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The Original Postal Has Been Made Open Source

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Re: The Original Postal Has Been Made Open Source

#61

Post by throwaway7767 »

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.

Postal had a very early linux port, I remember playing in the early 2000s. I think it was one of the games ported by Loki Software before they went bankrupt (ahead of their time I guess).

I remember I had some problems with sound in it because of the in-kernel sound driver for my laptop's sound chip didn't deal well with mmap()ed access, which the game required. I used the proprietary OSS audio stack which had a driver that didn't have that problem. Of course it was only an evaluation version and would shut off the sound after some minutes of play.

Kind of glad these things are rarely an issue on the linux desktop anymore :)

Re: The Original Postal Has Been Made Open Source

#62

Post by SwellJoe »

throwaway7767 wrote: post #61
SwellJoe wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Postal had a very early linux port, I remember playing in the early 2000s. I think it was one of the games ported by Loki Software before they went bankrupt (ahead of their time I guess). I remember I had some problems with sound in it because of the in-kernel sound driver for my laptop's sound chip didn't deal well with mmap()ed access, which the game required. I used the proprietary OSS audio stack which had a driv…

If it weren't so sad, it'd be hilarious how long it took for sound to even be close to usable on Linux. Only in the past couple of years has it become reasonable to use Linux for any kind of serious audio work (and it is still weaker than Windows and Mac on many fronts, though the latency and RT issues have been resolved for some time). I started trying to use Linux for audio in 1995, when I was still going to school for audio recording. Only now is it actually something that one might consider doing real work with.

It's always been such an afterthought, and always so flaky. For me, it was the one thing that kept a Windows partition on most of my systems through all those years.

Re: The Original Postal Has Been Made Open Source

#63

Post by SwellJoe »

a3_nm wrote: post #58
SwellJoe wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, but Postal is $0.49 in the Steam sale right now, if you need the assets. http://store.steampowered.com/app/232770/

Even if they are available for $0.49, having them under an open source license would be very different. (It would make it possible, e.g., to modify them and ship them in other games.)

Oh, I agree. I just wanted to point out that it's on sale, and so cheap that anyone wanting to play with this should grab it.

Re: The Original Postal Has Been Made Open Source

#64

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

SwellJoe wrote: post #62
throwaway7767 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Postal had a very early linux port, I remember playing in the early 2000s. I think it was one of the games ported by Loki Software before they went bankrupt (ahead of their time I guess). I remember I had some problems with sound in it because of the in-kernel sound driver for my laptop's sound chip didn't deal well with mmap()ed access, which the game required. I used the proprietary OSS audio stack which had a driv…

If it weren't so sad, it'd be hilarious how long it took for sound to even be close to usable on Linux. Only in the past couple of years has it become reasonable to use Linux for any kind of serious audio work (and it is still weaker than Windows and Mac on many fronts, though the latency and RT issues have been resolved for some time). I started trying to use Linux for audio in 1995, when I was still going to school…

Most things work nowadays. Oxenfree doesn't, but that might just be my system config.

Re: The Original Postal Has Been Made Open Source

#65

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

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.

Ah. Whoops. My mistake...

Re: The Original Postal Has Been Made Open Source

#67

Post by foxhop »

Insanity wrote: post #57

Reading this, as well as the comments in this thread makes me want to play the game again. Might fire it up over the weekend and I will surely go through the code for a while! It was a nice late-christmas present ;-)

I bought Postal Redux on Steam last night for under $2 and played to level 5. Still a very playable game!

Re: The Original Postal Has Been Made Open Source

#68

Post by criddell »

rl3 wrote: post #43
bminor13 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It never goes on sale

I'm betting it will one day. I'm waiting.

Re: The Original Postal Has Been Made Open Source

#69

Post by foxhop »

erikj wrote: post #60
aaronsnoswell wrote: post #51

I thought the title said 'Portal', not 'Postal'. Disapointed :P

It would be amazing if Valve made Source Engine open source, but that would require them to replace Havok and perhaps other middleware.

Many games from this era were free homebrew Half-life mods. I think Valve should do more to promote hacking and modding their games.

Counter strike was created as a mod by the community as well as day of defeat.

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