Open Source FPS Blood Frontier Releases Beta 2

An anonymous reader writes "The open source FPS Blood Frontier has now made their beta2 release. From the article: 'After many months of development, and massive amounts of input from the public, we are proud to present you with the new release of Blood Frontier, v0.85 (Beta 2). This new version totally redefines and improves the game in many ways, creating a whole new style that makes it almost nothing like its predecessor.'"

Re:Is it fun?

[Ziekheid]

Despite looking great, Killzone 2 isn't THAT much fun. It's the killer graphics that made it a hit. I agree with you that it looks a lot like the oldskool games I played back in the day, like most opensource games. This isn't really suprising since most of them run on a heavily modified Quake2 or Quake3 engine (this game isn't though). There should've been some actual gameplay in the trailer to get a better impression.

Re:It's "bloody" fun!

[sopssa]

It still ruins it kinda. Sure you get off the idiots who run around at 100x speed aimbotting and killing everyone, but discreet use of esp hack that shows you where enemies are or if someone is coming behind you will still give major advantage to the cheater. It will not ruin the game completely, but it still makes it kind of stupid.

Actually this is and will always be a major problem with open source online games. You don't even need to debug assembly and create a hack for it, you just need to edit the source code and build your own client. Open source anti-cheating system has the same problems too, and in addition open source community would probably yell against locking down the client with such system. Sure, server admins can still ban the obvious cheaters, but this is one of the things commercial games (and commercial anti-cheating software) will always have advantage over open source games, at least until we can actually just render the player screen on server and transmit it over the internet.

What about warsow?!

[arosas]

Feel free to mod this post as flamebait, but I feel it's time to rant about the Open Source gaming community. It seems to me whenever there's a new Open Source FPS that comes out, it's just another pathetic Quake clone. Sure the trailer videos *look* cool, and sure the screenshots are rendered at high resolution, with all the bells and whistles enabled. All is good until it comes to the actual gameplay. It's disappointing when all the freetards (excuse my french) drool over another cheezy clone (merely because it's Open Source, but not of it's merits alone) that's no different from the previous hundred clones that came before it. Boring and unoriginal.

Which brings me to my point: WHAT ABOUT WARSOW [warsow.net]?! This game has been out for years, it's free, the source code is GPL'd, runs on windows/linux/mac, and above all the gameplay takes the Quake shooters to a whole new level [wikipedia.org]. In all of my 15+ years of gaming, warsow is by far the most complex and elegant FPS to date. Imagine playing quake2/quake3, now imagine that on crack. That is warsow. It's not another lame re-skinned quake clone like it's predecessors. A quick search on slashdot shows only one post referencing it... ONE POST!!

The community is small and has been diminishing over the past couple of years. Which is quite surprising for a game with such immense potential. My only guess is this: the game is too hard. Yes I will admit that the learning curve is steep, but that's half the fun right there! You would think a community of opensource folks (who love to tinker with their own systems, to learn and read and gain a better knowledge of the inner-workings of their respective systems) would be chomping at the bit to take on a game that requires some sort of learning. If you're willing to spend 5+ hours trying to decipher an archaic perl regex, you shouldn't break a sweat trying to learn how to rocket jump over the period of a half an hour or so.

You would think a community that looks down on proprietary cookie-cutter products would embrace originality and innovation in their games, but it's starting to look like the Open Source gamers are painfully similar to their proprietary counter-parts. Same cookie-cutter crap as before, only difference being the price of their engine. </rant>

Re:It's "bloody" fun!

[arQon]

Since there's no "-50: Hopelessly Wrong", I'll sacrifice modding parent as Overrated to post a reply that will hopefully re-clue anyone who reads and believes it.

Even with access only to the data you "should know", it's still TRIVIAL to mod a client in ways that provide significant advantages. No offense, but parent has absolutely no idea what he's talking about, and obviously no actual experience in this area.

Rather than listing 20 or 30 trivial cases that disprove your claim, I'll just take the most obvious one.
An enemy is clearly visible a hundred yards away. I think we can all agree that that's "information you should have as a player", right? My client knows where he is, because it has to draw him. So, with some trivial math, my client is capable of instantly targeting him and shooting for me.

You say it's not impossible to stop cheating, just "hard". Start with that one, then we'll move on to the more complex cases...

(And no, even just streaming the game doesn't in any way resolve this, even if it wasn't impractical. Trivial image analysis will pick out the enemy player by motion, color, etc)