Slashdot Mirror
Valve Releases Updated Alien Swarm For Free With Code Base
baronvoncarson tips news that today Valve released an updated version of Alien Swarm, a popular Unreal Tournament 2004 total conversion mod. The creators of the mod were hired by Valve, and they've helped turn it into a stand-alone game running on the Source engine. Valve is also releasing the code base for Alien Swarm and an SDK. The game is available for free on Steam.
give BSD credit if you move la table of an admiitedly
Oh I'm sorry, I meant Nexuiz!
Nexuiz says it's a Quake 1 engine modification, but those menu widgets and fonts look awfully familiar.
From the summary: "The creators of the mod were hired by Valve, and they've helped turn it into a stand-alone game running on the Source engine."
They hired the team that made it for the Unreal engine, and had them re-create it with the Source (Half-Life 2 etc) engine.
So it's still running on UT2004, right? Man, I sure hope original mod-makers got paid for the work that Steam ripped off of them.
After Valve made such a big deal about them coming out for Mac?
No - it was always marketing bullshit first and last. Sucker.
Someone who's capable of discerning the topic at hand.
If you aren't angry, you aren't paying attention.
OK, proof.
1. Go to their homepage, Allow All in noscript, watch the video.
2. Have ever played UT 2004.
That's like saying "Genocide done right".
All DRM is evil, period.
In fact, STEAM is one of the worst forms of DRM that exists... it uses the "boil the frog" technique to lull the public into a false sense of security. But at the end of the day you still have to get permission each time you want to play (no, offline mode doesn't count because 1. it expires after a while and 2. you still have to get STEAM's permission to enter into it in the first place). And the cherry on the top of it all : it eliminates the first sale doctrine. I did hear about how STEAM(Valve) will kindly take your 10 dollars in order to "transfer" a game to someone else...
STEAM is the single most onerous form of DRM out today. The only thing which could top it is Trusted Computing (though that's coming too, but in piecemeal , so as not to disturb the frog).
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
Just in case you want to avoid another mod, let me spell it out for you: the topic is not about people from Black Cat Games getting hired by Valve. If that were the topic, the headline would say something like "People From Black Cat Games Get Hired By Valve". The topic being discussed is Valve releasing Alien Swarm. Notice there's no mention of Black Cat Games nor of Nightblade, let alone an announcement that Nightblade is "officially canceled". If there were an official announcement about Nightblade, you can expect that to be titled under something like "Official Announcement About Nightblade", not cleverly disguised in a story about Valve releasing an unrelated game.
While you are correct in that you cannot install games without teh intert00bs, you can certainly play them without connectivity. Steam's offline mode is quite good. It also keeps the games patched, which is nice. Valve still has some work to do in smoothing out their "cloud[1]" feature, used to sync your saved games between computers, but it's a step in the right direction. Particularly for someone like me who travels a lot for work. Play at home on desktop -> saves go into "cloud" -> continue where I left off on laptop. Mike [1] Hate that word, cloud. "New media" marketing BS for "It's on servers outside of your premises." Bah.
Just because it's free doesn't mean that it's OK to torrent it. Which is a wee bit silly, but I think the main reason for that is that there's no way that Valve can know whether or not the torrents have been tampered with.
You are such a submissive little wimp that it sickens me. There should be no compromise at all, for no DRM is acceptable.