

mmm yes

[Danzigism]

I tell ya, I came across Nexuiz a few months back by browsing through the ol' Synaptic package manager. Gave it a shot, and I was pretty impressed. I like OpenArena as well, but it crashes X sometimes for me. however, it is still incredibly tough to beat the best game on the planet, with the best graphics and runs on any system. . 0verkill....

graphics? bah... who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

To the people whining about the graphics in Nexuiz, I would like to inform you of the following. I recently played "action Doom II: Urban Brawl" and I found it extremely satisfying. I've actually completed it at least four times (player choices influence the game). Of course it doesn't have reflective water or shader support, but that does not matter. It brought me back to around 1990, but still felt modern.

Noob player but addicted

[bucketoftruth]

I get violently motion sick when I play FPS games, but I can't stop playing this one. It's screaming fast and really fun. I think what makes it desirable to play is that it lacks the polish of the commercial titles but plays incredibly fast on my dated hardware. What it really comes down to is well designed maps and textures (for me).

FOSS games != modern gfx standards, and that's ok

[Anonymous Coward]

Expecting open-source games to graphically match anything remotely recent is completely unrealistic. The amount of skill and effort required to output that kind of quality is so high that really the only people who are able to put in that kind of commitment are people who are trying to get a job in the industry. Most of these people have little to no interest in working with anything but the most recent commercial engines and tools.

Fact is, the current commercial graphical standard has pretty much moved beyond the reach of the casual hobbyists which comprise the great majority of the open-source gaming community. Whether this is a problem or not depends on how much importance you associate to visual appeal.

However, no matter whether or not this game conforms to your graphical standards, there is absolutely no justification to belittle or dismiss offhand the amount of effort that went into it. Games like this are produced by people in their spare time, for your enjoyment. To expect them to meet the absurdly high standards of contemporary games that have many thousands of man-hours put into them by paid professionals smacks of arrogance, hubris, and rather petty notions of self-entitlement.

Also, the reason there is such a proliferation of open-source arena shooters is mostly due to the quake legacy, and to the fact that it's probably the least content-intensive FPS possible. Single-player games have much larger content and code requirements, necessitating extrememly large and detailed single-player levels, a complex bot code(ie. not just running and gunning), and lots of level-specific scripting, all for a game that will have trouble retaining players, and, consequently, contributor interest, due to its lack of replayability. The amount of work involved in making a hobbyist-driven single player FPS makes it pretty much unnatainable for anything but the most cohesive, motivated, and talented development team.

Blake Stone is First PS. U all can suck kike

[Anonymous Coward]

sh1t down your neck. Lick my metic; Swallow it good, you resident alien bastards. Duke is back in town, so shake it baby! Don't blame me for Marilyn Manson shootin up your school next time.

Wow...

[roc97007]

I didn't know there was a bar for open source gaming.

TORRENT

[plotz]

http://www.mybittorrent.com/details/98c2aa057d30dfe40a5c7a10127ee9bf9445c517/

motion sickness

[quiddity]

after playing for 35 minutes I have horrible dizziness and nausea. is that a feature?

Looking past the game.

[lcoughey]

I've downloaded the game, but haven't tried it yet. I think it will be fun and only intend to play it in-house with people I know. We are more interested in playing the game than cheating. If I have to cheat to win, it just doesn't seem worth playing.

But, to the better part of this release. The fact that a single directory download can be run from within Windows, Linux and MacOS. I think that development like this can revolutionize software development in the future. If all software vendors would design their software in the same way, then the OS war could really begin. Right now, most places are restricted to MS Windows because of their accounting package they use or the games they play.

Imagine purchasing a single application and not having to match it with an OS. This would basically make choosing an OS no different than choosing between KDE and Gnome for a desktop.

The big question that comes to mind, will application developers ever adopt this model?

^^^ My post

[AlexMax2742]

Sorry about that, somehow I posted that as AC instead of under my original handle.