The apps are generally high quality because of the limited device pool.
It makes testing and making sure everything works vastly easier across the range of devices when you don't have literally thousands of possible devices to account for.
Then there's the monopolistic and highly curated app store.
In my experience as a former employee at one of the largest mobile game developers, the reason iOS apps are high quality is because the users are richer and deliver higher revenue.
I actually worked on this for several months a few years ago. The project suffered from massive scope creep and overall disorganization. At one point, we could load the main menu and get in game, but then the project changed directions a few times and ultimately switched programming languages (from Go to C++ if memory serves) so most of that progress got wiped out. I didn't know the language they switched to, so me and one of the other main contributor stopped contributing and started working on our own thing off and on, but that got put on the back burner for me due to IRL circumstances.... I keep wanting to pick this stuff back up but real life has a way of repeatedly getting in the way.
Anyway, this was also all taking place before Diablo 2 Remastered was really a thing, so there was more motivation to work on this -- at least on my part -- back then. Now, not so much when I can already boot up Diablo 2 on my Switch.
You have to login every 30 days which is pretty annoying when the game is at its core 20 years old and could be played entirely disconnected back then.
> DevilutionX is made publicly available and released under the Sustainable Use License (see LICENSE)
> The source code in this repository is for non-commercial use only. If you use the source code you may not charge others for access to it or any derivative work thereof.
The source is open. “Open Source” does not mean the FLOSS-flavour of Open in conventional speech. If you want to fight that battle, sure, it’s not unreasonable, but realize that you’re pushing a sub-consensus view.
> Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose.[1][2]
No it's not, and yes it does. This trend on HN that has consisted in wanting to kill the meaning of "open source" as most people understand it is very weird and surprising. I don't understand what is at stake. I have noticed this since one month or so.
The vast majority of projects that call themselves open source mean the open source definition as defined by the open source initiative, or something equivalent.
You might not like or recognize the OSI and that's fine, but you can't decide what people mean when they say open source.
You are the one starting the battle and I don't understand your motives.
I just searched for "open source" in a search engine, I'm getting [1,2,3] and lists of "the best open source software". And they are all using the OSD. You are at odds with Wikipedia, IBM, RedHat and with Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple [4,5,6,7,8], and with everyone else, really.
This sounds like it's getting into a pedantry I wasn't aware of. If the source is available for me to look at and potentially mess around with, I'd consider it open source, but I assume it's the non-commercial aspect that makes it not "Open Source"?
That said, I'm very impressed with the reverse engineering work on this having played it before.
Don’t forget who you’re arguing with on this website. Most people here earn their livelihood by commercializing huge amounts of work done for free by others. They definitely have a horse in this race.
There are many licenses and license models, and there's an already a consensus on what consists of open source software.
There are also licenses which shows you the code, but you can't legally reuse parts of it. Even some of the licenses prohibit you from compiling and creating your own version and use it, yet alone study, modify and/or distribute.
There are many sinister versions of so-called open source software per your definition. The most famous ones in my book is Microsoft's VSCode and Google's Chrome.
Both have "open source" counterparts VSCodium & Chromium, yet they lack the sauce to perform like the closed source one, or is confined to its small space and prevented from operating like the closed source versions.
Can we call these crippled versions open source software? Yes, they compile & run, but to what extent? They are intentionally a shadow if their real selves, and this creates a situation where you can see the code but can't use it. They run afoul the idea behind open source by adopting a permissive license, and abusing the license to create the closed source, superior version which is force-fed to users.
Even GPL doesn't prohibit selling the software itself or other commercial/for profit uses. It bolsters four freedoms, and make sure that it's continued from generation to generation, maintainer to maintainer.
So, just because you don't agree on the ideas, ideals and consensus amongst the developers and open source / free software people, it doesn't give you the license to treat every codebase the way you see fit regardless of the license it contains.
I have not used chromium in a while, but when I did, all it could not do compared to chrome, was playing proprietary codecs (I could add via terminal somehow).
> Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose.[1][2]
In which situation outside the developer world people use this phrase… to mean something other than FLOSS?
Open source is not common speech. It's jargon. Jargon that's becoming popular outside the tech world because of the advocacy around open source and free software going on.
Can't edit anymore, so replying to self instead. But now that I look at it again, it seems you aren't saying the face value meaning of the words "open source" would be the consensus either, just that the OSI-style meaning isn't common enough to be considered consensus either.
Which I suppose is fair enough, and it seems like I may have originally replied to something you didn't say. I'd still disagree both about the lack of a consensus, based on my general experience, and about the meaning.
> Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose.[1][2]
Is it stands, it would be rejected for inclusion in Debian and other distributions (unlike open source games) and I wouldn't be able to bring it to my software club and study it with kids, because that would be using it in a commercial setting.
Don't get my hopes up by calling it open when you post it on HN. It's not that much to ask.
"Commercial activity" can be as benign as "There are membership fees", "There's a soda machine in the corner that takes coins", "I'm doing it to brush up my CV" (increasing future income potential), or "There are ads on the website".
As such, any of these might trigger the "only for ... non-commercial ... use" clause. So folks generally just don't sweat it.
The Sustainable Use License doesn't seem to contain a blanket ban on commercial use. Here's what it says on limitations:
"You may use or modify the software only for your own internal business purposes or for non-commercial or personal use. You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes. You may not alter, remove, or obscure any licensing, copyright, or other notices of the licensor in the software. Any use of the licensor’s trademarks is subject to applicable law."
Studying the software in a commercial setting seems to be permitted.
Because it comes with the freedom to used for any purpose in its core goals / social contract [1], including commercial purposes:
> No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
>
> The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
I think you're in the minority here. Open source is generally understood to be the OSI definition of the term, not just "source available". The latter is typically what is understood by people who are not familiar with OSS or free software.
And it is of at best dubious legal status given that it was from decompiled Diablo code. I think it's unlikely that they'd get sued for this because Diablo is old and Blizzard probably doesn't care too much about the engine, but if they did I seriously doubt you would win a case against them.
Ugh this again. If you have the source publicly available, it’s open source. I wish you guys would get over it! If people want to profit from this work they can pay for it.
Does anyone have examples of games with a client/server architecture, where new clients have been written, but that can still connect to an original server? I think there's a valuable learning exercise in the idea, but I can't find anything that actively courts multiple clients being developed.
Similar to this is there any example of someone building an entirely "new game" by changing the front-end client and assets so heavily that it literally becomes a different story/world/lure/characters? Essentially a total facade reskin?
League of Legends, Dota 2, and Heroes of Newerth were all directly inspired from a Warcraft III map mod, Defense of the Ancients. Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas, MOBAs, are now an entire genre.
Of the 10 most popular multiplayer games in 2023[0] seven of them owe their core mechanics to mods / flashes of brilliance from a handful of amateurs.
A more or less correct history of their origins:
- Four of the games on that list are battle royale games, which started life as a somewhat popular Minecraft mod and really took off with "Battle Royale" - a mod of "Dayz" which itself is a mod of "ARMA II". It's mods all the way down.
- Two are tactical FPS games, which owe a huge chunk of their mechanics to "Team Fortress" a Quake mod and "Counter Strike" a Half-Life mod.
- One is a MOBA, which started life as "DotA", a Warcraft III mod.
Of the other three, one is Minecraft. Created by a solo dev, and I expect its moddable nature has helped its multiplayer popularity significantly.
One is Roblox. Created by two devs, and is itself a game creation system.
The final one is Genshin Impact - something of a an outlier in terms of team size and genre origins.
I've never played the map, but Aeon of Strife from Starcraft is a custom map that has the origin of Dota mechanics... and the Protoss Photon Cannon brought about some earlier versions of Tower Defense custom maps.
Ace of Spades is one. I usually play with the OpenSpades client[1], but there is also Betterspades[2], and probably many other clients I don't know of yet. There are usually about 10-50 players online on the public servers listed on BuildAndShoot[3], variable depending on the time of day and mostly from Latin America it seems.
One can host the game with piqueserver[4]. I'm not sure if one can still host with the original Ace of Spades server, but the game was 'shut down' in 2019 so maybe not.
It's well worth a go - there is intense satisfaction in digging a tunnel undetected all the way through to the opposing team's base! Playing with friends enhances the enjoyment for me as one can be a little more strategic when in direct communication.
Second life is tangentially an example. they open sourced (or similar) the official viewer and some enhanced community and custom clients are out there like firestorm
oh, and quake 1's quakeworld client. many excellent quakeworld clients like darkplaces and ezquake. lots of one offs showing off tech, etc
Back in the day all wikis used to be open for editing, unfortunately spam and vandalism has made it rare. Anyway, as another random visitor, I simply reverted that change.
Diablo 1 is my favorite Diablo game, but last time I tried this there were some weird changes (needing to use a town portal scroll in the butcher's room). Is that still the case?
I believe the "X" in DevilutionX signals that there are opinionated QoL changes made to that distribution of the game. There is another repository called Devilution that is unmodified.
The X is a reference to it being able to running on other systems then Windows.
Most QoL are optional and is either off by default or can be turned off in the settings. Devilution is more of a reference work then something intended for anyone to use.
This doesn't sound like DevilutionX, I think what you might have tried Belzebub which is an entirely different project with no relations. The game play adheres closely to the original and only bug fixes are addressed.
I want to meet the person who reported a bug with this running on the original Xbox. Warms my heart someone out there still uses it and has already tried this.
I still remember that I tried to install D1 on Win95 on 386 computer back then. System disk has 200MB and I needed 12 MB free space for D1 launcher that let me run D1 from disc. So I uninstalled Microsoft Briefcase. What a lovely times.
Still not finished, because then I got 486 and there was games like Heroes of M&M or AoE2 that I enjoyed more.
