Official Soldat Forums
Official Content => News => Topic started by: Michal Marcinkowski on October 29, 2010, 05:01:09 am
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I've been quiet lately because I have been thinking what to do. EnEsCe can't develop any longer as much as he would want to or as much as anyone would want to. It has been like this for some time now. 1.5.1 should have been released a couple months ago but it seems it was impossible. Now I know this for sure and I need to take actions to continue Soldat's growth.
EnEsCe has done a lot of work on the new version and I want to be sure it does not go to waste. We badly need a dedicated developer or team. I can't contribute because I decided some time ago that my main focus will be Link-Dead. Besides I'm not that much into Soldat in the moment to really do any good for the game. I'm sure there are people that know were to head with this and all I can do is supervise the work and make sure it is of best quality.
I have three options right now:
1. Find a dedicated developer and maintainer (because that was my job and then EnEsCe's) or a small team that knows how to code in Borland Delphi. I'm looking for SERIOUS volunteers. This IS hard work - I don't know if you imagine. I know Shoozza is always eager to step into the Soldat developers shoes and do some coding, but I am wondering if he is the best choice. We can all see what happened with his Open Soldat. People like FliesLikeABrick and jrgp are too busy with their own stuff and working on the web aspects of Soldat so it must be somebody else.
2. Sell Soldat entirely for a sum of money that satisfies me and let a professional company further develop it.
3. Open source Soldat. This means just give it out to the world and let the issue sort out by itself. This does not mean hundreds of people will start developing Soldat. It can be seen in most open source projects there still are just 1 or 2 people doing the work while the rest makes small patches. Which is cool but open sourcing brings 3 problems:
a) hacking - since everyone has the source, hacking is easy as pie. But this has another side to it; since everyone has the source they can also produce equally good anti-hacking software. This seems to work with the Quake trilogy games.
b) I can't cut off the hand that is feeding me. Soldat is my only source of income and I deserve to get money from it and continue my work on other games. So I still want to sell registrations. This is not impossible with open source, it's a matter of making an appropriate license.
c) another problem is Soldat uses some commercial libraries. If it would go open source this means those libraries would have to be replaced by something else which might take some time to prepare.
That's all for now. I'll be following this thread, you can find me also on Quakenet:IRC.
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Hey, you can't just leave soldat.
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I believe you should get 1 or 2 dedicated developers. This way you can keep track of what's going on and they are able to update the community with some real good feedback and news. However, in the end it's your choice, your game, but you have made a great community out of this game and remember these people have made the game its success.
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I think that open sourcing the project would be the best for obvious reasons. Hacks already are a big enough problem, at the very least that gives the chance for the community to do something about it. If that can't be done now, then getting a team of developers would be next on my list, with one lead developer leading that team. Just don't give an exclusive dev position to just one person, or what happened with EnEsCe might happen again, and we'll be waiting ages for updates. I'm sure there are plenty of talented and interested developers who'd like to help. Although openSoldat didn't really pick up, I think that Shoozza might be able to do great things to Soldat. Another person I know has the skills and right mindset to improve the game is Toumaz, but I don't know if he's interested in being a developer in the project.
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I would nominate Fryer, he updated polyworks added stuff like animated gif as well as new polys support for 1.5.1 so he has a sense how stuff works already, also he has coded several games before so he has the skills needed. however I agree with ramirez that there shouldn't be just only one person in the dev team.
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I agree with ramirez and zakath, Shoozza, Toumaz and Fryer are really capable of doing it however, I would also add to the team you two lads. So my suggestion for new dev team is: Shoozza, Toumaz, Fryer, zakath and ramirez.
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As usual, I'm gonna pitch for open source and address the issues.
a) hacking - since everyone has the source, hacking is easy as pie. But this has another side to it; since everyone has the source they can also produce equally good anti-hacking software. This seems to work with the Quake trilogy games.
As the dude in my avatar put it: "The enemy knows the system." There is no real security through obscurity besides delaying the release of hacks. Delaying is useful though, so a central server could be used similar to BE, which would hide some of the detection from hackers.
b) I can't cut off the hand that is feeding me. Soldat is my only source of income and I deserve to get money from it and continue my work on other games. So I still want to sell registrations. This is not impossible with open source, it's a matter of making an appropriate license.
This is where the Portal comes in. With an open-sourced game, anyone could generate keys without a problem. If you keep registrations server-side, you can use it to unlock features such as stat-tracking and so forth, without any issues with licencing as registrations don't affect things client-side.
c) another problem is Soldat uses some commercial libraries. If it would go open source this means those libraries would have to be replaced by something else which might take some time to prepare.
You could let people do this for you by just releasing the code and not bundling the commercial libraries, maybe.
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Ok well lets start...
I think you are a bit unfair with the openSoldat argument:
Creating a game from nothing is a difficult (and different) job compared to fixing bugs and adding features.
And creating a Soldat like game is a really huge task - else there would have been a lot of soldat clones flying around atm.
I always wanted to work on soldat with other people - teamwork is important (and has to be learned)
And I strongly believe that the community needs to have something to say - don't ignore feedback and try to keep the discussion objective as possible (no flamewars please) or nothing good will happen.
I see no need to exploit the soldat developers position - it just causes damage
Also I think it's not a good idea to keep me fixing bugs with soldat hacks :P
It eats much more time then doing it in the real source... and the hacks break once a new release comes out.
I think fixing bugs with hacks should show you that I am really SERIOUS about soldats development.
Who else would continue fixing bugs after being rejected from working on his favorite game year after year.
I'm also working on another soldat related delphi project called ARSSE (not all the time and alone because KeFear disappeared, sadly) and it has seen more releases then soldat has ever seen in his whole lifetime and it's not really clean code :P (It has Hungarian variable/function names and comments :D and the Unit1.pas contains almost all the code)
So I am actually dependent on the stuff the devs create.
I think the way I handle bug request and feedback for ARSSE and chatMod is not so bad, is it ;).
Also why did you give me an outdated version of soldats sourcecode back then? To contribute to soldat, right :P?
It was weird that back then my first commit accepted but once I started continuing to commit stuff the main dev got angry and told me to stop. I was shouted at for contributing - pretty much motivating you know :P.
I even had do talk to you to get bugfixes accepted (UAC and logout rendering issue in soldat).
Please make soldat open source or get it a nice dev team don't sell it to other people so that I have more issues to get stuff in it...
The community should get a nice and fun game without easy to fix bugs and with short release cycles.
I hate to see this whole game die slowly because of inactivity...
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I´m only for the 1. point, cause Soldat will only stay SOLDAT with that choice.
I also suggest a dev team which should contain ~3 people.
Development will be much faster, the communities voice can be handled much easier and so on.
Selling Soldat to some random campony is a step which will have non predictable consequences. This step should only made if your affiliate is okay.
So in my opinion there should be a dev team, I would suggest Shoozza as his attitude is the right one.
There are also some new strangers here in the forums who to made an application.
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Once a Pole, always a Pole. :P
You do know that you will never be able to get a good reputation again if you go for the 2nd choice right? (don't know if you've followed the Oracle/Sun thing)
The 1st and the 3rd option are not that different. You will always get a team working on an open source project, the only difference is that you might attract people that are not into soldat yet.
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I'm happy to see an official and long awaited announcement has been made.
I'm either for point 1. or point 3., but I'd be fine with point 2. if the company is willing to give MM royalties he can live comfortably off of.
But this has another side to it; since everyone has the source they can also produce equally good anti-hacking software. This seems to work with the Quake trilogy games.
It gives me great joy and satisfaction to see you finally admit this fact that so many game devs refuse to believe.
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In my opinion the best way to have a successful development in the future is to get a small team. As main developer Shoozzaa, he's the one who most deserves it and I think zakath is able to do something good as well.
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The dev team should be open to recruit new members just to help them solve one of the bugs and then leave peacefully waiting for another time they can help. That would make it faster(extremely important for the 1st release as the community have been waiting for like a year). As I have already mentioned Shoozza would be the best choice for head of the dev team imo.
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1. Find a dedicated developer and maintainer (because that was my job and then EnEsCe's) or a small team that knows how to code in Borland Delphi. I'm looking for SERIOUS volunteers. This IS hard work - I don't know if you imagine. I know Shoozza is always eager to step into the Soldat developers shoes and do some coding, but I am wondering if he is the best choice. We can all see what happened with his Open Soldat. People like FliesLikeABrick and jrgp are too busy with their own stuff and working on the web aspects of Soldat so it must be somebody else.
Like others have already said: openSoldat was being made completely from scratch with completely different code structure. In addition there was lack of participation and involvement from other people (which was supposed to be a major support for oS), which didn't help either. So using openSoldat as example doesn't really work here. I'm sure Shoozza will do a good job helping with existing Soldat, especially considering that he's already done a lot for it.
But in any case, more than one person working on the game is still a very nice option. No, not an option - a necessity.
2. Sell Soldat entirely for a sum of money that satisfies me and let a professional company further develop it.
I don't have high hopes for something like that. Soldat would either become a lame sparkly kiddy shooter (like BoosterTrooper), or become fully commercial, or partially commercial with even more and stricter limitations for non-regged players. IMHO, an indie game is best in hands of indie developers.
3. Open source Soldat. This means just give it out to the world and let the issue sort out by itself. This does not mean hundreds of people will start developing Soldat. It can be seen in most open source projects there still are just 1 or 2 people doing the work while the rest makes small patches. Which is cool but open sourcing brings 3 problems:
a) hacking - since everyone has the source, hacking is easy as pie. But this has another side to it; since everyone has the source they can also produce equally good anti-hacking software. This seems to work with the Quake trilogy games.
Hacking is already a problem now that BattlEye is gone, except right now there's nothing being done to fix that. I doubt that open-sourcing will make this issue any worse. Those who want to cheat can already do that.
If the source is kept closed - the solution would be updating the built-in anti-cheat, but the question is: would there be enough people who can do this kind of work on a (very) regular basis? I think with open source there are better chances of getting frequently-updated anti-cheat.
b) I can't cut off the hand that is feeding me. Soldat is my only source of income and I deserve to get money from it and continue my work on other games. So I still want to sell registrations. This is not impossible with open source, it's a matter of making an appropriate license.
That's understandable, although not very fair since you didn't really support the game or its community and let it get to a state it's in now. :/
Anyway, there's another option I can suggest: get money off donations and possibly in-game ads like many other games do nowadays. If Soldat finally starts looking and playing like a finished game - more people are likely to support it and more people would consider using it for advertising.
Or like you said yourself - just decide about the license and keep the game partially commercial like it is now.
c) another problem is Soldat uses some commercial libraries. If it would go open source this means those libraries would have to be replaced by something else which might take some time to prepare.
Well, preparing alternative libraries is something a new developer team could do as they work on the game. Then, once libraries are replaced, it could go open-source.
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Anyway, it's really nice to finally see some action towards Soldat's future. I just wish it has been done sooner. A lot of time and players have been lost before it got to this point. But I hope that from this point on, Soldat will finally stop going downhill and return to its former glory (or even better).
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Shoozza and L[0ne]R pretty much posted exactly what I was going to write, but I may as well add a few things.
I know Shoozza is always eager to step into the Soldat developers shoes and do some coding, but I am wondering if he is the best choice. We can all see what happened with his Open Soldat.
I don't think that is a very fair connection to make, and a classic straw man fallacy. Building on an existing game (ideally with a team) is very different to writing a whole game from scratch without much support. I think that Shoozza has more than shown his commitment to Soldat throughout the years.
I personally can't think of many people who have done more for Soldat than him (with the obvious exception of you, of course).
He writes hacks to fix bugs when the dev was ignoring them (given, perhaps he had his reasons to). That alone is quite note-worthy. Then we have the fact that he develops ARSSE, chatMod (the first and only hack to have been given support by you to my knowledge), etc. Those two projects only make his commitment to Soldat more obvious.
I personally think he would be a great developer, preferably part of a team though.
2. Sell Soldat entirely for a sum of money that satisfies me and let a professional company further develop it.
I don't think it is very likely that that would end up well. I think the best option would for it to be kept in the long-term community, rather than out-sourcing to a company. Of course, it's your game so you can do whatever you want with it lol.
a) hacking - since everyone has the source, hacking is easy as pie. But this has another side to it; since everyone has the source they can also produce equally good anti-hacking software. This seems to work with the Quake trilogy games.
This may sound ironic coming from a long-term member of AN (and one of the admins), but please hear me out. I have never supported the use of hacks to ruin games, and it annoys me as much as the next person when someone comes in and ruins the server by running riot with hacks. I have only ever been about programming hacks to learn, and perhaps use privately.
Not everyone is of the same opinion however, so lately with BE off, the level of hacking really is a bit ridiculous. Making it open-source could allow some of the anti-hacking systems which have been in development (by Massacre for instance) could really become a real possibility. As L[0ne]R quoted, security through obscurity is no security at all. Sure, it can make it a bit harder to write hacks for, but it also makes it easier for serious exploits to be discovered by the white-hats. Look at most Linux distros, they are very secure for the most part. More secure than Windows for example. This is the magic of open-source software.
b) I can't cut off the hand that is feeding me. Soldat is my only source of income and I deserve to get money from it and continue my work on other games. So I still want to sell registrations. This is not impossible with open source, it's a matter of making an appropriate license.
Yeah I can understand that. That is a decision you will have to come up with alone. Just try and keep in mind the possibility of donations, as you might be surprised by the number of us willing to donate to you.
c) another problem is Soldat uses some commercial libraries. If it would go open source this means those libraries would have to be replaced by something else which might take some time to prepare.
This is really only a short-term problem though. A dev team could replace those libraries with open-source versions given a bit of time. Investing that time to transfer to the new libraries would probably end up being a good thing for Soldat in the long term, and is only a small speedbump.
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Sell it to valve, I need hats.
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I think option 2 would be really good if some real developer picked it up but I'm not sure if that's really going to happen. I don't mind Soldat going commercial and that's pretty much the only downside of a real team of developers picking it up. Of course it's also very likely they'd like to code the game from the scratch or at least redo huge parts of the code so the end result might not be completely similar to what Soldat is right now but that's not necessarily a bad thing at all. And as upside at least we'd get regular updates, proper anti-hack system and much more bug-free game plus likely a nice graphical upgrade as well. As downside, the community would most likely be less involved and then there's the fact that Soldat is probably going to cost money at that point which I don't mind but some people surely will. But like I said, I don't see this happening and I have no idea what kind of money MM is even talking about.
Getting a team of dedicated developers is the next best thing that could happen to Soldat and of course it'll take time for them to get things rolling but as long as they have drive to get things done, I'm sure things will get done. Taking over a project like Soldat is huge job for a single person and we saw how that worked out with Enesce so a team is definitely preferred, though having one main developer to run the team is a good idea so the game will have some direction. Also MM, you mention that Soldat is your source of income and that you want to keep getting money from the registered users which is perfectly fine and makes sense but you do realize that if no one continues developing this game for you, your income will stop in no time? What about the people who will develop this game for you? Are they gonna get paid? You probably should work out some kind of a fair deal. If you can't do that, selling the game will probably make more sense unless you actually can find enough developers who just want to develop the game for the fun of it. But I fear that isn't going to last forever and at some point they'll want part of the revenue and truth is, they're entitled to it. If you don't wanna do that, do consider going open-source.
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I'm looking for SERIOUS volunteers. This IS hard work - I don't know if you imagine. I know Shoozza is always eager to step into the Soldat developers shoes and do some coding, but I am wondering if he is the best choice. We can all see what happened with his Open Soldat.
I don't want to repeat what the others said but I think you're getting it wrong. What Shoozza has done (openSoldat) is in my eyes just an act out of sheer despair. He wanted to contribute long time ago, he even got the sourcecode from you and then suddenly he was rejected to help in developement. Still he didn't give up, made fan-apps and maintained them over time. Then he thought about porting it to Linux, but only since you didn't want it he started the new project, building up a Soldat clone out of nowhere.
It is only understandable that you will lower your interest in it if you still have hopes to join development of Soldat.
Also I don't think we're searching a new developer for the next 5 years. The first priority is to get 1.5.1 done and to maintain it for the next 6 months to make it stable and fix as many bugs as possible. Also we would need some solution for the cheating-problem. When this is done Soldat is in a really good state, so development could focus on new features and improvements (there are lots of suggestions and I'm not talking about vehiculs or dragonflies) and hopefully this will attract new users.
Also I want to say that it wouldn't be a problem if Shoozza would leave Soldat development after.....a year for example. As I said in the beginning: it's not like he needs to be Soldat's last developer. EnEsCe made some great work with fixing bugs and improving Soldat. But still he lost his focus on the development after some time. Then it is just fair to tell the community that you lost your interest or you don't have enough time anymore and we together could decide on a new solution (again (a) new developer(s) or finally open-source).
What I want to stress is this: Soldat IS dying. I think we're all seeing it in terms of active public-servers. Soldat is still lively in the competive scene but this one doesn't attract the new users. Most of the players there play it for more than 1 or 2 years. So if we want this amazing game to live on or to revive it in my opinion we need to act now! So - pls MM - make your decision fast so we can finally get a new release public which will hopefully satisfy the users need and improve the mood in here.
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I can understand your frustration. I'm wondering if open-source is the best way to go. Then you would have the best of options 1 AND 3, as people like Shoozza who always have wanted to be dedicated developers can work on it, but also it would open it up to be developed by anyone who wants to contribute. I could see Soldat go back to the way it was in 1.2.1, but with the new poly types included. Some of the things that Enesce added have to be undone - like the portal. I just want to open up soldat and be on the server within 10 seconds. I think having the source within the hands of a dedicated community will renew interest in the game and people who have played the game for years will then be that much closer to it. It would mean so much to true hardcore dedicated soldat players who can also code. So the source would also be fiercely protected against asshole hackers. And speaking of hacking, even if the source is out there, how hard is it to do server-side version checking and checking for edited or changed code.
I'm in school studying programming myself and who knows, after some experience, in a few years (and after learning Delphi), if Soldat is open source - I might just contribute too. I have ideas of things I would love to see possible with Soldat that would not at all interupt gameplay, the interface, networking, etc. For example, one thing I would love to see that I posted once in the OpenSoldat forums, was to see a camera function that would allow broadcasting of a game - panning and zooming in and out of a map (to the point that you could display the entire map with all players on it). That way tournaments, such as the finals could be watched live.
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Well, finally something happens.
I think the best choice is to make it open-source, with shoozza and 2 more as main devs so other people will be able to contribute, but the game will have a good developing team. But getting delphi programmers isn't easy, as it would be if the game was written in C, etc. Also, the cheaters will be able to do something good for the game, like an anticheat system.
Just my opinion.
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I'd go for 1st option. Form a decent dev team. :)
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a decent dev team should do the trick imo! And if not then try another option!
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Even if a temporary solution, get at least one person who's readily available and interested to develop Soldat now - the candidates are already stated by other posters in this topic. Players are dying for an update that has been delayed for too long. We don't want to wait another year before we get someone to take another few months to finish up the update. We can implement a long-term solution later.
But I'd say no to number 2.
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glad theres finally something happening ;D really was starting to think i would have to quit
I think choice 1 best option.
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Option #2. We need money. There needs to be a good anti-cheat here, and nobody is willing to give up any money. Give it to a professional company with a lot of money and let them pay for it.
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you know, the thing is, it's not the company who'd have to pay for anti-cheat. It would be players. I've seen another project die immediately after selling it to a professional company. Just lost the spirit.
Dev team ofc, if it's not possible --> open source.
F12 for Shoozza.
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2. Sell Soldat entirely for a sum of money that satisfies me and let a professional company further develop it.
good idea.
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Option #2. We need money.
We? You won't see anything from it.
Dev team ofc, if it's not possible --> open source.
F12 for Shoozza.
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It's easier to just form a developer team and let them get things done, than also get them to release the source code, handle all the licensing stuff and whatnot.
I'd say that #1 is the way to go. Just have proper release cycle(+6 releases a month, at least every two months), have some anti-debugging and code obfuscating measures in place and you're good to go. I believe it would decrease the amount of hacks and hackers drastically. There's LOTS to do with the code to make it hard to go around, similar techniques are being used by software protection schemes, malware and anti-malware software. It's just matter of reverse engineering and trying to stop others from doing it.
Shoozza is completely other league than EnEsCe for example. What EnEsCe didn't fix with IDE + Delphi, Shoozza fixed with hex editor and machine code.
Selling the game to a company is the worst possible thing to happen to this community. For MM, it may be the best one financial-wise.
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Option #2. We need money.
We? You won't see anything from it.
Dev team ofc, if it's not possible --> open source.
F12 for Shoozza.
He meant the community of Soldat needs money to be going into Soldat to help with anti-hacking and such.
I vote 1), with more then one person developing. I think that would help with what happened with Enesce and MM becoming disinterested and speed up development.
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There are three options and three problems.
1. If we ever were able to find a dedicated developer he/she would eventually face the same problems as MM and EnEsCe have. It's not easy to get motivation for a work you don't technically get paid at all. That's the real problem of free games. One day our possible prospective developer/developer team has more important things to do in their lives. Then MM is posting once again announcements how Soldat needs new developers.
2. Since when have professional companies done something just because they are kind and care about tiny lonely gamers? The ugly truth is that private companies want and need to make money in order to continue their work. If Soldat were sold for some kind of professional company, it's more than likely that Soldat would become a game with a price tag.
3. If Soldat goes open source, can we be sure that the development would go on by itself? Open Source projects such as Mozilla or Open Office have managed to survive because they develope softwares, which are actually needed. Since Soldat is a small game that nobody knows about, I wouldn't be surprised if it died out in a year or two after opening the source code.
On the other hand I would be positively surprised if giving soldat out to the world would sort out the issue by itself. As MM said, it would be cool. Unfortunately people tend to be lazy and too busy in this world. It's a damn bad combination...
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If my say has any... say... I would attempt to go for #1 first, if possible. The reasons are mainly because of reasons not to do the other two. With option #2, it is a bit unpredictable, and we don't know if they will listen to the community, or what. With option #3, I want you to still make money off of Soldat, and you do too. This is mainly in addition to what others said, which I'm not going to bother repeating. I was always stingy on the whole idea of open sourcing a project, since it feels like you lose all control on the "main developer" or if it'll split off into multiple projects heading in different directions, becoming incapable with one-another, and possible splitting the community.
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I agree with ramirez and zakath, Shoozza, Toumaz and Fryer are really capable of doing it however, I would also add to the team you two lads. So my suggestion for new dev team is: Shoozza, Toumaz, Fryer, zakath and ramirez.
I would choose something like this - not open sourcing it but not being super-selective on who can work on it. There are a number of people in the community who are very capable developers. I would say that community members who are known for being strong developers and trustworthy be given subversion access as long as they work together to accomplish the same goals. That way then can then commit together.
I can't stress how important it would be for this group to work together to accomplish the same goals. You can't risk having someone working on making protocol changes that would require a version release while nobody else knows.
I really don't get the feeling that the code base or roadmap for Soldat are in a position where handling it as a fully open project is a feasible idea.
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Option #2. We need money. There needs to be a good anti-cheat here, and nobody is willing to give up any money. Give it to a professional company with a lot of money and let them pay for it.
No one will do something for free. We will either have 10000 adds or we will have to pay money to play. (or he's just getting like 1000$)
I just keep wondering how someone can't be interested at all in his only source of income.
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b) I can't cut off the hand that is feeding me. Soldat is my only source of income and I deserve to get money from it and continue my work on other games. So I still want to sell registrations. This is not impossible with open source, it's a matter of making an appropriate license.
I don't think that open-sourcing Soldat NOW is the best idea but still I want to comment on this:
I don't know how many licenses you sell per month, but I don't think they're many. Like less than 10.
Maybe even less than 5. So with the old licence fee of ...ehm.. something about ~10$ I think you earn approximately 70$ a month. If you then add the fact that you gave discounts or free licenses when someone bought many (>3) licenses and now this "pay-what-you-want"-offer I would lower it to ~60$.
I for myself wouldn't have a problem to give you 2-5€ (EUR because I'm german :P) every month if I know that Soldat is actively under development. If I know that a dedicated developer-team maintains it and while communicating with the community also adds new features. Also I think that we could get at least 15 people who would pay the same amount. By making it open-source also all the additional registration features would become standard features. So everyones the same, no kewl pro-gamers with a star (as if it ever meant something).
But still I think it would be better to choose the first option and now give the source-code to some trustworthy dedicated people (the ones already mentioned in this thread).
Why? FliesLikeABrick just got it right:
"I really don't get the feeling that the code base or roadmap for Soldat are in a position where handling it as a fully open project is a feasible idea."
So let the developer-team release 1.5.1 and let them make use of the update-feature more often. Let them maintain the game for about (half) a year. Then we would have
- a better, stable version
- some developers who know the code
- maybe even some new "registered-only"-features because of the bigger manpower (but I wouldn't recommend this one, because of the following)
Then you can go and make it open-source. Now we have developers who know the spaghetti-code, who could write manuals for the other new coders who would want to contribute and give advises. They also could have prepared the source-code before releasing it so the in-code-comments would help further development.
You would lose your income but then the above mentioned model (monthly donations) would step in. You could even bind these donations to the Portal service (which I hope will not be abandoned but just delayed after the important bugs are fixed) so that people who donate will get some advantages on this server-side Portal thingy.
I know it would be hard work and mainly depend on the new developers, how well and of course how fast they get the fixes done and make Soldat more stable. And also on the amount of money you afterwards receive of the donations. But imo it would be a great chance to bring Soldat to the next level.
So, MM and community, what do you think about this idea?
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I would choose something like this - not open sourcing it but not being super-selective on who can work on it.
But still I think it would be better to choose the first option and now give the source-code to some trustworthy dedicated people (the ones already mentioned in this thread).
Why? FliesLikeABrick just got it right:
"I really don't get the feeling that the code base or roadmap for Soldat are in a position where handling it as a fully open project is a feasible idea."
So let the developer-team release 1.5.1 and let them make use of the update-feature more often. Let them maintain the game for about (half) a year. Then we would have
- a better, stable version
- some developers who know the code
- maybe even some new "registered-only"-features because of the bigger manpower (but I wouldn't recommend this one, because of the following)
Then you can go and make it open-source. Now we have developers who know the spaghetti-code, who could write manuals for the other new coders who would want to contribute and give advises. They also could have prepared the source-code before releasing it so the in-code-comments would help further development.
You would lose your income but then the above mentioned model (monthly donations) would step in. You could even bind these donations to the Portal service (which I hope will not be abandoned but just delayed after the important bugs are fixed) so that people who donate will get some advantages on this server-side Portal thingy.
I know it would be hard work and mainly depend on the new developers, how well and of course how fast they get the fixes done and make Soldat more stable. And also on the amount of money you afterwards receive of the donations. But imo it would be a great chance to bring Soldat to the next level.
So, MM and community, what do you think about this idea?
I really like that option. Separately options #1 and #3 have some major disadvantages, but what FLAB and Illuminatus just suggested is pretty much both of those options taking the best out of each other, allowing more control over the development and source code, but at the same time not completely cutting it off from the community.
And I would totally donate every now and then... if I had a job <_<
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Yeah, I wouldn't lock it into being made open source at 6 months or so, but I suspect that any community developers like what Illuminatus and I said would want to make it open source once they could. I would say "let it become open source when they think it is ready and MM is ok with it"
It isn't something we would want to rush at the risk of destroying Soldat forever.
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I really don't know how open sourcing works as a whole, so go easy on me.
IF Soldat becomes open source, would it be impossible to add little adverts into the game and give the revenue to MM? I wouldn't mind one or two ads in the menu, as long as they are neatly placed and not annoying. Then again, ads in-game are a big no for me.
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IF Soldat becomes open source, would it be impossible to add little adverts into the game and give the revenue to MM? I wouldn't mind one or two ads in the menu, as long as they are neatly placed and not annoying.
Think of it. If these ads are just small images which will be automatically downloaded (Question is, at what time? When does my Soldat-client connect to some server online? Afaik the first time when it connects to the lobby server. So if I don't load the lobby-server-list the ads wouldn't show up.) and then be placed into the menu, then it is quite easy to get ride of them since it's all on the client's side. But if it's all bound to Portal, so you need to login when you want to play online using the lobby, these ads could be downloaded directly from the server (at best from the same IP/domain on which the Portal-server resides, so that you can't block the ads and still connect to Portal) and then be shown in the menu it would be harder. Since they still lie somewhere on your harddrive (of course obfuscated and maybe integrated in some file which Soldat also uses for other purposes) manipulation is still possible.
Think of a website: Everything you see when you visit one is just the content (text, images, video, ...) your browser shows from the temp on your harddrive. So you can manipulate it afterwards. Or you can block the ad even before it is downloaded to your PC by blocking the specific adress/domain (like adblock plus does it). So it doesn't even show up. The only ads I see online are these incorporated in a specific file, like ads in swf-files. For example flash-games or stuff. Either I download the whole file or none. So I can't block only the ads.
Somehow like that it could be done with Soldat.
In addition you could send some signal every...10 sec..whatever and make sure the ads are shown in the menu. If you recognize someone is blocking them somehow you could (temporarily) ban his Portal account. So no online ads but also no online play.
Not that I'm recommending all/any of this (since it's not really "Indie"-like or would fit to Soldat and won't be worth the effort) I'm just talking about the possibilities afaik. [pigtail]
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I'm all for getting a committed dev team, but the thought of communication and understanding failures could lead to severe issues.
If you want a dev team working on Soldat, you'll need a head dev, and quite frankly, I am yet to see anyone in the Soldat community with that kind of experience. (Leading a team of distanced dev's)
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If I was MM then I would go for the second option.
Benefits:
1. MM will get a reasonable amount of money if some big gaming company wants to buy this game.
2. Most likely the bugs will be fixed + game itself will be develop [(more features and stuff like that) probably anti-cheat system too!]
3. Soldat will have more more players.
Cons
1. None I can think of.
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You probably forgot about Monsoonix.
If it would work MM would still use it today for real ads.
Ads are mostly annoying. They can make the game less fun.
The goal is to see more people playing Soldat and more people buying it.
Ads seem to work against that.
They might work if they are not too annoying though.
On the other side selling game-licenses if the game is opensouce is still possible.
I already told MM how it could be done:
Just look at MySQL. It has a GPL and Commercial license.
People have to sign a CLA to get their code accepted.
The issue I see is with this idea is that MM doesn't work on Soldat at all.
Which means the community could fork Soldat and do stuff their own way.
And since everyone knows that the community has been unhappy with how the things went for some time now it's not a thing that couldn't happen.
The dev team idea doesn't have this risk.
So it's probably the best solution for now.
Still getting the game released under a opensource license, and hoping this could keep it alive, is the long term goal.
Selling the game to a company is IMHO equal to shutting everything down and deleting all files.
The company could do anything with Soldat... Who knows what their reason for buying the rights for the game is.
But their goal is probably not the happiness of the community.
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1. MM will get a reasonable amount of money if some big gaming company wants to buy this game.
1) I don't see this happening because the game as it is now is in a horrible state. If somebody wanted to buy it - it would've probably been sold long ago.
2. Most likely the bugs will be fixed + game itself will be develop [(more features and stuff like that) probably anti-cheat system too!]
2) The game will develop, features will be added and the bugs will be fixed, yes. But there's absolutely no guarantee that it'll be the same game that we all love. Most companies care about getting as much money as they can. And if they decide that making Soldat to be "a game for everyone" will bring them more money - they'll do that. They won't care about more serious gamers like us.
3. Soldat will have more more players.
3) It might have more players, but not as many as Soldat used to have. If it becomes something as generic as Booster Trooper - players will quickly lose interest.
So it's not all as simple as you think.
Ads are mostly annoying. They can make the game less fun.
The goal is to see more people playing Soldat and more people buying it.
Ads seem to work against that.
It all depends on how they're implemented. Something that looks completely out of place or takes up half the screen is bad. But like I mentioned already, some games use in-game objects to display ads. Here are a few examples from Battlefield 2142 - the billboards that are placed on the maps display real ads:
Screeny 1 (http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3168/2328106464_a043ed8a8b_z.jpg?zz=1)
Screeny 2 (http://www.next-gen.biz/files/in_game_ads_Battlefield_2142.jpg)
I wouldn't mind seeing something like that in Soldat (never thought I'd say this, but in fact, I actually WANT to see those kinds of ads in Soldat maps).
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Well, I felt sad ever since MM decided to abandon soldat for link-dead, that was pretty much the beginning of the end.
But, Just get a developer-team to get a STABILE, WORKING version and fix bugs. Then you can sell registrations, and continue to have small updates on soldat.
I think soldat-developents biggest mistakes have been to add so many new features before all the current buggs has been fixed.
MM If you don't trust the developement-team the comunity put together, sell it.
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Maybe sell the game to steam. Steam always seems to update games, even the very old ones like Day of Defeat.
If thats not working then option 1 and 2 are both fine. Get a dev team with 1 leader. IMO Shoozza looks like that person and 2 great working guys under him. Also if Shoozza became that leader, he should pick those people working with him for the best communication.
I chose Shoozza because he's fully motivated and experienced to do this job and seems the right guy!.
Soldat might make it actually somewhere now this announcement has been made.
Make up your mind Michal.
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If I was MM then I would go for the second option.
Benefits:
1. MM will get a reasonable amount of money if some big gaming company wants to buy this game.
2. Most likely the bugs will be fixed + game itself will be develop [(more features and stuff like that) probably anti-cheat system too!]
3. Soldat will have more more players.
Cons
1. None I can think of.
One major con is that nothing is done for free. So even IF you are registered you will get some cons to pay them as well.
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I'm more into the 1st option...
Others are just not logical enough for me...
I vote F12 for Shoozza..
Because as a "Soldatter" I can vote and I can trust Shoozza on this and no one can say anything againts it :3
Get a dev team with 1 leader. IMO Shoozza looks like that person and 2 great working guys under him. Also if Shoozza became that leader, he should pick those people working with him for the best communication.
I chose Shoozza because he's fully motivated and experienced to do this job and seems the right guy!.
Yeah, just like this guy said..
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Maybe sell the game to steam. Steam always seems to update games, even the very old ones like Day of Defeat.
If thats not working then option 1 and 2 are both fine. Get a dev team with 1 leader. IMO Shoozza looks like that person and 2 great working guys under him. Also if Shoozza became that leader, he should pick those people working with him for the best communication.
I chose Shoozza because he's fully motivated and experienced to do this job and seems the right guy!.
Soldat might make it actually somewhere now this announcement has been made.
Make up your mind Michal.
Steam? Are you out of your mind?
Do you have any idea how much damage that would do to the Soldat community and the game itself?
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Do you have any idea how much damage that would do to the Soldat community and the game itself?
None. Valve corp is not one of these "Bobby Koticks" who dont give a bloody f**k about the community and game.
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Do you have any idea how much damage that would do to the Soldat community and the game itself?
None. Valve corp is not one of these "Bobby Koticks" who dont give a bloody f**k about the community and game.
Well I'm not so sure - it's a big company after all, they are less likely to care about small communities like ours. Not to mention that not everyone wants to use the bloated Steam and play with bots when Steam servers are down.
But in any case, it's not Steam or Valve that updates games. They only update their own games, and other games on Steam they just sell.
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P.S. I really hope we won't have to wait another several months for MM's decision..
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Do you have any idea how much damage that would do to the Soldat community and the game itself?
None. Valve corp is not one of these "Bobby Koticks" who dont give a bloody f**k about the community and game.
Well I'm not so sure - it's a big company after all, they are less likely to care about small communities like ours. Not to mention that not everyone wants to use the bloated Steam and play with bots when Steam servers are down.
But in any case, it's not Steam or Valve that updates games. They only update their own games, and other games on Steam they just sell.
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P.S. I really hope we won't have to wait another several months for MM's decision..
Indeed, pretty much read my mind there.
@Foxconn: Do you every get tired of this advertising crappy game clients bullshit?
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Do you have any idea how much damage that would do to the Soldat community and the game itself?
None. Valve corp is not one of these "Bobby Koticks" who dont give a bloody f**k about the community and game.
Well I'm not so sure - it's a big company after all, they are less likely to care about small communities like ours. Not to mention that not everyone wants to use the bloated Steam and play with bots when Steam servers are down.
But in any case, it's not Steam or Valve that updates games. They only update their own games, and other games on Steam they just sell.
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P.S. I really hope we won't have to wait another several months for MM's decision..
What loner said (emphasis mine)
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@Foxconn: Do you every get tired of this advertising crappy game clients bulls**t?
Nah, i turned adverts off.
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Maybe sell the game to steam. Steam always seems to update games, even the very old ones like Day of Defeat.
If thats not working then option 1 and 2 are both fine. Get a dev team with 1 leader. IMO Shoozza looks like that person and 2 great working guys under him. Also if Shoozza became that leader, he should pick those people working with him for the best communication.
I chose Shoozza because he's fully motivated and experienced to do this job and seems the right guy!.
Soldat might make it actually somewhere now this announcement has been made.
Make up your mind Michal.
Steam? Are you out of your mind?
Do you have any idea how much damage that would do to the Soldat community and the game itself?
I was just giving a suggestion.
And it would work if both option 1 and 3 are not going to be chosen.
If MM wants to make some money out of it and makes a deal with steam, he might get more then just 1 dollar per reg key. Actually he would make the reg money AND the game itself.
Not giving MM ideas, but if this is what he decides in the end, we can't do shit about it.
Ofcourse no one probably wants to see this happening, but thats not up to us ;[. EXCEPT if we actually find some motivated & interested developers.
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OK I'm glad we had this talk :).
I'm currently biased with what FliesLikeABrick wrote:
I would choose something like this - not open sourcing it but not being super-selective on who can work on it. There are a number of people in the community who are very capable developers. I would say that community members who are known for being strong developers and trustworthy be given subversion access as long as they work together to accomplish the same goals. That way then can then commit together.
We can try that and later on depending on the results decide to open-source it or not. I'll have a word with people interested in being a dev and let you know what's next.
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I hope that the competitive community will have the heaviest word on which direction the development should continue, just as it has with the WM.
But suggestions aside for now, I'm glad that something's happening. I'm sure the new developers will do fine.
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Why would the competitive community have the heaviest word here? That makes absolutely no sense. The reason why competitive scene has more say as far as WM is concerned is because most experienced players are there and they have a deep understanding of the game's balance and also because many of the beta testers play in the competitive scene. However, that has absolutely nothing to do with this decision. The decision is MM's alone and if MM wants to hear what the community thinks, everyone should have an equal voice in this one.
Anyway, I also like the sound of FLAB's suggestion. :)
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I hope that the competitive community will have the heaviest word
Yea, I know, it's about knowing the game better etc., but still, this is about 2 things: fixing bugs (which requires the experienced community) and getting some new players, so both "teams" should be at least equal (and if I had to choose which one's voice should be more important, I'd go for the newcomers actually...)
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I hope this won't take much more time because I can't wait much longer for 1.5.1
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The story of Michal Marcintollski
MM creates Soldat, rapid changes everywhere from listening to the community he is involved, releases a patch every few months.
MM banks up and drops the game and only using the community to promote work on a spiritual successor which no one is interested in, looks about as boring as the original prince of Persia.
Refuses to continue work on the game keeping him alive and fed... New people involved implement pointless game mechanics such as self-bink which no one wanted to try and make it "harder", it does the exact opposite and the game slows down so much in 1-3 years that people rely on nades over aiming. Loads of the vets leave and dev(s) keep adding pointless s**t insisting it's needed.
Puts the source code and entire game in the hands of the biggest c**thole and hacker who listens to no one.
MM drops BE without implementing any sort of thought out plan to provide an alternative anti-cheat. In between making his usual half-patch every 2 years Enesce realizes it's going to be too much work without it and jumps ship never fixing anything and only ever adding more problems to the bug cesspool and a giant white box, relying on other devs to hack the game to show them how to fix it. with no BE and a stagnating version the game declines.
After over a year of weapon balance beta testing and on a game that still feels like an alpha version after 8 years, MM basically tells us 1.5.1 isn't coming out. No chance of open source and no chance of selling it, he wants people to work on it for free or basically nothing while he rolls in money so he can work on a game that he's essentially making for our community yet everyone wanted him to fix the current game and problems around it.
PLEASE SOLDAT PLAYERS, PLEASE FIX MY GAME, PLEASE PAY MY BILLS, OH BTW GL WITH THE GAME BAI LOL!!!
Thank f**k i never payed this jewish polak ****** a cent Worst of all, never puts in dragonflies!
tl; dr
>MM's face when he makes link dead
(http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/3310/mmtrolls40000people.png)
Just a chip in from roo. Sums it up quiet nicely, that being, the opinion of most of the Australian community.
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amen.
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Shut the fuck up asshat. You arnt included in the community.
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Oh look whos saying that! Hahahahaha!
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Shush...your from broadmeadows LOL. Enough said mate.
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I don't know the guy who wrote that, but I see lots of truth there.
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Let me give the new devs a good advice. It took MM 7 years to figure out.
it’s amazing how much you can accomplish if you just sit and code
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I lolled so much about Jazzas post hahahaahhaa
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Shut the f**k up asshat. You arnt included in the community.
This.
I'm glad I don't see you around the Aus pub servers, Clownman.. unless you're aliasing again.
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I am very impressed how quickly normal threads turn into flamewars. ;]
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yup, open source or a very well selected team that will work well together.
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Still no valid response from MM. This is getting really annoying...I wonder if he talked with anyone interested in developing soldat...
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OK I'm glad we had this talk :).
I'm currently biased with what FliesLikeABrick wrote:
I would choose something like this - not open sourcing it but not being super-selective on who can work on it. There are a number of people in the community who are very capable developers. I would say that community members who are known for being strong developers and trustworthy be given subversion access as long as they work together to accomplish the same goals. That way then can then commit together.
We can try that and later on depending on the results decide to open-source it or not. I'll have a word with people interested in being a dev and let you know what's next.
he's working on it ... give him more than two days. I'm sure you know how hard it is to get in touch with people all over the world within one or two days.
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OK I'm glad we had this talk :).
I'm currently biased with what FliesLikeABrick wrote:
I would choose something like this - not open sourcing it but not being super-selective on who can work on it. There are a number of people in the community who are very capable developers. I would say that community members who are known for being strong developers and trustworthy be given subversion access as long as they work together to accomplish the same goals. That way then can then commit together.
We can try that and later on depending on the results decide to open-source it or not. I'll have a word with people interested in being a dev and let you know what's next.
he's working on it ... give him more than two days. I'm sure you know how hard it is to get in touch with people all over the world within one or two days.
Two days? Wait a second...6 November - 1 November gives woot?? 5 days... Pretty much everyone interested in developing soldat idle constantly at #soldat.devs or visit this forums everyday just to check on news - so I'm sure that they can read and response to whatever PM Michal would have sent them either on forums or over IRC...
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Everything about Soldat happens in "Bullet Time" speed ::)
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Lol that's right. ;D ``bullet speed´´
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get some action going on turtles
even my boss wouldn't accept this speed
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OK I'm glad we had this talk :).
I'm currently biased with what FliesLikeABrick wrote:
I would choose something like this - not open sourcing it but not being super-selective on who can work on it. There are a number of people in the community who are very capable developers. I would say that community members who are known for being strong developers and trustworthy be given subversion access as long as they work together to accomplish the same goals. That way then can then commit together.
We can try that and later on depending on the results decide to open-source it or not. I'll have a word with people interested in being a dev and let you know what's next.
he's working on it ... give him more than two days. I'm sure you know how hard it is to get in touch with people all over the world within one or two days.
As much as I'd love to know the final decision about Soldat's future, I do agree that MM could use more time. This decision is not something to be rushed with. Of course I'm not saying we should wait another half a year for his response, but 5 days is too soon. I'd say 2 weeks should be enough (cmon, what's 2 weeks compared to almost 2 years we've been waiting for 1.5.1?)
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1.5.1 could be released by now regardless though
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OK I'm glad we had this talk :).
I'm currently biased with what FliesLikeABrick wrote:
I would choose something like this - not open sourcing it but not being super-selective on who can work on it. There are a number of people in the community who are very capable developers. I would say that community members who are known for being strong developers and trustworthy be given subversion access as long as they work together to accomplish the same goals. That way then can then commit together.
We can try that and later on depending on the results decide to open-source it or not. I'll have a word with people interested in being a dev and let you know what's next.
he's working on it ... give him more than two days. I'm sure you know how hard it is to get in touch with people all over the world within one or two days.
As much as I'd love to know the final decision about Soldat's future, I do agree that MM could use more time. This decision is not something to be rushed with. Of course I'm not saying we should wait another half a year for his response, but 5 days is too soon. I'd say 2 weeks should be enough (cmon, what's 2 weeks compared to almost 2 years we've been waiting for 1.5.1?)
I think 2 days is even too long.
Look how patiently we waited for a new version, and received nothing but some crappy details.
MM should know his soldat players have waited long enough and should do this asap.
Its his responsibility now anyway. so hurry the f*ck up. Being nice ain't working anymore seriously.
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That's bullshit, Meteorisch. Noone is entitled to tell MM anything. It's his game and he may do with it what he wants to do, and if he needs time thinking, it's none of your business to make him come to a conclusion. End of the story.
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What the heck are you expecting?
MM: Hey, wanna develop soldat?!
Shoozza: kk lawl!
Like he said he's going to try and reach a few guys. At least now we have a response from him and some sort of solution, 2 days is not too long.
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whatever i post is useless anyway, this MM needs a kick on the ass, and actually work for what he has created.
Why creating a retarded game like link dead while everyone is focussed on soldat.
Just pisses me off, why the hell would you do such a thing.
If he used to time on soldat instead of LD, soldat would probably be a greater succes then ever. seriously W T F. Well shows what Poland is made of.
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End of story*
And as much as I hate to, I agree with Crusade here, you should learn to wait.
Sure, 1.5.1 took WAY too long, same as MM's appearance in here to clear shit up, but making a decision that will affect his actual livelihood isn't something he can just do in 2 days.
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whatever i post is useless anyway, this MM needs a kick on the ass, and actually work for what he has created.
Why creating a retarded game like link dead while everyone is focussed on soldat.
Just pisses me off, why the hell would you do such a thing.
If he used to time on soldat instead of LD, soldat would probably be a greater succes then ever. seriously W T F. Well shows what Poland is made of.
Listen, you freakin' asshat. Michal Marcinkowski is working hard and trying to do his best. He needs to move on to better things and in his eyes its link dead, so let him do what he wants.
Also, don't go and make fun of his country, his country has nothing to do with this discussion.
Go to hell.
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That's bulls**t, Meteorisch. Noone is entitled to tell MM anything. It's his game and he may do with it what he wants to do, and if he needs time thinking, it's none of your business to make him come to a conclusion. End of the story.
The idea that the customers of a product aren't entitled to tell the creator of the product anything is incredibly absurd
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If he used to time on soldat instead of LD, soldat would probably be a greater succes then ever. seriously W T F. Well shows what Poland is made of.
lol
well, shows how much your argumentation is worth
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The idea that the customers of a product aren't entitled to tell the creator of the product anything is incredibly absurd
After all only those of us who paid for Soldat are really customers as there are no monthly fees and you've never seen Soldat in a shop, right? I was not explaining you couldn't tell MM anything, but not to demand him to make an overhasty decision. This is just too important to be rushed.
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Since everyone's talking about everyone's critical standpoint in light of this situation, id might as well give mine too. After all, its not going to matter anyway.
So. In MY opinion, continue working on LD. Finish it first, since its a new project which has'nt even gone through the first few beta tests- LD v.1 is a good enough start, i'm quite sure there are also a few fans here who want LD to be complete.
Soldat? Leave it to the new devs, if you can find 'em. No, im not suggesting to stop supervising soldat for good, but theres always a little bit of time to check in with the new devs to see how progress is working out.
I would'nt rush this. 2 days to make a critical decision about such thing's isn't going to go well. Not by a long-shot.
Oh and Meteorisch,
Try making a game yourself and actually update it often, alone.
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Oh and Meteorisch,
Try making a game yourself and actually update it often, alone.
I'd if I had the skills.
Michal Marcinkowski is working hard and trying to do his best.
Also, don't go and make fun of his country, his country has nothing to do with this discussion.
Go to hell.
We can't really say now that he is working hard is he. Look at all those years.
Also, have you ever met a few Pole players in this game? Try playing some gathers with em or leagues and see what i'm talking about.
I got warned for my post but people insulted me. How fairsome.
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Thanks for pointing out that you don't have any knowledge about making games nor programming in general. People with that level of understanding of what you need to do to make updates, and that as often as possible, shouldn't say anything about that.
You say we can't say he's working hard on LD? Prove the opposite.
You judge whole Poland based on the image of the average 10-year-old boy playing his first shooter game. Awesome.
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imagine what kind of image we would have about the netherlands if we based our opinion solely on meteorich's behavior lol
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We can't really say now that he is working hard is he
I´m following Link-Dead´s Dev-Log for around 1 year now and can say without any hesitation that he is...
it is sometimes updated daily, and there have been LOT of changes.
Stop to have a say in things you obviously don´t have any clue of.
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I know finding the dev team may take a while but its 2010 and arranging a meeting over the internet shouldn't be that hard. MM should atleast release something to get rid of all these hackers, im banning dozens on a daily basis. I'm hosting few public servers and I guess everyone who's hosting soldat servers could agree with me.
Also, have you ever met a few Pole players in this game? Try playing some gathers with em or leagues and see what i'm talking about.
Soldat was and always will be filled with polish players, i'd suggest you stopping whining. I've seen bad nl players also and it's not about their nationality its more about mentality.
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Everything about Soldat happens in "Bullet Time" speed ::)
MM just got some serious aim-lag. :)
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We can't really say now that he is working hard is he
I´m following Link-Dead´s Dev-Log for around 1 year now and can say without any hesitation that he is...
it is sometimes updated daily, and there have been LOT of changes.
And I can add to this that he posted at least one new build every week to the private alpha forum.
This November we already had 5 new builds. So pls don't claim stuff you can't prove.
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And I can add to this that he posted at least one new build every week to the private alpha forum.
This November we already had 5 new builds. So pls don't claim stuff you can't prove.
So he's released 5 builds for LD in a week but hasn't communicated progress on Soldat, the source of his income, beyond "I think we'll do this"
Excellent
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Just look at it this way, MM recruited nsc to take over the development of soldat, so that he can pursue other interests. A few months, even years later, nsc starts to screw things up because of OTHER interests. And then everyone starts to get pissed because of this.
As a result, he in turn resigns because he just could'nt handle the 'pressure' after so many years. And now that he's gone, MM is FORCED to come back and solve the matter because of the community.
Don't you think it's a lil bit extreme to actually start piling all the crap on MM when he already left soldat a year ago?
Do you think one could even get that much momentum to go back to a 'lost' interest in such a short time?
Do you think MM even wants to?
And please, don't give me the 'its his obligation to please the community' because he is not obligated to anything. It's HIS game, its HIS money, its HIS popularity that he has gained throughout the past years because of soldat., and ultimately, its HIS decision to do what he think is right for HIMSELF
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Don't you think it's a lil bit extreme to actually start piling all the crap on MM when he already left soldat a year ago?
Do you think one could even get that much momentum to go back to a 'lost' interest in such a short time?
Do you think MM even wants to?
And please, don't give me the 'its his obligation to please the community' because he is not obligated to anything. It's HIS game, its HIS money, its HIS popularity that he has gained throughout the past years because of soldat., and ultimately, its HIS decision to do what he think is right for HIMSELF
he's the only one who can do something right now. And if he doesn't, this game will die completely and his only source of income will be cut off. Stop this "LEAVE MM ALONE" crap please
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he's the only one who can do something right now. And if he doesn't, this game will die completely and his only source of income will be cut off.
I'm sure of that. But do you think rushing him any further would actually make a difference? think about it. its his decision that counts. Not yours.
Stop this "LEAVE MM ALONE" crap please
i never was defending MM in any way. Im just saying this from a persona standpoint as a modder. try making an ambitious mod with pwnz0r graphics and 1337 sounds effects and such. take Espadon's Halo mod for example, after at least a year in development, that mod never took off, since he could'nt finish it.
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he's the only one who can do something right now. And if he doesn't, this game will die completely and his only source of income will be cut off.
I'm sure of that. But do you think rushing him any further would actually make a difference? think about it. its his decision that counts. Not yours.
You're right it's literally impossible to influence someone else's decision and thus we should just shut up and be passive about it
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Wow... what a shit load of bullshit... all this arguing and carrying on about MM and obligations etc...
Can I just point out, Soldat lost it's popularity a long time ago. There are a few of us that still hang on, because we believe in the game. I've stopped playing, due to the excessive hacking and shit... so I don't know how much my opinion is worth here... but:
MM is the creator. It's his baby. He made a living off it... and then walked away. He left it in the hands of a developer who wasn't dedicated, who caved under pressure and resigned. He's come back now, to clean things up. Might I say, a bit late... but I guess it's better late than never.
How many people play Soldat these days? Do you honestly think getting new Devs behind the game will actually bring the players back? Will it really be worth it? MM, I think you need to find another way to support yourself... because Soldat won't keep you afloat for much longer.
Releasing source code may actually help the game, but the risk comes along that some other wannabe will come along and use the code to make his own version of Soldat. This turd will then sell his game to a big name developer and make his millions. Then what happens? Or, some other turd comes along... takes Soldat and adds cars and tanks to it, and ports it to Xbox live or some sh!t... Do you want the game to come down to this?
If you go this route, just release parts of the code.
I say, let the game die... or figure out some way to get the players back. Sell it, or advertise the fuck out of it... Make it worth your while. But be prepared for the day when Soldat eventually dies.
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Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy are you still here :|||||||||||
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he's the only one who can do something right now. And if he doesn't, this game will die completely and his only source of income will be cut off.
I'm sure of that. But do you think rushing him any further would actually make a difference? think about it. its his decision that counts. Not yours.
You're right it's literally impossible to influence someone else's decision and thus we should just shut up and be passive about it
Actually, influencing someone's opinions and decisions is the easiest thing in the world, it's only impossible on the internet.
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he's the only one who can do something right now. And if he doesn't, this game will die completely and his only source of income will be cut off.
I'm sure of that. But do you think rushing him any further would actually make a difference? think about it. its his decision that counts. Not yours.
You're right it's literally impossible to influence someone else's decision and thus we should just shut up and be passive about it
Actually, influencing someone's opinions and decisions is the easiest thing in the world, it's only impossible on the internet.
That's exactly my point.
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Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy are you still here :|||||||||||
His name says everything - he's collecting bones left after decaying soldat.
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Actually, influencing someone's opinions and decisions is the easiest thing in the world, it's only impossible on the internet.
(he was being sarcastic)
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How many people play Soldat these days?
*click* (http://rr.soldat.pl/?country=&os=&version=&be=&bots=&real=&survival=&advanced=&pw=&wm=&players=>=&sort=map&dir=down)
some other wannabe will come along and use the code to make his own version of Soldat. This turd will then sell his game to a big name developer and make his millions. Then what happens? Or, some other turd comes along... takes Soldat and adds cars and tanks to it, and ports it to Xbox live
Bullshit. Won't happen. We would have at least two popular forks. I actually think it will be just one, like the following scenario:
- The original game maintained by some/one old Soldat lover(s).
- One fork which has the above version as the coding-basis plus some added new features and maybe other big changes like more weapons, better graphic-effects, etc.
I say, let the game die... or figure out some way to get the players back. Sell it, or advertise the f**k out of it... Make it worth your while. But be prepared for the day when Soldat eventually dies.
I show you the "way to get the players back":
- Get (a) new developer(s).
- Release a new version which shows some great amount of bugfixes.
- People gonna try it out and perceive the potential it has.
- Now with regularly updates the game will live along.
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I show you the "way to get the players back":
- Get (a) new developer(s).
- Release a new version which shows some great amount of bugfixes.
- People gonna try it out and perceive the potential it has.
- Now with regularly updates the game will live along.
Indeed. Even that small glimpse of hope in form of MM's post made me want to play again... a little.
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Actually, influencing someone's opinions and decisions is the easiest thing in the world, it's only impossible on the internet.
(he was being sarcastic)
Exactly, I was supporting him.
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Lurker here for EONS... soldat nickname Mox[PT]
I think many of you are misjudging MM intelligence, for real... this Soldat problem isn't new... its symptom weren't new or hidden... as a game soldat is dead already... you reap what you sow (you didn't want to deal with it)... i just hope LD have as much success as soldat or even more, coz soldat(as it is) has gone byebye... likewise my faith in you as a developer (i know it means shit, but im just letting you know)
I hope for yourown sake that you learn with your mistakes, like i hoped to learn with this one
my 2 cents were given...
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It's not dead, look how many players circulate through soldat everyday.. It's dying, not dead.
But people start to lose their interest, when same version is staying and isn't developed. You were really generous, BTW. This pay-what-you-want is a bad thing people can pay just 2 cents as Mister whitdemon did.
I drawed a little map. It shows how people active to new version. It's bad map, I know..
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Did you just pull that graph out of your hat, or is it ACTUALLY based on real figures?
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Did you just pull that graph out of your hat, or is it ACTUALLY based on real figures?
out of his pooper... simply another insult to soldat memory
@Monsteri misinterpret my comment isn't gona help you making point...
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Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy are you still here :|||||||||||
I could say the same to you.
I've been watching this space, hoping for a day to come when we can actually see hacks being blocked and the game is playable again.
You could say I'm plankton, I just wanna see something happen with the game to stop the arguing and bitching..
Bulls**t. Won't happen. We would have at least two popular forks. I actually think it will be just one, like the following scenario:
- The original game maintained by some/one old Soldat lover(s).
- One fork which has the above version as the coding-basis plus some added new features and maybe other big changes like more weapons, better graphic-effects, etc.
The fact is, we already have that. We have Soldat, and we have OpenSoldat. Do we really need more?
show you the "way to get the players back":
- Get (a) new developer(s).
- Release a new version which shows some great amount of bugfixes.
- People gonna try it out and perceive the potential it has.
- Now with regularly updates the game will live along.
Hmm, the first suggestion is where we are stuck right now.
The second one is also one we're stuck on... the same goddamn thing we've been stuck on for many months.
Yea... they may try it out, but I think the ship has already sailed, hit an iceberg... and is sinking. Show me a bunch of people who are willing to patch the holes, help get the numbers back up... and I'll believe that this game has a fighting chance.
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The fact is, we already have that. We have Soldat, and we have OpenSoldat. Do we really need more?
In fact oS is "dead". I put that in quotes, because Shoozza is taking a break until he feels he's really capable of writing a whole new game. Read more here (http://opensoldat.u13.net/forum/index.php?topic=134.0).
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The fact is, we already have that. We have Soldat, and we have OpenSoldat. Do we really need more?
In fact oS is "dead". I put that in quotes, because Shoozza is taking a break until he feels he's really capable of writing a whole new game. Read more here (http://opensoldat.u13.net/forum/index.php?topic=134.0).
...and so we're left with just Soldat.
Where is MM?
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The fact is, we already have that. We have Soldat, and we have OpenSoldat. Do we really need more?
In fact oS is "dead". I put that in quotes, because Shoozza is taking a break until he feels he's really capable of writing a whole new game. Read more here (http://opensoldat.u13.net/forum/index.php?topic=134.0).
...and so we're left with just Soldat.
Where is MM?
Counting moneyzzzz. Seriously, he's actively working on LD. It entered open alpha stage (or something like that) - where to test unfinished game you have pay MM what you can afford just to get binaries. Of course it don't assure you of getting full version - for this you will have to pay separately.
EDIT: Writing "full" I meant "finished" after alpha, beta and RC stages...
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Lol, MM released an LD beta and he thinks we'll pay for it.
I think he deleted my comment at his blog. It was like "SCAM ALERT, do NOT pay! He might stop developing ANY DAY!" haha
I wonder how many people registered soldat last months when he announced to do a special register thing cause 1.5.1 was 'almost coming'. Pure scam
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Did you just pull that graph out of your hat, or is it ACTUALLY based on real figures?
It's an enlightened guess I base to my experiences. I have played soldat soon 7 years, and I have seen that I don't find so much servers, or full of them after long time from newest soldat version. So when new version is released, I soon find more players on servers. THAT'S WHERE I BASED THAT MAP
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@Monsteri: Basing a map off experience is like so inaccurate. Seriously.
@PQ: Money spins the world, right?
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@PQ: Money spins the world, right?
True, but you have to f**kING WORK FOR IT, f**king f**k sakes. He's not just f**king kidding us anymore. It's not that f**kING bad. Making 2 major new versions in 3 years is NO f**kING JOB. You f**kING gotta realise that he's sleeping for some years. He might be developing some random game right now. But he Hasn't done much about this game in YEARS. I know you all said this a million times. But it's just true. Dont trust the tard. It just seems too many of you do.
edit: This post was made while being drunk. Ignore half of it and realise it's true though.
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insulting will help for sure ! ......
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insulting will help for sure ! ......
Quietly accepting the fact that Soldat is no more doesn't help any better.
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Lol, MM released an LD beta and he thinks we'll pay for it.
it's even an alpha D:
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Yeah soldat totally needs another 5 week breaks, it will bring more life in the game wouldn't it roflmao.
How long can it take to find 3 or less experienced motivated developers. Even without looking I found 1 already.
MM is the one not motivated fixing his shit, so why should we care.
oh btw, hi.
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Meteorisch, could you finally stop talking out of your ass? All this shit you guys produce gets on my nerves.
I agree with Clawbug, though I don't think that insults will help much. Just wait and let a week pass.
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I'm done waiting, and soon enough I'll be done with the game itself.
MM stopped caring years ago, I should've known better, we all should.
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From posts in MM's Link-Dead announcement on his blog:
Trust me, this is taken care of. I’m not just ditching Soldat. It’s gonna be further developed. I just don’t have an official announcement yet.
Maybe he's just procrastinating.
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His announcement that he's finally ditched, and isn't ditching, our beloved soldat, anymore.
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From posts in MM's Link-Dead announcement on his blog:
Trust me, this is taken care of. I’m not just ditching Soldat. It’s gonna be further developed. I just don’t have an official announcement yet.
Maybe he's just procrastinating.
wat a joke
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Just get another game to play and keep
spamming/insulting mobilizing "dev(s)" here instead of getting frustrated.
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You're so right Gizd
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other games bore me tbh
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it's been two weeks since his last reply now
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Get used to long waits
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push
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Shoozza seems very interested in making the game itself better, also from what he said he's willing to work with the community to achieve that goal. need not say more
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Yeah, but I hope we don't need to wait another year that MM chooses (a) dev(s)
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Shoozza
Shoozza*
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it's been two weeks since his last reply now
He told us it's been taken care of. He just doesn't like soldat enough to make an official announcement.
Gotta love that guy. I wish I could be so lazy without any kind of guilt.
Best thing is that he's even getting paid this way.
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1.
I've read nearly every post in this thread and am a bit astound because of the replies and stupid arguments. I think the most stupid one sounded like "this is his game and his child so let him do what he wants".
It's his game, but the game will not be alive without us. MM must realise that this game is (nearly?) dead.
2.
I can't cut off the hand that is feeding me. Soldat is my only source of income and I deserve to get money from it and continue my work on other games. So I still want to sell registrations. This is not impossible with open source, it's a matter of making an appropriate license.
I couldn't believe what I was reading!! You want to have money from soldat, but you do not want to participate in developing this game??!! Point me out at least one game that is not updated and gets more and more players. Especially a game that has so many bugs. To be honest, this game seems to have more bugs than features. Not to mention the engine is slow as hell.
If you still want money from the title itself and "because you created something that other people love", sell part of the game so you will still have some income from it (I doubt that any company will want to buy this game, good for you if you find one), or hire real developers and share the income with them.
You seem to be expecting as much money as when you did all the things on your own. But hey, you decided to create next game, which will probably FAIL AS WELL, because you will want both again: money and creating another game.
3.
You do not want to hire a team of developers... I feel very sorry for Shoozzaa when I see how much he deserves developing this game. If I were him, I would have already said OK I'M F***ING AWAY, long long time ago. Two weeks are REALLY much time and many things could be done. Of course, in soldat's case, it's nothing, we used to wait much more... but we will not wait forever.
4. What would I do?
Definately, I would let Shoozzaa (and others) continue fixing the game. Whether they are good/better programmers or not. You can always open source it as well, but first try the closed-source solution!
And stop creating chats, other graphics, other maps, other aimlags, other sh*ts, god damn! First fix all those bugs, even if it requires changing netcode and file formats. I prefer having a better game without backward compatibility (with demos for example) than the current sh*t. You should also give up the current scripting idea... I do not know what libraries/parsers/lexers you have used, but I would seriously consider using a 3-rd party scripting language. This is not the priority, but as far as I know, this scripting system is source of problems as well.
And stop caring about cheaters as people have already got used to them! Bugs are much more annoying than cheaters (some might argue here). Create global account system and keep fixing bugs. Start selling registrations at last, and THEN -> you will be able to pay for BattlEye again (or maybe something better). But the bugs are the priority, since they discourage newcomers.
As you know, the anti-cheat software is not the only way to prevent hacking. More features should be server-side, as nearly neither of them are.
5. Conclusion
I'd love to see this game being developed again. To be honest, I think it's already dead because of your policy. I wish you succeed with your new game, but do not give it up as you have done with soldat, leaving it to one developer.
The game is money, but the time is money too.
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Gotta love that guy. I wish I could be so lazy without any kind of guilt.
He's not lazy. He just has his focus on LD at the moment. Remember, he just released the first public alpha version of it.
And stop caring about cheaters as people have already got used to them! Bugs are much more annoying than cheaters.
For me it's the other way around: I really got used to the bugs - actually I don't even notice many of them besides the bad detection of kills. What annoys me much more are haxors who join the server, have fun for about 3mins and then go for the "ultra-fast-capping-hax-mode" so that the match is over after 5sec.
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And stop caring about cheaters as people have already got used to them! Bugs are much more annoying than cheaters.
For me it's the other way around: I really got used to the bugs - actually I don't even notice many of them besides the bad detection of kills. What annoys me much more are haxors who join the server, have fun for about 3mins and then go for the "ultra-fast-capping-hax-mode" so that the match is over after 5sec.
Nice, that you didn't quote the full sentence.
The hacks you mention are not the problem, they will not use it in gathers/leagues. Who plays publics now? They are all empty, besides those well known and watched, like leo's. Much worse are information hacks, which are much harder to detect, but these are unavailable for public.
Fighting with cheaters requires money, and MM will not write an anti-cheat on his own. But he might do a lot by making server-side position checking, and then, you will NOT NEED ANY ANTI-CHEAT for mass flag hacks. Same goes for ammo, jets, and many other things. Even aimbots can be easier to catch, when you implement recording crosshair position. As I said - the hardest to detect are information hacks, but they do not give 100% advantage, nor they are available for public (at least some of them). Thus focusing on cheaters is not the priority.
Do you know how many problems I have playing on gathers?
Strange 'rejoining' (combinated with resetting stats), happened two times today
Game/fps drops (because of "slow" CPU, when there are more and more bullets)
Server crashes
Script crashes
(no need to mention grenades' hits)
Etc...
Anyway it does not change the fact, that there will always be cheaters
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The hacks you mention are not the problem, they will not use it in gathers/leagues. Who plays publics now? They are all empty, besides those well known and watched, like leo's. Much worse are information hacks, which are much harder to detect, but these are unavailable for public.
Hacks are not an issue because nobody plays public...?
If I were a new player, I would play in public servers and I would live with the bugs. But as soon as I see a hacker the game is shit. Aren't new players where MM would see most of his income?
I think whoever is going to code Soldat next shouldn't put off creating an antihack solution because the almighty gather players don't have to deal with them.
"Fighting with cheaters requires money"
You don't get money to fix the problem, you fix the problem to get money.
And speaking about bugs. Where are all these bugs we're talking about? The ones that I seem to notice have to do with hits and crouch bug, I have yet to play a match that has been interrupted by a huge bug.
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You know.. for those who can't appreciate the fact that Michal dedicated at the very least 6 years to Soldat and improving it for only $9 for those of us who paid and that the game was free to play anyway, can just fuck off.
How many other games have you seen or played that you payed such a low price for where you had 6 years of updates... hmmm. Can't think of any? Thought so.
I've paid up to $75 for a single game that pretty much lost it's support and had no updates or any further type of improvement from it's developer. I'm sure many of you have bought many games that had limited attention. I have thousands of dollars worth of games and hardware and the only game I have that is still being improved is, you guessed it: Soldat.
If $9 to $15 is too much for you still. Fuck off and leave Soldat. Thanks.
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You know.. for those who can't appreciate the fact that Michal dedicated at the very least 6 years to Soldat and improving it for only $9 for those of us who paid and that the game was free to play anyway, can just f**k off.
How many other games have you seen or played that you payed such a low price for where you had 6 years of updates... hmmm. Can't think of any? Thought so.
I've paid up to $75 for a single game that pretty much lost it's support and had no updates or any further type of improvement from it's developer. I'm sure many of you have bought many games that had limited attention. I have thousands of dollars worth of games and hardware and the only game I have that is still being improved is, you guessed it: Soldat.
If $9 to $15 is too much for you still. f**k off and leave Soldat. Thanks.
Amen to that. It just looks like nowadays ragging on MM is the cool thing to do.
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Ok, I see MM defenders are coming up.
The hacks you mention are not the problem, they will not use it in gathers/leagues. Who plays publics now? They are all empty, besides those well known and watched, like leo's. Much worse are information hacks, which are much harder to detect, but these are unavailable for public.
Hacks are not an issue because nobody plays public...?
If I were a new player, I would play in public servers and I would live with the bugs. But as soon as I see a hacker the game is s**t. Aren't new players where MM would see most of his income?
I think whoever is going to code Soldat next shouldn't put off creating an antihack solution because the almighty gather players don't have to deal with them.
"Fighting with cheaters requires money"
You don't get money to fix the problem, you fix the problem to get money.
And speaking about bugs. Where are all these bugs we're talking about? The ones that I seem to notice have to do with hits and crouch bug, I have yet to play a match that has been interrupted by a huge bug.
Read it once again. The hacks *HE MENTIONED*. Because I play sometimes publics, seriously, they are not a problem, players using them are quickly getting kicked. And yes, coming players pay attention to bugs too. My 2 friends who were playing soldat stopped because of the bugs and lack of popularity. Of course this is a single case.
I pay very much attention to the bugs, and there is LOTS of them. Do you know how many leaks soldat has? (I will not mention them, because that's not the point of the thread). I guess that the soldat's source is a TOTAL mess, (just look at the soldat admin's source). After a while of disassembling you can know how bad soldat code is.
I think whoever is going to code Soldat next shouldn't put off creating an antihack solution because the almighty gather players don't have to deal with them.
"Fighting with cheaters requires money"
You don't get money to fix the problem, you fix the problem to get money.
**LAUGH**
Do you have ANY KNOWLEDGE about anti-cheat systems? Do you know how much effort you need to put?
All Soldat needs is more server-side code. Nothing more, because there is NO TIME now.
ou know.. for those who can't appreciate the fact that Michal dedicated at the very least 6 years to Soldat and improving it for only $9 for those of us who paid and that the game was free to play anyway, can just f**k off.
How many other games have you seen or played that you payed such a low price for where you had 6 years of updates... hmmm. Can't think of any? Thought so.
I've paid up to $75 for a single game that pretty much lost it's support and had no updates or any further type of improvement from it's developer. I'm sure many of you have bought many games that had limited attention. I have thousands of dollars worth of games and hardware and the only game I have that is still being improved is, you guessed it: Soldat.
If $9 to $15 is too much for you still. f**k off and leave Soldat. Thanks.
At first, soldat is being improved? Oh please, do not make me laugh! It's only getting worse - because it is losing popularity and players, instead of gaining them. I would say that gaining popularity is some kind of game improvement too.
Secondly, it is not about appreciating. I DO appreciate his effort. But it is BUISNESS and his way of making LIVING. And thus, he should pay attention to payment and portal. Do not rely on people's goodness too much ...
Shall I f**k off and leave soldat? I see you are not a player who cares about his game. If you did, you would be more objective. Sure, I can leave Soldat, him, him, and him, and you will end up with a bunch of old players and dead game. Is this what you want?
From: November 15, 2010, 03:58:55 pm
You know.. for those who can't appreciate the fact that Michal dedicated at the very least 6 years to Soldat and improving it for only $9 for those of us who paid and that the game was free to play anyway, can just f**k off.
How many other games have you seen or played that you payed such a low price for where you had 6 years of updates... hmmm. Can't think of any? Thought so.
I've paid up to $75 for a single game that pretty much lost it's support and had no updates or any further type of improvement from it's developer. I'm sure many of you have bought many games that had limited attention. I have thousands of dollars worth of games and hardware and the only game I have that is still being improved is, you guessed it: Soldat.
If $9 to $15 is too much for you still. f**k off and leave Soldat. Thanks.
Amen to that. It just looks like nowadays ragging on MM is the cool thing to do.
Am I ragging on MM? I'm a big fan of this game and I'd love too see it being developed again, THIS IS why I am writing this (even though I know the game is dead...).
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At first, soldat is being improved? Oh please, do not make me laugh! It's only getting worse - because it is losing popularity and players, instead of gaining them. I would say that gaining popularity is some kind of game improvement too.
Secondly, it is not about appreciating. I DO appreciate his effort. But it is BUISNESS and his way of making LIVING. And thus, he should pay attention to payment and portal. Do not rely on people's goodness too much ...
Shall I f**k off and leave soldat? I see you are not a player who cares about his game. If you did, you would be more objective. Sure, I can leave Soldat, him, him, and him, and you will end up with a bunch of old players and dead game. Is this what you want?
There will always be people playing. I played since 1.0.5b. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
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There will always be people playing. I played since 1.0.5b. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
According to you, noone should care about anything, because there will be always people playing... thus MM should not worry about anything and should leave soldat as it is... nice policy, but I don't think it is going to work, sorry :(
Did you even read my message? Or clicked immediately on the "quote" button?
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Wow, you don't get it do you?
The hacks he mentioned ARE a problem, in fact they're the biggest problem. Do you really think some one is going to stick to the game with some random goof ball masscapping, mass killing, masswhatevering on the servers?
I know for a FACT that my server empties shortly after a hacker joins and admins aren't around to deal with them, I can see it on arsse.
I have yet to see a server die over bugs (of which I still can't think of many).
I would even assume your friends quit when battleye was still in place and hacking wasn't as big of an issue, meaning long time players are now quitting more because of hacks and less because of bugs they had to deal with ever since they started.
**LAUGH**
Do you have ANY KNOWLEDGE about anti-cheat systems? Do you know how much effort you need to put?
All Soldat needs is more server-side code. Nothing more, because there is NO TIME now.
Oh dear excuse my ignorance, I guess we should pack up and leave because something takes wayyyy too much effort...
Let's focus more on the "easy" way out which would be fixing all those bugs
/sarcasm
Also that last comment wasn't directed specifically at you. If you read through all this like you said you did you'd know there are many people that's going out to. But yes, you are ragging on MM. Getting paid for a game even after you stop developing it is NOT unheard of.
Anyway I apologize to whoever cares for going off in a tangent, I'll drop things here.
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How many other games have you seen or played that you payed such a low price for where you had 6 years of updates... hmmm. Can't think of any? Thought so.
I can't think of any game that after 6 years of "updates" is still so incomplete and broken.
I can however list a few games that have achieved a much more bugless and complete state in a much shorter time. Here they are:
Minecraft (of course)
Darwinia
Eufloria
Saira
Noitu Love 2
Hammerfight
World of Goo
Element
Battle for Wesnoth
Tremulous
The price for those shouldn't exceed $15. Most of those are single-player though, and some have not been updated in a long time (because they were made 99% bugless in the first place and don't need more updates).
As for multiplayer games - I didn't get too deep into them, so I only listed a few, but I'm sure there are many others that are cheap and well-supported. A lot of them are completely free (Teeworlds, Subvein, Alien Swarm).
Wait, I forgot that for those you HAVE to pay.
Still, like I said, there are lots of completely free games that are in a much better state than Soldat.
There will always be people playing. I played since 1.0.5b. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Sure there will be. There will always be a group of old farts that still play games from 30 years ago. If you are one of those old farts (which I doubt, I think you just lost interest in Soldat) - then you don't need to worry, everything will be peachy for you.
However you are in minority. Majority wants a working game.
Also, I agree that hacks are a problem and should be dealt with. Bugs are something you can bear with and get used to, but cheaters can really ruin the fun. And admins aren't always there to help.
off-topic:
Wow, you don't get it do you?
I know for a FACT that my server empties shortly after a hacker joins and admins aren't around to deal with them, I can see it on arsse.
I'm often online, so PM me if you need more people watching over the server.
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You are an admin having your server, telling these hacks are a problem, I am a player who plays/played many publics and tells you they are not a problem, well, at least not a problem which should be solved right now. Comparing to other stuff like hits, which affect gameplay of all the players. And you will never beat all the cheaters.
Do you understand, that writing server-side code, eliminates such hacks? Can't you just GET IT? Do you have any knowledge about programming? Hacks that are a real bottleneck are information hacks and aimbots. With information hacks Soldat will never win, I don't know any game which would get rid of them.
Oh dear excuse my ignorance, I guess we should pack up and leave because something takes wayyyy too much effort...
Do you start building new house with buying furniture?
I need to say it one more time - soldat is a TOO SMALL game to have its own anti-cheat software. Too small to have its own scripting language. MM should do anything now to show his activity. He is too weak to fight with the cheaters. With one, or a couple of developers, you can't make both, game and good anti-cheat. If you want to know, Soldat has a built-in "anti cheat" to detect memory scanners and debuggers. What for? It doesn't even work as it was supposed to...
And... I know hacks are a problem. You need to distinguish a server-side code between anti-cheat system. As these are two different things (even though they bring similar results). As I said - hacks which from my point of view are not a problem (inf ammo - and - masskill/massflag which will bore hacker in a few minutes) are those for which you can more/less easily write server-side code protecting it (soldat even has some - ?). It is something like a static protection... anyway, I won't be explaining it here.
Btw.
Maybe MM lacks motivation to get back to Soldat?
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I read your entire post Vtg and Loner, I do indeed give much a damn about Soldat. The thing is, it's playable. Whatever bugs it has, doesn't bother me. Plus I only paid less than the price of a single meal. So I feel, I got my money's worth, even if Soldat still has issues. Everytime I'm online, I enjoy it, even if my FPS sometimes drops or there is some bug that causes a minor annoyance. In fact I played Soldat so much over the years that I have "Soldat Finger". I hammered "W", the jump button so hard for so long that the first joint in that finger aches now and has ached for the last few years. Lol.
Just play the game and enjoy. Let MM do his thing. He has invested a lot more time into Soldat then we could expect. I know a couple of other indie multiplayer games that were released.. a few updates were made and then the game was left at that. In a lot of cases, the developer loses interests and leaves it be, even if the game has a strong following. MM never lost interest in Soldat, but it is a game that he made when he was only 16. Now he want's to focus on a more modern 2d game that can run on newer platforms.
Soldat has a very strong following and will continue to have that following. Despite that I got pissed off, because of the fact that you guys are angry about all the bugs and MM's seemingly lack of interest in improving Soldat, shows that you're strong followers as well.
After all this time though, you have to give the guy some breathing room and let him move on. That doesn't mean he's abandoning Soldat or doesn't want to improve it anymore, he just wants to find a way that the game can continue to be improved while he works on LD. As you can see, he's still hesitant about releasing the source. If he really didn't care about Soldat, he would have given the source out long ago.
Another thing that needs to be realized is that Soldat isn't really dying. I think it's more that since 2002, the market has been bombarded and saturated by all kinds of games. There are much more FPS's, consoles, etc. Back when Soldat came out, the average computer could run it, but couldn't necessarily run the newer PC games that came out. Everyone already had their fill of the old classics: Quake series, Half Life, Tribes, Mechwarrior, HL mods like DoD and CS, etc. Soldat was something new, interesting and could run smoothly on low end hardware. So it's popularity rose. Anyone with Pentium 2 266Mhz or greater and equivalents could play flawlessly. I remember playing up to 1.2.1 on a Gateway Astro of all things (Celeron 388Mhz, 64Mb Ram).
Now it's a lot different. Hardware and consoles are getting cheaper and cheaper. Now Soldat isn't the only good game that we play. Many of us enjoy TF2, New Super Mario Wii, Worms series, Trackmania, etc, etc, etc. It's not surprising that people leave Soldat for extended periods of time before they come back to it. And so, the community shrinks, but doesn't disappear. Servers are few and far between. Many players will come back after they've gotten their fill. My industry forecast is that casual gaming is going to be the next big wave and the only place left for hardcore gaming will be old games such as Q3, Soldat, CS, etc. The more modern multiplayer titles such as the Halo series and that goddamn Call of Duty garbage will eventually die out as there is really nothing special in those games. Tribes 1 was way more interesting and intuitive than COD or Halo ever was. People are just mesmerized by the shiny sparkly graphics at the moment... but that will go away.
MM will make a decision soon. That's guaranteed. Then we'll have a dedicated group that will take on improving Soldat and killing bugs. :)
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MM will make a decision soon. That's guaranteed. Then we'll have a dedicated group that will take on improving Soldat and killing bugs. :)
I'd love to see this, man. I see you are an optimist, I am a realist. And it's not so much dependent on good graphics etc. My friend, a great fan of games like WoW, CoD 4, Fear (and other sh*ts) used to play soldat very much. I hate going overboard with the graphics, which make game too chaotic.
I'm thinking how it would be, if MM started creating (now it's too late...), Soldat 2, instead of LD. I mean, the same soldat of course, but more flexible, more moddable, which can run on different platforms, written in a modern language, using at least D3D9/OpenGL, and BUG-FREE.
You all say that bugs are not annoying... so what should he focus on now, if not on the bugs? I'm sure, not on the cheaters...
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For me it's the other way around: I really got used to the bugs - actually I don't even notice many of them besides the bad detection of kills. What annoys me much more are haxors who join the server, have fun for about 3mins and then go for the "ultra-fast-capping-hax-mode" so that the match is over after 5sec.
oh god.. I've been playing soldat for years and was used to the bugs as well. But now, after playing other games for a bit and trying to play soldat again, the least i can think is "what the hell is this?" and "how can you enjoy it at all?" Don't get me wrong, i still love this game, it's been a lot of fun playing it etc. But when you bump off polygons flying away like a subatomic particle, die of falldamage after falling from a meter's height, can't hit anything because of lag etc etc etc it stops being fun. Games are supposed to entertain you and be smooth to play. Right now soldat is edgy as fuck, and i can't see how any newcomers can stay here for longer than ten nade eats.
Also, thank you Vtg, at least there are some sane people left here. And thinking about the scriptcore after reading your post - it would probably be better to implement a completely different scripting engine. Even (actually, especially) if it used different syntax from the current pascal-like voodoo. I (and many other scripters as i suppose) have lost too much hair fighting with the scriptcore, so it might even be worth it to rewrite whatever large scripts that there are out there than to keep working on them. (As for smaller utility scripts, it won't take much time to port those, so it's not too much of a problem).
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Sorry, I still don't get what kind of "information hacks" you're talking about. Infinite jet/HP/ammo, mass caps, teleport, speedhack, aimbot, etc. - if I understand you right, you're saying that they're information hacks and therefore they're not worth fixing, right? But those are 99% of hacks that we actually see on the servers.
If I'm wrong - can you list a few examples of what information hacks do and how?
I am a player who plays/played many publics and tells you they are not a problem, well, at least not a problem which should be solved right now.
So am I, and I say they are a problem.
Not so much of a problem on popular servers with regular players who know each other well and can quickly votekick cheaters. But on less popular servers with more random people from all over the world - one cheater turns the game into complete disaster and makes server empty in a matter of a few minutes.
If you want to know, Soldat has a built-in "anti cheat" to detect memory scanners and debuggers. What for? It doesn't even work as it was supposed to...
As far as I remember, built-in anti-cheat was somewhat useful. But now that it hasn't been updated in years - obviously there are tons of hacks that easily bypass it.
Besides. Nobody's saying that ALL focus should be on anti-cheat. Both anti-cheat and fixing bugs are important. So in my opinion this whole "bugs or hacks" discussion is pointless. Both cause a lot of problems and both need to be fixed.
End of discussion?
Maybe MM lacks motivation to get back to Soldat?
He doesn't have ANY desire or intention of getting back to it. He plans on handing over the development to someone else, but looks like he doesn't have motivation to do even that.
Just play the game and enjoy.
The problem is - it's becoming harder and harder to so because of the same old bugs, same old maps, heck even people are the same. You may enjoy it, but it's not the same for other players.
New maps and mods are only things that added something fresh to the game, but there are less and less players on the servers, and custom maps are hated by Soldat pr0s who don't approve anything but 3vs3 CTF on Ash (and they become more and more of a majority as more and more pubbers leave).
So there are less newcomers, less mappers and modders, less motivation to make anything new. Just hardcore competitive players.
My industry forecast is that casual gaming is going to be the next big wave and the only place left for hardcore gaming will be old games such as Q3, Soldat, CS, etc. The more modern multiplayer titles such as the Halo series and that goddamn Call of Duty garbage will eventually die out as there is really nothing special in those games. Tribes 1 was way more interesting and intuitive than COD or Halo ever was. People are just mesmerized by the shiny sparkly graphics at the moment... but that will go away.
I don't think mainstream games will die out. Because, well.. mainstream itself can't die out. Indie games are just too different and hard for some people to understand, or they're not shiny enough. Plus, another reason indie games are popular is their their low price and low system requirements (which allows them to be ported to devices like iPhone) but that is also why many people don't take them seriously and prefer something like CoD or Halo. I doubt mainstream and indie games will be switching places anytime soon.
kinda off-topic, but: don't underestimate Halo or CoD. There are many other games like them, but shiny graphics and same old gameplay mechanics aren't enough to make a game as popular as CoD and Halo became.
Btw, Halo is the first game I remember to have introduced an ability to throw grenades without switching to them first + a somewhat interesting story and universe. And CoD was the first game where you could aim down the sights.
Now it's a lot different. Hardware and consoles are getting cheaper and cheaper. Now Soldat isn't the only good game that we play. Many of us enjoy TF2, New Super Mario Wii, Worms series, Trackmania, etc, etc, etc. It's not surprising that people leave Soldat for extended periods of time before they come back to it. And so, the community shrinks, but doesn't disappear. Servers are few and far between. Many players will come back after they've gotten their fill.
Soldat is unique. While there are a lot of Team Fortresses, Call of Duties and other Crysises - Soldat has some things that no other game of that genre can offer (I won't even bother listing them).
That is exactly the reason why I still haven't completely gave up on it, despite that there are many other games to play. But still, each time I get back to Soldat - I leave sooner than before because each time I get back - it's the same old story, except each time it gets a little worse. I know one day I'll leave for good if things keep going that way, and so will many other players.
Let MM do his thing. He has invested a lot more time into Soldat then we could expect. I know a couple of other indie multiplayer games that were released.. a few updates were made and then the game was left at that. In a lot of cases, the developer loses interests and leaves it be, even if the game has a strong following. MM never lost interest in Soldat, but it is a game that he made when he was only 16. Now he want's to focus on a more modern 2d game that can run on newer platforms.
I think you're missing the point:
Nobody's forcing MM to keep developing Soldat.
All we want is for him to let someone else do that job for him. And there already are people who are willing to do that for absolutely free. And yet it's taking awhile even for that to happen.
I know I'm not the one to judge about how long it should take, since I don't know what's really going on. But since MM has broken his promises a number of times before - I'm having trouble believing in that "trust me" and "soon" of his. I have a tiny little bit of hope and faith left, but I don't know how much it'll last.
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Soldat died a long time ago.
Oh well.
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I'm thinking how it would be, if MM started creating (now it's too late...), Soldat 2, instead of LD. I mean, the same soldat of course, but more flexible, more moddable, which can run on different platforms, written in a modern language, using at least D3D9/OpenGL, and BUG-FREE.
There is no "bug-free" (aside from the "hello-worlds"). You should know this with your programming knowledge.
Actually Soldat 2 could be realized as a mod for LD which is highly moddable.
oh god.. I've been playing soldat for years and was used to the bugs as well. But now, after playing other games for a bit and trying to play soldat again, the least i can think is "what the hell is this?" and "how can you enjoy it at all?" Don't get me wrong, i still love this game, it's been a lot of fun playing it etc. But when you bump off polygons flying away like a subatomic particle, die of falldamage after falling from a meter's height, can't hit anything because of lag etc etc etc it stops being fun.
Yeah, ok. I notice something like this too. I only play on public-ctf-servers with default config (no wm, no bonuses, no heavy scripting). When a server suddenly changes the map to some custom one I usually rage because of the fact that I start to suck. As you said I bounce around like some bouncy ball. But then after some minutes I actually realize that many custom maps are really great in terms of leveldesign and mostly in terms of graphics. I realize that the reason for the lowering of my "fun-level" is myself. Because when the server changes back to some default map I rule again. So it's only my experience which is the main factor. On the default maps I move like a ninja and rarely notice any polybug-problem just because of my experience where to step on and which move to perform on which situation.
So I understand that for newbies the levelbugs are really a problem. Not talking about the eating and stuff.
Games are supposed to entertain you and be smooth to play. Right now soldat is edgy as f**k, and i can't see how any newcomers can stay here for longer than ten nade eats.
Yeah, Soldat really is edgy. But it always was this way. It simply is just a small indie game developed by some random polish guy who started it in his youth. I don't think it will be much "smoothier" in future. With the new developer(s) we certainly will fix some more bugs and maybe add some of those many useful suggestions. But the way Soldat will feel in the future will always be the same (at least I hope so). Despite all this "edginess" I still have these amazing "smooth" moments where I whizz through the maps and do kills which I can't explain afterwards.
Soldat died a long time ago.
Says someone who gave the answer None. (http://) to the question if you're a Soldater or Forumer. If this game died for you, let it alone and stop posting stupid assumptions.
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Despite all this "edginess" I still have these amazing "smooth" moments where I whizz through the maps and do kills which I can't explain afterwards.
yeah, again, that's because you've been playing the game for years
I don't think it will be much "smoothier" in future. With the new developer(s) we certainly will fix some more bugs and maybe add some of those many useful suggestions. But the way Soldat will feel in the future will always be the same (at least I hope so).
and you won't be buying the game more than once unlike (possibly) newcomers.
Anyway, the longer it takes for MM to decide, the more of a bullshitter he becomes in the eyes of other people. And that's not really in his personal interest :/
- Hey, have you checked out that game Link-Dead by MM?
- Oh that guy who didn't make any sense? No lol, i'd rather stick to my sandvich and hats
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now, after playing other games for a bit and trying to play soldat again, the least i can think is "what the hell is this?" and "how can you enjoy it at all?
I just stopped to say.. I have many times left soldat, played other games a month, but always I got bored to them and came back to soldat.
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There is no "bug-free" (aside from the "hello-worlds"). You should know this with your programming knowledge.
Actually Soldat 2 could be realized as a mod for LD which is highly moddable.
Yea, I know, I meant here free of the major and annoying bugs, I don't expect fixing all the bugs, only those most annoying which I have been seeing for last few years.
Sorry, I still don't get what kind of "information hacks" you're talking about. Infinite jet/HP/ammo, mass caps, teleport, speedhack, aimbot, etc. - if I understand you right, you're saying that they're information hacks and therefore they're not worth fixing, right? But those are 99% of hacks that we actually see on the servers.
I thought that term 'information hack' is self-explanatory.
Information hacks are those who give you precious informations, like radars and ESP (information about health, ammo, etc) without making explicit modifications to the game's state. They are much more useful, and much harder to detect (BattlEye didn't catch them either) and comparing to exploits, easy to write. Thus they dominate in most FPS.
Even big games use 3-rd party anti-cheat software and usually 3-rd party scripting languages (at the time of writing, only one company comes to my mind, which uses its own anti-cheat - Blizzard with its Warden).
Let me say it one more time - MM has no time for embedding custom anti-cheat and no money for 3rd party. But bugs are things he CAN fix, this is why he should concentrate on it.
If he wants money from this game, he must give up LD for some time. I can't see any solution. It looks like he would like to get people who will do the job for him... but... for free... ?
From: November 16, 2010, 10:10:50 am
SERIOUSLY, I entered LD site, and what I see is that to play alpha versions I need to ...
PAY ??
Is this a JOKE? Moreover, its not preordering the full version, so I pay only to help testing this game... but it's not even beta yet!
I have been always thinking that beta-testers are paid by companies, not companies being paid by beta-testers... but maybe I am wrong?
I'd love to take some of my time to help and test it but... sorry, I will not pay for my own effort...
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Information hacks are those who give you precious informations, like radars and ESP (information about health, ammo, etc) without making explicit modifications to the game's state. They are much more useful, and much harder to detect (BattlEye didn't catch them either) and comparing to exploits, easy to write. Thus they dominate in most FPS.
Oh, I see. Still, I think they're not as bad as more obvious hacks. They do provide some advantage and let you predict enemy movements better, but you still have to aim, dodge, steal flags, work with other players and do a ton of other things by yourself. And considering that a lot of cheaters use hacks because they fail miserably at fair game - they'll still fail even with information hacks.
It would become a real problem if a good player starts using them, but that doesn't happen all that often. Personally I don't find information hacks to be that big of an issue (except in serious tournaments).
SERIOUSLY, I entered LD site, and what I see is that to play alpha versions I need to ...
PAY ??
Is this a JOKE? Moreover, its not preordering the full version, so I pay only to help testing this game... but it's not even beta yet!
I have been always thinking that beta-testers are paid by companies, not companies being paid by beta-testers... but maybe I am wrong?
I'd love to take some of my time to help and test it but... sorry, I will not pay for my own effort...
I'll just point out that MM is a single developer, not a company. But other than that - I agree. You shouldn't charge money (even a small amount) for a product that isn't even close to working properly.
I love to use Minecraft as an example, so I'll use it here too. Even though Minecraft is in an alpha state but still costs money - in this case it's totally worth it. The game has very few bugs, frequent updates, and overall is very much playable and working. Even though its creator consideres it as Alpha version - its quality is comparable to a final version. That, in my opinion, is more than worth its price.
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You're paying to play the game ahead of its release, not paying to test it.
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You're paying to play the game ahead of its release, not paying to test it.
That's a good point I suppose. Looking at it that way makes it seem much more fair.
Though I got a different impression of MM's intentions from his post.
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Oh, I see. Still, I think they're not as bad as more obvious hacks. They do provide some advantage and let you predict enemy movements better, but you still have to aim, dodge, steal flags, work with other players and do a ton of other things by yourself. And considering that a lot of cheaters use hacks because they fail miserably at fair game - they'll still fail even with information hacks.
It would become a real problem if a good player starts using them, but that doesn't happen all that often. Personally I don't find information hacks to be that big of an issue (except in serious tournaments).
They let you dodge bullets easier too, I will not post any screenshot because it's prohibited. It depends on the information, for example maphacks are essencial in RTS, as well as wallhacks (seeing through walls) in FPS.
And yes, they are serious in tournaments, where telehacks are totally useless, and vice-verca, they are pretty useless in public servers, where fun hacks are not...
And one important note - soldat seems to have more old than new players, who care about gathers/tournaments rather random public servers, so in fact, these hacks are rather bad.
Regarding 'playable' alpha: when I see game marked 'beta' I suppose its incomplete, when I see it marked 'alpha', I suppose it's FAR from being complete. Thus, I'm not going to get deeply whether this alpha is more or less playable - the author released it to have it tested, rather give us fun...
From: November 16, 2010, 03:59:23 pm
I haven't heard about anyone, who would already play this LD alpha. I googled and found a list of servers for Minecraft, and there is a pretty high number of them.
http://www.minecraft.net/servers.jsp
I haven't seen such a list for LD, maybe there is one.
Btw.
I checked MM's last activity, it looks like he doesn't care much about this thread as well as his 'child', thus posting here does not make much sense, he will ignore all the posts.
From: November 16, 2010, 04:03:17 pm
So, you are right:
From http://www.minecraft.net/servers.jsp:
There are 3452 players playing on 1120 servers (351 of them private).
From soldat lobby: 879 players 369 servers
So, paying for minecraft alpha seems to be more reasonable than paying for soldat "full" and "stable" version.
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Why do you keep comparing Minecraft with Soldat? Yes, Minecraft has a nice new gameplay and an unique design (even MM itself admitted this, read this (http://mm.soldat.pl/inspirado/minecraft) blogpost). It is in my opinion something which you haven't seen before as an online game. Now 8 1/2 years back in time - the first public Soldat version. It was mostly the same. People haven't known something like Soldat yet (pls don't start this discussion, yes, it is true) and it was highly successful. Now think of the fact that MM only was 16 back then (Notch is 31 and already worked for some (flash) gaming companies) and that people weren't that open to buy games online like they are nowadays.
I don't say that if Soldat would have been invented in 2010 with the same presuppositions it would also come like a bombshell or would be even better than Minecraft.
But stop comparing the games if you have no idea. Go f**king buy the LD alpha for some 1cent before you complain about the number of bugs which LD has at the moment. Did you play the very f**king first version of Minecraft which was released to the public? Do you know how many bugs this version had??
And don't start like: "But I didn't need to pay money to try the first version of Minecraft" [pigtail]
Notch wrote the code for about a week and then released the s**t. Actually Minecraft is even based on some older game (Infiniminer) which became open-source, so Notch had a basis to work with. For how long does MM work on LD again? 2-3 years? And you still have doubts to pay him a few dollars to play the game before it's first stable release?
We (as the ones who - surprise! - "bought" this alpha version) f**king followed his devlog for a very long time and have no problems to support him so he finally can write the game we became so excited about.
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We are
Most certainly arguing in circles at this point
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Wow, you don't get it do you?
The hacks he mentioned ARE a problem, in fact they're the biggest problem. Do you really think some one is going to stick to the game with some random goof ball masscapping, mass killing, masswhatevering on the servers?
I know for a FACT that my server empties shortly after a hacker joins and admins aren't around to deal with them, I can see it on arsse.
I have yet to see a server die over bugs (of which I still can't think of many).
I would even assume your friends quit when battleye was still in place and hacking wasn't as big of an issue, meaning long time players are now quitting more because of hacks and less because of bugs they had to deal with ever since they started.
This and anti-flood protection is all I need right now. The dev team should focus on fixing bugs after it's done.
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Wow, you don't get it do you?
The hacks he mentioned ARE a problem, in fact they're the biggest problem. Do you really think some one is going to stick to the game with some random goof ball masscapping, mass killing, masswhatevering on the servers?
I know for a FACT that my server empties shortly after a hacker joins and admins aren't around to deal with them, I can see it on arsse.
I have yet to see a server die over bugs (of which I still can't think of many).
I would even assume your friends quit when battleye was still in place and hacking wasn't as big of an issue, meaning long time players are now quitting more because of hacks and less because of bugs they had to deal with ever since they started.
This and anti-flood protection is all I need right now. The dev team should focus on fixing bugs after it's done.
There is already implemented anti-flood protection, and MM CAN'T do a decent anti-cheat. You are saying that, because its all YOU need right now. Think about MM and what he can actually do at the moment.
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Wow, you don't get it do you?
The hacks he mentioned ARE a problem, in fact they're the biggest problem. Do you really think some one is going to stick to the game with some random goof ball masscapping, mass killing, masswhatevering on the servers?
I know for a FACT that my server empties shortly after a hacker joins and admins aren't around to deal with them, I can see it on arsse.
I have yet to see a server die over bugs (of which I still can't think of many).
I would even assume your friends quit when battleye was still in place and hacking wasn't as big of an issue, meaning long time players are now quitting more because of hacks and less because of bugs they had to deal with ever since they started.
This and anti-flood protection is all I need right now. The dev team should focus on fixing bugs after it's done.
There is already implemented anti-flood protection, and MM CAN'T do a decent anti-cheat. You are saying that, because its all YOU need right now. Think about MM and what he can actually do at the moment.
You need to stop your senseless arguing. He never mentioned MM, in fact he mentioned DEV TEAM. If there even will be one. MM has already said he is not and will not develop for Soldat. And it's not just him that needs it obviously, unless your ignoring everyone else who's complaining about hackers.
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Vtg, I must say you're having some good arguments, but two things I like to point out:
First I have to stand with mah buddy Bonechrusher. He and myself host some of the few popular public servers left in the lobby and we know that the current anti-flood protection is not sufficient. It's not really a secret, I think you can find something about it on this forum. So anyway, I also think there should come a solution for this ASAP.
Second, I wouldn't underestimate the positive effect of a server-sided anti-cheat. Since it should be able to get rid of the most 'obvious' cheats, many players would be assuming that there is no cheating at all, so less hard feelings. As you point out, this kind of anti-cheat works mostly for pubs, not organized matches. But aren't we a bit in need of new players?
I agree that the development team has many priorities and an anti-cheat might not be on the fist place. I see no reason why a server-sided anti-cheat could not include more developers, or maybe even be open sourced. Even with the source of the anti-cheat itself, it could not be hacked. And any weird work-arounds that hackers come up with can quickly be fixed and probably won't require knowledge about the deeper workings of the PC. I'm pretty sure I suggested this somewhere before and might suggest it again once the development team is assembled (if I'm still a little bit optimistic).
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Anti-flood is implemented and I think it's only matter of setting its sensitivity, number of packets rejected and so on. But it is implemented, if you say it does not work as it is supposed, it's rather bug, or too low sensitivity. If you say so, of course I agree, it should be fixed.
About anti-cheat: I said that server-side passive protection was the only anti-cheat MM can do (MM, or actual "dev team", I don't give a sh*t RafiPZ) and of course, he should implement it.
But from my point of view, fixing bugs at first is a better choice, but I won't be arguing here, since I do not have soldat's source code and I don't know how it is related to its netcode (probably it is much). Thus fixing bugs can be combined with changing netcode which can result in making more parts of the game server-side.
I said that there was no means to start creating new anti-cheat system (working on both sides). Obviously, you can call server-side passive protection an anti-cheat too, as it does prevent hacking, but for a better understanding, let me call 'anti-cheat system' a module working on both, client's and server's machine. Why? Because I do not consider server-side-protection kick as a proof of hacking (at least in these cases).
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Think about MM and what he can actually do at the moment.
Um... Choose one of 3 proposed options already?
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I see no reason why a server-sided anti-cheat could not include more developers, or maybe even be open sourced. Even with the source of the anti-cheat itself, it could not be hacked.
Such kind of protection is strongly connected with the game's engine. It's passive protection working 'by nature', so I don't know which parts of such an "anti-cheat" could be released. Surely including more developers would solve it, but the problem is, MM does not want more developers...
Um... Choose one of 3 proposed options already?
I've already chosen saying this in the first post - let Shoozza (and others) do the job. Apparently MM will not do this.
From: November 18, 2010, 08:44:27 am
@RafiPZ
Instead of trying to catch me in my words, try to post some arguments. For me: MM = "dev team" now.
From: November 18, 2010, 08:56:05 am
Can you see how much time he is wasting right NOW?
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the problem is, MM does not want more developers...
Where did you get that idea from...
All of the options MM laid out require more developers.
As I see it, bugs need to be fixed first, they affect the game a lot more regularly than hackers, and we actually have tools to deal with the hackers (vote kick, admins), what can we do about bugs, man up?
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the problem is, MM does not want more developers...
Where did you get that idea from...
That was irony...
Btw, he could have had more developers long time ago.
As I see it, bugs need to be fixed first, they affect the game a lot more regularly than hackers, and we actually have tools to deal with the hackers (vote kick, admins), what can we do about bugs, man up?
I agree about fixing the bugs, this is what I'm trying to say all the time. But actually, we have no tools to deal with the hackers, since vote kicks and admins can work for obvious hacks only.
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So we can kick the obvious hackers, how many obvious eats can we deal with?
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Um... Choose one of 3 proposed options already?
I've already chosen saying this in the first post - let Shoozza (and others) do the job. Apparently MM will not do this.
except Shoozza is working on it so yeah
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Um... Choose one of 3 proposed options already?
I've already chosen saying this in the first post - let Shoozza (and others) do the job. Apparently MM will not do this.
except Shoozza is working on it so yeah
He might dropped that AntiCrap months ago.
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I'll never understand hackers and cheaters, especially in Soldat.
-You're lucky if you can get on a server with lots of people playing.
-If you're playing Soldat vs. all of the other games that you could play and cheat in... why Soldat? If you play Soldat, obviously, you like it because it's an awesome game... so why ruin an awesome experience by being a douchebag? There just aren't enough other people or hackers that you could possibly impress (if you could even)... all you do is annoy the hell out of anyone who is trying to enjoy a good game. To think that, even now after all this time, of the few truly dedicated fans of the game that cheaters are still a plague to servers.
I like Soldat because it's hard and it's fun to pwn even with moderate skills, because every so often I pull some awesome moves and survive a barrage of gunfire or get a sweet knife kill. If you had an aim-bot... why bother having fun and pulling awesome maneuvers? All you would be doing is running/flying around hitting the mouse button and racking up kills. I don't get it.
Maybe that's it. Don't count kills anymore and maybe no one would bother cheating . Really, who cares who kills more than another, if the game isn't DM. If it's CTF (for instance), only flag count matters.
It would be a cool experiment to try... for real. If it was possible, have a server where kills weren't counted.. no matter what, not even in the server logs. See if people would just get on, play and have fun... as that is the purpose of a game: FUN.
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I'll never understand hackers and cheaters, especially in Soldat.
-You're lucky if you can get on a server with lots of people playing.
-If you're playing Soldat vs. all of the other games that you could play and cheat in... why Soldat? If you play Soldat, obviously, you like it because it's an awesome game... so why ruin an awesome experience by being a douchebag? There just aren't enough other people or hackers that you could possibly impress (if you could even)... all you do is annoy the hell out of anyone who is trying to enjoy a good game. To think that, even now after all this time, of the few truly dedicated fans of the game that cheaters are still a plague to servers.
I like Soldat because it's hard and it's fun to pwn even with moderate skills, because every so often I pull some awesome moves and survive a barrage of gunfire or get a sweet knife kill. If you had an aim-bot... why bother having fun and pulling awesome maneuvers? All you would be doing is running/flying around hitting the mouse button and racking up kills. I don't get it.
Maybe that's it. Don't count kills anymore and maybe no one would bother cheating . Really, who cares who kills more than another, if the game isn't DM. If it's CTF (for instance), only flag count matters.
It would be a cool experiment to try... for real. If it was possible, have a server where kills weren't counted.. no matter what, not even in the server logs. See if people would just get on, play and have fun... as that is the purpose of a game: FUN.
Welcome to the Life.
Hint of the day: this world is full of idiots who tend to do unexplainable things.
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I'll never understand hackers and cheaters, especially in Soldat.
Because it's a whole new way to experience the old game - to teleport around, be invincible, and have other features that other players don't have. Makes you feel special, and makes the game feel a lot different. Winning, skills - all that doesn't matter anymore. Ruining the game, trolling and being the center of attention; being one against the world and then going out with a bang - how can't that be fun?
At least I think this is how I would've felt if I actually enjoyed ruining other people's fun.
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Doing all that just to be first on the scoreboard... Simple minds - simple pleasures.
Welcome to the Life.
Hint of the day: this world is full of idiots who tend to do unexplainable things.
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all you do is annoy the hell out of anyone who is trying to enjoy a good game.
believe it or not, but some people have fun doing this.
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@Snow: Actually you could set each player's score to 0 after he killed someone by scripting. If you know how to use it, code below:
var
Reset: array[1..32] of byte;
procedure OnPlayerKill(Killer,Victim:Byte; Weapon:String);
begin
Reset[Killer] := true;
end;
procedure AppOnIdle(ticks:integer);
var i:byte;
begin
for i:= 1 to 32 do if (GetPlayerStat(i,'Active')=true) and (Reset[i]) then begin
Reset[i] := false;
SetScore(i,0);
end;
end;
I didn't test it, but it should work ;)
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@Snow: Actually you could set each player's score to 0 after he killed someone by scripting. If you know how to use it, code below:
var
Reset: array[1..32] of byte;
procedure OnPlayerKill(Killer,Victim:Byte; Weapon:String);
begin
Reset[Killer] := true;
end;
procedure AppOnIdle(ticks:integer);
var i:byte;
begin
for i:= 1 to 32 do if (GetPlayerStat(i,'Active')=true) and (Reset[i]) then begin
Reset[i] := false;
SetScore(i,0);
end;
end;
I didn't test it, but it should work ;)
Ha. That is cool. I didn't think it was possible... then again I've never done any server scripting, but for me, it's easy to learn. Plus, that's pretty simple. I'll see what happens in December or next year. I've been itching to set up one or 2 pubs. Because I'm so close our southern cousins, I'm sure I'd be in a good area for many western players.
If I can set up a CTF pub, I'll use this script. Like I said before, CTF should be about the flag only. At the moment... not to criticize MM's creation, but the reason that no one ever plays any of the other game modes (other than INF) is because CTF is basically a more advanced form of deathmatch and team deathmatch really. You're trying to get as many kills while capping a flag as well. Take kill count out of CTF and perhaps the other modes might see some love again. It's just an observation at the moment. Obviously many would disagree with me and that's fine. I still would love to test this or see this tested.
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Those spawning and fragging guys you are talking about are probably 12 year old boys who are yet to grow a large e-penis, so simply ignore them. Same for hackers: If one joins and messes around with anything-mass just go bonkers and vote him out, or even better, call an admin. Sure, this sounds like a bad solution, but what do zou want to do if not that? Quit? Hell, if you quit because of some stupid guys you only pretend to love Soldat the way you are stating it.
I think I have a partially working anti-hack script lying around somewhere. If I remove the messy mass-kill part it'll detect damage-hacks, speed-hacks, mass flag and more and will automatically ban the hacker. You'll have to deal with mass-killing and aimbotting, but I think that's the lesser evil, right? :P I'll definetly look for it
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Those spawning and fragging guys you are talking about are probably 12 year old boys who are yet to grow a large e-penis
Spawnkilling (laming in general) and the stupid arguments of the people who get killed are the joy of public Soldat games. If those people spent the time on thinking what they could do better instead of crying over a poor camper, they would beat him in no time. Unfortunately this will never change and everyone has to play how the worst player wants them to. OR ELSE KICKBAN!!111111
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Those spawning and fragging guys you are talking about are probably 12 year old boys who are yet to grow a large e-penis
Spawnkilling (laming in general) and the stupid arguments of the people who get killed are the joy of public Soldat games. If those people spent the time on thinking what they could do better instead of crying over a poor camper, they would beat him in no time. Unfortunately this will never change and everyone has to play how the worst player wants them to. OR ELSE KICKBAN!!111111
This.
Nothing is better than camping in the bushes and hunting the worst players on the server. The good ones won't bother to whine so it's useless. But the worst ones.. They're hilarious.
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OMFGZ what's bad in camping? Everyone likes something else, I like hunting, hiding in the bushes with a barrett on leo's, someone else might want to grab a flag. From my point of view, grabbing flag on a public server makes no sense as well, so stop stupid argument (or create a new thread).
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As long as a player doesn't spawnkill excessively - because it's sometimes necessary - I don't mind camping or hiding. Different people, different playing styles; that's why Soldat is still interesting. If everyone was just rushing rushing rushing capping capping capping Soldat would already be dead, so be a bit happy about all the annoying kids out there ;)
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OK I'm glad we had this talk :).
I'm currently biased with what FliesLikeABrick wrote:
I would choose something like this - not open sourcing it but not being super-selective on who can work on it. There are a number of people in the community who are very capable developers. I would say that community members who are known for being strong developers and trustworthy be given subversion access as long as they work together to accomplish the same goals. That way then can then commit together.
We can try that and later on depending on the results decide to open-source it or not. I'll have a word with people interested in being a dev and let you know what's next.
Let's create a group of programmers [some new (I'd like to make a project of new interface) and people taken from openSoldat], this team won't to make Soldat 1.5.1, it is time to create new Soldat2! New code: profiles, clans, irc, gather and community support, real FullHD quality of video and much more... Premium Accounts are necessary, too...
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What do we have to talk about then? Work's calling!
Seriously
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What do we have to talk about then? Work's calling!
Seriously
Ok, I'll start making a interface project in my Inkscape/GIMP, just a sketch, than we will decide, what's good and what should we fuck out... :D But the biggest problem is a system of "lvl'ing"... Got names of ranks but i still haven't got good idea how to gives a exp-points...
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Sorry, I was being a sarcastical fool. What I was trying to explain was that you cannot just create a game just like that. Especially big ones like Soldat.
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Let's create a group of programmers [some new (I'd like to make a project of new interface) and people taken from openSoldat], this team won't to make Soldat 1.5.1, it is time to create new Soldat2! New code: profiles, clans, irc, gather and community support, real FullHD quality of video and much more... Premium Accounts are necessary, too...
first of all - sorry, but what you're talking about is not even remotely close to Soldat2.
second - It's like like DC said:
you cannot just create a game just like that
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you cannot just create a game just like that
Yes, I know, but standing and do nothin' won't get you closer to Soldat2...
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you cannot just create a game just like that
Yes, I know, but standing and do nothin' won't get you closer to Soldat2...
That's true, but we've already tried to create something from scratch (openSoldat) and none of us had enough experience to pull off something like that just yet.
And in order to do something about Soldat we have right now - we need MM to decide who should develop it and give the source code to the new developers. And as you can see for yourself - MM is taking his time, so all we can do is wait.
(I wonder which'll be first - new dev team, or another rage thread...)
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(I wonder which'll be first - new dev team, or another rage thread...)
definitely rage. Lots of it
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he sure needs time to speak to people.
gosh this is outrageous
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Cmon guys...we EnEsCe has completed some critical development...MM needs someone to finish it off. Who's up to finish EnEsCe's useless job?
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just btw
http://www.realsold.org/index.php?topic=4207.0
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just btw
http://www.realsold.org/index.php?topic=4207.0
Yes we know... ;) Let MM add it into Soldat 1.5.1... ;D
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just btw
http://www.realsold.org/index.php?topic=4207.0
Hopefully this works out :)
I would try it but I don't host my server :P .
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One server is currently running msac: soldat://93.190.137.204:24574/
Download the required Msac on msac.mologie.de and test it ;D
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Hush...Let him make public announcement about it. Don't be so hasty.
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Yeeha, good news!
I just downloaded the software, joined the server and got kicked after 2 secs for corrupted memory. Anyway, just got released yesterday, so definitely is still buggy.
Edit: Woopsie, problem was the chatMod. Comeon Shoozza, hack his "hack" to make your hack work again! [retard]
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Yeeha, good news!
I just downloaded the software, joined the server and got kicked after 2 secs for corrupted memory. Anyway, just got released yesterday, so definitely is still buggy.
Edit: Woopsie, problem was the chatMod. Comeon Shoozza, hack his "hack" to make your hack work again! [retard]
I've already with couple of friends tested it for week or two. :) I'm not using chatmod but it should be definitely fixed somehow.
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Wow, cool that someone somewhere is actually doing something!!
I would like an anti-cheat system that fucks up the cheaters computer just like they fuck up others hard work and joy from a good game. Some kind of virus that spams them with dialog boxes "dont cheat again motherfucker" that you can't close.. then randomly restarts and spams again, and again, not allowing to check for viruses because of the constant restarts ;D
But thats just a dream..
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We had to do something as this was killing the game more than the non-existent development. I want to thank Mr for his hard work that made this possible. ;D
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Yeah, thanks for all your hard work you've putted into development of MSAC, Mr, really good job. (I know I'm repeating my self over and over again but you really deserve it.) :) Make somewhere DONATE button and I think you'll be surprised soon enough.
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Cmon guys...we EnEsCe has completed some critical development...MM needs someone to finish it off. Who's up to finish EnEsCe's useless job?
i think it's not useless :\
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@Scarface: You say EnEsCe's job is useless? Or do you want to say EnEsCe is useless? Both is so wrong that it already hurts.
@The_Punisher: That looks quite nice! I hope more servers use it in the future, and that there's someone developing it.
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Sorry professional no life. We can't be all as good as you in what you do.
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@The_Punisher: That looks quite nice! I hope more servers use it in the future, and that there's someone developing it.
Can't talk for the public scene, but it's already starting to gain momentum in the competitive scene, with SCTFL already enforcing their matches to be played on MSAC enabled servers. There are still some minor issues with the anti-cheat though, but as soon as they get fixed, we'll start upgrading gather servers, clanwar servers and other league servers to use it. So it's looking good! And from what I've talked with Mr, I've gotten the picture that he's very dedicated and hard-working programmer, so the project seems to be in good hands as well.
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now working in R/S CS servers and tournaments as well, MSAC should become a standard in soldat
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well if everyone else would do the same I would upgrade my public servers to MSAC also. however it might be best to iron out the bugs first I guess.
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So, where's MM now?
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behind a monitor, looking with already red eyes how framerate doesn't drop on LD and his mouth is opening for 'hooray!'
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well if everyone else would do the same I would upgrade my public servers to MSAC also. however it might be best to iron out the bugs first I guess.
The more servers employ this, the sooner we can ion those bugs out. (More players=Better chance of catching the bugs)
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I just got a hope Soldat BattlEye will come back official...
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yeah, good news... we support MSAC
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yeah, good news... we support MSAC
What you mean...?
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yeah, good news... we support MSAC
What you mean...?
Page --> 11
Search --> "MSAC"
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i think that soldat is slowly dying sry i now. i think the best was the 1.st
and soldat should get some extras like some new mods polys weapons and that should keep soldat up and make it more interesting and make more people registrating : )
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i think that soldat is slowly dying sry i now. i think the best was the 1.st
and soldat should get some extras like some new mods polys weapons and that should keep soldat up and make it more interesting and make more people registrating : )
Sadly, it's not that easy to do anything when we don't even have a developer. MM is yet to make a decision about Soldat's future.
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All praise the lord, I've just added MSAC to my servers, I hope people will download the client.
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Quite sad, just 40 people playing soldat atm. Gotta admit that I haven't loaded the lobby in ages.
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msac is enabled in all of lrs servers too from now on.
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Well, MSAC will be available at all coming Polish Soldat Leagues of DodgeBall... http://forumdb.eu (http://forumdb.eu)
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How effective is that MSAC anyway?
Has someone tested it?
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How effective is that MSAC anyway?
Has someone tested it?
Install a hack and join a msac server and you'll see ;)
*I am not promoting cheating here, just want to make a point.
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How effective is that MSAC anyway?
Has someone tested it?
Yes, actually I've managed to test it using well known public hacks. I have to admit I'm really proud of it as it detected them within seconds. Thanks Mr !
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Yep, it's quite effective, maybe even too effective. It seems that MSAC is even more sensbile than BE was, and some ppl who don't use any cheats gets banned (mostly for Direct3D Hook), even when they close all other running programs. Still, it's better to ban couple of innocent ppl than to let all those haxors spoil the game.
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been three weeks since MM's last reply now -.- Lovely.
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been three weeks since MM's last reply now -.- Lovely.
Proof enough that he's given up on the game...
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been three weeks since MM's last reply now -.- Lovely.
Proof enough that he's given up on the game...
and... his only source of income, but it's his problem.
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Yep, it's quite effective, maybe even too effective. It seems that MSAC is even more sensbile than BE was, and some ppl who don't use any cheats gets banned (mostly for Direct3D Hook), even when they close all other running programs. Still, it's better to ban couple of innocent ppl than to let all those haxors spoil the game.
Direct3D hook occured before i uninstalled Shoozza's chatMod. I'm not being kicked anymore after i deleted chatMod
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I tried MSAC too, but i got corrupt memory #0 every time i tried to join an MSAC server...
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@chutem, did you read FAQ at MSAC's page?
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Can't see any mention of a FAQ at all.
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Check http://msac.mologie.de/?page=help