Epic takes a 30% cut of your sales once you pass $5,000 in gross when using UDK for commerical use. Not bad for a small indie team considering what a full royalty-free license costs up front. 

and of course, I don't know how to read up, and noticed we were talking about incredibly different bits of the license... :D 

Not only Infinity Ward are retard fuckwits, apparently so is John Carmac/ID Software:

"id Software's John Carmack is mindful of the anger over Modern Warfare 2 dropping dedicated server support. That's why he's glad Infinity Ward is going first, because he plans to do the same thing with Rage.

"It's not cast in stone yet, but at this point no, we don't think we will have dedicated servers," he said, according to Variety. But he's glad "we won't have to be a pioneer on that. We'll see how it works out for everyone else."

News that Infinity Ward was dropping dedicated server support in favor of everyone playing online through its new matchmaking service IWNet touched, off, predictably, a petition-fueled backlash from a PC community that had long used dedicated servers to play Call of Duty games. Carmack, Variety said, indicated the felt the servers are a relic of PC gaming's early days."

So being "not shit" is a relic? Nice. What happens when the developer takes down the matchmaking service? Oh right, you are supposed to spend your money on the newest and latest sequel, we can't have people playing our old titles, that's just silly. 

I hereby officially make a commitment to: in the future, purchase every single new PC FPS that 1) is over 90 on Metacritic 2) has an SDK 3) has dedicated servers. I also make a commitment to not spend a dime on any FPS that lacks either #2 or #3. 

I srsly doubt UE3 sdk is free. You know, the way that Quakeinjector is free. 

A) The idea of dedicated servers is somewhat outdated, and is part of what holds back PC FPS games from longer lives and stronger competitive play-base. Players having to buy and support a server leads to a one way chain of self destruction in terms of player counts as players who run servers leave the game. Contrast this to RTS games, which have always been P2P systems, and the popular games can continue to have long lives and healthy communitys. Objectively speaking, a P2P system is a stronger choice.

B) Currently, P2P networking is problematic with FPS games (mostly due to player counts), Infinity Ward's very likely not solving some of the fundimental issues of networking when you're relying on the bandwidth of everyone on the server to be up to snuff. And how do you trust anyone's info they send? A fundimental part of a server/client relationship is that the server doesn't trust the client's information on anything except basic input. Now do this with client/client... or potentially server-is-a-client/client... and well, how do you trust anything? Plus, like you said, you're relying on the company's match making service to exist forever(Battle.net is running quite fine... but there aren't many companies as fornunate as Blizzard)

C) Carmack seems to be saying he's thinking about doing this (which means it's not a certainty), and if Carmack thinks about the networking limitations, he'll likely think about solving some of the problems. And if he doesn't, well, then whatever, it's their dollar they're losing by not changing things for the better. 

A) The idea of dedicated servers is somewhat outdated, and is part of what holds back PC FPS games from longer lives and stronger competitive play-base.

Do you honestly not see how you have got this COMPLETELY backwards? I mean, seriously? If you are in fact serious and not just trying to troll me, please point me to popular P2P-based multiplayer games which have survived with a healthy community and are still going strong after 10 years. And yes, this is a Quake comparison.

Players having to buy and support a server leads to a one way chain of self destruction in terms of player counts as players who run servers leave the game.

You must have missed the fuckton of games that offer free dedicated server as a separate download. 

Starcraft 

Starcraft is sort of a special case though. It's hugely successful in Korea, where there's an entire economy set up around Starcraft progaming. They also have a hugely successful Battle.net to help provide match making + community features + hosting games. So. 

Jago, I think that what Scampie was getting at is that with a dedicated server system, people have to pay from their own pockets to keep those servers running, so therefore when people stop playing, servers shut down and the game dies.

Of course there are always a few people who pay for dedicated servers through love for the game, no matter how many people play, but typically this isn't enough to maintain an active and healthy community, though there are of course exceptions (hello Quake / Doom etc). 

popular P2P-based multiplayer games which have survived with a healthy community and are still going strong after 10 years

Starcraft.

The world has moved on from Quake... all it's dedicated servers are dead. Yeah there's a modding scene, but not much of a gaming scene... too we didn't have a P2P system: no making a multiplayer mod/map and hoping servers run it; you just need to entice players to play it. With a dedicated server solution, getting mods played is very chicken and the egg in that server operators won't run something that doesn't get players, and players can't play something without servers running it.

You must have missed the fuckton of games that offer free dedicated server as a separate download.

Dedicated server software is free... the cost of renting a proper server to run it on is not. As someone who personally rents a TF2 competitive server, and admins a source engine gaming community with 5 servers... I can tell you, it's far from free.

I'm not trolling, I agree that currently, straight up P2P in a FPS enviroment isn't going to work. But I believe if some work is done, cutting out the middle man of a dedicated server is certainly a future which would be healthy for FPS gaming.

But currently the only benefits of a dedicated server structure is in speed and security. But there are downsides too. The server is the weak link in the game experiance, if it dies or gets overloaded, everyone suffers. Plus, somewhere along the line, someone has to pay the cost of running these servers and once the servers are gone, the playing community stops existing.

On the other hand, a P2P structure doesn't rely on expensive servers, and could theorically scale well to larger numbers of players without increasing cost. There isn't a weak link of a single machine or connection every player relies on. The downsides are that each player's connection contributes to overall lag, and security is a major issue, since each client is relaying information and trusting other clients which could be comprimised.

I'd think someone could be smart enough to figure out something for networking security. And I'm sure there's also something smart that could be done about minimizing lag (although, the march of the future with increasing internet speeds may solve this anyway). This is why I believe if Carmack thinks on these issues, they could fix them; which would make P2P a clear winner over dedicated servers... but if they don't, the gameplay experiance will be terrible (if inexpensive to deploy)... and they'll rightfully find no one playing their game. 

Starcraft is sort of a special case though...

I call BS on "special case", since IMO, a large competitive gaming scene is what drives a long and healthy life of a good multiplayer game in the first place. And I find that in FPS games with dedicated servers, the cost of renting servers is one of the early barriers that prevent more people from getting into the scene.

...but, if you insist on a different game, while it's not 10 years (6)... DOTA. 

The world has moved on from Quake... all it's dedicated servers are dead.

I've heard same bad things about the situation in the US Quake community, but this is absolutely not the truth in Europe. Around the clock, I can find SOME server with players on it and ping under 100. The last time I did a server search it turned up 150+ servers. I wouldn't call that "dead".

Dedicated server software is free... the cost of renting a proper server to run it on is not. As someone who personally rents a TF2 competitive server, and admins a source engine gaming community with 5 servers... I can tell you, it's far from free.

As someone who works in IT, deals with hosting on a daily basis and has his own server hardware I am well aware it's not free. However, you can in fact get away with things on a very very low budget. If the ONLY server version available is dedicated (and there is no technical reason why a game can't offer the options of dedicated AND listen AND p2p game hosting) there isn't anything to prevent you from running the server package on the computer of one of the players. If you actually want to run the dedicated server on it's very own hardware, a 200$ computer will very easily host multiple game servers and it will serve you for years.

But I believe if some work is done, cutting out the middle man of a dedicated server is certainly a future which would be healthy for FPS gaming.

Ironically, in my view, the biggest problem with P2P/matchmaking is precisely the man in the middle. It's simply not in the publisher's best interest to keep their matchmaking systems running for more than ~2 years when they want to sell you their latest and greatest sequels. And when it comes to men in the middle, I will definately take the longtime fans of the game over a game publisher. You don't even have to look very hard to find games that have been pulled the plug on by the publisher and you can no longer play them because the publisher decided so and you, the player, can do fuckall about it. And some of these games aren't even 5 years old. 

I'll wait to see how it turns out (the multiplayer), but yeah I'm not very hopeful... To top it off they've limited it to 9v9 games, I guess cause most people wouldn't be able to handle any more without a dedicated server, so meh...
To me dedicated servers are really a strong point of PC gaming, for FPS anyways.

About Rage, who cares? Have they even mentioned anything about multiplayer yet? Doesn't seem like that would be the focus of the game...

The only old p2p games still around that I can think of are Diablo2 and Starcraft yeah, and that's probably just cause it's Blizzard and their mountains of cash. 

"I srsly doubt UE3 sdk is free. You know, the way that Quakeinjector is free."
UDK is extremely free. And it does just a touch more than QuakeInjector. :) 

But developers/publishers are unlikely to just suddenly pull the plug on their match making system for a game that is actually successful, that'd just be bad business practice.

And while I can see the point that currently dedicated servers is the fastest/most stable/most secure system scamp is right in that if p2p architecture becomes more common for PC gaming then developers are going to address the flaws in the system (for example, if someone has a slow connection they can send their updated position to one client with a faster connection that then updates the rest of the clients, neatly avoiding one player causing mass lag spikes for everyone). And as for not trusting the data sent from a client, we already need PunkBuster/VAC/etc to stop people sending the server modified movement/shooting commands, I fail to see how p2p would make much of a difference... 

Oh, and I was one of the people whose initial reaction to the MW2 announcement was a 15 minute rant

(also, I apologise for my abuse of the common comma in the previous post ;) 

To buy as many multiple copies of the games Jago is boycotting as I can afford. Same goes with L4D2.

xxx 

Can I have the spare copies? I'm bare skint ;p 

http://www.cgpad.org/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=8323&d=1257899068 About four hours.

What do you guys think? 

I'm tellin' ya guys, it needs more cowbell. 

Well I think it could be a little brighter. I understand that the dark feeling is probably the mood he was going for, but right now it looks like disconnected pieces floating near each other.

Also, the angle is visually interesting, but it's hard to get a sense of the area itself.

I think it's visually interesting, but probably poor concept art, which I'm not convinced it was meant to be. I would suggest a brighter setting with more detail and the suggestion of a dark area instead of just Doom3 style picture. 

disconnected, but for the style as opposed to the darkness - the window looks photo realistic whilst the furnace is more painterly. 

Looks radiant.., although I agree with the contrast if the window and the smudgy reaktor feel. 

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