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FOSS RTS Game Glest Gets Revival — Enter Mega-Glest
Softhaus writes "Many readers here are likely familiar with the popular, open source RTS game Glest, which comes packaged with nearly every Linux distro. Unfortunately, all development ceased on the original game back in 2008, disappointing many around the world. During the past year, a new fork (called Mega-Glest) has endeavored to take this great game and bring it to the masses. This new fork can provide hours of fun at your next LAN party, as it supports up to eight players in real-time (with or without CPU AI players), and the newly released v3.3.5 offers Internet play via a master server lobby. Cross-platform network play is now a reality, which could help bridge the gap between Linux and Windows users in a cohesive manner. One of the best features of Mega-Glest (and indeed Glest itself) is the ease with which new 'factions' and mods may be produced via a Map editor, model viewer, Blender plugins, XML files describing your unit traits, particles, weapons, and LUA scripting for scenarios and AI. Full installers for Windows, Linux 32-bit and 64-bit are available on SourceForge, promising hours of fun. But one warning: the game can become highly addictive. You can provide feedback for the game through the official forums."
Good idea. I was actually kind of disappointed with SC2. They basically took 10 years to do a graphics overhaul and... well that's about it. Oh and they also managed to ruin Bnet, remove LAN play, and make it so you can never ever sell the game. Otherwise it's pretty much the same game from 1998.
My only saving grace is that I traded in 3 old games and got it for 'free'. Meh.
Win7, 64bit C:\Program Files (x86)\Glest_3.2.2\Glest.ini There's a "Windowed=0" setting. Changed it to a one and ran ok. I'm feeling a bit too lazy RTFforums to see if there's a fix or to switch the regular resolution settings for full screen >.>
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
as a former blizzard fanboy who loved every single game they released in last 15 years (maybe except wow) let me say this:
sc2 is bad - everything but core multiplayer pretty much sucks
- you are 'encouraged' to be always online, you have to deal with authorizations to even dream about playing offline on some shitty guest account (your progress on your account and on guest are separate so you'd have to start campaign from scratch)
- no LAN
- regions with no possibility to play across borders (unless you drop another $60 for the other region's version)
- only 1 account (no separate stats or single player progress for different people using it, in fact that $60 is not per game copy, but per account, you are not allowed to share)
- pathetic ways of communication (no easy to use and very social at their core chat channels, instead you get poor man's instant messenger which makes it total pita to run a clan or organize anything bigger that 2v2)
- no clan/tournament support
- creators of custom maps pretty much hand the rights to blizzard and map distribution is solely through battle.net, pretty much no option to have custom maps on disk and play them offline, not to mention ridiculous restrictions (max 5 maps, total 20MB)
- hard to understand, intransparent ladder with leagues and thousands of divisions that doesn't show anything even remotely resembling global ranks so players can feel good about themselves
- horrible custom maps - maps are sorted by popularity and filled automatically - obscure maps are never played and players have no control over the rules and players joining
- for sc1 lore nerds - poor story, an awful lot of retcons, completely redesigned personalities of core characters, large amounts of meaningless filler and everything you know and love going down the shitter. Only technical side to the campaign and missions themselves are good, everything else is incoherent, self-contradictory and cringeworthy. Watered down story means you need to pay 3times to get similar amount of action (story-wise) you got from sc1 vanilla alone.
doesn't sound like blizzard of old, eh?
read this rather blizzard-centric blog devoted to games for in depth analysis of the current state of affairs in blizzard
http://www.the-ghetto.org/
I spent almost half a minute wondering who did a graphics overhaul to Star Control 2.
I compile my kernel at LAN parties! Mwuhuahahaha!
total annihilation spring > that game
also open source and windows/linux.......
http://springrts.com/
I wish I were kidding. Section 7 of the EULA flat out states that you can never "sublicense or transfer" the game to any person or entity. The funny (and sad) part is it even goes on to say that *IF* a court overturns that little nugget, then you agree to call Blizzard customer service so that they can charge you a "processing/handling fee" just so you can sell the game.
It's one hell of a nasty EULA. :\
Not that I think this game would hit any 32 bit architecture limitations, but why is there no 64 bit build for Windows provided? I have seen this with many projects. OpenOffice, Inkscape and Mozilla do this, Eclipse only recently began to offer all of its preassembled packages for both Windows platforms. Developers of proprietary consumer software, with the partial exception of Adobe, seem to be largely oblivious of the existance of 64 bit platforms, probably because switching will not reap them more cash. But why do OSS developers opt to ignore this platform? The Steam Hardware Survey has Windows 7 x64 at 28%, double that of its 32 bit version and following closely to the 32% of XP 32 bit. 64 bit is not any more the domain of nerds or early adopters, it is becoming the dominating platform in the Windows ecosystem.
So my question is: Why is it ignored? Would it really be hard to provide 64 bit builds? Would this require a lot of additional development work?
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
One thing I've noticed over and over again is that F/OSS games always look horrible, have seriously outdated graphics and usually even sound effects are annoying enough to make me want to completely disable sounds. And another thing that seems very common for F/OSS is that they're always aimed for playing against other human players or a skirmish against AI players; there's never any actually interesting, multi-faceted single-player campaign with any worthwhile storyline. Why? Do we have no skilled artists to create graphics for games, or is it lack of coding skills? Or why no interest in developing a game enjoyable solo, only multiplayer games? Hell, not even co-operative campaigns with storylines! I'd give almost anything to find a recent, good-looking game with interesting storyline and which could be played co-op; none of the commercial games anymore these days seem to offer that so that'd be a great niche for F/OSS games to fill.
Of course, I haven't tried every single F/OSS game out there, but I've come across and tried quite a large selection and checked out gameplay videos etc on even more games than I have actually played. I _might_ have missed some really good ones but given the overwhelming evidence as to the quality of F/OSS games I doubt it. And no, I don't count remakes of old commercial games, they're not new games even if they happen to be from scratch with a different license scheme..
Makes me kinda sad. I am a F/OSS supporter, I've got several computers running Linux 24/7, and hell, even my phone has already 2 different Linux distros installed on it. But I am and have always been a gamer and I just can't use Linux for my gaming needs; I always run into issues when trying to run Windows-games via Wine, and there's no worthwhile Linux-games available...
I hadn't planned on playing SC2 but having read the above (relating to battlenet and multiplayer in general as well as the authentication DRM nonsense) I'm starting to worry about what they'll do to Diablo 3...
I'm really surprised at the ammount of hate SC2 has received and the lack of people defending it. It might be something with people liking it a lot, though, and all the points you raise are generally very subjective. I do agree with the lack of region inter-play and the lack of LAN support, the rest aren't really all that important to me.
Oblivion Awaits
Over here in the UK, we have the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contract regulations. I'm pretty sure that "You have to call us and pay us so you can resell this game you bought" would fall foul of it. It's a question of whether Blizzard would turn up to small claims court when you sue for the "processing fee" to be waived.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
your progress on your account and on guest are separate so you'd have to start campaign from scratch
This isn't true. You can go in there and copy saves over just like you can on SC1. They are in a folder in Documents by default. It contains a Save subfolder.
- only 1 account (no separate stats or single player progress for different people using it, in fact that $60 is not per game copy, but per account, you are not allowed to share)
The stats part is true, however the single player progress bit is not. You can have more than one. Just hit new campaign.
- pathetic ways of communication (no easy to use and very social at their core chat channels, instead you get poor man's instant messenger which makes it total pita to run a clan or organize anything bigger that 2v2)
Social chat channels? They were just bots spamming for clans or (if some D1 or D2 was involved) item selling sites... The more private channels were useful for sure, but they have a party system for that now. Also how is a 3v a pita? Works just fine for me... Now a clan you might be spot on about, I wouldn't know.
- creators of custom maps pretty much hand the rights to blizzard and map distribution is solely through battle.net, pretty much no option to have custom maps on disk and play them offline, not to mention ridiculous restrictions (max 5 maps, total 20MB)
This also isn't true. You can put maps in a map folder and play them just like in SC. And you can load them for single player use or fire up the editor and launch them from there.
- hard to understand, intransparent ladder with leagues and thousands of divisions that doesn't show anything even remotely resembling global ranks so players can feel good about themselves
Eh hopefully they add this for you. I think it is a valid request even if I am not interested in it personally. However I doubt the vast majority of players need "global ranks" to "feel good about themselves" so it probably wasn't given priority over making leagues that work well for prompt and equal matchmaking.
maps are sorted by popularity and filled automatically - obscure maps are never played and players have no control over the rules and players joining
Huh? You can invite who you want and pick the map you want and change rule options.
Watered down story means you need to pay 3times to get similar amount of action (story-wise) you got from sc1 vanilla alone.
This one is just kind of ridiculous. What POSSIBLE measurement do you use to get that figure? Did it take you 30 minutes to read the little quick story panels in SC1 or something? Might want to take off those rose-tinted glasses and actually go review the Story presented in vanilla StarCraft. It is fine that you don't like SC2. You made some good points (no real LAN play is sad, though you can still play over LAN provided you have internet to auth there. and the logging in every time can be annoying. can't sell the game etc) but some of that was distorted to say the least. Personally I rather enjoyed SC2. If I had to guess I would say a good number of people ragging on StarCraft II never played it. Hence comments that just aren't true or are exaggerated like some of the stuff you had or "graphics overhaul is all it is".
?
I downloaded it but I notice the installer is an ELF executable. This is sort of a Windows-style way to distribute an application. If I run it, I have no idea where it will put files on my system. I'm not too comfortable with that, why not distribute a deb that will allow my system's package manager to let me uninstall it easily?
(Or next best thing, just a tarball that unzips to a predictable location and runs from there.)
As it stands, if I want to be careful I'd have to create a low-priviledge user with a clean directory just to easily track what happens during install without worrying about it writing to my system directories or to a weird place in my home directory. Kind of a lot of work just to check out a game.
And if they changed much at all lots of people would had complained.
Doubt they have made bnet worse either but then I haven't played it.
People ARE complaining - look at this thread you started!
Their DRM structure is about as Draconian as Ubisoft's new titles. I had purchased it while my desktop was at my parents house, I installed it and started the campaign on it. Now I moved into my new place last week - and I won't get any internet installed until tomorrow. When I try to play offline - under my account or guest mode - it says I need to authenticate my client and have 1 character created on my account.
Well - I did some searching around - What does it mean by "Authenticate my client?" Enter my CD key into my Bnet account. I did that. I created a character, thats how I started the campaign. Through some shitty DRM scheme, it is designed to delete the offline info of your account every 30 days so you'll need a need a net connection every once in a while to keep playing. (I've seen A TON of soldiers complaining about this. They bought the game to play overseas, but its not going to work for them). Also - until the most recent patch they released, the DRM bugged out and deleted that offline info prior to the 30 days, in fact, almost instantly. If you have a connection, you wouldn't notice, but pretty much everyone who activated it online, then went to try it offline - had issues starting, even in guest mode.
Honestly - the little bits that I've seen have suggested that its a little bit of a let down. They have stripped away some of the things that made the first SC so appealing, from pretty much every aspect of the game. In the storyline - you aren't actually yourself, you pretty much take control of Jim Raynor. I prefered being Magistrate, or Cerebrate, or Executor from the first one, it made me feel like being above the battlefield and issuing orders was an actual position one could be bestowed. But now you basically take on Jim, who was never a character I liked much anyways.
In terms of gameplay - everyone is complaining that Zerg are underpowered, though I think its really just that they have a steeper learning curve than the other races. Battle.net Matchmaking is still in some VERY infant stages - it rarely gets it right until you've had about 100 games under your belt.
Honestly, I'm not sure its worth the $60. It seems a decent enough game - but the struggles people have had with it are really putting me off of it, I would not urge anyone I know to go and buy it. There was even an issue on the technical forums where MULTIPLE people reported that the game borked their video card. (Though I think that was mostly an issue with people trying to overclock them or something and it caused issues on certain cards)
The people who like the game are too busy enjoying it to even read the hater comments.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
Thank you, you just ruined my weekend. I'll likely be sucked into playing that w/ a friend...
Likewise, there's Warzone 2100, which I thought was quite a bit like TA (with acknowledge for the fact that I maybe spent 20 minutes playing the original, 5 years after it came out, and got my ass swiftly handed to me by the computer.) I've sunk many an hour into this one.
There so many enjoyable, well-one multiplayer games for Linux (and open source in general) I've not had the desire to pay for a game in some time/with any significant frequency. (Note, I fall in the 5-hours-or-fewer per week demographic by quite a bit.)
That said, Glest kinda sucks. It's boring and slow paced, even when you speed up the game speed. The gameplay does not feel fluid, either, even when run on a higher end system. It's like the Warcraft (original) of Open Source RTS: the sides are (For all intents and purposes) identical, and the gameplay is painfully simple.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers