Thursday, June 28, 2007

Gate 88 to become open source?

Before I start, a quick note of two changes made here. Firstly the main articles are linked on the front page now - they were getting buried too quickly. Secondly I reorganised FG forums to condense them a little - there were too many subforums. Also FreeForums seems to be a bit more stable now so There are handy links on the right of FG for the latest forum entries and help wanted sections. I encourage you to join in the open source game chat. :-D



I'm going to open with a Web 2.0 gripe. If you don't like gripes, skip the next paragraph.



The Ubuntu forums recently "upgraded" with a "Web 2.0" feature to display the thread tree. It's a feature of little or no use in a forum where people just want to read page by page. I have a P3 1000 laptop with 512 megs of ram. My iGoogle homepage does not seem to help matters either. Firefox becomes sluggish, sometimes hangs for 5-10s, with this new feature. Is this what Web 2.0 is? Bloat? Crapware in web pages? I remember playing Wing Commander II on a 286 10mhz. Admittedly it was slow, but it was a graphical 3D space game that came on a few floppies. As I write this, firefox grinds to a halt, consuming just short of 200megs. This is ludicrous. All to display some glorified text. Welcome to Web 2.0.



Sigh... ok, zen, be positive, karma, appreciate the better things in life...



The i-team project gets a new forum, meaning I have one less reason to browse Ubuntu's! Yay! It also got a wiki. By all accounts there has been quite a lot of coding going on by the i-team guys so I'm hopeful we'll see something fairly soon.



The rather more mature Atomic Tanks project, another game similar to Scorched Earth / Worms, just released version 2.4 of their game. The game is portable to Windows and Mac OS X although there only seems to be a Linux binary (rpm) for the latest version. According to the release announcement it also runs on DOS, which is quite interesting. Do I sense a DOS revival, FreeDOS stealing in on the alternative OS market to consign Linux to an early Internet grave? DOS was the most fun I ever had with an OS, but then again I was young and hence not very cynical. With age comes experience, with experience, cynicism. ;-)



It seems that the rather cool freeware abstract RTS game Gate88 has an open source future. I encourage people to lobby the author in a friendly manner to speed up the process. I got in touch yesterday although he has yet to reply.

6 comments:

hikaricore said...

On the web 2.0 topic, I love watching my system grind to a halt if I have more than 3 SourceForge pages open at one time. >.<

This makes things a little cumbersome in the release research I do daily.

Anonymous said...

[criticism]
I'm always surprised how many people on the net get that Zen-word totally wrong.
[/criticism]

Sorry, couldn't resist.

DOS was great. The only MS-OS ever that was fun to use. Probably due to the fact that it was not much more than a dozen executables. Not enough code to turn it into a complete mess...

Quote from Wikipedia:
Early versions of Microsoft Windows were little more than a graphical shell for DOS ^-^

Charlie said...

You assume I was not intentionally using it incorrectly... ;-)

Anonymous said...

Hehe, ok ;-)

Anonymous said...

Hey, Charlie ;)

I've been reading but haven't posted in a while.

Wanna know what I use to avoid Web 2.0 in all it's glory on my machines?

Two words for you, mate: patched Dillo.

That's right. Dillo with tabs, SSL and frames-rendering, whenever needed.

There's a few sites I only read through Dillo, and it's pure bliss, believe me.

Keep up the brilliant work, this silent reader of yours enjoys it very much.

Onyros

Anonymous said...

Free MMORPG - Come Check us out.

http://fenrisonline.googlepages.com/home
http://fenrisonline.blogspot.com/

Provide feedback:

Due to SPAM issues we have disabled public commenting here.

But feel free to join our forums or easily chat via IRC with us.