Controllers provide analogue controls (eg. thumbsticks and triggers) that most keyboards don't have.
If, as you suggest, the control schemes of video games are becoming less complex (Forward, down, forward, high punch) then surely the result would be more games that are playable with only a keyboard, not fewer?
Trying to play with 2 players on the same keyboard was a nightmare. On mine WASD seemed to cope better than the arrows, so there was always a rush to pick sides of the keyboard. Ah, good times.
The source is only partially available; they released the source code of the game logic, but the engine was not included in the source release. You'd need to reverse engineer & remake the engine to make any major improvements to the game, such as porting it to new platforms.
This sounds like how most moddable games of the era released their SDKs. You could make a mod that changed gameplay and/or assets, but you needed the needed the original game itself for the engine and original assets as a foundation/runtime. One step further would be a 'total conversion' that replaced all the assets but you still needed the engine, and then you get later releases like the id GPL releases of the engine so you could have engine+gameplay+content all by yourself. Even then you'd still need to abide by the license of the original game or the GPL engine, unless you went and signed a different license with them including if you wanted to sell anything derived from their work.
So you can't buy it, but you can play it, and the source is available. Is this really a problem? I know the article mentions this in passing, but preservation & the ability to actually play a 25 year old game is more important than its capitalization, IMO.
Well, no, you can't play it because the source code doesn't include assets like the 3d models and textures and levels and sound files. You need to acquire those some other way if you want to build a playable version of the game.
It's like GZDoom, you have to supply your own copy of DOOM.WAD
It's a different game. It may be technically compatible with other WADs and that's useful, but if the point is to actually play Doom, your idea is basically like when I once observed people around me downloading illegal video files and I wondered why they didn't just download Big Buck Bunny instead. (I was in middle school and not into movies)
Is not so different in the end. Also, the game data it's made in a way so PWADs and total conversion stay totally coherent with texturing and world building.
Playing for instance, Strain and such with FreeDoom.wad as the main IWADs yields the same experience. Ditto with Back To Saturn X.
That isn't at all what they are saying.
They are saying that you need to provide all the game assets. Exactly like you do if you want to play the original Doom with modern source ports.
Since the game is not available to buy, this means either pulling those assets from an original retail copy, or pirating them.
> preservation & the ability to actually play a 25 year old game is more important than its capitalization
> Even if you don't want to pirate it, there are lots of copies for multiple platforms available to buy just on eBay.
This feels like a contradictory position.
On the one hand the important thing is the preservation and availability of a work. On the other hand it's okay if the it is only available as 20+ year old used copies and pirated copies.
And any preservation or restoration project is under the shadow of 3 companies (Warner Bros., Activision, and 20th Century Fox) which have all recently "complained that they may have rights to [NOLF] and may sue over it"
They like it when old games are unplayable because if gamers can't find or play the old games they'll have to pay (and pay more) for their newest games. Why compete with your own back catalog? Especially when your old game isn't full of bullshit like day one DLC, lootboxes, season passes, and microtransactions.
My first reaction to the steam machine was “you’ll own nothing and be happy about it” but yeah everyone seems happy about it… I like how old games were sold on physical cartridges or discs. Much more fun to know the experience can be relived. Kids growing up today will never have nostalgic experiences in their middle aged years since so many games are internet linked and drm locked.
> On the one hand the important thing is the preservation and availability of a work. On the other hand it's okay if the it is only available as 20+ year old used copies and pirated copies.
And any preservation or restoration project is under the shadow of 3 companies (Warner Bros., Activision, and 20th Century Fox) which have all recently "complained that they may have rights to [NOLF] and may sue over it"
No, it’s not. Warner, Activision and 20th Century can collectively suck my balls and lick deez nuts. Literally no one benefits from this.
Let me quote the person I was replying to for you:
Exactly like you do if you want to play the original Doom with modern source ports. Since the game is not available to buy, this means either pulling those assets from an original retail copy, or pirating them.
They are clearly stating that Doom is also not available to buy, which is not true.
In the post you were replying to, perhaps inserting a paragraph break before "Since the game..." might help, more than selectively quoting from it. It might then be more clear that the phrase "the game" is referring to the same game both times it's used.
Seriously though, break a law that no one is interested in enforcing? What are we doing here, exactly, carrying water for a handful of companies that had nothing to do with the original development of the game in the first place?
ETA: This aside from the fact that you can buy a used copy and play it...
> What are we doing here, exactly, carrying water for a handful of companies that had nothing to do with the original development of the game in the first place?
What we're doing here is complaining about the bad law. And complaining about these companies, but it's bad they even have the ability to cause this deadlock.
I assume the community goal would be to find out who owns the rights and get them to either use them or give them up formally and bless the community project?
Used copies won't be around forever, it would be better to have a proper community version.
The background is that Night Dive tried to do this back when they formed, but it turned out to be intractable for a number of reasons including no one knew who actually owned it.
Something like what happened with UT99 and the original Unreal: the source was made available to a dedicated community group (who continue to push out patches for the games), and when the games were no longer commercially useful, they allowed them to be posted on the Internet Archive for free access.
The rights holder can give permission to use the assets and IP let the community basically own the game. Marathon and Project Aleph is a good example of this where Bungie gave it up, and so the open source version of the engine has fixes and things now.
Nothing from the article suggests that is on the table here, but rather Nightdive wants the rights so they can sell a remake of the game without the threat of getting sued.
> Seriously though, break a law that no one is interested in enforcing?
I wouldn't put it past any one of the companies who think they might maybe have some rights to the game to sic their hired copyright goons on gamers who aren't too careful about how they go about pirating the game, their ISPs, and anyone else they think they can threaten into a settlement offer for a few bucks.
The copyright enforcement regime has no morals and they're happy to make it your problem to prove in court that they don't actually have the rights the material they claim was infringed. When a bunch of record labels sued Cox for a $1 billion in damages Cox eventually found that the labels never had the rights to many of the songs they were successfully sued for.
They were willing to threaten Nightdive. I certainly wouldn't call them disinterested in enforcing the copyrights they may or may not have.
> What are we doing here, exactly, carrying water for a handful of companies that had nothing to do with the original development of the game in the first place?
It may not bother you, but there are many people who would prefer it if they didn't have to break the law to play the game. Used copies won't be around forever, at which point those people will be SOL.
I'm in the speedrunning community[0] for NOLF and just want to chime in on the amazing work that haekb did (I believe the "community-driven project" is only them) for these games[1]. They made both NOLF and NOLF2 a lot more accessible to people casually picking up the game, as there was a lot of jank and configuration needed otherwise to get the games running in a good way on modern systems. In addition to fixing jank, they actually fixed tons of bugs and added other QoL and fun stuff like a jukebox in the menus to listen to the (great) soundtrack. Some stuff - like how if you have certain USB devices connected, the game will just flip out - still remains, but that's just a part of the _voodoo_ with old games like these.
Fixing bugs and stuff is nice, but a lot of the fun speedrunning tech we depend on was also fixed, and they were kind enough to create a separate "lithfix" that only made the games playable on modern systems and left the in-game bugs intact. Not only that, but they also added a dev console and fixed some of the old cheat codes, which made it so that we could finally noclip around to inspect the maps properly and toggle on hitboxes, etc.
It's incredible the impact a single individual can have. They never asked for anything back, and now their work is even included by default on the "unofficial" download page. Even though I don't speedrun anymore (maybe one day!) I'll always be grateful for that :)
The game holds up incredibly well - beautiful scenery, fun story, some of the best and most humorous dialogue in any game ever[2], and a really strong and well-written female main character. Would strongly recommend anyone to pick it up, just know that some parts struggle a bit with the "stealth", and expect (and embrace) "going loud" at times. But do try to stealth a lot, as you're nicely rewarded with brilliant dialogue! NOLF2 is fun too, but very different - definitely worth a play through though!
They're also very fun speedrun games, and the community is very helpful to anyone, even if you're just wanting to play it casually :)
Edit: Forgot to mention that they also fixed the multiplayer in NOLF2, and some people still play sometimes! More info on this page[3]
The OP delivered a drive-by contribution and proceeded to condescend one of the maintainers. They posted the interaction to HN (for the second time) out of spite for the maintainer, labelling it an instance of gatekeeping.
Having a polite and diplomatic conversation about a non-trivial contribution idea is a common prerequisite for it to be accepted into a project, like Hapi.js.
It's no surprise that project maintainers don't wish to work with recalcitrant individuals, regardless of the merit of their contributions.
Wrong, maintainer started conversations with complete rejection, and continued to coming up with new ideas why not to accept the PR. And maintainer started to drag politics into conversation, such as elitism.
“If you’re looking to deploy multiple images, Chainguard’s per-image charges could quickly exceed Bitnami’s flat subscription cost. For example, licensing 3 images at $30K each would already reach $90K/year.” via Reddit.
There is a new Catalog option. Their pricing is “custom” and not published online so all we have is Reddit anecdotes like here
At one point in his demo, he uploads a file but terminates the upload more or less halfway. Then he begins downloading the file - which only progresses to the point it had been uploaded, and subsequently stalls indefinitely. And, finally, he finishes uploading the file (which gracefully resumes) and the file download (which is still running) seamlessly completes.
I recall we had special apps to queue and schedule our downloads, and resume them where servers supported it. They were a dream compared to the boredom of staring at progress bars.
Anyone remember DAP, Download Accelerator Plus? The colorful bars were nice. A part of my childhood, downloading shareware Windows games through dial-up.
Finding that piece of software around 2001-2002 was what allowed me to finally download a specific piece of, ahem, 'shareware', that was about 400 MB, zipped, that I would never have been able to finish on a 14.4kbps modem on a single very noisy phone line that usually dropped the call every 2 hours or so. It eventually took three days but the file came across uncorrupted. It wouldn't have been possible without the ability to resume downloads after dropped connections.
And that software download went on to allow me to start the path learning what I wanted to learn about, and that paved the way for my engineering degrees and thus setting me up for the last 20-some years. Wild how little pieces of the puzzle like that drive so much of your life.
(also a great app to download everything you wanted from a site, regex selections, etc.)
Makes several connections and downloads chunks in parallel, for some sites with limited upload (their, your download) speeds per session it really speeds up the downloads.
Sadly, not much development recently (9 months ago was the last commit)
The trouble is those special tools also needed downloading. So I could either sacrifice an evening's, ahem, download, or just chance it yet again. I eventually got an FTP client and it was like a superpower. BitTorrent was honestly more impressive to me than AI. Ah, the good old days.
The server that has moved countless Petabytes is glFTPd that allows FXP ( clients without bandwidth can initiate to transfer files from server to server ).
wget will pick up a dl where it left off. i know that "pick up where you left off" capability has been built into HTTP since the mid '90s if not right from scratch
i used to use that feature to run several downloads from several different sites of different sections of linux distro isos when new releases were put up
The vast majority of web servers out there¹ support partial download and have done for years. That the most common UA for accessing them (web browsers) don't support the feature² without addons, is not a server-side problem.
Sometimes there are server-side problems: some dynamic responses (i.e. files that are behind a user account so need the right to access checked before sending) are badly designed so that they uneccesarily break sub-range downloads. This could be seen as a “poor server” issue, but I think it is more a “daft dev/admin” or “bad choice of software” problem.
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[1] admittedly not all, but…
[2] wget and curl do, though not automatically without a wrapper script
Many sites also had an ftp server behind it. E.g. ftp.id.com and ftp.cdrom.com were two off the top of my head. Another I remember was downloading high resolution images of Tyan motherboards from ftp.tyan.com. Supermicro also had an ftp server you grabbed bios images from. I dont really recall ever having to download anything big via http. Mostly images, pdf's and small zip files.
No, but FTP and such protocols shouldn't need to be aware of that layer, any more than it should be aware of my VPN that is happens to be connecting through. You can resume an FTP transfer once the PPP or SLIP connection has been restored though.
I remember redownloading Liero over and over again and failing. And then cherishing it once getting a successful download. It would barely fail to fit into a floppy.
Amateur. Use Flashget or Netants which download the file in 8 simultaneous chunks. I used to cheer the threads on last legs of a whopping 5m download. I hated servers which dont allow resume or even report file size.
bittorrent needs to know the complete file at the beginning to make the pieces. This tool doesn't need to know the complete file to start the upload, nor the download...
I wish Gary was one of the people that the average joe associated with "people who are known for doing computer things", instead of only people such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
He was brilliant, but he was not a predator, which is always part of the problem. We know names like Gates and Jobs because they stepped on the shoulders of others and ate anyone who stood in their way alive. History remembers the victors.
That should automatically tell us we shouldn't trust them, and yet fandoms and followings abound.
Both of them screwed over early employees wrt company shares.
Jobs and Apple board didn't give stock options/shares to some early employees, Woz stepped in to make up for some of the shortfall. see https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Woz_Plan
Gates argued with Paul Allen about the percentage of company ownership. IMHO, Allen didn't like confrontation so Allen acquiesced to Gates benefit.
The Valley promotes such figures. I once had to intervene on behalf of some Japanese visitors who were being taken advantage of by a headstrong young whippersnapper in the Valley who was totally oblivious to the needs and customs of others.
Yet in Gates' recently released memoir, if you do a ctrl+f for Kildall there are zero results. Unsure how Gates, as a programmer and business founder , could write a memoir without a single blurb for Gary.
If, as you suggest, the control schemes of video games are becoming less complex (Forward, down, forward, high punch) then surely the result would be more games that are playable with only a keyboard, not fewer?
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