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Real Time Strategy (Games) Businesses Software Apple Linux

OS Independent Scotland Yard Released 35

Posted by Zonk from the follow-the-crook-watson! dept.
DarkLaser writes "When's the last time you played Scotland Yard? A version called London Law, written by Paul Pelzl, is now in beta. Its updated status can be seen on the freshmeat information page. It is written in Python, and intended to be able to run on Linux, BSD, Mac, and Windows."
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OS Independent Scotland Yard Released More

OS Independent Scotland Yard Released

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  • Cross platform gaming (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Alcimedes ( 398213 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @01:54PM (#10822280)
    I'm glad to see that another online game is built around the idea that cross-platform gaming is important.

    What I think a lot of companies might not realize is that when you're making a game that plays on Mac or Linux boxes, you're not just adding that ~2% - 3% of marketshare to your total games sales.

    Instead, what you're doing is creating a game that everyone can play. That means next time someone decides to have a LAN party, YOUR game is at the top of the list for anyone who would rather bring their Linux or Mac machine along with them. Sure, there are half a dozen MMPORG's out there. However, the only ones I'm considering, along with half a dozen friends of mine are ones that are cross platform. The reason is that we want to make sure our friends who use something other than Windows can still play in our groups. So yeah, there might be one Mac user and one Linux user out of 10 people, but writing your game to support those two people happened to net you another 8 monthly subscriptions.

    • You missed one more point. I do not have a MS Windows machine. If you have a linux version, and none of your competitors do, you get 100% of the linux market (sure only 2% total) by default. If you have 100 potential in the target market, but and it works out to 2 linux users, or 1 MS Windows user, you are better off targeting linux. It is only when you achieve the big bucks that the MS Windows platform is better.

      I recall several games for tiny platforms that did very well in global sales, not because

    • For gaming I usually use Windows, it came with the PC and I don't have to fiddle with the settings to get anything to work.

      I work in Linux though, and its great having fun time wasters that don't require a reboot to run. I'm tempted by Transgamings WineX, but I can't justify the $60/year for it to the board (wife).

      Portable games are more than just Windows/Mac/Linux, by going with Python or Java you also can be on phones, PDA's etc. The biggest battery killer for my old phone was Gemmaster.
    • What I think a lot of companies might not realize is that when you're making a game that plays on Mac or Linux boxes, you're not just adding that ~2% - 3% of marketshare to your total games sales.

      Actually, you are. The important point is that if you create your game using cross platform tools you get 2-3% more market share (your figures, I'd expect it to be closer to 5-10%) at no extra cost. If you write it using DirectX, then try to port it then it will cost a huge amount to get this extra few percent.

      • if you create your game using cross platform tools you get 2-3% more market share (your figures, I'd expect it to be closer to 5-10%) at no extra cost.

        For something to be actually cross-platform (instead of theoretically cross-platform), it would have to be actually tested on all those various platforms. This testing, not to mention the additional hardware and software, is not even close to free.

        Which is not to say designing something so it'll even just theoretically work across platforms is a bad thin

  • great game... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Nos. ( 179609 ) <andrew@nOSPAm.thekerrs.ca> on Monday November 15, 2004 @02:23PM (#10822600) Homepage
    Though I never played it much, it was a very interesting concept. One player as Mr. X trying to run from I believe 5 Scotland Yard agents. The basic game play was that you had various tokens to travel around London (taxis, bus, subway, etc). Mr. X was foced to reveal his location every so often. If the agents ever managed to land on the same spot as Mr. X, then the agents won. If the agents ran out of tokens first, then the agents won.
    I'll have to look at it more later (I'm at work now, and believe it or not, don't have time to look at it too much). I'm hoping in the endgame you'll be able to trace routes of Mr.X and the agents just to see how close they came.
    • If the agents ever managed to land on the same spot as Mr. X, then the agents won. If the agents ran out of tokens first, then the agents won.

      So Mr. X gets the short end of the deal, then? ;)

    • Re:great game... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Flyboy Connor ( 741764 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @04:03AM (#10828014)
      One player as Mr. X trying to run from I believe 5 Scotland Yard agents.

      Against 5 detectives, Mr.X has no chance at all.

      The game is best played with Mr.X against 4 detectives. The detectives will almost always win the game, but occassionaly Mr.X will make a brilliant escape.

      Against 3 detectives, Mr.X easily wins the game.

      Actually, that is the bad thing about Scotland Yard: the game is fun but never fair; either Mr.X has a huge chance of winning, or the detectives have, depending on the number of players.

      One cannot help wondering whether with a different map design, the game could be made more fair. Perhaps with different maps for 4-player, 5-player, and 6-player games.

  • detailed game info (Score:5, Informative)

    by honold ( 152273 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @02:37PM (#10822734)
    can be found here [boardgamegeek.com]. fury of the dracula [boardgamegeek.com] is a better-received (but woefully out of print) game in the same class.
  • A friend of mine designed a version of the game using Toronto public transit. Kind of a neat idea, and I imagine it could work in a lot of places (like, umm, London).

    http://www.culturehole.com/index.asp?giorno=27&mon th=7&year=2004 [culturehole.com]

    This was a first pass at the rules, and they've since been changed a bit, but you get the idea.

  • from the author (Score:5, Informative)

    by Fourier ( 60719 ) on Monday November 15, 2004 @05:09PM (#10824324) Journal
    As the author of London Law, I'd just like to point out that
    1. I personally have only tested this code under Linux, Win98, and WinXP. And not so heavily in Windows.
    2. While the game is fully playable, this is an initial release and it needs a whole lot of work yet. My plans are laid out in the TODO file buried in the archive.

    Also, have mercy on my department's poor webserver. I understand some people actually rely on it to deliver important things like, say, homework.
  • Has anyone actually tried this, or should we wait until it's done w/ the beta?

  • Anyone inspect the source yet? (Score:3)

    by tuxedobob ( 582913 ) * <tuxedobob AT mac DOT com> on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @01:51AM (#10827615)
    Call me crazy, but I'm not fond of needing to be root to install a shareware/freeware app.
    • You have two options for installing as an unprivileged user:
      1. Don't install. Just extract the archive somewhere, change to the londonlaw/ subdirectory, and you should be able to launch the client and server from there.
      2. Use the '--prefix' option to setup.py to set the installation directory somewhere that does not require root permissions. But if you do this, you'll need to set the PYTHONPATH environment variable appropriately so that python knows where to find the module.

      Now quit complaining about free st

  • I don't know that you're projecting the correct "image" of the game by using this screenshot [umich.edu] which says:
    what a great game!
    yeah, it's not too bad
    needs a more robust server, though
    I mean, we know it's Beta, but maybe take a new shot that's not putting down your hard work?
  • Mornington Crescent

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