11 ms·
Soldat: a 2D (side-view) multiplayer action game
- noman-land 6y agoI used to play this game so much back in the day. It was the first MMO I ever played. Are there any popular public servers that we can join?
- mkoryak 6y agoFYI: Soldat means "soldier" in Russian. So not the most creative name, but it didn't matter since this game is awesome.
- mahathu 6y agoAlso in German
- scotth 6y agoAlso, french.
- cozzyd 6y agoAnd Romanian :). Based on https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/soldat https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/soldat it seems to originally come from Italian?
- worldsayshi 6y agoAnd Swedish.
- RBerenguel 6y agoAlso, Catalan (close cousins with French)
- someperson 6y agoThe creator is Polish, and it means soldier in Polish too.
- skocznymroczny 6y agoNo. The Polish word for soldier is żołnierz. There is a Polish word "sołdat", which is a borrowing of the Russian солдат, and it's mostly used to describe Russian/Soviet soldiers and comes with a negative connotations.
- someperson 6y agoThanks for the clarification.
- developer2 6y agoThe developer hosts the game on a Polish domain (https://soldat.pl/ https://soldat.pl/), and even has a FAQ entry regarding the name: https://soldat.pl/en/page/faq https://soldat.pl/en/page/faq Q: What does "Soldat" mean!? A: "Soldat" or "Soldaat" means "soldier" in the following languages: german, dutch, norwegian, swedish, danish, french, slovenian, afrikaans, russian, catalan and romanian.
- GoblinSlayer 6y ago> 11. Can you give me the source code of Soldat? > Eeee, no?
- yetihehe 6y agoEven funnier, "no" in polish is "yep".
- S4M 6y agoFor those who are too lazy to compile the game to see what it looks like, here is the official page of Soldat: https://soldat.pl/en/ https://soldat.pl/en/ It has screenshots.
- tvb12 6y agoThe video on this page reminds me so much of Terraria. I think I even saw rocket boots at a few points.
- sitkack 6y agosoldat gameplay video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUdsLsD23Eo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUdsLsD23Eo
- 8draco8 6y agoThat's a blast from the bast. I played a lot of Soldat in high school in Poland like 15 years ago. We was virtually never doing any actual learning we just played MoH:AA, Unreal Tournament and Soldat for hours.
- abtinf 6y agoIs this similar to Abuse?
- skocznymroczny 6y agoThe control scheme is similar, but this is player vs player only.
- therealdrag0 6y agoIs there a list of games like this? I remember playing a free side scroller sci-fi FPS game on windows ~12 years ago. That I liked a lot but never found again.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ugotsta 6y agoMaybe Armajet? I think we've done a pretty good job with the alternatives here (I work off and on at AlternativeTo): https://alternativeto.net/software/soldat/ https://alternativeto.net/software/soldat/
- GoblinSlayer 6y agoIt's more from Liero family.
- tillinghast 6y agoSo… multiplayer gravity shmup?
- keyle 6y agoWell, shazbot!
- sgtnoodle 6y agoI miss tribes 1. There's still servers, but the only folk still playing are too hardcore.
- superkuh 6y agoI guess I shouldn't be surprised so many Soldat players also played Tribes. We love jetpacks. And yeah, the community that is left in T1 is hardcore, but if you join the US (any time) or EU (21:00GMT, 3pm CST) LT servers on the weekends there's occasionally less hardcore pick-up games. As Dynamix would say, "Join us!"
- someperson 6y agoSoldat's gameplay (particularly its jetpack momentum) brought many hours of fun to my childhood. Capture The Flag (with ~5 people per team) is still my favorite game mode. Great game!
- anderspitman 6y agoPointing the minigun down and hovering for a few seconds was my personal favorite.
- anderspitman 6y agoI've been meaning to clone the 2D FPS style of Soldat in the browser for years. I had no idea they had open sourced it! How long ago did that happen? It's written in Pascal!? Man I can't wait to poke around this codebase. EDIT: Looks like it went open source May 2020: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/638490/view/2192636057421436702 https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/638490/view/21926360...
- nicoboo 6y agoSomething around 15 years ago, we've been playing a lot with some friends. Simple, much more dynamic than Worms... Glad to see that this great game has gone open-source.
- simlevesque 6y agoThis is the type of game I'd like to see a console port of.
- cush 6y agoThis is one of my all-time favorite games! I put hundreds of hours in back in high school. Haven't seen it in ages. Thanks for sharing!
- contingencies 6y agoAlso played Soldat years ago - another classic indy from the Soldat period was Tetrinet. For a modern casual side-scroller that's cooperative and kid-friendly rather than pure violence, try Spelunky 2.
- rubyist5eva 6y agoSoldat 2 is in early access on steam - for those who might be interested.
- Tade0 6y agoI remember paying a grand total of 18,75PLN for a copy in 2004 - I think me and my friends got a group discount for buying five keys. That was back when the company currently known as CDPR only started work on the first game from The Witcher series.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoI used to play soldat back in 2003. That is 18 years ago.
- chias 6y agoOh man, I played this a ton back maybe 15 years ago. I haven't played it in forever and a half, but it's a really solid game and a lot of fun!
- skocznymroczny 6y agoI attended a presentation by the creator of this game, it was around 2010. The most fun part was the business model. I don't remember the exact numbers, but he made a lot of money on a free to play game before "free to play" model got really popular. One notable thing I remember is that the paid version had higher resolution options and it was one of the highly sought after features.
- wyldfire 6y agoLast time I learned about this game I think was when someone shared WebLiero. Which was a pretty fun distraction for me and my son for a few hours :) https://www.webliero.com/ https://www.webliero.com/
- 0xdba 6y agoFor some reason this reminded me of Cannon Fodder from the early 90s.
- yor1001 6y agoI remember play SolDat In highschools with friends.
- callesgg 6y agoStrange how I have been thinking about the soldat game a few times the last 2 months. Then a link on hacker news... the universe works in mysterious ways.
- buzzert 6y agoSoldat was a really excellent game for LAN parties back in the day! Really fast to install, small download, and loads of fun.
- Arch-TK 6y agoI don't think I've played this game for over 13 years now. Such a pleasant surprise to see it open sourced.
- JazzXP 6y agoI used to play this lunchtime at my old job, there was about a dozen of us that used to play. I wrote a log parser (in PERL!) that would generate stats of who was killing who the most, and who had the most kills with a particular weapon to display leaderboards. I'd run after a session and people would check out their stats.
- bogwog 6y agoI played the hell out of this back in the day. Was this open sourced recently, or has it been open for a while and I just never noticed? It's been at least a decade since I last played.
- GnomeSaiyan 6y agoUsed to play this game all the time back in the late 2000's. Honestly thought it died out long ago. Really glad to see it still alive with an active community.
- qq4 6y agoIt's finally open source! Wow, I hosted a server back in 2006 and used to play this game all the time back then. The European players would annihilate me until I learned how to prone-fly with the sniper rifle. I still have a collection of maps I made back then that I included on the server. For anyone that remembers... \smoke
- shoozza 6y agoThe map editor (called Soldat PolyWorks) is also FLOSS. It is written in Visual Basic 6 and uses DirectX 8 though. Might need to rewrite it or use one of the other community made map editors in the future, especially when people on other Platforms want to start mapping.
- loa_in_ 6y agoI used to do maps for Soldat. You can get creative with the included editor
- inoffensivename 6y agoahhh so many hours of my high school life consumed by this game
- djmips 6y agoStory of Soldat (short) video narrated by the creator. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpWuOOs0TMg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpWuOOs0TMg
- syspec 6y agoI love that this is coded in pascal
- dartharva 6y agoThis looks very similar to the mobile multiplayer Mini Militia: https://www.minimilitia.mobi/ https://www.minimilitia.mobi/ We used to play this a lot among friends a few years ago in college.
- fho 6y agoExcept this is like 20 years older :-)
- rgoulter 6y agoThis was a favourite game in the high school computing lab for students who finished their work early. :)
- stelonix 6y agoOh wow, I love Soldat! I used to play it a lot in the mid 2000s and even bought a license to get rid of the nagware and support the developer. Been dreaming of having access to the code for some 17 years now, this is great news!
- renewiltord 6y agoSomething my brother and I enjoyed was to switch to the ballistic mortar / grenade launcher instagib weapon and then play. You could instagib but the weapon had a massive gravity effect so it was hard to aim. Deliciously fun in the air.
- romwell 6y agoOMG, I played this so much back in the day. It's super fun. Soldat is to Quake as Terraria is to Minecraft. Awesome to see it open sourced! Side note: Soldat means "soldier" in several Slavic languages
- wiz21c 6y agoin french too
- romwell 6y agoApparently, it's from Latin "soldarius", so it's pretty much the same in all European languages :) [1]https://www.etymonline.com/word/soldier https://www.etymonline.com/word/soldier
- fho 6y agoAnd in German ;-) I played this so much back in the days that it is the only game I can say I played it on a somewhat competitive level. A friend and I dominated the 2v2 games only some Scandinavian guys were better then us ... good times :-)
- shoozza 6y agoWhat a surprise to see Soldat on hackernews :) I maintained Soldat back from version 1.5+ to 1.7 before someone else took over for a few years. The current version on Steam is Soldat 1.7 while the open source version is an unfinished Soldat 1.8 and needs some love before it can be released (gui is missing, new netcode, switch to lazarus/fpc, macOS and GNU/Linux support, new config file format to name a few.) So don't expect everything to work out of the box if you compile it. Any help is welcome btw ;)
- Chilinot 6y agoThank you for your work! I used to play Soldat for hours a day when it was first released.
- MarcScott 6y agoThanks for your work on Soldat. I still remember a bunch of us sitting in our living room, all with our desktop PCs, and the floor being a mess of cables connecting to power banks and an old switch, playing Soldat for hours.
- dbrgn 6y agoThanks for maintaining it! I have fond memories of that game. One time about 80% of my class in school ("Informatik-Berufsschule" in Switzerland) was playing that game while the teacher was talking about some boring Active Directory design topics. Suddenly one of the students screamed "HEADSHOT!", followed by an annoyed teacher and everyone quickly minimizing the game window :)
- MrYellowP 6y agoHeya mate! Long time fan, since 2003! You're not the original developer? Does he get any money from the Steam sale? The situation is rather weird and different people seem to know different things. Could you shed some light on the situation?
- shoozza 6y agoYes, the original developer gets the money from the steam sale. He's hosting the lobby server, website and forum for the game. Afaik the contributors didn't get any money and worked on the game in their spare time because they love Soldat. One of the goals was to release it as FLOSS.
- weiliddat 6y agoGlad to see this published. I really miss the follow-up Link Dead. I played the alpha releases and thought it had lots of potential as a deliberate 2D tactical shooter.
- zelphirkalt 6y agoAh good memories ... The 8 was much fun, perhaps broken. I developed an uncanny precision with it. But also 6 was great, with more ammo, but still great precision. And the jetpack tricks ...
- penetrarthur 6y agoGive me back the years I spent playing this absolute masterpiece!
- zaczekadam 6y agoNo way! This is one of my fav childhood games! It ages well too!
- MrYellowP 6y agoI love this game since 2003!
- mnming 6y agoThere is a very similar browser version on https://thd.itch.io/commando https://thd.itch.io/commando I enjoy a lot.
- can16358p 6y agoWhat a lovely game it was: even though very small and basic, it made into my top ten by the time played.
- fwn 6y agoI played hundreds of hours of Soldat back in my school days. Almost exclusively in realistic mode. There was a great community, I think realsold.org, truly a flashback to think about it now. I think it's great that they opensourced it, although it somewhat faded not by the lack of development but by a slow and steady reduction in players (at least, as far as I remember, in realistic mode). It's an amazing game. Ruger was overpowered though.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- g0ran 6y agoMan I remember this one, it was all the rage in its hey-day. One other I would love to see resurrected is Babo Violent 2.
- Arrath 6y agoOh wow blast from the past. I played so much Soldat, and probably spent nearly as much time in the map editor.
- Diederich 6y agoI saw mention of Pascal, so I had to take a quick peek: https://github.com/Soldat/soldat/blob/develop/server/ServerCommands.pas https://github.com/Soldat/soldat/blob/develop/server/ServerC... The last time I used Pascal was in the late 1980s on a VAX/VMS system. Very fond memories!
- albertzeyer 6y agoI was surprised and happy to see this also being open sourced. As a developer of OpenLieroX (http://www.openlierox.net/ http://www.openlierox.net/), we also took inspiration of Soldat. The main difference is mainly the way you control the game, i.e. with mouse aim cursor in Soldat, and purely with keyboard in Liero. And also the ninja rope. Once we added mouse aim support to OpenLieroX as well, but the Liero community didn't liked it, and basically it became another game. Network play between both versions would be unfair. It would really need a different name. Teeworlds (https://www.teeworlds.com/ https://www.teeworlds.com/) is also a more recent very similar game, also with mouse aim, and ninja rope. Interesting also that Soldat is implemented in Free Pascal / Lazarus.
- gspr 6y agoOoh! What happened to OpenLieroX? I used to love it, but I see there hasn't been a release in ages. Is development still ongoing? Is it still tied to that quirky abandoned networking library that I can't remember the name of? How did it stand up to the original Liero being opened up? (Rereading the above I sound super critical. That was not my intention!)
- albertzeyer 6y agoI really would love to continue working on OpenLieroX (OLX), but my priorities have shifted, and I just don't find the time anymore, although I still really would like to. I guess it's the same for the other developers. We used to be three main developers. When I started working on it, I was in school, and then started studying at a university, and continued working on it during most of my studies (and I think my studies somewhat suffered from it, as I spent way more time on coding on OLX than on studying...). But then I started a PhD, got full-time job, now got kids, etc... Also, this is kind of an infinite project. You can always improve things, implement nice new ideas, etc. For reference, repo is here: https://github.com/albertz/openlierox https://github.com/albertz/openlierox The code you find there is already more modern than all the published builds. It is based on SDL2 now, and has lots of cleanups. The merge of the Gusanos engine and OLX engine is much more completed and cleaned up. Although this could still further improved. I would like to use Lua as the pure scripting engine (from Gusanos engine), and port over all the OLX game logic to that as well, so that the core engine becomes much simpler. The graphics effects and drawing should be optimized further. On the transition to SDL2 and due to code cleanup, graphics has become slower. And it was already somewhat slow before. This is maybe not much a problem on a modern machine, but this game really should not require a modern machine to run nicely. One reason is that this is all purely software pixel based, including all graphics effects. We definitely should move to OpenGL, Vulkan or so, but some of the graphics effects are a bit tricky to re-implement, and probably need some shader logic. But we also want to have it cross platform, really running anywhere. I think you refer to HawkNL, which is used for the low level networking (UDP/TCP sockets, DNS)? Yea, we definitely could replace that. Although we anyway provide our own fork within OLX, and it's not so special. One of the many things you probably could replace by sth more modern. The (higher level) network engine is probably a more important item which needs a reimplementation to support more players, be more stable, etc. OpenLiero (https://www.liero.be/ https://www.liero.be/) is a reimplementation as well. We planned to provide this (the game physics / logic / weapons) as another mod inside OLX. It already has some mods which are similar, but not exactly the same. And many more things...
- ggambetta 6y agoLooks super fun, I'll give it a try! Something like 10 years ago I had a similar idea - a 2D shooter with the feel and gameplay of a FPS, only that in my case I thought of making it top-down, and the plan was that visibility would be a huge thing - your 2D character would only see things from their point of view that weren't blocked by the level geometry or other players. I never completed that game, for various reasons. But in the course of making that prototype, I did a lot of research about the networking model. I read every article I could find about client-side prediction, server reconciliation, and entity interpolation. I didn't want all this effort to go to waste, so I wrote what I had learned in article form, and put it on my website. That's the never-told-before origin story of my multiplayer networking articles :) https://gabrielgambetta.com/client-server-game-architecture.html https://gabrielgambetta.com/client-server-game-architecture....
- chromanoid 6y agoThe game is nearly twenty years old. It's really a pity that you didn't play it at its peak. Do you know "Running with Rifles"? I think line of sight is not a thing there, but it still reminds me of your idea.
- chazapp 6y agoI've been trying to build that very game as a .io game using Phaser3, MatterJS and WebSockets. Thanks a lot for these ! Your articles are one of the most important ressource i've been refering to in order to build it. I'm still struggling with entity interpolation and reconcialiation, but i'm hanging in there and i hope to finish building a complete game loop sometime this year. There are still a lot of issues to fix before reaching that point, but I like what i've built so far: https://mtvs.chaz.pro https://mtvs.chaz.pro Thanks again for these truly useful articles !
- ggambetta 6y agoLooks very promising, well done! If your world is going to be tile-based, doing shadow-like visibility should be simpler than if you did arbitrary meshes :)
- 6y ago
- NikolaeVarius 6y agoI learned alot about computers trying to set up LAN games on the school network with this game.
- tarboreus 6y agoThis is a great game. Used to play it quite a lot. Playing a lan game with 2 friends was incredibly fun. I'm too old and blind to play a game that needs this level of reaction now, but if you can actually play a modern FPS and if people are still playing this, it's quite unique.
- physicles 6y agoYeah we’d use it as our LAN opener so as people arrived they could just jump in. For me this game is tied to those memories of hefting your 19” CRT on the corner of a ping pong table and trying to get set up ASAP so you wouldn’t miss another round. The weapons are balanced and controls are tight. This might be the nostalgia, but it felt as polished as Starcraft, in its own way.
- umvi 6y agoWow, I remember playing this game back in 2006. It's in the same vein as Liero
- l-lousy 6y agoUsed to play this with my cousins 10 years ago... what great game
- k__ 6y agoI used to play this with my class mates 20 years ago... :D
- damidekronik 6y agoAbout 15 for me :) Great mechanics Great soundtrack (if you like heavier music) Great varied modes of play