Talk:Game ideas: General game ideas

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Comment by ShoDaN:

Well. that are nice ideas, but:

1.) How do you do the LAN-Party-Leavers-must-uninstall-check ? This is impossible to implement. -> The Game would spread from Lan party to Lan party -> Nothing to make money with anymore.

2.) The Game engine should be free: Impossible. Implementing the Game Engine costs more money than any other part. This is the main answer to the Question: Why is the Quake (I) Engine still used in many new games? Many Commercial Game Companys make money through selling their engines. (Much more than selling their games in fact. (Example: Quake - Engine))

Comment by Created by: X(Reply to ShoDaN) - Nov 5, 2004:

True the LAN party uninstall idea is if'y at best. But it also kinda ties into the first licensing idea "Unlimited copies or installs per household." Which would imply that you could take your computer or laptop over to somone elses house, install and play the game there but again have to uninstall before leaving the premisis. I did not specify this in the post but I had the .NET framework in mind at the time. With apps created under the .NET Framework you don't need installers. You could simply hook up a LAN line to both computers and the visiting computer could run the app off of the hosting computer, all over the wire without having to copy the game over to the visiting computer. So the visiting computer could come and go as it pleases without having to void the "Unlimited copies or installs per household." licence because no part of the game or game files were copied from the hosting computer.

As for your second point,... Quote from my Doom 3 Review "...After all there is no competition when game engines like Doom 3, UT2004, HL2, Halo2 at there core are all the same. They all render fancy graphics to the screen, they all play sounds and music, they all have characters running around, they all simulate phisics etc etc. The only difference between them is not there technology but something completely seprate from it. Textures, Sounds, Music, and 3D geometry. You can take a game like HL2 and move/convert all of it's textures, sounds, maps etc and run the same “game” using the doom 3 engine, with only minor technology difference between the two engines." So it's not the code that makes games different its the data files that make up the content of the game.

Comment by Doug Sheets:

In reply to X's "Game should ship with all or partial source code and utilities etc, bound by its own licenses." Multiplayer cheat would be rampant in such a game, decompiled source code is much more difficult to understand and current anti-cheating programs are mostly just placebos.

In reply to ShoDaN's point 2: Game engines can be free, several such engines exist (look around on sourceforge), in fact the complete Quake and Quake2 engines are now being distributed under the Gnu Public License (summary: take the source code, do whatever you want with it, but you have to publish your changes). I'm not sure I'm convinced that implementing the engine is the most costly portion of creating a game, the amount of media (including levels, textures, models, normalmaps, sounds, music, scripting) that goes into a modern game is immense and generating all those things takes a huge amount of time. If you read some of the comments made by the people who work on engines you begin to notice they're the first ones to start work on a new project. In reply your question the Quake1 engine isn't really being used in any new (commercial) games, just heavily modified forms of it. Half-Life2 for instance I would think is based on Half-Life's engine which was a heavily modified Quake1 engine on its own.

Comment by Lachlan87

If you make non-licenced copies of your game have to connect to a licenced copy to be playable, you should be able to accomplish much of what you want.

Comment by Chris Walker

In response to Doug Sheets, Half-Life 2's engine takes design principles from their development using the Quake 1 engine, but the Source engine is 100% original. If it wasn't and it did use some Quake 1 source code, then it would be in breach of its contract with id Software as it would be repackaging their engine. So in short, the Quake 1 engine isn't being used by commercial projects anymore, though it is very influncial.

Comment by joe70 John Carmack's blog says "There are still bits of early Quake code in Half Life 2" so you are probably not correct.

Design Processes

Some people find it interesting to talk about the different ways people go about building a video game.

• One Guy Does Everything
• One "master surgeon" and a team of specialists
• Wiki:CabalDesignProcess
• ... any others I missed ?

Comment by Created by: X(Reply to Doug Sheets) - Feb 3, 2005:

Quote: "Multiplayer cheat would be rampant in such a game, decompiled source code is much more difficult to understand and current anti-cheating programs are mostly just placebos."

That's kind of the point of having the source code all or partially available, especially the multi player components of the code. The more ways that are discovered to exploit flaws in the code the more knowledge is learned about how to prevent them, and write more secure code! I am a firm believer that with proper design and techniques things such as multi player cheats can be prevented and overcome.

Comment by Created by: Doug Sheets(Reply to X) - Jun 7, 2005:

"I am a firm believer that with proper design and techniques things such as multi player cheats can be prevented and overcome."

I am a firm believer that you are incorrect. Some cheats can be prevented this way sure, being able to sell of a building multiple times for tons of cash for example in an RTS, but how do you propose we stop aim bots (or worse yet aim proxies) and wallhacks in FPSes? The problem of multiplayer cheats can be reduced to the problem of making sure it's your code running on a remote system. It simply can't be done. Absolutely Anything you implement to protect yourself I can simply mime to your server to make you think I'm not cheating. Even if you were to do everything right down to rendering every pixel server side and sending them to a dumb terminal I can still calculate how far I need to tell you I moved the mouse to shoot that player-colored pixel.

-DS (Up for a breath. Got World of Warcraft and a full-time job that requires a lot of travel the same week. limit of free-time as x->inf. = 0)

I'm going to have to agree with DS here, there are ways around just about any cheat prevention system out there. The best way to keep people who are making the game less than fun is not to implement overly complex checks to try to prevent bad behavior, it is to leave it up to the players to remove these types of people from their games (and believe me people always figure out who these guys are).

-Philoetus