ZeXx86 writes "ArenaLive is a new open source game based on the well-known OpenArena. Its aim is to become an open-source alternative to id Software's QuakeLive. The main idea is to make a game available in your web browser. So far, the game is playable and provides player stats, straight-forward settings for your account in a web browser and, of course, loads of fun with your friends. At the moment, it is available only for 32/64bit Mozilla Firefox on GNU/Linux, however, support for other platforms and browsers is coming soon. The game is licensed under GNU/GPL2. It's still in an early development stage, so players and developers both are welcome to join."
Would someone like to explain why a game with a grand total of 5 Git commits (http://repo.or.cz/w/ArenaLive.git) and approximately 1 kloc is on the front page?
Hey, I clicked the link and even started installing it. That's more than 95% of the articles on this site can say, for me. The reason I stopped installing it was because I already decided I didn't like playing quakelive, since I have Unreal on the windows side anyway, and because I genuinely suck compared to people that play that game. It is neat to see someone targetting the linux crowd before anyone else, but that feeling is overruled with the question "why?" I guess they're doing this just for the hell o
i wouldn't say they're targetting linux first it for the hell of it..
many horrible "our first opengl software project" FPS games target linux initially, and for good reason
people expect so much less out of linux games, as there simply isn't much good entertainment software available to them. linux gaming addicts end up appreciating any peice of shit game they can get their hands on
windows users laugh at you when you release a work in progress, or something that is simply a peice of shit, as they'r
windows users laugh at you when you release a work in progress, or something that is simply a peice of shit, as they're used to commercial grade game releases. that can be very hard to compete with, considering the development time that goes into even a passable 3d game.
By your argument Linux should not exist since commercial OS's are so hard to compete with. Labor is not the issue with open software, it is more having a good idea that attracts people who want to work on it. So if a game sucks and stalls in alpha it is probably because it just outright isn't any good and nobody wants to fix it.
There are so many gamers so pissed off with the commercial game world who would leap all over a by-the-gamer-for-the-gamer open source revolution. So what's pissing us gamers off? How about paying upwards of $50 for a game only to have seven hours of single player game play and mediocre multiplayer with hardly any servers. Or amazing graphics, sophisticated sandbox gaming (Cryengine) and it's all over in that 7 hours of cookie-cutter linear storyline with little replay value (Crysis). Throw some buggy code and DRM and you have all the reasons to be angry.
By your argument Linux should not exist since commercial OS's are so hard to compete with. Labor is not the issue with open software...
Labor of skilled programmers is not an issue with open software. Labor of skilled graphics artists, UI designers, project managers, and various other professions vitally important to get a polished final product, is definitely an issue.
Where do you live? Where do you work? How do I move there? Who do I have to bribe to get a job there?
Clearly you have project managers of value for you to mention them as valuable assets! Actually contributers to the process and progression of a project?
Ah! Project Managers, the turd polishers of the IT world.
Don't know enough to collect business requirements, and yet unable to write a "Hello world!" program. Yet they still manage to slip themselves into the middle and get paid more than their customers OR programmers!
A good project manager is worth an order of magnitude more than a good programmer because they enable the good programmers to do good work without being hassled by things outside of their job of writing and documenting good code.
The fact that there are few good project managers doesn't make this any less true.
I find it sad that the parent poster, who is spot on (and precisely mirrors my experience), is modded Troll. You mods are poor, sad people - if you have bad PMs, then blame them specifically, not the profession.
You're probably used to the business world. In the games world, the project manager is the creative vision of the game. Analogous to the director of a movie.
In any case, if you have useless project managers that says a lot more about your company's hiring practice than the value of a project manager.
I'm just a developer. However, from my experience, I have concluded that a good project manager is absolutely crucial to get things done. And developers usually do not make good PMs (though a good PM must have some understanding of what he is managing).
It is true that a good PM is a rarity in any case; before you ask, a good one is the one who listens to developers he manages, and doesn't try to second-guess them or override their time & comlexity estimations for individual tasks. I had a pleasure of wo
There are so many gamers so pissed off with the commercial game world who would leap all over a by-the-gamer-for-the-gamer open source revolution.
Horseshit.
The plain fact of the matter is that you're not going to get the same kind of quality, by any stretch, out of an "open source revolution." I don't suppose you've noticed that virtually all of the open-source FPSes out there are based off very old (originally proprietary) code, do you? Code that has to be hacked at significantly to get much beyond the nVidia TNT2 target that it originally topped out at (oh boy, the GPL'd Quake 3 code has hardware T&L!)? Even the really good open-source FPSes (I'm talking Warsow here) are extremely limited games, and sure as hell don't address what you complain about ("linear storyline").
Open source software is good in some cases. Games are clearly not really one of them. You aren't getting Half-Life 2 out of the open source world, I'm sorry to say. You don't have anything technically equivalent to even Source (and despite Valve making great, quality games, Source really sucks, it's one of the main reasons I'm glad my team is writing our own engine for our games). You don't have the kind of incentives to create a focused, quality project because you're not paying them to stay in line (people will just toddle off to play with your code--which is by no means a bad thing, but it kind of makes it hard to make a kickass game when everybody's off dicking around with their own thing).
Sorry, but no, open source is not always the answer. Like right here.
Code that has to be hacked at significantly to get much beyond the nVidia TNT2 target that it originally topped out at (oh boy, the GPL'd Quake 3 code has hardware T&L!)?
This kind of comment makes you appear to have no clue what you're talking about. Hardware T&L is an artefact of the drivers, not the engine. GLQuake makes use of hardware T&L if you run it on a card which supports it. Most modern open source FPS engines - including things like DarkPlaces which are based on updated versions of the original GLQuake engine - make heavy use of fragment and vertex shaders, rather than relying entirely on the fixed-function pipeline that older engines used. This puts
Tongue-in-cheek sarcasm, anyone? Of course hardware T&L is a driver thing, I was poking fun (you know, that thing normal people have) at the old Quake 3 requirements.
Yes, DarkPlaces supports shaders. It also couldn't have been a particularly easy task to convert a largely fixed-function setup to a shader-based one, which is why I said "has to be hacked at significantly". And any of the GPL'd iD Tech engines suffer from fairly huge technical shortcomings (yes, BSP is a technical shortcoming--modern engin
Wow, you've completely missed the entire *point* of the grandparent's post to focus on a trivial technical error. Which was probably a joke you didn't get in the first place. You win Slashdot.
You might want to check those trees again, I think there might be a forest hidden in there.
cube2 [wikipedia.org] shows that on the technical level opensource can compete. Nethack [wikipedia.org] shows that on the complex non-linear story level opensouce can compete
You don't have the kind of incentives to create a focused, quality project because you're not paying them to stay in line (people will just toddle off to play with your code--which is by no means a bad thing, but it kind of makes it hard to make a kickass game when everybody's off dicking around with their own thing).
The same could be said about linux. In addition closed source gaming is pretty complicated, so its safe to say that it's not as simple open source not being able to produce quality games. There are many problems but simply being open source isn't one, a free highly customizable engine would surely be a great base for many indie developers to work from.
Yes, I know Sauerbraten. It doesn't compete. I'm sorry, because it's a really nifty concept for an engine, but it really doesn't.
Compare Sauerbraten to UE3 and tell me how it goes.
As for Nethack--frankly, and I say this as somebody who loves NetHack and has ascended four times, it doesn't stack up from a gameplay perspective except for the "god dammit I WILL BEAT THIS GAME" people. That's not at all the people who you'd be targeting for the person I replied to's "open source gaming revolution" because they'
But Wesnoth still lacks anything even approaching the polish of a commercially published game, and there doesn't seem to be a huge drive to it. I'd agree that it's probably the highest quality, but that doesn't mean it's within driving distance of a commercial release.
Stuff like FreeCiv is the same way. Good game? Sure! Better under-the-hood than the original? Maybe, if you're feeling generous. Ugly as sin and misunderstanding the end user? Fuck yeah. (Anything that pops up a lobby for a single-player game,
The only area in which I found Wesnoth to be lacking polish was some cringeworthy grammatical errors in the story. Not great, but Serious Sam (a commercial game) had far worse abuses of the English language in its story text.
By your argument Linux should not exist since commercial OS's are so hard to compete with. Labor is not the issue with open software,
Yah it is.
Where are the great open source artists, musicians, screenwriters, modelers, level designers? Those all count as "labor", buddy. And the open source community has few-to-none of them. (For good reason: those people like to be paid.)
Having a good idea to attract people doesn't help make a finished game if you only attract programmers.
windows users laugh at you when you release a work in progress
No they don't. We get plenty of half-assed, non-polished games for the windows platform. And for consoles too. Rushed deadlines and shitty code aren't just part of the GNU/Linux world.
Wrong. Your platform is NOT decided at the API layer. Your platform is Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, OSX Tiger, PS3, Wii,...
First, consoles have no API. You use the hardware directly. Second, you forget that writing platform-neutral code that is not a lowest common denominator and used the maximum power of each platform instead is HARD and time-consuming to do (and mostly happens in game engines that are then sold as middleware). Third, you forget QA and support.
Pretty much all consoles now have an API. The only exceptions are probably like the game boy DS. Even the PSP has an OS. The XBOX runs direct X as its api. Don't know about the PS3, but I'm sure they do have some operating system to make calls to. Sure a lot of programming is still being done directly on the hardware via assembly, but we are not in the DOS days where the OS just took a back seat to the hardware.
The "OS" is little more than the main menu you get at the start. Today's consoles remind me a lot of the Commodore Amiga; there is an OS, but the programs have the option to completely bypass them, and return control to the OS cleanly. If you want to squeeze out performance, this is what you have to anyway. I would not be surprised if games effectively shut down the OS (or at least large parts of it) and restart it when necessary.
As for DirectX: exclusive AAA titles still use the 3D hardware directly. Why s
On the PS3 a certain amount of ram is reserved for the OS and it's features, the amount has been lowered at times but no game can turn off features to use that memory. At one time it was around 90 megabytes.
What are you talking about? Of course there's an API on consoles, at the very lowest level at least. There has to be an OS that exposes the hardware and provides access both securely and in a uniform manner. You can't provide hardware to development studios and expect them all to write low-level code and for it all to work.
Your post screams of unfounded bullshit. Can you back up any of what you're saying?
First, consoles have no API. You use the hardware directly.
Wow, you're writing this post from a time-warp! Because all modern consoles certainly have an API, and some of them (like Xbox) have an extremely extensive API.
The reason I stopped installing it was because I already decided I didn't like playing quakelive, since I have Unreal on the windows side anyway, and because I genuinely suck compared to people that play that game.
The skill matching system didn't work for you or did they not have that in place before? It seemed to work quite well for me.
First, as another poster said, Quake Live has a skillmatching component to it that is poised to work better than any OSS alternative even simply because of sheer number of players.
Secondly - prepare for onslaught of aimbots in ArenaLive. It is, after all...open source.
It's too bad this isn't under the AGPL. Maybe it has to be GPL2 because of what it's based on. But with the GPL2 source only has to be shared with people who receive binaries. This does not include visitors to a website, or an in-browser game in this case.
The AGPL got me thinking about the relevance of FLOSS if everything moves to cloud computing. If this project takes off, it would be a "cloud" that is based on FLOSS. Meaning that others could take the code and run their own "clouds". It would be th
You receive a binary each time you load the game. Hosting it on a website and re-downloading it with java each time doesn't circumvent the license. If you want the source, perhaps you could approach them about rectifying their license obligations.
It's too bad this isn't under the AGPL. Maybe it has to be GPL2 because of what it's based on. But with the GPL2 source only has to be shared with people who receive binaries.
The AGPL is a complete waste of time - it is an EULA and thus suffers the exact same problems as every other EULA. Namely that it is pretty much unenforceable and thus its only use is to intimidate your own customers into doing things they have no legal obligation to do.
I'm afraid the FSF has completely lost the plot these days - they are more interested in pushing their own agenda than supporting the Free software projects.
The AGPL is as much of a EULA as the regular GPL, be that version 2 or 3.
It only really applies to developers, not end users. The ability to retrieve source code is not the same as forcing users to download source code.
The AGPL is as much of a EULA as the regular GPL, be that version 2 or 3.
Wrong.
The GPL is a *distribution licence*. If you don't distribute the software, you don't need to agree to it. If you do distribute the software then copyright law prevents you from doing so unless you have a licence to do so - i.e. if you're going to distribute the software, you *must* agree to the GPL because there is nothing else that allows you to do so.
The AGPL is a *use licence*. If you use the software (i.e. you are a service provider, using it to provide a service to your users) then the FSF tel
Every lawyer I've ever talked to about the GPL and AGPL (some very invested in the open source community) agrees with this viewpoint.
The GPL is a distribution license, and thus probably enforceable (has been, some places). The AGPL has poorly worded extensions to the GPL, and redefine "distribution" to essentially mean "use"--which they may find cute, but does turn it into a use license and an enforcement mess.
I think you need to talk to better lawyers. The AGPL doesn't say anything about use, it says something about modification. If an AGPL program includes a download-the-source link, you are not allowed to remove it. If you do remove it, then you have created a new derived work, which is something restricted under copyright law and requiring explicit permission from the author. The AGPL provides you with explicit permission to create derived works as long as they do not remove the download-the-source link.
IIRC, AGPL only additional clause over GPL is that, in addition to being obligated to provide the source code if you distribute the executable, you are also obligated to do it if you make it available to the public. There is nothing forbidding you to alter it in any way, as long as you make the source code available for anyone that either received a copy of the executable or received access to use the application.
I don't know how did you came to that particular conclusion, but it is not right at all.
But with the GPL2 source only has to be shared with people who receive binaries. This does not include visitors to a website, or an in-browser game in this case.
In the case of a browser game, the game is sent to the client for play, and so it most certainly does apply. You receive the binary before execution. The site isn't sending geometry data to your browser in realtime.
I guess it's better than the current option we have for running QuakeLive for Linux (i.e. nothing). Yes I know they're working on it, but it'd be nice if Linux wasn't treated second-class to Windows all the time.
I like Linux in some capacities (I hate it as a desktop because it doesn't work particularly well for me and advocates try to foist it off on people who don't know better, but it's running on all but two of my server machines). But there's no market share worth noting for targeting for most consumer applications.
Well in my days of playing 1st Edition D&D during the late 1970s it was "Role-Playing Game" but when Doom and other FPS games came out, it also became "Rocket-Propelled Grenade".
So I guess for a game like OpenArena, either could apply.
Thats not an issue yet, atm you have QL = windows only (500k players) AL = linux only (a few players) Even when both spread to multiplatform QL is going to get the majority of players, and AL will be an interesting project but between hosting costs and lack of a recognized name will never be able to split the community
This is absurd (Score:2, Informative)
Would someone like to explain why a game with a grand total of 5 Git commits (http://repo.or.cz/w/ArenaLive.git) and approximately 1 kloc is on the front page?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
to increase that number?
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Hey, I clicked the link and even started installing it. That's more than 95% of the articles on this site can say, for me. The reason I stopped installing it was because I already decided I didn't like playing quakelive, since I have Unreal on the windows side anyway, and because I genuinely suck compared to people that play that game. It is neat to see someone targetting the linux crowd before anyone else, but that feeling is overruled with the question "why?" I guess they're doing this just for the hell o
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
many horrible "our first opengl software project" FPS games target linux initially, and for good reason
people expect so much less out of linux games, as there simply isn't much good entertainment software available to them. linux gaming addicts end up appreciating any peice of shit game they can get their hands on
windows users laugh at you when you release a work in progress, or something that is simply a peice of shit, as they'r
Re:This is absurd (Score:5, Insightful)
windows users laugh at you when you release a work in progress, or something that is simply a peice of shit, as they're used to commercial grade game releases. that can be very hard to compete with, considering the development time that goes into even a passable 3d game.
By your argument Linux should not exist since commercial OS's are so hard to compete with. Labor is not the issue with open software, it is more having a good idea that attracts people who want to work on it. So if a game sucks and stalls in alpha it is probably because it just outright isn't any good and nobody wants to fix it.
There are so many gamers so pissed off with the commercial game world who would leap all over a by-the-gamer-for-the-gamer open source revolution. So what's pissing us gamers off? How about paying upwards of $50 for a game only to have seven hours of single player game play and mediocre multiplayer with hardly any servers. Or amazing graphics, sophisticated sandbox gaming (Cryengine) and it's all over in that 7 hours of cookie-cutter linear storyline with little replay value (Crysis). Throw some buggy code and DRM and you have all the reasons to be angry.
Parent
Re:This is absurd (Score:4, Insightful)
By your argument Linux should not exist since commercial OS's are so hard to compete with. Labor is not the issue with open software ...
Labor of skilled programmers is not an issue with open software. Labor of skilled graphics artists, UI designers, project managers, and various other professions vitally important to get a polished final product, is definitely an issue.
Parent
Re:This is absurd (Score:4, Funny)
??? Project Managers ???
Where do you live?
Where do you work?
How do I move there?
Who do I have to bribe to get a job there?
Clearly you have project managers of value for you to mention them as valuable assets! Actually contributers to the process and progression of a project?
I need to know desperately where this nirvana is!
What a second. Are you a project manager?
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Ah! Project Managers, the turd polishers of the IT world.
Don't know enough to collect business requirements, and yet unable to write a "Hello world!" program. Yet they still manage to slip themselves into the middle and get paid more than their customers OR programmers!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A good project manager is worth an order of magnitude more than a good programmer because they enable the good programmers to do good work without being hassled by things outside of their job of writing and documenting good code.
The fact that there are few good project managers doesn't make this any less true.
Re: (Score:2)
I find it sad that the parent poster, who is spot on (and precisely mirrors my experience), is modded Troll. You mods are poor, sad people - if you have bad PMs, then blame them specifically, not the profession.
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Too bad I'm a developer, moron.
Re: (Score:2)
You're probably used to the business world. In the games world, the project manager is the creative vision of the game. Analogous to the director of a movie.
In any case, if you have useless project managers that says a lot more about your company's hiring practice than the value of a project manager.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm just a developer. However, from my experience, I have concluded that a good project manager is absolutely crucial to get things done. And developers usually do not make good PMs (though a good PM must have some understanding of what he is managing).
It is true that a good PM is a rarity in any case; before you ask, a good one is the one who listens to developers he manages, and doesn't try to second-guess them or override their time & comlexity estimations for individual tasks. I had a pleasure of wo
Re:This is absurd (Score:4, Insightful)
There are so many gamers so pissed off with the commercial game world who would leap all over a by-the-gamer-for-the-gamer open source revolution.
Horseshit.
The plain fact of the matter is that you're not going to get the same kind of quality, by any stretch, out of an "open source revolution." I don't suppose you've noticed that virtually all of the open-source FPSes out there are based off very old (originally proprietary) code, do you? Code that has to be hacked at significantly to get much beyond the nVidia TNT2 target that it originally topped out at (oh boy, the GPL'd Quake 3 code has hardware T&L!)? Even the really good open-source FPSes (I'm talking Warsow here) are extremely limited games, and sure as hell don't address what you complain about ("linear storyline").
Open source software is good in some cases. Games are clearly not really one of them. You aren't getting Half-Life 2 out of the open source world, I'm sorry to say. You don't have anything technically equivalent to even Source (and despite Valve making great, quality games, Source really sucks, it's one of the main reasons I'm glad my team is writing our own engine for our games). You don't have the kind of incentives to create a focused, quality project because you're not paying them to stay in line (people will just toddle off to play with your code--which is by no means a bad thing, but it kind of makes it hard to make a kickass game when everybody's off dicking around with their own thing).
Sorry, but no, open source is not always the answer. Like right here.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Code that has to be hacked at significantly to get much beyond the nVidia TNT2 target that it originally topped out at (oh boy, the GPL'd Quake 3 code has hardware T&L!)?
This kind of comment makes you appear to have no clue what you're talking about. Hardware T&L is an artefact of the drivers, not the engine. GLQuake makes use of hardware T&L if you run it on a card which supports it. Most modern open source FPS engines - including things like DarkPlaces which are based on updated versions of the original GLQuake engine - make heavy use of fragment and vertex shaders, rather than relying entirely on the fixed-function pipeline that older engines used. This puts
Re: (Score:2)
Tongue-in-cheek sarcasm, anyone? Of course hardware T&L is a driver thing, I was poking fun (you know, that thing normal people have) at the old Quake 3 requirements.
Yes, DarkPlaces supports shaders. It also couldn't have been a particularly easy task to convert a largely fixed-function setup to a shader-based one, which is why I said "has to be hacked at significantly". And any of the GPL'd iD Tech engines suffer from fairly huge technical shortcomings (yes, BSP is a technical shortcoming--modern engin
Re: (Score:2)
Wow, you've completely missed the entire *point* of the grandparent's post to focus on a trivial technical error. Which was probably a joke you didn't get in the first place. You win Slashdot.
You might want to check those trees again, I think there might be a forest hidden in there.
Re: (Score:2)
cube2 [wikipedia.org] shows that on the technical level opensource can compete.
Nethack [wikipedia.org] shows that on the complex non-linear story level opensouce can compete
You don't have the kind of incentives to create a focused, quality project because you're not paying them to stay in line (people will just toddle off to play with your code--which is by no means a bad thing, but it kind of makes it hard to make a kickass game when everybody's off dicking around with their own thing).
The same could be said about linux. In addition closed source gaming is pretty complicated, so its safe to say that it's not as simple open source not being able to produce quality games. There are many problems but simply being open source isn't one, a free highly customizable engine would surely be a great base for many indie developers to work from.
For example, if i
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, I know Sauerbraten. It doesn't compete. I'm sorry, because it's a really nifty concept for an engine, but it really doesn't.
Compare Sauerbraten to UE3 and tell me how it goes.
As for Nethack--frankly, and I say this as somebody who loves NetHack and has ascended four times, it doesn't stack up from a gameplay perspective except for the "god dammit I WILL BEAT THIS GAME" people. That's not at all the people who you'd be targeting for the person I replied to's "open source gaming revolution" because they'
Re: (Score:2)
But Wesnoth still lacks anything even approaching the polish of a commercially published game, and there doesn't seem to be a huge drive to it. I'd agree that it's probably the highest quality, but that doesn't mean it's within driving distance of a commercial release.
Stuff like FreeCiv is the same way. Good game? Sure! Better under-the-hood than the original? Maybe, if you're feeling generous. Ugly as sin and misunderstanding the end user? Fuck yeah. (Anything that pops up a lobby for a single-player game,
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
By your argument Linux should not exist since commercial OS's are so hard to compete with. Labor is not the issue with open software,
Yah it is.
Where are the great open source artists, musicians, screenwriters, modelers, level designers? Those all count as "labor", buddy. And the open source community has few-to-none of them. (For good reason: those people like to be paid.)
Having a good idea to attract people doesn't help make a finished game if you only attract programmers.
There are so many gamers so pissed
Re: (Score:2)
No they don't. We get plenty of half-assed, non-polished games for the windows platform. And for consoles too. Rushed deadlines and shitty code aren't just part of the GNU/Linux world.
Re: (Score:2)
Wrong. Your platform is NOT decided at the API layer. Your platform is Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, OSX Tiger, PS3, Wii, ...
First, consoles have no API. You use the hardware directly. Second, you forget that writing platform-neutral code that is not a lowest common denominator and used the maximum power of each platform instead is HARD and time-consuming to do (and mostly happens in game engines that are then sold as middleware). Third, you forget QA and support.
In the real world, specific platform
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Pretty much all consoles now have an API. The only exceptions are probably like the game boy DS. Even the PSP has an OS. The XBOX runs direct X as its api. Don't know about the PS3, but I'm sure they do have some operating system to make calls to. Sure a lot of programming is still being done directly on the hardware via assembly, but we are not in the DOS days where the OS just took a back seat to the hardware.
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The "OS" is little more than the main menu you get at the start. Today's consoles remind me a lot of the Commodore Amiga; there is an OS, but the programs have the option to completely bypass them, and return control to the OS cleanly. If you want to squeeze out performance, this is what you have to anyway. I would not be surprised if games effectively shut down the OS (or at least large parts of it) and restart it when necessary.
As for DirectX: exclusive AAA titles still use the 3D hardware directly. Why s
Re: (Score:2)
On the PS3 a certain amount of ram is reserved for the OS and it's features, the amount has been lowered at times but no game can turn off features to use that memory. At one time it was around 90 megabytes.
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Your post screams of unfounded bullshit. Can you back up any of what you're saying?
Re: (Score:2)
First, consoles have no API. You use the hardware directly.
Wow, you're writing this post from a time-warp! Because all modern consoles certainly have an API, and some of them (like Xbox) have an extremely extensive API.
Re: (Score:2)
The reason I stopped installing it was because I already decided I didn't like playing quakelive, since I have Unreal on the windows side anyway, and because I genuinely suck compared to people that play that game.
The skill matching system didn't work for you or did they not have that in place before? It seemed to work quite well for me.
Re: (Score:2)
First, as another poster said, Quake Live has a skillmatching component to it that is poised to work better than any OSS alternative even simply because of sheer number of players.
Secondly - prepare for onslaught of aimbots in ArenaLive. It is, after all...open source.
Re: (Score:2)
why not AGPL? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's too bad this isn't under the AGPL. Maybe it has to be GPL2 because of what it's based on. But with the GPL2 source only has to be shared with people who receive binaries. This does not include visitors to a website, or an in-browser game in this case.
The AGPL got me thinking about the relevance of FLOSS if everything moves to cloud computing. If this project takes off, it would be a "cloud" that is based on FLOSS. Meaning that others could take the code and run their own "clouds". It would be th
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
You receive a binary each time you load the game. Hosting it on a website and re-downloading it with java each time doesn't circumvent the license. If you want the source, perhaps you could approach them about rectifying their license obligations.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
It's too bad this isn't under the AGPL. Maybe it has to be GPL2 because of what it's based on. But with the GPL2 source only has to be shared with people who receive binaries.
That's not true [gnu.org].
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It's too bad this isn't under the AGPL.
The AGPL is a complete waste of time - it is an EULA and thus suffers the exact same problems as every other EULA. Namely that it is pretty much unenforceable and thus its only use is to intimidate your own customers into doing things they have no legal obligation to do.
I'm afraid the FSF has completely lost the plot these days - they are more interested in pushing their own agenda than supporting the Free software projects.
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The AGPL is as much of a EULA as the regular GPL, be that version 2 or 3.
Wrong.
The GPL is a *distribution licence*. If you don't distribute the software, you don't need to agree to it. If you do distribute the software then copyright law prevents you from doing so unless you have a licence to do so - i.e. if you're going to distribute the software, you *must* agree to the GPL because there is nothing else that allows you to do so.
The AGPL is a *use licence*. If you use the software (i.e. you are a service provider, using it to provide a service to your users) then the FSF tel
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Every lawyer I've ever talked to about the GPL and AGPL (some very invested in the open source community) agrees with this viewpoint.
The GPL is a distribution license, and thus probably enforceable (has been, some places). The AGPL has poorly worded extensions to the GPL, and redefine "distribution" to essentially mean "use"--which they may find cute, but does turn it into a use license and an enforcement mess.
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I think you need to talk to better lawyers. The AGPL doesn't say anything about use, it says something about modification. If an AGPL program includes a download-the-source link, you are not allowed to remove it. If you do remove it, then you have created a new derived work, which is something restricted under copyright law and requiring explicit permission from the author. The AGPL provides you with explicit permission to create derived works as long as they do not remove the download-the-source link.
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No, because in the course of using it you are subject to specific restrictions (the inability to modify it--just like a closed-source EULA).
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I don't know how did you came to that particular conclusion, but it is not right at all.
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But with the GPL2 source only has to be shared with people who receive binaries. This does not include visitors to a website, or an in-browser game in this case.
In the case of a browser game, the game is sent to the client for play, and so it most certainly does apply. You receive the binary before execution. The site isn't sending geometry data to your browser in realtime.
Fair enough (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess it's better than the current option we have for running QuakeLive for Linux (i.e. nothing). Yes I know they're working on it, but it'd be nice if Linux wasn't treated second-class to Windows all the time.
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Then have a community big enough to merit it.
I like Linux in some capacities (I hate it as a desktop because it doesn't work particularly well for me and advocates try to foist it off on people who don't know better, but it's running on all but two of my server machines). But there's no market share worth noting for targeting for most consumer applications.
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Otherwise, I don't see much of a reason for having an open source Quake Live clone especially when the service it seeks to clone is free as well.
The real reason for this is for the FSF to finally get a chance to call something "GNU Quake".
Re:mmoRPG (Score:5, Funny)
Well in my days of playing 1st Edition D&D during the late 1970s it was "Role-Playing Game" but when Doom and other FPS games came out, it also became "Rocket-Propelled Grenade".
So I guess for a game like OpenArena, either could apply.
Parent
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Thats not an issue yet, atm you have
QL = windows only (500k players)
AL = linux only (a few players)
Even when both spread to multiplatform QL is going to get the majority of players, and AL will be an interesting project but between hosting costs and lack of a recognized name will never be able to split the community
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And only runs on Windows!