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Stop Killing Games

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Re: Stop Killing Games

#171

Post by mvdtnz »

duped wrote: post #166
runevault wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're assuming game devs write every line of code in their server infrastructure. First, could be using a third party library you have license to use on a limited number of machines that make up your backend servers. Second you could be paying for third party API access to something like snowflake. You either have to rip out the code (which may or may not break the server, but still requires developer time to do)…

Genuinely curious - what third party closed source dependencies are they using? Like what is their purpose?

Web servers, message brokers, physics engines, anti cheat, fraud detection, flood mitigation, ranking systems, chat moderation, match making systems. There are thousands of possible components which may have been licensed in any given game server system. In some cases the entire game engine runs on the server.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#172

Post by esikich »

Telaneo wrote: post #124
eckesicle wrote: post #116

My father was a printer his entire life. I went with him to work one day when I was around 12 years old. He loaded up a box of, what seemed to me a random selection of flyers, booklets and other printed goods in his car, and together we drove to the National Archives (in Sweden). He explained to me that every media artifact of cultural significance would be stored there in three (I believe) copies for future generati…

> I was always at unease growing up, wondering what would happen to video games when they no longer became popular. Would I be able to enjoy them when I got older? Would my children ever be able to play the games that shaped my teenage years? The worst thing, at least to me, is that the worst case scenario, as long as the devs don't go out of their way to kill a game permanently, is still not all that bad. There's em…

I think in the AI age, it might not be so bad. There's a small online game that I played years ago that I checked in on 2 days ago to see if it was still running, it was with a handful of people playing it. So I downloaded the client to pop in. It had aged really poorly so I thought, fuck it, let's see if Codex can reverse engineer the client, maybe I can build another one. I let it cook and came back an hour later to check on it. It had pulled out all the assets, a bunch of enums for different game states and animations, etc, and had started doing network protocol reverse engineering by building a bare bones client and pointing it at localhost. It had figured out how to authenticate and was already figuring out how to decode the game state from raw packets. I shut it down so my IP wouldn't get banned, but I was floored it was able to do that much in an hour.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#173

Post by TylerE »

ZeWaka wrote: post #72
F3nd0 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That... basically kills the entire gaming industry. > > Am I missing something serious here or is this really trying to advocate for that. What you might be missing is that the author advocates for free software (which is framed differently from open source), while games typically aren’t pure software, but rely very heavily on art assets. The movement for free software traditionally draws a distinction between soft…

Dwarf Fortress is a modern example of that paradigm.

In what way? I'm not seeing any.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#174

Post by TylerE »

stale2002 wrote: post #119
DSMan195276 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wouldn’t it only require action from you if you were trying to kill multiplayer in the first place? It's a question of when, not if - you're not going to pay to keep the servers online forever. What are the legal consequences of not releasing a functioning server if for some reason you can't? If they're bad enough then plenty of people will not be interested in taking that risk by making such games.

> What are the legal consequences of not releasing a functioning server if for some reason you can't? How about "the government forces you to release the code"? That's seems fair. Unless you hid your source code in USB drives under your bed, the government can probably just force GitHub (or similar )to release it. I bet they've got it backed up.

And how do they force release of all the proprietary dependencies? Overriding contract law is a hell of a lift, and a terrible precedent.

The whole "Stop Killing Games" movement is deeply misguided, and most of the people supporting it have absolutely no clue about how software or anything computer related actually works.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#175

Post by TylerE »

duped wrote: post #166
runevault wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're assuming game devs write every line of code in their server infrastructure. First, could be using a third party library you have license to use on a limited number of machines that make up your backend servers. Second you could be paying for third party API access to something like snowflake. You either have to rip out the code (which may or may not break the server, but still requires developer time to do)…

Genuinely curious - what third party closed source dependencies are they using? Like what is their purpose?

A very large percentage of multiplayer games keep the backend in an MS SQL or Oracle cluster.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#176

Post by Telaneo »

usef- wrote: post #165
krupan wrote: post #47

The discussion here is amazing! Takes me right back to the early days of Linux and discovering Free Software. How will developers eat?? Who would write software for free?? These people clearly didn't think this through!! Amazing to hear it all again, lol! Let's think about it. Free software just applies to the source code. Artwork, logos, even trademarked names are not Free. Support, services, and documentation can a…

Have there been commercially successful free software games? If the code was Free Software, how would you sell in-game purchases? Note that if it were just 3d models for your character, others could sell them too, likely cheaper without the overheads of developing the base game. Note that the article is advocating for multiplayer code to be open too. I love free software, but I don't see how it was works in practice…

> Have there been commercially successful free software games?

Going by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_video_game... , yes, although probably not to any helpful extent (and some of those are FOSS now, but weren't when released).

2048 had in-game ads that you could buy your way out of. You couldn't just install the ad-free version, because iOS is locked down. You could on Android, but not everyone is tech-savvy enough to actually do that.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#177

Post by BlitzGeology91 »

felipellrocha wrote: post #32
nerdjon wrote: post #8

This is basically advocating for open source games which is a completely different story than what stop killing games is trying to do. There are tons of closed source games that have zero online component to them. I don't see how you can actually argue that this is a good thing, especially when they say: > The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others. That... basically kills the entire gaming industry. A…

To be fair, the legislation also kills any sort of multiplayer games, so it's in the same spirit. It just takes the idea to its logical conclusion. As a game developer, if this thing passes, I would just not build multiplayer ever anymore.

> To be fair, the legislation also kills any sort of multiplayer games, so it's in the same spirit.

No, it doesn’t. It just requires that we go back to making multiplayer games the old-fashioned way (the good way). Descent 3 was released in 1999. You can still play Descent 3 multiplayer to this day if you want to [1], and there’s nothing that anyone can do to stop you from doing so. You can still play Descent 3 multiplayer because Descent 3 allows you to host your own servers and allows you to manually enter IP addresses in order to connect to servers (this is necessary because the services that Descent 3’s in-game server browsers depend on no longer exist). Descent 3’s source code was released in 2024 [2] which certainly helps with multiplayer preservation, but I can tell you that a small number of people definitely did play multiplayer Descent 3 in 2023 when the source code was not yet available.

Descent: Underground was released to Steam Early Access in 2015 [3]. Unlike the previous Descent games, Descent: Underground (or at least, that iteration of Descent: Underground) was pretty much multiplayer-only. The developers of Descent: Underground did not allow players to host their own Descent: Underground servers. (I think that they had some plan to allow for hosting your own servers in the future, but that didn’t get implemented in time). At some point, the official servers for that version of Descent: Underground were shutdown. As a result, you can no longer play Descent: Underground’s multiplayer.

The fact that I can play the multiplayer for a 27-year-old game, but I can’t play the multiplayer for an 11-year-old game is unsurprising. Many older multiplayer games did not have fatal design flaws that would cause them to die after certain period of time. Many newer multiplayer games do have such fatal design flaws. The good news is that this means that we already know how to stop killing multiplayer games. We just have to go back to doing things the way that we used to do them.

(In fact, some games don’t even need to “go back to doing things the way that we used to do them”. Take Counter-Strike 2, for example. Counter-Strike 2 was released in 2023 and does indeed allow players to host their own servers.)

The statement “the legislation also kills any sort of multiplayer games” is absolutely ridiculous.

[1]: https://tsetsefly.de/>

[2]: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/descent-3-programmer-relea...>

[3]: https://store.steampowered.com/oldnews/18969>

Re: Stop Killing Games

#178

Post by usef- »

Telaneo wrote: post #176
usef- wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have there been commercially successful free software games? If the code was Free Software, how would you sell in-game purchases? Note that if it were just 3d models for your character, others could sell them too, likely cheaper without the overheads of developing the base game. Note that the article is advocating for multiplayer code to be open too. I love free software, but I don't see how it was works in practice…

> Have there been commercially successful free software games? Going by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_video_game... , yes, although probably not to any helpful extent (and some of those are FOSS now, but weren't when released). 2048 had in-game ads that you could buy your way out of. You couldn't just install the ad-free version, because iOS is locked down. You could on Android, but not everyone i…

Oh yes, I know open source games existed, but did any raise enough to pay wages of a team?

ps. I personally played Threes first, which 2048 copied without the style and made free. I admit I was slightly disappointed for the original devs that the copy became significantly more well known. It wouldn't be my first example of the benefits of open source.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#179

Post by dijit »

duped wrote: post #166
runevault wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're assuming game devs write every line of code in their server infrastructure. First, could be using a third party library you have license to use on a limited number of machines that make up your backend servers. Second you could be paying for third party API access to something like snowflake. You either have to rip out the code (which may or may not break the server, but still requires developer time to do)…

Genuinely curious - what third party closed source dependencies are they using? Like what is their purpose?

Audio subsystems (wwise, fmod).

Physics subsystems (havok, ISI).

Procedural systems (Gaea, Houdini)

Vegetation (Speedtree)

VFX subsystems (Nvidia Gameworks)

First party SDKs (Sony Playstation, Microsoft NDK, Horizon/Quest).

Pathfinding (Kytheria, Mercuna)

Cutscenes/Videos (Bink)

UI (Rive, Neosis)

Networking (Photon, Coherence)

Theres… thousands more, if you’d like me to continue.

Re: Stop Killing Games

#180

Post by dijit »

abetusk wrote: post #159
dijit wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Jason Rohrer puts many (most?) of his games in the public domain, including "One Hour, One Life" [0] [1]. As far as I know, his game is pretty successful, by indie standards. OAOL runs commercial proprietary servers and the community was not free to distribute the game or run competing servers during the commercial active period. The community only got access to the servers when they had declined to 20-30 concurren…

> OAOL runs commercial proprietary servers and the community was not free to distribute the game or run competing servers during the commercial active period. Reference? The source was dedicated to the public domain in early 2018, which coincides with the release of the game [0]. > So the model that made this economically viable was the proprietary control model. This is a complete fabrication. > Anyway, just because…

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