Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Original Postal Has Been Made Open Source

runningwithscissors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 80 posts

Re: The Original Postal Has Been Made Open Source

#41

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

Maken wrote: post #40
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #20

Wow. Now I can play it on my Linux system. Thanks, RWS. This, as well as being a fantastic gesture, makes it seem as though RWS understands something that many of its contemporaries don't: Games, or rather, their engines, must be open-sourced for those games to continue to be playable and relevant. You can't update your games forever, and sooner or later, they will be rendered unplayable by the inexorable march of te…

Alternatively, you can keep updating your games until the end of times like Valve does. On a serious note, the thing about Doom and other Id games is that they used to release the complete toolbox along with the game, allowing anybody to create content on-par with the base product.

True, but Duke Nukem 3D did the same thing (actually, id didn't release any tooling for Doom: id's internal DoomEd was written in Objective-C for NeXT machines, so it wouldn't have been much use in any case. They didn't start releasing their internal design tools until a bit later, meaning that DN3D did it first), and DN3D's community is virtually dead, while Doom's continues to thrive.

Re: The Original Postal Has Been Made Open Source

#42

Post by rl3 »

agent86 wrote: post #29
pyromine wrote: post #4

This is completely off-topic, but in the vein of talking about old games. Does anyone have any suggestions for games that scratched the same itch as the old school RTS games like Age of Empires and Rise of Nations? I've been searching for years but never found anything that eclipses the classics.

Maybe try Planetary Annihilation: Titans? The original Planetary Annihilation was developed by the people that made the classic Total Annihilation RTS. After delivering the Kickstarted game, they further revised it into the "Titans" verison, and gifted the upgrade to the initial backers. http://www.uberent.com/pa/ Currently on sale for $6 on Steam too! http://store.steampowered.com/app/386070/

Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance[0] is, IMHO far superior. I've put far too many hours into both.

Only play the community-maintained version[1], Forged Alliance Forever. Over the years it's improved upon and polished the Steam version in virtually every respect.

PA: Titans is still a good game, different enough to be fun, and a great deal for the money. It's just not quite in the same league as games like SC:FA, Age of Empires II: HD or Factorio.

[0] http://store.steampowered.com/app/9420/

[1] http://www.faforever.com

Re: The Original Postal Has Been Made Open Source

#43

Post by rl3 »

bminor13 wrote: post #11
pyromine wrote: post #4

This is completely off-topic, but in the vein of talking about old games. Does anyone have any suggestions for games that scratched the same itch as the old school RTS games like Age of Empires and Rise of Nations? I've been searching for years but never found anything that eclipses the classics.

It may be only tangentially related to the genre, but Factorio has stolen far too many of my hours and is definitely worth the $20. It is engaging and challenging like no other game I've played in the past couple of years.

>...and is definitely worth the $20

One thing I love about Factorio (aside from everything else), is the pricing model. It never goes on sale, and never will. That means the usual agonizing over "should I buy it or wait until a sale?" is non-existent. More developers should adopt that model.

Re: The Original Postal Has Been Made Open Source

#44

Post by mgurlitz »

1wd wrote: post #27

"the CDude class, which is the main, player-controlled character in the game." "CDoofus is the class for the enemy guys [...] Started this file from from CDude and modified it to do some enemy logic using the same assets as the sample 2D guy." "COstrich is the object for the ostriches wandering about in the game. class COstrich : public CDoofus" Hilarious. Reminds me of CBruce in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater: "Their code […

From Postal Overview.txt: "The game is built on top of our cross-platform library, called "RSPiX" (pronounced "risp-icks"). RSPiX is organized into several levels, from low-level to high-level functional. Each level is named after a color." (https://bitbucket.org/gopostal/postal-1-open-source/src/defa...)

In summary, blue provides graphics/audio/input functions, cyan is a UI framework (with printer support), and the distinctions between green and orange "become rather blurry at some points."

Re: The Original Postal Has Been Made Open Source

#45

Post by SwellJoe »

cr0sh wrote: post #26

I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of useful comments in the code. I remember when the source code for Descent was released; not only was the code somewhat opaque (unless you were experienced with portal-style engines), but there were hardly any kind of comments to help guide you along.

Reading some of the docs in the source tree makes it apparent it's been ported to a bunch of platforms and for a bunch of different markets, and it looks like a lot of people have touched the code over the years. With an experienced hand guiding the process, that usually leads to good quality, in terms of re-usability, stability, and code comments. Being 19 years old is also good for quality...even if it's huge and scary and difficult to wrap ones head around in a short time, somebody has run into every possible edge case and weird compatibility issue in all that time, and they've probably fixed it. Old code bases aren't really fun to work on, but they are usually really productive to work on.

Re: The Original Postal Has Been Made Open Source

#47

Post by SwellJoe »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #20

Wow. Now I can play it on my Linux system. Thanks, RWS. This, as well as being a fantastic gesture, makes it seem as though RWS understands something that many of its contemporaries don't: Games, or rather, their engines, must be open-sourced for those games to continue to be playable and relevant. You can't update your games forever, and sooner or later, they will be rendered unplayable by the inexorable march of te…

Now I can play it on my Linux system.

It looks like it's been available for Linux for a while. Steam has it for Linux, and the compatibility info shows Ubuntu 12.04...so, I would guess the port happened many years ago.

Re: The Original Postal Has Been Made Open Source

#48

Post by pkd »

SwellJoe wrote: post #47
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #20

Wow. Now I can play it on my Linux system. Thanks, RWS. This, as well as being a fantastic gesture, makes it seem as though RWS understands something that many of its contemporaries don't: Games, or rather, their engines, must be open-sourced for those games to continue to be playable and relevant. You can't update your games forever, and sooner or later, they will be rendered unplayable by the inexorable march of te…

Now I can play it on my Linux system. It looks like it's been available for Linux for a while. Steam has it for Linux, and the compatibility info shows Ubuntu 12.04...so, I would guess the port happened many years ago.

That's not necessarily true. Many games show the version as 12.04 because the original Steam OS is based on it.

Re: The Original Postal Has Been Made Open Source

#49

Post by andrewflnr »

jakebasile wrote: post #14
Alupis wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, Postal 2 was the peak of the franchise. It's goofy, and has it's fair share of [sometimes funny] bugs, plus it has first person view. It's currently on sale for $0.99 on Steam[1] [1] http://store.steampowered.com/app/223470/

It is amazing how much objectionable content they put in that game while still maintaining a satirical black comedy tone instead of a "trying too hard" feel. The tagline was "it's only as violent as you are!" as it is possible to complete all your tasks without violence. At one point, it has you protecting the developers of the game from anti-violent video game protestors who want to solve their problems with violenc…

So what you're saying is that it's the video game version of Cards Against Humanity.

Re: The Original Postal Has Been Made Open Source

#50

Post by angersock »

jakebasile wrote: post #14
Alupis wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, Postal 2 was the peak of the franchise. It's goofy, and has it's fair share of [sometimes funny] bugs, plus it has first person view. It's currently on sale for $0.99 on Steam[1] [1] http://store.steampowered.com/app/223470/

It is amazing how much objectionable content they put in that game while still maintaining a satirical black comedy tone instead of a "trying too hard" feel. The tagline was "it's only as violent as you are!" as it is possible to complete all your tasks without violence. At one point, it has you protecting the developers of the game from anti-violent video game protestors who want to solve their problems with violenc…

Remember that if you urinate on somebody with the gonorrhea urine it will instantly kick them into the vomiting state, which can be useful if you don't treat it--I seem to recall that as an optional sidequest.
Post reply on HN