Alan Pope wrote: > I've recently been chatting with someone who is enthusiastic about an > Ubuntu Community Gaming Server, and wanted to run it past you lot to get > opinions/ideas. > > The idea is that a physical server would be provided which would run > servers for a number of popular games. The game servers would be run in > rotation on a schedule, and not all the time. The reasons for this are > social and technical. > > If all games run all the time there is less incentive for people to meet > up at a particular time/day to play. This has been shown with the > LUGRadio guys having their game server up on two nights a week. Having a > game server up only on specific days means people are more likely to set > time aside to play, and also more likely to set aside time to play with > the same people. Rotating the day however gives people the opportunity > to play with different people (whoever is available on that day). > > One of the problems with having a particular game up on a specific night > is that people often have other things they need to do in "the big blue > room", "meatspace" or "real life", and these occur often on a particular > day. > > So one way around this is to rotate the games so that they don't always > come up on the same day each week. For example in the first week the > game Enemy Territory might come up on a Monday, but on the second week > it would be on a Thursday. > > This (I believe) would mean that people would potentially try new games > "I'm only available on Wednesday night, so will play whatever is > available that day", but also allows for the "meatspace" problem > outlined above "I'd like to play game 'foo' but I can't do Wednesdays". > > On the subject of games, there is an argument that the server should run > only Free (as in speech) games, and this I can understand. However it > would probably be the case that the gaming server would run a > combination of Free and non-Free games. > > It also makes sense that people should be able to play games that are in > the repository - as well as those that are installable from external 3rd > party download sites. Experience tells us that gamers are not averse to > installing software from 3rd party vendors (whether free of cost or not) > and so it probably doesn't make sense for us to prescribe that people > should _only_ be able to play games that are in the repository. However > we need to cater for both groups (in my opinion). > > The following games have been considered for inclusion as they have free > server software (an important criteria for the gaming server is to not > have to pay out for each game):- > > Tremulous, Warsow, Nexuiz, Open Arena, Alien Arena, Enemy Territory. > > In addition there are some more conventional (non first-person shooter) > and less resource intensive games that could be included such as:- > > Bzflag, Atlantik, Armagetron. > > Yes, there are already servers for all these games available online. > However this would be an Ubuntu community effort. A way to bring gamers > into the Ubuntu community, and to bring Ubuntu community members to > gaming. > > Of course there's also the "You can put a bullet through popeys head on > Wednesday" which might attract a few people too. :) > > Thoughts, ideas? > > Cheers, > Al. > I'd certainly be up for it. If you wriggle original UT (the unrivaled King of 1st person shooters) in there I'd definatley be up for it :-)
-Matt Daubney -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.kubuntu.org/UKTeam/
