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New 'Reloaded Edition' of Alien Arena Open Source FPS Released
An anonymous reader tips this news from IndieDB:
"Alien Arena: Reloaded Edition has been released. This is a major release of this game, with many new features, and a veritable truckload of new high quality content. Every aspect of the game has been improved upon and expanded, from the engine, to the game code, weaponry, and overall gameplay. Some of the new features for this release include: Many new rendering features; Twelve new/rebuilt levels; Two new player characters, the Overlord and Warrior; Brand new 'super' weapon, the Minderaser; Improved antilag code; "Simple" items rendering option; Improved and expanded movement; Improved Bot AI, particularly with CTF; New music, and music 'shifts' in game situations; and a variety of bug fixes and code cleansing. Alien Arena is free to download, free to play, and the code is open sourced, and that will never change."
the code is open sourced, and that will never change.
Are you sure? Are you absolute certain? Do you feel lucky, punk?
I'm downloading it now. Prepare to be teabagged, bitches!
By 'anonymous reader' do they mean their advertising department? How many "this game is-coming/just-came out" stories do we need on the front page?
The Windows installer will also try to install the crawler toolbar. Supposedly it lets you uncheck the boxes but they are checked by default. This is BAD behavior in my opinion. If they want to recommend it and leave them unchecked to start with (i.e. you must opt IN not OUT) that is acceptable.
"Computer Scientists can count to 1024 on their fingers" (non-mutant, non-mutilatated, human computer scientists)
Confirming that it's just you.
It was actually the first movie cut into 5 segments in order to get you to go to the theater 4 more times then you should have to. Unfortunately, this plan backfired and most people stopped caring about the movie after sitting through it a second or third time. They then turned the franchise to marketing towards the 7 and under crowd who won't have a chance of understanding the concepts but are excited because the few strokes of genius initially released got Daddy excited.
Now, like a lot of other open-source multiplayer FPSes (Xonotic, Warsow, World of Padman), all we need are people actually PLAYING them online and we'll be set. Bonus points for active players here in Australia.
Most people on Slashdot are fucking idiots.
...meaning opensource games are 13 years in the past.
I haven't played Halo since the first version and I finished it in like 3 days or something. I'm a little out of date on it so please describe these reject kids to me.
Game cannot be commercially used and the data is proprietary. Don't get too excited...
http://svn.icculus.org/alienarena/trunk/docs/license.txt?view=markup
It does have a good story element though, even if the actual combat isn't hugely exciting.
there are few enough A-grade open source games
The problem here is that there's no money to be made from free video games, which in the present capitalist system of things means no way to put a roof over the developers' heads and food in their children's stomachs apart from a bounty system like Kickstarter. Though selling support works for some kinds of business software, games that aren't massively multiplayer tend to need far less support from the publisher. Furthermore, the game consoles tend to have explicit anti-copyleft policies. See previous posts by jcnnghm, turbidostato, and alexo.
Then they'll argue that this is the only way they can fund things like the program's web site.
To defeat that argument, you'll eventually have to demonstrate a way of funding the development of freely licensed software intended for non-business use without installing this sort of adware. The "selling support" method works only for MMO games, not for single-player, living room multiplayer, or LAN multiplayer games.
...meaning opensource games are 13 years in the past.
Like that's stopped anyone. People are still making and selling new software for the Nintendo Entertainment System, a hardware platform twice that old.
The first thing I thought when I saw this footage was, 'hee, this is unreal tournament'...
games that aren't massively multiplayer tend to need far less support from the publisher
Even free to play games were rare because the idea of selling in-game items had not been tried. Who would think that someone would pay for a digital flower? [...] The sale of vanity items in multiplayer games can fund development.
I don't see how selling items could work in a Free game that isn't MMO. If the game is Free, someone could just hack the game to give himself the item in a non-massive mode such as living room multiplayer, LAN multiplayer, or private server online multiplayer.
But just to get you thinking, imagine a multi-player game which has updates every 2 weeks. If you don't have the latest copy you can't play with others.
Yes you can: just play a non-massive mode.
An automatic update subscription costs $48 a year billable in increments. Yes you can wait a few days and find someone willing to give it to you for free, but wouldn't you rather pay for a subscription?
If the game is Free, it wouldn't take a few days. Someone would script up an automatic mirror in one of the P languages and have a delay of no more than an hour.
Single player serialized content has similar potential if it is well made.
I don't see how so, especially if above-board mirrors of Free single-player mission packs pop up within the hour.
You can even write games whose only intent is to create a brand for selling merchandise (ala Hello Kitty in Japan)
Now you're getting somewhere. Non-copyright restrictions such as trademark law can be used on a product released under a copyright license for free software and free cultural works, much as Fedora and OpenBSD restrict their brands. But not all brands can become strong enough that they inspire parodies