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The Original Postal Has Been Made Open Source
- j_s 10y agoPOSTAL Redux is currently $1.43 (84% off) on Steam; reminds me of Contra. Reviews say the only unexpected down side is load times; hope they can tighten that up. http://store.steampowered.com/app/401680/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/401680/ Edit: I think the big "feature" is co-op.
- Alupis 10y agoFor me, Postal 2 was the peak of the franchise. It's goofy, and has it's fair share of [sometimes funny] bugs, plus it has first person view. It's currently on sale for $0.99 on Steam[1] [1] http://store.steampowered.com/app/223470/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/223470/
- krylon 10y agoPostal 2 was one of the funniest games I ever played. Also, the movie was practically the only movie adaptation of a video game that did not totally suck. (It got there using the same indiscriminate crude humor of the game, but it did not pretend to be anything else.)
- jakebasile 10y agoI think the part that cracked me up the most was Boll's dying words: "I hate video games!".
- jakebasile 10y agoIt is amazing how much objectionable content they put in that game while still maintaining a satirical black comedy tone instead of a "trying too hard" feel. The tagline was "it's only as violent as you are!" as it is possible to complete all your tasks without violence. At one point, it has you protecting the developers of the game from anti-violent video game protestors who want to solve their problems with violence. You can use cats as suppressors for your weapon. You can urinate at will, and can discover you're infected with gonorrhea, for which you can get medicine. Really, a great game for those with an open sense of humor. Postal 2 is a great example of why games shouldn't be censored.
- Alupis 10y ago> You can urinate at will Just don't do it while looking straight up - unless you're on fire, that is.
- amiga-workbench 10y agoI'm very pleasantly surprised to see people who can appreciate the humour on HN.
- andrewflnr 10y agoSo what you're saying is that it's the video game version of Cards Against Humanity.
- jakebasile 10y agoI think CAH does tread into the TryHard zone, but that's personal taste. They're similar in method but different in feel.
- nso 10y agoI think CAH is going for the shock factor, while Postal is like an extended penis joke
- angersock 10y agoRemember that if you urinate on somebody with the gonorrhea urine it will instantly kick them into the vomiting state, which can be useful if you don't treat it--I seem to recall that as an optional sidequest.
- jakebasile 10y agoPostal REDUX and Postal 2 are great games, but I strongly suggest you do not buy Postal 3. From the developers of Postal 1 & 2: > Okay, I’m going to level with you – don’t buy Postal III. You’d regret it. Hell, you’d regret playing it for free. It’s a sometimes boring, other times frustrating, unfinished, borderline-broken mess, and we can’t do anything about it. source: http://runningwithscissors.com/?page_id=853 http://runningwithscissors.com/?page_id=853 edit: for fun, click on the "(Don't) buy on Steam" link on that page.
- Insanity 10y agoClicked on the "Don't buy on Steam" button, was worth it! These guys have a sense of humour that is quite inline with what I find funny :-)
- pyromine 10y agoThis is completely off-topic, but in the vein of talking about old games. Does anyone have any suggestions for games that scratched the same itch as the old school RTS games like Age of Empires and Rise of Nations? I've been searching for years but never found anything that eclipses the classics.
- gchadwick 10y agoHow about AoE and RoN? AoE II (the remastered HD version) is available on Steam as in RoN. AoE II HD currently 75% off.
- j_s 10y agoThey are still publishing updates to Age Of Empires, not sure the quality though: http://store.steampowered.com/bundle/2148/ http://store.steampowered.com/bundle/2148/ To quote a review: I grew up on AoE2, and these expansions have really brought life into the game as a whole.
- coldpie 10y agoThe AOE2HD port is reasonably well done, and they've even released new content for it. It holds up.
- oneweekwonder 10y agoMaybe the single player campaign but 3vPC multiplayer just sucks and will dc/hang easily. Unfortunately the same holds true for 0AD as recommend by someone else. But both still wonderful games.
- pilom 10y agoAoE2 has been a staple of my entire family gamers and non-gamers alike for 20 years now. My ~50 year old parents played with my wife an I in a big 4 person game over Christmas. The updates have definitely improved the balance. Huns cav archers are a little more expensive, fire ships beat galleys beat demo ships beat fire ships, better AI. All great improvements imo.
- grendelt 10y ago"I regret nothing."
- joaodlf 10y agoThis reminds me, I actually had some contact with the guys behind RWS many years ago, I was a young man and very excited about HTML/CSS and design in general, I ended up designing their forum (it was running on IPB): http://tinyimg.io/i/5GTDNgx.jpg http://tinyimg.io/i/5GTDNgx.jpg Postal 2 is one of my favourite games ever. Had a blast in both single player and online. Me and my friends still talk about it after all these years!
- uncletammy 10y agoI spent a lot of time on that forum! In fact, I just dug through my email from 2003 looking for my photo contest submission (I didn't win but I got an honorable mention) and I found an email that I had sent to the webmaster complimenting them on the new layout. I guess that should have gone to you ;)
- joaodlf 10y agoI wasn't a huge regular, just kinda lurked for most of the time. I remember those forums being absolutely relentless... Definitely one of the far corners of the internet!
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoWow. Now I can play it on my Linux system. Thanks, RWS. This, as well as being a fantastic gesture, makes it seem as though RWS understands something that many of its contemporaries don't: Games, or rather, their engines, must be open-sourced for those games to continue to be playable and relevant. You can't update your games forever, and sooner or later, they will be rendered unplayable by the inexorable march of technology. If you open source your engine, that doesn't have to happen. Take a look at Doom. New content for Doom 1 and Doom 2 is still being released by the community, long after competitors like Duke3D have stopped. Why? Because Doom has a passionate community, and many modern, open source engines that make running the game on new systems a piece of cake.
- gbersac 10y agoIt's not in their interest. If people stick to old games, they have less time to play others and buy less games.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoBut if people stick to old games, they can make content packs for old games, and people will still buy them (and relatively cheaply, too).
- Maken 10y agoAlternatively, you can keep updating your games until the end of times like Valve does. On a serious note, the thing about Doom and other Id games is that they used to release the complete toolbox along with the game, allowing anybody to create content on-par with the base product.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoTrue, but Duke Nukem 3D did the same thing (actually, id didn't release any tooling for Doom: id's internal DoomEd was written in Objective-C for NeXT machines, so it wouldn't have been much use in any case. They didn't start releasing their internal design tools until a bit later, meaning that DN3D did it first), and DN3D's community is virtually dead, while Doom's continues to thrive.
- crack-the-code 10y agoAwesome! Now just give me Diablo 2, and I will be content for life.
- pelasaco 10y agolooking forward for a linux build!
- cr0sh 10y agoI was pleasantly surprised by the amount of useful comments in the code. I remember when the source code for Descent was released; not only was the code somewhat opaque (unless you were experienced with portal-style engines), but there were hardly any kind of comments to help guide you along.
- SwellJoe 10y agoReading some of the docs in the source tree makes it apparent it's been ported to a bunch of platforms and for a bunch of different markets, and it looks like a lot of people have touched the code over the years. With an experienced hand guiding the process, that usually leads to good quality, in terms of re-usability, stability, and code comments. Being 19 years old is also good for quality...even if it's huge and scary and difficult to wrap ones head around in a short time, somebody has run into every possible edge case and weird compatibility issue in all that time, and they've probably fixed it. Old code bases aren't really fun to work on, but they are usually really productive to work on.
- 1wd 10y ago"the CDude class, which is the main, player-controlled character in the game." "CDoofus is the class for the enemy guys [...] Started this file from from CDude and modified it to do some enemy logic using the same assets as the sample 2D guy." "COstrich is the object for the ostriches wandering about in the game. class COstrich : public CDoofus" Hilarious. Reminds me of CBruce in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater: "Their code [...] originally written for Apocalypse[...] a Playstation game featuring Bruce Willis, which, we learned, is why in Tony Hawk the code for the classes of skaters is called CBruce." http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131563/postmortem_treyarchs_tony_hawks_.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131563/postmortem_trey... "Project: Nostril (aka Postal)" Any idea what RSPiX Blue, Cyan, Green and Orange layers are?
- mgurlitz 10y agoFrom Postal Overview.txt: "The game is built on top of our cross-platform library, called "RSPiX" (pronounced "risp-icks"). RSPiX is organized into several levels, from low-level to high-level functional. Each level is named after a color." (https://bitbucket.org/gopostal/postal-1-open-source/src/default/Postal%20Overview.txt https://bitbucket.org/gopostal/postal-1-open-source/src/defa...) In summary, blue provides graphics/audio/input functions, cyan is a UI framework (with printer support), and the distinctions between green and orange "become rather blurry at some points."
- mixedbit 10y agoDoes the release include the original game assets, or do assets need to be purchased (like with Doom releases)?
- SwellJoe 10y agoI dunno, but Postal is $0.49 in the Steam sale right now, if you need the assets. http://store.steampowered.com/app/232770/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/232770/
- a3_nm 10y agoEven if they are available for $0.49, having them under an open source license would be very different. (It would make it possible, e.g., to modify them and ship them in other games.)
- SwellJoe 10y agoOh, I agree. I just wanted to point out that it's on sale, and so cheap that anyone wanting to play with this should grab it.
- BillinghamJ 10y agoMisread the title as saying "Portal"! Pleasantly surprised however - I never played Postal.
- Circumnavigate 10y agoThis game is one of my favorite classics.
- foxhop 10y agoI still have my original copy from 19 years ago, when I was 12 years old! : ) picture: https://twitter.com/RussellBal/status/814612135150055424 https://twitter.com/RussellBal/status/814612135150055424
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- aaronsnoswell 10y agoI thought the title said 'Portal', not 'Postal'. Disapointed :P
- erikj 10y agoIt would be amazing if Valve made Source Engine open source, but that would require them to replace Havok and perhaps other middleware.
- foxhop 10y agoMany games from this era were free homebrew Half-life mods. I think Valve should do more to promote hacking and modding their games. Counter strike was created as a mod by the community as well as day of defeat.
- talmand 10y agoI do believe that almost all of Valve's games started out as mods. One could make an argument that all of their games started out as mods, in one way or another.
- Endy 10y agoIs there any word on a DOOM-style sourceport happening?
- Insanity 10y agoReading this, as well as the comments in this thread makes me want to play the game again. Might fire it up over the weekend and I will surely go through the code for a while! It was a nice late-christmas present ;-)
- foxhop 10y agoI bought Postal Redux on Steam last night for under $2 and played to level 5. Still a very playable game!
- ionised 10y agoMany a fun time I had with the Postal level editor, placing ostrich-dispenser-dispensers around the map in great number and watching the ensuing carnage after a few well-aimed napalm canisters.
- nercury 10y agoReading the source code of this is sure sobering. All files and code lines are there for the single purpose - to ship the game.
- stygiansonic 10y agoThere are some interesting notes about how the multiplayer was originally implemented:[0] "Once the game is running, everything is peer-to-peer. The only information the peers send each other is the local players' input data, which is encoded as a 32-bit value (where various bits indicate whether the player is running or walking, which direction, whether the fire button was pressed, etc.). No position, velocity or accelleration data is transmitted. NOTHING else is transmitted." In order for this to work, they had to make sure all memory was initialized to the same values, so that each client had the same known starting state. They also had to use the same PRNG, initialized to the same state, so that a known, deterministic pattern would be produced. But eventually they ran into a problem that couldn't be solved in software: The FPU of different CPUs would not return the same results for the same inputs: "However, dispite our best efforts, there was still a serious flaw lurking behind the scenes that eventually caused serious problems that we couldn't work around. It seems that different Floating Point Units return slightly different results given the same values. This was first seen when pitting PC and Mac versions of the game against each other in multiplayer mode. Every once in a while, the two versions would go out of sync with one another. It was eventually tracked down to slightly different floating point results that accumulated over time until eventually they resulted in two different courses of action on each client. For instance, on the PC a character might get hit by a bullet, while on the Mac the same character would be just 1 pixel out of the way and the bullet would miss. Once something like that happens, the two clients would be hopelessly out-of-sync." 0. https://bitbucket.org/gopostal/postal-1-open-source/src/default/Postal%20Overview.txt https://bitbucket.org/gopostal/postal-1-open-source/src/defa...
- EamonnMR 10y agoThis is also how the original Doom's networking worked[0], and still used to implement RTS networking[1] where the number of entities to be synchronized is very large compared to the amount of input. 0. http://fabiensanglard.net/doom3_documentation/The-DOOM-III-Network-Architecture.pdf http://fabiensanglard.net/doom3_documentation/The-DOOM-III-N... 1. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131503/1500_archers_on_a_288_network_.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131503/1500_archers_on... 1500 archers is the classic treatment but also see dissenting opinion here: https://medium.com/@treeform/dont-use-lockstep-in-rts-games-b40f3dd6fddb#.aq6fut80r https://medium.com/@treeform/dont-use-lockstep-in-rts-games-...